Alex

Think of it as a reverse-takeover by the Solar elements. The Yelmies have always thought this whole "cyclic" business was far from ideal, and to the degree they're an influence on the Empire, they'd be happy to trade it in for consistency, especially one with an improvement across the piece. Arguably some measure of accommodation is necessary just to get the concepts "Lunar" and "Empire" into the same noun phrase!

Not exactly a change, unless you have a grand unified theory for RQ skirmishers and regimental-scale mass combat... the effect doesn't necessarily scale linearly. Though that'd be the way to bet, absent an explanatory device otherwise...

On the face of it, a magical breeding programme would look like a series of divination rituals to determine which lineage members need to be mated with which others to best advance the Golden Path. Those might be exceptionally high information gain, or they might be just some woo for window-dressing. Whether the whole enterprise looks more like Dune or like Carry On Incestuous Orgies maybe a matter of taste or IWG.

Peckishness?

Wow! Or Sandy, delivering an impromptu lecture on FPS level design. 🙂

For the Lunars, the RQ3 take was of course they don't just disguise one as the other, they actually combine the two. Whether that's still true to any extent in the RQG canon-to-be I assume we'll just have to wait and see, I imagine. Among the Arkati the same might be true and for essentially the same reason, but we know less about them, there's very few of them, and they vary hugely from instance to instance, so it's even harder to say.

They're often (but not always) big and flashy in effect, but bear in mind they whole 'SR 1' thing. They're exceptionally quick. They're quicker than moving your feet, or moving your hands. Not all that quick, and they pretty explicitly require some sort of physical movement, Or Reasonable Local Equivalent depending on the exact spell and whatever the 'special effects' of that particular tradition might be. And potentially in the same speed range as sorcery if mega-boosted by MPs. (Looking at you, Bladesharp 12 (ab)users!) I suspect the nature of the "semi-trance" sorcerers lapses into varies considerably, including whether it's quiet, and how demonstrative it might look. That there's a DEX SR element implies to me there's indeedsome degree of physical manipulation involved, whether subtle or grandiose. On the face of it, if you were going to confuse any two of the three (other than ritual magics of each time, deliberate subterfuge, or especially weird examples of each type), it'd be "slow spirit magic" with "quick sorcery". I suspect the Orlanthi (or those that care enough to worry about and rationalise such things) see it as the same, but LM have it safely mastered and contained. A little like Orlanth's Magic Weapons -- we beat up those other guys and took their stuff.

1992 being the publication date of King of Sartar, source of the "Lunars get kicked out, and then kicked some more!" metaplot-by-fragments, lest I have made myself more obscure than usual.

Needs more context, I think. In the LM case, the distinction between a snappier sorcery spell and a slower spirit magic will be fairly opaque to anyone other than a colleague. ("These long-winded long-beards really like to make a meal of these things, eg?!") I don't think (non-ritual) sorcery and ritual rune magic will in practice be especially confusable, in the same sort of way as you can generally tell what's a 100m race and a marathon without waiting to the end. But an especially wily (or long-winded again) caster might blur the distinction somewhat. If dealing with Evil Foreign Magic(TM) -- Malkioni, Lunar, etc -- the distinction is likely fairly hard to spot, unless you've been doing as Captain Picard instructed, and studying that enemy recognition chart really closely.

By that standard, they were "massively nerfed" in 1992. Or potentially earlier, if IYG you anticipated the plucky underdogs might actually succeed in their Resistance Roll at some point.

I have no idea, and I don't think I have either (spare room is too far away, and I'm far too lazy) but personally I'd not go looking for a map of Refuge in a non-Gloranthan supplement for Carse/Karse. This thread may also be pertinent:

