Akhôrahil

One of the things about RQ weapons is that there’s no particular armor-piercing quality, which means that weapons that were used mostly for that purpose (like maces and war hammers) suck. House-rule such a property, upgrade the damage, or give them axes instead (which should be a much more reasonable weapon against both trolls and elves anyway).

Mobility in particular, I would say. Ompalam has Harmony though, so it’s at least not fundamentally opposed to slavery.

Well, not for many weeks in a row, given the permanent RP cost.

Very few gods/cults are actively opposed to slavery in general. Orlanth kinda but not fully - the Larnstings might come the closest? I could also see an argument for Issaries - fair exchange is impossible if one party is enslaved, after all.

Agree. Plus it would be silly if your Allied Spirit could achieve Rune Level and get its own Allied Spirit, and so on recursively. 🙂

Presumably they would start with one Rune Point (and the spell that comes with it), as sacrificing 1 POW to 1 Rune Point is part of initiation?

Many places have ”default” cults. If you’re mostly average and typical in Sartar, you’re likely to worship Orlanth (if male) or Ernalda (if female). Both cults are super wide, and will accommodate the things most people do. They don’t expect you to be unusual or weird. You can worship Orlanth and be a warrior, or a farmer, or a lawspeaker, or a king. The behaviours expected of you are mostly the ones expected of you as a member of society anyway.

A fellow player told me this about driving a bus. If it wasn’t for the passengers…

"Golden Shower is a Hellwood Dryad" Huh... "Her name comes from the fact that she was a lover of Yelmalio" Oh okay, I guess Yelmalio gets his freak on where he can!

I really hope there are tardigrades, especially giant ones.

I think this is pretty good (as is the standard rule, I would say). Rolling for hit location can’t mean that you swing wildly and randomly hit some body part (well, maybe with missile fire). Rather, it’s about how this was where the opportunity for an attack materialized. If you’re willing to make things more difficult for yourself, you can go for a hit location that provided less of an opening.

Kidneys though? And POW grows back (slowly), so it's not even as bad as that. "Your freedom for a kidney" might be a reasonable proposition if you're a slave.

Linking Rune Points to Devotion could be a method, or making Rune Points take up an increasing part of your mental space in the way Jeff has been mapping recently? For now, Rune ratings, Devotion, Honor and similar scores do some of the same thing.

I mean, they were mistaken about its efficacy? People believe in demonstrably unfounded things even today, when we have proper science to check it out. A lot of the time, sacrifices are about stopping bad things from happening rather than to acquire personal magic, so then if the bad thing doesn’t happen, it worked, right? No-one likes feeling helpless, so we’re on the lookout for coping mechanisms. If you don’t know how earthquakes happen, deciding that they’re caused by a wrathful god that can be placated may be more satisfying than deciding it’s just one of those things and completely outside your control. If you believe that the Sun rising is dependent on your blood sacrifices, you’re not exactly going to stop to check… This isn’t about being naive or stupid, it’s about psychological mechanisms combined with the absence of structured empirical testing and naturalistic explanations. And the latter bits may not even be enough.

In my mind, sacrificing POW for RP is converting part of your soul into a copy/emulation of the god’s. More Rune Points means less free will as you have literally shifted the balance between your human soul and the presence of the divine within you.

I consider the worlds of the respective games subtly different, each an implementation of the the "true" Glorantha with different modelling. But I'm also mostly a rules realist about RuneQuest - healing is trivially available, for instance, in a way it possibly isn't in HQ. The game rules tells the players what their characters can do, and NPCs should be able to do what characters can. You just need to ask the question "what are Lhankor Mhy's runes?" to see that the settings aren't fully compatible. You can look around in an LM temple and tell which game (or set of games) you're in.

My homebrew theory is that The Lady of the Wild is either a super-Wild Woman or some kind of collective entity of them.

What I think is lacking is a kind of sacrifice that was (and is) super-commonly the real world. In Glorantha, you sacrifice as part of cult membership, but there certainly aren’t any rules in RQ for the efficacy of sacrificing to Chalana Arroy (or S:t Xemela) when your child is sick, to Issaries when you’re embarking on road travel or an important trip to the market, or to Magasta when setting sail. Propitiatory Malia-worship comes closest, but this is a deeply suspect activity, mere extortion that strengthens Chaos.

Also, I believe mortals feeding magic to the gods is a necessary part of the magical ecology of Glorantha. Power flows in both directions, but it seems to me that the mortal world is much stronger at producing magical power (perhaps this is reflected in the crummy POW gain rolls disembodied spirits get?). Glorantha isn’t free of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but it has a workaround - Chaotic energy flows in through the Chaosium, and then yearly the world is ”washed” of accumulating Chaos through the Sacred Time rituals (while during the Darkness no-one knew to do this, resulting in the downward spiral of the Greater Darkness). Presumably some of this magical energy is fed to the gods’ world through worship, keeping it going? RQ isn’t HeroWars, but HW was careful about describing where gods picked up their necessary worship (including propitiatory and collateral worship).

And one at the HHD.

I mean, this is so much more powerful than mere tapping! POW >>> MP.

Gark the Calm ftw!

I think it’s fair to say that threat of murder or mental control voids the ”voluntary” part. But yes, it seems that you can use arbitrage on how POW is worth equally much as magical energy, but very differently in monetary value to individuals. Contributing some points of POW to buy your freedom as a slave seems like a great deal for everyone involved. Another way to use this is on a social level. If you can get every adult in the clan to contribute just one point of POW (which isn’t crippling - they have probably spent 4 POW on the Wyter and their Cult anyway, and probably gain one POW per 5-10 years even if you don’t allow them normal POW gain rolls), you could make a 500 point Rune Magic Matrix, which should be utterly devastating if it’s something like Thunderbolt 500 and it’s a permanent treasure of the clan (although it’s probably smarter to make 5 Thunderbolt 100, as this recharges better). I see no reason why a clan couldn’t manage this once per generation, apart from how apparently it doesn’t actually happen.

We know that the Unity Council awoke dryads, and I think it could be reasonable to think that they did it for rational reasons, like being mistress of a grove or orchard (that's how I picture the Appletree Dryad mentioned above).

I definitely run it like that. The PCs have so far run into one very friendly appletree dryad, and one intimidating rose hedge dryad with thorns for teeth.