Lordabdul

Yep that's how I would do it too. After their adulthood rites, the PCs are sent to work by the clan chieftains... or more probably by the thanes or somebody down the chain of power, as they're not important enough yet to be managed by the clan ring directly (although there's probably a clan ring-issued directive to put the new adults to good use right away after the initiations are finished). They would get equipment for whatever task that is. Looking at some fancy/mentor NPC, with his/her nice looking armour and fancy Rune-covered shield and weapon, and thinking "oh my how do I get this stuff" is pretty much part of the coming of age story. It's very much appropriate for the players to be longing for it, but not for them to get it right away. Instead they would get second-hand gear for whatever task they're instructed to do first... maybe a shitty 1H Axe to feel safer while they're herding cows out on the hill. Ideally, the adventures will increase in danger just as they increase in gear... and better gear will be given to them as they prove themselves, or as they find it themselves. There's also the fact that they would be looking at becoming Initiates of a cult or other, and they would get gear from these temples, possibly. Asking the local Priest if they have anything the PCs can help with (and thus getting that NPC to give them a mission) will probably be rewarded with extra gear and spells and such. Thinking about buying gear with actual coins, and getting paid in coins, sounds a lot like Lunar brainwashing...

You might be remembering the special Rune Magic spells that let troll Rune Priests/Rune Lords turn their head into a giant Spider/Beetle/Grasshopper head (from the Aranea and Gorakkiki cult write-ups). These spells give temporary head armour points and give a 1D6 damage bit attack. Searching for "bite" in the Trollpak PDFs, I can also find some nasty new troll types like the Midget-Slashers who get a whooping 3D6 bite attack (that's without any damage bonus, because they get 0 Db as they're average-human size, so that's 3D6 worth of pure teeth ugliness). Interestingly enough, the Sea Trolls in there only get a 1D6+2D6 Bite attack damage. Some Troll NPCs get a bite attack in their stat blocks and as far as I can tell it's set to 1D4+Db (including one NPC which I think has an error in its stat block on that front, but I'm not sure).

I have read many times how early attempts at making heroquesting rules for RQ were described as "super RQ" but I have zero idea what that means... is it just that you get bigger stats and fight bigger monsters and get bigger loot? Also, what did you mean in that last bullet point? (there a typo obviously but I'm not sure what was supposed to be the sentence there) What book is that?

I see a lot of newbies here... welcome everyone! Who knew ducks were so attractive!

Thanks! Since ducks are anthropomorphised, it might still work. After all, humans use "chicks" as slang for "women" and/or "girls", and in French we have the same words ("poulette" or "poule" as similarly sexist slang). There's no reason duck slang wouldn't also cross over to other species, although they might be prejudiced against being associated with poultry....

@7Tigers and @GianniVacca might be able to weigh in, too.

@Manimati's suggestion is very good! The best I can come up with so far is: "canette pas nette": "canette" is a small female duck, like the duck equivalent of "girl", and "pas nette" means "shady", in the sense that there's something untrustworthy, mysterious, and possibly dangerous about the person. "volaille racaille": not as good since it's more generic.... "volaille" translates to "fowl" or "poultry" (no real bias for female animals, but the noun itself is female), while "racaille" denotes danger but in a more thug/brawler way. It might be useful as slang for a band of rowdy Humakti or Uroxi, though. "poule fripouille": "poule" is more for the female chicken than for ducks but it could work.... "fripouille" is a sort of cute-ish way of saying "dishonest" or "up to no good", although it also has a bit of a kinky vibe to it.

I imagine that Sea Trolls have razor sharp teeth to help catch and eat sea creatures (like a shark's teeth). Land-dwelling trolls would have blunter teeth, like that of wolves or other such predators. Telmori in wolf form, bears, and dogs give 1D8+Db in bite damage so I would go with that.

