Eff

There's a pretty interesting metaphysical question underlying this one- ''What does the Cult Compatibility Table represent?" That is, does it represent the relationship between gods, the opinions of the cult membership, the opinions of the cult leadership, the opinions of the broader community, some combination of these? If we take it the first option, which is certainly how we tend to talk about matters- Orlanth is opposed to the Red Goddess, not the Orlanth cult leadership to the Red Goddess cult leadership, Orlanth cult membership to the Red Goddess cult membership, or Sartar's population to the population of the Lunar Empire, is how we tend to talk about that H in the table. But if we accept that Yelmalio and Elmal are the same entity, and Yelmalio is N on the table and Elmal was F with regards to Orlanth, how does that work? Did the gods, residents of the Godtime that supposedly only changes when Lunars are using their salacious Lunar Ways to alter it, change with Monrogh's revelations? Weren't these revelations an attempt to salvage the relationship of Elmal worshipers to the dominion of Orlanth? So why would they make Yelmalio less friendly to Orlanth? Should we assume that Elmal also was N on that table? Doesn't that require significantly reinterpreting or Xing out the Elmal mythology that actually exists? Maybe we should understand this as a social phenomenon instead. After all, isn't it meant to be a method for shaping the initial interactions between members of different cults? But then we must ask "Which society?" and "Should these initial interactions dictate the ability of cults to interact with one another period? Shouldn't there be room for differences of opinion?" Many questions.

In the real world practice of Zen, "austerities" like sitting zazen or monastic life generally are an important component. In fact, typically the process of achieving "enlightening moments" of kensho as recorded in koans only comes after a prolonged period of preparation through austerity and study of sutras and so on. Gloranthan mysticism is much more occult-tinged, in large part because Greg Stafford both was in that crowd and also was getting his cultural knowledge of Buddhism from a very mid-20th-century Californian filter. But it's fairly easy to understand its mysticism in the terminology of mystic traditions in Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism... without even dipping into the Thelema or Theosophy wells.

A couple of thoughts here: My preference is always going to be Option 1 on that list, because I think that I disagree with the idea that there is a story to be messed with in the sense you seem to be using the word- if the PKs kill Agravain or Mordred, what's happened is that you've ended up in a different branch of Arthurian possibilities... but there are a lot of those out there. It would take a lot more than that to even get close to Camelot 3000, Seven Soldiers: Shining Knight, King Arthur and the Knights of Justice, etc. So with that in mind, I think there are also a couple of interesting points to talk about. The first one, which has already been lightly invoked, is that murdering either of the two problematic ones among the Orkneys is going to mean that the surviving brothers will be forced to pursue some combination of justice or vengeance against the murderers, and if it's not done very carefully and stage-managed to reveal some unutterable perfidy from the victim, Arthur is also going to be forced to act against the murderers. Now, to play out some of the implications of a Malory subplot, the Orkney brothers do manage to survive their group murder of Lamorak de Gales and Gaheris's matricide, but they are also extraordinarily important political figures, and in the former case they are pursuing the apparent murderer of their mother, and in the latter case, the truth is effectively concealed. That said, player characters could try to get the protection of a major noble or petty king or round table knight first. Perhaps Mark of Cornwall. Who, in the later medieval traditions, frequently was the actual destroyer of Camelot after Mordred and Arthur kill each other. Which is to say, this action very straightforwardly and directly could be a proximate cause of the fall of Camelot and death of Arthur and destruction of Britain in civil strife. You maybe lose Camlann, but the Italians (in La Tavola Ritonda) had Mordred survive Camlann and end up killed by Lancelot later. You're well within the skein of tradition there. The tragic rise and fall of Arthur is still there, though the causes and the meaning are different. So the second point here- what's the player intent with this proposed action? Why do they want to kill Mordred, Agravain, or both? I'm not asking in a character-knowledge/out-of-character-knowledge sense, to be clear. If their intent is to protect/preserve Camelot, or to try and break Arthuriana, there's actually nothing wrong with that! But it does require having a conversation as a group about why, and what the premise of the game is meant to be, and whether Camelot's eventual destruction is a fixed aspect of that premise or not. And then from that conversation, everyone can have a better idea of where they want to go from there. I'm not even talking about ceding authority over backstory and setting to the other players, although that's an option. I'm just saying- talk about it, make it clear where everyone is and then move forward from there. Maybe they agree that, yeah, they want to see how long they can hold Camelot together even though it's impossible for it to last. The Last Temptation of Christ it up. Or maybe they just want to throw some bombs and make things happen, and they decide that they're going to pick a different direction to throw the bombs in. Third point- Agravain and Mordred are, of course, scummy villains, and part and parcel of that (being only mildly tongue in cheek) is that they might well have a cool head in the midst of battle and be able to throw down their weapons and beg mercy. (And in the Welsh Triads, Mordred is associated with calmness, clever speech, and the ability to get his way through talking, though usually positively.) This is mostly an option for players explaining that they want to whip Agravain's little ass because he's a jerk or whatever- there's a way for them to get that victory, that concession, without seriously risking Agravain becoming the Franz Ferdinand of Camelot. But it's just hanging out there- this opportunity for these two to win the sympathy of the crowd by working the refs- if you want to play the culture of Camelot that way. Fourth point- there's some weird parallels between Mordred and Jesus in the Post-Vulgate and then in Malory. Whether these are to be read as Mordred being divinely blessed (which is consonant with his Vulgate depiction and earlier) or as Mordred being an Antichrist figure or as a sign of Arthur's corruption under Merlin's baleful influence or as a strange rhyme with the New Testament without much meaning is mostly up to the reader, but if you have a fairly "magical" game, it's entirely possible for Mordred to be miraculously (or diabolically) resurrected after death. This can push things well into spooky apocalyptica if you let it. Caveant lusores. But I do think it might be fun.

