Akhôrahil

They are a bit weird - for instance, they don't care about how much land or how many herds you have access to (although the idea may be that there's ample land), merely the workforce, and they don't accumulate costs for dependents. They could also benefit from being a bit more elegant in execution. The basic idea is pretty good, though. One thing I have implemented is to separate an income roll (typically Farming) from an expenditure/management roll (typically Manage Household), and that two different people need to perform these. Yes, same here. Another thing that you basically have to change in this situation is to roll family events in advance for the year. It's fine to find out in Pendragon that your wife had a child this year when you check in winter - it's not fine to retroactively find out that one of the PCs in RuneQuest did...

Agree. I have been looking at house-rules for this, but it's hard to have them 1) good, 2) in the style of the game, and 3) simple enough. My PCs have a joint farmstead, and the rules don't really work out for that.

Join Humakt and this will finally stop!

Pendragon's system or any system where you count the margin of your roll versus your skill works for this. It basically requires moving to D20 for resolution though, as the math is just too annoying otherwise.

Yes, that was my thought. It’s clearly not what we have on a large scale in Sartar (although the same mechanics were in play when some collaborators adapted Lunar-style slave farming), but it’s also the way society might go if the slow rise of the nobility continues.

Yet another option might be to put only the PCs into mandated peacefulness (better get player buy-in first!). In some magical event, they get tasked with non-violence but also magical-social protection against violence (much like Chalana Arroy cultists). This is probably granted by someone who wants something from them, so once more, it’s an adventuring set-up. A bunch of youngsters emerge from their adulthood initiations with a completely non-standard experience as something calls on them to bring the Hero Peaces? Hand out various peace and harmony spells like they were candy!

It doesn’t even have to be that neither part wants to fight - maybe they’re both quite ready to continue (the uncompromising fanatics especially), but the PCs are the ones who attempt find the Other Way? This kind of thing shouldn’t be easy - quite the opposite - but that’s what adventuring is about. And you don’t have to be nice because it’s peace, either. Diplomatic missions, information gathering, actually keeping the peace when there are hotheads all around, heroquesting… there are all kinds of things you can do. (If I ever GM:d a full Argrath-based Hero Wars campaign, I would all but expect the PCs to at some point go “enough with this carnage, how can we get peace?”) This is a lot trickier - it only takes one side to start a war or launch a raid. If Violence Is Never An Option to Orlanthi, what do you do do when Praxians come to take your stuff, Lunars to enslave you, or Trolls to eat you? Glorantha can be a harsh place, and people with power and military capital will be only too eager to wield it, especially against people who won’t fight back (you can go the Oasis Folk route and just surrender, but that doesn’t seem like something anyone would prefer given options). But peace might be possible even if violence is an option - after all, that’s how the real world works. If you’re not locked into RQ, HeroQuest/QuestWorlds puts far less rules focus on the combat, too, while supporting formal resolution of non-combat conflicts more strongly.

This makes sense to me - you could have someone staying at your stead and working as farmhands for you for the longest time, and while they wouldn’t actually be clan members, after years and years they wouldn’t exactly be strangers to the clan either (if we’re comparing to Athens, they’d be metics, or in the modern world, non-citizen residents). How acceptable would this be? Would they get thrown out eventually, or given an “in or out?” ultimatum? That probably depends on the clan and its circumstances. (It’s even conceivable that some landholders would prefer to have their lands worked by outside contracted farmhands with few rights, especially if the clan is low on labour, something that would surely cause all kinds of social issues.)

I mean, I don't think there's even a "both" in RQG - it's the one thing. The difference was (I imagine?) introduced to support both a spirit and a god cult, and the whole need for that is gone now. That said, even if we only talk about "Storm Bull" from a rules perspective, he's called Urox in-world in some places (not necessarily Dragon Pass/Prax)?

Maybe, but that would be kinda weird - in HQ/HW Storm Bull was the Great Spirit in Prax and Urox the God among Heortlings (while being the same transcendent entity, presumably).

It's in the Guide though, so it's probably more a case of "less-used" than "obsolete and deprecated"?

Absolutely, but this meaning doesn’t seem to be part of Aurochs.

Guide p. 279, Safelster Regional Activity Table: "Agent from Kingdom of Seshnela discovered undermining the city; public execution scheduled for the morning." Guide p. 555, Fonrit Regional Activity Table: "Public execution." (This is Common, even.) It's unclear whether Kralorelan exuctions are public, but I would think it fits their style.

Gotta Worship 'Em All!

I don't believe this is correct. Ur/ürr/úrr/ūro/*ūraz is just the name for the animal - it has nothing to do with it being "primal" or anything even though it sounds like that in some languages (including Swedish). Aurochs/Urox is basically a tautology, where "ox" is attached to a word that already meant the type of cattle. (Although weirdly Wikipedia suggests both explanations, even though they can't really be compatible with each other.)

God-forming Uleria?

Umath and Asrelia as the love story that never quite happened is sweet, and seems to be the prototype for Orlanth and Ernalda. "So Umath and Asrelia never joined, and once the separation began, it continued. Soon there were other couples intended for each other that never met each other. Then some of the couples even broke apart, and the world began to fill with longing. We feel that longing now because we were born into that yearning world. It isn’t some- thing that we do, or make, or want. It just is, for us. It isn’t a fault to feel that way." —Storm Tribe

This made me wonder about something else entirely - what's the speed of light in Glorantha? Does dawn rush over the lands from east to west in a way that could be seen from above, the terminator moving at a less than instantaneous speed?

It happens randomly to PC river travellers in an HQ adventure, so if we trust that, it can't be utterly rare.

I’m unclear on whether clan tattoos appear magically or have to be applied by a tattoo artist, but either way, the new members need to get them some way!

Looks fine from horseback, but on a high llama, you really have to reach down a lot further. I like the idea of a polo swing - a hit like that is going to be devastating.

And you probably need two hands to use it, even though you swing it with just one. Like when you raise it after an attack, or when you want to bring it to the other side of your mount. You won't be moving around a long pole with a heavy metal head much with just one hand at the end of it.

I love to hate the Mostali - they're just the worst.

One thing must surely be that unlike other herd beasts, Herd-men have to be trained. A bison just has to eat grass and go where you prod it (unless it's a riding bison, in which case things change a bit), but collecting tubers for your masters or carrying their palanquins is a decidedly non-natural activity. So I believe we need to consider a lot of Herd-man training going on, since all of them have to be trained.

The OED likes "shamans". https://www.lexico.com/definition/shaman (Edit: Oops 2017, oh well... 🙂 )