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Professor Chaos

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  1. As an example Alexandria to Rome is 2,600 km by sea which according to https://orbis.stanford.edu/ was 3 weeks of plain sailing in the summer. IIRC the whole of Genertela is just 5,000km from W to E and Nochet is roughly in the middle and so you can theoretically sail to either Loskalm or Kralorela in a month. Incidentally Martin's (excellent!) new book has AFAICS no discussion of the grain trade at all other than to mention that there are indeed Esrolian grain ships - although according to the tables here and in The Guide nobody in Glorantha seems to actually import or export grain! The only way I can rationalise this knowing what we do know about maritime trade in the ancient world is that like the Rome-Alexandria grain trade it would be carried out not by normal merchants but by large specialist grain ships that carried nothing else - and in which a periplus aimed at general merchants would thus not have much interest.
  2. Also why would Seshnela be exporting grain to Esrolia which is presumably the most fertile land in all Glorantha with the most potent earth, grain and fertility goddesses? Barring some catastrophe such as the Windstop or a particularly destructive war, post-Opening Esrolia will like Egypt in the Roman era always be exporting grain to feed the cities that are easily accessible by sea. Also remember Glorantha is (still!) unfeasibly small - the distances between Genertelan ports are relatively trivial compared to those that RW ancient and medieval merchants routinely traversed and so unit costs even of bulk imports and exports are significantly reduced.
  3. Isn't it much more likely that the monopoly is on grain IMPORTED into Seshnela from Esrolia and was granted by the Seshnelans who as xenophobic misogynist bigots would hardly want to deal directly with those brazen Esrolian harlots? Of course from the Esrolian supplier POV the Capratis would be mere compradors - local agents who relieve them of having to deal directly with the odious Rokari.
  4. My West still has knights, bishops and saints as in the end these are all just translations of whatever actual terms the Gloranthans use and I prefer those terms. My Lunar Empire is still as described in Life of Moonson. My Orlanthi are still as described in King of Dragon Pass - all those chitons and hats in the new art are just summer wear and as Dark Season approaches the tartan kilts and plaids and trousers and furs come out again. And my Hero Wars will carry on into the 1700s as per original King of Sartar rather than being telescoped into just one generation.
  5. TBF it is not unreasonable for players of either/both DnD/computer games where every other room has a new monster behind the door and you slaughter hundreds upon hundreds of them to be confused by a game which doesn't have that. But it is not just RQ and Glorantha that is not like that but neither pretty much all worthwhile fantasy fiction - Conan generally fights one monster, one usually sorcerous villain and a bunch of mooks per adventure, even Aragorn probably doesn't earn that many XPs from the orcs, orcs and more orcs he slays, Beowulf over a long lifetime of hero-ing kills a bunch of dudes, Grendel and Grendel's Mum (who in the Anglo-Saxon are called orcs) and gets killed by a dragon, and in Greek myth in the whole world there is only the one minotaur, one pegasus, one medusa etc and generally it takes a demi-god to beat or tame them. So maybe what we really need to do is explain what Runequest and Glorantha are like better?
  6. A good point - while for commercial reasons Glorantha has returned to a high crunch ultra-tactical system for nearly two decades Greg and Jeff told us RQ was not the ideal system to represent Glorantha at all. Unfortunately most of the fans myself included never accepted that Hero Wars/Quest was the ideal system either which is why we all are where we are again. But it is now a highly tactical game where combat run by the book needs to be avoided not just because it is deadly but because it takes forever. Which is a problem that no Minius Maximus's Guide to Combat in RuneQuest is going to solve - there are just too many moving parts in RQG and with each new publication - not one or two but TEN cults books! - more and more are added. So we all just have to muddle along.
  7. So just a 180 km or at most a week's march through some of the most fertile land on Glorantha - which has little in common with Napoleon's retreat from Moscow or for that matter Xenophon's anabasis after Cunaxa.
  8. Remember that 'noble' in medieval England was a much more restricted category than in continental Europe - for several centuries the only official noble title was earl/count and that baron as an actual hereditary title only comes in after Parliaments become a thing and that viscounts, marquesses and dukes only appear in the reigns of Edward III and his successors (which would be Pendragon phase 3 if not 4?) and knighthood was something that landowners increasingly avoided as it was an unnecessary expense. But I am pretty sure that Greg did not want the later phases of the GPC to slavishly imitate the actual 14th and 15th centuries - for a start there is no near constant state of war with Scotland and France, no great peasants revolt and while Mordred's rebellion does owe something to the Wars of the Roses it lasts for one battle rather than 30 years...