This is definitely a factor. I think it was Ron Edwards who pointed out most recently for me that in the RQ1-3 method where starting characters had low skill %s, combat really does work like the example with Rurik getting into a barfight and both combatants mostly whiffing- and not affecting each other in the process. And then when you get up into the more experienced characters with much higher skill %s, what's more likely to happen is that both combatants are more likely to parry each other, which means that weapon damage becomes far more of a factor and round-to-round combat becomes even riskier- but you're eased into it. And obviously, in RQG, it is quite doable to have starting player characters with 90% in skills, and 70% or more in weapon skills, parrying is folded into the base skill, etc. so you're already in the mode where the most likely outcomes are mutual parries and weapon damage is a factor, etc. (My vivid experience of RQ combat was a one-on-one duel in the Munchrooms scenario, with a marginally improved character from baseline fighting a Karrg's Son, and it was nail-biting even playing pure defense and with a Passion going.)

Pain points for running, as opposed to prepping: -allied spirits and bound spirits and remembering what they can do -DI and the breadth of magic options But most of the pain points are in prep.

So the initial question that led to this thread being created was: "How do you expect new RuneQuest GMs to both "[take on] a Dark Troll warrior who’s a Death Lord of Zorak Zoran, with the full panoply of Rune spells, enchanted lead armour, zombie and skeleton hordes, etc., and a clan or warband backing them up (with specialists, healers, trained battle-insects, allies, and the like)" and also understand which of the rules in the 400+ page rulebook they just bought should be ignored when running this fight at the table?" with some additional clarification: "GM that Zorak Zorani Rune Lord fight, with trollkin or skeleton/zombie henchmen and an allied spirit, against a suitable group of PCs. Strike Ranks, tracking magic and Rune points, NPC allies providing magical support, paying attention to damage done to specific body locations, splitting attacks and parries, all according to Hoyle." Which is to say, the question is not about "how do you organize battles", this is a more specific question about how to run powerful opponents with a great deal of resources, and doing so according to the rules. With that in mind, there are two difficulties here. The first one is the "handling time" of the combat rules and the extent to which it increases nonlinearly. That is, if you have a group of five PCs against the same number of dark trolls (ten combatants), and you have a group of five PCs against a Death Lord, four skeletons, an allied spirit, and two NPC allies of the Death Lord providing magical aid, (thirteen combatants), does it take 1.3x as long to run each given round, or does it take longer? This leads into the second aspect, which is- how should GMs play someone like a Rune Lord in battle? Let's step away from ZZ for a second here and focus on, say, a Wind Lord, because I've spent more time thinking about what an Orlanth cultist can do. So by default a Rune Lord will have 90% in a relevant Rune, which is to say, they can cast their Rune magic at a 90% chance absent anything else. They will have 18 CHA and so will have access to up to 18 points of spirit magic. They will likely have high POW to cast said spirit magic with, and thus a plentiful reserve of MP. They have a 90% or better Passion related to their cult or deity. They also have a heightened chance to use Divine Intervention. Finally, they have 90% at a minimum in a relevant weapons skill, quite likely multiple of them. Their allied spirit will also be an initiate of the same cult and have their own pool of spirit magic, rune magic, and MP to work with. And we have NPC allies casting their own magic