Akhôrahil

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...)

I just realized that if I’m ever in a position where most PCs have Allied Spirits, the player to the left will get to RP the spirit. 🙂

An easy solution would be that they start to acquire the Chaos rune, and as they go on, Chaos features. This seems to be what happens to the Boristi "Chaos Monks", who specifically tap (only) Chaos. Under the actually really reasonable interpretation that Malkion's dictum "Do Not Ruin That Which You Love" doesn't extend to Chaos, as you shouldn't love Chaos. This isn't covered by the rules, however.

Hic Sunt Sueones? 😉

I think this is a big part of it, and it's absolutely endemic in fantasy RPGs. The city should be this big, because that's cool. The dragon hoard must look big and impressive, even if this amount of gold to make it look this big is completely unreasonable. There must be dungeons everywhere, because where else would you adventure? Monster ecosystems don't seem credible. It's more important that weapon selection maps to original D&D than that it's historically accurate. We must have tight ranks of troops and medieval castles, even though easy access to fireballs and flight ought to make this tactically silly. Glorantha is less bad at this than most fantasy RPGs - it usually does its best to draw the conclusions from the logic of the setting.

Hic sunt dracones.

I agree with this. It doesn't really affect understanding, but it's a constant cosmetic issue that should ideally get fixed.

It's also often questionable just how navigable a river is. When the Creek-Stream River rises into Dragon Pass, there's every risk of cataracts (and there's even something that looks like a set of them in the AA mapwork at "Runnel", p. 29), and even if they can be bypassed in various ways (including getting lifted over by undines), every such solution adds to the cost.

This certainly does help, but it’s still a matter of logistics. Transporting foodstuff using animals that in turn eat foodstuff very quickly becomes impractical, for instance. In Rome, the cost of transport from Ostia to Rome was comparable to the cost of transportation by sea from anywhere in the Mediterranean to Ostia, and that was a mere 15 miles. Roman roads were primarily military installations (but of course great for any personal transportation) - even with good roads, land transportation is a major hassle. If it wasn’t overshadowed by other events of the HeroWars, the opening up of the Janube as a trade route into the Lunar Empire (by the Thaw) would have been massively disruptive to Dragon Pass trade.

Land transportation is awful though, so only luxury gods or other lightweight, valuable items are candidates for long-distance trading, and even then only if there’s no local substitute. Trading through Dragon Pass is a bit like the Silk Road, only with far smaller populations at either end, and with less geographical divergence. And if the city populations are sustained by trade, they will get a very nasty shock once we get decades of more or less constant warfare from now on...

I think the argument is that 20% urbanization is huge. Probably unreasonably so. This is higher than England in 1800, higher than the U.S. in 1850.

”Are we the baddies?” is always fun.

I think this is a very relevant distinction. It short-changes mysticism dramatically to have it be all about Illumination.

Being humanoid can only be part of Man-rune access, surely? Cf. Herdmen.

Thanks, I could have sworn I read that! 🙂