Darius West

Blessings of Sacred Time be upon ye all, and may the Curse of Malia be broken and rent of its power as the Yearly Cycle is reborn, clean and new.

So, remember that part in the Lightbringer Summons "The Hand has pawed me"? Is that the left or the right hand? They both live in Snakepipe Hollow. I think Snakepipe Hollow is a nicer place than Dorastor, but mainly because it just isn't as big. I also think the scenario as written is a bit low key in terms of threat. I think SPH is a very big place with many more caves, and it would be a hell of a lot worse if it weren't for its reputation as a place where adventurers can make it rich.

If you don't want the players to have to do this, why not give them the option of having the morokanth bounty hunter Bor-bor the Fat show ups and promise to take care of it for them for half of the Assistant Shaman's usual ransom (125L), and is willing to start for a down-payment of 25L ? They succeed and come back a few days later saying they have the Assistant shaman, and want the rest of their pay or they will sell the Assistant shaman into slavery to make up the difference, even offering to top up the other characters if they get over 100L in the deal, because they are honest business-morokanths.

I like Akhorahil's idea of Silence improving a Move Silently roll by one level of success. A fumble becomes a fail. A fail becomes a success. A success becomes a special, and a special becomes a crit. While not the official reading of the spell from RQG, it is a well thought out response to handling the spell imo, and as with Mechashef, I think the spell is unclear as to its effects within existing game mechanics. I also thought that Crel's point was valid, but I would treat the removal of armor penalties as merely an added bonus, because often IRL, all that would take is a few pennies and a trip to a tailor, but the rules don't accommodate such things. Want things to stop clanking or jingling? Add cloth. A silence spell is supposed to represent magic, and even though spirit magic is supposed to be minimalist, a silence spell should do more than the write-up says in order to justify its existence.

I think you need to properly grade the pedantry on a bell curve Bill. 😈

This sounds a bit like a classic example of Murphy's Rules in an RPG. I would suggest rolling separately for each Hide instead. Players like rolling dice I find.

Yes, except that it is perfectly feasible that if the characters have cash reserves to spend on their upkeep and are prepared to risk adventuring with reduced rune points, they can potentially knock over another adventure or two in a season. I have players who utterly hate the prospect of being limited to one adventure a season, and complain bitterly if they can't, and they have point imo. Yes. Players may even spend a whole season as downtime if they need to blow their rune points on something other than adventuring, and don't feel confident about heading into danger under-powered. Yes, these are pretty good rules imo. I like finding reasons for cutting into characters cash reserves, so players gasp and mutter about lost income and talk about selling their magical loot. It's the whole taking-time-off-work thing. Will you have a job to go back to? And the answer in Glorantha is yes, but ouch.

The reason I ask is that I once ran a Tovtari Campaign starting in 1595 where one of my female players wanted to play an Ernaldan, and rolled high nobility, so I made her a potential claimant to both Sorana Tor and FHQ through an ancient blood tie to the early settlers of Far Point. This meant I could run a lot of intrigue, and get the rest of the party pushing to help her succeed as a means of undercutting Lunar power in the region, post-invasion. It was a rollicking treach + murder fest, and definitely MGDV.

WARNING: Dorastor is the most horrible part of Glorantha, a cursed land full of terrors. Secrets of Dorastor deals with extreme horror, with topics including violence, cannibalism, seduction, forced matings, ritual sacrifice and the liberal use of acid (as a weapon, not a drug, but y'know...). Please do not purchase this if these themes might cause offense. Now that's a disclaimer that will make a seasoned Glorantha Grognard grin.

In short, you won't run into many pitfalls. While the game system has changed a bit over the years, any GM who is halfway competent will be able to look even at HQ material and be able to make a pretty fair fist of converting it to RQG. In terms of the older material, you will find that some of the lore has since been superseded, but most of the info will still stand up. RQG is different to RQ3 mainly in that it doesn't have a fatigue point system (which is a glaring omission from the RQG rules, and we all know how much a system of fatigue and encumbrance improved game play back in the day, and we all really cared about how every last coin weight measured up to our overall fatigue, and I am being intensely sarcastic), and of course the Skill Category Modifiers were calculated differently etc. The overall Basic Roleplaying Chaosium system hasn't changed too intensely from version to version, with HQ being the stand-out exception, bearing precious little resemblance to any of it, but it still comes with a conversion system attached in the errata sheet as far as I remember. Overall, don't get too hung up about differences. Your Glorantha WILL vary. You literally can't avoid it, so don't fret about it. It is great that you want to provide your players with the most lore-authentic experience you can, and kudos to you for wanting to do that, but even Greg Stafford used to contradict himself in the lore occasionally, sometimes intentionally to trickster-troll the overly lore devoted GMs I think, so avoid getting too anxious about it. If you are even asking this question, you are likely already a bit over-prepared, and your players are in safe hands. At the end of the day, what is important is that your players have fun, not that they get lore-dumped out of existence.