  9. Happen to have just read Delbruck and he had two big things to say about medieval warfare - firstly that chronicles etc are almost always madly and impossibly inaccurate when they describe armies numbered in the hundreds or even tens of thousands and secondly that medieval armies were predominantly knightly with infantry playing little or no role on battlefields until the appearance of English longbows, Swiss pikes and firearms. And more recent - that is to say the whole of the last century's - scholarship has broadly confirmed his views on army sizes but has largely rejected his downgrading of infantry. In any case we have two pretty good points of comparison: the size of the late Roman field army in Britain as per the Notitia dignitatum was only about 6,000 of which half were cavalry and the number of knights fees in Norman England was again no greater than 6,000. And the number of Norman era shires or counties or earldoms was depending on the date and definition you use between 30 and 40. So you'd expect a Norman era earl should have perhaps 100 to 200 knights assuming that they have an entire county or shire to follow them (and the link between shire and earldom very quickly weakened and then disappeared over the period). And in 1154 we find the actual earls holdings ranged from 21 to 365 knight's fees. Now in both late Roman and Norman England there were additional forces available - the limitanei garrisons of the Saxon Shore and Wall forts, and the mercenary knights and sergeants and town militias that were added to Norman and later medieval armies - but Pendragon is not a historically accurate military simulation but a game about knights. (Source for table below https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/2950/2/D050003_2.pdf) And few and legendary as actual early medieval sources are they do tend to talk about very small armies: Hengist, Aella, Cerdic and so forth are supposed to have landed and established kingdoms with just three or five shiploads of men, King Ine of Wessex's Law code specifically states that an army is a gathering of 36 or more armed men, the Atheling Cynewulf came close to taking the throne of Wessex with just 97 followers, King Mynyddog of the Gododdin led three hundred, three score and three men in an invasion of Northumbria etc. So a huge battle whether in actual or fantasy medieval Britain should really be one involving ten thousand plus combatants on both sides, a large one thousands, and so on down. As for infantry in the actual middle ages there were dozens of sieges for every pitched battle and even Delbruck points out that knights didn't dig trenches or construct siege engines so infantry were still indispensable.
  10. And I now see I did successfully download that particular file as recently as 9th November so there was no problem then...
  11. I had no problem downloading files from BRP but now have started getting 'This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it' on files I know I downloaded successfully in the past - for example the Middle Earth BRP downloads. Am using chrome and Windows 10 but get same with Opera as well. Example - but I am getting this on everything.
  12. My point was precisely that Roman legionaries used 1d6+1 shortswords rather than 1d8+1 broadswords because they worked better in the formation fighting that was their job. And yes RQ doesn't represent that sort of close combat (or any combat involving more than a literal handful of characters on either side) at all well. Neither however does it represent well the sort of fighting even those small groups might get into inside buildings or tunnels or on bridges or in forests or anywhere else that you may not have room to swing or poke the high damage weapons adventurers tend to pick. But to reflect that you need yet more spot rules in a system already overladen with them. So in the end you just have to accept that for all its fiddliness and granularity RQ is not and cannot and should not be a realistic combat simulator.
  13. 1) I fondly remember Greg at a con answering a rulesy question with 'but Gloranthans don't know the numbers!' (I also remember him quite possibly in the same session saying that RQ was always a poor representation of how he saw Glorantha compared to Hero Wars/Quest, but hey ho...) 2) So following minimaxing logic why on earth would the most successful actual army of our ancient times have chosen to be armed with a mere 1d6+1 gladius when they could have a 1d8+1 broadsword or a 1d10+1 long spear? And that would be because Roman legionaries fought side-by-side in disciplined ranks where after centuries of experimentation they found that pilum + gladius + scutum were the best combination against most enemies (and when those enemies eventually changed so did their equipment and tactics). So Iron Mostali are armed that way because it works in the most important situations they will find themselves - which would be battles for existence against their primary Aldryami and Uz enemies and not random skirmishes with weird little gangs of human adventurers. 3) Formidable as they may be any Iron Mostali venturing outside of their mines is carrying around an almost unimaginable fortune on their backs which would make them very worthwhile targets and I therefore can't see them wandering about in anything smaller than platoon or company strength. 4) So what happened to Apostate Dwarfs?
