Darius West

16 hours ago, Jeff said:

Again, very unlikely that in Nochet you are likely to have a "thieves cult" that specializes in using sorcery. You might have individual sorcerers that are willing to work with thieves - in fact I am pretty sure of that. Just like you have lawyers and accountants who work with criminals. But even Jimmy McGill learned his lawyering skills from outside of the crime organizations he worked with.

 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 hours ago, g33k said:

Rather to my surprise, even rod-fishing goes back to antiquity (although early rods were just long fixed handles that their lines were tied to, without a spool or guides for the line; more like a glorified carriage whip, I think ... ); 2000BC seems to be the commonly-cited date.

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?  

8 hours ago, metcalph said:

What you are describing here is a single person rather than a criminal group.  The group aims to get large sums of money from other people with as little as work as possible (violence may or may not be counted as work depending on the members).   That's contrary to the mentality of a sorcerous society which would be full of people spending large amounts of work for something of little value. 

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.  

8 hours ago, metcalph said:

Why mess around with sympathetic bonuses when you can easily get spirit and rune magic success rates above 50% for far less effort?  A thief wants good magic right now, not something he has to spend five years to have  a middling chance of success.

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.

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?

On 6/15/2022 at 7:02 AM, FlamingCatOfDeath said:

Jeff mentioned that Kyger Litor rules Dagori Inkarth, and that got me thinking about how this relates to the compromise. Gods are allowed to give instructions to their followers and they have a castle of lead and those extend down into the underworld where Kyger Litor can act more freely. Can anyone elaborate on how she rules a middle word kingdom while following the compromise?

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)

13 minutes ago, metcalph said:

Sorcery is heavily limited by the requirement for literacy.  Thus a thief would find it easier to know and cast heal 2 or heal wound than to take reading lessons so he can cast mend flesh with a chance greater than 5%.  And if the thief was prepared to endure long periods of study to become a half-decent sorceror, he won't have the mindset of being a thief, would he?

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.

On 6/20/2022 at 4:27 PM, metcalph said:

I don't think there would be any such thing as a sorcerous thief cult.  There might be thieves working for a sorcerer but even in Malkioni lands, thieves would worship a thief god (like Lanbril) or demon.  

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.

Is Garundyer a superhero?

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.

4 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

As I understand it undead = animated corpse.  And they are not ghosts, which are "always tied to a specific site or object" (RQB p.170) and are classified as genius loci!. They seem to just be the dead on annual holiday.

The rule of thumb these days seems to be that Undead have magic points but no POW.

On 6/10/2022 at 11:32 AM, FlamingCatOfDeath said:

Given this I am having trouble understanding what difference there is between Awakened herd-men and humans,

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.

Surely Ty Kora Tek is more important as a deity of death than Daka Fal in Esrolia/Nochet?

On 6/18/2022 at 8:25 PM, Agentorange said:

Just ran a search on the search box but drew a blank, what criminal organisations exist in Nochet ?  I'm going to just start working through the results for Nochet, but thats a lot of results, so if some one knows of a thread or  article please point me in the right direction......

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.

10 hours ago, Ludovic aka Lordabdul said:

I count him and Arkat (half troll or whatever he is) and other such NPCs as the exceptions. They are heroes (superheroes maybe even) who clearly did something totally unique to become who they are. My point is just that "half-whatever" isn't a biological thing, otherwise we would have all possible variants of ancestries, like "well you see I'm 70% human and 25% elf on my grandmother's side, but there's also a bit of pixie in there somehow, and I'm also 3% troll from my great-great-great-grandfather but we don't speak about that and we haven't eaten mushrooms for 4 generations because of that story, it's a long story"

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.

10 hours ago, Ludovic aka Lordabdul said:

What Man Rune conspiracy? Is that the thing Joerg brought up in the episode? (I don't know anything about it, or I forgot)

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.

3 hours ago, EricW said:

They don't have to both choose the same option. One could choose the Lunar path, the other could stay true to Praxian traditions. Philosophical divergence vs family. "I won't report you to the secret police because you are my brother, but..."

