Richard S.

I can't tell if he has stirrups or not, but this picture of Grazelander in RQG certainly appears to have a more comfortable and sophisticated saddle than the "rug on the animal's back" that I've seen suggested.

6 minutes ago, Pentallion said:

🕺

And the award for the hardest to read on a phone screen emoji goes to this guy. I had to actually zoom in.

Geez. All you guys must have like history and linguistics phds or something because I've got zero idea as to what y'all are talking about now.

Technically if it goes down the whirlpool it fulfills the requirement of "never returns to shore". Maybe the giants didn't quite have to negate the closing, just tell it "we want our ship to be destroyed in this particular way".

"The Lance: A lance can be used in a charge, a 
straight run of 20 meters or more. If a target is hit  during a charge, the damage bonus of the animal  ridden is used, not that of the rider. If the adventurer using the lance has had no training in its use,  they can use it at 1/2 their normal attack chance  with a one-handed spear, unless their Ride skill  is below that. It can also be used as a one-handed  spear if the adventurer has the necessary STR and  DEX to use a long spear one-handed." Page 219.

I also recall there being another thread on this same topic a while ago. I think at least a few cultures have developed stirrups, one of the many discrepancies between Glorantha and our bronze age.

I second this request. With Heroquesting being such a major feature of Glorantha it's frustrating that we don't have official rules for it yet.

17 minutes ago, metcalph said:

Dragon Magic does not seem to use a rune pool because Dragonewts are NPCs.  A rune pool can however explain their behaviour in using Dragon Magic and would be useful for human casters of Dragon Magic.  So the objection isn't as strong as you assume.

Well according to all the sources I've read, at least, dragon magic for Dragonewts is innate and not granted by some higher power. Humans in organizations like the Path of Immanent Mastery may cast their dragon magic with Rune points since the path evolved out of Hsunchen dragon worship iirc, but true dragon magic seems to be more along the lines of personal abilities, not learned/god-given spells. The real cost of dragon magic is probably emotional, with overuse of it causing the Dragonewt to lose mastery over the emotional pairs they had to master in the previous stage and thus devolve (humans don't have to worry about devolution so the consequences of overuse were probably much less concerning to the EWF and other second age dragon mystics).

In any case, I would personally say a Thanatari who tries to bind a Dragonewt head would suddenly undergo a traumatic awakening of their dragon mind/dream, a process which may well kill them unless they somehow prepared for it. If they survive then they can use the dragonewt's magic until the rest of the nest comes to hunt them down, tear their limbs off, and throw them to the dragons. Taking the head seems like it would be as serious a crime as egg breaking.

20 minutes ago, Darius West said:

https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Closing

"The effect of the Closing was to prevent all travel across open oceans. Any ship going out of the sight of land would be lost to unknown forces: including the sea monsters, weather and Triolini." 

Once again, it doesn't say it immediately sinks. Sure, "lost" can be interpreted that way, but it also can mean it just doesn't return to land. It also doesn't say it happens immediately, unlike your claim. And in any case, the cradle technically was lost too by going down Magasta's whirlpool, it never returned to land.

7 hours ago, Darius West said:

The point is, no ship can make it over the horizon due to the Closing.  Yes, Glorantha has a horizon, and the Closing made things such that when any vessel sailed out of sight of land, it sank immediately.  The Cradle didn't do that.  It went into the Maelstrom eventually, but it did not sink immediately upon losing sight of land as it should have.  This should raise a lot of questions, but it seems that nobody really wants to address it, other than to find reasons why it doesn't matter, when it obviously does and should.  For all anyone knows, the Shiprise was caused by the Cradle.  After all, the Cradle heads down the Zola Fel in 1621, and the Shiprise occurs in 1624, so logically could quite possibly have made the other possible.  Remember also that Giants (the children of Larnste) are tied to Issaries, who likes things like trade and communication, which the Closing and Syndics Ban have curtailed.

Okay, you seem to be saying a lot about how boats cannot make it past the horizon without sinking but can we get a source? Like a quote from the guide of another generally canonical source that? Sure, they never return, but as far as I know (and to be honest I know very little) it's never been explicitly said that they sink, as in going straight down to the ocean floor.

Honestly, my opinion is that if it would be fun for your players than let 'em at it. I would recommend requiring something like a DEX roll to avoid getting burned yourself, and of course they can't command it without the right spell, but creative and unique uses for magic are how Argrath and the Lunars both rose to power so I don't see any real reason to not let your players try the same. YGMV and MGF.

In all honesty, I wish my players would come up with stuff like this. Sometimes its like they don't realize they have magic.

Edit: a thought. If the players figure out a potentially overpowered idea, well, there's technically nothing from stopping the GM from using it on them too... 😈

18 minutes ago, Ragnar said:

They look nice, but Stasis and Plant are missing, and what's that thing that looks like a cow head? And the lowercase "g" with 3 dots?

I want these:

Cow head is Eternal Battle or Anti-Chaos, Urox's personal rune. It's used in HQG. The "g" is Sartar's personal rune which represents the holder's right to rulership of Sartar. Most of his descendants have a connection to it as shown in S:KoH.

Edit: plant and stasis are available on the redbubble, just not as part of the grid. Plant also has a green instead of white background for some reason.

7 minutes ago, Leingod said:

Confusing this with the traditional Elmali "Oi!" is of course gravely offensive to both of them.

I thought they used "Yo!"

Unless they had awakened their Draconic consciousness, no. They'd intellectually understand the parts of it comprehensible to humans, but lacking a dragon mind they are physically incapable of fully using it.

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

It was pointed out to me recently that the dragonewts that are still on Glorantha and haven't transformed into dragons are essentially the special ed class of the dragon world, and it's a bit of a wonder they haven't all fallen off and become dinosaurs by now.

