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Darius West

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Everything posted by Darius West

  1. So who converted the Ostriches to Yelmalio ? Remember that Yelmalio is a relatively recent advent in Dragon Pass, brought in by Monrogh to supplant Elmal, and thus break the subservience of Dragon Pass solar worshipers to the Orlanth Pantheon. The so-called Yelmalios of Mo Baustra (Sun County) actually follow Tharkantus, and likely only started calling their deity Yelmalio due to the need to legitimize themselves with the Lunars. The Aldryami by comparison worship the Light in the Hills, not Yelmalio, and the Balazarings follow Balazar. Yes, these deities may be Sons of the Sun, and they may have the similar mechanics to Yelmalio, but to say they are the same deity is God Learnerism. Just because two deities seem to have similar powers and a similar mythology doesn't mean they are the same deity. If you go down that line of reasoning you will wind up with the Goddess-Swap experiment, and subsequent catastrophes.
  2. You mis-understand... Ship Handling isn't a skill so much as a perversion... 😝
  3. Argrath literally killed all the Gods, on purpose, to usher in an age of humans. He is also the actual reincarnation of Arkat. He's unequivocally a superhero by the end imo.
  4. £10 is a small price to pay to secure one's immortal soul. Perhaps I could interest you in a certain bridge project in the village of Lynbrook while you are here? 😉
  5. One of the biggest hassles at Sacred Time is travelling during Storm Season to get home for the ceremonies. The roads are packed, and often troubled by weather related problems. Inns will be full up, and even floor space will be at a premium. Think Xmas or Chinese New Year. Then you finally arrive and have to contend with the family dinner table "God's War"...
  6. So here's a question that has been much on my mind of late. What version of Yelmalio do the Ostrich tribe of Prax worship? There are obviously umpteen versions of Yelmalio, each with a different name and regional history, but what version do the Ostrich people follow? What do they call their Yelmalio? Obviously their version is nothing like the version followed in Sun County, as the pygmies haven't chosen to mass ranks of hoplites, but will more likely follow an Ostrich-Kuschile version of the god, more in keeping with their needs and traditions. Thoughts?
  7. My party calls that a "power spanking".
  8. *Snortlaugh* Now this is a story that should be epic in the retelling. How did someone get their Allied Spirit captured?
  9. If you ever hear a fool complain he has too many beasts to care for, raid him.” Quote from Chuknal Khan (called "He who pulls the whiskers of Basmol") of the Avalanche (Green) Llamas.
  10. Challenging what most people can do with a bow by bringing up Lars Andersen videos. Where have I seen this before? I would suggest you get yourself off to the Society of Creative Anachronism and do some shooting of your own to get a proper sense of what is possible. Lars Andersen is a bit of a marvel, a brilliant athlete and bow sportsman, and might be considered something of a hero level archer by Gloranthan standards. Lars claims that he has recovered techniques from Turkic horse archers and the Plains Tribes of America, and I don't dispute the possibility based on what has been written about them. They were cultures with a lot of master archers. In Glorantha we call what Lars does spirit magic like "multimissile".
  11. I think you have a far more grandiose idea of what a sorcerous order is than I do. And anyhow, as the saying goes "To level a mountain one must first carry away small stones". You don't need to build a university, you can start with a rural kindergarten and work your way up over generations of thieves. Seriously, it is easy enough to make new spells, and not that hard to get a decent level of proficiency with a sorcery spell or two, especially if you are being trained. The more I think about it, the more I think many Zzaburi may well have their own personal cadre of thieves who do their bidding behind the scenes, much like House Tytalus in Ars Magica. Lanbril doesn't have arbitrary appetites? No rules? read the cult write up in Common Knowledge for Players more carefully. Sure, Lanbril has no spirit of retribution listed, but break the rules and see what happens. I would argue that the lack of a spirit of retribution is further proof of Lanbril's likely sorcerous origins in any case. In Malkioni lands Shamans are burned at the stake. While I completely concur that shamanic criminal organizations are and should be a thing, I think that denying a similar opportunity to sorcerers is arbitrary and ill-considered. Organizations that use sorcery for thieving lie well within the purview of what is possible.
  12. There is no reason why an exiled or discredited zzaburi wouldn't decide to turn to crime, especially if they start with a compliment of illusion magic. Every sorcerer has the requisite intelligence to become an evil genius, even if there might be some deficits in the charisma department sometimes. Your exiled zzaburi then decides that they want to move silently and invisibly, overcome locks and barriers, and carry away large quantities of loot, while being magically undetectable. This sounds like a manageable wish list to me given what sorcery can do. All that is missing at that point is a few students who want to learn the tricks and you would have a sorcery cult run by an new enlightened master. The zzaburi just has to use spell creation to add in a lockpicking skill or a divination blocker and the matter is concluded I think. How will they finance this? By stealing money.
