Alex

23 minutes ago, Kloster said:

Don't forget the Aeolian, the trolls and all the stygian churches, but yes, agreed.

That's true, but we don't have much on those yet either -- I assume we'll get lots of Esvulari detail in the Heortland book, which is somewhere on the pile/in the pipe, but not yet on any class of boat from China AFAIK.  And any or all of those might still be "off-brand" sorcery, cross-contaminated by too much theistic or animist thinking.  Rather than the pure and unsullied variety, which might on the one hand, introduce a different SorCatMod, or on the other give us a rationale for why the RAW are actually perfectly fine and Logical.

4 hours ago, Kloster said:

Frankly, the fact we rationalize spirit magic capacity with memory (=INT) or capability to negotiate with spirits (=CHA) does not matter. Both work correctly.

Let's no start too far down the road of what "doesn't matter", or bang goes the entire hobby!  As I say, CHA seems the better choice, either for "balance" or for "story", so all in the plus column, however minor in magnitude compared to [actually important thing to taste].

4 hours ago, Kloster said:

Either adding INT to the magic category modifier, counting as CHA, or adding a specific sorcery category modifier that would replace CHA by INT. My preference goes to the latter.

I concur on both the above conclusions.

I'd offer only the small caveat that for me it seems that to me that we're very much at the stage where all plans between wizards are provisional.  We've had a preliminary sketch of LM sorcery, and we assume sorcery is still a significant thing for the Lunars.  But until such time as we get a deep dive into Mostali and Malkioni sorcerors, it all seems rather like a provisional ball we're smacking down the fairway.

2 minutes ago, Meleros said:

If one, instead, wants their morokanths to be carnivores, well, they can argue that "yes yes, morokanths are herbivores, but you know, because of "religious practice", they are required to eat meat every eight hours".

Excellent line of argument, well made, counsellor, but on the whole I think "YGWV" is the more straightforward and robust approach.  Then we don't also have to rationalise the text in RQG ("primarily as slaves" (*)) too, and we're saying explicitly which version works best for us, which ideally spares confusion of expectation later.  After all, YGHV'd here already, we're all doing the Lore equivalent of Karallan's Plight all the time.  "Follow Chosen Sources."

(*)  And no doubt we could.  If you especially want gramnivore herdmen and obligate hypercarnivore morokanth, that already requires quite the population of them to prop up the biomass pyramid, but add in lots more still as additional slaves, then done!  By that point we necessarily have far more herdmen than human Praxians, which seems like a notable factoid it's a little surprising wasn't mentioned to us earlier, but not impossible either...

4 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

If you are merely expressing how this could not work in the real world, I'll just agree and save time.

Mind you, in real-world biology, turning a human into a grass-eater would be quite the big anatomical and metabolic stretch.  Now I don't know what the standardised exchange rate between that and two points of one-use rune magic is, but for me it sounds a much bigger one than that implied by the Revisionist take (that they now have the instincts to harvest and the ability to live on Praxian roots), that Darius won't hear of.

Now of course, one person's grating implausibility is another's high-fantasy sensawonda.  My personal bias here is very likely that I'm not the biggest fan of the Dark Fantasy/Horror aspects of the setting, so there's not a huge amount of payoff for suspending my disbelief in this case.  Even if the RQG take in turn becomes Post-Canonical and we go back to the RQ2/3 one, I think I'll be sticking with this.

15 hours ago, Darius West said:

All the extra effort that the morokanths need to go to in order to keep this model viable is grossly inferior to a model where there are no herd men to care for and each morokanth spends a couple of hours a day grazing.  Calorifically, a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is very reliable and allows for a lot of free time.  Pastoralism by comparison likely emerges when population pressure increases the competition for game to the point where it becomes necessary to guard your game animals, combined with the domestication of infant animals taken as pets when their parents have been hunted.  In Prax, competition for herds is intense, and no tribe is as disadvantaged as the morokanths, whose animals are far slower, weaker, and allegedly are not to be eaten by morokanths, despite the fact that other tribes are on record as eating herd men.

