Leingod

Unless you're describing how it was in earlier editions (I never really bothered reading the mechanical stuff in those, since HQG was already out by then), that's actually more in line with what HeroQuest called "natural" or "basic" magic. As HeroQuest: Glorantha describes: Meanwhile, becoming an initiate allows you to use whatever Runes you share with your god as a normal ability, and to do blatantly magical things, just so long as it's something in line with your god's deeds and abilities.

For my part, I came into Glorantha through HeroQuest (well, King of Dragon Pass and then HQ), and I've never really gotten deep into the RuneQuest mechanics, including the ones regarding cults and worship. So, I tend to just go with what seemed to be the case in the stuff I was introduced to the setting through, which is that most every free Sartarite (or Praxian) is an initiate into a rune cult or spirit tradition, though it strikes me as a good bet that "stickpickers" of all stripes (that is, the not-enslaved but very marginal folk, whether that be a charcoal-burner in Sartar or a day laborer in Pavis) are usually stuck as laity because they can't really afford to give 10% of their time and income to a cult. I personally got the feeling that that's exactly why the "Little Sister" cults exist. They provide extremely limited forms of the Seven Mothers' magic, but don't require any Kindling rites and each one still provides useful and practical magic for a given relatively high-status profession (namely soldiers, healers, clerks, and temple attendants), so for a modestly ambitious Heartlander looking to move up in the world rather than seek deep spiritual truths or entrance into the echelons of the great and powerful, they're a less demanding route toward reasonable upward mobility in service to the empire.

It's funny, that kind of reminds me of how the old Hero Wars and Sartar Rising stuff portrayed Valind and his place in the Great Winter. In Storm Tribe, Valind's write-up states that the Heortlings see him as the "bad child" of the Thunder Brothers; he's that annoying punk no one likes (apparently "valindi" is often used synonymously with "entitled whiner"), but he is still family in the end, so you try to put up with him. And in the context of the Great Winter, that's potentially where Valind finally makes himself useful (again, to the Heortling perspective), because Valind doesn't just give his followers powers to summon cold and snow, he gives them the power to survive or even fight off the powers of winter. They wouldn't exactly be making pockets of springtime or anything, but turning aside a blizzard or being able to go out and hunt or scavenge food while everyone else is shivering by the fire is still a lot. This makes them very helpful at this time, but (again, old material, might not be canon anymore) that also means the Lunars target them. Which leads to an interesting situation where the Valindi - who are traditionally consigned to the margins, if not living as actual outlaws - might suddenly both need to rely on a wider community to survive Lunar manhunts, and be treated with a lot more respect by people whose survival they helped ensure.

As stated, Samastina and Inkarne are definitely the two biggest ones, operating at the same level as Broyan/Kallyr/Argrath/etc. Other, somewhat more low-key Ernaldan heroines also exist, either doing their own thing at a smaller but still very significant scale (which is probably where the likes of Entarios and her daughter Ernalsulva will be) or being one of the named companions to any of the biggest players, like Ernaldesta the Vigorous is to Kallyr.

I don't recall ever reading anything about whoever would be responsible for that, actually, though it certainly makes sense to be a thing. It might be one of those roles in myth that has a different person filling it with each myth (and version thereof), so that you might have to talk your way in past Rigsdal in one Heroquest and Vinga in another. And, if we take that as the case, it's also a pretty natural place to put in a slight deviation from the myth that often crops up in Heroquests, by just changing who's guarding the door, with the easiest or best means of getting past them being different from what they might have planned for.

Bringing back the talk of Tatius and his choice of location for the temple, the Sartar Companion has this to say on page 80: The "Broken Ring" is a Dara Happan name for the Ring of Orlanth (also called the Broken Planet); it was Umatum, which was broken by Shargash, and it corrupts and pollutes the perfect order of the Sky. So if we go with this, it's Tatius trying to bring back a "fixed" Orlanth/Umath/Rebellus Terminus who will fit neatly into some Lunar or Solar notion of a "perfect sky" to put his own family on top politically. Which probably helps explain why bringing back the Ring of Orlanth with its Three New Stars into the middle of this was such a serious disruption of his plans even before a dragon rose up and ate everyone.