According to KoS, there is a point where the Lunars manage to completely roll back the Sartarites to Prax, even retaking New Pavis, but the Lunars still manage to lose the war. Of course, if someone had assassinated Garrath Sharpsword in New Pavis on 1616, well, Argrath means liberator, so was he the only one who could fill those shoes? As to what would happen to him, well, the Lunars would likely try to send him to a Lunar Hell, but Argrath had already liberated Sheng Seleris from such a place, and while I can't quite see Sheng returning the favor, there are others who had raided into the Lunar Hells by this point, so the HQ paths there were open.

These days characters get to increase their skills once per season (is that a mis-spelling of session? jk). Adventures may take a while, but it is generally assumed that once ended the characters get down-time for study, training, household management chores etc. It is therefore reasonable to assume that a character can devote the period of their season not spent adventuring on the matter of communing. Now this can be augmented, and I draw your attention to page 246 of the RQG book. If the character spends 1 week involved in 'intellectual union', they will get +60% to the roll. That's the augment, and it is a substantial bonus on the base INT + POW roll. If they devoted their whole season to the matter it would be +75%, but then they couldn't have adventured. It is up to the GM to determine how much time a character can devote to their pursuit of intellectual union. Technically there is no monetary requirement for performing this, but the character needs a source of upkeep during their downtime, and the liberty to take time off. Intellectual union is not discussed at any length in the write-up, but it is a ritual of sorts, just not like theistic or shamanistic rituals. Instead it involves a lot of conferring and poring over books (especially one's primary grimoire), consulting tables, astronomy and astrology, observance of sympathies and correspondences, taking measurements and perhaps dabbling in a test involving alchemical runic principles, and a general literature search on topics relevant to the technique they wish to master, or perhaps none of this occurs and the sorcerer simply sits very deep in thought for a very long time staring at a blank wax tablet while they gather their thoughts. Then they sit down with the evidence and begin the process of reasoning out how it works, and experimenting with getting it to do so. If successful, there is a moment of epiphany when the intellectual union is achieved, and the technique is understood in all its subtlety and glory. The 1 POW represents the opening of the mental channel that initiates the sorcerer into the technique, in much the same way that spending 1 POW allows a theist to form a connection with their deity. Sorcery Techniques are a rarified and abstruse, highly intellectualized sort of deity (if you will indulge the analogy). Imagine if you will, treating Calculus or Topology or one of the other forms of Higher mathematics as a deity. Instead of only numbers and signs however you are manipulating the runes, the very underlying system of Gloranthan reality. The techniques and runes make no particular demands on you, unlike most deities, and are utterly indifferent to your fate. You cannot call out to them for aid, for they have no intrinsic ego to appeal to, and likely no body, but they also don't inflict arbitrary cultural rules upon you, and nor do they demand your loyalty or obedience. Abstract principles are unusual gods, but don't assume they aren't real or powerful, or that they are intelligent. It is enough that they are intelligible, and once grasped, are completely indifferent to being used in a way that other pesky gods are not.

The Glowline is extended by the huge lumps of moon rock employed as the focus of the temples. If you replace these with sufficiently large Thunderstones, the effect on the Lunar Glowline is predictable and valuable when harnessed by Orlanthi. The first time this was done was in the Temple of the Reaching Moon in Tarsh after its capture, but it is posited that the Household of Death had always intended to do something similar back in 1602. The roll-back of the Glowline persisted throughout the rule of Argrath, and it seems likely that the moon itself declined in power with the decline of the Glowline's reach, or this may have been part of some sort of grand Wane cycle that reached its apogee just before the Dragonrise, and met its nadir with the dismemberment and fall of the moon, but will rise again. At least this is my take on it.

