EricW

You could have a lot of fun with this. Tempt the player to break the rules, like finding a scroll of sorcery skill, or other slightly forbidden magic. Put them in scenarios where they solve the problem by using the forbidden magic. Encourage them to convince themselves that rule breaking is justified by the greater good - I mean sorcery isn't chaos, and a little sorcery makes a great secret weapon which can save the party.

Trickster would get jealous!

EricW is good - thanks, flattered 🙂

The way I think of Shamen, a shaman is like someone who spends all their time looking at Tik Tok or youtube and posting comments to friends while walking down the street. They barely have time to learn physical skills because they're always messaging people. Occasionally they start babbling about some video they saw, which means absolutely nothing to anyone else around them because nobody else has seen the video. But boy are they well informed about esoteric stuff, so if the crops start withering, or someone has a sore which won't heal, the guy or girl with the mobile phone has access to the solution. Or perhaps the video they watched was total nonsense published by scammers.

Wasn't the chaos god Atyar believed to be lost in the catacombs of a Kraloralan city, or stranded on a remote lost island? Maybe too overpowered for your scenario.

I wonder if one of the most disturbing aspects for Red Moon advocates is the White Moon doesn't appear to provide any magic, or anything a third age Gloranthan would recognise as magic. An unsettling prelude to the metaphysical upheaval which follows Moonfall - third age power crazed red moonies fearing the loss of magical mastery which elevates them above other mortals. .

You can believe without wanting, so the characters in the movie “Warlock” believed in the magic of the Warlock, but didn’t also want to be warlocks. Of course, not everyone reads such books and is repulsed by what they read. HP Lovecraft wrote “The history of the Necronomicon”, that the book was outlawed as heretical because people who read it attempted monstrous experiments. There’s a great movie “Dagon”, which is a great intro the Cthulhu insanity and belief.

Lovecraft's The Haunter of the Dark might be a good template Humans discover a horrific artefact which summons a being who provides insane magical revelations in return for blood sacrifice. The old "church" congregation was arrested and shut down, but the creature (possibly a manifestation of Nyarlathotep) still manifests in the Church of Starry Wisdom, which nobody dares to enter. Once the monster makes contact with your mind you're doomed. If the church hadn't been forcefully shut down, the worshipers likely would have become coenobite like - totally twisted and revelling in their wicked inhuman knowledge, rapidly losing their connection to humanity.

I think murdering someone even in self defence is worth a san check. People in desperate situations like soldiers can get inured to it to an extent, but a lot of them come back pretty messed up. I know someone who had do so something horrible in Iraq, I think what he did was right and justified, but what he had to do to achieve that justified outcome was so horrible it left him profoundly f*cked up. At a fundamental level he cannot reconcile committing such an act with being the good person he imagines himself to be, and actually is.

I think horribly murdering someone without desperate provocation is a pretty insane act. I think I remember reading somewhere to say sacrifice someone for a grisly magic ritual you have to *fail* a SAN check to proceed - so murdering people in gross ways gets easier as you lose sanity. Should probably lose sanity as well just for committing such an act, a save means you convinced yourself your action was justified.

Most cults are recognisable ad sub cults of other cults. For example, the cult of skiving teenagers who want to fake illnesses who avoid their chores is a Trickster subcult (the Malia subcult is the version where the illnesses are real, offers spells like "school plague" and "defer exam"). Poison - Black Fang hero cult. It's pretty hard to think of a cult which isn't derivative of one of the existing cults?

I'd be surprised if there were no devices for firing toxic or irritating compounds in the 1920s. There would have been no problem creating a device to produce pressure on demand, everyone knew about carbide lamps, devices which drip water onto calcium carbide to produce acetylene, which burns with a brilliant white light. My grandpa showed me once, if you add too much water they fizz up very rapidly. Or they could just have used a water pistol action. As for the irritant, extract of crushed onion or chilli would have worked fine.

I wonder if there might be some insane level of conformity, amongst the leaders at least. My thinking is, no communication is required, if everyone thinks the same. Such suppression of individuality would stink of chaos.