in support. Now, whatever goons or henchpersons are brought along probably aren't quite so kitted out with magic. But even on a basic level, within a given round, the GM does have to think about the combinatorial effects of having the Rune Lord, the allied spirit, and whatever allies are casting support magic interacting with one another. They also have to consider when the Rune Lord might call for divine intervention, because that's a far more practical option than for mere mooks, something which the Rune Lord would reasonably consider invoking. What, then, would people do to make this specific kind of combat, of PCs versus a Rune Lord in full kit, with some support casting and some goons, run smoothly without glossing over the things the Rune Lord can do? Even a spell like Leap, hardly the first to come in mind, offers the option for an expeditious retreat or a circumvention of PC defensive positioning.

None of this explains why it would be a problem if they had dragon-hide armor out of it too, if killing a dragon is such an unprecedented accomplishment.

I think you may misunderstand me- the problem that I am outlining there is that the GM doesn't know, or feel confident about knowing, how powerful the monster is, and so doesn't know whether the players should feel confident or afraid or unsure when sizing up the monster. And they don't have particularly good sources of advice on how to make monsters available to them. This is itself more of a problem for RQG than for RQ1/2 because RQG characters take longer to make and are presented as much less expendable, so the instinct is to be less risky with them and killing them off due to a misapprehension means more inconvenience for everyone, putting more pressure on the GM to get the opposition right... or start pulling out the railroading playbook.

This is actually not the worst idea! Especially if you're running RQ '78/RQ '80 "by the book" and thinking of it as a sword-and-sorcery kind of play experience where most characters will die ignominiously- on a tavern floor, in the gutters of the Big Rubble, knifed by a trollkin or baboon... If the monster kills off half the party, the other half tells the guild or cult they were doing this job for "no dice unless we get more help", or the players end up going deeper into debt with the free sages to figure out a way to defeat this horrible monster, or they try to reason with it if it's intelligent- there's a lot of room for creative play in that space. Now, a lot of people aren't looking for that experience, of course, and it does become its own problem if the "gigafrog" I made up is sitting in the way of The Plot or whatever. But you know, just throwing that whole thing out there. I think some kind of project to collect these different play cultures for RQ '78/RQ '80 would be very interesting both in "academic" terms and in practical play terms- people have been exploring the space of what that little book and whatever addons they could find for it allowed, enabled, and encouraged for decades and I'm pretty sure they've found and made some really exciting and interesting things!

I suspect that the broad stopping point for many people when it comes to this is simply not being confident in what constitutes a fair challenge, what the ranges of characteristics and AP and the like are for a given opponent for a given set of PCs. And there, of course, all too often the answer to requests for clarification is that there is no guideline for this, that RQ "isn't balanced", and that, by implication, you simply cannot create your own foes that people can fight fairly without playing vast quantities of RQ and learning by doing. Now, I've read RQ1/2 and a few other 70s-vintage games closely, so I know that's wrong, but there are several layers of failed communication going on making dissemination of this more difficult.

Why are those things problems? The PCs did indeed slay a dragon, did they not?

