Leingod

Yep. The soft, sweet pulp of the chocolate fruit might have been used to make a fermented drink (about 5% alcohol). Which, incidentally, is something they still do in Latin America. Also, as of November 2018, evidence now suggests that the cultivation of cocoa is actually much older than we previously thought it was. Until now, the oldest evidence was among the Olmecs of Mexico about 4,000 years ago, but now there's reason to think it was being cultivated by the Mayo-Chinchipe people of South America as far back as 5,300 years ago.

On the other hand, clerical disapproval didn't stop people from swearing, they just made up minced oaths, and whatever the clergy might try to tell people about that, there are minced oaths being used in the Bible itself. So you can just make up some euphemistic way to swear the oath or vow.

Sometimes it seems like a recipe for spiraling into madness in Glorantha, too.

Can't really help you with the passions and such, but as for tribe, generally speaking you probably won't directly change tribes, you'll just become part of a different clan and if that clan is part of a different tribe you're part of that tribe now, too. In Sartar, at least, the tribe isn't really a "top-down" entity that you'll seek to join directly. Unless you're going the specific route of becoming a part of the tribal king/queen's own household/retinue, in which case being a part of the king's household probably makes you more or less a member of that tribe. Especially if the king rewards you with land (like, say, being named Thane of Apple Lane).

Well, not necessarily. In the above, another point to consider is that older hippogriffs aren't as easy to bond with, as they're more set in their ways, thus they can only bond "with disparity." You might transplant that over to griffins and have it that they can be bonded with, you just need to get them very young, so there can be an adventure to acquire eggs or chicks (cubs?) if the PKs really want their griffin mounts. Of course, the problem then arises that it's more than a little unfair for a knight to be attacking his enemies from the air. You could rule that it's fine for monsters like dragons and giants, but at least against other knights fighting from griffin-back probably suffer penalties much like using bows would, if not more so.

Of course, that's for Runequest, so a different system, but built along the same lines enough that you can move it over here just fine. 😉 You just have to use Passions in place of Rune Affinities. The basic system is that the hippogriff has a personality of its own; it has its own passions and ideals, and it won't bond easily with a knight who doesn't share those things in common. Give each hippogriff three Passions, and two ideals that the PK can appeal to when trying to convince it (see below). If you have a high affinity (let's say, 15+ in one or more Passions the hippogriff prizes, like Energetic, or Indulgent, etc., and no strong opposing Passions), then the bond is a "match." You don't need to roll for it, you just do something to show that matching affinity. If you don't have either matches or oppositions, or if you have both, the bond initiates "with disparity," and you have to make a roll for it using some appropriate skill, and you get a bonus if you appeal the hippogriff's ideals (like, say your hippogriff prizes its freedom; you can use an Orate roll to try to promise it you won't try to bind it or steal its freedom, for example). And if you don't have a match and you do have an opposing Passion, the hippogriff refuses to bond, and you can only forcibly break the hippogriff with a successful Horsemanship roll (likely quite a high one). Noble creatures that hippogriffs are, this is an act that gains Glory of a negative sort and likely loses a point of Honor to boot. In addition, any other hippogriffs are likely to consider the knight an enemy.

There are rules and a ready-made adventure for bonding with hippogriffs in The Pegasus Plateau & Other Stories.

The Orlanthi know him as Rigsdal, and in that guise he's had a write-up as a sub-cult of Elmal and has been stated as also being a sub-cult for Orlanth (being a Thunder Brother). You can probably also find him in stuff like the Book of Heortling Mythology under that name. Of course, that's from HeroQuest, so there's a chance it's not really compatible with how he'll be portrayed in any future RuneQuest materials.

In the Book of Uther, there are eight Roman civitates in Logres that retain the right to self-government, and Durnovaria/Dorsette is one of them. This means it has its own senate and senators, and it fields its own army and officers. In The Great Pendragon Campaign, the title "praetor" is said to refer (in this context) to refer to a lord whose power derives from the city he rules. So, Praetor Jonathel might be the guy in charge overall of Durnovaria/Dorsette, and he would have been elected by the city's senate rather than appointed to that job by the king like a sheriff or duke, or inheriting it like a count (but unlike the consuls of old, he has no equal and doesn't have a limit on his term of service). You could easily say that, in the chaos of the Anarchy, he became the guy everyone in the county looked to for leadership and protection, and so became the de facto count and when Arthur came to power he just made that official. Whether he had the job earlier and just managed to miss the Infamous Feast for whatever reason (he wasn't at St. Albans, he was but he was injured, he was but he's a famously Temperate man who drank only water, etc.) is something you can decide as you think would suit your campaign best. Either way, as Durnovaria/Dorsette/Dorchester is the main port in the county and would certainly be the base of whatever coastal/riverine defenses might exist to drive off Saxon incursions, the city's authorities would absolutely be the first people you'd want to ask/accuse when a band of Saxons somehow manage to boat themselves all the way up to Salisbury and make off with a bunch of babies.

