Alex

History situation normal, then! Erol mentioned an Osprey book by Turnbull, and another Wikipedia article cites this source: Samurai Women 1184–1877, Stephen Turnbull, Bloomsbury Publishing, 20 Jan 2012.

Characteristically stoic understatement on the part of a bushi expiring on the end of a 7-foot staff-sword. "That... was... just... a bit... odd. <slumps>"

Or Lightfore, or Polaris, apparently. Sounds a bit like a fire-tribe omnibus or placeholder!

I'd offer slight caveats about worrying too much about "first" anything, and what is or isn't too "early". The God Time is, after all... very timey-wimey. And Ernaldan Consciousness dates back to the Green Age, and the Orlanth one "only" to the Stagnation Age, so they might disagree on that point if pressed to name a "first". But that said, yes, the Cinder Pits are from "before" the Chaos Age. The most obvious Darkness tie-in would be with the Shadowlands period, which obviously would be later still. I'm not sure of this region would be within the Kitori Tribute area, but certainly the later (re)settlers from Esrolia and Heortland would have mythic memories of that. Personally I'd be inclined to go with whatever Ancient Enemy, either of your take on the Colymar, or what's particular to your group, that works best for the story. So a Darkness Enemy would be great for your PCs, in a "I have this hammer, woo, a nail!" sort of way. Conversely a Fire enemy would put them in a more awkward spot, if they're Runically less keen on the "remedy here is the Evil-Emperor-stabbity" approach. Which might be exactly the narrative tension you want, or more headache than you need. 🙂 When humans first came to the area? That'd tie into the exodus from the Spike. Or the King of Dragon Pass resettlement narrative? The latter would tie very directly into Colymar history, but I'm not clear if you're looking for a God Time tie-in here.

There's no Glowline or Chaos-festering Lunar Empire, but I'm medium-confident the Red Moon is visible from Pamaltela. Granted some RQ2 descriptions did make it sound more like a Temporary Local Phenomenon. And of course, Your Sky Dome May Vary! There's even Red Moon worshippers in Fonrit, according to the Guide.

"Sunpath" doesn't imply "diurnal" -- and "Southpath" pretty much necessitates "not diurnal", I'd imagine. And thinking too hard about what "diurnal" means in the God Time, and before the sun is doing the obvious thing, isn't necessarily recommended. Protestations of the Dara Happan calendar notwithstanding. The later "Jernedeus" footnote (yet another alias!) makes clear it's certainly the modern Lunar understanding that other bodies -- "moons", if you will -- were rising and setting before Yelm. I think it's strongly implied in the Plentonus material, too: celestial objects have "trails", sully themselves with the world and the underworld, etc.

The 'kralori' one is admittedly a tad unconformable, given that on the one hand the Gloranthan East has been critiqued as heavy-handed orientalism, and on the other, it's equating a polity and a "race". As if we might end up playing the 'CJK' game (KVV?) to physically identify different nations by their features alone. 'Wareran' is a more muddled case, and maybe seems more benign as a result. It covers quite a variety of appearances, especially now that the Rokari are Brithini-colour-coded. (I suspect they're faking that with makeup, mind you. Such wannabes!) All the 'races' also straddle multiple different origin myths (again, especially the Wareans). There's the Malkioni one, the Yelmic one, and the Orlanthi one, and the Hsunchen one, which itself extends across all the outward appearances. So arguably they're not really 'categories; at all, just broad ranges of appearance.

Wasn't that the take-away from Sandy's comment about the general pattern of the difference between G.n and P.n chaos? "We're going to need a bigger broo," to paraphrase someone else. i.e. that rather than a hoard of broos, you'd get one really huge one? To double-disclaim that, I might be recalling him wrong, and equally, he might just have been using "one really big broo" as a frinstance placeholder.

I suppose it might at a push, if you squint at some of the 'minor' details, be a 'rogue' planet with a very colourful collection of moons, one of which happens to be exceptionally bright and orbits daily. If Glorantha even gets its "Bending of Arda" moment, and ends up with a physically sun-sized sun, it'll need one heck of a handbreak turn by either the Sky Dome or Yelm...