It is absurd, isn't it? I think that the basic disconnect is that "RQ2" was essentially designed "at the table" and the question of just what a Rune Lord or Rune Priest (or shaman) is capable of was something people were finding out as they played the game, and then its run came to an end before the release of the promised Heroquest, (which I'll call Heroquest '80) which would have been, according to my copy of Runequest a successor game where you start as a "Rune level" and presumably quest to become a Hero. And then by RQ3 you have the beginnings of a play culture which sees the idea of defined stats for opponents as kind of unnecessary beyond the very basics, and so you still don't really get a sense of how to play opposing forces. And this eventually makes its way down to RQG, which even has minimal GMing advice within its main book.

I don't think that psychological interpretation holds together. It may be a fantasy metaphor for psychological phenomena, but I think it very much is concrete and material and driven by the cult and the cult apparatus. You think that "violence is violence, and it doesn't matter who the perpretrator is"? Would that more people had your clarity of vision. But we must live with distinctions between homicide and murder, of murder in the first degree and murder in the second degree, of manslaughter, of lawful killings, of lethal use of force in self-defense. Even for killing, there is justified killing in various forms and there is unjustified killing in various forms, and that's only a matter of law- in the social realm people frequently make even finer gradations of justification and rationalization, and all this is multiplied for lesser forms of violence. So, too, there is a distinction between the impersonal act of divine wrath or justice, and the personal act of the creepy priest who has very strong opinions on how people's children should marry. Of course, in the political context, matters look quite a bit different, and cursing the wolf people with a mark signifying people's freedom to kill them as monsters of Chaos may extend a bit beyond what any one wolf person thinks about it, whether they contextualize this as a scandalous injustice or whether they think that injustice is the hallucinatory product of self-righteousness.

Depending on how you look at it: -The spider is the watch, or rather the consciousness and self-awareness of the watch. -The spider is too closely entangled with the watchmaker for a distinction to be meaningful. -The spider entered into the watch at some point and convinced all of the watch's inhabitants she was very important. The moon woman, for her part, is in some sense a spider, but as to whether she's an aspect of the spider, an emanation, an avatar, a gongen, an impersonator, a daughter, a sister, a distant descendant, or simply an unrelated spiderlike phenomenon, I don't know and she doesn't tell me these things.

A converse of all of this is that the psychobabble is a manifestation of the concept of forgiveness, and no matter how much I, personally, might believe in a one-strike rule where any degree of moral or functional failure requires immediate destruction (luckily I would be perfectly morally guided and every action I take would be beyond reproach) forgiveness is one of those things that people keep doing to each other. And so the potential for Illuminati behavior is there even if you try to guard against it with harshness.

The thing with the snark there, "it's great to see someone working through their issues and really growing", is that the only alternative to it is violence. If you're confronted with a Bartleby the Scrivener, who would simply prefer not to leave the building he's squatting in, you must violently remove him from the premises. There's a wide range of possibilities for peaceful resolutions depending on tolerance, of course, but the two endpoints, of non-interventionist psychobabble and drawing a knife, remain a palpable presence. And what Illumination does is remove a psychic prophylactic against recognizing the violence as violence. Because you can always displace the siccing of retributive spirits as the god's decision, not your own. When someone falls behind on their tithes and refuses to make good, when someone refuses the marriage contract their family negotiated for them, it is not you, the priest, who shreds their lungs apart from the inside or incinerates them with lightning, it's Orlanth, who knows better, despite the belief in the setting and the fandom that the gods are incapable of acting on their own. Because Illuminates are immune to a particular subset of techniques for enforcing control here, they are thus a terrifying presence even if they do nothing but live out their lives humbly and peacefully. They are beyond indirect authority, and if it is necessary to bring them into line, it must be done via force that is more naked and less justifiable on its face. The problems become pettier, less about defying the will of the gods and more about sassing the priest. It is thus that Illumination comes alongside Chaos, not because they do anything to positively bring it, but because they throw the justice or injustice of the society into sharp relief. And it is then that the demons of Chaos emerge to force confrontations with injustice. Of course, what you can do is operate at a level beyond this, and rigidly control the means of freedom, inculcating everyone who achieves the liberation of enlightenment in your own ideological beliefs, preventing them from ever challenging the order of the society that you think is just and correct. This requires you to be omnipresent, to murder ruthlessly and without thought for what anyone has done in moral terms, and to discipline any shirkers or rivals. But in this way, you can keep the Chaos monsters to the bad places where we don't go. (In all of this, it's worth asking whether the plague the Riddling Priests "spread" was a communicable disease common in Peloria or Kethaela that spread as a virgin-soil epidemic in Seshnela and Tanisor. Clearly, canonically this is false and the Nysalor priests were running a false-flag operation of literal well-poisoning, but if we ignore the facade of canon, what might come from probing this possibility?)