To clarify, the "Evil Uncles" (who seem to be Lodril, Magasta, Flamal, etc.) cast the sons of Umath into different pits, hoping the trials in there will take care of the young godlings before they could come into their own and become as powerful and threatening as Umath. The other four (Orlanth, Humakt, Vadrus, and Urox) all managed to overcome the dangers of their respective pits (and, in so doing, each came into his own as a full-fledged god, exactly as the uncles had feared), but "the other brother" fails in the Sex Pit. Orlanth leads his brothers in getting him out of there and do their best to heal him of the damage.

Pavis: Gateway to Adventure gives the name of this clan as the "Green Stripe Morokanth" on page 124.

Ah, my mistake.

Elves probably use the name "Arstola Forest," and it's humans who call it the Stinking Forest because it's home to the Ivory Plinth, trolls, and Snakepipe Hollow.

I don't remember where exactly it was from, but I remember reading somewhere something to the effect of, "We often talk about these heroes as though they were these lone figures doing everything themselves, but pretty much every hero has an entourage of companions who do a lot of the legwork that later gets credited to the hero, who tends to overshadow everyone." The companions of Argrath, Harrek, Jar-eel, Kallyr, etc., etc., have probably been responsible for a lot of deeds (or at least helped in a lot of deeds) that don't actually get remarked upon when people recount their sagas. And what's more, if Argrath was a fairly hands-off guy who mostly sent warlocks and companions and mercenaries to do a lot of the actual dirty work until something sufficiently important comes up for him to bother his enlightened self with, it wouldn't really be flattering from an Orlanthi perspective to actually portray him faithfully as such in a saga meant to aggrandize him. The Orlanthi love their active, dynamic warrior-priest-kings, after all. Heck, the Dara Happans consider an emperor who sits around on a throne all day barking orders as an ideal and even they sometimes do this. You'll sometimes see records saying "the emperor did this" and "the emperor fought here" when what's probably more likely to have happened is "the emperor commanded this to be done" and "the emperor sent out a general to fight here."

The problem with that theory is that Sartar's descendants all had a pretty decent number of kids. Of the ones who weren't assassinated young, the majority of them had 2-4 kids. Sartar's bloodline has never had any serious problem with fertility, they've mostly had problems with getting assassinated by Lunars (and sometimes Esrolians).

You mean, a proper description of the actual rites? If so, I'm not really sure. It is kind of alluded to in stuff like the Guide; Hon-Eel is said to have discovered maize, she's strongly associated with imagery of human sacrifice alongside agriculture almost everywhere she appears in there (being depicted with a bloody sickle while dancing triumphantly over a man's corpse, for instance), she's stated to have rediscovered old Naverian rites of human sacrifice, so it's at least still there, but otherwise I don't know of any books that are still canonical that actually lay out the Maize Rites of Hon-Eel.

That's a very fair point. Most people aren't going to see these places and be able to get any kind of accurate idea of how many people live in the country versus the city; that's why a census exists, after all. It might be that Sartar keeps getting characterized as a rural backwood despite the relatively large urban population simply because it's sandwiched between Tarsh and the Holy Country, which both have a much larger overall population and have cities that are much larger and more built-up. So the popular perception of Sartar at least still makes plenty of sense. Especially since, Boldhome excepted, Sartar's cities are pretty humble-looking.

Exactly, thank you. In fact, a larger proportion of the overall population are city-dwellers in Sartar than in much of the Lunar Heartlands, such as First Blessed (whose proportion of city-dwellers to rural folk is a little over 1 in 6), and is only really beaten out by Silver Shadow (just under 1 in 4). And unlike the Lunars, the Sartarites aren't using blood-soaked corn rites and winter-blocking Heroquests to support those kinds of numbers. So even by Gloranthan standards, Sartar seems to have a lot of its overall population dwelling in cities for a polity that's consistently characterized by people both within and outside of it as a backwoods, "barbarian" kingdom inhabited by quarrelsome hillfolk, which you wouldn't think would be able to support a city of 11,000 that doesn't even have a river running through it (meaning all goods shipped in have to come in overland).

