Bohemond

This isn't dice-related, but I use a box of Go stones during game. I gave the players three stones as their hero points for the game. When they spend one, they hand it to me and I ask "what does this look like?" which gives them a chance to briefly narrate their impressive effort. It lets the player control some of the color of the game. During extended contests, each time one side or the other scores RPs, I put a stone in the appropriate pile--it lets the players easily see where the contest is at.

I just realized that I never replied to this. Joerg, thanks for the very extensive discussion. I'm not sure i read Heortling clans quite the way you do, but you've definitely gotten me thinking about the issues in a new way.

Yeah, what the fuck was that about?

But of course, everyone knows the definitive Glorantha canon was set by Mongoose, right? <ducks>

That's so good I may have to go with that.

Hmmm. Given that we're dealing with mythic time, I think by-names have much more truth-value than post-Time ones. To borrow from the old joke, "but you fuck just one sheep..." and you've fixed your mythic identity for all time.

How did Porscriptor get his by-name? Normally in Heortling culture, cannibalism is only acceptable when its done by Maran Gor and Babeester Gor and similar Dark Earth figures. So what's his story?

Doesn't Flesh Man meet Darhudan at one point during the Lightbringers' Quest? That would suggest they're not the same person.

There's a missing step after the Plains of Dust--Crossing the Styx. The quester can pay Jeset to take him across or else try to swim, but that's unwise.

I was really glad to see this article. Early Gloranthan material tended to have a very male-centered approach, as much fantasy gaming did back in the day, and although Glorantha has slowly opened up to a wider range of female roles for PCs, especially since HQ came out, there's still a ways to go, I think. So it's nice to see an article that explores ways in which female cults are 'cool' and how they can be made more dynamic for game play. We still need more hero quests for goddesses though.

Since people gave me a lot of good ideas for this quest, I figured I'd share the myth I came up with. "When Odayla died, he went into the Underworld, where he crossed the Plains of Dust, where he nearly lost himself but remained true to himself. Then he came to the Nightwood, a vast dark place that he knew from his hunts. While he was there, he found Hedgehog, a creature so small that it escaped notice of most things. Hedgehog offered to tell him a secret if he gave Hedgehog something of value. He gave Hedgehog his Flying Wind, and Hedgehog told him that he wasn’t truly dead because he could sleep his way back to the world of living, and he taught Odayla the words to say to the Judge of the Dead that would allow him to prove that he was still alive. Then Odayla met the Dead Earth Witch, who hated him. He tried to avoid her, but she trapped him in a net and took him back to her steadhouse, where everything was cold and dead. But in her stead he found a dead ember and used it to burn through the net and free himself. And so he escaped and took the ember with him so that the Fire of Life burned within him. As he traveled further through the Nightwood, he was confronted by the spirits of the creatures he had killed. They refused to let him pass, saying that he was no longer a hunter but now only prey like them and so they no longer feared him. But he proved that they still had to fear him and that he was master of the forests, and they let him pass. When he reached the City of the Dead, he said the words that Hedgehog taught him. The Judge asked him to prove that he was not dead. He did this by doing something the dead cannot do." That's the 'basic' version of the myth. As they spoke to Odaylans from different clans, they learned two versions of the myth that filled in the details and gave different contexts for Odayla's death. They learned that there is more than one way to prove that the quester is not dead. What I tried to do with the myth is have Odayla move from being dead to realizing he might just be sleeping and finding the warmth inside that shows he's still alive. And he needs to establish that having died doesn't mean that he's no longer a predator. And because I loved Byll's idea about giving birth during hibernation, I gave them this little snippet from the Jonstown Library: “When King Harvast Openhand of the Dinacoli was killed by the Three Disloyal Thanes, Tyrelia the Bearwalker opposed them because Harvast was a better man than any of his thanes. She went into the Underworld to prove that he was not dead but only sleeping. While she slumbered, she birthed him back to life as her cub. He returned with a bear spirit and slew the Disloyal Thanes and reclaimed the throne they had taken from him. Thus he is accounted the third and fifth king of the Dinacoli.” So they know the quest can be done vicariously but it might involve birthing the target. The PCs were very worried about what returning "with a bear spirit" meant. Did he get a spirit ally, or did he have a change of soul? The Odaylan player couldn't make the session, so they haven't actually done the quest yet. If anything amusing happens, I'll post about it. Thanks again for all the great ideas!

