Glorion

16 hours ago, Grievous said:

Agreed. Powerful stuff!

And Lincoln's original was pretty powerful too.

On 6/24/2020 at 12:32 AM, Crel said:

Yep! Though as Metcalph notes, spirit magic and Rune magic are generally better in this regard. As I understand it, CA basically lets you use any sort of magical tradition/abilities, so long as you retain the vows of non-violence. The cult itself teaches neither sorcery nor shamanism, but its followers can engage in those practices.

In a tactical sense, this does let a CA adventurer become a very powerful "utility caster," with access to a wide variety of healing and support magics.

In a roleplay sense, I think a potential story to explain this is a person converting to Chalana Arroy after traumatic events. I believe coming back from the dead often leads to this, something called the "re-life sickness", which leads resurrected persons to convert to Humakt or Chalana Arroy. So the adventurer might have started learning sorcery before play, and then converted to CA while retaining their knowledge.

Should also note I don't know to what extent sorcery exists as a magic outside of cultic/religious structures. I think the implication of the Philosopher profession is that sorcery does exist outside of cults. Though RQG does note that many cults don't allow their followers to practice sorcery or become shamans, it doesn't include a list of which cults do and don't, so the point's a bit bunk.

In the West, doesn't all sorcery pretty much exist outside of cults? Yeah, there is veneration of saints, but that is different. The One God for whom Malkion is his prophet does not have a cult. And the Brithini certainly don't have cults! And of course there are the sorcerors of God Forgot, who don't believe in any gods in the first place, not even the One God.

On 5/17/2020 at 9:48 AM, Richard S. said:

Yelmalio does have Shield as of GaGoG/CoG/whatever they're calling it now. Associate spell from Yelm. Personally, I think Morale would be better for him than Truespear, as a god of soldiers.

Morale is useful for soldiers, but if your spear is your weapon and your god doesn't give you a divine gift to up its damage, your mercenaries are not going to get hired.

On 5/17/2020 at 12:37 PM, metcalph said:

Spears are phallic and having spear magics indicates base desires which Yelmalio abhors.

I don't know if that was a serious post, but if it was, then they shouldn't ever use spears either, and they should just stick to bashing people with their shields.

BTW, as to the possible "evil in Pavis" Queen Leika referred to at the end, which an assassinated Lhankor Mhy scholar thought it was conceivable that Argrath was involved in, see the article on page 57 of Questlines II, published in 1998, from a Glorantha Con Down Under in Australia, written by Michael Raaterova.

As far as I know there is no "official version" of the final fate of the body (and soul?) of Kallyr Starbrow in Boldhome after the Battle of the Queens, which should be an essential moment in any Sartarite campaign after the Dragonrise. So I want to provide one that people can use if they want, especially since it fit so perfectly into my house campaign. Also it gave my players, some of whom are getting itchy about my tendency to run published stuff with a narrative that has to be adhered to, more flexibility. As I only had a paragraph or two from the Sourcebook to work from, I was able to both give the players total free reign *and* follow the official timeline religiously! This summary, written by one of the players, of our latest session comes right after our doing the Duel of Dangerford and the Battle of the Queens, summary posted to the RQG public blog a few weeks ago, which seems to have gotten good reviews. Mostly self explanatory, but the campaign site can be explored for further explanations now that all the many needed spoiler warnings have been added. None needed for this! http://gloranthagame.pbworks.com/w/page/140572533/Fire Season 1626 Session 4?fbclid=IwAR1j7ao7IWtnGV8_As84xsNtQaJwVGA8bdeozmYg8i1ObHfSfljxK1OVeiE

On 5/14/2020 at 5:25 AM, jajagappa said:

 

Orlanthi can be Lay Members of Humakt.  Humakt generally requires his initiates to sever their prior relationships.

 

In my campaign, we have a Humakt initiate who, for very good reasons, has been offered initiate status in Orlanth, jumping right over lay status. When initiated to Humakt, she severed her previous cult relationship, which was, of all things, Chalana Arroy (a sad story about that.) Can she accept? And is that how Londra of Londros managed to be in both cults?