But "grazing morokanths" and "allegedly not to be eaten" herdmen are neither what Current Canon(TM) state or imply, nor what anyone's been arguing in this thread.  (At already excessive length in my own case, I feel, so I'm attempting to keep the reiteration of points we've evidently been talking past each on to a relative minimum here.)  Or perhaps I'm suffering a sense of humour failure here (and indeed elsewhere) on intentional hyperbole.

55 minutes ago, buzz said:

I also find the change from INT to CHA for Spirit Magic limits weird — it weights CHA more heavily than earlier editions.

Clearly it does, though I'm not sure that was the motivation.  Or not admittedly to be such, at least!  But not necessarily a bad thing, IMO.

Conceptually it makes sense, I think, as dealing with spirits isn't a matter of intellect, as is sorcery, but of presence.  Arguably this is a little loose -- does what impresses a follower or negotiator cut ice with the spell spirit?  But that's in the nature of characteristics for you...

24 minutes ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

For a bog standard elf (are there elves living in bogs 🙄)

Probably more of a slorifing thing. 😄 (AKA "red elves", but not strictly speaking aldryami.)

24 minutes ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

at least, by my interpretation of the rules, a GM might modify it some).

24 minutes ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

(GM might rule elves focus on bow)

Or GM might just borrow the approach from RQ3 (and I assume RQG?), problem solved.

20 hours ago, GMKen said:

I think you’re reading too much into that s.

The context for that comment comes from my current reading of Eleven Lights, which I just found at my new local FLGS, as well as the RQG adventure supplements.  So.  Much.  Narrative.  Pages and pages of narrative.

My personal opinion and feelings are that it seems to create a sense of the characters participating in someone else’s story, versus creating their own.

Fair enough, and that seems to me to pass the "plural" test, with maths that didn't even need me taking my socks off.  Everyone is going to have a different sensitisation in their metaplot allergies, and I'm only passingly acquainted with the scenarios put out for RQG:  maybe they run more "narrative" than I'd realized.  But as far as I can tell, they're not all in the category of accessories-before-the-fact in someone else's huge world-changing heroquest and military campaign.  But those things are happening, one way or another.

I think it's not news that Gloranthan history ("recent" and otherwise) has some Big Events in it.  Just look at what antics happen in White Bear and Red Moon -- if major magical happenings aren't to your liking, you need to reverse-iterate back to before RQ1 -- and indeed the entire hobby of roleplaying itself -- were things.  Obviously there needs to be a balance between generic "could have happen pretty any time" material, and "timeline" stuff.  Which in turn in necessarily going to have to vary between the PCs being bit players, I'm Argrath and so is my alynx, and everything in between.  And tastes on what the right balance is will vary.  Hopefully we can discuss how best to configure available resources to suit different preferences without it getting too edition-warring.

2 minutes ago, SirUkpyr said:

It is highly doubtful that she was unable to write. The point I was making is that when a woman could write, she did so, baring being unable to do so due to needing the specialized knowledge provided by a lawyer or doctor etc.

Apologies, but I'm as wise as before.  Are you saying Hildegard is an exceptional case?  And again, what's the nature of the evidence for this?

1 hour ago, SirUkpyr said:

In the various letter collections - you rarely will see a lady that is able to write who does not do so, outside of letters which contain specialized terms (legal ones come to mind).

I might just be being dense, but I don't quite follow what you're saying is the evidence for this.  Isn't this a lot like absence of evidence, rather than evidence of absence?

Hildegard von Bingen (now perhaps a slightly different category, being in Holy Orders) was apparently a big ol' dictator, and I'm not sure there are any remaining works in her own hand.  But is it plausible she was entirely unable to write?

On 11/5/2021 at 3:24 PM, SirUkpyr said:

In multiple letter collections you will find lines such as "I read your letter when I had a moment of privacy", then at the end in the signature line you find the ladies name with the words "dictated by", or "written by my own hand".

