Eff

is a combination of and . It's, itself, an act of magic at its root, because "harmony" and "motion" seem to be somewhat at odds, and when we say that "motion" is "freedom", then an apparent paradox asserts itself- how can harmony exist with freedom? Don't they constrain one another? is the answer. Communication, Trade, Equal Exchange. By this magic, you can make the two compatible. The free movement of goods and jogging up and down of prices produces a beautiful harmonious world. Of course, I know a lot of people personally who might call that . Harst Sparegrain? Isn't he a bit of a... speculator on grain? So the disappearance of the balanced scales suggests, perhaps, a kind of suspension of interconvertibility. Battening down the hatches against a potential bank run. Maybe the currency reserves are running a little dry, or there's a slight problem of overleverage. Argan Argar has divested himself. Lokarnos probably will go next. Etyries is in it for the long haul, of course. Issaries is. Maybe there'll be a "Solaran put", or we'll discover the other side of Issaries deep in country, the one who's still got the explicit financial wizardry and knows that the big triangle was really the central bank.

Well, yes, in the past tense. I guess he traded it back to Issaries between 2012 and 2018.

Perhaps Law's percentile rating is simply half that of Fertility on the character sheet's, and Trade's is Harmony's but with one of the digits turned sideways. I don't know what happens if you roll with the number like that, but I suspect it involves lots of pretty lights and colors and heated arguments at the table.

The idea seems to have been to reduce the Runes that have gameplay functionality in Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, to ones that are "universal"- so Spirit and Law, tied to particular magical worldviews, were cut. Communication, only relevant to merchant cults Issaries and Etyries, gets cut, as does Storm Bull's Eternal Battle. Of course, we still have Chaos and Undeath and possibly Mastery as Runes that aren't "universal", so it's incomplete, and you could even imagine expanding to cover a whole range of skills in a hypothetical Runequest variant.

This perhaps implies that Talar, Horal, or both has a very prominent feminine representation, though this may be called the ranavolana and kodalisdaughter manifestations or emanations.

I think that the given example of knockback suggests that the knockback rule might be best adjusted into an average of the two characteristics rather than their addition, or that it should be something like STR+SIZ vs DEX+SIZ, so that having a large size advantage translates into being harder to knock down. But setting that aside, I think the overarching question is "What do we want these rules to enable and constrain?" For example, in the POW vs POW contest, I think the answer for how to produce results is dependent entirely on whether we want magical faceoffs to be primarily about who can muster the most POW, and as such make getting into one with a dream dragon, a shaman, or a dryad a very bad idea, or if we want them to be more unpredictable and thus make it less of a bad idea to try and Disrupt or Befuddle a dragon. An additional method, Method D : For the purposes of the Resistance Table, characteristics higher than 21 are treated as if they are 21. So for our adventurer versus dryad situation, of 18 vs. 28, this would resolve to 35% chance of success in POW v. POW contention, and the advantage of superhuman POW is that you have more MP and a greater ability to cast spirit magic, but not advancing out of the Resistance Table's domain. This method's main effect is that active defenses remain equally important for major magical combatants, because they can't rely on the passive POW protection going beyond the ability of ordinary humans to reach, but they still have a greater reserve for making use of those active defenses.

Flashman Fought, We Won (1846-1847, 1860-1862)? For that matter, is Elspeth also present?