-jh

You know, I can see the logic to Yelmalio not having Shield and Elmal having it, as a loaner from Orlanth. Orlanth quite possibly took from Yelmalio in the first place at the Hill of Gold. For Elmal to have fire powers too is questionable IMHO, Shield is quite enough, and the mythical reasons for losing it really apply to both of them. But what I have a problem is, why on earth doesn't Yelmalio have True Spear? That both Yelmalio and Elmal should have. They didn't lose a spear in any of the myths, and they are both spear using cults. They should have it, seems to me. Without it, Yelmalio phalanxes can't be really worth hiring.

On 3/20/2020 at 1:41 AM, Thaz said:

It really is. Certainly as BwT have been playing it as otherwise stacking various spells for years in sequence becomes rather easy. Sure Shield and Axe Trance dont let you lead normal lives. But Charisma and various other spells do. Of course that may well be worth it in some cases but that's a nice crunchy set of choices for players and I'm all in favour of options. Sure you can stack x but it's going to mean you have no or limited rune pool for the duration. Oh, your comrade is down and really needs a Heal Wound? Shame. 

If you are in Axe or Sword Trance you *don't care." And should roleplay it that way. In fact you are too deep in trance to cast any such spells on yourself. Not because you can't, but because you don't want to.

18 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

The craziest such effect is Maran’s earthquake spell, which combines free Magic point spending with a geometric increase in effect. It takes less than 50 MP to affect all of Glorantha.

Not the most useful spell, perhaps, but the effect is absurdly powerful.

If you are a Maran Gor worshipper, spending 50 points to shake down all of Glorantha would sound quite useful indeed. To the greater glory of Maran Gor to the max. The only reason it doesn't happen fairly often is that it's a small cult, so a 500 pound Maran Gor priestess whose avoirdupois means she can survive the Giant Quake nicely and has *access* to 50 MP probably only does that every 20 years or so.

On 3/6/2020 at 12:19 PM, soltakss said:

Sorry, but if I face someone who seems to be in a trance and has a huge skill with a sword, I am going to Dispel the Sword Trance, probably using Multispell and getting several goes at it.

We used to play that you could target Offensive or Defensive spells, rather than naming spells.

Indeed, if you make that INTx5 roll, you should be able to figure that out. Because now at least we have a statement from Jason, albeit nothing in the rules unfortunately, saying that Sword Trance is like Arrow Trance. Without that trance obviousness, it would be more like INTx2 or 3. The current rules don't allow targeting offensive or defensive spells as a generality, although certainly GM's can and maybe should do that as a house rule. The rule is that if you don't say what you are targeting, you automatically target the largest defensive spell.

1 hour ago, dumuzid said:

 

Unless they've got Darksee or equivalent magic the first Kimantoring response team up against that berserker can take most of the Sword Trance bonus away just by having their Argan Argari shroud the offender in a nice deep Create Shadow.  Then an Orlanth initiate with Darksee (or Darksense) can crack em with a Thunderbolt, and a Gorian can step in to chop up what's left.

e: or ex-Kimantoring House Guards after the Esrolian Civil War, but the same spread of magic and war cults applies

Yeah, I suppose he'd get taken down one way or another after his/her first couple hundred kills. But Create Shadow would be useless. It'd reduce the Sword percentage from 2000 to ... 1925? And given the RQG parry rules, it would take about a thousand Gorians to take him/her down-unless of course they had Ax Trance *and* access to equally sizeable numbers of MP's. Ax Trance and just their own MP's, maybe a hundred.

Just now, Thaz said:

Ah the joy of RQ. Anything your players can do the NPC's can do right back and this case they have access to entire cults of thousands of people magically power them. Not to mention extensive hero questing.

So go ahead and try it on the big guns and see what happens. 

 

Point taken, Argrath and Jar-eel have it too, as their single strongest combat powers, bigger than anything else they have going. So yeah, that means anyone with Sword or Ax or Mace Trance and access to lots of magic points is unstoppable by anyone without, pretty much. it's just so much grosser than any other combat spell as to be absurd. Battles get won based on how many soldiers on each side have Sword Trance, and a berserker with Sword Trance and Extension could personally put Nochet to the sword if in a bad mood. 

52 minutes ago, Thaz said:

Except these two will be running levels of munchkinry which will make your ears bleed and your eyes burn.

Argrath has the backing of the White Bull Society. In effect his allied spirit could be the Society Wyter. Which means it may have a POW of hundreds or thousands. As just one wrinkle I could use. And that's before he founds his own magical millitary units.