Less a "theory" and more a stupid headcanon: Your elemental rune affinity directly affects your comfort level for various temperatures and weather patterns, or at least some of them do, and this has directly impacted the cultures of people where certain runes predominate. The most extreme examples are Fire and Air, which are opposites in this regard. Or at least, they are as represented by Orlanth and Yelm; with the likes of Storm Bull or Yelmalio things are a bit different. A strong Fire Rune affinity makes you very resistant to heat but very susceptible to cold; that's why Dara Happans insist on wearing so many layers at all times. When it's hot outside it doesn't really bother them, but many will start shivering and complaining that it's chilly and breaking out the winter gear as soon as it drops below 70°F/21°C. A strong Air Rune affinity makes you cold-resistant but prone to overheating. That's the real reason Orlanth's worshipers love hills and mountains so much; they go higher up to try to cool off. By the same token, they start complaining that it's too damn hot today and start stripping down in anything higher than 75°F/24°C. And that, my friends, is the real reason Ernalda chose Orlanth over Yelm(alio). The view is just so much nicer. It's also a big part of why these two have never gotten along: Yelm sees Orlanth refusing to wear proper attire until it's literally freezing and thinks he's an immodest savage, while Orlanth sees Yelm mandating his stifling dress code no matter how sweltering it gets and brands him a prudish tyrant.

My own thoughts on it is that I would definitely go with Lot being born in 467 or thereabouts, and thus with him becoming king before his majority. Because that means there's a story behind how Lot becomes the dominant force in Caledonia by the time he marries Margawse, one more complicated than just "He's got Pictish allies because of his mom and he's a good general, so he just conquered everyone." And if that makes Lot's comments about Arthur come off as hypocritical... I mean, why would that stop him? Heck, that's something I'd want to lean into when telling that story, not shy away from. Going back to Lothian, Der-Ilei (Lot's mother, IIRC) is from Orkney, a notably isolated and foreboding place even to the Picts, and where Margawse is going to retire to after Lot's death, so her being cut from the same cloth won't exactly be a stretch. A powerful (but not necessarily evil) Pictish enchantress would make for an interesting regent for Lot. Young Lot would necessarily be very dependent on the loyalty and skills of his relatives and vassals, too, so there's a lot more potential for interesting political factionalism, likely centered around Lot's Cymric followers and his Pictish relatives being at odds, but with Lot needing both of them to secure his reign, leading to a delicate balancing act that only starts to get resolved when Lot comes into his own and isn't as reliant on others to secure his rule for him. I'm seeing a lot of potential in that setup for roleplay and character creation options. It'd be the kind of tense political situation you don't quite see in Logres outside of the Anarchy (since Uther is always hugely advantaged in any purely internal struggle, and Arthur even more so).

Possibly. In the story of the First Ring, Orlanth gifts Lhankor Mhy the Ivory Marking Bone, which is described as being able to "mark signs of power upon anything." Animal bones have often been used in tools for tattooing, historically.

I'm not so sure about that. Your most common enemy isn't the same thing as your #1 enemy. Usually conflict between Orlanthi is just low-level, small-scale stuff. Cattle raids and the like, with lots of special rules and customs to keep things from heating up too much that every Orlanthi (in the area, at least) knows and can generally be counted on to adhere to for practical reasons. It's usually with those damn foreigners who don't know the rules for this sort of thing (and who these rules thus don't apply to, either) that things can get really bad. Well, to any Orlanthi who actually cares enough to find out what the Fonritan arguments about that are it would be utterly repellent as an idea, since that notion of "everyone is a slave, everything is slavery" is completely antithetical to the notion that Orlanth is Freedom.

Wergild isn't just about pure economics and value lost; it's a way of sublimating the impulse to take revenge to keep feuds from happening. If one of "your own" has been hurt, you as an Orlanthi are obligated to seek redress and restitution, whether that be from violence or from legal recourse. Heortling society is a "revenge society," which means the primary means of discouraging wrongdoing is the knowledge that if you hurt someone, their kin are not only expected but required to seek you out and try to get even. Accepting a pittance in wergild because "he wasn't hurt that bad!/he got better!" just sends the message that you're reluctant to avenge wrongs done to your own, which just emboldens anyone who might want to wrong you for whatever reason (a grudge, to show his friends how tough he is, etc.). It's not just about calculating exactly how much value the clan has lost (though that is a consideration), it's about not looking weak. You can't let other people think they can beat on your kin, break some bones, and then get off by just handing over some pocket change because "oh, there's healers, it's alright." That makes you a target.

