womble

Aye, the Underworld associations match with "sending their youngsters down Magasta's Pool to the Underworld in a Cradle" thing.

Aye. Divination: "Dear Mother of our Kind, why are we having these stunted weakling babies so often now? And can we do anything about it?"

Isn't that just the stupid 'small' ones that adventurers might be expected to run into terrorising a locality? I thought the Giants who made Cradles and put their babes in 'em were a bit less 'stereotypical grind-your-bones'...

Longspears or pikes used two-handed while a-horse. There is no functional difference between a Dory, a Sarissa, a Xyston and a medieval combat lance. But the Companions of Alexander and the Achaemenid Persian Kataphraktoi never couched their lances.

DI is more a desperation measure than a tactic. It's not reliable unless you're a Rune Lord (specifically), and it's potentially very costly. I'm sure other RQ-2/3 players have stories of the successful DI that mostly crippled a character because of the low remaining POW... Another difference between previous RQs and RQG is the duration of Spirit Magic. It's dropped from 5 minutes (25 or 30 rounds) to 2 (10 rounds), which makes the long buff sequence and pre-combat maneuver RHW describes for Korgo and his chums impracticable. Something that I think is a key difference between most other games and RQG is that, while magic is available (and to some extent expected) for everyone to cast, it isn't 100% reliable. And it takes time. I'd be very wary of handwaving this away, either for PCs or NPCs. It's part of the 'tactical environment' that sometimes your 'go-to buff' needs a couple of goes to get cast, and low-POW creatures like Trollkin are inherently worse at Spirit Magic than your average human.

You're neglecting the Kontos and xyston, weapons from an earlier period than you've mostly alluded to, and wielded in ways other than overarm and couched. And the light lances of the Napoleonic era which could be used single-handedly underarm. Using the lance two-handed probably required at least as much training as learning to use it couched, and, given stirrups, would probably be an obsolete approach. Using the lance underarm wouldn't be any harder, maybe even easier than using it overarm. I'd've thought that 'systematic' training would cover both uses.

If you're looking for 'mean tricks' you can use in RQG: Multispell is very good. Case 1: Disruption. RQG Multispelled disruptions stack. So a Multispell-2 lets you cast a 3d3 POW v POW armour-ignoring attack as fast as you can manage the finger-wiggling. For 15 minutes, or as long as you have MP to fuel your finger, whichever is shorter. Case2: Multimissile. Having 2 or 3 people shooting Multimissile-4-ed projectile weapons in the same round without them all having to know Multimissile-4 is really handy. Case3: Buff spells. You want to be able to put up Vigour, Strength, Coordination, Protection, Bladesharp, Parry and Mobility, on yourself and Protection and Mobility on your mount... Good luck finding a spare round to actually do any fighting... With Multispell-2 you can achieve that in 3 rounds and have 7 rounds before you have to start refreshing. Or if your party is working as a team, they can each know one big buff spell, and mutually cast it on everyone, so if you have 3 folk: one knows Prot-4, the other knows Bladesharp-4 and the last knows Parry-4, if they all Multispell-2, the 'line' has all those spells by around SR 5-7 or so of round two. Extension has its uses You have to think about when you use it, because it commits RP for its duration (not in the RAW; an official clarification). But with many major Cults getting weekly RP refreshes, by the time the character has enough RP to think about having permanent effects up, using Extension-3 for a 'key Rune spell' to make it last a week is worth considering. Multispell is a good candidate, for a MP-rich character. Saves a round at the beginning of every serious fight, and means you can always fire up a location-busting stacked Disruption. The Stat-doubling spells are also pretty attractive for this approach. Focused fire can be devastating Even if none of them crit, the Encumbrance rules in RQG mean not everyone will be in arrow-stopping armour. A targeted rain of arrows or sling stones has a good chance of ruining the day of anyone in lighter armour. A targeted rain of Speedarted missiles much more so. Cooperative enchantments RQG allows people other than the caster of an Enchantment to contribute their POW towards that enchantment. An organised group with either a Rune Master or some Spirit Magic- or Sorcery-based Enchantments can produce very large MP stores quite rapidly. With "must be a member of our unit/Cult/Clan/[whatever]" user limitations (which are not so onerous when you're putting 10 points into something as they are if you're only putting in the one 'for effect') so you're not handing the party the ability to store a season's worth of MP... Warding For defense, Warding is amazing. If you've got an opening to defend, don't cast the Warding as an "area you stand in", cast it as a narrow block across the opening. Then any attackers take damage on the way in, and on the way out (when you shield bash them back, or they decide it's time to leave). And they last as long as the stakes are there, so if you're defending a place you're staying in, and you and your buddies (it's an Enchantment, which is, I believe, new, and something I'd missed before because it's not an Enchantment that's mentioned in the Magic chapter, and it's the only Rune Magic Enchantment that's both Common and not restricted to Rune Masters) can spare the POW, you can set some nasty traps. Bless Pregnancy A bit Dynastic, this one, but that's one of the game features/facets that RQG is bringing to the fore: Knowing an imposing (i.e. high CHA), mature (i.e. has a CHA full of RP) Ernalda Initiate or Priestess is really good for your children. If you're the Tribal Chief, you probably had 18 or more points added to your stat rolls before you were even born. As a GM, natch, you don't need to work stats up from the ground, but this is a plausible rationale for your Big Bads to have imposing statblocks, even when they're not a Big Bad yet (or, at least, the party haven't realised that the Chieftain's progeny that they grew up with will be the Big Bad for their kids). Healing Don't forget that nearly all Initiates have access to Heal Wound. Keeping 'em all stomped down when you're outnumbered becomes even harder if they keep standing each other up.