  14. This also begs the question of Lhankor Mhy/Irippi Ontor conversions. God only knows whether it is still canonical but didn't LM and IO share the Jonstown library during the Lunar occupation? Which as the library is a temple implies they could both get all mechanical benefits from the same site. We also have Etyries and Issaries sharing their great markets/temples. Surely the whole point of the Lunar way and particularly that of the Seven Mothers is that they can break the normal rules - although not altogether without consequences (e.g. the sword breaker curse but only on non-curved weapons). As for whether any YT is allowed to worship and derive benefits from a Humakt temple the logical answer would be to fight a ritual duel and respect the outcome?
  15. I don't have my books to hand but didn't short swords and spears have higher base attacks in RQ1 and 2 than long ones which were then rather obviated by cultural weapon skills in RQ3+? In effect this means your Roman legionary though he may do less damage if he hits than the longsword twirling Gallic warrior he is facing, will assuming similar levels of experience and training be more likely to both hit and to score a critical or special. Which to me makes sense - the longer and heavier the weapon the harder and slower it is to wield and so shorter, lighter, faster weapons should get an in effect to hit bonus. Unfortunately RQG has rather gone the other way. Also great point on javelins vs bows - the Romans conquered pretty much the whole civilised world armed with several different types of throwing spear and very few or no bows. Alexander's all-conquering army had just two regiments of archers and many more javelineers. Hannibal's army had IIRC no bows at all - just javelins and a few Baearic slingers. Wargamers however love having a choice of ranged weapon units and so have long overrated the bow in rules terms and this has been carried over into RPGs. An 'ancient' RPG should however reflect a world where the javelin was the primary missile weapon of almost every culture rather than a cod-medieval one of longbows and crossbows.
  16. Also shouldn't that unit of the Sartar Magical Union now be called the Cheap rather than the Free Philosophers?
  17. Shades of the legendary House Un-American Activity Committee exchange: Philosopher: 'Well actually I am anti-Lunar...' Lawspeaker: 'We don't care what sort of a Lunar you are!'
  18. Good call. Am I the only one who seeing 'Isidilian' at first thought those were Cthulhoid tentacles where his mouth should be?
  19. Which is where taking a more classical rather than 'bronze age' view may help. Citizenship in Rome or Athens was not dependent on what you owned or how you made your living - it was something you just had - primarily because your parents and grandparents etc were citizens. So you could be a wealthy metic or socii merchant who has lived in the city all your life and still have no right to vote for magistrates and in the assembly while the prole who sweeps the street is a citizen. And the rationale for how this might work in Sartar is right there in the Clan Questionnaire where your clan once decided what to do with some refugees. So your semi-free tenants (who may or may not be actual tenants - who is my Odaylan hunter who lives in the woods a tenant of? and who is going to say to him that he is not really free?) are defined by their ancestry in that they are not full members of the clan as they are not descended from its founders. And while in normal times the clan economic system is sufficiently strong and flexible to ensure some congruence is maintained between legal status and social position in times of war and famine everything gets shaken up. Which incidentally is why I still prefer the term cottars and carls as they are just obscure enough to mean whatever we say they mean - and so in a clan context a carl is what a Roman would have called a citizen and may or may not actually hold a hide or more of land - but remains a citizen with certain inalienable rights, while a cottar is a resident alien or metic or pereiokos and while generally are poorer than the carls can in some cases be quite prosperous but still have no right to own land outright and serve in the fyrd or citizen militia and vote in the clan assembly. Which was somewhat better captured in Pendragon Pass chargen where you first rolled for your status (cottar, carl, thane) and then again modified by that result for your occupation. But unfortunately we are trying to represent what should be a multivariate set of social and economic factors with just an occupation table and a standard of living by occupation table - while also denying ourselves any terms that are analogous to any society on earth - so that all those social entities that used to be defined by a single word like knight or carl or saint or cottar now needs a multi-word description accompanied by qualifications.
