M Helsdon

Depends upon the species of troll. Cave trolls can't tolerate sun light - it hurts them; trollkin dislike and avoid it - it demoralizes them. In fact, most trolls avoid sunlight if they can, but dark trolls can tolerate it if they have to. Trolls are always more comfortable at night and in the dark when their darksense also provides them with an advantage.

It was left at D20 because that's what the original said, as it isn't 'wrong'. Unless Rick changes it, the D20 marks the era when D10s were as rare as dragon's teeth.

It was Waha who established the Covenant. RQ3: Fix Intelligence - which transforms a sapient into a beast; Release Intelligence - which transforms a beast into a sapient. Detailed in Gods of Glorantha. In HeroQuest: Glorantha these seem to have become the charms Suppress Man and Awaken Beast, and Beast or Man.

The first and third comments are purely cosmetic... Page 139: 'rune spells' might be 'Rune spells'. Page 139: 'and only Heroquest' might be 'and only a Heroquest'. Page 141: 'makes the rune for Fire/Sky' might be 'makes the Rune for Fire/Sky'.

Many have been, in addition to the Errata. It's a question of finding them. ;-)

That's an error present in the original RQ2 document and not covered by the Errata. I suspect that '21-35' should be '11-35'.

Reported to Rick but posted here to prevent duplications. Page 9: ‘Again, this is a high average roll When’ should be ‘Again, this is a high average roll. When’ Page 11: ‘POW It’s nice having a touch with the Universe’ might be ‘POW It’s nice being in touch with the Universe’ Page 34: ‘the suppression and re-impression of the spells taking place Simultaneously’ should be ‘the suppression and re-impression of the spells taking place simultaneously’. Page 84: ‘instead of working under the guide. lines’ should be ‘instead of working under the guidelines’. Page 91: ‘Spells: Healing 2; Speedart 1’ – Speedart is not a Variable spell so this should be ‘Spells: Healing 2; Speedart’. Page 118: ‘could not take to 13’ should be ‘could not take it to 13’. Page 140: 'Even this number is high, and most of it consists of monks rather that priests of a congregation' should be 'Even this number is high, and most of it consists of monks rather than priests of a congregation' Back cover: ‘the Dragon Pass area’ among’ should be ‘the Dragon Pass area, among’.

I know: I was referring to Mr. Scott's list of the current cults/spirit societies in the Prax Book.

Might there be a (King) Condor spirit cult? Might there be an Oakfed spirit cult?

Glancing through the Glorantha Bestiary (which is far from a complete overview): Baboons, Lucans (Timinit beetles), Myrmidons (Timinit ants)...

And Mark Smylie's Artesia RPG? Not a direct linkage, but the influence of RQ is apparent in the game and the comics.

As noted by others, Stormbringer, Call of Cthulhu and Ringworld are all missing. Pendragon should be included because it included published RQ concepts (Personality Factors etc.) and unpublished RQ concepts.

Her parentage and origins are mentioned in some detail, in The Fortunate Succession, page 57 of the recent versions. Yara Aranis resulted from the Red Emperor mating with a demon in the Pentan Hell. The Sartar Companion names the demon as the Goddess of Tormented Death.

The Kingdom of Ignorance is more on the periphery of Kralorela than of it: throughout history and before it has been the site of worship of strange and often perverse deities little known beyond its borders. Its major cults rarely interact directly with those of Kralorela. You might like to read the Cryptic Verses of the Yellow Calendar in the Guide where the Blood Sun of the Kingdom of Ignorance, and Can Shu, its ruler impact apparently catastrophically in the future upon Kralorela.... In Kralorela, Bodkartu is not an enemy deity as she protects her sister Halisayan from demons and the bad emperor, and answers the prayers of oppressed mortal women and so has a cult, albeit a small one, in Kralorela.

Bodkartu is usually described as the horrible sister of Halisayan, and the equivalent, if not identical, to Gorgorma (see Revealed Mythologies - which is not always totally reliable). See also: http://www.glorantha.com/docs/yara-aranis/

But not on the side of the Lunars allied with Sheng in the Battle of Gardint...

Additional: I find it intriguing that in King of Sartar, Yara Aranis appears to jump pantheons to join or at least fight on Argrath's side in the Battle of Gardint. The Guide further supports this. Perhaps her allegiance was always to Saird, and the Lunars failed to appreciate this...

Being clan-based permits very wide mutability into new tribes, confederations, nations, kingdoms and even at times in history, empires. For example, Sartar created a kingdom primarily from Orlanthi tribes (and had a hand in the formation of some of those tribes from clans) but also integrated into it to a greater or lesser extent, ducks and hsunchen. I would argue that whilst we are very focused on the stability of certain Orlanthi social constructs they are far more mobile than immediately apparent. This is why the Red Moon is a threat: not just as a competitor for the Middle Air, but also because it has started to assimilate many Orlanthi societies by their own nature. Whether it is thus acting as a seductive face of Chaos can be debated, but it is also utilizing the inherent change. All true, but also indicating the extreme mutability (mobility?) of Orlanthi social constructs up to and including their pantheon. Heler the foreigner replaced Varnaval the Shepherd King; Elmal, himself a foreigner once had his own charioteer, Saren, who has been eclipsed by Mastakos; Issaries and the various artistan gods such as Gustbran and Orstan replaced Oonil the Skilful; Lhankor Mhy seems to be a Western Foreigner and Chalana Arroy perhaps a northerner. If pantheons can radically change then so can the societies that venerate them.