I have a question about how Sartarites view kinship and how that affects marriage patterns. In real-world Germanic society, kinship is defined by blood and marital relations. You inherit property from your blood kin and your spouse's kin, and you have a duty to avenge (or assist in avenging) harm done to your kin. If your kin harms someone else, legally you become a legitimate target of vengeance, so kin don't just support each other, they also restrain each other. You don't engage in kin-slaying because you are weakening your own support network and your other kin are morally obligated to kill you, which just makes the harm to the kin-group worse. Sartarite society uses a modified version of that system. But its definition of kin seems to be broader than one's blood and affinal kin. It seems that Sartarites view other members of their clan as kin even if there is neither a strong blood nor affinal relationship. Kinslaying produces chaos, which harms not just one's immediate kin but the whole clan. Sartarites are expected to support all members of their clan against other clans and other outsiders, although one imagines that support for other bloodlines might not be as enthusiastic as support for one's own. This inability to resort to violence against one's clan-mates is part of what makes conversion to the Lunar Way such a problem for them--they cannot raise swords against another bloodline without creating the chaos they are trying to avoid. What I'm wondering is how that affects marriage patterns. It's established that Sartarite marriage is exogamous--you generally marry outside your clan, the way that Orlanth and Ernalda married outside their tribes. But how rigid a system is that? How common is it for members of one bloodline within a clan to marry members of another bloodline within the same clan? To use an example from the Red Cows, how common might it be for a Tormakting to marry a Bolthoring? Would such a marriage be uncommon and perhaps discouraged, but not considered a Bad Thing? (You should reconsider, Wulfstan. Marryng Maralda doesn't bring any wealth into the clan. It won't strengthen our ties with the Blue Berries. It's selfish to put your desires ahead of the clan's needs.) Would such a marriage be rare and considered disgusting, a form of incest, but not actually a crime? (She's practically your sister! I mean, not literally, but she's still kin! We don't marry our kin, for Ernalda's Sake! Yes, no one can make you do anything, but you don't do that!) Would such a marriage be unheard of, something that encourages chaos and is therefore a crime? (If you go ahead with this, we will outlaw you and hunt you down and kill you. We cannot let such filth pollute us! What demon has possessed you to even consider such a thing?) Marrying other bloodlines would make social kin blood kin and would therefore tend to reinforce the clan's cohesion. If the Tormaktings and the Bolthorings are actually kin, they are more likely to support each other and share resources, but it also means that children who grow up together might be inclined to marry each other, thus reducing the number of exogamous marriages and so reducing the clan's ability to form strong alliances with other clans. But given that the Red Cows and the Blue Berries marry each other a good deal, the affinal relationships of one generation will become the blood relationships of the next. Wulfstan's wife is Blue Berry and her sister is married to a Torkmakting, creating an affinal tie between the two bloodlines. When they have kids who marry into the Blue Berries, within a generation of two, the Tormaktings and the Bolthorings are going to share a lot of cousin ties, and perhaps even aunt/uncle with niece/nephew ties. So clans will tend to be composed of loosely-related blood kin, as long as all bloodlines tend to marry into the same 2 or 3 clans. But if the Torkmaktings mostly marry Frithans instead of Blue Berries, that won't happen. Is it different depending on what sort of marriage is involved? Are Day Marriages within the clan common but Year Marriages rare? Is in-clan Day Marriage an acceptable thing that all teens do as they are becoming adults, but once they get those first surges of the Life Rune out of their system, they are expected to do the mature thing and marry outside the clan? (Wulfstan, stop being so immature! It's time you acted like a real man and chose a wife from the Blue Berries!) I want to play up the whole ogre problem among the Red Cows, and one obvious way to do that is for the ogres to seduce other members of their own clan, but if such activity was outrageous, they probably wouldn't do that. Also, strictly exogamous marriage means that PC Ernaldans have to leave the clan when they get married, which makes maintaining an adventuring group a bit trickier (although Esrolan marriage solves that problem). So I'm looking to see what people think about this issue.

