Akhôrahil

You get pretty big temple, holy day and sacrifice bonuses. Minor Temple and HHD/Sacred Time gives you a +50% even without any sacrifices (and MP sacrifices are essentially free) or augments. Assume 75-95% chance of success. Plus, since they keep succeeding, they get experience checks, and it snowballs from there.

What this shows is that the character advancement system is broken when applied to regular people. I think that's a bad thing, as PCs shouldn't be privileged by the rules in a simulationist game, but it will be even worse if you try to apply it to regular people expecting a functional outcome. This will result in incredibly high skills and vast reservoirs of POW spent for different reasons. Hence the need for a "Regular Vargast" advancement template, as I think it's clear that you're not expected to use either of the advancement schemes in the rulebook.

I'm actually not sure, did they? Perhaps the trick is getting out in time, but even that didn't save Mularik, for instance.

While +3 Rune Points per decade seems far too much for the average Joe. Another thing I don't even have an idea about is additional magics. How much POW does a veteran Shaman have, and how many shamanic gifts? How many spirits, how strong, and of which types? What kinds of magic items should we expect a Rune Lord to possess? If 10 Rune Points is the lower limit for a Rune Lord, how many does the average one have?

This a great idea that has been raised a number of time. It would help a ton to have some kind of NPC template, perhaps adjusted by age and success. We have had to guess and deduce a lot of things, like expected Rune Point amount (the typical competent adult, at least in the Dragon Pass region, seems to be an initiate with 3 Rune Points and 50-75% in important professional skills) and Spirit Magic knowledge. Even if not an official product, a well-made Jonstown Library publication along these lines would be helpful.

"Heortlings for Dummies" "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Lunar Religion"

Even to the point of earning Seasonal Experience, and not just rolling for POW gain and resolving experience checks?

Magasta’s Pool shows how the final roll was a one?

Aldrya isn’t a goddess in the traditional sense. ”She” is ”merely” the collective consciousness of the aldryami and their woods as experienced through Elfsense. Mostal also isn’t a god, merely the cosmic order imagined as an individual (like Einstein’s God, in fact - does Mostal roll dice?).

This is correct. I’m unclear about whether Sacred Time counts as a season, though. Note that Assistant Shamans get one extra POW per year outside of this, making it a great min-max occupation.

Arkat was good? News to me! Arkat fought Nysalor and Gbaji won, after all... That said, I think you could probably raise the heckles on any PC by describing Argrath as a combination of overpowered and ethically sketchy...

"'Hmmm! it smells like elves!' thought Bilbo" —J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

Maybe because of things like this? 😉

HeroQuest had something like this - above Devotee was Disciple, but at this point, you have given up so much of your free will and personal identity in order to emulate and personify your god that the character is barely playable any longer. This is what I would expect from Old Wind heavyweights.

Another angle would be to see mysticism as an approach, not a separate type of magic. There would be mystical polytheism, mystical monotheism, even mystical shamanism.

Ars Magica. We’ve had in-character discussions about substances and accidences, the effects of Impetus mechanics, and whether Latin is the ideal magical language or a (purely hypothetical) reconstructed Adamic would be preferable. It’s a game that’s hard to beat when it comes to drawing the logical conclusions from a setting.

Yeah, If Humakti weren’t allowed to prepare, the Morale spell wouldn’t even be castable.

Meanwhile, in the Byzantine empire, it was usually enough to maim them (slit nostrils was popular) and pack them off to a monastery.

I'm trying not to drift from the subject, but this would clearly be prep-cast, and commonly Extended by a point while you're at it. You can slice up a dungeon or a smaller battlefield in an hour without much problem. With regards to MP regain, it takes only a few days even at worst, and you will start every scenario with a full tank assuming any downtime whatsoever, which is what matters the most.

Oh, sure. My point isn't that you always want this, but that MPs quickly stop being much of a limitation on anything. (Both dispel and spirits can easily get countered, though - defensive boosting for the dispels, and using that 1000+% sword in spirit combat against spirits.)

This is one reason why the Magic Point system doesn't really work, at least not as a limitation to spellcasting. Any PCs with a bit of experience will have enough crystals and matrices on them that MP expenditures become trivial. This way lies +1000% Sword Trances.

Also, would you sail over the edge, or collide with the sky dome?

King of Sartar depicts him as essentially doing everything, himself, personally. But then it would, wouldn’t it?

It helps a lot that for much of the campaign, Arthur doesn't do too much - he lets his knights do all the questing while acting as their support system.

Could one method for at least trying to rule without the correct bloodline be to do the Gondor thing, and rule in the place of the Rightful King (may the day of his return soon arrive!). You would have to do without the magical goodies, but it would at least make for a legal fiction. (And then the Rightful King does show up, and he’s some scruffy adventurer...)