Does the former indicate inability to?  Or simply "why keep a dog and bark yourself"?  A lady of the upper nobility will have a number of ladies-in-waiting, precisely the sort of person to whom you'd farm out the laborious part while you compose your thoughts.  Also the latest in online editing and realtime informal feedback technology!

On 11/5/2021 at 9:35 AM, Oleksandr said:

Another interesting question is, in GPC, in one of the "gossip" sections, court ladys was shocked and horrified that Morgan is literate...

Greg used a variation on that gag on at least on other occasion.  In the Salisbury setting local heiress Lady Madule has a vast collection of books...  five of them!  So naturally the gossip is that she's a sorceress.

On 11/5/2021 at 8:41 AM, Oleksandr said:

Don't forget that, as early posts there shows, both H/L MAs and Arthurian literature had female knights. Just not as many as would be in more conservatively "dark age" culture.

Personally as a campaign narrative that sounds wildly anticlimactic to me, over and above any possible concerns I might have had about neither part of that being historically supported.  Though in truth I don't, unless I was pitching it as such for some very particular reason.  But different folks, different strokes!

2 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

So tiny-sorcerer-in-a-backpack is a trope now?

"SIZ 1" and "anything ducky" certainly seem to be heavy adders to the trope-tally and odd-audit!

1 hour ago, Leingod said:

"Freedoms" was probably the wrong word. I was thinking specifically of stuff like inheritance laws changing to the detriment of widows and such.

Gotcha.  I'm not up on the ins and outs of how that plays out through the historical H and L MEs, but I can see how that might work narratively in terms of the Arthurian arc, seen as (supposedly!) benevolent gendered paternalism.  Not necessarily a cheerful one, but could work...

5 minutes ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

GM at the time didn't use the experience supplement -- all of our characters started out as 16 year old brats finally allowed out of town...

I won't quote the red boldface (those were my good seeing-eyes! well, best ones I have, at least), but I understood the stat-minima for self-bows part, was specifically asking about the elf ones.  Wasn't expecting the starting as 16yo's;  previous experience is in the main rulebook rather than a supplement, but granted it's in an optional appendix, not baked into chargen.  It's far from starting characters have 100% Axe skill that we were reared!

Had very much forgotten how steep a a step RQ2 Aldrya intiation was.  The RQ3 bar ("may join automatically on reaching maturity") sounds vastly more sensible.

So on balance I'm standing by my ironman-rules diagnosis, but sharing responsibility for that between the GM, the RQ2 rulebook, and CoP!

30 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

or he had and you did not know... his last joke, only for you

"No wonder they call me a Trickster character, I even trick my player!"

3 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Once you realize that Maran is just the other face of Ernalda, this resolves very readily... 🙂

I think if that particular iteration of Da Roolz presented that take in mix-and-match (or cake and eat it!) terms, that player would have been entirely satisfied.

15 minutes ago, Oleksandr said:

more conservative celts (i.e. ones who had female warriors in largish numbers)...

Not following your rationale, there.

11 hours ago, Monty Lovering said:

She really she play Vinga as she lives by 'violence is always an option'.

For Orlanth/Vinga, some weight on the "an option".  It's not "violence, always!" or even "violence is the option".  (It's the option we have an actual proverb about, admittedly!)

The "Orlanthi saying" and "Ernaldan saying" aren't incompatible, or even opposites.  More like call-and-response of the same couplet.  The Orlanth-worshiper can be one arguing "but now is not the time for that option", and the Ernaldan the one saying "we're not taking that way today".

BG is more in the mindset of "violence is required, until conclusively proven otherwise!"

On 11/2/2021 at 4:27 AM, Rob Darvall said:

Slightly younger than my two (17/18) now. Both were under 16 when we started. Both have BG characters, though the older now plays her's as secondary to her CA. 

Is there a pattern anyone can see (IE: is this more widespread) or mere coincidence?