8o I may have to do this to him. He'll probably find it amusing.

Thanks for the good suggestions! These are definitely helping me plan out the quest. To clarify the situation, I'm running the Orlmarth campaign, but I started well before 1618 (it's 1617 at the moment) and the PCs have gotten too reliant on Gordanger giving them guidance, so I decided to shake things up. A situation arose where Gordanger had to do the Battle of Thrinbarri Clouds quest (to keep the Venebaini demons from escaping the Cinder Pits). He succeeded but came back badly wounded, and people were saying he needs to step down. I was trying to set up a situation where either one of the PCs or an NPC they've had conflicts with would wind up becoming chieftain. But then my Odaylan player, who's a newcomer to the campaign and has been a bit detached from things so far, suddenly pitched the idea of doing the Odayla Sleeps Back to Life quest as a way to vicariously heal Gordanger. It's definitely a stretch--Gordanger's not dead nor is he an Odaylan--but he clearly has a long recovery ahead of him if he ever recovers at all, which does sort of fit the idea of hibernating back to life. I decided that I'm gonna allow it because I want to make the player feel more integral to the game and I want to reward the players for trying to find ways to use questing to address some of their problems. In general, Heroquest has been teaching me to adopt more of a 'Say Yes' approach to GMing. So even though this wasn't where I thought this plot was going to lead, I'm rolling with it and letting the PC have some real agency in how the plot develops. So when he does the quest, I'm going to emphasize that this is an unusual and risky way to use this quest--there's a real risk the PC will have to sacrifice something to make it work and the difficulty will be higher than it might otherwise be. But heroes are supposed to be risk-takers, right?

The cult write-up doesn't provide any detail on that. It mostly just says that no animals would eat his body. There are probably multiple stories about that piece. In my quest, I'm going to start the hereoquest with a ritual combat against some enemy in which Odayla gets 'defeated' and 'killed'. They put him in a cave and that's where he crosses over into the Underworld.

I've got to give the player the text of a myth to work with. The myth could end "and then proved he was alive" but that feels a bit anticlimactic for a sacred story. Also, I've trained my PCs to research quests before they run off to do them, so they'll probably try to find other examples of people doing this quest, which means I probably have to at least give them an example of how one proves one is not dead.

In my campaign the clan chieftain has been severely injured due to a heroquest he performed. One of the PCs is an Odaylan and pointed out that Odayla has the Sleep Back to Life Feat, so he proposed doing Sleep Back to Life as a heroquest with Gordanger as the beneficiary of the quest. (Obviously, this is stretching things a wee bit, but the player has been a bit disconnected from the game, so I'm gonna let him do it in hopes that it helps him engage more). The text of the Odayla cult doesn't give much detail about what Odayla's time in the Underworld looked like (S:KoH, p.283 "His soul awakened in the Underworld and made itself to the Hall of the Dead where Odayla proved that he was not dead, but merely sleeping. The king of the dead returned him to the world of the living and his soul rejoined his body, now fully healed." That gives me a lot of freedom about the myth, but that's a double-edged sword. To complicate things, the campaign is headed toward an Underworld HQ later, so I don't want to just copy exactly what's in the Underworld quest portions of the Orlmarth campaign, the Eleven Lights, and quest from HQG, although I'm looking at those for a framework. But I don't want to steal thunder from later in the game (although I think the Odaylan will get some benefit from having gone to the Underworld before). So I've got two questions. 1) Any ideas about what Odayla might have run into in the Underworld? 2) How did Odayla prove he was not dead but only sleeping?

