Leingod

Well, keeping in mind I couldn't buy and read everything, of what I actually have, my four would be: Valley of Plenty Six Seasons in Sartar The Dregs of Clearwine Secrets of Dorastor

I tend to err on the side of the Dragonrise being unintentional; clearly there was some conscious attempt to ally with draconic powers, and obviously they intended to disrupt the ceremony at the new Reaching Moon Temple, but much of the evidence seems to weigh on the side of an actual dragon coming out and eating everybody there very much not being a part of the plan. I think it's very fitting for the opening moves of the Hero Wars to be first the Lunars (with the Great Winter) and then the Orlanthi messing with powers beyond their reckoning to dramatically unexpected results with far-reaching consequences, with even more to come. And honestly, I think it would also be very fitting as a prelude of what's to come if we believe that Argrath had nothing to do with the Dragonrise at all but would (and eventually will) gladly claim the credit once the actual architects are either safely dead or on his side and seeing things his way.

Well, as I mentioned with Lord Green Tongue, it appears new ones do appear within Time. I was just pointing out that the presence of eggs in themselves aren't really proof either way. And if there are cases like that, at least part of the time I'd imagine it's a matter of the way the Dragonewt hierarchy and division of duties goes that some of them are going to get jobs heaped on them that make advancement difficult or a longer path. In that same encounter in the Sartar Companion, Lord Green Tongue and his entourage speak to the party solely through a crested dragonewt (called "Speaker to Lies") whose mouth has been mutilated to let him speak human languages. If the tailed priests and other higher-ranking Dragonewts are regularly shoving the jobs most likely to arrest your spiritual development onto lower-ranking members like him, it would make more sense that you'd have cases where it takes a long time to advance. Though it may be a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario where your punishment for not making enough progress is to get the duties that are more likely to threaten your progress. EDIT: Plus, it could shed some new light on where the "mystical pyramid scheme" setup the EWF devolved into might have actually originated from. Maybe they didn't so much "stray from" the draconic path as they took to it a little too well, if you catch my meaning...

Well, IIRC Dragonewts don't exactly hatch out of an egg, or if they do the egg ends up repairing itself, because a Dragonewt re-hatches out of that same exact egg each time they die and come back. So the presence of eggs doesn't itself imply new Dragonewts, since even the oldest Dragonewt's egg is still intact back at home.

I seem to have the impression that it's been suggested if not stated somewhere - I might just be thinking of a thread here - that it's a matter of speculation whether any new Dragonewts have been born/created within Time. I think it was in the context of suggesting that, if there haven't, the ones around now must be the bad eggs who are taking longer? Anyway, page 108 of the Sartar Companion has a line that suggests that there actually have; it details an encounter with a group of Dragonewts led by a tailed priest called Lord Green Tongue, and says that his "first incarnation" was in 1450. So, not only are there new Dragonewts, at least one of them was able to reach the third stage of the Dragonewt spiritual journey/life cycle in "just" 170 years or so (assuming he only attained this stage recently). That said, I'm aware there's stuff in the HQG line that's been superseded by newer stuff. Does anyone know of any reference elsewhere about the question of whether or not Dragonewts have been born within Time?

On the other hand, I'm sure a lot of Heortlings have Vingkot as a blood ancestor if they go back far enough. It might be less a mythical adoption and more of a mythical recognition of being Vingkot's descendant. Which is functionally the same thing, admittedly.

Personally, I prefer to just have those unique/personal Runes as more indicators of specific gods/spirits/etc. and their nature/powers than as an actual mechanical thing. That is, they exist in-universe, but aren't part of the mechanics. A worshiper of Issaries doesn't have a special Rune that only merchant gods get for some reason, they just have Movement and Harmony, and the Communication/Issaries Rune is just iconography that specifies that this is Issaries or some other god of communication, trade, and travel. For HQG, that means my own personal approach as a GM would be to switch out those personal Runes with a "basic" Rune, possibly two. Issaries gets Harmony and Motion, and the powers assigned to his Communication Rune I assign to whichever makes the most sense. Similarly, the Eternal Battle Rune of Storm Bull becomes Disorder, the Yinkin Rune is split into Movement and Beast, etc.

