Akhôrahil

That sounds more like Illumination to me. The God Learners were very interested in what’s true.

However, the Hero Plane(s) are also where you go when you HeroQuest, correct? And those parts, while changeable to an extent, are outside Time (but also in different mythical time periods - for instance, when HeroQuesting, you can tell when you are from the color of the sky). To an extent, tSotGL makes it sound as though they could HeroQuest the God World and not merely the Hero Plane(s).

Now I can't find it explicitly, which raises the question whether I made it up/analyzed what was there and conflated it with canon... I mean, we do know that they could permanently alter the Gods World, and Sorcery was their preferred tool (and what the Guide's definition makes it sound like). Anyway, the Guide still has one explicit definition: "The secret is dead with its initiates, but was evidently called the RuneQuest Sight. It apparently allowed initiates to see the world as a series of patterns, relationships, and repetitive reflections which could be organized according to the now famous Runes. Their Heroquesters followed the paths of their Runes through the Otherworld, and then shaped the Otherworld by planting those Runes into other parts of it." Combine it with the other definition in the Guide: "A man whose name is lost made a discovery thought impossible. Mixing magic was always a dream of the God Learners, but seemed to be impossible due to some mysterious internal structure of the world. Yet, around 700, that forgotten person did it: he learned how to use sorcerous manipulation to alter divine Rune magic." Which are both in complete harmony with the text you quoted. Taken together, it seems reasonably clear to me that the Secret was all about applying a naturalistic sorcerous world-view and methodology to both the physical world and the God World. That said, I'm super unclear on the relationship between the God World and the Hero Plane(s). They keep sounding like very different things, but I'm not sure how they differ so fundamentally. HW made it seem as though when you go to Orlanth's Hall, you're in the God World, and then you can exit from there to Hero Planes.

The Guide gives a direct answer: the God-Learner secret is the ability to change the Gods World using sorcery.

I don't know... take the best athletes in the world, and I can guarantee you that they all but universally have a trainer (well, multiple, most likely).

Not by the rules, and not really going by the real world either. The trainer needs to know what works for training, not have a higher stat.

Which is also really weird - you think people who are utterly excellent at stuff didn’t get there by training their asses off? It seems like someone’s idea at a balancing rule, not something that has anything to do with modelling reality.

I would not trust anyone who claimed to be able to tell grass-fed and grain-fed humans apart by taste!

There’s always the risk someone snuck in people though - it’s not like you could tell.

This means that you have the "party training trick" available - each season, one PC trains the others, taking turns. This is (usually) more efficient than everyone practicing, and avoids the absurd costs for training.

All training prices in RQG are ridiculous, it's just that characteristics training is even more ridiculous. I assume these are old RQ2 "balanced" money sinks? Because they make absolutely no sense within the RQG framework.

Weird, that "temporal leader" thing doesn't seem to fit at all into the current interpretation of the Orlanthi. And from Tribal levels, it's Rex and not Adventurous that's the ruler cult anyway.

Yes, and this is patently ridiculous, which is why I ignore it. There is a good way to make the rule make sense, as long as you’re ready to ignore the explicit (and appallingly bad) rules text. The basic idea isn’t awful (although I also house-rule that the participant with the lower skill can have it at most halved). At some points in RQG, you have to go with “surely this is what they meant, and they just can’t express it?”. It would be a lot better If they could express it, though.

I’m fairly certain the idea of the rules is this: In an opposed exchange, for purposes of this exchange only, if the participant with the higher modified skill has above 100% (or if both have the same modified skill above 100%), then reduce both participants’ skills, percentage point by percentage point, until one of the following happens: the higher-skill participant’s skill reaches 100%, or the lower-skill participant’s skill reaches 0%. This has some unreasonable outcomes in practice, but at least it makes sense as a rule. It’s incomprehensible that they could mess up pretty basic rules design this badly.

There are two separate problems, though. One is the effect of using the reasonable interpretation of the rules (I mean, we all know what the intention is). The the other is that the rules and examples are really poorly written and that the RAW is all over the place.

That part is really rare in real-world examples, though. As has been noted for Pendragon, there is absolutely no problem for honor to cut down a poorly trained and unarmored guy with a spear who stands no chance against your armored knight. Similarly, Achilles can kill all the no-name enemy soldiers he feels like. I doubt anyone will raise the question of honour when your Humakti PC cuts a bloody path through trollkin.

#beowulf

I wonder if it would be overkill to classify "cast Sleep then slit their throats" as a Chaotic act. It's in the neighborhood, at the very least.

Skis are not an anachronism, at least, and if any people are likely to have them, it'd be the muskox people! For a god of skiing, compare Ullr: "Ullr, Sif's son and Thór's stepson, is one [too]. He is such a good archer and ski-runner that no one can rival him." (Prose Edda) Love the tame foxes - you can use pictures of those domesticated Russian foxes for reference! They are absolutely adorable with floppy ears and everything! (And tame foxes are also period, as found by recent archaeology.) 5000 year old skis from Sweden Norwegian petroglyph of skier, 1000 BCE Skiing archer, possibly Ullr, runestone

I do the same.

Or, RAW, from any shaman, or the Daka Fal cult (including for starting characters). I was a bit surprised to learn this. It makes a lot of sense as a ruling, but even so, shamans should beable to pick it up from Drowsiness Spirits and the like. Shield is the better defence - any size of Countermagic will just be popped by a huge boost. Countermagic sucks that way. On the other hand, Shield is notably superb, so it won't be rare to see it used. POW vs. POW tends to be trivial for shamans. Except for reusable Resurrection, you don't really need CA for healing. Other cults can pick up the slack in almost all cases. I do think that abuses of Sleep might lead to consequences. For DF, your ancestors might be displeased with you.

You need to go in with your biggest Shield spell against them. That’s super nasty against Spirit Magic.

While I don't use screens, the GM Screen is nice as a collection of the tables.

It's a kind of Spell Trading, but in a way where the donor can get horribly victimized. It might be used for putting a single character at peak performance, though, like for a duel or other single-person activity, or to project an effect beyond where the caster goes. The slingstone magic penetration effect is superb against Counterspell (and nothing else). Would be a lot more useful if it worked as some kind of Dispel effect on the target instead. All in all, not entirely useless, but definitely trade it in for something that's a lot better.

While everyone is free to play however they want to, the distinction you're drawing doesn't exist in the rules. There is Common and Special Rune Magic, but this does not go for Spirit Magic. (Similarly, Shamans can teach "any listed spirit magic spell". The entire Sleep monopoly for CA has very shaky foundations when any shaman or anyone who pals around with a shaman can learn it.) Perhaps it would have been better to have Sleep as Rune Magic instead? It's really overpowered as Spirit Magic, anyway - it's an "I Win" spell. Befuddle at least has a number of balancing safeties.