This may just be a category/terminology niggle, but for the sake of what little clarity I can manage in my own mind, surely the "new canon" Morokanth are precisely "reluctant omnivores" -- a diet of mostly (presumably mostly root) vegetables, plus some amount of herdman meat variable between minimal ritual obligation, and ostentatious consumption to display social and ritual status. Whereas "old canon" Morokanth were hypercarnivores, give or take whatever lacto element there might be in their herdmen-protein consumption if we insist on splitting that out separately. I don't see where "they're strict vegetarian and simply can't and don't eat meat" is coming from as a proposition, other than as one to be knocked right back down. I'm not seeing much (if anything) of a training issue, though I'd stop short of having herd-peeps able to fend for themselves right out of the womb, as ruminant neonates do. So they learn to dig and forage in much the same way as chimps or hunter-gatherer children do, for my money. Alter Creature is mostly just a reconfig of their existing cognitive faculties. (Maybe helped to an extent by it apparently only working on Praxians, however that's defined.) *taps microphone* Is this thing on? Old canon is that Morokanth ate (lots and lots) of herdmen. New canon is that they're ritually obliged to eat herdmen. Where are we getting "can't eat" from, and why do we keep circling back to it? As a side note, digestively and metabolically speaking pretty much any animal can eat meat. As the BSE scandal and youtube videos serve to illustrate (horrifically or hilariously, depending on which side one is inclined to sympathise with). I think that's a pretty reasonable comparison, in the scheme of things. Clearly the mental transformation is more permanent and deeper, and there may be some degree of physical transformation too. (Note to self, actually get the new Bestiary at some point.) The turning humans into grass-eaters certainly seems like a lot magical heavy-lifting to me to, as I've mentioned. Though I suppose there are models other than the "cattle" one, some of would be be their own category of body-horror. It also skips right past the "different beast with different ecological niches" aspect, which seems needless. And it definitely (unless Glorantha has an entirely different biomass pyramid, Always An Option!) needs more 'head' of slave/cattle. The combination for me certainly seems to stretch plausibility and even story-logic, as either we have lots of heavily physically transformed humanoids competing for the same resource as other major tribes, or lots subsisting on a 'niche' resource. But justifiable as "possible", sure. I guess it'd had thirty or forty years of bedding in as a concept, so for some it's going to be heavily grandfathered in by now, which is fair enough. There's been long-rumbling forum-gripes than this one over less. It shouldn't need to be said, but we can't say often enough that I'm (moderately!) confident David and Rick aren't going to turn up to people's houses in mid-session and instruct them to cease-and-desist any post-canonical interpretations of Prax. Or indeed, to tell then to stop even thinking about it in a heterodox manner.

Certainly at least cousins, given the Tada connection -- literal or mythic -- I'll grant you that.

With some google-grade research, a while ago there was Genpei, which @Ian Absentia seems to have been working on, which is indeed set in the Heian period, and more recently David Larkins, who I'm not sure is summonable via the dire @-incantation, mentioned something called Samurai being in development, which is... also Heian period! Very crowded, (not all that) suddenly.

To translate that from "gratuitous out-of-context computer nerdery": has indicated that some (but not necessarily all) of the pieces are no longer canon, so they'll all need to be redone,and we won't know until then (as I thought I'd elsewhere said in other words). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bit Interesting. For me this either sounds like a super-loose take on what "effectively Orlanthi" entails (yay) or an ultra-monomythic interpretation of certain God Time events (boo). But either way, 1600+ years is a loooooong time for marriage customs to vary rather a lot. Let me hijack it to very much agree with you. Not only is YGWV the least variable part of Gloranthan doctrine, even more fundamentally all roleplaying should be a consensus and consensual experience as it happens at the table. Ideally people would get roughly onto the same page on desired tone and content in the "pitch" or the Session Zero, etc, but that's no reason not to take people's concerns seriously and sensitively as and when they arise.

