Alex

That's the thing about these debates about "pure" vs "impure" and "correct" vs "misguided" mystical paths. If you manifest gross magical powers, you may be suspected of giving into worldly temptations (or even having deliberately sought to "fail" in that manner, per one or two prominent alleged examples). If you don't, but you and your followers abide in the material world indefinitely, are they being noble bodhisattvas, or are they having a metaphysical jolly at everyone's expense? (Looking at you, anyone with "Empire" in the name, and with a notionally mystical religious practice!) And if you don't do either of these things, and just disappear utterly from the world and the cycle of birth and death... Is that complete success? Or utter failure? People -- and especially other mystics, though by way of more subtle forms of shade and snark -- will of course have their own view on any and all of the above permutations. And perhaps with some validity, but it's all a bit more wibbly and wobbly than the theismcore "my Fire Rune's bigger than your Fire Rune!" stuff.

But it's a good choice for "points for a dwaggin-pun!" purposes. I vaguely recall Greg once saying something to the effect that for the Orlanthi, if something's not on their mythic maps of the otherworlds, then it's presumptively chaos. You could perhaps apply similar logic to some other religions, except of course their maps will be at least a little different. Even given Sandy's comment that remaining dragonewts are all really bad at their jobs -- they've been trying to become dragons for literally all Time, and likely a good deal longer, all the bright students passed the course centuries ago -- I can't help but feel that Donald Rumsveld would have still been bottom of even the Class of 1625! 😄

Indeed. Nor is "Arthurian literature" a closed canon: there's been self-consciously revisionist takes, and there will be more such, whether "revising" in the same direction, in reaction to those, or off at a hyperdimensional angle of their own. Such as long as by the time the (express or implied) game pitch is done, everyone at the table is more-or-less on the same page (as it were) as to what take on the literature and starting assumptions for the fiction of the game are in play.

Or at least if he's "nice guy" chivalrous, as opposed to Law of in the Letter of his oath take on that (or Sir Tash-Twirling Panto Villain on the other hand). For me, there's a Toon logic to this in the dynamic of the fiction: maybe, but only for as long as it's adding to the story. E(hot take guess) = 1. After that it's the diminishing law of big reveals/sequels.

That's an interesting take! Yes, I think you could certainly argue that, insofar as Escalation corresponds in many respect at least to historical "progress". So eventually, I'm Henry the Eighth I Am, I Am -- strict egalitarian nor equity we're not. But surely that's only one dimension to it: there's the Christian vs Pagan thing, and there's the whole Magical Justice of Arthur himself, as that waxes and then wanes. And maybe something there could be material PK agency in helping to determine, surely! (Of only sociological (if even) interest, I happened across an utter trainwreck of a discussion on A Certain Other Forum, in which someone issued dire warnings that due to "leftest females" (sic), the next Pendragon will feature "mandatory" female knights. I assume that means that otherwise David Larkins rides on his charger straight to your house, siege-engines his way inside, and then military-flails the rulebook out of your hand.)

That's an interesting calibration, as I've seen HQ described as borderline systemless in a couple of contexts! Partly as its supplements ranged between "stats lite" and "stats homeopathic", and partly as it goes out of its way to give you lots of ways of not rolling the dice... (Though there's lots of broad-sense "system" in nudging people to get there, like the infamous "why this almost certainly isn't an extended contest, and probably isn't even a dieroll" decision tree.) Depends on the nature of the fiction. I imagine. If you're going for "fraught political drama" or "bizniz sharks with no ruth whatsoever" type of negotiation, you could be modelling a situation where each side is playing what their "bottom line" or "right, I'm out" really is. Obviously their actual negotiating position/demands/wants should be obvious, otherwise someone's not doing it very well!

Interesting -- in a 'fake curse' and 'utterly horrific' sort of way. That the victim is being actively fed during the process surprises me a little, and I suppose implies it's an even slower version of death by crucifixion -- eventually the victim succumbs to some cardiopulmonary complication, sepsis, or some miscellaneous other malady.

Of course, HQV is the classic "unreliable narrator" (and brilliant for it!) source. So the spokesuz in this case may be not so much a supertaster gourmet, as a dangerously reckless mostaldoper. 😄