I am no fan of the Lunars, but they are a much more punishing and interesting enemy when they have full moon access within the glowline imo. You always know that the middle of the week is when they are going to move, but you can't always guess what they will do next. Without it, the Lunars are pretty nerfed imo, but the RQG rules specifically say on p303 that the moon is only Half-Full within the Glowline. It seems a bit daft, given that the rule purely existed to prevent an HQ rort, and we aren't playing HQ, but there you go... As to the Cyclical Characteristic Rune Spell, I can't agree with your player's complaint. The spell is for use outside the Glowline as you suggest imo. As to Madness being a 1 point spell, I just looked at Page 43 of Cults of Prax (1979 edition) and Madness was a 2 point spell. BTW I think your friend might be a bit of a power gamer.

So lemme guess, it's a True Dragon that got SIZ tapped by Zzabur? Or do some dragons just dream small? In terms of your question, much depends on how intelligent the dragon is imo. If the critter can talk, then it might improve its skills, but if it has a really long lifespan, it might not improve those skills once per season but once per year, once per decade or once per incarnation, I suppose. It sounds a bit too much like a D&D pseudo-dragon to me.

As an aside, has a FHQ ever become a Sorana Tor I wonder?

Well, Jar-Eel might have risen to prominence if she weren't born into the 'House of Eel', but let's face facts, she's a daughter of privilege. I say this to highlight the fact that a substantial portion of her power derives from the influence of her family and its connections. The Eel family brings a lot of political, military, magical and economic resources to the table; when Jar-Eel comes to negotiate, she is never coming to the table alone, even if she is technically physically alone.

I got the impression that Sorana Tor was hereditary, but I might be wrong. I am pretty sure that a marriage can only be sanctioned to occur within an Earth cult if the individuals could actually be co-fertile. It stands to reason imo. Humans and morokanths aren't deities; they can't mate with mud and produce viable life forms (though I suspect we have all met people who might give it a go 😄).

Weird Mostali metallurgical sex ritual right there.

While Wind Children worship Orlanth, they are also listed as worshiping Kolat (the father of winds), and the shamans of Kolat and their fetches are called Seza. I would be surprised if they don't also worship a hunter deity, but that is likely Yinkin, not Odayla.

Probably not, but you never know. If all myths are true, then perhaps things happen exactly as they are recorded. Well, Argrath is an Orlanthi, and so he can Guided Teleport, or fly, and can use the Sandals of Darkness to pass unnoticed. Or he can just roam the land with a terrifying band of warriors and his enemies will simply pretend they cannot see him. Nobody installs kings just by their reputation alone. Argrath at this point in his life already controls the good will and resources of Prax. Crowns are bought and sold in Sartar, and it is likely that Vailor Blue Fox had his own fortune to call upon, as well as Argrath's herds. Of course, having Argrath's personally appointed man on the tribal throne of the Malani may well have been politically astute for the Malani too, so reputation certainly doesn't count for nothing either imo. Call it a 30% discount?

Cragspider is very old. She was first recorded as being a powerful Darkness Spirit (shade?) used by Gor and Gash to help the trolls escape the Underworld. She is a powerful enough Hero Quester that she made an actual race of Trolls (Great Trolls obviously). She is described as an incarnation (avatar?) of Aranea, and a direct worshipper of Arachne Solara (one of the few). She is also the double-value WMD of the boardgame, as she controls the Black Dragon (nuke) and the Pillar of Fire (nuke). While the Earth Shaker and Sir Ethilrist can create some truly impressive line destroying effects, they aren't able to do what Cragspider does, and neither can the Lunars or Sartarites. While her troops are adequate, the magic WMD she brings to the faction that allies her is what makes her a must-have, and any Sartar player who doesn't have multiple units ready to traverse the mountains to Cliffhome to ally her is being foolish. I advise using the Wasps. While she is unequivocally known as the Fire Witch, nobody quite understands how she conjures the Pillar of Flame except her. The notion of an ex-shade controlling fire in that quantity obviously isn't without precedent, but Cragspider's power over fire emerged as a result of her being caught in the Web of Arachne Solara (which are made of myth and power, not silk), where she was forced to make the Dragon's Choice. This is when she meets the Black Dragon for the first time, and it offered to ally itself to her then, but it seems she didn't perhaps take the offer at that time, as she is also recorded as allying with the Black Dragon during the Dragonkill War. Perhaps she merely renewed their acquaintance after centuries? Whatever the case, the implication is that Cragspider is best described as a semi-demi-god (not a superhero), and is almost certainly illuminated (after the Draconic or the Arachne Solara mystical traditions, as she was hostile to Nysalor even before he inflicted the Trollkin Curse). This has allowed her to survive some cosmic unions and events that would likely have slain lesser entities, and her power, coming out the other side, is to deliver death by fire despite being a thing of darkness. (At least that is my take on the evidence).

