Akhôrahil

Perhaps one of the most powerful ways to use Lie would be to make people believe you're an authority figure that they don't dare disobey. "I'm the Red Emperor in disguise" may not be mind-control, but even completely unreasonable requests are likely to be granted by people who genuinely believe that this is the case.

The bond is a just legal and social construct, isn’t it? The chief says ”hey, this trickster is under my protection, and I will cover the costs”? It can be recalled at any moment (and a sign of a wise chief is one who does so before the sudden but inevitable betrayal).

If you use Lie and say "this statement is a lie", Mostali will have a meltdown. Or so I've heard.

We must have had very different Malk experiences!

A Gloranthan Molotov Cocktail would be a very angry small Fire elemental captured inside a magically sealed clay jar that will break on impact.

I would imagine it matters a lot what the surface is. Hay or threshing room floor, sure. Stone tiles, not so much.

Yeah, this. You want burning fluid to flow down into the engine compartment. Otherwise, when not used against vehicles, the most you can hope for is to set something flammable on fire. It was useful enough that the Soviets constructed the Molotov Projector, a spigot-operated device to toss them further.

Isn't the whole point of lamp oil that it will only burn through the use of a wick? Not sure you can even put a puddle of lamp oil on fire in any simple way. It's not gasoline, or even ethanol.

This isn’t at all in the rules, but is a very cool idea. Opposed rolls for runes would make a great mechanic.

I'm thinking we ought to have numbers for time and workforce to raise a basic wood Motte-and-Bailey castle? No real idea, though.

Move and SR is a huge headache under the current rules, doubly so with fast creatures, triply so with mounts. I'm just winging it so far, but...

It stands to reason that there were High Priests of Orlanth Rex before the Kingdom of Sartar was formed, I think? Also, maybe you can have a hierarchy among High Priests? I imagine that huge and top-heavy organizations like Lunar cults would have any number of priestly ranks above regular Priest?

I always assumed it was the Tribal Kings.

Ah, thanks, wasn't aware of that! Would that require picking up a Mastery rune (however you do that), or is that just for Initiates and up (actually, who would be an non-Priest Initiate of Orlanth Rex?)? Has Orlanth Rex changed a lot? It always used to be about the political leadership being able to dominate the religious leadership, but with those role having merged almost completely in RQG, does it even make sense to separate the hierarchies that way?

Wouldn't she be like the only one in all of the Colymar tribe to worship Orlanth Rex, though?

Current CoC is a more modern ruleset than the ”it’s still 1978, damnit!” RQG, so that sounds promising.

You can probably argue that the Uleria temple has a... what should we call it... ”independent revenue stream”? This income-from-services might work for a CA temple that provides a lot of healing services as well, and is likely a significant part of the income for Humakti temples. An Issaries temple might have no land but a ton of tithing from wealthy merchants. And so on.

Another way is to deconstruct the numbers from p. 406, where a combined Orlanth & Ernalda temple has 80 hides worked by cottars, and land dues combined with tithes nets the combined temples 4500 L yearly. The temple itself probably costs a bit less than this, as this is the entire Public Sector budget that also supports the Chief, thanes, housecarls, and so on. At a rough estimate, a small temple in itself, with five or six priests, costs maybe 1500 L per year to maintain using these standards? This also seems to make sense with the Site numbers, as long as you go by the low numbers. Maybe site is 150 L per year, Shrine 300 L per year (including one God-Talker) and a Small Temple is 1500 L per year, including a head priest and five other priest? This seems to make sense to me. The 1500 L would then have to be collected from a combination of land dues and tithes (if purely from land dues, just under 40 hides, but it will never be purely from land dues).

Maintaining a Holy Site - which is one step below a shrine - costs 25-200L per season. Presumably something like double this for a Shrine? Otherwise, the best way to do this is probably to go with the number of worshipers required on p. 284, and assume that a combination of their tithes and some of them working as cottars is what’s required for maintenance.

Fortifying a single building, blockhouse-style, probably makes more sense than a wall you couldn’t man anyway.

I'm sure they tell themselves they're using the funds to help those without wealth. Meanwhile, that's a really nice temple...

One nasty thing could be that if someone was already thinking of raiding you, they will make damn sure to do it before the wall comes up now.

I strongly recommend against handing out XP/checks for roleplaying - it's one of those old-fashioned ideas that never seems to work yet keeps coming up. If you want to reward players with points, consider giving them re-rolls or something else that's more transient. Presumably something copy&paste-related?

Oh, I know that game!

This is a really good question. It used to be POW vs. POW, which is clearly allowed, but Spirit Combat seems trickier, not to mention inherently being violent conflict resolution. On the other hand, things would turn weird if CA initiates couldn’t fight Spirit Combat even when attacked, as that would leave them wide open to possession. I would be inclined to allow it, on the grounds that Spirit Combat is more of an abstraction than outright violence. One could still argue about whether binding unwilling spirits would be okay, though.