And the real answer to this in 'current' RAW of RQG, is "No." It has been officially clarified that the rulebook's mention of Detection spells as being something Countermagic protects from is erroneous. You need Detection Blank or something to stay under that particular radar. However, I feel that Illumination would protect a Cult infiltrator to some extent. Detect Enemies is a pretty personal spell. I don't think it would detect someone who only had malicious intent towards an institution that was precious to the caster, and it would only detect such intent on a person other than the caster, in the case of Find Enemy. So unless the infiltrator was a bit indiscriminate in their attentions, they'd pass the test: "I bear no wish to harm the examiner, and learning cult secrets for my use doesn't actually cause them any harm." I see Illuminates as being very practised at compartmentalising their motives and attitudes, and that's a skill spies also need. RQG gives Find Enemy to a lot more cults than that, too. So 'being an enemy' of the Cult you're trying to join would be a stopper for most Cults, if detect spells were that capable. They'd also need a Heroquesting gift or something to be able to do that without the examiner noticing.

I think the best advice I've heard is to feel your way into the thing. There are so many variables: your 100% broadsworder might be casting Shield-2 and wearing 5 points of armour, which means your D8 sling bullets are going to bounce, even (most of the time) with Speedart, unless they crit. Start with 'some' small opponents, and ramp the number up if the early fight seems 'too easy'. Be aware that a big damage bonus can make a combat very swingy if you've only got a small party. The larger the party, the more the PCs can afford to have someone taken out of action by a lucky Special/Crit, and the more chance they have of getting them back into the fight (especially with Heal Wound readily available). I don't see any harm in making early combats near-walkovers; the PCs are supposed to be exceptional. Push the numbers and skill of the opposition up a bit at a time, so the PCs get used to not having things all their own way gradually. However, be aware that RQ combat can turn deadly very quickly: the first physical fight my lot got into was against a half dozen (really rubbish) Trollkin, and the first thing that happened to one of the PCs was that her arm got taken out by a slingstone. The fight was over by the time she patched herself up, but it was hopefully a lesson learned...

So you stab someone with a 300mm spear head. It goes all the way in. Then it goes all the way through. Leaving a wound track the depth of the struck portion of the body, and the width of the spear blade. Or you stab someone with a 1200m greatsword blade which goes all the way through, leaving a track the same depth, but wider and that does less damage? Also, spears easily get as wide as some greatsword blades, especially the width of the sword at the same distance from the point as the cutting edges of a spearhead extend. And fighting spears tend not to have long, fine points because such features deform on interaction with shields and armour. Hunting spears have different profiles.