I would have thought Trickster is mostly about cheating when it comes to gambling, he is full of illusion and deceit.

The moral relativist path to chaos doesn’t explain why chaos gift gives you a taint, and implies illuminates with mutations might actually not be chaotic. Lunars casting chaos gift are acting within the moral bounds of their society - so why the taint? I suspect while immorality, acting against your conscience, might lead to chaos, copying the godtime betrayal of glorantha’s enemies always leads to chaos, even if illuminates can conceal their treachery with Gbaji deception. This further implies Sedenya is an agent or manifestation of Wakboth, the chaos gift corruption she provides must contain a fragment of that great betrayal.

I like it but it may be too powerful. Like why bother being a Thanatari if you can just join Lanbril and steal similar power with far less risk? Lanbril stole magic in god time. I think each act of theft should be a dangerous separate heroquest, so if you manage to steal Orlanth’s chariot, you get teleport - but good luck sneaking up on Orlanth!

How Lanbril stole death might be an interesting one - find someone who is hero questing somewhere on the trickster stole death then passed it around cycle and steal death from them. Death is separation, such as separation of people from their belongings, or separation of people's abilities and powers from their person, so a Lanbril thief in possession of a piece of death would be terrifyingly capable - maybe even able to steal heroic abilities, as Lanbril stole magic from the gods in godtime.

Kallyr returns in the Battle of Moonfall? She’s listed as one of the heroes sent to support Argrath?

I think there’s a strong hint in Orlanth is Dead that things magically return to normal after the battle of Iceland - at least for people who didn’t defect to the seven mothers. So cattle turn out to be fine, and lots of people who everyone thought were dead turn out to be alive?

In the fantasy which is Glorantha, Argrath turned away from genocide. Arkat tried genocide and it didn't work. Argrath tried something else, and was much more successful at ending the chaos threat, or at least deferring it into the impossibly distant future. Glorantha is full of uncomfortable topics, it has always been a playground for philosophy and ideas, where consequences can be explored without the risk of people actually being injured or killed. I'd rather explain to someone why they are wrong, than silence them for advancing an idea I don't like.

Sheng was deliberate. Argarath shook the universe when he demanded Sheng in the Halls of Justice, and the gods of truth could not honour their promise

Wouldn't Lunars who saw error be more likely to try to correct the error? I mean, look at all the good the Lunars have done - tamed the barbarians, stopped the worst ravages of winter, even tamed chaos, by providing a path for beings touched by the primal forces of creation to set aside their destructive natures and live as productive members of society. Let's not forget, the Lunar Way is the only path which offers hope of creating a better world. The alternative path, championed by the barbarians, would deliver us a world of barbarism and suffering without end, without hope that the suffering might one day be alleviated through the healing touch of the goddess. If some occluded sometimes appear to drag the empire into directions many might consider selfish or corrupt, surely that risk is a small price to pay for following a path which offers the possibility of salvation, of making the world a better place. What more noble purpose could there be, than honouring those who risked everything to bring the goddess into our lives, by dedicating every fibre of our being to the fulfilment of their great vision?

One thing which strikes me, the dragonrise seems oddly reminiscent of the dragon kill war, where a concentration of magic and people in one place with draconic connections aroused a feeding frenzy. Perhaps the reason critics of the Dragonrise got so upset is it could have been much worse. Maybe it was just luck that the magical event was restricted to one dragon and one group of magically charged Lunars.

So is your perspective that the Lunars actually support the monster empire, at least to an extent? I always thought of them as purely victims of a magical catastrophe they found themselves unable to escape?

The motivation sounds a bit off? If there is one defining trait of Arkat it is that his focus was utterly on his quest. He didn't want to selfishly do anything, every act was dedicated to purging the world of the influence of Gbaji. In the end he gave up everything to achieve his goal - his honour, his humanity, and who knows what else. Gbaji was selfish, self indulgent, power hungry, putting his needs before others solely for his own aggrandisement. Is your hero quester seeking more power to achieve a goal, to defeat a chaos foe? Or do they just want to be more powerful. Because if it's the latter, it might not be Arkat they encounter on the heroplane.