Jar-Eel is a demi-goddess and is semi-divine. 

They can both throw _serious_ amounts of mojo about and your couple of hundred MP aint gunna scratch them. 

That won't scratch 'em. But your 2000 or so percent sword skill from your couple of hundred MP would be another matter. Automatic crits are handy. Of course, you'd have to sneak up on them, that's what the Invisibility etc. is for.

7 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/home/catalogue/publishers/chaosium/runequest-roleplaying-in-glorantha-players-book-print/cha4028-runequest-roleplaying-in-glorantha-qa-by-chapter/cha4028-runequest-roleplaying-in-glorantha-chapter-14-rune-magic/

Sure, you could say "that's not a correction, it's only an opinion", but that's probably all you're going to get. Maybe it will be incorporated into the spell writeup in GaGoG, I don't know if anyone who has an advance copy of that could comment.

That's progress at least. The problem with it is that all too few RQ GM's will know that. And it doesn't solve the problem of the spell being just too damn gross and abusable. Give it one point of Extension, pump in a couple hundred MP's, cast a day of Extended Invisibility extension, and maybe a few other things to avoid magical or spiritual detection, and you can visit that big battle between Argrath and Jar-Eel and kill both of 'em without breaking a sweat. In my house rules, besides making it a trance I rewrote it down to reasonableness, I hope others will do the same. 

1 hour ago, JustAnotherVingan said:

My brother-in-law would tithe his income if my sister would let him. As it is they give 5% of their income to his evangelical church and 5% to her choice of charity.

Good for both of them, especially her. Don't think it's too usual, especially these days with so many people going broke.

14 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

I keep wanting to post some of our Lunar stuff in the "How does your Glorantha vary" thread.  Haven't had time.

But short story on the dart war is that the Lunar govt. favored the "Anister" side, the very young "Arya Tark" fled to Charg and befriended their young heir.  This kind of fits @davecake scenario, just on other side of the Empire.  (And Dune is a nice reference!)

 It's unlikely to end well for the Lunars. :-). Though we have returned to Sartar in 1626 so may be a while...

And now we are doing your standard Sartarite campaign with almost all Colymar PC's and a plan to follow the official timeline, which was definitely not what our Lunar campaign was doing.

14 hours ago, davecake said:

I find Dune as a great inspiration for the warring houses, more so than the game of thrones houses. They already have the houses employing lots of weird specialists, and following weird mystic traditions, with a distant scheming Emperor, etc. And a tradition of assasinations that is innovative and draws on all sorts of weird tactics from all sorts of sources, and so is more like Dart Competitions seem to be. They even have a case of a breeding program to produce the Next Inspiration of the goddess. 

Always thought about a game that starts with the premise that due to losing a political battle, your PCs noble house (or at least your part of it) has lost their nice prime heartland satrapy land, and instead been given land on the Eastern edge of Empire just next door to possibly raging Pentans, and has another rival house trying to take you down while you are weak. 

Maybe more fun to have it later in the timeline, so your PCs will be around when Sheng comes back. Maybe one of your PCs will be a candidate to replace this corrupt Red Emperor? 

 

In our campaign, the Red Emperor first disappeared into eternal sloth, and then disappeared altogether, actually leaving the Senate in charge of the Empire, as we had a very Roman Lunar Empire. The Senate leader was a pawn of an ultra chaotic ultra powerful immortal Brithini sorceror, who went toe to toe to a draw with the Crimson Bat, who only survived partially due to the efforts of my Natha priestess on behalf of the sadly misunderstood Bat. Who subsequently became the Great Hero of the Empire by a brilliant speech in front of the Senate, with much help from her Danfive Xaron backers, which toppled him. She then naively made the mistake, as a brand new reluctant DX champion, of suggesting the head of the cult as new head of the Senate, with short term excellent but long term disastrous consequences. He may well have slain the greatly weakened Emperor, but in any case did his best to make sure there would not be another one. She was too modest to propose herself.

2 hours ago, Dissolv said:

The priests and lords lead the way of course, but there are only so many of them, so for the mundane problems, or the really big ones, the farmers will have to fight.