IMG it isn't a huge deal unless it's at "first cousins" level of incest, and it similarly doesn't matter very much if a woman has a child while unmarried unless there's reason to suspect there's some major transgression involved, like an affair, the aforementioned close incest, some suspicion of possible treachery (i.e. canoodling with a Lunar officer while part of an anti-Lunar clan), etc. Or, if there is a stigma, it's a minor enough one that it would be considered a problem for the family/household itself to deal with, not something you drag before the Ring and have all and sundry discussing. Not every bit of family drama is important enough that the whole clan deserves to have a say in it. The consequences here are, at worst, some minor loss of social standing for the family depending on the (known or suspected) identity of the father, not outlawry or Chaos.

The RQG character creation goes with a default assumption of a permanent marriage that only ended with the death of one or both parties (potentially), almost certainly for the sake of easing new players into what is already a more complex and involved process than they might be used to. But as in reality, a Heortling's family situation might be more complicated and outside that "norm." Their parents could be divorced, for example, or the marriage itself was actually temporary, or maybe they're actually the product a sacred union their parents undertook as part of a religious festival (in which case the resulting child is seen as a blessing from the gods, and possibly destined for greatness). All stuff that could well be used to enrich a character's family and background with GM approval, I suppose.

Sure, if we're talking incest between close relatives, or she was seduced by a trickster, or something like that, which is covered under what I termed "unusual circumstances" above. But if this is just "Onorfal's father was some distant cousin within the clan, or a wandering entertainer, or etc." then I don't think it'd be considered a big deal by most. As I said before, the Heortlings don't stigmatize sex outside of marriage, and marriage itself is more about binding clans together than about babies. So, I don't think a woman having a child while unmarried would be especially unusual or worth remarking on for most, or that their child would face a major stigma under most circumstances.

On the other hand, the Heortlings don't have a strong taboo against sex between unmarried people, and their views on property means obsessing over inheritance isn't going to be as big of a deal, either. So, barring unusual circumstances I don't think children born out of wedlock are going to face such a stigma that it could be described as "taboo." At worst, typically they might just get chronically short-changed, like having a real uphill struggle to make anything of themselves but a tenant of their more prosperous relations.

Seems pretty simple to me; the child is unquestionably the child of their mother, so in any case of uncertainty or unusual circumstance that's the important part. Any status or relations in the clan comes from her. The only issue that might arise is if the mother later marries out of the clan, in which case either her new husband agrees to raise her child as his own or the child is left behind with their mother's family. In short, if he was conceived out of wedlock, then all that really matters is that Onorfal is the son of his mother.

Heck, depending on the time and place it was often more unusual if a sailor did know how to swim.

The dislike of dogs mostly relates to Yinkin's place in the Storm Tribe; the more prominent Yinkin's place in the clan (such as claiming him as an ancestor), the more anti-dog the clan probably is. Who your neighbors are will also affect that; those living in Saird necessarily aren't going to be as big on hating dogs, because there are so many dog-loving people around them that it just wouldn't be worth it to be as vehement as they might be down south. In general, the further north you go, the less there's a hard "hate dogs, love cats" thing. The Sartarites are probably going to be some of the most anti-dog, both because of the Telmori and because they're kind of hard-line orthodox Heortlings in general. But of course there's always an exception with Orlanthi. Same with goats; the Balkoth are pitied and mocked as "Goat-Suckers" because they were forced to start raising goats after the rest of their livestock were taken from them by the Lunars, it's not that it's a traditional part of their lifestyle or something (though I suppose it might be, if we suppose Angtyr of the Horn indicates they were already more accepting of goats). I personally imagine the Balkoth situation as being the test-bed for some Lunar administrator's pet project to force the Sartarites to abandon their traditional lifestyle in favor of more intensive, single-product agriculture or animal husbandry, which makes sense as something a Lunar higher-up would want to impose for several reasons. It helps strip away the independence and self-sufficiency of the bulk of the Sartarites, would produce more goods that could be more efficiently extracted through taxation or exported for profit, etc. It seems like something you'd have been allowed to get away with under Euglyptus the Fat; a few bribes and the right connections and I could see him letting you push through this or that plan for this or that tribe, and then when Fazzur and Tatius are in charge they always have bigger things to worry about than untangling those messes.

The portrayal of sailors as bravely "fighting against" the seas is not an uncommon one, so it wouldn't be without precedent.

It's also perhaps a useful source here as it provides some explanations of where the various Sartarite groups come from and what that means, albeit mostly in terms of "They're patrilineal/matrilineal/mixed, they prefer X and Y weapons, and they usually do/do not practice slavery." With more Hendriki influence meaning a higher likelihood of being patrilineal and not practicing slavery.

I mean, they were a tribe that was shattered, their people forced to flee, their lands given over to foreigners, but then managed to take it all back and recreate themselves. That's all great stuff to build a campaign out of.

That's the best way to balance modesty with comfort for this particular breed of Chaos monster, yeah. Scorpion Mankinis.