JonL

Thus did the people rejoice, for their wonders had not been lost after all, and the benevolent gaze of Queen Bey did once again shine upon them.

We should start a separate thread for the tales of the Pop Star Captains. I wish Jeff had moved those into a different thread rather than deleting them. Their good natured playful collaborative fun was a refreshing change from heatedly debating the fine points of whether Yelm's beard braids curl clockwise or widdershins (which can also be fun, but still).

Is it a frog who hustles at pool?

Be wary. Geat is her mirth, and greater still is her wrath. Few can say which is sharper, her tongue or her blade.

Behold, Katiperi astride her Great Golden Lion, blazing forth to defend the Sky Realm. The epic of her great friendship, feud, and reconciliation with Tay-Tay the Swift has great power to weave peace among mighty foes who could be even mightier allies.

That seat being a pivot point between those bolded two specifically, I'd expect to see it on Rings in Heortland & Esrolia, in keeping with the annual Elmal vs Heler competition to be Esrola's year-husband. (I now contemplate an Argan Argar follower making a play for it, because we all know who Esrola really wants.)

The old HeroQuest Voices PDFs are really good for this. Some of the details are a little off now, mostly where the Malkioni are concerned, but they're great for getting the "Here's what my grandfather told me..." perspective. You might have to hunt around for them with the HQ content on Chaosium's site down until QuestWorlds transition.

Absolutely. The idea that Monrogh stripped off a majority of the Elmali ( presumably including many who were not disgruntled but were backing Prince Tarkalor's right-hand Elmali on his HeroQuest like a good Loyal Thane should, only to end up dragged along by the revelation) to resettle in Vantar, conquer and enslave the Kitori, and get their Sun Dome on is not new. What is different in the RQG books is the degree of their success and influence on the culture outside of Vantar. The previous figures we had from the Sartar books told us that there were 3000 Initiate or better Yelmalio cultists in Sartar, compared to 1000 Elmali and another 1000 Redaldans (check out that gender parity!). That's a majority, sure. If most of them are in Sun Dome County though, those proportions would indicate that Elmal+Redalda was still the more common Solar cult in most parts elsewhere. That makes perfect sense, as the ones who embraced Yelmalio quite pointedly packed up and left. That's quite a different picture than what is being painted now.

The former are outside the social order (parallel the Chinese concept of the wu lin), while the latter get bucketed in the top tier with the scholars.

That's alright. I probably would not have made a very worthwhile god anyway. On a more serious note, I think that the reason Zistor can no longer be contacted by worshippers while Pavis and Sedenya can is that the latter defeated their divine foes who extruded God Time within Time to come put them down. Ironically, Waha inadvertently established Pavis's presence in God Time with his failed attack.

If someone can answer the straightforward question without involving the matters above it, we will all no doubt be illuminated. 🤣 Short answer? Depends on what you call "modern." The Glorantha Sourcebook (2018) tells us that "...among the Heortlings of DragonPass, the Sun Disk is identified with Elmal, Orlanth's Loyal Thane." (The Sourcebook also tells us that the planet Lightfore is known as Yelmalio by the Orlanthi.) The Guide to Glorantha (2014) tells us that "Most Orlanthi say that the Sun is Elmal, a thane of Orlanth." This perspective is consistent with the various HW/Q1 and HQ2/G materials released between 2000 and 2015 with the latter still being available until earlier this year (though currently off the market pending a rebrand - long story). Starting with the RQG Preview that appeared at Gen Con in 2017 though, we start to get things like "Yelmalio is the predominant sky deity in Dragon Pass" - with Elmal relegated to ever more marginal status when he's mentioned at all. If you get a new RQG book tomorrow, it'll probably tell you something like, "Yelmalio, though some folks still call him Elmal." (It seems that Monrogh's Revelation has spread from Vantar to Chaosium itself.) So basically, pick what you like. Various books currently on offer disagree. (Take any answer of course with a spoonfull of regional and community variation, even just within Sartar.)

Yep, All of them, roughly six out of seven.

Waha challenged Pavis without Zistor-level provocation, and there was no divine pile-on. Sedenya continues to play fast and loose with the Great Compromise whenever she pleases (and wasn't ever a party to it in the first place).

Gods can violate the Compromise, it's just risky. Too much of that and the world starts to fall apart and more Chaos seeps in. Typically, when one crosses the line other gods step in to bring them to heel. If the violation is relatively minor though, the others might hold back - seeing an escalation of interventions as potentially more damaging than the initial transgression.

