Richard S.

Orlanth is definitely a bandit god. He may prefer you fight honorably but he's not completely bound by it like Humakt. Plenty of Sartarites turned bandit during the occupation, and the Old Tarshites have been doing it for even longer. You might even consider regular inter-clan raiding a form of banditry. For other gods, pretty much any air god fits the bill, all of them being big fans of violence and taking what you want by force. Gagarth is probably the most quintessential bandit god, being a god of full-time outlaws and murderers who can't exist in regular society. Of course, that also makes him the least common bandit god, since his initiates can't just go back to the farm or the city if things settle down - you don't just leave the wild hunt!

I think the noble profession in RQG implies that the character was both born to noble parents and has earned (or inherited, depending on homeland) the social status of a noble. It's entirely possible for someone to be born to nobles (learning the appropriate skills in childhood) but not have actually earned the status, or vice versa. If those cases apply to the PC, just change their status of living to whatever they actually have.

I'm pretty sure all of those are true. Nobody argues about who the last hero was - anyone who's taken part in sacred time ceremonies has gotten a chance to experience it themselves, to be that last hero. I fought. We won.

I think you're right in that it's more for people being groomed for leadership, rather than appointed martial positions like thanes. I feel it's more appropriate for Esrolia and Lunar Tarsh, where the ruling class is more distinct. For a Sartarite thane you might want to take the warrior occupation and just change the standard of living to noble. The book does say to tweak the occupations to fit what you need.

Lunar sorcery is just regular sorcery, using the moon rune just makes it subject to the lunar cycle. The weird stuff that Red Goddess initiates can do to spirit magic is a different thing.

I think I'll get the new cover to unify the look of my bookshelf, then pass the original off to an unsuspecting friend

Thank you. The use of "this edition" confused me.

Assuming you mean that nothing is being changed, what's this referring to then?

Can we get a summary of what will be changed aside from the cover?

Barntar is the only cult that explicitly says his RP can be transferred, in his case to Orlanth Thunderous. There's no provisions for the reverse though. Ernalda and the Grain Goddesses might be a reverse case - Ernaldans are automatically considered initiates of the local Grain Goddess without having to sacrifice POW, though it's unclear whether they can use the same worship skill. Grain Goddess initiates aren't automatically Ernaldans in return though. Of potential note, Yinkin and Odayla are listed as associated cults in Lightbringers, not subcults like Barntar. Yinkin cultists have an easier time joining Orlanth Adventurous, but their RP don't carry.

Fair enough. Where'd you get the philosophical truth thing from though? Also fair. I suppose we'll just have to wait a few years for the IG book for a definite answer...

Why do you think he's unreliable? Frankly I don't think he takes much more credit than others like Orlanth or Yelm do, he's just a bit more arrogant about it.

"A very few men and women attain spiritual perfection in life and achieve complete unity with the Invisible God." From the Guide. That's a bit different from having to reveal a philosophical truth, and also makes Talor and Gerlant being masters make more sense. I think the box about ascended masters in the guide might have been partially deprecated, since it mentions how they provide no direct magical benefit when worshiped, yet we have rune spells for three of them, and Jeff has mentioned that Xemela's cult overlaps with Chalana Arroy's in Seshnela. That last bit also casts some doubt on whether the Rokari really do "view prayer to the Ascended Masters as barbaric superstition".

That's what radmonger said. The Zzaburi, however, would like it better if they were the only magic users and everyone else relied on them and didn't let gods and spirits muck up Malkion's ideal society. That's not going to happen though, except maybe in Loskalm for a few years, because of the complications of living in a world of mortals. Sorcery typically replaces spirit magic instead of rune magic, since the former ties up your free INT and also uses MP. Full sorcerers, of course, prefer to only use sorcery, but mixed sorcerers are far more likely to use it alongside divine magic, which doesn't take up space in their brain and doesn't eat up their personal power as much. Also, base level sorcery is closer in power to spirit magic.

I think some of the lists of fan saints are still up on various personal websites, though you'll probably have to do some digging in the wayback machine. I don't think it'd be too hard to remove the old western flavor (unless you're into that), and then just give them 1-3 Rune spells similar to whatever their blessing was. I'll see if I can find some.