KILRO ILL AVE BEEN ERE

I can think of a couple of things that could open Ramalia up- for one thing, the Seventh Council of the Malkioni probably does exert an impact on their leadership. But that's not Maniria-centric, that's Ramalia getting sucked into the Seshnela-Ralios-Loskalm conflict. I have some nascent thoughts about why Ramalia is the way it is, though- why does the Ramalian elite Tap the common folk? One answer is because they're Chaotic and Chaotic entities defy analysis. But that answer sucks, so having invoked it, I hereby dismiss it. So here's another possible answer- further west, in the remains of Old Seshnela, there's a population of Beast People who emerged after the shattering of the peninsula. Perhaps, and this is only a perhaps, this represents a more general spontaneous reemergence of shapeshifting and hsunchen characteristics in areas of the Middle Sea Empire, and what happened in Ramalia is that the majority of the population turned into wereboars. Now, perhaps (and this is decidedly non-canon, maybe even anti-canon) this effect isn't limited to the "lower castes" who aren't "really Malkioni". Perhaps the outbreak of therianthropy extended its way up to the blues and the golds, mocking the pretensions of blood purity and of superior rationality. In Ramalia, though, by frequent use of Tapping, the rulers are able to suppress this possibility, and so they focus entirely on maintaining a rational society through magical force. And those people who prove stubbornly resistant to the suppression magic are driven to the fringes of society and embrace Mralot fully. But doing this consistently perhaps requires the use of Chaotic magic, because it involves the apex of antisociety- the idea that you can make the social world through force. But what about fear and hatred of the sea? Well. Perhaps it's just the ocean as an expression of untrammeled irrationality, which degrades the power of the Ramalian magic. Or perhaps many of the people aren't wereboars, but descended from water creatures (Perhaps even the blue skin and white hair of the "helering" phenotype was seen as proof of Zzaburi status) and the ocean's call is too difficult to resist. There are giant talking otters not too far from Ramalia, perhaps their oceanic cousins once swam off its coasts. Perhaps they feel the urge simply to return to dolphin, or to monk seal. Or perhaps they know the sea has a reason to hate them. Perhaps Slontos sinking was to forestall the reawakening of the goddess of Slontos, rather than a consequence of her rolling over in slumber. Several major possibilities! In any case, all of this rambling means that the Ramalians would have very strong reasons to object to the Reforestation and Pralori revival of Serpent Beast Brotherhood magic. This puts them in an uneasy position as far as assumed PC groups go- they have a shared interest in not becoming elf-"friends", but they also are clearly malevolent. What will the PCs do? Will they accept possible damnation by allying with Ramalia? Will they break the repressive core of Ramalia? And when are those Fire Elves going to fall from the sky, anyways?

So, is there a kind of ballpark figure on just how much rape and sexual assault increases under the Lunar Way, then? Some statistics or numbers worked out?

This is a heroquest: This is also a heroquest: And this is a heroquest: The "back to the age of gods and heroes" part is fairly unhelpful compared to the "you pass outside of your usual circumstances and into different, stranger ones" part. How dangerous is a journey into fairyland? What kind of game are you playing? Maybe fairyland is drenched with perils and deeply hostile to the intrusion of mere mortals. Maybe fairyland is friendly and inviting. Maybe fairyland is standoffish and aloof. Maybe fairyland is frightening because it's so eager to have you. It all depends on what your group is playing and discovering through play.

I'm actually not sure that it's likely to be weaker at all. It's easy to turn around and say that Detective Storm Bull isn't going to detect a tax farmer siphoning off from the coffers to enrich themselves, donating in thanks to She of Below who protects their graft, unless said tax farmer is actually using spooky reality-warping magic, and so is going to miss the Krarsht cultist right under their nose, because their focus isn't on actions but on intrinsic characteristics. Whereas contrarily, Lunars having pragmatic opposition based on the actions involved means they don't get caught in the blind alley of looking for the person with unusual mutations to figure out who's committing the crime. Unless your Glorantha is one where criminal activity is intrinsically Chaotic, of course, but I think that creates some unusual consequences.

I suspect this is why the Questworlds SRD uses a fixed scheme of advances for character improvement. But by default, player characters will only gain XP from being defeated in a contest or from having their flaw(s) used by the GM in a contest. Someone who focuses on one or two abilities at very high levels and uses them for everything is simply going to plateau unless one or more of their flaws is frequently invoked, and their flaws scale with their highest and second-highest abilities. So to put it another way, this is a problem that fixes itself- player characters plateau in development unless they start using riskier tactics or the rest of the players reach a point where the base resistance gets high enough to make that 5M3 ability high but not exceptional. And of course, the other side of all of this is that story obstacles and story questions can be ones that those 5M3 abilities can't credibly overcome or answer, if there's an actual problem with the the player's use of abilities in play beyond them having a high ability. (But I would also perhaps talk with the player about why they're pouring all their points into a single ability and what they want out of it, because it's entirely possible they just want to be "the best" in a narrow specialty, etc.)

The basic social anxieties of the Krarsht (that corruption and crime is done with malevolent intent to undermine society) and Thanatar (that there are evil forces out there that want to steal knowledge that is held secret and take it for themselves) cults as laid out in existing Gloranthan media mean that these cults would exist in the Lunar Empire, but I don't see why they would be especially strong- I think Thanatar probably would be somewhat weakened because there's more emphasis on the syncretic sharing of knowledge and less on the closely-guarded secrets of cults or guilds, but maybe Thanatar is instead strengthened because the knowledge of enlightenment is policed and controlled. Now, maybe these are stronger because the Lunars love crime and think that information wants to be free, or because the Lunars being tolerant of Chaos means that they're neutral on Chaotic cults regardless of what they represent, but I'm not sure that these are all that compelling.