I could see that as being one station of a myth, something like "The First Thief Ring," where Lanbril has to put together a crew to do a big heist, with Eurmal being that one unhinged guy in the heist movie who almost inevitably causes more trouble than he's worth (think Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs). Perhaps Lanbril cultists could use it as a Heroquest to try to forge connections or even establish a leadership position in a criminal underworld that has other "thief gods" in it.

To reiterate the point that a.) there never has to be just one "patron god of x" or "god worshiped by y," and b.) that these gods, within a specific pursuit or purview, often differ mostly in their approach or reasons for doing a thing, or the skills they use to do them, I'll point out we're missing yet another "thief" god that might be found in Pavis, albeit obviously rarer than Orlanth or Lanbril (but probably more common than Eurmal): Yinkin. A god whose magic is often used to do things like climb or leap over obstacles, to move without sound, to see in the dark, to find things that are hidden, to notice and avoid threats? Whose followers are often stereotyped as selfish, full of guile, and overly interested in creature comforts and pleasure? It's easy to see how many Yinkini that find themselves in an urban environment would probably naturally gravitate toward thievery. The jokes about cat burglars write themselves, and I'm sure some old RuneQuest book somewhere has made at least a few already, if not plenty of peoples' campaigns. I tend to think of the followers of these various "thief gods" as each having their own broad archetype, which of course individuals can and will deviate from but which work well as loose categories for different kinds of thieves these gods most embody. Lanbril I tend to see as a kind of "artisan thief;" Lanbril's cult is unique among the ones being discussed in the variety of clever tools and tricks they have up their sleeves, fitting with Lanbril's semi-mortal origins, his mythos of overcoming nominally superior gods through his great cunning, and the aforementioned guild-like feeling of how his cult tends to organize. Lanbril thieves are the professionals, reliant more on honed skill, careful planning, and the tricks of the trade than powerful divine magic to do their job, and while they take pride in their work, most of them think it'd be stupid to bandy that about outside their own circles. That contrasts with, as noted above, Yinkin, a god whose followers that engage in thievery do rely on skill, but not on tools, and who are well-suited to playing the "charming rogue" role to the hilt with their noted talents in seduction and winning smiles. You'll see similar distinctions drawn in the kinds of thievery followers of Orlanth and Eurmal are most likely to get up to, and how they'll often go about it.

The words "Bright" and "Blight" sound even more similar in the dialect spoken by the Sartarites than they do in English. Clever poets and singers (of which the Sartarites have many) make full use of this and other similar features of their language and pronunciation to call Tatius bad names in a way that goes over the heads of anyone who isn't actually fluent in it. Many of these - though the ones coming up with them don't know it - were also used in the days of Nysalor. This idea comes from me misreading Tatius the Bright as Tatius the Blight the first time I came across him, and then deciding that it's exactly the kind of swap a rebellious Sartarite would make.

I haven't really been able to find much about what spirits and spirit societies exist among the Old Pavisites other than ancestor worship for guys like Mani, Opili and Balastor (and also Black Fang). Presumably whatever founder spirit exists for the Pavis Survivors/Zebra Tribe, too. Is there any other information on minor spirits/spirit cults you would find among the Pavisites?

For the Sartarites, in a lot of cases it seems to stem at least partly from Hendriki descent or influence. And in their case, it probably comes out of their relationship with the Larnstings and their focus on Orlanth's powers of freedom in particular in their history and myths.

As I've said before, the Windstop is one of those things that pretty much ends any debate for me on whether the Lunars can be considered "the good guys" that you should root for. If the Windstop was intentional, then it was a deliberate attempt at outright genocide that killed tens of thousands, and the Lunars are indeed every bit the vicious, bloody-handed tyrants the Sartarites have made them out to be. If the Windstop wasn't intentional, then it was proof that the Lunars aren't nearly as smart as they're convinced they are, and they got tens of thousands killed through sheer hubris. Either way, it's pretty obvious they need to be stopped one way or another. Not that I personally really needed convincing. The idea that the violent, expansionist empire who brutally conquered Sartar can convincingly be portrayed as somehow more in the right than the Sartarites they conquered is a pretty hard sell, personally (and no, "But the Sartarites can be real jerks too" is not a convincing rebuttal, even though it's true). At best, the Lunars can be quite convincingly portrayed as misguided, deluded imperialists who honestly think they're making the lives of the people they've violently conquered (and in many cases dispossessed and enslaved) better, because they've built roads and fund charities and proselytize the Lunar Way and all that. Which goes right back to the stuff about hubris and not being as smart (or helpful) as they think they are.

