Leingod

I seem to recall there's a Heroquest or something a duck can do that will grant them the power of flight if they succeed, but for the life of me I can't recall where that might have been or what it entailed.

Communication rather than Harmony, but the intent of "we're here to deal peacefully, not make war" should still carry through regardless.

Well, Argan Argar is the god of surface darkness, and all his conquests and journeys are done on the surface, not in the Sky World. So other than perhaps some myth where Argan Argar learns/teaches to read or reckon by the stars, probably not much. Which is probably the only kind of star lore most trolls are likely to concern themselves with, as Xentha herself is rarely worshiped directly and most trolls want nothing to do with the world of Sky.

Plus most of the Yelmalio cult's membership in Dragon Pass came out of Orlanthi roots, so even if Yelmalio's cult elsewhere has a more typically Yelmic view on what "Chaos" is, that won't necessarily be reflected in the local version at Vaantar or Alda-Chur.

This is also true in Six Ages, where the standard dowry is 20 cows normally and often rises up to 40 for nobles, though of course you can go well beyond that depending on the circumstances.

I would probably handle it by playing up the fact that it's a "favors for favors" economy within one's own clan. Your characters want arms and armor? Then they should talk to either the chief or the redsmith, and they'll get a hook-up in exchange for doing some job or mission that turns into whatever quest the GM wants to give them. Maybe the clan's redsmith will let you each take a single weapon of your choice from his stock in exchange for investigating a shipment of bronze that was supposed to come in for him that's running really late, and that leads into some adventure? Something like that. Or if they really want the experience of buying and selling, there is a local market, small as it is. Send them on quests as above, give them valuables that they can't really use as rewards, and they can turn around and sell it whenever the merchant's around. You could justify him having a better stock than a merchant would typically have when passing through some village by saying he's on his way to Boldhome or Jonstown or wherever, or maybe have them accompany him as guards so they can buy what they're looking for there and make a bit of extra cash in the process.

Pretty much. Whether you adapt and repurpose a preexisting myth by going for a different result, or "find" an old myth that just so happens to be what you want, or "create" a new one that due to the fact that everything is always happening at once forever in God Time was "actually" always there, as long as you can pull off the Heroquest, you can find/make the myth you're looking for. No one in-universe can actually know for sure which of these they've done, and in the end it doesn't actually matter. Just look at the Fangplace in 13th Age Glorantha. The God Time should not be understood as what actually, definitely happened, exactly as it happened, but just how you're seeing it happen from your own perspective, and by forging your own path you make your own story out of it. The Fangplace story of "Orlanth got mauled by wild animals and left for dead this one time" can be completely changed by Heroquesters into just about any outcome they can manage to pull off, and with very different magical results. And yet, as far as the God Time is concerned, this is all valid. After all, there is technically nothing "new" in the God Time because the whole idea is that it's outside the linear Time experienced by mortals; it is the place where everything that ever happened before Time began is always happening, forever. So in a sense, even a myth you "create" has in some sense "always been."

"Bride price" is generally about compensating the family for the loss of their child's labor (and thus tends to be most prevalent in societies where labor is more valuable than capital), so presumably whichever of the new married couple is going to be leaving the clan of their birth for that of their partner is the one whose family is compensated.

Actually, for now it's definitely canon, as it's in the Guide to Glorantha (volume 1, page 352):

I don't know where you're getting the idea that's it's at serious risk of going in that direction and Chaosium needs to be warned away. Even from the beginning of the "Argrath Saga" with King of Sartar they've provided explicit license through things like in-universe unreliable narrators and deliberately contradictory and exaggerated information for groups to have as much latitude as they want to say they or one of their number is "an" Argrath who did some or several of the deeds attributed to "the" Argrath, had mysteries like "who was Kallyr's Feedman?" so you could give your heroes important positions even before Argrath's rise to power, and in at least one book have explicitly said you're completely at liberty to just say one or even all of your heroes is actually "the" Argrath and the later historians just got it wrong when they concluded the Whitebull was the most likely candidate for "the" Argrath. And anyway, in many of the "official" published campaigns - let's use the example of the Red Cow Saga, which is explicitly meant to be the chronicle of an only somewhat important clan and thus smaller in scale by design for much of it - you still end up playing an important and direct role first in the Dragonrise itself and then are directly responsible for the victory that manages to free Sartar from Lunar control for the first time in a generation. Does all of that suddenly not count as "important things" just because Argrath advises them on how to harness the power of the Three New Stars? Are they glorified errand boys simply because Kallyr was the commanding officer at Dangerford? Is their hand in the liberation of Jonstown (and their direct impact on how intact Jonstown is at the end of it) worthless just because they're not wearing crowns at the end of it? And if your answer to that is "yes," then just spring off from the Colymar Campaign in Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes, which is actually built on the assumption that at least one of your characters (even all of them, if you'd like) is in fact a member of the House of Sartar and thus a totally viable candidate for the throne if they can build up enough power and support. I'm sure they'd love to, but most of their writers are freelancers and the ones who aren't are working on stuff like Gods of Glorantha, and that's probably more important to get out there soonish than an official Lunar campaign, especially since it'll already have a lot of detail on Lunar cults and magic. It'll happen when someone with the talent and the interest picks up that torch, and no sooner.