Indeed. Though DI is a rather drastic way to do it, and IIRC not every cult actually has access to one-users. But I think this is a a compelling gedankenexperiment as to why this doesn't make sense as a limit to be enforced, even if the PC isn't actually "burning" those RPs. Maybe this explains hero cults and certain types of subcult. "It's a separate deity for tax purposes!" I think that's the only logical (if I dare say so in a thread along with Commander Mirror Spock!) interpretation, but I can't find such a clarification or ruling either (not a guaranteed, but I did try a couple of different search methods, and it's not in the relevant WoD Q&A.

In this case, the Inconstancy was IMO probably basically just the whole new-fangled rising and setting thing, which is implied in a couple of places to be something the Dara Happans were very much Against (before they were For It -- such ideological Inconstancy themselves!). To which possibly add Southpath rather than Sunpath behaviour, i.e. very erratic in where she rises, sets, and passes through the Middle and Upper Sky. Given that GRoY refers to her as "Red" and as a "Sun", I'd be inclined to provisionally equate her with Verithurus/Verithurusa/Verithurusus(/Verithurususus, etc?), who gets mentioned a handful of times, in almost as many different spellings. Though by all means throw in phasing too, if it feels good!

Pardon the thread-Zorak-Zoraning, but having just wrrrrecked ma heid trying to follow the ins and out of this I thought I'd try to tie up some loose ends, in case anyone else happens along with the same confusion... Several links/images no longer working here: deleted, or changed URLs, perhaps? This one was entirely clear from the quote given, but the URL it's from has changed: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/home/catalogue/publishers/chaosium/runequest-roleplaying-in-glorantha-players-book-print/cha4028-runequest-roleplaying-in-glorantha-qa-by-chapter/cha4028-runequest-roleplaying-in-glorantha-chapter-14-rune-magic-spells/#Shield (and scroll down a bit, there doesn't seem to be an anchor for "Spell Trading". But while I'm here, a couple of further thoughts... Only for Runies, and they're losing temporary RP, so no rules edge-cases or changes of initiatory status (from that part!) involved. My intuition is that the deity would allow the God-Talker or Priest to voluntarily self-demote to Initiate by repeated use of 'One Use' rune magic. After all, it's in theory possible this could happen with just one such use! But this is a 'deity-facing' attribute, so if it fails your SimGlorantha smell test, it also seems legit to to say "no repeated 'one-uses' if it causes a change of initiatory status". Casting rune magic that (in effect) loses your status as an Initiate seems much iffier. It's counterintuitive to think of of someone doing something notionally devout, and losing all connection with their deity in the process, even if that proves to be a temporary glitch in the subsequent narrative. I'd be inclined to say these normally simply don't happen. Unless the deity/GM think this is a rare case of a sucker needing an even break, in which case I think I'd say you retain that last point of PRPP, but have to lose a point of POW to make good the shortfall. Most one-use magics aren't one-pointers, so that rules out many opportunities for immediate do-overs anyway, over and above the "rare" concept.

Some cases are yet-worse than "a Trickster did it". Which doesn't preclude a Trickster being an accessory, before, after, or during the capital crime in question...

Then why would they consistently described as "families", "clans", "houses", and indeed a "class", were they strictly a particular set of appointments? The usual term for the latter is Kugyō, as I understand it. There may be a risk here of generalising too sweepingly over very different time periods: the concept existed for over a thousand years. In the Heian period, they were the real nobility deal, and the samurai class held a very different place than in the shogunate. Then in the Meiji period, the upper echelons of the two are entirely merged to form the Kazoku. Can't argue with that! Off-subforum even, unless we're going to have a Bushido in Pendragon discussion -- fun as that might be...

Eh, depends who you ask, I think. Clearly in the Standard Model they're distinct things -- subcategory of thing, even! So in crinkle-cut runic terms, this is a Big Obvs. OTOH there are famous bits of lore like giants' tie to Disorder often being confused with Chaos... including by themselves. If you asked many people, including certain notorious chaos-fighting cults, disorder is the very best remedy for chaos! Embodying the philosophy of fighting fire by whacking it vigorously with a frying pan, perhaps. On the other other hand, if you ask the Solars, their take would be more like "it's the thin end of the wedge!" A wedge that kinda goes Air (the source of all the trouble) -> Death -> Disorder -> the only-incrementally-worse state of Chaos, or something along those lines.

