Alex

Thanks for the link, I enjoyed, and very largely nodded along with. (And likewise when rereading Greg Sezzing.) There's another sort? 🙂 It's a pretty key part of the mythology. Suppose someone complained that being Alone in Hell, utterly dependent on being rescued by their community from offstage, deprived the characters of agency and rendered them passive. LBQ is boring, let's skip that bit! OTOH, if you're going to roleplay a heroquest (and these would both quality), it's essential to have meaningful choices, not just Hobson's Choice stages, and preferably not just a series of lost-in-the-god-time screens until you make the "correct" choice, either. Off the top of my head, maybe this works (as I suggested elsewhere with my idea of HQs as being like walking around the coastline one weekend at a time) by deferring this part of the myth? Then a normcore Ernaldan encounters it again in her cultic initiatory rites. Or if she goes 1/7 rogue and ends up having an Elmali or a Risgali initiatory experience, she permanently takes another path. (Must. Stay. Awake. Pass. Matchsticks.) Or more commonly an Orlanthoid one. Thing is, what you're covering here lasts for years. In the usual telling, it starts with -- initiation is, after all, by definition starting something -- the weeks of the 'gendered rituals', then it rumbles on and takes as long as it takes, with womanhood having exactly the same options are manhood, in that respect. (In both cases often taking the form of your relatives 'repeating their advice' on the lines of "are you still just a lay member? when are you ever going to take some proper responsibility and join a cult", seamlessly transitioning into "are you still at the Vinga/Orlanth Adventurous nonsense? when are you going to settle down are become a proper steadwife/holder?") So in the first instance, I think you're in a way quibbling about which part happens when.

I know Greg surrendered some fairly big hostages to fortune on this. I had a moan about "active" and "passive" earlier, but rereading the Book of Heortling Mythology there's a "Greg sez" that puts the 'duality' in almost exactly those terms. D'oh! And I recall him once standing in the Burg Stahleck porch declaiming that "this stuff is hardwired". (Albeit unclear what stuff was in the scope of this statement, or precisely what he meant by "hardwired".) But for me, Glorantha itself is the counterexample to this. Or whole series of arguments. Now, quite possibly none of the gender models presented are to a given person's liking. To which I'd say first, we're gaming or telling stories there, not adopting a new declaration of human rights. And second of course, VYG. But the sheer range of models in evidence -- even just in humans, never mind whether these dualities are not merely genetic but cosmic -- surely argues against any particular 'pink jobs and blue jobs' narrow essentialism.

Session Zero was when the rules arguments in your old game you went a li'l bit Khmer Rouge. "If we're not gonna play it right, I'm gonna ragequit and run it myself!"

Coulda, shoulda, woulda. YGWV, but if I might quote from a certain "post-canonical" source: Why would the "blood" option necessarily be the dishonorable one? Assumes facts not in evidence. See especially the "feuding clans" part. And how such feuds can start in the first place. You're already on someone else's territory, attempting to <yoink!> their property. Either you have some theory of the case as to why this is an Honourable thing to do (they owe us tribute/wergeld/recompense for some other wrong, and won't pay up, the dogs!), and hence Violence is Always an Option if it comes to that, or that ship sailed as soon as you started.

In my personal experience it doesn't necessarily extend to ever getting a roll to see if you realize another PC in a long-running game is themselves Fae, so I'd say your mileage may very much vary on that. 🙂

Sheepcats.

For me definitely so, with the usual proviso that the chance of success isn't 95%. Might be something that it's worth getting an official clarification on though, with a view to this being explicitly covered in future editions.