The 3 people in the back who have subscribed to our podcast using their finest podcast player might have noticed that it's the end of the month but Episode 4 still hasn't magically appeared on their listening devices... it's taking a bit longer than usual due to it being bigger to edit and cut than our previous episodes... You'll understand why when you hear what we've got in store for you! We think you'll like it! It should go out in the next day or two...

One thing I forgot to mention is that the questionnaire was a bit leading in terms of "fantasy world" as something set somewhere between the late Stone Age and the High Middle Ages. It might be on purpose, but it might not be. There are some cool fantasy things to be done outside of this range... Wyrm is taking care of the early Stone Age, 7th Sea is taking care of the 17th century stuff (mostly European but not just that), to some degree Blades in the Dark and others are taking care a bit of the 18th/19th century but I think there is a LOT of wiggle room to do more here (and Victorian London doesn't have to be limited to Cthulhu by Gaslight horror games). There are some games of urban fantasy set in the modern days, from the more classic (Dresden Files? Tales from the Loop? Maybe Rivers of London?) to the more weird and dark (Unknown Armies), but that might not quite be what you have in mind when you talk about a "fantasy world".... but hey, even when it comes to some Magicians/Harry Potter/Mortal Instruments type modern fantasy world, I think there's also still stuff to be done in the gaming space...

I'm not sure a questionnaire will really help you figure out what you want in an RPG setting -- at best it will give you a skewed version of what a subset of the people on this forum enjoy, and that means it will be skewed at least two or three times cumulatively... But hey, I like questionnaires! No preference but I like leaning into it: if it's high fantasy then make it HIGH FANTASY GODDAMMIT. It could be a "Futurama-style satire" where magic and monsters are everywhere but are mostly there for the social commentary, or it could be a high-concept thing where you really dive into "What it would look like" if there was, indeed, that much magic and this many monsters. On the other hand, if magic and monsters are rare, they should be scary or super powerful or other similar inflated importance to compensate for the fact that they're rare (like, say, what Cthulhu Dark Ages or Cthulhu Invictus try to do). That one of the things I don't like so much about Harn: it tries to be a super realistic medieval simulation, but it half-heartedly throws a bit of fantasy in there without really making much use of it IMHO. Whichever. It really has to do with the themes and feel of the setting. Plus, in a high fantasy setting where transportation, resource production, warfare, communication, and even maybe entertainment are all virtually 21st-century level thanks to massive amounts of magical infrastructure, it doesn't matter so much whether that's complemented with Renaissance-style muskets vs. Medieval-style swords vs. Stone-age hatchets IMHO. I guess what I'm saying is that your fantasy elements might take over your technology levels... depending on how your magic is, i.e. "magic as science" (like most mainstream fantasy settings where you have a list of reliable spells) vs. "magic as alchemy" (where it's not as reliable) vs. "magic as a truly alien/unpredictable/corrupting/whatever thing". At this point I should really plug books like GURPS Fantasy, GURPS Thaumatology, and other similar "GURPS genre books" which are, like, 90% systemless, and really go into this kind of meta-analysis of genres to show you all the options you can imagine for a custom game/setting, what that means, library/cinema references for all of them, etc. Again, depends on the themes you want to