Akhôrahil

Who needs a worship bonus when you get +10% from an MP? 🙂 I've yet to see a single Worship roll of under 95%. This is true, but that's more useful than crucial.

Probably sensible. No restriction on the severely elongated ones, though?

EDIT: My mistake - I thought I was smart by searching for "spell teaching", but for God-talkers it actually does say "As with Rune Priests, a God-talker may teach other cult members the spirit magic spells they know. They may charge for this service in the same fashion as a Rune Priest." So yes, God-Talkers can teach spells. One question that emerges is whether they can just choose not to take pay and hand out all the free Spirit Magic knowledge they feel like (and have time for) to other cult members (lay membership counts and is often easily accomplished to minimal cost) in the party? It seems so, and there doesn't seem to be any inherent cost involved.

Do we know this for a fact? I mean it makes sense and all, but I thought the same thing about needing a priest to lead worship, and the rules don't state it (and in fact somewhat suggest the opposite - "If one or both parents were cult initiates, the adventurer may join simply by sacrificing 1 point of POW"). (And at least going by RAW, you can explicitly regain Rune Points in a merely Sanctified area - "Ceremonies are performable within a Sanctified area that normally can be performed only in a temple, such as replenishing Rune points.")

Huh. So priests are actually a bit extraneous? You can have them as magical specialists, but you don't really need them? "Priesthood of all initiates"? Good news for Vostor, I guess! 🙂 Always, always save one Rune Point if you can't trust you will have temple access, since as long as you can just Sanctify, you will get a regain! It also makes getting Banned less impressive than it sounds, since you can just DIY the worship.

There is a certain elegance to the complete being concept, something that has values in each characteristic.

You need a Rune Level to officiate the service, but if you have that, you’re all set, sure.

Also some activities where winter actually offers better transportation, like sledges to pull logs in the snow or using frozen lakes and rivers as highways. Ice fishing is also good. If you’re good with the cold and snow and your opponent isn’t, even raiding might work out. I’m thinking that in winter, the swamps in Dorastor are frozen and a lot of Chaos creatures are unhappy (Gorp frozen solid?). My players timed an incursion into Spider Woods for winter, rightly estimating that most spiders either die or hibernate.

That's interesting, and seems likely. Or at least parts of him throughout his history. Essentially aspects of him, where Arkat the Retiree is one of the less interesting.

True, but every player knows there's a huge difference between one-use and reusable magic.

The whole communal aspect becomes tricky even if there aren’t PCs messing with it. A clan has hundreds of POW per generation to spend, and might be able to call on a couple of thousands from clan members in an emergency. A clan that taps even a small part of this for enchantments will build up huge magical treasures over the decades, and an item like a 100 point Thunderbolt matrix is both quite achievable and devastating in clan wars.

This leads into a complicated discussion of "voluntary", that I don't think the game provides the answers for.

Since only one point of POW has to be provided by the caster of the enchantment, it seems reasonable to assume that in many cases, the Rune Level will try get away with the minimum investment, while getting others to stand for the rest (volunteering or getting strong-armed). Since you can do this as long as you start out with POW 19+, it shouldn't be all that uncommon. The enchanter probably prefers to make a few larger ones than many small for that reason.

Yes. Note that Humakt doesn’t have Priests either, and a God-Talker tends to function as a lesser priest.

Pippin is the youngest at 28, which makes him not yet a full adult (age for that is famously 33), maybe corresponding to 18-19 in human years. Gimli is significantly older than Aragorn.

This is interesting - if we think of the planets Earth-style, they would be absolutely miniscule compared to the Sun or the Moon, basically just luminous dots (Tolat and Lightfore kinda map to Mars and Venus respectively?). Do we have sources that say that in Glorantha they are large enough to register with a geometry, and at a considerable angular size? I always thought of the stars and planets in Glorantha as basically dot sources of light like in our world (only Venus at its largest exceed one arc second in angular size, but that's still something like 1/20th of the Sun), but maybe that's wrong? If Lightfore shines with its own bright light and at 1/4th the subjective size of the sun, it's going to be a significant source of light in the night sky.

It’s not completely clear how it works - does the alarm sound from the point of breaching (in which case you could tell direction with just one warding), or from the warding as a whole (in which case you couldn’t)?

I'm not sure I get it. Yes, Rune Magic is a lot more powerful than Spirit Magic, but it's not as though you have to choose one or the other - naturally you use both. Something weird is going on if the players don't use Spirit Magic.

Pushing the skill of your parrying weapon up far enough that the opponent will be left with ideally only a 5% chance of hitting after the skills are adjusted. Works best against large and strong monsters with modest attack skills - like giants and dinosaurs - but Humakti can do it against essentially anyone else using a sufficiently large Sword Trance. It's one of the easiest ways in the game to trivialize an opponent that relies on physical attacks.

This is my reading too. It becomes better yet when attacked by very powerful creatures like giants, where stopping 10d6 DB gets pretty damned hard otherwise (barring degenerate tactics like skill tanking).

Spirit Magic seems to have the ”workhorse” spells that the PCs want up in every fight if possible. Rune Magic is more when they want to shift into a higher gear. My players are also very good at opening up a fight with some initial rune magic, hoping to bring it down to manageable quickly and finish it off the old-fashioned way.

They call it the World Wide Web for a reason.

For actually good poetry, is probably better to find a good translation of Icelandic poetry (not a rhymed translation, sheesh!), like Egil Skallagrimsson, and modify it. (Also, improvising poetry in order to save yourself from execution? Peak Orlanthi.)

Presumably Yelmalians also invented the Yo-yo?