I think these are each critical points. The starting location is going to in large part drive the other choices -- or at least, preclude a number of options without significant additional work on the part of the GM. And the playstyle thing could be a sharp delineator for a number of groups. "New" and "veteran" aren't a sharp binary here: there could be a significant number of "returners", whether past dabblers, or long-lapsed gnognards themselves. And they too may benefit from gentle (ideally!) nudges in the right directions. Whether it be by way of "bring back the good ol' days of <previous publication era>!" or "Wakboth no, anything but the stultifying nonsense of <edition>!" Especially if they're in the mindset of, it was a cute little game when it was a couple of books, but now I'm overwhelmed. And even the technically.new.com players might have absorbed some of these by osmosis, or be strongly predisposed to one of the legacy modes of play. Most obviously people might tend to split into: The "Prax and Pavis" crowd; The Sartarite (or by extension, any of the other three 'on-map' Theyalan homelands) clan game; Embryonic lozenge-hopping game. (Not necessarily exclusive with the others.) A sketch route-map for each of those could be a public service, and any another premises for play that spring to mind...

PAX Aus explicitly says it's free. Warhorn is too, but does have a tip-jar for donations: https://warhorn.net/donations?ep=footer

I agree, in practice, in custom, and maybe even to an extent in law power in an Orlanthi clan is more pluricentric than (for example) a Clan President and a Cabinet Ring serving at his Pleasure. For a lot of the things that come up in the typical game, the chief likely is the decision-maker: if you have to decide "should we welcome these strangers?" or "should be raid the neighbours, and as your answer is 'yes', which ones?" Can't be going all bottom-up procurement processes for things that need a swift answer and a small decision-making circle. OTOH, for other matters it's likely effectively another Inner Ring Member's call. Why have a specialist in skills and ritual role for various matters, and then second-guess then? And in particular when it comes to the use of land, it's clear that the Earth Priestess has a huge role. Possibly a very complex one, because as Jeff set out, it might be the tribal or regional temple that's the formal holder of sovereignty, who then farms that out to the chief, rather than the clan one. But she'll have a big spake one way or the other. And as you say, some decisions will be taken by the whole Inner Ring, or the Outer Ring, or the clan moot. Pace your political efforts accordingly! Which of course also applies even before you know there's to be a vote, or other decision-making process. Get your retaliatory obligations in first! Ouch. Well, let them do them, I guess.

I think the player in this case should refer to her "non-player sidekicks", and the various warriors-to-do-the-heavy-lifting PCs as her "player sidekicks". The Hero Wars are hard to win by stabbing on Lunar (or other preferred target) at a time. Skills like "obscure celestial lore" and "fast-talk dragon" are apparently much more applicable! If it's what's desired, then why worry about changing it? Obviously if the ruleset isn't RQ, or the group wants something different, or different parts of the group want different things, then that may vary considerably. In the HW/HQ/QW take on Glorantha, it's pretty explicitly the intent to make non-combat conflicts 'first-class citizens' too. To quibble that, Orlanth's precocious infancy is pretty much what starts the Storm Age, and his joining the PTA is essentially what ends not that, but the one after that, the Chaos Age! But the Green Age and the Golden Age are important as regards Ernalda's (rather deeper) mythic roots.

Maybe you did the right thing at the wrong time. You thought you were dealing with one "stage", but it was actually another, or a slight variation on it. Variation is not just possible, it's inevitable, due to differences in the material circumstances: you're doing the HQ because the world is a little out of line with the myth, so you have to whack it back in place. And also because Trickster is gonna happen, with Illusion and Disorder in tow -- and if they're not, it'll turn out even worse. Plus of course implementation problems. You did the right thing, but not well enough runicly, devotionally, knowledgeably, or skillfully -- whatever's scripted or improvised for that 'stage'. I think one pattern here is to "cross the beams" -- splice in a stage of a different, but related heroquest, which permits a different resolution. Telling a mashup of the two myths, essentially. Of course we don't have every myth known to every Gloranthan, much less an Ordnance Survey map of the heroplane, so when those happens we generally have to wing it. "Sure, sounds like it could be a thing, who knows?" So IMO resolve much as before, but with an additional or tougher Lore check, and improvise a new set of applicable tests and mods. I think so. After all, every worshipper of a deity is a variable-sized mask or 'avatar' of that being. Manifestations all the way down. I'm sure we'll get official rules at some point. Neither those nor our own fanon attempts may completely solve the problem for everyone, in every case, but if we can continue to nibble around the edges of it...