And I won't stop pointing out that they're colonists from different parts of a vast empire who in many cases speak different languages and worship different gods from each other, not an established native culture (that would be the Praxians, who have had some of their best grazing lands along the river given over to the Grantlands). They're being kill over (or possibly forced off of) lands they've inhabited for, at the absolute most, a little over 10 years in the case of the Grantlands and (in a very few cases, since most Lunars in the city probably didn't intend to make a life there, or did so as servants to a patron) as many as 20 years for Pavis itself. That's a tragedy, yes, but it's categorically not ethnic cleansing.

Which is actually significant in the context of Prax and Pavis. There is, unless I'm forgetting something important, no mention of Argrath's liberation of the city and then the region being a massive bloodbath where every Lunar colonist, convert, and collaborator was hunted down and put to the sword. And this despite the fact that the Praxian nomads and Sartarite settlers who made up the large majority of his political and military support at the time would have been 100% in favor of it and in fact would likely have needed him to give direct orders against doing so. And the writers of Argrath's saga could easily have spun that into something less horrible-sounding and so wouldn't need to shy away from it if that's what he did, so it probably shouldn't be written off as just oversights for the sake of making sure Argrath still looks good.

Makes sense. Sartar was a Larnsting, and Orlanth is certainly not the only god to have inherited the powers and nature of Larnste. Issaries is said to be the son of Larnste by Harana Ilor. Which may well just be a God-Learnerism, since I don't recall the Heortlings ever recognizing Issaries as Orlanth's uncle, but the point it makes still stands, namely that Orlanth is not the only god of transformative change, even within his own pantheon.

I mean, Sartar himself was a weird magician espousing strange ideas and cooperating with peoples the Quivini hated - he made an alliance with the Telmori, who'd destroyed multiple clans and tribes, and he married a Horse-Spawn, just to name the two big ones. It came with the territory of being a Larnsting. So, Argrath being a weird magician espousing strange ideas and with companions and alliances with weird and traditionally hostile peoples? Well, it worked out pretty well the first time, so I can see why a lot of the Sartarites would at least be willing to see where this goes, especially as long as Argrath is winning against the Lunars. All the other people who had or might have ended up in his position (Kallyr, Broyan, Leika, etc.) could only boast mixed successes against them, after all, and while Argrath is due for his own major setbacks later, that's off in the unknown future.

A huge Peace Clan that got successively attacked by quarrelsome invaders and had to get hard to survive... or maybe a War Clan that claimed a huge territory because they got way too big for their britches when they arrived early and thought they could become a tribe in themselves like the Colymar did and were proven very wrong. After all, if Greenstone Temple was where "their" goddess was stolen from them, it's interesting that the aspect of Ernalda most worshiped there is Enferalda, essentially Ernalda-as-Backboy who supports Orlanth in battle (this also plays into my conspiracy theory that a lot of the Colymar-Malani conflict throughout history, including the Zarran War, has actually been, in part, anyway, a long-running proxy war manipulated by Clearwine and Greenstone Earth Temples in their competitions over temporal power and spiritual supremacy in the region). Anyway, I personally like to think of the Varmandi as that one run I'm sure we all tried in King of Dragon Pass where you try to play the most quarrelsome, bullying bastard of a War Clan you can, seizing as much land and going on as many raids as you can possibly manage without pissing off someone too big and getting wiped out. And their run has been... not entirely successful, but they aren't dead yet, so clearly they're doing something right. This has made them convenient catspaws and scapegoats, not just for the Clearwine Earth Temple to use, but also the Colymar kings, which is probably a big part of why they're still around.

The unnamed third member of the "Two-Legged Alliance" alongside the Bolo Lizard and Ostrich tribes are the Men-and-a-Half, on the logic that since they travel on two legs (albeit their own) it counts. Naturally, there are some crude jokes among the other tribes about the difficulties of marriages within this alliance, and at least one Lhankor Mhy sage in Pavis came up with a bunch of very nerdy fraction jokes about the Men-and-a-Half allying with different tribes of "Half-Men" that you can find written down in some obscure section of the library.