Well, I would say the bigger problem with the God Learners was their lack of any actual respect for the gods or myths they were messing with. They treated Heroquesting as nothing but a means of gaining magical power and the God World as much as a resource to exploit as a subject of study.

So the actions of people who have been dead for roughly 500 years justifies the mass enslavement, conquest, etc. of their descendants in the present? Good to know. That explanation means nothing if only the people carrying it out actually buy a word of it, it's pure self-justification.

We should absolutely bring up that it's been outright stated that the settlement of the Grantlands and similar policies being pursued in "Civilized Prax" are being done with the actual long term goal of destroying the Praxian nomads' way of life simply because it makes them harder to tax and rule and they constitute a military threat to the empire's expansionist regime. Like, what, is an expansionist empire taking concerted efforts to undermine and destroy any way of life that doesn't play nice with its model of society suddenly excusable because the Praxians/Orlanthi/whoever are also jerks? And in what way are the raids for livestock and goods or inter-tribal feuds that comprise the vast majority of military action among the Heortlings and Praxians both comparable to the Lunar Empire wiping out entire tribes and clans of Sartarites, forcing others to violate their cultural taboos just to survive, and literally killing their god because they won't accept their subjugation under a foreign empire? And, you know, the whole "imposing quotas of your own people that you have to feed to our horrific Chaos demon that eats their very souls" thing that the Lunars have done repeatedly in Sartar to quell dissent. What could the Sartarites have ever even potentially done to the Lunars that would actually morally justify that? Ever?

No, as far as I can tell a grimoire can be anything that can effectively impart the knowledge needed to work the spells. As one example, in The Coming Storm, the first book of the Red Cow Saga, the Grimoire of the Brazen Skull (which was stolen from the Provincial University in Mirin's Cross) is described as an actual talking skull that teaches spells.

Paladin actually has some beginning adventurers for squires, and basically the way it handles them is generally by having all the knights be unavailable for a task due to some adventure, and/or the squires are given a task that turns out to be more adventurous than bargained for. You're asked to escort a borrowed relic because all the knights are out chasing some infamous bandit knight (who Roland is later going to kill and get knighted for), which turns into you facing an evil werewolf knight, IIRC. Then there's the "Battle of the Squires," where under the leadership of Ogier the Dane the squires, who are at first doing typical squire things on the sidelines of a big battle, take up arms and armor and take to the field themselves to the turn the tide, and all get knighted for it. Normally, a squire wouldn't get the chance to take the lead on an adventure before being knighted, sure. So you just have to make a squire's adventure the result of some irregular circumstances that either make the squires the only option right now, or have the adventure find them, preferably in some circumstance where going back to fetch their knights just isn't a realistic option. Alternatively, Merlin or some holy man has a task that can't be done by a knight for whatever obscure reason, so the squires will have to do.