Actually, not really.  Why would they need to cure their mother twice?  These aren't teenagers with social prospects, they're likely 10 y/o or thereabouts.  They need to pool their resources to achieve anything much.

On 1/1/2019 at 8:42 PM, Steve said:

I don't recall Jeff saying in this thread that "Yelm is the sun god of the Orlanth pantheon". Some Orlanthi calling the sun disk "Yelm" doesn't make that so. I don't see a retcon here, I see a useful clarification and more details.

 

There are places where people never see the Sun such as Far Point where it rains continuously due to the Skyfall Lake weather system (?).  There it is Elmal who is the Sun, who is witnessed as the Light in the Hills.

19 hours ago, simonh said:

A really nice way to show and break down the visual and thematic elements in Aztec iconography. Not directly applicable to Glorantha of course, but indirectly highly applicable I think.

https://pudding.cool/2022/06/aztec-gods/

This is a great example of how to teach mythology to kids.  A really well produced website.  I am also a fan of the sheer ghastliness of the Aztec pantheon regardless.  One of the few true horror religions.

9 hours ago, Ludovic aka Lordabdul said:

Hah where is that from?

It is a staple from my Prax notes.  In other words, I made it up.

9 hours ago, Ludovic aka Lordabdul said:

Half with what? Elves are their own species. This isn't D&D with its silly and somewhat offensive approach to ethnicity. IMG the only way to get cross-species offspring is by going into the God Time, where weird sex stuff just seems to work.

You're right, of course, but that does make Pavis' half-elven status even odder.  I mean we all know about the Green Age Man Rune conspiracy of the Godlearners in Prax which produced him, but...

It is fought outside Bagnot, and Harrek manages to kill Jar-Eel, but not permanently.  

So... These elves... Do they eat poop? 🤔

I only ask because of their strange behavior after we ate near their camp.  They kept following us around with "the shovel" and handfuls of pre-picked leaves of Old Friend (the wiping leaf).  Is this the origin of the old Gloranthan saying "never kiss an elf?", and why half-elves are so rare? 

For the record:

Old Friend

This is a perennial and fast growing weed of Glorantha, having travelled the world, likely with the God Learners on their ships, if not traded far and wide by Issaries merchants in the First Age.  Old Friend has a soft, broad downy leaf that is fibrous and doesn’t tear easily. The down of the leaf is actually its seeds. Old Friend is used for wiping bottoms, and in the process of doing so, its seeds get the nutrients it needs to grow more Old Friend.  Old Friend does need more water than is commonly available in Prax, and hence it is mainly found growing at Oases, or the banks of rivers, and seasonal rivers.  As a water-rich plant, grazing animals like to eat Old Friend’s succulent leaves, and propagate it in their dung.  If picked and allowed to dry, Old Friend can be burned to produce a very smoky fire, which sometimes has signaling value.  The down of Old Friend can be scraped and collected in a laborious process that produces a pinch of material per leaf, and can be used to season with a mild taste which has a gentle nutty bittersweet flavor, with hints of pepper, citrus and anise.  The leaf itself is safe for humans to consume but has little to no taste, and has very little nutritional value, but has plenty of water content.  Praxians are not at all squeamish about eating a plant normally reserved for wiping bottoms, especially if they are thirsty. 

On 6/10/2022 at 6:54 PM, Manu said:

Hi,

Is there myth of chaotic snakemen? Snake is strongly related to Earth (Ernalda cults and even Pamalt is represented as a snake man). Then there could be some chaotic snakemen, no?

I believe there are chaotic Yuan To snake-men native to Kralorela.

9 hours ago, Imperial_Solaire said:

How do you pitch this game to new/less experienced players. What is your session 0 like? And How do you guide your players in this world for the full experience?

I have done this at least 3 times in my life. 

Step 1.  You need to establish trust and understanding with your players and their expectations.  You think you need to explain Glorantha to them, but that is impossible, so don't do that.  Instead explain that you are going to teach them the game by letting them grow up in Glorantha and learn the game by interacting with the world.  Don't be afraid to let them read some source material.