For my part, I'd keep the Aquitainian de Ganis thing, because I like it. To line things up with historical events better, in 507 when Clovis takes over Aquitaine, Ban and Bors surrender and become vassal sub-kings, possibly before Toulouse even falls. This has the added benefit of explaining why none of the de Ganis family ever fled to or sought aid from their fellow Visigoths in Hispania; Ban and Bors's actions were seen as cowardly if not outright treasonous, so they'd get no friendly reception there. In 511, when Clovis dies, he splits up his inheritance among his four sons, with Aquitaine and Soissons going to Chlothar (497-561), who we can assume wouldn't be happy if fully half of his kingdom (and worse, a half very distant from the other half) was being controlled by two non-Frankish vassal kings. He might consider things like their helping Arthur to be signs of planning for a future rebellion and, in 518, decides to crush them both (likely with some help from one or more of his brothers) and thus takes up the role of being the "King Claudas" of the stories. This also adds credence to the ease with which Arthur briefly conquers the Franks in the Conquest Period; the brother-kings are currently on the outs with each other and keep trying to undercut each other even in the face of a foreign invasion. Which is actually a neat contrast with the de Ganis clan, who are always completely ride-or-die for each other.

Or in other, other words, go the Sartar Larnsting route.

Well, with France it's not as bad, since after the Roman campaign the ones spearheading that are the de Ganis family, who you can argue have just as much of an inherent right to the place as the Franks, at least the parts of it south of the Loire. So IMO if you contain it to Aquitaine it can be more about the de Ganis reclaiming the land of their fathers, albeit with the aid of British knights who themselves mostly just want land, loot, and Glory. Ireland, on the other hand, yeah, I'm with you there. Even if it's drawing a lot more on the historical Anglo-Norman stuff that eventually led to the assimilated "Old English" rather than the much worse stuff the later British Empire got up to, it's still something I'd be iffy on running as-is. That said, I think it could be something I personally would be more comfortable running with a few tweaks to just make it less lopsided and more of a case where a canny local ally is benefiting from his alliance. See, what I'd do is greatly play up King Anguish and his role in all this. He's not just the local ally, he's the whole reason this setup exists. He made the deal with Arthur about "speculative land grants" because he wanted to extend his reach without spending his own manpower and resources on it. If you take and hold land in Ireland (and of course Anguish's men will helpfully point you towards the best targets - 'the best for who?' Does it matter?), per Arthur's agreement, Anguish is the lord you're holding that land from, not Arthur or any other British lord. And all Anguish really had to do in return was pledge fealty to a different High King and open himself up to some very lucrative trade with Britain. Basically, you're not the mighty imperialists coming in to claim these lands in the name of Arthur, you're foreign mercenaries (paid in land) that the local magnate is using to extend his power for basically no personal cost. Your PKs still get their adventure, land, and Glory in Ireland, but King Anguish is the one who's really making out like a bandit as a result of their efforts. Because not only does he get more sword arms and more tax revenue, he's creating an excellent buffer zone for his core territory with all these foreign knights building fortifications to hold off their acquisitions against all comers. Of course, that's just how I would put it more in my own comfort zone, if that's still not something you'd be eager to run, that's fine.

I meant more in the sense that, as I've always understood it, it's accepted that some people have a longer road to walk than others, but that doesn't necessarily make them iniquitous or lazy.

I mean, there are knights from all over the (known) world attending the Grail Feast, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth Arthur conquered not only Western Europe but Scandinavia, you've got some prominent African and Eastern European knights, at the very start of Arthur's reign a noble from Greece (Sagramore) heard about how awesome he was and wanted to come see it for himself and ended up spending the rest of his life there, and so on. A lot of pre-modern takes on Arthuriana have been very cosmopolitan, and ironically it's the more modern stuff that's tended to make Arthur's Britain a lot smaller and more insular than that.

Even as early as the Boy King period, you could perhaps say that Merlin brings back some friends from his travels during the Anarchy. So you could potentially have Egyptian Hermetics, Babylonian astronomers, Indian gurus (of any number of differing traditions), and perhaps even more, all attached to Arthur's court from the beginning. Which would probably be used by Lot and others as yet more ammunition against him, framing him as a puppet not just to Merlin but of a whole weird cadre of foreign sorcerers led by Merlin. Not to mention what churchmen like Dubricius would think of that.