EricW

If they mostly hang out on Orlanthi sacred mountains maybe fire gods are difficult to contact. Seeking help from air spirits was maybe how their ancestors survived the Greater Darkness. Having said that it’s a bit boring none of them have tried anything new.

If the crimson bat is the beast lord of all bats, does this mean all bats were corrupted when their lord fell to the devil, or was the bat just an animal before the devil captured it?

I've always thought of the relationship between being a cultist and sex as being like the relationship between a meth head or heroin addict and sex. Initially the magic and frenzy might drive heightened sexuality, but after a while the madness displaces all remotely normal urges. To put it another way, to a cultist, a sexually attractive person is not for seduction, they're a useful ingredient for powerful necromancy, or a fitting vessel for birthing the mythos hybrid who will bring down the world of mankind. A cultist might use seduction to lure their victim to the temple, but the end goal is not sex, in any normal sense. There are exceptions, like deep ones want to have lots of sex with humans, and insane cultist humans at least tolerate this attention, if not relish it - the selling point is the gold, the magic, and that the children will never die from old age. But this seems more transactional than based on genuine sexual urges, at least from the POV of the humans, though who knows where the insanity leads in this case.

The Hervey Bay Dome is a mysterious weather pattern which seems to protect the Australian town of Hervey Bay from bad weather, almost like the town is shielded by a forcefield or a dome like the Stephen King story. I'm a believer - I've seen a hole in the clouds both from the air and the ground. I'd love to know what causes it. No doubt meteorologists would give a boring mundane explanation, rain shadows and currents and wind patterns and whatnot. But the island next to Hervey Bay, Fraser Island / K'gari, is a sacred site for Aboriginals, a seat of ancient culture and magical dreamtime experience. Hervey Bay is also known as "God's Waiting Room", a lot of old folk choose to settle in the town. The mild climate must be good for them, they tend to live a very long time, and hardly ever leave once they settle.

Ah but are living things alive and intact? Or have their experiences changed them?

In the manifestation Hisfault, Eurmal is theologically to blame for everything wrong with Glorantha, so there is no real defence against this accusation 😉

The book says swallow just kills people. But things swallowed by Trickster in god time are just gone. So the question is, do victims really die, or do they end up more or less intact but horribly trapped in Trickster’s stomach? If they don’t die, how could resurrection bring them back? How could non trickster divine intervention reach into the stomach of trickster?

Maybe the Broo found a way to consume the bodies and absorb / acquire the chaos features of other Broo. That would explain the reduced number of extremely powerful Broo. What a terrifying magical feat this would be - instead of chaos monsters taking their chances with a dip in the ooze, Broo hunt each other, with individuals with uniquely powerful features at the top of the kill list. The survivors would be fewer in number, but extremely dangerous.

Well Eurmal was the first god to “moon” the sun 🙂

I would argue the only reason Trickster doesn’t have a chaos rune is he agreed to help fix the mess he created when the joke goes too far. Would the EWF Great Dragon project have broken the compromise? Likely. Trickster didn’t necessarily suggest the Great Dragon project but he gave mankind the tools to stuff up the world, by teaching them how to learn Auld Wormish. Is Trickster chaos? Absolutely not. Do Trickster’s pranks sometimes lead to the compromise being threatened? Absolutely.

Given Trickster’s role in EWF and likely other violations or near violations of the compromise I suspect any serious concentration of Trickster power is way too unstable and close to chaos to rule anything. Look at what happened to the God Learners in Slontos, who built a great temple to Trickster. There is no rule against Tricksters attacking each other, so tricksters with access to an infinite range of divine spells would have wielded unimaginable destruction on each other, until the land itself gave way. At least that is my theory 😉

Disorder can mean strife but it also represents breaking away from the old order. Disorder could represent a youth movement, like hippies rejecting the societal rules of their parents, or people refusing to participate in the deadly clan feuds of their elders. Like a group of youths who refuse to initiate as warriors. How would they survive? Would they be easy prey to the first group of enemies? Or would the primal disorder they embrace somehow protect them, cause plans to attack them to go astray, magically divert bullies and enemies? How would the Lunars react to a movement which was sapping their enemies of potential warriors? Or would the Lunars have their own problems with youths refusing to take up the holy Lunar mission to heal the universe? One thing for sure, the parents would not be happy with this rising movement of lazy deserters, they would accuse them of everything from being secret chaos worshipers to clan traitors.

They wouldn't even need a machine shop. An old guy I used to hang out with sometimes once whittled a pistol out of steel - worked out the mechanism on a piece of paper, cut rough pieces out of a piece of steel plate, then whittled the parts to shape while watching TV, using a small but very sharp cold chisel, one almost invisible metal shaving at a time. Watching him really looked like someone whittling a piece of wood, except what he was whittling was the action for a gun, into a perfectly shaped component. The pistol wasn't for me - I have no idea what happened to it. Point is if someone is an expert fitter and turner or machinist, I wouldn't require them to have anything but the most basic tools to make something like a set of lock picks, people that skilled could probably fabricate a set of lock pick out of a few pieces of hard steel and an abrasive rock.