Step 2.  Raise your players as good Orlanthi.  That is... Run some scenarios set in a standard Orlanthi setting, with them as kids initially.  Make these adventures easy and childish, but memorable.  Then run their initiation into adulthood as a scenario.  Then have them run into Lunar trouble in some form.  If they are clever they don't get exiled as outlaws.  Don't push them into combat stories, or encourage combat.  Combat is a product of role-playing context.  If there is no good political and contextual reason to get into a fight, then players need to understand that fighting for its own sake isn't desirable. 

Step 3.  There are plenty or resources regarding the views of the various cults, so have them roleplay encounters with the priests of the deities they are interested in.  As GM you play the priest and answer the questions they have a la "Staves of the Storm Priest" etc.

Step 4.  Build a consistent reality with re-occurring NPCs whom the characters can have meaningful interactions with on a regular basis.  Players turn into murder hoboes when they don't value NPCs lives.  Give them friends and family who are useful and care about them and matter.  This will potentially raise the emotional stakes of the game and help the players invest in the story and the causes become motivations in the story.  Let the players choose their path, but remind them that they have friends and family who will judge those choices.  Yes they can join the Seven Mothers, but their parents may well disown them, for example.

Step 5.  Set the characters up with the training they need to become decent examples of their cult and society, give them the grounding in the world they need by teaching thru play, and then "chuck them out of the nest".  The simplest example of this is having them need to seek safety in New Pavis and begin the adventurer lifestyle there, but as rounded characters with a lived/played back story.

9 hours ago, metcalph said:

Ran off to the join the army, did he?  How vulgar.   He can worship whatever strange gods he likes but don't expect further advancement in Yelm's graces. 

I would not be so absolute on this matter.  There is nothing in the Yelm cult that suggests that an initiate of Yelm may have no other cult.

20 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

I sometimes idly speculate on how Bless Crops compares to Haber–Bosch for crop yields.

Heh. Nice thought.  You raise a separate point entirely imo.  The nexus between Alchemy and Sorcery, as well as how they relate to Divine magic.  Is there a sorcery spell that aids and protects crops?  I would be surprised if there wasn't.  Can it be supplemented by alchemy?  We just don't know, but it probably should be possible.

Nitrogen fixing is a long term issue for agriculture.  I understand that the Mesoamericans used to save and plant fish heads and fish bones with their maize to act as nitrogen fixers due to the chemical composition of the bones. Medievals used legume crops to fix nitrogen.  Observations were made and methods employed even without a scientific basis.

19 hours ago, JRE said:

We will have to agree to disagree, as I just deleted a draft that was just a ping pong game of arguments, when clearly we have a quite different vision of orlanthi families, and the associated mortality that drives that same situation.

Though I punctually agree the events from 1621 onwards will mean lots of kids after 1626, which will be important in the final stages of the Hero War, as the lot of kids in 1602-1612 will fuel the coming war years and supply player characters. 

Honestly, Sartarites have a huge impetus to repopulate after 1602, and every subsequent year.  They had a huge reason to populate prior too, given the threat on the horizon.

Ignoring that, they have a huge impetus to populate given the "axles over the next hill" want to take their land in stock standard Orlanthi territorial feuding.

In a society where motherhood is revered, and social survival of the in-group depends on motherhood, please don't assume that women don't want to make that choice.  That's a modern post-industrial thing and both anachronistic an inappropriate for Glorantha imo.  Motherhood is not a boring or inferior life choice for women in Glorantha, and it carries social and religious power and importance.  The bronze age is a "populate or perish" environment where motherhood is very important.  Sure, in Orlanthi society there is the law "nobody can make you do anything", which means that human females in Orlanthi societies need not choose motherhood and can opt into pretty much any cult, and some do, but 85% (the orlanthi definition of All) women will likely join earth related cults like Ernalda to help them with farming and maternity, just like 85% (again All) of males will join Orlanth or the Thunder Brothers such as Barntar.  At least that is my take on matters, but I think it is born out by the material.

