Alex

It's a dirty bat-troll job, but somebatty's got to bat-troll-do it! There's the names Quatanara and Mahaquata (t)rolling around, or "Lesilla, or a daughter of hers", but I wouldn't take that cheque to the canon bank in any real confidence of being able to cash it. Another possible case of "same god(dess), different mask, different name", as per usual.

Bit of a head-scratcher, all right. If this were Stafford Library territory, we'd doubtless have just learned of Madeupfunkypeloriansoundingname, little-known and little independently worshipped stabby Blue Moon deity and Annilla-relative, who is essentially for most purposes a Shargash subcult. These days we're more likely to cut to the masks-of-the-same-deity chase, and call it an associated cult of a normally geographically very different god.

Bear in mind those are pretty central Orlanthi Trickster myths! Eurmal's kinda the source of the whole 'death' trouble. Steals(!) Death, kills Grandfather Mortal, plays lending, swapping, and stealing it back a few more times, etc, while others do likewise. And he spends most of the LBQ stealing things (mostly) to order. Naturally if you have a bonded Trickster, you can tell them to definitely not ever learn particular runemagic. And you can trust their word that they'll do as you've told them -- right?

You're welcome! I think some sort of 'session zero' exercise is very useful for establishing this sort of thing. Could be something like a relationship map, a 'community questionnaire' type thing, or just a running-stuff-up-the-flagpole exercise. "So peeps, I'm thinking of structuring things around Fubar the Windy, High Storm Voice of Somelocation, being the main patron for your PCs -- that work for youse?" As far as I'm aware, there's no restriction of this sort-- unless I've missed such a thing entirely. My meta-logic would also be that it'd be a bad idea if there were, as it'd be a whole extra and fairly unnecessary bookkeeping exercise to track skills-I-need-to-improve-with-a-tick vs ones-I'm-able-to-train.

I'm not sure if this is more likely to help or hinder, but I'd take the flat statement that 'vingan is a gender' with a pinch of salt. IIRC El Jeff as said he's not sure Theyalan is even a gendered language. Which could in any case mean a few different things: is there a vingan pronoun? A vingan agreement of adjectives, articles and verbs? I suspect that's what's meant here is that vingan is a normative social/gender role. In practice meaning, with as many of the male (and contrawise female) social role norms as locally expected or successfully personally insisted on. Which isn't to say very much, of course, which gets us right back to the weeds of it! I doubt we'll get much on that in CoG, beyond "Vinga: see Orlanth." Magically the two are either identical, or "within the normal range of variation, see local cult for details". Cultically they pretty much always -- not just Orlanthi-always, closer to always-always! -- caucus with the vanilla, testicular Orlanth-worshippers. There's some references to Red Hair Lodges and so forth, implying intermittent occurrences of all-female -- OK, all-vingan! -- shrines and rites, and some sort of Otherworldly possible distinction if you're a heroquester, but that's very much going to be a minority sport. The outstanding issues are more social ones, as we've been discussing. Hopefully later publications will give us chewy and maximum-fun (and minimum angst and grief) detail on this. As this turned into quite the thread-zombie, I assume we're a bit late to help with that, but I hope it worked out -- is working out? -- well!

Yes, I agree, possession is six (out of seven!) parts of the law, and this is rarely a problem in practice. But there are possible plot hooks if the 'default' doesn't quite align with the wishes of either parent -- or of either parent's clan, indeed, as regards to the status of the relationship, of patri-/matri-lineal/-local issues, and so on.

As has been pointed out, 'adventuring' in the gameable sense isn't necessarily the same thing as the Orlanth the Warrior ritual role. But that overlap is the most common use case, sure. But if you're a Sartarite woman chaffing at any given gender restriction or norm, then Vinga is the go-to route to challenge it. "Men are chiefs!" "I'm a Vingan." "... fair point." "Woman are the earth! Men are the rain and the storm!" "I'm a devotee of Vinga Thunderous." "OK, Boomer."

Yeah, this has been much-discussed in the past, in threads on clan exogamy with such content as "wait, having sex with my tenth cousin -- or tenth 'cousin-in-law' of no known blood relation at all -- is incest, and I'll get the the full 'you're festering chaos and will now be put solemnly to death' treatment?!" But there are inheritance and property laws in play, albeit not quite the stuff of eurofeudalism. So if there's two clans, a kid and no marriage involved, you have a potential dispute as to whose inheritance and property practices apply. (You might have a dispute even in endogamous 'irregular union', but more in the 'scolding from your relatives' range, and 'swift decision by the clan ring' at worst.)

NIMG, or more accurately, NCUIMG(*), but sounds like a very viable take to me. Orlanthi obviously have something of a Conservative Republican streak to them -- a rural independent Fianna Fáil TD and a Kinahan OCG ones too, but I digress -- so it's entirely possible this could be regarded as ritually 'wrong'. "No one can make you do anything, but duuuuude, that totally weakens your, ya know, 'air rune', if ya get what I mean!" Also, your co-religionists are your neighbours, and your neighbours are your relatives, and your relatives are judgy as All Five Hells. (*) Never Come Up... Or else Queen Ernalda's take is much like Queen Victoria's on that... No sperm, no foul! I think they mainly have the "are terrible company and worse dates" contraception magic. Procreation is backsliding in your dedication to death, but equally so to a lesser degree is sex generally. I don't think your fertility insta-drops from 100% to 0% when you Initiate. (Or indeed from whatever it'd potentially dropped to after you became a lay member, if that's a key part of your take.) But I'm absolutely certain that there are Humakti Geases (or Gifts!) that cover that. Or otherwise cover it in 'sufficiently advanced Humakti' sorta ways. Bear in mind there's generally reckoned to be a couple of Humakt-as-primary-deity clans in Sartar (and presumably far more in total elsewhere). Unless the other cultists are really picking up the slack, or they're very big on adopting-in, I don't think they have insuperable... problems in that area.