While it varies dramatically between different versions of RQ (and arguably fairly dramatically according to interpretation in some cases), it would be wrong to say "there exist no 'balanced' three-on-one encounters" in any of them. We're just haggling over where that happens in each. Pick a opponent, pick a version, work out how tuff you have to be kill fight three of them at once, then replay this in as much detail as you seem to wish to dig into, but without first controlling for version differences. But there's a big difference between "not solely, I need situational backup" and "I need to focus pretty much equally on these two skills as I'll be using them both incessantly and indeed at the same time". We can pretty confidently rule out physics as a necessitating criterion here. Even if you insist -- over the explicit protestations otherwise of the designers of multiple editions -- that SRs are timings, what they most definitely can't be is 0ns instants. So this isn't a "two places at once" thing, it's a "can I move between two undefined places in an entirely undefined period of time, or indeed tactically co-locate the two things so I don't need to" one. They are? I missed that memo... If you're referring to rounding rules here, well, you know what they say about rounding errors... You say "muddy the waters", I say "the case I'm by far the most concerned with, give or take some historical curiosity". YRQWV. That's firstly, an interpretation on your part, and secondly, an inconsistent one, as the "can't parry on your attack SR" rules doesn't take DEX into account. But that's the exact point at issue. The "three opponents" case was entirely subsidiary to that point, not a prompt for an entire change of topic.

Also a little-known product called RuneQuest: Glorantha, but I agree on your observation about its (and their) scope.

That doesn't appear to be a zine, but one of the Midkemia Press editions of the Carse supplement.

Interesting question! Or pair of questions, really, as there's two aspects do it: does the CA's magic fail spontaneously, due to violation of their oath in a way that's magically real and effective in and of the action itself? i.e., the goddess herself 'notices' and cares about? And the cultic one, which is what other worshippers would make of this case? @simonhis IMO exactly right that the correct approach to fixing it -- to whatever extent it needs fixed -- is the amends and reparation. Especially seen through the Orlanthi social context, where they were moving fast and breaking things, long before that guy in the Valley adopted that as a slogan, but with an emphasis that fixing them afterwards is the thing to do.

That'd be here, I believe:

Wait, what? Why was I not informed?! 😄 Yes, very true. It's an issue in any system, obviously, as however crunchy you make a system, or detailed a description, you eventually hit the edge at the end of the road, and you get judgement calls. Subsequent arguments optional. This is maybe murkier and fuzzier than most, since it's kinda related to these "who started it" arguments that start in playgroups, and jurists, politicians and philosophers argue about regularly. Who's "initiated the use of force" in any given situation, and hence who's simply responding to it (by magical detection in this case).

Westerner Side Story.

Jointures de airain? 🙂 Mind you, D&D weapons lists long included "Lucerne Hammers" for worlds with no such canton...

Not entirely sure what you're looking for here, but several BRP games are definitely less crunchy/simmy than RQ. Almost all of them, in fact! CoC itself for example, or potentially Pendragon (if we ignore it being the non-D100 black sheep -- just multiply through by five!) might be worth a look at for inspiration. I'm not familiar with either incarnation of Classic Fantasy, though on the face of it it does sound like more of a one-stop shop. But if you're comfortable with kitbashing, a toolkit approach combining the best of each of the things you like seems very doable.

Isn't determining an entity's intent exactly a case of reading their mind? Or whatever decision-making faculty they're using for that (instinct, clockwork).

Any similarity to the phrase "The Elusive King" wildly coincidental, no doubt...

The refusal to build more than one of everything is somewhat sciencey. If one is a sufficiently posh Theoretician, one has Experimental minions to make the test-equipment for one. If not, one may be making one's own "research-grade" prototypes, testbeds, software, etc...

English included -- pick and pickaxe are both used, if not quite interchangeably, then without a completely systematic and consistent distinction between the "weapon" and the "digging tool" senses. Oops, that's a good point. Scrub my suggestion for the Italian too, on the same basis! Sounds like the same thing, then. If we trust Wikipedia -- which we don't, but it's not much different from the many-amateur-hands-and-eyes effort we're running here -- then "A bullet-shooting crossbow, pelletbow, "ballester", sometimes referred to as “stone bow” and even rock-throwing crossbow, is a modified version of the classic crossbow." and "Unter einem Balester (auch Kugelballäster, Schnepper, Vogelschnepper, Kugelschnäpper, Kugelarmbrust) versteht man eine mittelalterliche, leichte Armbrust, die vorwiegend für die Vogeljagd verwendet wurde." (Their bold, for headwords being defined.) My original caveat was mostly in the event that the W&E was some dragonewt monstrosity made of bone, or the like.

The Orlanthi are a rich and diverse culture indeed! Sometimes with the diversity extending widely even between "what I said before" and "what I'm saying now".