While this has never been confirmed, there is the possibility that some are the results of newer clutches laid during time, possibly even around the time of the EWF. The Mongoose book interestingly mentioned the Dragonewt/IK being able to produce eggs by virtue of being a True Dragon in a lesser body, but I doubt this as it has no mate and no real reason.

3 minutes ago, Darius West said:

Yes it did.  As soon as a ship goes over the horizon and out of sight of land it sinks.  Those are the rules of the Closing.  Most ritually unprotected ships sink well before they ever reach Magasta's maelstrom, but the Cradle doesn't.

"Any ship going out of the sight of land would be lost to unknown forces: including the sea monsters, weather and Triolini." Quote from the wiki. It doesn't mean it sinks necessarily, though that's probably what happens most of the time, the ship just never returns.

Also according to the same source, the closing was broken in 1624 by the reappearance of the Boat Planet, not by the cradle.

4 minutes ago, Darius West said:

I just thought of something.  The Open Seas ritual became obsolete with the Cradle.  Think about it.  There was no Dormal initiate on the cradle, and no Dormal shrine, and subsequently, rumor has it that ships started sailing without needing the Open Seas Ritual at all (though people still perform it, just to be certain).  So the question becomes, how did the Cradle break the Closing?

Giant magic.

You'd probably have until the ritual wears off, since IIRC it's an enchantment on the ship itself, not something directly caused by the presence of Dormali. I'd also think that most sailors would be Dormali to some degree, though I don't know for certain as I've never studied Gloranthan sailing, so if they all died I think there'd be much more pressing problems than the closing.

Perhaps semi-related: "Peloria" is actually the name of a process through which normally irregular flowers become regular through repetition of the special irregularity. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/peloria

I wonder if Greg and later authors had this in mind when designing the land. To me, it seems perfect as an allusion to the idea of all these unique cultures gradually being absorbed into a larger classification.

HOLD UP

If the Abiding Book's appearance in 635 was a manifestation of the Devil then that would put the next Devil birth at 1235 or so... which is suspiciously close to the birth of the Red Goddess!

7 minutes ago, jeffjerwin said:

This makes sense to me.

This is what Greg wrote in The Middle Sea Empire, p.42: 

"They used the Abiding Book as a source, a “cosmic grimoire,” and cast great magic that did bad things. They did not know it but the entity that had led them there was Gbaji, the Deceiver. It led many, including some of the greatest and most powerful people among them, to do evil and to worship Malkioneran, revealed later to be the Devil."

So does that mean the Abiding Book is false?

17 minutes ago, g33k said:

Or alternate Ages' structure & tropes.

1st/3rd similarities, and then the GodLearner'ism of the 2nd Age echoed in the 4th...

 

Yeah, that was my other theory. But really, I do think it's kinda stretching it to say there are these cycles when all we know is the first through third ages.

Another possibility: there is no cycle. We have three ages of Glorantha which we know about, that's not a lot. Just because the third mirrors much of the first could mean nothing, and in all honesty most of the third age, historically and culturally, is completely different than the first or second.

Well, if the devil is indeed reborn every 600 years or so like Argrath claimed, were there any important events that happened around 975? Considering that Nyaslor was born in 375. Or course, you could claim that the devil really appeared sometime after Nyaslor's birth too.

All in all, I think the second age isn't a part of the regular hero/devil cycle. It was an intermediate age between the first and third, an age of mortals like Argrath claimed the fourth age would be, unrestricted by the godtime and defined by humanity's ambitions. In fact, it's my theory that the fourth will be a repeat of the second, the fifth a repeat of the third and first, the sixth the fourth, and ad infininitum. An age of gods and an age of man, cycling for eternity until the day when Chaos finally reclaims its own.

Pah, your speak as if dreaming and waking are different, self-absorbed dream as you are. The world is a perfectly truthful lie with OUROBOROS at the center and the outside and nowhere and everywhere all at once. Self and reality are not, all is subjective as all is illusionary but oh so perfectly real. I am a dream but by my awakening I know I am dreamer as well and am split in half, and so all of the dream is of me and I of it. Only the fools know there is a barrier between dreaming and waking. They do not know the true secret of OUROBOROS so they see with both eyes but still hold one shut for fear of illusion being illusionary.

Alright, serious answer. I think people's imaginations in Glorantha are pretty much like their own otherworlds. IIRC there are even Vithelan sorcerers who deal with dreams much the same way Shamans do with the spirit world. They can have their own denizens, environments, and such which are just as real as the other otherworlds but contained within one person (or multiple in some cases. Hell, Glorantha itself technically only exists in the imagination of people :P).

On dragons and dreams, one of my personal theories is that dragons, their kin, and draconic mystics view the world and themselves as the dream of the Cosmic Dragon, the concept/being of Ouroboros, or some other entity we don't know. Due to this, they can cast magic by basically treating reality as a lucid dream since, if they're a dream, then that means by extension they are a part of the dreamer and thus the dream is really their own. The EWF masters believed the Cosmic Dragon was the source of reality and so everything within their dragon dream began to take on draconic characteristics which could not exist beyond, which is how they could have all their unique animals and crops which disappeared after their fall.

23 minutes ago, Joerg said:

IMO, the dragonewt buildings in their cities aren't constructed, but dreamed up by their guardian dragon or dragonet, and maintained through the meditations of the ruler 'newts. They do resemble adobe constructions, but they aren't really, unless they fall out of the dream.

That makes sense, though I wonder how that works out for barbarian nests whose rulers are mostly dead/trapped in the egg dream. That would also mean that all the nests except for Dragon's Eye probably disappeared after the Golden Horde was through with them, which could have some interesting implications.