  13. Fishing hooks found in Sakitari Cave in Okinawa are far FAR older. Rereading the article I can't believe that the Proceedings for the National Academy of Science uses the acronym PNAS btw. Have they never said that out loud without the implied punctuation?
  14. A group has to start somewhere, so why not with its smallest constituent number? i.e. 1. Sorcery would potentially provide any group regardless of size with an edge that was not dependent on divine favor. Sorcery isn't hard to develop to a useable level, and if other people could see the benefits, it might encourage them to support the initial developer with a view to benefitting in the future from their research. Your position here is interesting, but perhaps the sorcerous group in question don't want to be beholden to a deity and their arbitrary appetites, spirits of retribution and rules, while also lacking access to a shaman who can offer them easy access to spirit spells? This would be a problem arising in Malkioni areas. I personally could easily see a situation where a Zzaburi forced into exile turned to crime only to become an "enlightened master" of certain specialist sorcery spells. It is not entirely impossible that this is the hidden history of the god Lanbril's emergence, given all the mechanisms and alchemy that cult is heir to. Divination Block smells of a sorcery fix to me, and Lanbril just seems like a sorcery cult pretending to be a religion.
  15. Fishing with a hook and line is really ancient, like 22,000+ years ago ancient. It is also a lot less effective than fishing with a net (which is mesolithic). Why do I even know this stuff?
  16. Ya know its a bit hard saying you're the Only Old One when you can wander north and find Kyger Litor still hanging out there 😉 (just trolling)
  17. People can become thieves for a variety of reasons, but one thing is certain; urban populations are universally more literate than rural ones. I suspect it would be relatively easy for a literate person to wind up on the wrong side of the law, especially a corrupt bureaucrat who knows how to cook a book. As for long periods of study, I draw your attention to all those sympathetic magic bonuses on p387-388 of RQG. You can boost a low level of competence by using these, and that will get you your seasonal ticks assuming training is not available. I have seen a player get their Defense stat from RQ2 up to 120% over the course of a campaign and getting better at sorcery seems easy by comparison.
  18. IDK, I could see something like a sorcerous thief cult occurring in Fonrit. If you think about it, sorcery is the easiest form of magic to learn, because all you need is a grimoire and the time to puzzle out how to cast spells. Also, the spell creation rules on RQG p390 would mean that you could cobble together some useful new thief specific magic.
  19. The dynamic between the various deities on the matter of death is interesting. Humakt is neutral to pretty much everyone, except he seriously hates the worst excesses of Chaos and likes Orlanth. Daka Fal likes racial ancestor deities like Aldrya, Kyger Litor, and even Thed, but is hostile to nearly all other deities. Ty Kora Tek is tied to other Earth Pantheon deities, and not much more can be said for certain. The rule of thumb these days seems to be that Undead have magic points but no POW.
  20. RQ3 had a concept called Fixed INT, which applied to animals. Fixed INT meant that the intelligence of the creature wasn't rolled and it wasn't sentient in the same sense a human or a trollkin is sentient. Animals function according to instinct or some-such under the Fixed INT rule, and can only understand a few words in terms of their language acquisition. Awakening a herd man was simply removing their Fixed INT status, plus some small physical changes. Awakened herd men are essentially human beings. The fact is, an obstreperous human prisoner of the morokanths can be subject to Alter Creature and become a herd man, and when his friends pay his ransom plus casting fees, he can be changed back to a human being. Herd men "awakened" this way are a bit like feral humans; they likely have few skills and little language (except maybe Understand Beast Speech?), but they now have full sentience and so can learn far more easily. Cosmetically, herd men have large teeth, and it is at the GM's discretion whether the Alter Creature spell changes this.
  21. Surely Ty Kora Tek is more important as a deity of death than Daka Fal in Esrolia/Nochet?
  22. Nochet is a hotbed of Lanbril activity according to what I have read, with multiple competing Lanbril families controlling different districts, and the cult grows as the city grows. They operate very much like the armed night gangs of ancient Rome. No doubt there are other criminal organizations in such a large population, but Nochet is not well organized, and such law as there is will be mercenary warriors paid for by the matriarchs of the noble families, who are unlikely to be impartial arbiters of the law.
  23. I hate to say it, but the Man Rune conspiracy may well mean that Pavis was closer to the latter than the former. It suggests that he was part of an experiment to recreate a person of the primal man-rune incorporating all the Elder man-rune races into one person. The man-rune conspiracy involves the shadowy parents of Pavis, who were allegedly of Godlearner stock hiding out in Adari during the Second Age after the fall of Robcradle. They were hooked into the lost lore of Prax, and were interested in Genert's Garden, and worked to "build-a-brat" Pavis into a Green Age expression of the man rune, from before there were properly defined races. This in turn would open certain ritual opportunities to recreate the Green Age, which sort-of happened when Pavis built his city.
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