  20. Well yes of course it is only a game! But we have decisively moved on from the pseudo-Viking/Saxon/Celtic Heortlings we thought we all knew via Bronze Age Greeks to Hellenistic Bactrians (but not really) with cities that now all look a lot more like a small classical polis than a Celtic ring-fort, a Saxon burh or for that matter a Mycenean palace-town. Which should bring with it the problems and gaming opportunities a classical polis in its various stages of development had - conflict between the city and the country, the debtors and creditors, born citizens and the metics or peroikoi or socii demanding citizen rights, the patricians and the plebs, the slave and the free... All of which are presumably already present to some degree in the Lunar Empire (which already has had its Spartacus - albeit one who seeing how unbelievably hot the Crassus they sent to slaughter him was promptly changed sides) and will become more so. Or are all these changes not about making Glorantha a denser, more complex and dynamic place at all?
  21. And there is your problem with associating free status only with direct holding of land - hunters, merchants, redsmiths, brewers etc may in some cases be farmers who hunt, trade, smith, brew etc on the side but the rules actually present them as specialists who make their living wholly from their profession. But if a guy who has to lease some land - even if he is leasing multiple plots of land from different farmers and making a better living than his putative landlords because he is just a better/luckier farmer - is by doing so rendered semi-free and excluded from full community membership then other surely non-landowners are in a similar position. Plus you now have class conflict built into every clan because while slaves (are we still saying 'thralls' BTW?) can do little about their condition other than run away or mount suicidal rebellions a semi-free class will want to be free - which as a soi-disant Marxist I am more than happy with myself but the consequences of which I don't think may have been fully thought through. For instance what happens when the Crimson Bat has suddenly eaten half your fyrd and all your best warriors and there are now more unfree tenants than free farmers and the free farmers that are left cannot any longer plough all their land? What happens in the Great Winter when the richer farmers leverage their greater grain stores and their not having had to kill and eat their last plough-oxen to convert their neighbours to tenants? Or does the farmer who no longer has an ox or seed-corn and has to become a tenant of one who does still retain his free status and use it to agitate for land re-division and the cancellation of debts? And the accumulation of debt is incidentally what would more likely happen in most clans - you already have references to cattle loans and debt in a couple of JC scenarios but as it turns out that these clans and tribes are no longer the barbarous hill-folk we thought they were but have nice (if small-ish) classical cities with guilds and a monetised society with written records even at the clan level, then the many crises they pass through will inevitably produce social tensions with thanes and rich farmers and merchants and temples becoming the holders of ever larger cattle- and grain- and money-debts. This was after all what happened in the classical societies we do have some real social and economic history for and theoretically may well have happened to some of those late bronze age societies on whose fall we have no real data on at all. Which if you run with it is perhaps a better way to motivate characters to go out and adventure than trying to fiddle the rules so their normal background earnings as not quite enough. So why on earth are you defending the Tin Inn against a band of Tusk Riders who will torture you to death, feed your corpse to their pigs and bind your very souls to their service? Well your father owed a 500 guilder debt to Gringle the accumulative interest on which is crippling your family and which Squinch has inherited and will partially cancel if you save his assets. And debt and interest rates are one of the key advances of the actual Bronze Age and a very significant part of what survives in the ancient archives are actually accountant's files... So if we are to abandon what we thought we knew about Sartarites as it was too viking-y and Greg's conception of them moved on, then let us go the whole hog and introduce different forms of debt and interest and indentured servitude and class conflict and slave rebellions and agrarian reforms and demands for enfranchisement that follow from adopting a more ancient model.
  22. Jeff - thanks for the clarification on the Demographic Categories Formerly Known as Cottars and Carls and apologies about the Mycenaean dig which was uncalled for and plain silly on my part. As we are still nevertheless sticking with thane is there not a case for weaponthane rather than 'martial thane'?
  23. Cottar and carl are no more or less anachronistic than 'thane' which still survives. If Jeff is really serious that only bronze age terms will do then as pseudo-Mycenaeans Sartarites should surely have a wanax, a pa-si-reu and an eq-et-a instead of a king, a chieftain and a thane? It also leads to pointlessly long-winded descriptions like 'semi-free herder' - three words (two of which are IMO still problematic in that I don't think that there is anything in previous canon to suggest that cottars while poor are not free) - to replace one perfectly good word. And given that thane is still OK then why 'martial thane' rather than the far more characterful weaponthane? Anyway my Glorantha will certainly vary on this.
  24. One important change is that the - demographically absurd for an ancient society - assumption that for every population group 50% are children is finally ditched - although conveniently the 'free adults' remain 50% with 33% being children and 17% 'semi-free' (which also seems a new departure to me in that previously IIRC there was no doubt that cottars were 'free') so you can still gloss over older sources with the 50% figure.
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