Richard S.

The tournament has never been detailed as far as I know, beyond that the entire time period of the contest is basically an extended heroquest for the participants. I imagine that they at least need to reenact the actions Belintar took to unify the Holy Country, and probably there's some direct magical and/or physical contests between competitors. It was going to be detailed in the third board game after WBRM and Nomad Gods, but that unfortunately never saw the light of day beyond some of the tokens.

Ah yeah I forgot about Zistor, though it's debatable how much of a "god" he really was. He may have just been a giant machine they built to help fuck with the other side.

I assume you mean "How dependent are the gods on mortals"? The easiest (if a little monomythic and sorcerous) way to think about it is that the gods are how most Gloranthans see the variety of eternal forces of creation, like the Air, Sun, Stars, Earth, Underworld, the concept of Love, and so on. They don't need worship to keep them alive, per say, but they do need worship to be active. Because of the compromise, the only way in which gods can actively affect the world is through their worshippers. In a similar vein, nearly every god that ever existed in Glorantha is and always will be somewhere in the God Time, "nearly" because the Devil did permanently kill some gods when Chaos invaded, so there are some forces that simply don't exist (though some of their places were filled by others later during the Gods War). Many, if not most of the gods are relatively powerless though, as they don't exist beyond a handful of worshippers or as minor character's in some other gods myth. Mortals can't "create" gods, but they can "discover" them, tracking down a being in the God Time and beginning to worship them, which over time and the course of several heroquests will start to reveal the myths of that god to its worshippers, giving them more power and, by extension, giving the god more influence. Note that there may have been one case of a god actually being created from scratch. A god learner experiment involved preaching a completely fake religion to the population of some place in Pamaltela, however when that area revolted the god learners discovered that they actually were wielding powers from their supposedly fake god. We'll probably never know the truth of what happened, but it's possible that either the worshippers stumbled across a god that was coincidentally similar enough to what the god learners were espousing, or they somehow brought an entire new power into the world from the void through sheer belief. In the end, YGMV on whether you can actually create new gods, though generally "new" gods are just older ones that have been rediscovered (EDIT: or mortals who have achieved apotheosis, like what Jap said).

So would you say that at this point if we do anything with the current SRD there shouldn't be any major conflicts with the core rules/1.0 SRD once it comes out?

To follow up, if you do feel like these have to have some mechanical significance, these can all be represented with Rune augments. Or just assume they're what people do normally, and instead of giving bonuses for doing them apply penalties if it's specifically stated that they're not. Any other bonuses come from higher magic beyond the common magic that people use to get by day to day.

I didn't mean to imply that minor magic like that doesn't exist at all, I just feel it's unnecessary to try and codify it within the rules of Runequest. If you really need to show it, it can just be a purely narrative thing: farmers say a prayer over their plows before going out to the fields, weavers sing to help guide the threads together, potters feed their fire some scraps of meat to appease it. They don't need spells, or even a POW cost, they're just things that people do normally.

I think if you introduce an even lower level of magic than Spirit magic and Rune augments (the latter of which can probably be used to describe "petty" magic already) it starts to get ridiculous. The last thing we need is another spell list, especially one that would probably have little appreciable difference mechanically to Spirit Magic.

Which can be expressed as a combination between specific aspects of Movement and Harmony. Equal Exchange. RPG isn't saying Issaries doesn't have the Communication rune, it's just breaking it down into its component parts. People in-world can still express Issaries as having Communication, or they can mark him and his followers with Harmony and Movement, or both; it's all the same.

56% of the total population of Pavis County, so actually yeah that's a good point. I'd forgotten about kids, though I don't know how much of the population they'd be. In any case that means that significantly more of the adult population is going to be initiated than just 56%.

Not sure if this will shed much light on the issue, but I ran the numbers for Pavis County as described in P:GtA and got roughly 56% of the population as initiates. I think that's probably a good amount if we assume that the Sartarites, like the ones back home, have high initiation rates, and among everyone else it's a little scarcer.