Sartar is usually described as a pretty rural place, with a relatively small urban population; Sartar: King of Heroes, for example, claims less than 10% of its populace live in cities. But the numbers seen in the Guide to Glorantha don't seem to line up with that portrayal, and certainly not with that proportion. Those numbers are 25,000 urban and 100,000 rural, which would mean that a full 20% of Sartar's population are living in cities, a much greater proportion than many places that are described as being very urban. Now, part of this is because it's counting the 5,000 people living where they work at the New Lunar Temple, but even if we throw that one out, that's still 20,000 and 100,000, meaning 1/6th of Sartar's populace is urban, and that's still a lot for a supposedly rural "barbarian" kingdom, and that in turn raises the question of how you could support that many. And most of that is down to Boldhome having a population of 11,000. So, is the answer that Boldhome is just dangerously, unsustainably overpopulated? Has its population swelled by thousands over the course of the Lunar Occupation, for example? How are they keeping that many people fed, when the city is built into a mountain and there's really only so much you could possibly buy or take as tribute/taxes from the surrounding tribes?

It's well known that in Pavis, Lunar soldiers and administrators call a crappy posting no one wants that's used as a punishment is called a "Corflu job." What many don't know is that this is merely one end-point of a virtual road network of similar colloquialisms, spreading out from the Heartlands. In Sartar, such a posting is a "Pavis job," while in Tarsh it's a "Sartar job." Meanwhile, over in Sylila, the ending of a similar network is that the Lunars there call that kind of punishment an "Elkoi job." And with each new conquest the Lunars make, a new term for a crappy posting that no one in a different area wants is born, as the chain gets another link. And thus, the true recipe for the Lunar Empire's success has nothing to do with its magics or its administration, but that, whether by sheer brilliance or happy accident, the Lunars have created happiness and contentment among their populace by making a situation where almost all of them can look over somewhere else and say, "Whew, glad I don't have to live there. I better be a good citizen to make sure it stays that way."

The Guide to Glorantha says there are about 10,000 of them; much smaller than any major tribe, but the same as the Pol-Joni, and definitely larger than several of the remaining independents, since those are numbered at 30,000 altogether.

I wouldn't say they're considered "normal" Praxians, but I do get the impression that they're generally (if grudgingly) accepted as Praxians, and an independent tribe in their own right. Same with the Agimori and (maybe emphasis on grudgingly accepted) the Basmoli.

Definitely. Stuff in The Eleven Lights like the boxed text "Around the World" (pg. 143) regarding the Three New Stars makes that pretty unambiguous: Which is good, because it means a campaign set in Ralios or Talastar or wherever isn't consigned to just passively watching stars disappear and reappear from the sky, having a metaplot that isn't relevant just kind of happening somewhere a long way away. Every campaign can have its own distinct explanation for what the disappearance of Orlanth's Ring means and what the consequences are, and every campaign can have its own version of the Heroquest that puts the Three New Stars and later the full Eleven Lights back up in the sky. It's just up to GMs (and/or writers or even players) to think up what those might be.

On the other hand, though, she joined up with a mercenary company and left home right after coming of age and seemingly hasn't come back to this parts of Sartar since. If she'd remained in the tribe, or even if she was just in semi-regular contact with it, that'd be one thing, but if no one in Apple Lane has seen her since she was just out of childhood (which in itself doesn't really suggest she was all that attached to the place or its people), then in many ways, the woman who suddenly arrives demanding her "birthright" is virtually a stranger to many of the people living there now, even the ones who grew up with her.

That's interesting. Personally, I tend to think of Tatius as being closer to Admiral Tarkin, with the Reaching Moon Temple as his very own Death Star.

Her claim is pretty nonsensical as far as standard Sartarite property/inheritance laws go (I guess all that time abroad has given her some un-Sartarite notions about what being someone's daughter makes you rightfully heiress to), and I think that's probably the point; it's a case that would be laughed out of the tribal court (unless the tribal king was unhappy with their thane for whatever reason), so Raveena is either going to try to gain allies in the tribe to strengthen her case (likely out of whatever enemies or rivals the thane makes), or try to get outside help, maybe even from Lunars looking to destabilize Leika's still-fragile reign. Or you could just have it be some absurd claim no one takes seriously and laugh her right out for it, or maybe just settle it with a duel.

Except (in addition to @Jeff's point) even in HQG, Disorder is listed as one of the "Opposed Runes" of Issaries (along with Stasis and, of course, Chaos), and the Communication Rune is still explained as being a combination of Harmony and Motion (but for some reason instead of just having both those components lumped into its powers, Issaries gets Communication and Motion). Your theoretical smuggler would probably be better-suited to having Illusion than Disorder, I think.

Only because the Red Emperor blocked them from one-upping it during the Dragonewts Dream (at least if you believe that repopulating Peloria with dragonewts really was part of the plan).