The nature of the 'problems' part is verifiable and on the public record, but I have no idea if it's at all connected to the non-pub of RQ4. It does seem a little questionable to bring it up here, I agree, and would similarly suggest @Mugen considering redacting as inappropriately off-topic.

Oh, that'd be a whole legal drama/soap opera! But just to be clear, I was thinking of the rather more boring "neither party is married at all" case.

Missed a trick there. If they wanted -- or someone wants -- to go Full GURPS (let alone RM/MERP), just extrapolate backwards to 1D2, 1D2-1, 1D2-2... or some much malarkey.

OK, I admit my "dwerulans" comment was a failed bid for cheap laugh-reacts. (Reddit's done bad things for my spiritual Acceptance when it comes to post karma, and look at how the BB deals with equal gains of on rep. First place and ties? Alphabetical? Give the poor newbie an event break? Nooooo. To him who has been given, let him be given more! And on one of Jeff's days off, too! 😄 😭 🤣) So to make a more sincerely tryhard orlanthropology response... How does it work with the most obvious slightly off-All case, human males? I assume that Nandan initiation is a 'career path' to Ernaldan priestesshood, at least as a theoretical possibility, if the 'flipside of Vinga' comparison is to be true to any real degree at all. OK, they're pretty clearly mostly not, but they're often mentioned in the same breath as if they were, so surely this must be at least about 15% true? Is this largely a formalised ritual thing? Or does it require and involve pretty high-end magic? Doing a little gooooogling, I see that the CoG draft has a Nandan subcult with the 'Pregnancy' runemagic (for which, text not yet publicly given AFAIK). So... on the face of it fairly high-end magic, it seems, but not "we're gonna need a bigger heroquest" level. Assuming this doesn't get cut for space, keeping out of the twitter trans wars, or the traditional Gloracanonian authorial change-of-mind. Your "Carry on Up Vantar" literary-mode Glorantha will rightfully vary. So for me, that sets an approximate bar for the magical difficulty in other cases. The social difficulty will no doubt vary even more widely. "Oh, so that's how your species, em, does it? The ways of the Goddess's bounty are endlessly manifold!" "We don't have any truck with your kind 'ere. Sling 'yer 'ook, before I have six burly huscarls sling it for you."

Yus. Sex is easy, marriage is hard; the gods bless the sworn bond. Or however that one goes. But I don't think they see "out-of-wedlock" kids as "illegitimate", much less kids from slightly-less-gender-role-conforming actual (or de facto) marriages. OTOH it must be said that this is an area with a lot of modern RW baggage (and recent-modern in my current location, at that), so I don't claim to be a studiedly detached anthropologist on this. Or on anything else, come to that!

Forum feature bugfix request! Oddly, I can only give this one reaction, when it very clearly needs all of them at once! <checks to see how many times it's been posted, just in case...>

You're welcome, I'm sure! Other than "precedent" or "feasibility study and proof of concept", I don't see why "agree as far as CAs are concerned" is informative as far as XU cultists go.

The two aren't identical in their magic or in their attitudes. Or maybe they are, YGWV! And of course even when they're generally different, particular priestesses may have their own... foibles. But unless this was a deliberate plot-twist, I'd maybe have made this clear to the PCs in advance. Good luck with them trying to enforce modern understandings of contract law, mind you...

KoS?

Going native!

Or a dwerulan that has done their share of the reproductive heavy lifting. For example!

I have a pipedream for an RPG 'session zero' that plays out a little like a clan questionnaire writ cosmological, and a bit like a game of G:tGW. "Select from the following cosmic dualities..." "Roll to hit the Cosmic Order to advance to the next Age!"

Shake it off!

Heor(t)Quest: now there's a brandname to conjure with! (T's are pretty much optional in my accent anyway.)

As Simon says, "cult business" can cover this if the cult is explicitly acting as a patron on an adventure-by-adventure basis, or if they have the status of community champions and get broad licence. This is only a credibility stretch if the cults are wildly incompatible or actually hostile: why would the Seven Mothers and Storm Bull be co-sponsoring the same random bunch of adventurers, say? But that's the sort of thing you can just iron out (or decide how best to hand-wave!) in session zero, I think, if you have buy-in from the players to having PCs from the same community, or otherwise having a clearly understood common purpose of some kind. For lay members, even fairly major back-sliding is going to have more social than magical consequences. So if you have either permission or forgiveness from the mundane hierarchy, you're fine. This is situation normal. Praxian tribes are constantly at war with each other, and most of the warriors are Waha cultists. Likewise Sartarite cattle raids: Orlanth-on-Orlanth crime. Evidently not a metaphysical problem for the god for his followers to be knocking lumps out of each other. In social terms, priests are very much primarily loyal to their tribes rather than any separate religious hierarchy, which doesn't really exist anyway. Except for cults like Paps-Eiritha... who're not the ones doing the drive-by stabbing, anyway. Only if the cultists break religious norms (acting against cult virtues, breaking ritual taboos) would they get any sort of religious pushback. Humakti killing each other in honorable combat: mythically correct behaviour! Humakti breaking oaths to each other, nooooo.