deal with in your setting. I personally tend to fall back more often on the human side of things, i.e. Magic Colleges ruining the environment by harnessing natural forces beyond what is safe, political alliances with nomad clans and monster factions and what that means for the local population caught in the middle, the ravages of imperialism, the dangers of nationalism, etc. A feudal system is good for some commentary on the modern loss of the middle class and the power structure of the 1%. Etc. It's not so much what the setting is, as much as what the setting is trying to tell, and how. That's often the difference between a good sci-fi or horror movie, and a "meh" one, even though both have flying cars or cool death scenes or whatever. See above: whichever, it depends on what the setting's "heart" is. I'll add that the advantage of feudalism is that everybody know about. The further you stray from it, the more the people reading you book need a history lesson 101. Gray is always better IMHO because, first, it reflects our real world's inherently complex reality, but also because it offers more opportunities for intrigues and storylines. That said, sometimes it's nice to have a simple black and white world where you play the good guys against the bad guys. I find it harder to pull off however because it requires a particular treatment throughout the setting that really screams "this is a comicbook world!" or "this is an anime game!" or something, and that often breaks down when you have adults playing that for longer than 3 sessions in a row (which means you would need to make the setting mainly appropriate for one-shots). But maybe that's just me and my group, we try to overthink things? Again, it depends. In a REALLY HIGH FANTASY world where you play the Uber Mages and you can influence entire nations, destroy a castle in minutes, and flatten an army in seconds, you better make the stakes high! On the other hand, a gritty street-level fantasy world where you play orphans recruited by the thieves' guild would have stakes only as big as the neighbourhood or, at best, the city itself (and this might actually be more dramatic and gut-wrenching than when the stakes are impersonally wide!). It could even be small stakes in a high fantasy world: try to save your family while 2 Uber Mages destroy your entire valley because it happens to be in the way. Hey, that's the one thing where I can something else than : "it depends" I like some element of familiarity, or at least some kind of internal consistency or basic rule by which you can grasp how this setting works. I like the idea of Numenera's setting, for example, but I had problems relating to it because it felt a bit too much like an "anything goes" kind of setting. I'm OK reading dozens of pages if the first page grabs me Ideally, all the other pages are just refining this first picture and "concept" of the setting... and you could potentially skip 3/4 of the lore and still fill in the blanks during play and end up not too far from "canon". In Glorantha, for example, you can explain the basics of the world and of an Orlanthi clan in under a couple pages, and then you can sprinkle the rest in the character creation process (family history, homeland, cult). You might spot that's kind of what RQG does. Either way is fine by me. I'm more interested in having a clear picture of what everybody's agenda is, so I can extrapolate future events, rather than reading a pre-established future history and having to reverse engineer the NPC's agenda in order to know how they would react to the PCs interfering. If the future history is also given as a bonus, that's good too but it's optional, and, frankly, for a new setting, I wouldn't spend much time on this until after I know that people like this setting enough to play more than a few scenarios. There, I hope it helps!