To unpack the various parts of that.. Humans are most definitely not carnivores. We're monkeys that eat a bit more animal protein than the average such, for fun and evolutionary profit. The normcore monkey or ape is a frugivore. You'll survive a lot longer on a middling-grade vegetarian or even vegan diet than a vitamin-C-free one (which true carnivores, in either the taxonomic sense or in the purely dietary one, are merely delighted with, having a metabolic synthesis pathway for that instead). I've not see any statement that Morokanth can't or don't eat meat. As best as I recall (don't see any explicit statements in RQG, so this might be by word-of-forum, so I swear to nothing!), they're "plant-based"-leaning omnivores. At a guess, principally rhizovores (root-diggers, not wildly unlike pigs, not to mention, eh, herd-longpig). As opposed to tapirs, who're folivores (leaf-browsers). So that's a significant difference right there, without making them predominant meat-dependent in the way that other (yappy-type human) Praxians are. I forget whose line it was about mythology being psychology mistaken for history, but taking it for a series of legal contracts seems even more off-base! 🙂 I imagine the in-world answers to such questions range from "it's a just-so story, son, get back to flensing that carcass", through "a bunch of other combos played, then they got et by chaos, so sad", to "Are you some sort of... God Learner or something? Die Meldek, die". Well, RAW you get a herd-tapir. If you want a variant take on that, how about that it bounces right off 'em, as they're the only creature to have won all the rounds of the Contest they entered into. Immunity to do-overs! (Well, relative immunity, as we were discussing on another thread, there's doubtless Sufficient Advanced Magic that'll flip the INT-status of any creature, not just the ones specific to this particular local custom.) It's clearcut current canon that other Praxians eat herdman-meat, so there's some economic value right there. If you're at all squeamish, don't eat the Praxashire Hotpot. Or to be cautious, even the Swenstown mystery-meat pies. And herdman clearly have some value in the way that truffle-pigs do, or as with fishing using semi-domesticated otters and cormorants. There's added value in helping with physical availability, not just the metabolic sort. If there were plenty of grass, it would hardly be a semi-desert, would it now? And not all herdbeasts (nor Morokanth IMO) are graminivores. High llamas also are folivores, for example, per RQG. Part of the reason the different tribes are only intermittently at war with each other. Roots are a low-accessibility, high-value food (especially in Prax), so labour is considerable factor if that's the bulk of what Morokanth as well as herdmen eat. if you want to get fancy, they might eat different roots, however. That Darkness rune on the one hand, and the Covenant magic on the other, might well mean them eating slightly different things. Which would help with the self-pick strawberries problem, as would the traditional regular savage beating. AH-era RuneQuest had very specific rules for this, which would have made fresh-minted herdman fixed-INT geniuses. (i.e. average 13, if we ignore any self-selection biases in getting into such a predicament.) I forget if we ever got RQ3 stats for either usual herdmen or chimps, but my guess is that the former would be higher. But in the Gloranthan Bestiary it mentions herdmen being able to fight in combat with "crude" weapons. I'm not personally aware of any experiments in training prospective slave-chimps. They can outperform humans on some cognitive-perception tasks, so it's not wildly improbable, if you could find exactly the right job. Except for the ethical and practical issues, and that they're probably also automatable with AI. I certainly don't see Prax as much of an industrial-exports industry, but tasks like assisting in the preparation of animal carcasses shouldn't be beyond herdmen. And assisting with the "domestic drudgery" stuff is surely an economic benefit, seen in the round, as it frees the Mories to do higher-grade work. And kinda most of all about sentience, especially when you bear in mind what that rune magic used to be called... Another part of the great RQG chariot comeback! They've come a long way since they were just the punchline in a Tales joke. (I forget which ish, anyone have an exhaustive listing or index of the Rumours, or otherwise remember which it was?) I'm not sure how practical using sledmen to pull 'em would be to pull them -- kinda slow, for one thing. OTOH, great stamina! Maybe more agile too, and certainly with more low cunning than other herdbeasts. Which could work either for or against the Morokanth user...

Really?! You some sort of hippy-tippy vegan troll? 🙂 Though I guess technically Mostali are the trippy ones. And humans are the go-to long-BLT option...

In the special case of Eurmali, I can't help but think of the Tarot Hanged Man, dangling by a foot. Can't even do that the same way as right-minded, clean-living folk! Which as a punishment is either much more lenient, being non-fatal in the first instance... or even worse. Starve slowly to death, crows peck out your eyeballs. At night, ice-weasels come...

If you want a "compatibilist" reading in which diseases are all still caused by (are identical with, really) spirits, but still work in the sort of infectious way RW ones do, the obvious fix is to have them bud (or breed? what an image!) inside living victims, then waft off to others.

"Ah, but what about metaphysically?! <smug nod>" Sorry, my bad on the corona, yeah, that still works within Stated Canon, AFAICS. And works for me, too. it's both major sources on the appearance of the Moon, indeed, Tales and the Guide. A difficulty if one goes with the "single rotating bright face" take is that the details of its appearance in these then needs a very vigorous edit -- in the admittedly unlikely event this ever comes up, I admit it never has for me. One side is now straightforwardly visible to mundane perception, the other only magically. Maybe not quite as visible as with the RW Moon as it's (presumably) slightly smaller, but (presumably) fairly comparable. (How visible the disks and surface features of of Shargash, Entekos, etc are is another day's work.) Now I don't think it's RuneSight Science to determine which is which: hrm lessee, the one centred on Zaytenera’s Palace, or on Gerra's Pit to be the bright side, I wonder... Another possibility would be to have it both rotate and phase... but at different rates. (Say, a daily rotation, for the sake of not over-over-complicating this over-complication.) Then you have both each part lit at different times, and each part facing in different directions. I kinda like that as a compromise of sorts, though it's very whole-cloth. That in a week you get Six Turns that are actually Seven (depending whether you're counting relative to the mundane world, or relative to the Light Face) is kinda nice. A still-bigger hack would be to drift it in "Glorantha's more like Earth, but for very distinct (or rather, Bronze-Age mythic) reasons" style. Get rid of the feature of it looking different from different parts of the lozenge, then you have one less variable to worry about. The mindbuggering weirdness part seems bang-on, at least! Question is, it it the correct amount -- and right sort -- of mindbuggering weirdness. That fine line between High Mythic and Low Cartoonish again.