If we go by historical examples, horse nomads generally aren't hostile to the existence of settled or urban communities (except where there's active encroachment or colonies being set up) but prefer to keep them under their dominion. So I think that sedentary farmers around the Hot Lake or even in the major river valleys are perfectly plausible, just like the Oasis People further south. In turn, how you might do it is to say that individual nomadic polities control particular good rest points, and caravans are free to make use of these points so long as they pay- or in other words, by giving up a portion of their goods to a central authority that can then spread them out as they please. In turn, these leads to the possibility of rival polities on the prairies advertising their own particular routes to prospective caravaneers, which is a charming possibility for play- picking between the different options and interacting with nomadic salespeople. Some additional thoughts about trade- if you want to use the old "godbone" motif, Pent is fairly close to where major struggles took place in the Gods War, it seems entirely believable that there are whole skeletons of bronze or gold or lead (or even pure silver, once you're close enough to the Blue Moon Plateau) scattered about, perhaps far from anywhere people normally go- but ready for the picking if you're willing to risk it. Or people selling stories of a big claim for their own purposes. Beyond all of that, Pentans may trade to a limited extent with the Altinelan demigods that live far to the north of the middle world, and in turn people in Kralorela and Chen Durel may well try to buy them via proxy.

That's not really an in-Glorantha answer, that's an out-of-Glorantha answer- Yelmalio worshipers are weak materially because the concept that Yelmalio represents is weak materially in the Gloranthan context. Mystic practice won't preserve your life against those things which might try to end it. Which is a perfectly fine answer to go with. (The weirder, loopier take on this might be that with Death as separation, Yelmalio is weaker than Humakt because embracing Humakt-Death-separation is part of mystic austerity... but that's not as good for explaining specific Yelmalio rules that aren't directly associated with Humakt.)

I don't think that distinction means all that much on its own. For one thing, the standard sets of elemental associations from broader culture only apply infrequently in Glorantha- Fire is associated with being cool and dispassionate, Earth is associated with being cunning- and for another thing, the determination of what makes a "Light god" in Glorantha- ascetic, sex-repulsed- is plainly derived from the development of Yelmalio in the early period of Gloranthan gaming. I think it is just as valid to say "Yelmalio is a Light god, so Yelmalio should have a Rune spell that fires lasers that are mechanically similar to the Lightning spell in damage," or "Yelmalio is a Light god associated with birds, so Yelmalio spirits are likely angelic and angels famously form a heavenly army that smites people, Yelmalio should have relevant Rune magic to this." Answers entirely from within the "setting canon" are not especially meaningful to anyone who isn't already invested in the canon, and they also can't really explain why Yelmalio being a Light god means that Yelmalio worshipers are significantly more restricted in the boons from their god than Orlanth worshipers are. To do that, you have to step outside the setting and talk about the meaning or connections of this decision or that one.

Yes. My understanding of it is that December 25th arises from a belief in folk Judaism at the time that prophets died on the day of their conception, that the Crucifixion was believed among early Christians to have taken place on March 25th (or as they might have put it, six days before the kalends of Aprilis), and therefore that Jesus would have to have been born nine months later on December 25th, all of this somewhat separately from the tradition of the shepherds with their flock recorded in the Gospel of Luke. But I'll be damned if I could cite sources on that without a lot of work. (On top of all of this, December 25th is around when days begin to noticeably lengthen again after the winter solstice, so it's unsurprising that festivals like Saturnalia, the feast of Sol Invictus, Christmas, and the Germanic Yule all ended up taking place close to that date.)

Yeah, dispelling as it exists in the game is frustrating because if it's applied "naturalistically" it breaks some of the commonest reasons for picking a particular cult- "princess play" (playing the role of a particular fictional character type for personal appeal) and wanting to play a character with a particular social role in the fictional society. So it relies on an implicit social contract that NPCs won't use it when it would be most useful for them to do so, without making any of that explicit.

This is assuredly more a function of Orlanth being the cult that has existed for the longest in Runequest and Glorantha's real-world history and receiving the largest quantity of fan attention and fleshing-out, rather than because there's something intrinsically different about Orlanth as compared to other gods. Orlanth is as we have made him, and Ernalda is as we have made her, and Magasta is as we have made them, and Yelm is as we have made him. Saying that Yelm exists without doubts as if that condemned him- no, Yelm only has the projected existence of a fictional character, one defined by reinterpretation by each group or even each player. Does Chalana Arroy ever contemplate violence? Who says she does or doesn't either way? Who's actually sat down and determined for all players and all groups that Chalana's pacifism isn't an active commitment, but instead a sign of her pigheaded refusal to kill people? Indeed, who can really claim to have spent enough time in Ernalda's head to say, "she's just the pantheon bicycle, nothing more"? Who has devoted the time and the energy to play with Ernalda to that degree, and on that interpersonal I-have-contended-with-God level?