I heard the story from different sources (mostly some interviews with Sandy Petersen) that Greg and the other mostly-north-american designers were favouring the Orlanthi in the early days (if not by "preferring" them, at least by having planned a whole bunch of books on them), but after travelling to the UK and meeting the British fans, they were amazed to see people who were pro-Lunar even though they read the same books as the US fans... Greg then allegedly decided to keep any future writing more "neutral" than what they had planned.... I'm not sure if I'm phrasing this all correctly and conveying the information accurately, but that's the general idea from what I understand.

No problem in the gaming context -- just trying to figure out how practical it is in-world. But mainly, I forgot that Sanctify was a Common Rune Magic spell in RQG so yeah I guess anybody can do that. In terms of game mechanics, the only thing you can justify is that your little shrine gives your 1 Rune Point once in a while I think?

Are we keeping track of Joerg's walls of text? I mean, this one might break the all-time records, no? Yeah there's potentially a bunch of spirit cults/hero cults/ancestor cults that let you do small offerings and prayers to a figure that is known to have some authority/specialty on some niche activity, and that might work well for worldbuilding and general roleplay fluff... but I'm not sure it works well in a gaming context, especially, say, RQG. This type of secondary figure doesn't have much presence, so the nearest shrine might be several days away from your stead. You might be a lay member because you visited that shrine several years ago while learning about your trade, but since then it's pretty much you by yourself in a corner of your stead in front of a homemade shrine or something, no? More importantly, these practices wouldn't give out any game mechanics advantages? (except for having given you skill bonuses at character creation/when you visited that shrine years ago) Good point. I always figured these types of buildings dated back either to the God Time (i.e. it was really gods and giants helping build these things, and people never really knew how to do that themselves), or to things like the Unity Council or EWF (similar situation: it's lost knowledge because it was split among various factions and elder races). I should look back in the Guide to see if there's any information about these Holy Country cities and their walls... I assume that the upcoming Starter Set is aimed at new RQG GMs, but not necessarily just at newbie GMs that are new to the hobby (although it should address that kind of audience too, of course). Even a newbie GMs might still want to know who's going to repair all that stuff after their player group has made a mess of everything One way handle that is to handle the Cult of Wilms as more of a guild wyter/spirit cult... (I think he's already a city wyter for Wilmskirk, but I'm talking about a craft guild wyter in addition to that). Many people might be interested in helping build and maintain cities and roads: Ernaldan priestesses who want to improve travels and transport to nearby fields or between Earth temples, Orlanth initiates who want to improve the defences of their community, Lhankor Mhy sages who are fascinated by architecture or engineering, etc... Wyters and spirit cults are orthogonal to Rune cults and allow diverse people to come together, and make it easier to separate people's activities from people's faiths and traditions. I guess this goes back to your other comments regarding how cult initiates are not (should not be) all stereotypes. I wonder if a certain podcast could explore all this in more depth... I haven't thought about it for very long (as in: I haven't thought about this for more than a decade, like you might have ), but I think my current take on this is that you can have both: viruses and bacteria exist and do their thing, but they can also be manipulated through Mallia worship and spirit magic. This is similar to how taking care of your crops using the usual things (manure, water, sun, etc.) works both because of "Science!", but also because that's what the Earth goddess wants in order to help things grow from the soil. The same way quantum entities are both particles and waves in the real world, I guess. Yay, another topic to discuss. As if we didn't have a giant list of possible topics already... It's a problem in RQG where a sub-cult needs a write-up and spell lists and stuff, but it's a lot less of a problem in HW/HQ where it's really just a name, basically. You're still free to pick whatever appropriate traits fit the character concept, and after that it's all roleplay. Saying you're an initiate of Destor doesn't sound any more as a "problem" as saying you're an initiate of Vinga -- they're all subcults. This is potentially where the rule system may have an effect on the world or, at least, on YGMV. I'm not familiar with those, I'll check them out, thanks! I didn't quite say that you can't retrofit resource management into Glorantha though... there's still enough wiggle room (even after more than 40 years!) to fit a giant quarry somewhere, with a decent-sized mining settlement, political alliances, and a small detour from some Lunar armies in this or that season of this or that year to attack it and do whatever... all without making your Glorantha vary much. I'm just saying that the absence of this type of story from the metaplot or the published books shows that this isn't something the authors thought was interesting to tackle. Resource management warfare in Glorantha is primarily about the gods, their magic, and the reality-altering powers of the God Time. While real-world spycraft has to do with securing access to oil or whatever, spycraft in Glorantha has to do with access to Rune Magic. In some ways, propaganda operations and cultural overtaking is even more important in Glorantha, too -- trying to export rock'n'roll and Hollywood movies might have helped during the Cold War, but it's nowhere near as effective as when Lunars retrofit maize and solar deities into someone's culture through heroquesting. Mmmh... now I want to run a spy thriller in Glorantha... It really varies based on the local weather and landscape. Up around Alone, with the mountains nearby, there might be suitable places to build a quarry, but with the Indigo troll tribes nearby, it's not as easy and maybe not worth it.

Yeah, and wattle-and-daub, along with dry masonry, are fun mostly because they can optionally include the one thing every Orlanthi clan should have more of: cow dung. It's used mixed with soil and straw and stuff for the daubing in the wattle-and-daub wooden houses, but it can also be used as heat insulation in dry masonry by just sticking it between the stones. In my ever-in-prep Far Place campaign I was thinking of having a stead where "cow dung" specialists live, as insulation is important in colder places. A family with stinky hands, but a very important job.

