Alex

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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.

A striking thing about the Wikipedia article is how big the error-bars on the estimated death tolls are. I know that wikipedia gonna wikipedia, but it does look like they have pretty genuine and pretty up-to-standard sources on this. Of course, a mere factor of six between 17m and 100m is as nothing to the extent of the "inaccuracies" some people seem to think are involved in the Covid-19 numbers. After all, some hospitals got grants for treating patients affected by the pandemic, so obviously, absent the slightest evidence of the career and criminal-penalty consequences of anyone being on the fiddle for that for no actual personal gain, let's just assume they're multiple orders of magnitude wrong. See also "election fraud", I suppose.

Not sure I want to get too deep in the trenches on this one, but in the spirit of "pointing out a couple of things"... Uh-oh. I strongly suspect that's not a propositional-logically correct statement, parsed literally (as to verify we'd need to compare the doctrinal, or even the average congregant's, stance of an entire church with the most antisemitic neo-Nazi anywhere in the US. Which is quite the prospect. Even read loosely, it's pretty iffy. But more significantly, I think, this very much conflates structural racism with ad hoc prejudice. As is very popular to do, especially in the Old Conservative narrative! As you were going for "especially concerning India", maybe good to get the distinction between South Asian Muslims and Arabs straight. Also handy when it comes to Iran, and... well, lots of places, actually!

Yeah, that's a very common one. And it kinda started with "it's just the common cold", then "it's comparable to seasonal flu", and now they're clinging up by their fingertips that it's not closed in on the 1918 H1N1 total fatalities -- though it's certainly an appreciable fraction already, anywhere between a tenth and a quarter. If it did kill 50m they'd still have the Black Death to comfort themselves with!

I do hope that's not a still-more-damning guilt by association than the Hero Wars one! 🙂 But yes, I think there's been a few descriptions that work a lot like that. For example, the KoDP one, where you can be either Lost in the God Time, or you can be dumped back out on yer arse. For a "stationary" or "vertical" heroquest other-side quest, I think that works logically enough. You're back in the ritual circle, which in a sense was the same place as the Hero Plane for the duration of the quest, and where you were all along. For a "mundane world" or "practice" quest, it checks out too. The Hero Light in your eyes dims... for now! You take off your myth-goggles, and go back to perceiving things again as having their normal appearance and significance, rather than everything being hugely freighted with mythic meaning. Materially, nothing dramatically changes -- you're still in the physical place you were anyway. Now if you've gone Full Lightbringer, bodily locked behind the Gates of Dusk and that whole palaver, and you're Alone in Hell when the ritual goes irretrievably wrong... Oops. Wait until the rescue squad show up, with an even bigger and -- necessarily! -- better one?

My main reason is that I don't think I've seen my copy (either of them, I think I have two?) for about a decade, so I'd have to find them first, and no doubt eliminate a hazardous amount of dust... So with the huge caveat that I might be misremembering wildly, as I recall the starter-motor issues there were... Firstly, that they were couching things in terms of the intended difficulty of "full" Otherworld quests. So if that takes a whole clan, the associated magical regalia, on a holy site, on a propitious day and time, preparation, duration, as well and multiple high-ability celebrants and questers, or reasonable equivalents, that sounds about sensible. Secondly, anything magic-resistance-related in HW ended up being a huge last-minute bodge job, where what back in those more innocent days we called a "narrativist" core set of rules had some very old-school thinking "simulationist" numbers grafted far-from-seamlessly onto it. While a couple of Chaosium have a track record of a philosophy of, "don't bother with a number unless it's a big one", suddenly we're getting out of bed unless there were three Masteries involved. So if those two things ever actually met at any point, I suspect it was more blind luck and stopped clocks...

Could be. "But where's the proof?!?" Which is an instance of the popular human pastime of goalpost-shifting and confirmation bias. If I want it to be true, a theory or a surmise will suffice. If I don't want it to be true, it requires a seven-sigma beyond even an unreasonable doubt mathematical theorem, and anything short of that can be instantly dismissed as "no evidence". The XKCD toon springs to mind. "Science" is shown in positions 3.5 to 5. Medicine and maths straddle it from opposite sides. https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/purity.png But mostly, I think it's people being people. Throw enough compartmentalisation and cognitive biases -- omission/commission is a big one here, I think -- at something and people can believe any combination of things.

Femme Yelmalio is a red -- as it were -- flag for Yelornan Niche Protection, I feel!

o.O Oh no! It's the Ritual of the Reverse Canonisation!