Dunno.  Sublimated (or otherwise!) militant radical feminism? 🙂  If they're in the same group, not exactly statistical independence there, of course.  "Waaaau, Axe Trance, now that's a good/cheesy/broken/fun spell!  I want one too!"  "BGs are so passé now, everybody has one.  I'm going vegetable rights and peeeeeace."

I've never sold a BG PC to anyone, personally.  In fact one player actively pushed back on it as an option, as being an unappealing crazy-extremist type, and felt that Earth cults should be much more of a light/dark balance, as embodied in each worshipper, rather than split out into mutually exclusive pairs.  (That kinda lurched from one extreme to the other in the HW and HQ eras, with RQ sitting someplace in the middle.  Let's split up Earth Rune magic 36 different ways.  No wait, not split up at all!)

4 minutes ago, Oleksandr said:

Well, as i pointed out earlier, in culture where female warrior are more common, and women don't by default seen as weak and helpless, attacking and killing women seen as not different than attacking man. Glimpses of such attitude remains in oldest celtic literature (even filtered by monks edition), but many women would not perceive this as utopia.

Big difference between "deep culture" and the sort of relatively brief Anarchy of an interregnum, though.  Though that cannons into what Phase -1, Phase -2, etc, etc were like, so maybe that's a less than helpful framing.  I guess if you're seeing that as essentially continuous from "look to your own defence" in 410, it'd be pretty bedded down.

4 minutes ago, Oleksandr said:

There was some research which imply that women on average tend to be less reckless and more pragmatic than men (admittedly, some people find this controversial...).

I think I took a wrong turn someplace and ended up in the Orlanthi Homelands discussion! 🙂

4 minutes ago, Oleksandr said:

Which suggest that many women would prefer "gilded cages" but with great potential for power behind the scene. Especially when such intrigue and manipulation not just acceptable, but encouraged.

Which is precisely the "traditional roles" character option (maybe minus the "enchantress" one we kinda-sorta had for a while).  Certainly this has possibilities.  It tends to get pushback on the grounds of baking sexism into the (broad sense) game system, and because making them at all playable in practice means much more far-reaching changes to the game as a game.  Entirely changes the procedures, the flow, the "default" game activity.   While I'm not suggesting that Mandate-by-Mace (cavalry mace, naturally!) is at all the way forward, each of those options probably needs more explicit support and discussion than the game has traditionally (as it were) done.

3 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

(I shy away from terms like "Celt" because there wasn't really shared cultural norms across the channel, nor any awareness of relationship between Britons and Gaels, and the influx of the latter into the Isle of Briton and the probable invasion of the former into Ulster were just "oh shit barbarians".)

I had that qualm the other way around;  to wit that the specific evidence of terrible legal position of women in Britain and Ireland in that period didn't preclude just moving the "Celtic Druidical Princess Crap" (as that author put it) over the Channel, or back-dating it a tad.

3 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Did this power mean only for nobles? Maybe. We don't know. But certainly it was notable in comparison to that of the Germanic societies.

Or power "in practice" contrary to the legal baseline so rare as to be the exception that's worth jotting down for future generations.

Is that the comparison we wish to make, though?  Surely the question is more whether the situation in Late Romano- or Early-Early Medieval Britain is notably better than High or Late Medieval England?  Or perhaps more precisely, better than the literary norms for what we're typically presenting as medievalised Arthurian stories, variable as that itself of course is.  Of course that's itself very much moving the goalposts from "historical" -- KAP situation normal, naturally enough, so why angst too much about it too much.

I think personally for me the game issue here is much less the history -- want a different opinion, ask a different historian.  It's what's the game arc will look like.  Do we really want to present Phase 0 as a gender-role utopia, and then crush every non-traditional avenue slowly away?  (OK, the Arthurian story is indeed a tragedy, but customarily mainly when we eventually get to Phase 5!)

8 hours ago, Leingod said:

You might write the rise in status and freedoms of women, only for it to start to degrade later into Arthur's reign, as just one of the many indications of the gradual decline of Arthur's reign, as Arthur and his realm start to stagger and totter under the weight of their own successes and their small failures and failings compound and start to come home to roost.