Yeah I think that's really what's going on here... and to clarify things given @Tindalos's reply, I didn't quote Morrisson for the "it's a made up story!" bit, but more for what I interpret as his actual point behind this quote, which is that details like "who's pumping the tires" are irrelevant to the story unless they are relevant to the story. That is: the story is most probably about Batman using cool gadgets, doing detective work, and punching criminals... so nobody cares about the tires. Similarly, the stories in Glorantha are about the relationship between mortals and deities, the clashing of cultures, magic, and so on -- not about resource management and distribution... until it is. Maybe we'll see something coming out of Chaosium on that topic, and so they'll have to think about how it works given everything that was published before... otherwise, maybe that's where your/my Glorantha varies because that's what we are interested in. You can still build fortresses and towns and cities without using much masonry, though, no? Like, late-neolithic walls vs. late bronze age walls?

I like that too, although (if I'm following this correctly) the few cities that are on the coast should have been able to switch over to long distance sea trade after the Opening... or maybe they're near the coast but above cliffs or behind hard to navigate rocky shores or something, and got skipped altogether? I'm not sure, as I'm not familiar with the geography there. It's an interesting idea to put the Goddess Switch in there, too... Earth goddesses are what's needed to build and keep a community together, so if you mess with them, it makes sense that it messes with your ability to build and maintain communities too. The local cities might be even more prompt to devolve in disorder and violence when all the land trade goes away after the Opening, i.e. those cities broke down way faster than they should have.

I get the impression that most Orlanthi see rocks as just a part of the Earth, and that's why they don't have a cult or even much knowledge about how to do masonry. They pick up the rocks, they pile them up, they throw them at each other, they might even play music with them and other such uses, but it's still "magic" or "obscure awesome hero and/or dwarf knowledge" that someone might be able to *shape* the rocks into something else than what they were when they got picked up in the first place. Since the Orlanthi have known about that for a little while now (Sartar's roads and walled cities are not exactly new), and since the Orlanthi still haven't done much about it, I think we can assume that they are, indeed, the stupid conservative barbarians that they are, and that's possibly why the Lunars feel so justified in "civilizing" them. Mind you, guys like Sartar might have kept all masonry knowledge (among other things) close to their chest in order to secure their legacy... it doesn't look so magic and awesome if you explain the trick to the masses. I think it was a fair consequence of some of the often overly-mythical aspects of Glorantha... for example, someone might say "a lot of diseases come from spirits". That's fine. But instead, we're told that no, *all* diseases come from spirits. Does this means there's no bacteria? If so, a whole bunch of stuff falls down and you need spirits to make cheese or something. That's how HW/HQ1 ended up with spirits and gods for making beer and alcohol AFAICT. Of course, there are many other and better ways to handle this particular problem, but I don't want to derail the thread... so I'll just say that one way to handle it is that deities don't have to map 1:1 to a thing we, as modern humans, know as "a thing". So for example, rock slides and avalanches might be Maran Gor, finding good rocks in the ground might be a quick prayer to (or even a "finding" spell from) Ernalda/your local Earth goddess, figuring out how to cut stone and pile them up (architecture-ish stuff) might be Lhankor Mhy cult secret that they reverse engineered from Mostali documents or whatever, and actually breaking the stones according to the plan might be, well, Maran Gor again maybe? Or Lhankhor Mhy sorcery? Or just nobody in particular: the sage just points at the drawing and says "hit here". Yeah there's not much... I asked about it in the Gloranthan Lore thread, but it was ignored so I guess Jeff doesn't think it's interesting. You can actually tell it's not interesting to the main authors because AFAICT there's not a lot of mention about cutting people's resources in times of war -- even though I think resources and trade were a big factor (and sometimes a trigger) in many classical era wars and politics. Instead, the focus in Glorantha is almost always on alliances and magic and myths which, I guess is really what Glorantha is about. It's telling how the Lunars focus on expanding the Glowline and bringing about the Great Winter instead of, you know, taking control of the few mines that Sartarites rely on to build all their armour and weapons. Nope, when armies clash, nobody asks who built their shields, the same way (to quote Grant Morrison) nobody should ask who pumps the tires on the Batmobile...