I think so, yes. If you're playing a "crunchy" sort of game like RQ you have to at least throw some illusionism to make it seem like you're 'simulating' it in a consistent way, but only to a point. So either way, I think it's important to first ask, would failure at this point be an interesting option, or is it just making the game resistant to its own plot? And it might be, but if not, maybe better played as a "lesser" or dare I say a "costly" success. Ah, the 'heroquest dealer' approach! The first hit's free, then the cost ramps up to triple! 😄 I think that works. There's any number of things the PCs (and the players and the GM in collaboration) might do. Try again with more community support, at a different time (either in the short term or the longer term), with some additional ritual object, etc, etc; Try again but with a different Quest, or as you suggest 'transpose' to that immediately as a result of the failed roll; Fake it until you make it: just because you didn't do the ritual 'successfully' and spark the hero light as intended, you can still carry out the intended actions, and 're-ritualise' on the hoof.

"I get up every morning and read the 'wanted chaos horrors' list. If my name's not there, I eat breakfast."

That's exactly right. You mutate on a cellular level, so mostly they cells just die, as they've been damaged beyond basic metabolic functioning. Which is fine at low levels (we'll just replace those), but causes radiation sickness and in sufficiently severe cases death, from losing too much metabolic function at once. And then there's the more subtle cellular mutations, where they continue to live and multiply, but malfunction -- including, ironically, when programmed cell death is mutated to 'off', and the cells become "immortal". What you don't tend to get is the chaos-feature or comic-book superpowers sort of mutation (kinda not biologically possible), or the "turning into a new species" mutation (too low-probability an event, so takes multiple generations). But this is Glorantha, so the question is, where do you want to configure it between strict physics and biology realism, and general fantasy or particularly lozengey ideas?

Though "needs to be fought" is inherently a more flexible, ever-expanding, and dealer's choice category than "needs to be healed". Of course, the two are extremely complementary in the obvious way, but in a combat-heavy game, you can make the "healing, buffing, and some combat on the side" role as amazing as you like, and people will still feel "oh no, borrrrrrrring, I'm playing the cleric".

Ooooooooooooooo. Just looked at the preview of this, seems very good!

Just had a quick look at them, and failed my Save vs Nostalgia badly. I don't see any strong dependency on any particular year, apart from the matter of the difficulty of getting between the two, depending on the Opening. Obviously for the (possibly) Manirian one, whether it's before or after the Wolf Pirates and the death of Belintar will affect the setting, but not the scenario itself, as far as I can see. I think the default "current year" at that point was 1621, but then as now people played from any number of different points. So I don't see a lot of percentage in angsting about what the authors may or may not have had in mind, if the material fits. Or can be adapted to your purposes!

Oops. Sorry, my bad, I see now from the separately published Rune Spell Reference index, and someone else's mention of it elsewhere, that I was wildly wrong here, and it was published long since in the Red Book of Magic. Evidently I'm very behind in my memos... and shopping.

Correct pronoun is a brisk, silent salute. 🙂

Presumably the third thing concerns Maker himself? Gata doesn't want to beholden to Maker by overtly asking for a favour, and wants there to be some sort of balance between Maker and Grower.