Do be warned though that the Stafford Library is essentially just collections of worldbuilding notes, not all of which agree and not all of which are still true. King of Sartar is by far the most useful one. I'd also recommend looking at least at the Sourcebook, if not the Guide. They're mostly about more mundane stuff and the third age, but knowing the mundane here and now of the world provides helpful context for the deeper stuff. The cults books so far have made sure to point out how the gods are seen in places outside of dragon pass, especially for the earth deities in the south, and I expect the solar book will have a decent amount on the east once it comes out. For the most part their major myths remain the same, but maybe with some new names and associations. The deep lore for those places is mostly in Stafford Library VI: Revealed Mythologies, and the Prosopaedia has a lot of interesting tidbits to sort through.

The cover is supposed to be Orlanth, the Red Goddess, and Nysalor/Gbaji iirc. I don't think I've ever seen an image of the Red Goddess that has her looking anything but serene.

The invisible god is just as real and powerful as the cosmic egg, primal plasma, cosmic dragon, void, etc. It predates the cosmos and gives no appreciable magic, but it has been communicated with, and it did create the cosmos (or at least created it to the same extent the other mentioned concepts did). Within time, its power is omnipresent in the form of basic natural law and the fundamentals of sorcery. From a certain perspective, you might say that part of Arachne Solara's job as the goddess of nature is merely upholding the Invisible God's laws.

I guess that's true. Though I think since that's from the perspective of one society it sidesteps a lot of the problems of setting something pre-time. I think Six Ages could be seen as basically "this is what the Hyalorings say happened to them in the darkness", not "this is exactly what was happening in Peloria during the darkness".

We'll almost certainly get more godtime lore in the form of myths, and we'll eventually get the heroquesting rules to expand on those, but we're not going to see something like "the society of the Vingkotlings" or "adventures in the Artmali empire". The godtime isn't a historical epoch, with definite borders and timelines and events, it's the unknowable story of creation that we tell stories about to explain why things are the way they are. Some stories are united by specific themes, so we have golden age myths, storm age myths, etc., and the God Learners managed to develop maps of where these stories intersect, but it's supposed to be, ultimately, background for the story of mortals within time.

The Artmali worshiped Artmali as their primary god, not his mother. Jajagappa lays it out much better. Not an illusion, it's absolutely real, I just don't think it existed before either the Seven Mothers' ritual or the Red Goddess's godquest. In using the raw creative potential of Chaos to create a new goddess, an entirely new element was also made, either by accident or design. When the RG then earned her place in the compromise, the new Moon power was too, and so was retroactively associated with all other moon deities like Gorgoma and Annilla, so that to third age heroquesters it appears that they always had the association.

Where did you read that she used to be more powerful than the Red Goddess? Personally, I don't think "moon" existed as a separate element before the Red Goddess, who used Chaos to make herself something New that then was retroactively added into the godtime. There were several moons pre-time, but I think it was just another type of celestial body, like stars or planets. I think Annilla would have been worshiped alongside other still-existant gods of darkness and water, with the occasional power god like Mastakos, not at the head of some now-nonexistent pantheon.

Ascended masters are Malkioni heroes who ascended to the otherworld and are now worshiped through hero cults. Gerlant, Talor, Hrestol, and Xemela are the only ascended masters we know of definitively, but there's probably more. They can also be worshiped as ancestors, with Gerlant as a notable example. There's no set requirements or prerequisites that we know of, but they probably just need to have been acknowledged as a capital-H Hero in life. Whether they're now gods or spirits is up to interpretation, the important part is that they were mortals who achieved something great enough in life that their power persists and can be contacted after death. The word saint is basically unused now, since there's been a lot of effort to distance the Malkioni from the old allegories to real-world monotheist religions and their ideas of sainthood.

It wasn't Runequest, but I was part of a very short-lived HQG adventure where we were all Helerings sometime during the flood. From what I remember it involved lots of over the top descriptions, heroic speeches, and bollywood-level action. I don't think Runequest would be great for that type of game, but something more like Six Ages could be fun. I'm not going to try and get into the weeds of how the lack of time as we understand it might affect things, but I feel you could just ignore that and still have a fun time playing in a world of living gods and active creation.

I can't post the excerpt since it's too long, but there's a more modern list of which cults can enchant which metals on page 14 of weapons & equipment. All of the lunar cults except for the red goddess and seven mothers have enchant silver natively, so I think they're the "associates" mentioned for those two, probably because all of the rune magic for the RG and 7M comes from associates/subcults. Some other possibly interesting things are that Lodril can enchant quicksilver/aluminum and lead now, Aranea can enchant silver, and the Invisible God's sorcerers only know how to enchant iron.