Akhôrahil

I think the Windstop pushes them into outright villainy though, at least the ones involved with and supporting that.

At some point though, shouldn’t you just stop him rather than trying to mitigate his constant excesses? Supporting him, even while trying to curb the slaughter, makes you an accomplice of sorts.

Sure beats getting murdered or enslaved, though. This is the best outcome that can even be imagined for them. Everything else is far, far worse.

Yeah, this. Argrath’s brutality, genocides and wars of extermination make every kind of historical sense. But since much role-playing is aspirational and people like to not be the baddies, is this really the kind of thing they are fine with going along with and even supporting? Argrath only gets worse as things progress, too. When is enough enough for the PCs?

Not sure about the details, but there is absolutely no way it could hold out against the Praxian tribes. Various “nicer” and more soft-hearted solutions have sometimes been suggested, like evacuation downriver or into Sun County. Perhaps best outcome for them in situ would be if they could get treated like an Oasis people, i.e. victimised freely by the Praxians but not exterminated. The “default” outcome is surely massacres and enslavement, though. Anything better than this will be the work of PCs.

Given that they're overwhelmingly non-combatants (and often even pacifists, if they're white moonies), I would assume lots of enslavement, agree.

I also don't imagine the Grantlands settlers had a good time when the tribes swept down on them (I'm assuming massacres and enslavement), but that wouldn't really be anything Argrath could be blamed for directly.

If you want to use a Humakti for a cattle raid, what might work is to put him on the border to your own Tula, drive cattle past him, and if the other clan shows up, have him tell them that none shall pass without a duel. This will at the very least slow the other team down.

Yeah, I mean the Lunars are the enemy, but our neighbour clan, those guys are the ENEMY.

I believe the idea is to eventually go all the way through it, GPC-style.

Presumably, this is what the Argrath campaign will provide.

This another reason why people like Humakti, Storm Bulls and BG:s are so scary - they will try to close to melee, and once they do, someone's getting messed up. (In the American Revolutionary War, British bayonet charges virtually always succeeded - not because of actual fighting, but because if you're not superbly drilled, you will break in the face of that.)

I've been considering creating copy/paste "spellbooks" for them, but that becomes pretty ugly.

Is it all new spells, or does it modify the magic systems as well?

Sartar does look pretty great, and especially in comparison with almost any other Hero. Perfection is a high mark, though. (The whole Brangbane thing could have turned out better...)

Sartar seems to have been amazing at non-violent solutions. I’m not sure whether his body-count was zero, but it was shockingly low for a unifier of a kingdom. When there was a conflict with the Telmori, Sartar settled the issue peaceful and brought them into his kingdom. Argrath exterminated them.

Glorantha certainly dodges the colonialism charge, at least - all empires are doomed and colonialists (even just cultural colonialists) will not come out okay in the end. If anything, it can go to extremes in the opposite, isolationist direction - Loskalm becomes a utopia once it's cut off from the rest of the world, and the Thaw seems to be bringing more harm than good on average.

The problem is that we're not told anything like this. It's as if there was no prophecy, Oedipus kills his dad and and becomes king and marries his mom all by his own choice, and it's described as awesome. He then goes on to conquer the rest of Greece so that he can be even more awesome (he ruins most of it along the way, but that's alright). Then he defeats the gods as well, isn't he awesome? The end. There's a reason this wouldn't be much of a story. Where's the drama or the personal arc? Where's the tension? I would love to see an Argrath who realizes he has been ensnared by fate by his own life choices, railing against it... but no getting out of it now, that's fate for you. (By the way, I'm not ruling out that the Argrath campaign might be able make Argrath a lot more interesting and a lot less annoying - I would even think it likely. There's a lot of room for it if you don't see KoS as giving a particularly accurate account.)

This could serve as an example of why you don't swear on the River Styx - it's absolute and irrevocable and it messes you up. This is Oath of Feänor stuff!