You keep saying that. It ain't necessarily so. The Talhoffer style longsword has a pretty much needle point. The japanese Yari (and jo-spear) have approximately 90 degree points (with the edges that make up the point honed to sharpness. A spear is 'just' a dagger on a long stick. It has no special pointiness not available to other bladed weapons.

You are making unsupported assumptions about the pointiness or otherwise of a greatsword in Glorantha. As am I. Those assumptions differ. Such variety is the spice of Glorantha.

Yeah. It doesn't feel too bad when the higher skill isn't high enough to reduce the lower below 5%. 50 v 200 with the mook ending up with 5/1/1% (hit/special/crit)and the master having 95/20/5% seems very wrong. Hence my preference for capping the reduction at "whatever would reduce the lower skill to 5%. Which would make the skills 5/1/1% vs 155/31/8%.

But greatsword is a thing in Glorantha, and you don't, as you say, have any examples of (supposedly) "in-period" Gloranthan peasant-choppers to assert that they wouldn't have points (since a good proportion of the actual combat examples of weapons of this kind do). I'd argue that I'd rather be stabbed by either a spear or a shortsword than a two-hander. The spear has a limited cutting edge. You can use it in ways that maximise that cutting, but if you hit hard armour, or even ribs, those ways may well result in skating across the surface resulting in no (if skittering across armour) or superficial (if glancing off a rib) damage. The shortsword has more cutting edge and is probably broader than the spear, making a wider wound track that can be expanded more. The greatsword just keeps on cutting as you push it through the target, and is broader yet than the shortsword. You can eviscerate someone and let their lifeblood pour out of a severed inferior aorta with a narrowish 6" blade, in one smooth motion. But that takes skill and, for a normal human, would be close to impossible against someone with even middling body armour because you'd have to punch the armour (feasible against scale or lesser), or find a hole (vs any type), then cut the armour as you extend the wound track in the target (difficult but not impossible against boiled leather if your blade is sharp and both you and it are strong; anything heavier would preclude). But that sort of wound modelling is way past what RQ has ever attempted to simulate. Yes, a greatsword should probably do less damage when used to impale than it does when swung, but that should, IMO, probably be more than spear or shortsword.

I don't really think it needs 'handling'. It's a general framework/suggestion/average. If you want to be a stickler, it's probably best to count the actual days-away that the adventurers 'steal' from their general livelihoods and other responsibilities, to see whether their income etc. should be affected per 'three week' out of the loop. So the 2nd 2 adventures in the GM pack probably don't exceed the three weeks away, in aggregate. Also, I'd probably be more lenient on income penalties if the time away were, for example, three weeks spaced out through the season (and not contiguous across a season-break, either) than if the adventurer took three weeks on the trot away from their responsibilities. I'd also be relaxed about the PC's cult duty time counting as additional "away time" permitted from life-management... That gives another 5 days' or so grace.

'Cept you're jamming it into the other guy using both hands. So either a big base weapon damage or an increased DB for 2-handed use ought to apply. And if you get an Impale, both, since you've got a much longer, and probably broader wound track development tool.

Parthenogenesis, or other forms of asexual reproduction like vegetative, or binary fission (RW) limit variation, with the offspring being 'clones' of the single parent. Perhaps the advent of the Mythic concept of 'fatherhood' allowed more differences to develop between things in an analogous fashion to the advent of sexual reproduction in the real world?

Given that the evidence for Bronze greatswords in the real world is sparse, they can have points or not, as your game desires. Steel two-handed swords often did have working points, as ChalkLine says. The classic Landschnecht's zweihander, the claymore and the longsword of Talhoffer fame all could stab you up. Similarly, there are many patterns of hand-and-a-half sword which had effective thrusting points; hardly surprising when they're cousins to the Estoc which was primarily a thrusting weapon. Having a point is a really useful attribute in a long weapon. It would be rational for the 'bronze-that's-not-really-bronze' greatswords of Glorantha to have them, if only for the purposes of keeping the target at range, and being able to work in a constrained environment.

That thread's hardly a monoculture of discussion, though, is it? New shinies are cropping up all the time for 'us' to offer our suggestions and praise for, and, occasionally nitpick with each other... And it's actually worth the time, rather than being largely navel-gazing, since something beautiful may be born to the world from it, unlike a discussion about stirrups where the answer is: "There can be stirrups if you(r GM) want(s) them."