Orlanth = Sun Wukong Eurmal = Zhu Bajie Lhankor Mhy = Sha Wujing Issaries = Prince Bai Long Ma Chalana Arroy = Tang Sanzang Flesh Man = Taizong Emperor Ginna Jar = Avalokitesvara/Guan Yin Wait, I don't think that's the right comparison! In any case, I think that any one-to-one comparison between the 7M and Lightbringers is perhaps missing the point, in that the two quests are straightforwardly opposites of each other- one is to bring back the lost order, and the other is to smash the current order.

Well, the monomyth is a construction of psychology, and Orlanth's not quite a culture hero. But the fixing of the world only happens by breaking the looping structure. Once Orlanth's gone through the Baths of Nelat (in the KoS version) the third iteration of the loop closes. What happens next is something which violates the narrative logic of tyrannical uncles being overthrown by bloodthirsty nephews on behalf of suffering parents- the tyrannical uncle Yelm and the bloodthirsty nephew Orlanth are able to partially shuck their roles and become less tyrannical and less bloodthirsty. The bloodthirsty nephew Kajabor is thus able to be integrated into the universe (via an advanced kink scene) and the problem of the tyrannical uncle Orlanth is resolved with an explicitly temporal and not permanent peace- and this produces linear time. So what saves the world is the willingness of the participants in it to bend and compromise, and by this means they are able to produce a transformation of Kajabor/entropy, a rotation of that puzzle piece to fit into the patchwork jigsaw. Or- I Fought We Won is a recapitulation of the Lightbringers Quest and the Lightbringers Quest is a recapitulation of I Fought We Won.

Orlanth, to Eurmal: "Well, well, well, if it isn't my old friend, the consequences of my actions." But perhaps that's the key problem- the stable pathways for the many-faced Storm Guy seem total reintegration (the Vadrus complex) or disintegrative expulsion (Trickster is "bonded" to Orlanth, Orlanth takes responsibility for "his" actions, none of which are Orlanth's, and possibly even stronger externalizations of Eurmal*). The Moon is unstable, so instead we have a non-integrating dynamic which cannot be so easily ceremonialized, and which can only be approached through first splintering (or having a pre-existing splintering) and then moving in the same general directions. All of which sounds like utter moonspeak unless you're pretty well embedded! Perhaps it would help if Sedenya had a Ninshubur, or more precisely, if we could agree on which Ninshubur/sukkal between Etyries, Valare Addi, Charmain, etc. to use. *I can't help but think of the Storm Bull/Ragnaglar relationship here, though that would be an incredibly extreme externalization and act of automutilation. It's not surprising Argrath is a bull, but we're maybe lucky Arkat stayed well away.

The key thing here for me is the irony of "took upon himself the task to right the wrongs which had brought such disaster about." Orlanth begins seemingly in ignorance of his own role in this catastrophe, but decides to fix the problems anyways. In the later King of Sartar formulation, this is more explicit while also less explicit- Orlanth begins his quest in the role of the storm king. He summons up winds and calls upon his human subjects to fight, he brings along Humakt and Babeester Gor and Lightning Boy and Mastakos and whoever embodies the Shield of Arran and Sandals of Darkness and Scarf of Mist. Even when he reaches the point of sunset and the gates of twilight, he still doesn't seem to understand just what he's in for, though it seems to beggar belief that he handed Humakt off to Rausa casually and was whistling aimlessly when she struck the fatal blow. Regardless, he still retains pieces of that self, and one by one (like with the rest of his comrades), they are all stripped away in the depths of death. And then it's only once Orlanth has sacrificed everything he got from killing Yelm that he reconstitutes himself and arrives in the halls of the dead gods. In a very important symbolic sense, what happens in the hall is simply recapitulating what has happened before- Orlanth, full of bluster at the start, is stripped down to nothing to prove his sincerity and willingness to sacrifice, and then rebuilds himself from that nothing. So I think that Orlanth Penitent is perhaps less salient than Orlanth the Fool (though mostly in Tarot terms). Orlanth's consciousness of his deeds comes as he strips himself of being Orlanth, and he comes back to himself as a recognition of his deeds to make good. There's certainly some psychological fruit to pluck there!

Or, taking it in a very different direction, Eurmal's starting point for the Lightbringers Quest is found in Revealed Mythologies under the section on "Malkion the Sacrifice".