Argrath's modus operandi in warfare seem to be a total magical war of extermination, leaving gods knows how many millions of civilians dead. Exterminating the Telmori and then using their skins as crafting materials is small in the scale of things, but seems especially egregious (we do not typically look kindly on genocidaires who skin their victims for crafting projects). I don't think it's a coincidence just how poorly it compares to Sartar's treatment of the Telmori in KoS - my reading of KoS is that it compares Sartar to Argrath, with only one of them looking good in the process. Rescuing Sheng Seleris, waging climatological warfare, eradicating the gods, and being a major part in how the world almost ends, all in the name of his personal vendetta. He's like a Cold War general who decides that if you can kill 100% of the enemy and only lose 99% of your own population in a thermonuclear war, that counts as a win and should be enacted. Even if PCs can be constructed to support all this, many players enjoy aspirational play and don't like the "are we the baddies?" experience, especially not in an extended campaign. Although it would be really interesting to run a campaign and see just where the players decide they've had enough - Argrath in 1627 isn't beyond the pale yet, although wariness and concern about just how weird he is seems called for (and will prove correct). And yeah, add the Mary Sue thing to it as well - I liked multiple Argraths so much better than one single guy who is just the best at everything and ultimately does everything. When someone on the Lunar side is powerful, it tends to be because of organizational backing, large personal cults, extended magical projects, and the like - Jar-eel feels credible to me (as do Kallyr and Broyan, on the Orlanthi side). Meanwhile, we don't understand how come Argrath and Harrek are such ultimate badasses for no obvious reasons, and "they're adventurers!" feels lackluster and "gamey". Argrath does Arkat:ing better than Arkat ever did, EWF:ing better than the EWF ever did, LBQ:ing better than Harmast ever did, and so on and so on (let's not even get started on how he's much better at Prax:ing than the actual Praxians are, who need him to come save them from themselves). He can never suffer more than the rare temporary setback, and there is zero tension in the certainty of his ever-escalating triumphs until even the gods become disposable small fry. There's no emerging logic to his amazing brand-new powers (that no-one else has access to), they just happen. It screams "Player Character", and one with a lenient GM at that. There are a set of Glorantha characters - Argrath, Belintar, Harrek, and Sir Ethilrist are perhaps the most obvious - who seem (to me, at least, but I doubt I'm alone in this) like they don't belong in Glorantha at all and just dropped in through a magical portal. Steven Erikson at least put his ultimate badass ridiculously overpowered PC (Anomander Rake) far in the background when he wrote his books. HQ suggested "You can be Argrath and change future history!" RQ suggests (it seems - I'm willing to be surprised by the books!) "You can be Argrath's minion while he enacts the metaplot!" And these are my conclusions from King of Sartar, which is a propaganda piece trying to make Argrath look good! Gods know what it whitewashes. (Sometimes things almost seem like parody: "This is how we deal with assassins with no respect for life *kills assassin*." Really? It couldn't display more hypocrisy if it tried!)

I thoroughly approve of how Prince of Sartar suggests that Argrath is not the Liberator, but the Destroyer. Could be entertaining to just let the Harrek player narrate, with increasing exaggeration, just how he wins every fight he's in. No need to roll, he can't ever lose a fight anyway. Modern computer game design decisions would mean that all you need to do is have a separate 3D-model while not changing anything else. Bret Devereaux made this point about Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. It's not just that you can have a woman viking - no-one in the game even bats an eyelid.

Especially since the entire point of the cattle raid is to be sneaky and not particularly honorable. You don't want the Humakti to loudly declare himself and challenge anyone to a duel, or to complain how your approach technically counts as an ambush.

I wonder exactly how bathing is defined for the Yelmalio geas. Do you bathe if someone tosses you into the Zola Fel?

I think The Eleven Lights does a really great job here - when Argrath turns up, he's a real weirdo, and his pals are even worse, and they're obviously going to be trouble, and no sensible Red Cow PC would ever accept a mission from him. Except that the situation is utterly dire and you're grasping for straws just in order to survive, which is of course why he turned up now when you have little choice.

I don't think it's about bloodlust - it's more that Humakti have a very different approach to combat than regular Orlanthi. A typical Orlanthi has been taught limited violence and proportional responses - you beat up that herder on the raid, maybe club him if he tries to fight, but that's it. Meanwhile, a Humakti might say "he pulled his sling, so of course I cut him down". They don't do proportional responses, and any fight is at least potentially to the death. And of course, if your default response is a magically boosted sword strike, then this will cause a lot more casualties. And I would not bring a BG on a raid either, good grief! Storm Bullies can probably handle themselves, though, or at least it will be individually determined. Very likely, people with sky-high death runes aren't the ones you bring on raids - it affects their behaviour in ways you don't want there. With an 80+ Death rune, I would ask for a (failed) Rune check in order to do non-lethal combat, just as for other behavioural traits.