Status I can see, but which freedoms in particular?  Are we going to have warrior women in Phase 2, and pedestals and gilded cages in phase 4?  Or something more like the opposite?

2 hours ago, Oleksandr said:

Another thing about Anarchy, is that such unstable and violent times is very good incentive for women to learn some combat skills.

Certainly.  But it'll make for a very awkward narrative, for my money, if that looks like Rosy the Riveter works out great, and then it's back to behind the pinny (or period- and class-appropriate equivalent).

1 minute ago, PhilHibbs said:

My trickster was executed by beheading. Sadly he didn't have Detach Head so that was the story of him.

He should take a leaf out of Yelm's and the British House of Commons's book, and apply retrospective magical thinking here!  Pop-up heroquesting!

On 11/1/2021 at 8:44 PM, RHW said:

I feel like somewhere I read that Orlanthi hang Tricksters.

Thinking further on this, I'm leaning towards there not being so much a special-case method for executing Eurmali, as that they're fair game for any method otherwise in use for capital crimes.

After all, they are the Scapegoat.  And there's at least one Trickster aspect that literally embodies a Theyalan capital crime, and any number that'd be handy for facilitating any or all of the other.  They're presumptively guilty of everything.  They can accordingly be treated as such.  (Outside of protection of Bonding, or the more-recently described Customary degree of acceptance.)

7 hours ago, RHW said:

I just wanted to say that this LIFE IN HELL reference did not go unnoticed.

But it went un-laugh-reacted, so my quest yet continues. 😄

42 minutes ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

RQ2... Aldryami...

Who had to earn enough money to afford to have at least one stat, if not two, trained up a point! This was an elf that could not use a bow as generated. Had to train the stats to use a mere "self-bow" since it would take some time more to get to the point of growing an elf-bow.

Think I might nominate that more as ironman-rules GMing!  Or lack of foresight on the part of that aldryami forest.  "Just had your character rolled up, huh?  OK, we'll start growing an elfbow for you now..."

5 hours ago, Mugen said:

I see early phases as being closer to actual 5th century britain, and having less emphasis on what is culturally acceptable.
You're a woman or a man and have the skills to fight on a horse ? Ok, fine, do it, at your own risks.
I'm not even sure I'd use the term "knight" at all.

"Knight" is definitely not applicable for me before Phase 1 (as we used to call it Back in the Day, though I think that went by the wayside a decade or two ago?), really not until nearer Phase 2 if you want to follow the historical parallels of the Escalation very closely.  Which of course is difficult and pointless to do after a certain point.  Whee, we're in the sixth century and the fifteenth at the same time, somehow!  Worse still if you get into the linguistics of the actual word...  until the 13th C. (playing the role of Phase 3), everyone of player character is speaking French, and the German root of "knight" means something more like "adolescent in training to be a warrior".

As to gender and status in 5th century Britain...  funnily enough just recently I was reading something of a tirade by a historian of the early medieval Celts about the "everything was much better for women in the EME, than Christianity showed up" narrative.  The extent laws were extremely to women's disadvantage, so the best-case assumption is that Anarchy -- and hence presumably utter lack of enforcement of them -- works to their overall good.  Which personally for me isn't sounding hugely likely to be historically accurate, but if it works for the premise of someone's game, then of course totally legit, go for it.

5 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

No, I agree, but would they really maintain that it's the Desert Wind that they've never and seen and worse, has absolutely no relevance to them? Or would they map it onto some local wind that actually matters to them? It's been 1500 years, after all.

The whole "Block and the Devil" thing is surely core and so important that they's have gotten the memos by now.  But that doesn't mean it's not polycentric, with local attributes in addition.

1 hour ago, PhilHibbs said:

I played am agoraphobic duck sorcerer who tapped his own SIZ and lived in his familiar's backpack.

Enquiring minds want to know...  what type of critter was the backpack-wielding familiar?