Stating up front that a lot of my answers are going to have at least some element of a probably-useless-to-you "I don't know, as long as the setting looks like it'd be cool to have adventure in and makes some kind of sense as a place with people in it, I'd be down for almost anything" kind of attitude rather than anything firm: I think the ubiquity of magic in a setting is less important to me than its... I don't know, utility? Versatility? Basically, I don't much like the standard D&D Wizard approach where some people can use magic to do basically everything and most people have no magic at all except through items. I think my preference is that magic should be really powerful but laborious, requiring extensive rituals and lots of components or whatnot to undertake a Great Work, or else there should be some kind of "small magic" that a lot of people can have access to. Glorantha has both, where great heroes can undertake great workings of magic but even your average Orlanthi farmer might know some little prayer or chant that lets him plow a field better. I like that. Again, it's all good. Anything from 10,000 BC to some twist on Napoleonic Europe could be great to see in a fantasy setting. My only issue at all is that I'm just sick of seeing what are obviously late medieval (often with anachronisms that belong more in the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, Pathfinder's setting of Golarion being a prime example) settings where there are either no firearms, or (to pick on Golarion again, even though I actually like the setting for having this pulpy fantasy kitchen sink approach) they're all confined to one tiny corner of the world map and apparently no one's interested in figuring out how to make their own. That said, I definitely feel like it'd be interesting to have a fantasy setting that went straight for the Renaissance instead of "the Middle Ages but with a lot of Renaissance or later stuff thrown in to make it less crappy," because to my knowledge that isn't something that's been tackled as much. Whatever makes sense with the above, I guess. I feel like a good fantasy world where a lot of people might want to have campaigns in would need a range in there anyway, but I guess I prefer a certain level of dynamism in the balance of power in a setting, since totally settled and stable places are only good for certain kinds of adventures. On the other hand, courtly/political intrigue can be fun, but I think you could do that with, like, fractious and quarrelsome city-states or whatever just as well. (I'm realizing that I guess I like the idea of fractious city-states?) Again, probably something where I'd like to see a spectrum, both to provide different options for campaigns but also because I think there's interesting possibilities in characters coming in from different societies clashing in worldviews that are so ingrained they aren't even actually aware enough to articulate them to an outsider properly. I feel like the presence and interference of the divine should have the relative timeline in account. Like, if this is a fantasy world that's drawing on places like the Fertile Crescent or Ancient Egypt or Mycenae, absolutely there should be gods walking among men or whose presence is otherwise very real and felt by everyone, because it's a big part of how the inspirations you're drawing from saw the world and it contributes to the feeling of a world that would later become myth and legend. As for divine morality, there's nothing inherently wrong with a setting where the good and bad guys are pretty clear-cut, but I prefer at least a little bit of nuance to it. Perfect Good and Perfect Evil are equally uninteresting to me, and if a setting has the presence of the divine as something real and felt, I'd rather they have some personality to them. Low to medium, I guess. I feel like I've "saved the world" so many times in games it no longer really has any power to inspire hype in me unless it's done really, really well. Plus, once you've saved the world, where do you even go now? If you're going to save the world, it should be some big blow-out to end something really epic, not just every other year-long campaign. I guess I tend to prefer settings that seem familiar, but something more "alien" can still be great so long as it's sufficiently realized enough that I can look at it and say, "Yeah, given the circumstances I can see that that's how people would live here." Basically, as long as it's fleshed out enough that I can see a clear through-line on why it's so different, that's just grand. I feel like, given where you've put this topic, you're going to get some biased answers in terms of how much buy-in people are willing to give a setting and how much Deep Lore they can enjoy. You can hand me a whole twelve-volume primer on your fantasy theogony, history, culture, etc. and I'd eat that up if it was well-written. Of course, in actual play I consider pretty much all of that as more just groundwork and suggestions, even without the explicit license to do so provided by YGWV. I'd say the first option definitely needs a rather high level of ambiguity and open-endedness to work, to the extent that you may as well just go with the second one flat-out if you're not going to do the third. King of Sartar goes out of its way to make its version of events open to interpretation regarding whether the stuff it recounts actually happened at all the way it says they did, deliberately adding what are clearly inconsistencies and unreliable accounts and etc. to give you as much room to feel justified in saying "this is how it really happened" at your table as possible, and people on this forum have still described worrying that they or their players will feel shackled to following the events it describes, as it describes them.

Another thing to keep in mind is "How Orlanth Wooed Ernalda," which is of course taken as the ideal model for Heortling courtship. Boy meets girl, they hit it off, boy wants to impress girl, girl gives boy some challenges to undertake, boy succeeds and asks girl to go steady with him, girl says they should go to her house because he needs to meet her mom first, etc. So, there's definitely a place in the Heortling conception of courtship and marriage for the parties themselves to make decisions as to who they want to marry, even if they're still expected to involve their parents in that process and hash things out with them.

I would think that if "courtly love" is a thing in Dara Happa, then much like fine amour it's typically going to be something not something that's expected to lead to marriage (and thus is also expected to not ever result in sex, though of course the realities of the situation will be what they will). In a patriarchal society, it's the patriarchs who have the final say in who marries who, after all; that one or the other party loves someone else is immaterial unless the patriarch is the type to be swayed by that argument. Displays of courtly skill and elegance are of course a great way for young men and women to show off how accomplished and sophisticated they are, and will thus play a role in ensuring good marriage options, but any actual courtly romance is likely expected to be a chaste pursuit that both parties are probably expected to put aside when the time comes for them to marry whoever their family decides they'll marry and settle down into their rightful roles as husbands and wives, father and mothers.