I'd first slightly tweak the in-world answer: the key part is to (re)conform the world to the myth. The Lightbringers' Quest is to make the sun rise in the morning. If the sun was -- hopefully -- gonna do that anyway, then recreating that myth is essentially just an act of worship. I say "just" -- it's critical to the culture and to religious life, and if anyone fumbled their Devotion Passion and didn't trouble themselves to take part, then maybe it actually wouldn't rise at all! Yelm might be more of a sun and less of a god than in the good old days, but he's still enough of a god that he might need the magic points to get out of bed in the morning. So what makes it a hq is having a material-world problem you need to fix. Probably a slightly smaller one than the sun not rising -- I hope! Maybe the "super-resurrection" application for the LBQ, or some form of bringing order and consensus-reality to the world. I think it's easier to apply for "practice" hqs, and -- contrary to the HW model -- I think it makes sense to do those first in gameplay. Hopefully they in turn make more sense of the otherside, "full" versions. And what I think a practice hq looks like is a self-conscious mashup of the "mundane" actions you'd need to take to solve the particular problem, and the actions you'd need to take to reenact the myth. Hopefully there's a decent overlap between the two, or otherwise you've maybe chosen the wrong myth to apply! There might be "stages" that make less intuitive sense in the current context, and that you have to do almost purely for sake of the ritual. Then you're in the "We Hate Darjiin Usurpers" situation -- what you did seems pretty dumb, but it's mythically correct! So for example if you're doing the Hill of Gold hq in order to fight Chaos, you'll likely have to pick several other fights first (or other encounters with a particular slant according to the exact version of the myth at each stage), with people or groups you Identify as taking the Orlanth, Zorak Zoran, and Inora roles. OTOH, this is Glorantha, so it's not like that'll be hard!

Of course if one is essentially only counting warriors -- and combat medics -- as "active", then I suppose one could deem KL to be a "passive female" cult too.

Not so much 'per se', as 'at all'. Not even speakers of the same language family, for example -- Bengalis and Brettons have more in common in that respect. Which is only one axis of dissimilarity, of course -- much like religion is only one point of commonality. It's one thing to call stuff out when you see it. But when you're pivoting back to it -- more than a little hyperbolically -- in the middle of a discussion of something else entirely, the whiff of "ah but what about" might potentially be discerned.

That doesn't seem at all accurate, even without knowing precisely what you mean by 'active' vs 'passive'. (Though I think it would be important and helpful to say quite what you do mean by it, I should say, otherwise this could rapidly seem like we're kicking at moving goalposts.) In Sartarite culture (and for the Theyalans fairly broadly, so far as we know) there are gendered expectations, but very little in the way of gender exclusions. You can find the sexism-of-passive-expectations objectionable by all means, but let's not conflate that with "few 'active' outlets": available outlets for female characters are every single cult on the 'upcoming Sartar cults' list for CoS, as well as all the already actually published ones. Orlanth, Chalana Arroy, Eurmal, Issaries, Lhankor Mhy, Barntar, Daka Fal, Foundchild, Heler, Humakt, Gagarth, Lanbril, Mastakos, Odayla, Storm Bull, Valind, Ygg and Yinkin are all, as far as I know, open to women initiates. (Waha sneaks onto the "Storm Pantheon" list, but they're a Praxian-only cult as far as I know. Maybe a slight question mark on Valind?) To which add the horribly Earth-stereotyped Ernalda, Aldrya, Asrelia, Babeester Gor, Caladra & Aurelion, Donandar, Eiritha, Flamal, Grain Goddesses, Hykim & Mikyh, Maran Gor, Mostal, Ty Kora Tek and Uleria. Not a flicker of 'activity' in any of those? That's without getting into the Lunar options -- still a few holdouts of those even in Sartar, it seems! I'll admit dunno where in "canon" Glorantha that'd fit, or even where I'd want to put it in headspace Glorantha. I'm sure I'd read it, not least because it seems a hard thing to do generally, a harder thing to fit in with Glorantha's "mythic archetypes" mission statement, and I'd wanna see how. But in between "few outlets" and "straight up flip everything" -- which is a heckuva wide range for any one post! -- we have self-declaredly gender-equal cultures, female-dominant cultures, and female-only cultures. More needs to be done with each (ideally all) of those, too.