Probably so, in a "farm out the less important heavy lifting" sort of way.

Well yeah, but if the KL cult were even more matriarchal, potentially it'd be very hard or impossible to make either...

No, its impressive makes it look rather petite! Dear. <profuse sweating and glancing around for Babeester Gori>

I suppose if you wanted a High Concept Mythic Gloranthan rationale, you could always have a higher Earth-Runic density...

I vaguely recalled this too, but forgot about the 2d6+2 STR, too! Ironically meaning that the lowest possible female "NPC human" STR is 4, but for males is 3...

It does rather smack of a try-hard Dayzatari/Buseri materialist rationalisation, in the spirit of RW epicycles, crystal spheres, etc. "My first theory didn't quite work out, so I added a kludge konstant and a fudge factor with no empirical, logical, or intuitive basis, and now it's grand, so!" There are of course Black Moons in Lunar mythology, notably Gerra and Rashorana. That the "shadow moon" isn't linked to either of those in myth, nor apparently magically visible to those worshippers is indeed iffy. Though that either of those would be "suppressed" by the Glowline would sound even more problematic than that is already.

I blame certain 'Who spinoffs of erratic-at-best quality, myself. 🙂 Yeah, that's the sort of thing I had in mind when I mentioned the two different 'Age Consciousness' ideas. To take the Green case: if some portion of your being doesn't recognise distinctions of individuality, then doing violence to someone else becomes in part like doing violence to yourself. It's possible, but it's going to be a whole lot less popular. Yeah, to mystically rules-lawyer the Compromise, it'd have to either sit "below" deity level (people and 'normal' spirits and so forth not being bound by such things), or "above" it (trumping Illumination), presumably as some sort of 'mystical' understanding.

While this is far from specific and is surmise on my part, sounds like it includes things like shared warehouse facilities:

I forgot who it was that said something on the lines of the secret to peacemaking being that people have got to the point where they want peace, but don't know how to do it. So I think the UN rep might indeed despair of Sartar in 1625 being at that point yet. OTOH, if you wind things at little forward in the KoS timeline, and some real silliness is now happening... Maybe quite a few more people are at the "I'm out!" stage. Displaces it from the "official RQ present" setting, but doesn't sound like the OP was planning on running a lot of published adventurers anyway... Also loses the Dragonrise as the triggering event, but other draconic moments are available, and others besides... More peaceful on the face if it, yeah. According to one Greg thought, Vithela (proper) never even had the Darkness Age... Kralorela presumably did have it in some form, but just likes to act as if it's still the Golden Age. I already quoted that game's self-deprecating comment about it being the most mundane application of magic... Kinda that "Torchwood" series/mega-episode again! But we have actual Gloranthan myths about what a world without Death was like, and they're very different from that. A fullscale "rollback" to the God's War or before sound vastly difficult magically. (That Big Table of Greg's where the Runes have ratings in the W9-W12 range springs to mind. I'd hate to think what that'd be in RQ %ages or even DP MgF...) But a better way for me of thinking of it is, what happens if everyone suddenly gets 15% Golden Age Consciousness? Or even 2% Green Age same, perhaps. Could you inflict violence and indeed death on someone? Yes. But the difficulties and consequences of doing so have gone way on up.

That's essentially how most "executions" for "crimes" work among the Orlanthi. Either with or without the legal formality of outlawry beforehand to facilitate this without the messiness of kinstrife, feud, or violation of hospitality.

IIRC it's canon that the Lunars use it for (some) executions. And it's certainly canonical what the shape of the Death Rune is... That it might prevent or hinder or hinder to some degree resurrection has certainly been around for quite a while, and hasn't been ritually rubbished as a weak-ass fan theory by the IP holder at any point that I can think of, but that doesn't technically canonify it. Buttoning my lip on that first part!

It occurs to me that another metaphor for "extended resolution" is the visual that PbtA seems to use a lot: clockfaces. Decide what "ply" your conflict would be; anything for from two half-pies (Moon Roon!) to twelve orange-segments if you want to take the 'clock' part to its exhausting extreme. HQ extended contests/QW scored sequences would have five chunks. The signature "Apocalypse countdown clock" of AW and the Trivial Pursuit-style wedges/cheeses would each be n=6, just drawn differenty. (6*2 vs. 3*3+3*1.) One-off rolls, skillchecks and the like are just the default n=1 case, so don't really need the paraphernalia, but it's trivially consistent in that sense. Of course, this tells us very little about either the details of the mechanic -- is this a two-runner race to n, or a zero-sum back and forth? And it doesn't help work out 'n' -- you either have to take a pacing/important/randomness decision in the abstract (not such a big deal, maybe a 3; this is epic, let's make it an eight!), or split them up according to how they might decompose in the fiction. (Points at issue in a negotiation; people or factions to persuade in a group, etc.)