The thing with Glorantha's empires is that they're much like our own: They rise, they innovate, they stagnate, they fall. Maybe there are some brief dips or recoveries and sometimes the whole process gets prolonged and drawn-out with various rump states and successor states and etc., but in the end the simple truth is that nothing lasts forever. But that's not the same thing as everything being "reset the zero" as soon as the latest big empire falls, where everything as bad or worse than it was before and nothing's changed. In general, I think a running theme with Glorantha is that nothing, neither a Golden Age nor a Dark Age, is going to last forever. Both for good and ill, you're never going to be right where you are for all time. Change is a constant, and men like Sartar prove that people can have the power to make sure that Change is the right Change, the kind that brings peace and plenty and new ideas that improve the lot of thousands of people for hundreds of years, so long as they do things the right way, for the right reasons, and aren't making it all about their own inflated egos or personal vendettas.

Going mostly by the stuff in the Red Cow books: Are marriages usually inter-tribal? Yes. Most spouses will come from nearby clans you have good relations with to make sure you maintain good relations. It's less common but not especially unusual for a spouse to be from a neighboring tribe, but typically they'll at least be in the same tribal confederation (in which case it was likely hashed out and brokered at least partly from the local city). When a spouse marries into the clan from more distant places, there's typically a story behind it. How are marriages arranged? Most of the time, the couples' families are neighbors, and they hash things out with each other, and the rest of the bloodline or the clan ring will only be involved if the marriage is politically important or sensitive. Several of the Red Cow clan villages are right across the creek or otherwise a very short trip away from a nearby clan's village, and those villages will be full of in-laws moving back and forth to visit and talk marriage. For marriages that aren't so super-local, there are actual matchmakers, though that's probably not so much a formal title or job description and more just a local woman who's very well-connected with the women of other clans and who accepts "gifts" for brokering marriages. Generally, there isn't a dedicated "go on the marriage circuit and get shown off like a stud horse or a milk cow" thing, it's more that people talk at whatever festivals or other occasions leads to people from other clans mingling, like the races at Larnste's Table and whatnot. Generally at any big tribal feast or major religious festival where a bunch of clans attend, you'll see people talking marriage. It's just one more way these occasions are often used to maintain or strengthen good relations with neighbors. This would also be a good way for the prospective brides and grooms to actually meet and get a feel for each other, of course. How much say do the bride and groom have? Well, generally the bride and groom are expected to honor the arrangements their families have made, to trust in their wisdom, and not to go off and decide these things themselves. On the other hand, "No one can make you do anything" and a marriage isn't going to happen if one or both parties is resolute in their refusal. The more likely thing to happen if one of them is unsure is that they'll agree to a year-marriage, which can be renewed or ended after the year is up. And even if they go through with the marriage, divorce is generally not stigmatized and is available for both parties. As such, the parties brokering the marriage typically have little reason to try to force a match that just isn't going to work. Which people are involved in negotiations?/Does the clan or tribal ring need to approve all marriages? As mentioned above, typically it's something the families involved decide on; only if the marriage is actually important on the clan or tribal level, like if it's a way to end a feud or there's some sacred importance involved, are higher authorities going to actually intervene. Otherwise, I imagine that if there's any involvement it's mostly a formality, more just a way to inform them of what's happening than anything. The chief or king and/or their ring might well have the power to gainsay a marriage, but that isn't a power they're likely to exercise often.

I could think of numerous setbacks Argrath suffers, several of which people have recounted. It's just that we don't actually get very much of a window at all into Argrath as a person in King of Sartar (very much by design), so we can only speculate on how that affected him personally in most cases. The framing of it of someone centuries after the fact trying to piece together a fractured historical record also means that we can't really get a feel for how much work he actually had to put into his victories and his recoveries from the setbacks mentioned; the feeling that none of it ever really bothered him and he just kept on trucking 100% certain of his eventual victory is more just a product of how it's presented through the aggrandizing legends that are all the in-universe author has to work with in a lot of cases. The march of time and the transformation of history into what is essentially a national epic in particular tends to erase a lot of the setbacks and doubts and genuine hardship that accompanied all the grand victories on the battlefield, except of course where it makes "our guys" look even cooler and better. Heck, the new default year for RuneQuest, 1625, starts off with Argrath's first grand victory - the Liberation of Pavis - that is then immediately followed by his first major defeat, when he and his Praxian allies try to capitalize on their success by moving into Sartar and instead get wrecked by the Lunars just before Kallyr feeds most of them to a dragon. Maybe King of Sartar glosses over that or just mentions that this is where Argrath realized he needed the Sartar Magical Union, but as it actually happened to him I'm sure this wasn't something he responded to with just a subdued "Oh, drat."