AFAICT, "Harmony" is related to how Ernalda is called the "Binder and Weaver" -- her affinity to the Harmony Rune has to do with binding communities together and weaving relationships. So I think it's the fact that Ernalda initiates would be involved in, say, clan politics, finding compromises to appease the arguments, especially when these arguments involve the fiery emotions of Orlanthi men. It might also have to do with arranging relationships (marriages, business, whatever), preserving deteriorating ones (family feuds, diseases, etc.), and even protecting existing ones (blessing warriors before they go defend the tula from enemy raids). So apart from that last example, it comes into play whenever a danger to the community is resolved in a productive, non violent way, which means the GM should often allow for non-violent resolutions for instance.

Vampires are briefly presented in the Guide to Glorantha, p704. Daylight strips them of their powers, they're vulnerable to fire and water, they are "diminished" by the "loss" of the soil in which they were buried (so I suppose they keep that piece of Earth somewhere safe). The Death Rune "vigorously presented thwarts them".

What's this? Some local collaborator that everybody hates because they are the ones making the rounds taking a third of everybody's harvest (or writing it down for later confiscation), and who travels back to the nearest Lunar authority for reporting? Do you have references for me? Even when I was considering a permanent Lunar presence in Alone, I imagined a skeleton crew (less than 40 soldiers, officials, etc. in total), most of whom got placed in Alone as some kind of "shit job" punishment, so I'm not sure it would register much on the big picture. And probably by the time my campaign reaches the early 1620s, these people would be requisitioned elsewhere as the Lunars get in a "all hands on deck" situation. I'm OK making my Glorantha vary a tiny bit on that front if it lets me have more interesting local politics (maybe... maybe not, I still haven't decided, but the information you shared is definitely helpful!). Again, thanks a lot for these sneak previews! Is the provincial army only counting actual Lunar soldiers deployed in provinces like Sartar? So it wouldn't include Harvar Ironfist's army or Praxian mercenaries or hired Broos or whatever?

If you don't totally feel like the forum is the right place, you can use the "Blogs" section of the forum, too. Other people have been using that to post actual plays. This has the advantage that each session's report is a separate blog post with its comments underneaths: basically one thread per session report, but tucked neatly in your own little corner. But otherwise, one thread per adventure works fine too! Either way, I enjoy reading your group's games, so keep it up!

For the Colymar tribe, that's a lot indeed... although out of these 2300, most might be foreigners, and the "half-free" might be otherwise free members of the clan who happen to be currently indebted to someone and working that off? (I seem to remember something along those line for what "half-free" means, but I could be misremembering) As for the slaves, a whole bunch of them could be slaves accompanying foreigners and visitors from other clans.

Yeah that's what I'm going for, more or less. To be clear, I was previously debating with myself whether Alone would have a permanent Lunar presence in the form of some kind of local Lunar Provincial Governor living in some permanent villa in, or near, Alone, with a permanent guard and patrol. Now I'm thinking it's more appropriate anyway to have Lunar officials only visit from the time to time, and have varying numbers of Lunar soldiers posted there depending on any ongoing Lunar business in the region. In most cases, the Lunars might not even care too much themselves, instead delegating most matters to Harvar and his Yelmalite bullies... so half the time it would be those people instead of Lunars coming in town (and probably looking down on everything, eager to go back to Alda-Chur as soon as possible). One of the big opportunities for adventure and intrigue in the Far Place at this time is the number of Sartarite rebels looking for a place to hide, so every now and then some Lunars and Yelmalites would arrive in force, spending a few weeks or more intimidating various local steads and clan rings until one of them gives up the fugitives.

Yep agreed, a set spell list goes against what HQ/QW is all about. It will be nice to have another list of recommendations in Valley of Plenty to complement the ones from HQG and S:KoH though.