They pull out their spears in emergencies, and when war impends, a lot of them do initiate to a wargod. But day to day, it isn't the priests or the lords or the farmers or the herders who do most of the fighting, it's the warriors. Something we should be aware of, as most PC's roll up as warriors. Roll up a character as a warrior and roll up another as a farmer. Even if the farmer initiates to Orlanth, the warrior Orlanth initiate will clean his clock easily, due to better armor if nothing else.

5 hours ago, Kloster said:

In french, 'tithe' is 'dîme', that is a contraction of 'dixième' (tenth). I know quite a number of current christians (catholics) that pay 1 tenth of their income to their church. In older days, this was the rule (and in France, before state and church were completely separated, the law).

Yup, sure was. Everyone did that in medieval Europe who actually had an income. There are something like a hundred million Catholics in the USA, hey, some of my best friends are Catholics.😉 I'm not surprised to hear there are a few actually ultra old fashioned enough to tithe the church, out of such huge numbers of people I'm sure you can find tiny minorities up for just about anything you can imagine. The percentage has got to be microscopic. And there are innumerable Protestant sects in America, probably the 7th Day Adventists aren't the only ones you have folk who tithe in them. But barring the Mormons, I'm sure there's an inverse relationship between size of sect and frequency of tithing.

On 2/27/2020 at 9:02 PM, davecake said:

I'm sort of come to terms with Sword Trance, using the corrected version of the spell as an actual trance not just a skill boost without disadvantage

What correction? Where? Definitely correcting that spell is badly needed, and certainly making it a true trance like Arrow Trance is obvious, and pumping a couple hundred magic points into it as written could be, er, problematic, but I haven't seen one.

21 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Not mutually exclusive even now, as those were Bull Shahs who may have kept or built up those bull barbarians as their strike force.

Quite sorcerous in our setup, and even some attempt to use my particular sorcery ruleset, all based on knowledge (want to cast "Dominate Human"? What's your Human Lore, etc.) And lotsa Carmanian dualism.

10 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

As mentioned by @Glorion we had two Carmanian houses in a Dart War: Tark and Anister.  Not so creative on names 🙂

The Tarks ended up mostly going over to Charg, which was an RQ3 Blank Land, not a Storm Bull dominated area like in the Sourcebook. The idea we worked from, going all the way back to that early '90s modernist nonLunar campaign (set in around 1630 or so I guess), was that Charg was the last holdout of the original anti-Lunar Carmanian Empire. A more interesting idea IMHO than what's in the Sourcebook.

52 minutes ago, Joerg said:

And all that outside of the Dart Competitions/Dart Wars between the major houses?

From what I have seen (in the British Museum youtube videos on their collection of cuneiform letters), quite bronze age, actually.

 

It was very Roman Empire in our campaign, which fits pretty well with how the Empire was portrayed back in RQ3 days. Actually, the GM for the campaign that preceded the beginning of our decades long Lunar campaign,  ran a downright modern version of the Lunar Empire, in which Mostali was actually a computer code. My old LM scholar Glorion was actually awarded a robot follower by a friendly dwarf. And in the Lunar campaign, Rodney had a PC named Gem who set up a mercantile company named gem.com. There were definitely dart wars between major houses, one PC was a major figure in her house which was involved in a longstanding dart war with another house that was a major undertow in the campaign, intertwined with the bigger stuff going on.

1 hour ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Disagree.  We had lots of fascinating campaigns where the PCs "saved" the Empire from the White Moon Heresy, Gbaji worshipping coups, malicious plots by Yolanela and other cliques, Pentan invasions, a corrupt and vicious DX Chancellor in alliance with Delecti, and misguided attempts to improve mankind.

Frankly, much more interesting than avenging a cattle raid.  It is a more "modern" take on the overall flavor, less bronze age.

Yes. In the last but one, my Natha priestess, who got suckered semi-involuntarily into becoming a Champion of DX, and then the Grand Hero of the Lunar Empire, with a lot of help from the other PC's organized a worldwide coalition of Everybody from Argrath to Delecti against the grandest chaotic menace to the very existence of Glorantha, including a successful personal meeting with Argrath to get it going (easier getting Delecti on board). And in the last campaign we were trying to deal with the extremely unfortunate consequences, with the DX head of cult who'd sponsored her turning into a truly vicious tyrant holding the Empire in an iron grip after doing in the Emperor, hand in glove with Delecti and a Zorak Zoran replacement for Jar-Eel, who had been taken over by the Grand Chaotic Menace.