For me, the thing that always helps is to approach HQ like a movie. In a movie, the scale of action varies depending on what the point of the scene is. A sword fight between a man and an orc might look quite different depending on what point of the film we're in. Early in the movie, when Rurik is a total novice who is the only survivor of an orc attack on his farmstead, the fight might stretch out for several minutes, with each swing of the sword mattering because our hero isn't very skilled yet. So the film might get a lot of drama over whether Rurik can survive this desperate encounter. Late in the film, when Rurik has finally tracked down the orc chieftain who ordered the raid that slaughtered Rurik's family, the sword fight between Rurik and the watchman orc on the edge of the camp might be totally incidental to the drama, which is about confronting the evil chieftain. So when Rurik fights the watchman, it might just be a single enchange of blows that's over in a second or two. Same challenge (kill the orc with a sword) with two very different dramatic objectives (kill the orc to survive vs kill the orc to get to the chieftain). So for me, HQ encourages me not to look at the specific action, but rather to consider the importance of the action in the dramatic narrative. No one at the table really cares about the watchman, but if Rurik can't kill him, we don't get to the much more dramatically interesting moment when Rurik finally gets a chance to avenge his dead family. So let's treat the watchman as a Simple contest while the chieftain is going to be an Extended contest. Put another way, in RQ you're simulating a series of fights. In HQ you're simulating a movie or tv show about a character who has a series of fights. Which system you want to use is determined by what it is you're interested in simulating.

I posted this on the Glorantha forum on Google, but didn't get much response to it, so I thought I'd try here. In S:KoH, Roitina is listed as a Harmony Rune subcult for Ernalda, meaning that a PC must have a 10W in Harmony to become a devotee to Ernalda that way. But the Ceremonialist feat is listed as based on the Earth Rune, not the Harmony Rune. Is this a typo? If not, it seems very strange, because it would mean that the PC probably has a lower Earth Rune score (since she would have to sink a lot of points into Harmony) and therefore she wouldn't be very good at her own feat.

A while ago I wrote up a Thed heroquest for an RQ scenario. The PCs were supposed to encounter the effects of the quest part way through and stop it before the quester could finish it. It might give you an idea for something. http://ruleonemagazine.com/Iss14/BellyOfTheBeast.php

Wyrm's Footnotes would be a great way to get some bits of my wishlist met, like more heroquests or scenarios.

If anyone cares about my wish list, here it is (in descending order): 1) A book of hero quests for a range of cults (or scenarios built around the same, like the Humakt, Raven, and Wolf scenario and quest). For example, an Ernaldan quest, a Lhankor Mhyte quest, a Babeester Gor quest, etc. Especially quests for female PCs in less martial cults. 2) A book of drop-in scenarios for Red Cow (especially something that makes use of Snakepipe Hollow) 3) Praxpack! Please please please! How do shamanic quests differ from theistic ones? 4) A Holy Land sourcebook 5) A Lunar or Dara Happan sourcebook. Something that makes the Lunars playable as PCs in a full way (detailed write-ups of the individual Seven Mothers cults for example) 6) A book of Lunar or Dara Happan scenarios

Now that Eleven Lights is out in hardcover, is there any word about what's next in line for publication? It would be really nice to see some scenario packs, either for generic Sartarite clans or drop-ins for the Red Cows (the way the scenarios in Sartar Companion serve as drop-ins for the Orlmarth campaign. Or a book of myths and the quests associated with them, fleshing out cults that don't have a lot of quests available (which is to say, most cults except Orlanth and Humakt)--things on the order of the Lawstaff quest and the scenario written for it.

I'm not sure this is really a House Rule, but I occasionally award a player the 'Humor Point' or the 'Great Story Point'--a bonus Hero Point awarded when a player does something that makes everyone laugh or go "wow! that was awesome!" It encourages the players to think in term of telling their character's story rather than 'following the rules'. Also, when someone spends a Hero Point to affect a die roll, I ask them "What does that Hero Point look like?" They get a chance to briefly narrate the thing the character did that tipped the balance in their favor. "I jumped up into the air and drove my spear down through the Lunar's chest, pinning him to the ground " or "I rendered her speechless by given her such a seductive look that all she could think about for a moment is how much she wanted me" or something like that. Again, it encourages the players to focus on the storytelling, not the rules.

Why the hell does that second trailer feature a rendition of Silent Night? What can an 19th century German Christmas carol possibly have to do with the series?