Akhôrahil

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?

It's a deer's head though, to go with the name Heort (=Deer)?

One of the things that make my head spin is that not only are the letters very similar, the words that make them up start with the same letters and in the same order. It’s like if you had three words in one language, translated them into an unrelated language, and wound up with the same three-letter acronym as before. And that’s before realizing that in the other language, the equivalents of ”Wyrm” and ”Without” must start with the same letter in order for it to work. (Utterances like ”Youf” for EWF and the Yelmalio ”Yo!” further seem to suggest that Glorantha has the same letters as English, at least in part.)

The Undeath rune is a stylized bow tie, to go with the tail coats the vampires like to wear.

I think it’s pretty clear that the weapon is the target and that the skill loss is only about the weapon becoming unwieldy. No POW vs. POW. If you have a Spirit bound in the weapon, its POW has to be overcome, though.

That’s when you need the institution. It’s like with freedom of speech - supporting speech you like or being hospitable to your friends comes naturally; it’s when it’s something or someone you don’t like that the institution steps in to regulate.

Which will make life as a Gagarthi heroquester particularly interesting, because you can get pulled into most anything as an enemy.

Narangros is an interesting suggestion, but does he have any cult at all, rather than occurring as a monster and mythological figure? But I do think you might invoke your worship of Gagarth to get a better reception by Narangros at least, and might even get provided with spirits by him if you promise good hunting. With other criminal cults, I would guess that it's probably more a case of neutrality and occasional cooperation rather than any formalized association. I don't think Gagarth makes a lot of friends, and not-actually-hated may be as good as it gets.

Not sure he has any, but Valind might be the closest, both in kinship and mindset. EDIT: And maybe Ygg, if the cults ever met. Although things might be different in Pent, where it's conceivable that the Four Winds are associated with each other.