As far as I know there isn't really a definite answer of where souls come from in Glorantha, certainly not one that everyone in Glorantha could ever agree on. Much as IRL, there isn't even an agreement on what the soul is, whether you have more than one, and how many exactly there are if so (the Lunars predictably think you have seven, the Theyalans seem to believe you have at least five - one for each element - and possibly more, etc.). But several deities and spirits have names that suggest a close relationship with souls, and in some cases a form of reincarnation is described. For example, one of Larnste's names is the "Soul Arranger," it's said that kolatings join Kolat in the Horn Zone when they die and eventually become umbroli, and in Kralorela it's said that Yothbethda's Stream is where the souls of humans are sent "upon the Clear Stream to the wombs of those who will bear them," which is straight-up reincarnation as we tend to think of it.

Personally, I don't really get thinking the Lunar Empire as it is in most sources could possibly be considered anything but the bad guys, even taking into account that the Orlanthi certainly aren't saints by any means themselves. And the best (but not only) example of why I think that is definitely the very existence and use of the Crimson Bat. When you're regularly feeding the very souls of people who dissent or rebel against your conquering, expansionist regime to your giant demon bat in order to inspire fear and terror, then I don't care how convenient your roads are, or how much money you raise to feed the poor, or how inclusive the doctrine you preach is, you're not the good guys in this conflict. And I don't care how nice an individual Lunar might otherwise be, they're supporting something utterly vile so long as they champion the Empire in its current form. When the Sartarites start feeding the very souls of their conquered enemies to the gaping maw of oblivion, then we might have room to talk. But until then, there's a very clear "right" side in this conflict as far as I'm concerned.

Well, I'm not super knowledgeable about the Holy Country in general, but Whitewall is the capital of the Volsaxi Confederation, yes? It might be that Heortling cities are usually built to be (or used as) the center of power of a great king ruling over multiple tribes, not something that multiple tribes come together to build without surrendering their independence; city-building is probably not usually seen by the Heortlings as a way for several neighboring tribes to come together in burying old enmities and forging new alliances, which is how Sartar used it. It's also known that Sartar is the one who invented the City Ring and the position of Mayor, to give both every tribe and the city-dwellers a voice in how the city was run. And that further ties in with Sartar's novel use of city-building as a way to bind people together by giving them something they all had a stake in maintaining.

I definitely agree with suspicion and a refusal to leave their clan lands to live in a "foreign" city (insofar as things that have been around for hundreds of years can still be called such) is probably a big part of why the Trader Prince cities are small on the one hand, and on the other the Trader Princes themselves are mostly interested in just having a secure stronghold to meet their needs, service travelers, and facilitate trade. Anything else would be a bonus, and likely a costly one if the Trader Princes are going to be the ones investing in that (and who else would it be?). So a city of 3,000 or so is just fine as far as they're concerned; it doesn't take a metropolis to make money off the caravans. On the other hand - and I realize you probably weren't actually being very serious about it - I feel like the simple realities of the situation keeps it from being a situation where the Trader Princes are despotic imperialist exploiters of the natives like you've kind of implied. The Trader Princes don't have a strong relationship with their ancestral homeland that would allow them to bring in reinforcements if the natives got uppity (and have also adopted the local languages and a lot of their customs), and they also don't have enough of a technological or military advantage (especially not the latter, since their military is mostly elite mercenaries drawn from the local clans and the Pralori) for their position to really be something that could ever exist without, at minimum, the grudging tolerance of the people around them. Notably, when the Guide describes Dormal's companions, one of them is "Edro, an ambitious Esrolian merchant anxious to compete with the Trader Princes of Maniria" and another is "Mendalan, a bankrupt heir of an Esrolian ship building family." I suspect at least part of the motivation for going west first was that Belintar wanted certain parts of Esrolia to be lifted up and others to be brought down a peg by making the Manirian Road much less of a money-maker while reviving shipping.