Does it? Why? That's the section I just cited myself, and it doesn't cover that case. (And in fact if you read it excessively literally, would preclude any 'SR-modified' use at all.) But I'd play it that way, at any rate. That's the hazard with "clarifying examples", that in order to be clearer and simpler, they end up misstating the original rule they're supposed to be elucidating! I think the rule here (above in bold) is itself pretty clear, albeit less punchy than it could be as it's trying to deal with two cases (unengaged and engaged) in the one breath. Good example! I couldn't think of any non-opposed "attack" spells off the top. I'm in two minds about this. Arguably this is even worse than the "attack spell and melee attack" situation where you're engaged with the target, in a walking-and-chewing-gum/no-look-pass sort of way. You'd be trying to target one thing with your spell, and another with your melee attack. Somewhat more feasible-seeming is... Self-targeted spells only (including buffing weapons held in hand); Or, less restrictively, unresisted Touch spells only. The latter providing for the ever-popular "heal an ally before they croak at the end of the round" option, and leaving players to argue just how practicable that is in any given tactical situation...

This isn't expressly covered in the rules (or the Q&A AFAICS), but my reading is that the intent is that you're always allowed to sack POW to you god ("never known to refuse!"), whether or not you get both of of the possible benefits of doing so. So if you're already at your CHA it doesn't affect your rune-point pool, but you get the new magic, just as that's explicitly covered the other way around. The latter being the more usual case, that Rune Priests will regularly run into - unless their cults have a huge range of magic, or they're notably uncharismatic! There's a slight possible niggle here if your RPs reach your CHA, then you sacrifice again for another distinct spell (not increasing your RPs) but your CHA later increases. Personally I think in this case I'd just track the two separately.

Sure, but it's one of the major differentials from Generic Theyalan Homeland(TM). So as we'll (I assume!) already have at least the Sartar Box and the Gods set by that point, unless it's going to be pure gazetteer (and essays on how they don't much like those uppity Esrolians, etc), I'd expect a large chunk of the cultural background to be on these guys. Unless-unless that's being kicked for touch somewhat further if it also needs to wait for the IG book, who knows.

"Prepared" magic is noted as being a SR 0 thing, though that's on the table of SR modifiers (p193), while RM specifically "always" takes effect at SR 1 (p314). The distinction is fairly moot as there is no SR 0 "impulse", so only comes up if you change your statement of intent and your GM allows this (oops, Harmast's HPs are negative what?, time for a Heal Body!), or if you're having to move, or prep something else first #becausereasons. So arguably there's a question of whether this happens at (current/as determined by movement, etc) SR +0, or +1. Right, but Ryan accurately quotes from the very next paragraph which restates this less than entirely accurately/clearly:- To avoid any appearance of contradiction or confusion here, #2 should really read:- ... and cast attack spells. Or some other such tweak. So In personally think this indeed Q&A/errata/reprinting textual refinements fodder, your threshold on that may vary. I assume that this reasoning applies to not just "buffs", but to any magic that doesn't involve a resisting target.

Channeling some of my inner rage from when quiz shows made by English-English speakers declare words to be homonyms which actually only are for non-rhotic speakers! (If even then, TBH.) What's worse even sometimes filmed in Glasgow, where the R is definitely not thrown away! (... to quote a musical duo fae Embra.) 🙂 Humakt as God of Minimalism is giving me all sorts of crossed synapses about music and interior design...

Can't recommend strongly enough, personally, but if one's concern is acutely about canoncity, we should note that Jeff's soft-reset the post-canonical dirty bit on the whole thing, and hard-reset for unspecified specific cases. i.e. some of them are now no longer canon. @David Scottmight be willing to chime in as to whether it's wildly off-base for his current thinking.