22 hours ago, JRE said:

Actually that is the whole point why I fully disagree with the idea that Glorantha is Bronze age, except in appearance. My thesis is that the presence of magic fully changes the dynamic, as we can see also with the population density in most of Glorantha, that are much higher than in Earth during modern times, not to mention the Bronze ages.

Based on those population densities we must assume that the rural population is very high.  Yes, magic can mitigate these requirements a little in terms of keeping urban populations supplied, but not unreasonably as the magic only protects the crop; it doesn't multiply it.

22 hours ago, JRE said:

And I insist the changes are good for a game world. Women are free to do other things besides having kids. No obsession with sex for procreation (except high class Yelmites, I suppose, but we need someone to mock), which also avoids most of our world's hang-ups with same sex couples and casual sex, or with people changing or assuming different genders. Just because most peoples are over the subsistence level, so the extra people are not really necessary thanks to fertility magic, and there is a very good chance that a pregnancy will give you a new adult (or two) in sixteen years.

You are denigrating motherhood, whether you accept the fact or not.  Do you seriously think that a society like Esrolia gets as large as it is because women would rather be filling other roles?  Motherhood is the social glue of Orlanthi society, and Ernaldan society too.  Raising a large family is useful for many reasons, and the legal institutions relating to marriage exist to protect mothers and children and their inheritance rights, as males are warriors and thus disposable.   This is not a society where most women want to travel or fight or spend their lives cooped up in a library or a workshop.  Motherhood has immense dignity, and each live birth is a personal hero quest that adds to the viability of her family, her clan, her tribe, and her state.  Ernalda is the epitome of this role, and you don't see the goddess eagerly running off to try her hand at killing broos, or learning calligraphy etc.

22 hours ago, JRE said:

Borders have moved very little in Dragon Pass in the last centuries. If we do not count the Lunar occupation, which is a recent event, Sartar has been a haven of peace for more than a century, so I do not see that low intensity orlanthi on orlanthi warfare in Dragon Pass. There are a few sharp wars with Tarsh, roughly once for generation, but I do not expect that affects most of the population, but the professional warrior class and martial magicians of both sides.

 We MUST count the border alterations caused by the Lunar occupation.  The entire focus of Orlanthi identity has been dedicated to fighting the Lunars and losing.  How can we not count that?  Also we cannot be entirely certain about when Moonson gave Ethilrist his land, and we know that the Amber fields and Forthanland only become recognized as Yelmalio territory in 1579.  The fall of Tarsh also saw the territory of that state subtract the land of the Exiles, the Bush range and Far Point from its previous holdings imsmc.

22 hours ago, JRE said:

But Dragon Pass is quite full, so anybody with big families is planning war gainst their neighbours. Which could be a thing in Sartar, if they had not just suffered the long winter. 

I strongly disagree with this assessment.  The pursuit of large families is a constant for every clan at all times, as children become the wealth and power of a family.  Furthermore, danger is a proven aphrodisiac and war and hardship drives population booms when you look at demographic evidence irl.

22 hours ago, JRE said:

As for Argrath, I would expect he will try to ritualize even his affairs, to extract all the power he can. So he will cast his partners as Orlanth's partners, and really love them. And then he will play at being Heler, and sow further afield. He will be (Storm) White Bull in Prax, and extend even further his influence by fathering little Wahas, or look for less known myths that foster the brotherhood with benefits between Urox and Orlanth...

 Personally I base my Argrath on Greg Stafford himself, and have always imagined him as Greg's character and reflecting Greg's personality if playing this very focused Orlanthi leader.  I see Argrath as highly intelligent and innovative, mercurial, and highly political.  Of course Argrath is also an illuminate, and so there is the temptation of power-hungry over-reach.  All of this would no-doubt permeate his use of sex (I employ the term "use of sex" very deliberately as I am sure he would see it as another tool).

That being said I think that your approach to Argrath works well JRE and I think agree with it.