Akhôrahil

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.

I would allow it. For one thing, it means the PC wouldn’t completely outpace the animal. I wouldn’t allow it any occupational experience.

Or Wyrms' Friends - that's such an obvious Stitched Zoo creation!

The divine genealogy of the platypus would be far too convoluted. Also, I don’t think Glorantha has penguins - they would have to be northern penguins, which seems off.

Orlanth Rex has a huge head, sharp teeth, and tiny little arms.

Agree, but it is an example where cannibalism is completely accepted and even expected.

This is my interpretation as well. Note how often "Chaos" is just what the society is unable to handle. In Heortling society regular murder is fine (well, perhaps not "fine" exactly, but it's a civil offence and certainly not inherently Chaotic) while Secret Murder is Chaotic. It's not hard to connect this to how society is primed to handle open murder, but not secret murder. And Kinslaying is particularly bad (and presumably Chaotic) because Heortling society doesn't even have the conceptual framework to handle it in a way with just outcomes. Cannibalism? Yeah, it's going to be really bad for a society if people start murdering each other for food when there's a famine (= Chaotic), but if you have a ritual framework around it, it doesn't have to be. Rape? Assault rape is widely considered (and not just considered - clearly is) Chaotic, but there's plenty of things we would consider rape (like marital rape, or sexually abusing your slaves) that evidently don't turn people into Broos (or I'm sure Dara Happa would be overrun by them...). The latter kinds don't threaten to upend society, so no Chaos there. And sometimes even this measurement doesn't work. Why is hyperviolent and exceedingly anti-social Zorak Zoran making zombies non-Chaotic, while it's Chaotic when pro-social Gark the Calm does it in a controlled, consensual and regulated manner? Damned if I know - I don't have a better answer than "It's Chaos because it's Chaos that does it", and that's not exactly satisfying.

The RQG rulebook also picks up some unusual bugs because it uses an amount of copying and pasting from earlier editions, which can work but is also a great way of introducing edition-dependent errors. Bladesharp is a good example - the proviso about Dullblade makes no sense, until you realize that it did make sense in RQ3 where the text comes from. This kind of thing can be very hard to catch, as it's dependent on the interaction of the old rule and the new one. (This corresponds to how in software testing, bugs that depend on the interaction of two functions are much harder to catch than a straightforward error in the basic function.)

I think a reasonable reading is that you can only regain the type that just dropped to 0, so if you get to 0 MP (easily happens in spirit combat) you can only regain MP. Dropping to 0 POW is far less common (and I would argue you cannot do it voluntarily, although it could happen due to DI). So you could pick up expensive MPs in a spirit combat emergency, and repair (possibly even exceedingly the original) POW against the rare soul destroying opponent.

Does it have to be either, as opposed to from Fralar? I don’t think we have one single Cat Father (even though that would be practical)?

Two possible answers: 1. No, it was only funny the first time, and Eurmal tries to stay original. 2. Yes, hence Argrath.

Same as if you're vanilla Adventurous and become king, I would assume - you initiate into / become priest of Orlanth Rex as part of being elevated into kingship. This is in addition to your previous subcult.