I will admit to a preference for more high-functioning Tricksters, closer to Brer Rabbit or MCU Loki than many of the more insane examples we get in the tales.

A key thing contextually here is as emphatically as Jeff is stating things as being the way they are now, they also non-trivially contradict things he wrote years ago in products that were still in the regular catalog earlier this year (as opposed to the explicitly deuterocannonical Vault) and were referenced on glorantha.com as works upon which future Glorantha products would be built until fairly recently. (And the still-on-sale Guide is more congruent with the HQ2/G materials than it is with some of these more recently presented perspectives.) Now, Jeff & the rest have every right to make changes to the product line(s) that reflect their evolving tastes and perspectives on such matters as they deem fit. That's entirely legitimate. Let's not pretend though that they weren't also selling Sartar - Kingdom of Heroes at full-price concurrently with the new RQG stuff, which you that in Sartar the Yelmalio cult has 3000 Initiate and up members, while the Elmal and Redalda cults have 1000 each. Similarly, a Guide to Glorantha bought today still lists the Sun god in the Orlanthi pantheon as Elmal, and that his Runes are Truth and Fire. That's a different picture than the new messaging paints. It's not just that YGWV. Chaosium/Moon Design has/had multiple varying Gloranthas on offer as well, concurrently, and that when they have previously said, "I know things were a bit all over the map at times in the past, but here are the works we will reference going forward in new products..." there was an unwritten "...until we change our minds again." Once you walk something like that back the very concept of a canonical point of reference gets a bit squishy. Again, they can and should change things if they think it's the best move for whatever reason, (even if I don't like it, lol) but the more often they do the more limited any pronouncements of "this is how it is" become.

My Heretical Take: To say that Elmal and Yelmalio are both the Little Sun is like saying that St. Louis and Kansas City are both cities in Missouri. They are built from a common foundation and substance, and are part of the same greater whole, but that doesn't make them the exact same thing, or make one the-real-one and the other an error.

The Brown Book of Zzabur is such a gem. @Tindalos, if you'd ever be of a mind to collect those HQG cults into a PDF or the like, I'd be happy to help with layout, proofing, etc.

The TM business shouldn't require the Vault vanishing altogether though. Really early HeroWars branded stuff wouldn't be affected, and I thought it also had earlier edition CoC materials.

That's one of the very few differences between HQG & HQ2. You'll see that opposed runes section in SKoH's cult write ups, but not in HQG's. You just have the general power rune oppositions in the latter. In either case, the principle still holds for Argan Argar, Etyries, or Dormal. RQG's rune opposition mechanics are gentler still, but a mismatched character could still put you in a frustrating place when it's time to pick up the dice to cast certain spells. WRT the magic in RQG, If I were patching in Communication, I would just go through the spell list and pencil in Communication next to some-but-not-all of the Movement and Harmony spells, and perhaps even make a few Communication-exclusive - as thematically appropriate. Same with Eternal Battle.

I bet you could do many other cults' heroquests as Lanbril, either as an impostor - Lanbril masquerading as a supporting character in the tale and pulling a fast one without the other characters realizing it, or as a hidden participant acting alongside but unbeknownst to the other characters - helping or hindering them by turns for his own benefit. An Arkatic Lanbril cult in Safelster centered around the divine mystery of just who stole all these other cults' secrets from whom is left as an exercire to the reader.

This sort-of works, but can run afowl of the opposed nature of power runes. A smuggler who is strong in Trade and Disorder works, but not so much if the trader magic is based on Harmony. Similar closed doors arise from replacing Eternal Battle with Death & Beast for Urox.

As the Guide & HQG are in agreement WRT the runes and gods runic associations, their model is largely how I frame the world. I respect RQG having a condensed rune list for the sake of being more managable on the character sheet, spell list, etc. I dislike the idea of bending the setting to match the condensed list (or pretending that it had always been that way), along with some opposed rune consequences that the condensed list has for characters. If I were to run a RQG campaign, I'd let players write in Eternal Battle, Communication/Trade, Light, or whatever they need on their sheet, and go with whatever makes sense for matching up spells, cult requirements, etc.

Chained Simple Contests, Scored Contests, and Extended Contests are all there for supporting finer-grained resolution in various ways. The key is to zoom the contest framing in or out in response to player excitement and interest.

The section in the back of the HW players' book that explicitly laid out sacrificing to saints and such comes to mind. It was more expensive in terms of HP spent on advancement to gain magic the "wrong" way, but it worked. HW had playable-level detail on the county, Atroxic church. and the Troop, which is rad.