Or to put it another way, Arkati defend against the prospect of people accumulating vast quantities of power with which to dominate others through radical freedom via accumulating vast quantities of power with which to dominate others through radical freedom. But they do it for good/with the right elemental affiliations.

Of course, it would be almost disappointing if Arkat cultists weren't engaged in some ends-justifying-the-means behavior around Chaos, wouldn't it? After all, somebody needs to be the Gbaji for any given petty squabble, and you can't rely entirely on random Lunar encounters or "wild" Nysalor illuminates...

Brithini never eat green beans outside of a casserole covered with breaded and fried bits of onion.

Let's go metatextual for a moment. These two groups represent different things. The original Brithini are part of the Arkat-Hrestol stories, and there they serve related functions- Arkat's spiritual journey begins with his departure from the Brithini, and Hrestol speaks against the Brithini and offers a mystical understanding of their religion. The Brithini, who believe in eternal life if you remain obedient to a set of rigid laws and never step outside them or inquire beyond them, are a fantasy representation of American mainline Protestant Christianity in the 20th century, exaggerated to the point where they don't really believe in God. Arkat's journey is thus from spiritually dead Christianity to mystical and spiritual Christianity to paganism, but he finds enlightenment and peace when he integrates all of them together. (Pause for a moment and note that Greg Stafford called himself an Arkati and also had a personal journey from what I am told was a fairly repressed upbringing to a wild, earthy pagan life.) Mostali, to contrast, are simply a representation of mechanization and the act of making and manufacturing, with, like their counterpart elves and trolls, strong potential to run amok. Because of these metaphors, the Brithini and other Malkioni have a difficult relationship with the dwarves, one which goes back and forth, because of the neopagan perspective that Christianity robs the world of spiritual life and renders it dead matter, but also the recognition that Christianity, too, is suspicious of mechanization and the mechanical world. Oh, right, this is the dumb theory thread. So here's my dumb theory: Brithini temples to the Invisible God are made very simply, with barely any internal decoration, with sides made of clapboarded wood, covered with a simple coat of whitewash and little else. There are potlucks twice per season.

The creation of the Orlanth Rex cult was a necessary but not sufficient precondition for the emergence of the Red Goddess.

Based on Cults of Terror, yes, Storm Bulls are encouraged to be murderous unthinking fanatics and it's only enlightenment/illumination which grants them the capacity to not be that. Which is interestingly like how Chaotic entities and their subjective perspective are described.

Brangbane is an adaptation of the Bluebeard legend, so giving him a Lunar wife would make her one of his victims and present Lunars as capable of being victimized. I'm not sure that's the road most players are interested in going down.

They're both characteristic shapes animals have. They even share some key relationships in their physical structure. If you're looking for a classification system divorced from our primary reality, it doesn't work, but Glorantha has never been so divorced and it's not worth acting as if it is.

I think that, on the contrary, form and shape are very closely related. Plants are things that look plantlike, beasts are things that look animal-like, spirits are things that you can't see, chaos things have inconsistent and mutable, even chaotic shapes. Dragonewt in this scheme probably refers to things that look "like dinosaurs", or "like dragons"- dragonewts, dinosaurs, magisaurs, wyrms, etc. Which would almost seem to make Dragon redundant, unless it's pointing to something that's not contingent on specific shapes.