I mean, if you initiate to a lot different subcults then that's gonna be a lot of possibly conflicting duties and obligations. Even if they don't conflict, you're gonna have a much larger time commitment than someone in only one or two. Also there's a point to be made that there aren't really that many subcults in RQG; Golden Bow and the two Orlanths are the only ones I recall off the top of my head, nothing like the sprawling mass that we got from HW (in fact, most of those can probably be considered to be individual Rune spells - you pray to a specific name or son or servant or whatever specifically to get each spell).

I can't find the exact quote, but I belive it was said elsewhere (probably by jeff), that there's pretty much no PHP left in Pent - the remainder are what we know as the Grazelanders - and Kargzant the Little Sun is the Pentan's primary god. They don't worship Yu-Kargzant/Yelm at all.

One thing you should keep in mind is that there's both Kargzant and Yu-Kargzant. Kargzant is the little sun worshipped in Pent, Yu-Kargzant is Yelm as worshipped by the Pure Horse People (the Yelm described in RQG core). YK is Kargzant after he became the emperor at the dawning, while just Kargzant is still lightfore. As for the differences between Yu-Kargzant and Yelm's cults, they really aren't that different. The Yelm writeup in the Cult Compendium is probably closest to current Gloranthan canon, based on how everything else has seemed to go these past few years, so you may want to look there for some clarification on that point.

Edit: meant to edit my last post not quote it, oops

I think it depends on the type of game you're running. In a game or world where attacking with a spell is no different than attacking with a sword, there's not really any point to restricting the use of either, unless magic is supposed to be especially draining or taxing, in which case using magic may inflict a penalty on future uses for a short while. Which one you use in Questworlds should depend entirely on what is best for the overall narrative. Instead of asking yourself: which should I use to make more effective use of my limited resources, like you would in D&D or Runequest, you should ask yourself: which one should I use to make a better story?

The hill of gold is a central part of the little sun regardless of what he's called. They're all cold.

Basically what dumuzid said, though Yelmalio is also sometimes said to have been a captain of the sky who came down in the Darkness to defend the world. In that latter version of where he came from, he also usually wandered the world instead of just hovering over the footstool.

The issue is, while you can boil down the rules to a few oversimplified bullet points which get the idea of the game across well enough, the rulebook itself does a poor job at making things as clear as that. Yes, the rules may be clear once you know them, but the OP is saying that picking the rules out of all the text and fluff is difficult for someone without a lot of prior experience.

Er, sorry if this is common knowledge, but what is the cult of silence? Serious question, I haven't heard of them.

Magisaurs, and other intelligent dinosaurs, are dragonewts who have become dominated by a single emotion, not simply fallen from the path. As for one-use dragonewts in barbarian nests defying the nature of dragonewts... that's the point? They don't have an inhuman king, so they can't resurrect, and so they become erratic (compared to other dragonewts) and fearful of true death.

While the dragons were definitely sad that so many dragonewts died, I don't think they'd willingly produce immature eggs. They'd be much more likely to lay true dragon eggs, I feel, replacing the dragons that could have been, rather than replacing the poor, stunted things that were born before they should have been. If any new dragonewts were born at the dragonrise, they would've been laid by former dragonewts who'd ascended quite recently, and somehow found the feasting ground of the dragonkill a good place to mate.

Since the Green Dragon reportedly only settled down around 1469 or so, it's possible that the aforementioned Lord Green Tongue may have been laid by it if he was born in 1450. Maybe the 19 year gap is a little big, but time probably doesn't matter much to dragons.

While it's generally been implied that the remaining dragonewts are the "bad" ones, I don't think it's ever been explicitly stated that there have never been new eggs. Personally, I think it could make for an interesting adventure seed, if the PCs come across an immature dragon egg (which will soon hatch into a dragonewt) and have to figure out what to do with it. New clutches of dragonewts could also serve as an origin for dragonewt PCs, removing the pressure of one player having eons of life more than the others.

iirc, Jeff confirmed in a Yelmalio thread that this is a Polaris spell. Kargzant also gets it as an associate.