You make an interesting argument, but the idea of marrying into the Paps suffers from the problem that the position of High Priestess of the Paps isn't hereditary, it's elected, and Egajia Chewer-of-Flesh, the present High Priestess is a morokanth, and quite probably married already. It's an interesting issue though... Who would the Lunar Hierarchy marry to a morokanth? I can think of a few Lunars who deserve to.

I was commenting on the idea put forwards by Joerg that the Lunars aimed to take the Paps. The idea of the Lunars ignoring the Praxian holy peace and neutrality and seizing the Paps isn't utterly unthinkable, it's just the sort of thing an empire might do to annoying people it classes as savages.

The idea that the aim was to take a Lunar Punitive expedition to the Paps is certainly an interesting one and there is a reason I put Punitive expedition as my number 1 choice; it seems the most likely. I would also suggest that the Empire definitely had designs on Prax, because frankly, if you want to stop nomads raiding your lands, the best thing you can do is poison their nearby water sources. The main reason you wouldn't do this is (a) can't afford enough poison, or lack the tech, neither of which apply to the Lunars imo or (b) don't poison wells that you will eventually use during your invasion. I think it is reasonable to assume that Lunars had likely scouted and mapped out Prax well in advance of their first invasion, likely via Etyries merchants, so we can assume that they knew where all the oases were before they invaded, and were well aware of the importance of the Paps in Praxian religion. I have a couple of problems with taking the Paps being the goal. (1) If the aim was to stop raids on Occupied Sartar, surely invoking a Praxian jihad against you by invading their Holy of Holies isn't the best strategy (though I admit that Euglyptus is a stable genius). (2) The whole expedition seems a bit too disorganized for it to have such a clear objective. (3) The fact that the Lunars make it to the Paps for negotiations makes it seem too much like a Lunar success. There is a trail that leads from the Paps to the Stony Creek, then to Rory's Well and down to Helmbold. Unlike most water sources in Prax. Stony Creek seems to be a Zola Fel tributary of the non-seasonal kind. I would not suggest that Stony Creek was navigable by any boat with a remotely deep draught, and indeed I suspect that your average Impala could likely leap it with a run-up, but a road with 2 settlements and a water supply counts as easy access in my book. That seems like a pretty easy way from the Paps to the Zola Fell. Map evidence available in front of RQG. I don't think this invalidates your Paps argument, but it doesn't negate the idea that the Lunars are looking for a path to the sea either. Perhaps our stable genius thought he could fortify the Paps? Y'know... Build a wall?😄 Again, this depends on which map you are looking at. What we can say with certainty is that Tolkazzi and his Lunar mission find the ruins of Feroda in 1611, and founds Corflu (named for Tolkazzi's wife) around the same time, because he sells his rights to it in 1613, and the Corflu Bubble gets going pretty much immediately. The RQG 1625 map shows Sog's Ruin sitting on the top of a cliff about 10km from Prax's coastal swamp, and with no obvious water supply. I think the Lunar engineers were competent in their assessment. TBH, I think feinting around the back of the Stormwalks with an extended supply line through hostile territory to create a surprise attack on the Heorland's southern flank sounds very much like something Euglyptus might try. After all, the fortifications in the area are hardly a match for Lunar magic and siege equipment, and when enough Prax beasts all piss at the same time, Praxians call that a river. It is an act that is redolent with both stability and genius. Ici, ici, ici, et victoire Napoleon, C'est un fait accompli. ☺️. (I still give this a much lower likelihood than the punitive expedition however.) I think Lunar perception of the Holy Country at the time was that if Belintar can pull off one Building Wall, he could always do it twice, and lock down Hendrikiland. I would suggest that this is one of the main reasons why the Lunars don't invade until after Belintar is out of the picture. As you go on to say, Karse (while still not a blue water port) was realistic for the Lunars, but only after Belintar's assassination imo. In the post 1619 period, the pro-Lunar faction in Esrolia are definitely in ascendency, and I'm sure that nobody in Nochet seriously objects to getting rich on Lunar trade despite how they may publicly chafe about it.