Thanks for the information about Orgovale. She features in the Adventure book....

It is perhaps worth noting that Clearwine, in RQG's Adventure Pack, is described as being a structure built by a minor Goddess in the Lesser Darkness, inhabited by humans in the First Age, and taken over by EWF in the second. Colymar started cleansing the Draconic taint in 1325, apparently, and moved in once redecoration was complete...

I think you just have to carefully tease out which Associated Cults have Holy Days coming up for each of the Cults your PCs are members of. Vishi Dunn is a bit of an issue because he's "a fish out of water" and Daka Fal doesn't have many Associated Cults to share worship with, especially in Sartar; Yinkin and Odayala don't get weekly holy days. You could change this, probably, by introducing some Orlanthi spirit-talkers/Ancestor Worshippers or a subcult of some sort in that vein [I'm racking my brain for the name of the folk that do this... it's currently filed under unavailable; this will probably change as soon as I hit 'submit reply']; it'd at least introduce a few more Seasonal holy days Vishi could lig offof. One thing that isn't clear to me about Worship is whether a Priest is necessary to hold a Worship ceremony at all. While (almost every) Initiate can cast Sanctify, there are non-worship uses for that spell, so it doesn't necessarily mean they can do Worshipping without a Priest, RAW. IMG, Initiates can undertake Worship without a Priest to lead them. They need to have an RP left to cast the Sanctify, or to be able to use an established holy place, like a wayside shrine (with or without keeper) or the Temple to All Gods in Apple Lane. I also apply some risk of error and/or failure if the Initiate undertakes too-deep a Ritual: things went badly wrong when an Ernalda Initiate tried to undertake the High Holy Day celebrations in 1625 while on the road... But "weekly prayers" just need the one point of Sanctify to be possible and mostly safe.

I think my disagreement is that you're applying the conditions to the Spirit rather than the Enchantment. Specifically, you can't command the spirit to take any action except by releasing it (unless you whack a Control/Command/Dominate on it beforehand), and Target conditions have to be 'interpretable' by the Enchantment not the Spirit. All a target condition can do is make a target valid or invalid, and for my money, that doesn't count as releasing the spirit, for the purposes of "you get to give it one command, then it clears off" nature of the Binding: if the Binding suddenly "stops working" (on the bound spirit) because the enchantment detects it's "bathed in the viscera of an enemy", the Spirit is simply no longer bound (so the inherent one-command function of the binding doesn't apply either) and can do as it wishes, including disappearing whence it was originally summoned, if it wants. Regarding the specific condition: 'blood shed' would be fulfilled by any damage inflicted by an edged weapon beyond armour, for starters. Attack conditions cause spells to be cast. So you could have a matrix of Command Spirit, linked to a POW store to fuel it with an attack condition of 'anyone struck by the weapon', or even, if you're feeling liberal 'anyone impaled by the weapon', but that just casts Command Spirit on the subject of the attack condition (which can't be the Spirit, else the spell would get cast on it as soon as it was put in the Enchantment). I don't see Attack Conditions on Enchantments as "release the contained spirit if the Enchantment is stuck in someone's innards" as valid and within the scope of what a Condition can determine. Replace "stuck in someone's innards" with "bled on" or "touched", and you've still got to get past the fact Attack Conditions are for casting spells, not controlling them; that's the obvious design intent (to cast Disruption/Sever Spirit on someone who touches something you don't want touched) and going beyond that is permitting exploit in the purest senses of the words. In the end it's your game, and if you want the players to have it, you're going to let them. There are plenty of reasons to disallow it within the Enchantment rules; they're not designed, and I'd imagine, not meant, to generate sophisticated decision-chain effects containing intent beyond when and who along pretty coarse delineations. Unless you decide otherwise.

As does RQG sorcery. A calendar is also important to track Rune Point potential in RQG and some Rune Point shenaningans. But not breaking training and working time down below the week level does help give the atmosphere of time passing, I feel.

RAW, I think they'd have no chance for DI. I'd possibly say they can lose the ability to replenish one of their actual RP that they've spent, rather than knocking off POW... It's not much of a difference, but it is slightly less of a commitment. Especially if they're a Priest.