Akhôrahil

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! 🙂

And as regards strength, apes and monkeys tend to be buff.

I would assume Grandfather Baboon (i.e. Daka Fal) would use Beast instead of Man for the rune? With regards to som other points in this thread, Gloranthan baboons are clearly significantly larger than Earth ones. 3d6 SIZ is almost human-sized, while Earth baboons max out at considerably smaller (40 kg for the largest kind, and smaller yet for others).

Word of mouth?

Seems likely, but we can dream.

This makes sense to me - we may well see her cult if the Pamaltela cults book happens.

I read this to mean that they have a Dex SR of 1 for non-SC purposes, but that large spirit magic spell will still take longer to cast in the usual fashion Also, they can (by QA) cast multiple spirit magic in a turn, same as everyone else.

I would love to see a bunch of different Arkat-cult write-ups - that could be so interesting, and offer upp all kinds of new magical avenues, including for sorcerers.

My impression is that Tatius was a mix of brilliant and idiot, seeing only the path for success while discounting any possible problems. ”Oh, here’s a huge source of unknown magical power, I’m sure it will be well-behaved and nothing bad will come of it.” ”I’m sure the locals won’t manage to pull anything sneaky off when we consecrate the temple.” ”Orlanth and Ernalda are dead, so there is no way they could return from the Underworld, why that would be unheard of!”

I mean, you need the balance, but that surely can't be all that hard and is mostly in the shaft, assuming the tip is already the right size?

Testing seems to indicate that the intentional bending is a myth - the design is for armor (or specifically, shield) penetration. Bending could still occur as the iron isn't all that (and it's perhaps unsurprising that archaeological fins would sometimes have a bend), but it's not the design. Matt Easton has some great videos showing how a pilum will punch straight through a shield and how the tip is long enough to go into an arm or even the body afterwards.