Eurmal Swallow spell. The book says death, but perhaps with Trickster it is not exactly death, so I would argue the Dragonewt may not reincarnate. Whatever happens to them I suggest their chances of returning to the mundane world are pretty slim. Unless Trickster decides it would be incredibly funny to unleash a broken, half insane dragonewt wearing a permanent clown face in pursuit of justice against one of his followers.

Its the hero wars - why does it have to be someone we have heard of? But perhaps Belintar himself was the reason no hero came forward to restore Belintar, the stagnation of having Belintar in charge robbed his subjects of much of their initiative. What were the Seven Mothers trying to do?

I’ve always wondered why someone in the Holy Country didn’t perform a hideous seven mothers style quest to put their god king back together, with chaos as the glue and replacement for any missing parts. I mean they just seem to wither away, instead of the usual Gloranthan response to disaster of attempting something desperate.

Trickster hero war? Now that would be strange. They could deploy “Eurmal’s Harmony” to keep the peace. Eurmal’s Harmony causes everyone at the meeting to talk over each other, and leave the meeting convinced that everyone else fully agreed with their position Obviously this could lead to some confusion, but if the harmony spell was cast at every meeting, everyone would always be convinced the peace negotiations resolved all differences. So all you need is a trickster with an endless supply of harmony, then no more war.

Malia worshippers are killed, preferably from a distance, and their houses and possessions are burned. Orlanthi on the few occasions they capture and execute a traitor rather than just killing them probably fling the traitor off a cliff, and let Orlanth choose whether to grant them clemency.

This came up a while ago. Most GMs interpret it as magically neutralising harm, but I like the idea of whatever is happening tearing the wizard apart, but the wizard magically reforms as fast as the damage is dealt. How grisly would that be? Blood and entrails everywhere, magically flowing back together, like those liquid metal robots in terminator, except a lot faster and a lot more colourful. San checks all round!

Humakt also survives...

Ah, you're talking about the Church of Eurmal, Scientist. Eurmal Scientists believe that since the entire world is an illusion, only by embracing the illusion rune can one hope to discover the path to ultimate truth. They dress in robes, try to look serious all the time, and write angry pamphlets about how unfair it is that the ignorant followers of other knowledge gods do not take their faith seriously, and refuse to engage them in debates as fellow knowledge seekers. They play pranks on each other at cult meetings via a formal rota, with a selected member ritually deploying a series of fart spells or other trickster pranks, while other members discuss the deeper meaning of what they are witnessing and experiencing. Many outsiders are hostile to the cult, and allege it entraps vulnerable new members with deceptive group discussions and community events. The Church of Eurmal, Scientist is widely believed to have started when a trickster hero bet another lightbringer he could start a new religion, but members of the cult vehemently reject such offensive trivialisation of their sacred beliefs. Members claim their founder, Eh Wrong Cupboard, received his divine revelation while standing alone in the middle of a magical elven grove while performing an unspecified trickster ritual.

Yet Tricksters lie to themselves all the time. I've got to say I kind of like the idea of tricksters being able to fool truth spells, providing they accept the consequences of believing their own lie. But maybe that would be too powerful.

What a fascinating idea. If a trickster casts lie on themself, do detect truth spells show they believe they are telling the truth?

One persistent theme in CoC is if an entire region comes under the sway of the mythos it kind of decays and is forgotten. So with The Shadow over Innsmouth, the townsfolk deliberately cut ties with other towns, to preserve their secret, and because other towns no longer offered anything they cared about, except maybe a few trade goods. The Innsmouth folk became totally obsessed with joining their relatives in the sea. Or if there is a catastrophe, it is simply written off. Consider the Tunguska Event (a 12 megaton explosion in Siberia in 1908), the East Mediterranean Event (a multi-kiloton explosion over the Mediterranean Sea in 2002), even the Chelyabinsk meteor in 2013, most people have never heard of these events, forgotten about them, or only think of them when someone mentions them. Or the Tsar Bomba in 1961, a Russian arctic nuclear test so large it shattered windows a thousand miles away. Any of these events could have been say a summons of Azathoth which got out of control, in the CoC Universe - but people simply dismissed them. An event which attracted attention would have to be insanely impactful. One of my favourite examples is Thor Meets Captain America, which despite the cheesy title is a brilliant short story by famous Sci Fi author David Brin. Brin's editor pestered him to write a story where the NAZIs won, so Brin wrote a story in which the NAZIs crushed the D-Day landing by somehow summing the Norse Gods to fight on their behalf. Loki of course betrays his fellow gods and helps the allies, but refuses to explain how the NAZIs managed to work the ancient magic. Only at the very end of the story does the main character understand the awful secret Loki is concealing, and why he couldn't tell anyone.

Obviously a chaotic ally of Gloomshark... 🙂