The boundaries between neighboring groups are always fuzzy, but the further away from the borderlands you get, the wider the distinctions become and when you start approaching other cultural borders it starts to be difficult to define what, exactly, are the core attributes of identity. Most modern nation states and national identities are far younger than we usually assume. In Europe most borders and nations have been in near constant flux right up to the present; even some of the nations that look to be old aren't as old as most people assume. Consider the identity English, which didn't have any reality until long after Wessex united most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (which themselves weren't entirely Anglo-Saxon in nature). One of the mildly disappointing (but inevitable) things about the recent BBC The Last Kingdom series were anachronisms such as characters referring to England... For that matter, the meaning of England as a geographic term was relatively late. And The Last Kingdom was a bold try, and it seems to have deservedly won a second series. At its widest (and perhaps most accurate) meaning Orlanthi means a people who venerate an entity that might be identified as Orlanth, or an important member of his pantheon. As some of the deities in the pantheon weren't members until the Lightbringers' Quest, the identity becomes even more nebulous?

Ah, but Germania wasn't a heartland of the Celtic People at the time. And there never was any such thing as the Celtic People; it's a relatively modern construction. The term has very different connotations for different people: for linguists it refers to speakers of particular Indo-European language families; for archaeologists it relates to a distinctive material culture. For geneticists it is even more fraught, as populations you would assume to be homogenous aren't (and some you would expect to be very different are similar). In both former cases the definition is imprecise with the division between Q Celtic and P Celtic languages, and the wide variety of artifacts over a very wide area and a wide spread of time. And people can change their language and their material culture, but they can't change their genes. For the Romans there were clear (but fuzzy) differences between the Gauls and the Germans, but then they didn't recognize the Britons and Irish as identical to the Gauls either. For the linguist there are sharp distinctions and there were sharp differences in material culture - but they often weren't quite so sharp on the ground. Caesar certainly recognized and used the differences, using German auxiliaries against their traditional enemies in his conquest of Gaul. However, in some Roman accounts some Germans had Gallic names... The language difference between Gauls and Germans was pronounced, as was the material culture, and they were rivals for lands in northern and central Europe for centuries. And this illustrates that whilst it is easy to make broad brush generalizations, they rarely give an accurate account of reality. This is certainly true in Glorantha which makes it one of the rare fantasy worlds where its reality is intentionally messy.

Even more intriguing from a modern point of view is that the Classical authors rarely if ever referred to the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland as 'kelts', but there's a widespread modern assumption that they were. Then there's the fact that Tacticus infers that a Germanic language was spoken in the south east/east of Britain in the 1st Century AD, long before the Saxon invasion (which left little genetic footprint on the population compared with, say, the later Danes). Barbarian Belt is probably more meaningful, those for ease of usage, Orlanthi as a template is here to stay.

I wonder if the belief that the Orlanthi are all very similar is derived more from our liking of labels that provide an easy handle on something, than the reality presented in the canon source material? Consider, for example, the label Keltic. Whilst there were very general similarities from north to south, to east to west, the cultures we call Keltic displayed a very wide variation in time and in space. However, if you could go back to the second century BC and could talk with a Kelt, and called them Keltic, they'd look at you blankly, unless they happened to belong to the Keltoi tribe near Massilia or the Celtici in Iberia. The name seems to have had a wider usage, but possibly because of the use of the term by the Greeks. The Guide gives an overview of the Orlanthi, as a major culture, and in a few pages cannot be expected to detail the actual diversity among them. However, the Distribution and Subtypes section suggests a very much larger diversity than the overview might indicate. Snippets elsewhere throughout the Guide highlight some of the distinctions, but I suspect it would need an entire Book of the Orlanthi to present their cultural and religious diversity.

The illustrations in the forthcoming The Coming Storm offer a wider representation of Sartarites in terms of social class, occupation, armor and weapons. Good weapons and good armor are expensive, and available only to the wealthy and/or fighting specialists.

Based on the material available on the Sacred Peaks of the Orlanthi, and their impact (see especially the Guide pages 296/297) it is likely that the Orlanthi vary far more than is immediately apparent. The detailed cult descriptions are centered on Sartar/Prax, but even then cannot be expected to convey the variations (and I'm sure there are many) in that 'small' area. Suspect we tend to see the basic template of Orlanthi society and culture, and not the rich regional variations.

Aha! Found it! Tales of the Reaching Moon#9 - The Origin of Humanity - excerpts from conversations with Monastavrolakhos, once of the Brick House in Kam Ramal: "According to our oldest records, the Brithini once claimed to be the descendants of the only "true" humans on Glorantha. According to K'rzalis this is partially true, but certain other races, including the dreaded Ogres, are also descended from the First Men and are thus distant cousins of the Brithini. In any case, it is well known among Western scholars that the Brithini refer to almost all non-Western races as "animal-men", or, more precisely, "animals with human form." Most people think of this as an insult or metaphor based on our shorter lives and or our lack of "proper" (i.e. Brithini) human behavior. In fact, during the Golden Age, when they were much more open, the Brithini claimed that as they had travelled around the world they "awakened" various animals and taught them to assume human form. This was apparently their explanation for the origin of the Hsunchen, and no-one knows if it is true. Some of these animal-men then proceeded to lose touch with their beast-selves and attempted to imitate human ways and even civilization, especially the ape-men and monkey-people. So if this ancient Brithini claim is true, then they are correct in their reference to us as "animal-men"; if they hold this belief, it explains much of their behavior towards us, including their horror of mating with normal humans."