Lordabdul

To interact with a God in any constructive way (such as a normal conversation) would mean that the God is able to act in Time, which goes against the Great Compromise. Of course a few things, like Divination and Divine Intervention, are kind of loopholes. There are also precedents of Gods breaking the Compromise in the past, but these tend to be for world shattering events. Other Gods can (in theory) be "seen", such as Kyger Litor who supposedly lives under the Castle of Lead in Dagori Inkarth, but frankly none of the trolls there have gotten any more than a glimpse of her once or twice, and they might have unknowingly just seen some Mistress Troll Priestess channeling her Goddess in a particularly impressive way. Or maybe it's trolls trying to show off. Lankhor Mhy cultists are supposed to be searching for the Truth. They're scientists and philosophers. If you could casually call up your God and ask him to double-check your homework, that would be cheating, wouldn't it? Worse, it could be seen as an insult, as you're supposed to be searching for Knowledge, not be told what it is! So even if Lankhor Mhy could/wanted to break the Compromise, I don't think he would do it for that. However, if you really want to make it work like that in your Glorantha, you would have to figure out the economy of it. How expensive would it be to contact Lankhor Mhy? How often does it happen? I don't think anybody should be able to call their God willy nilly because in the case of Lankhor Mhy for instance that would break the whole idea of Initiates spending years to research things. One simple idea is to use the same kind of rolls and percentages as for Divine Intervention, where it's really only happening sometimes for Rune Priests. Add some expensive Rune points cost (possibly as high as a dozen Rune points, so you're forced to Meditate to bring the cost down, or make it a group ceremony), maybe it could work. IMHO Lankhor Mhy doesn't care about it -- it's most probably a rule that the cult imposes on themselves. It's not even tied to any actual mechanics so nothing forces you to wear a beard besides social pressure. You could totally play a character (of any gender, for that matter) that refuses to wear a beard. They would probably get shunned a lot by the Lankhor Mhy temple priests, but that can be an interesting theme and story to explore. However, note that the definition of "beard" is veeeeeerrryyyy liberal -- initiates that can't/don't want to grow facial hair don't typically wear a "fake beard" in the sense of a theatre prop or something. It's really more "a thing that hangs from your chin and/or jaw line". As a result, many initiates take this as an opportunity to wear cool looking and/or elaborate jewelry, like a necklace that hangs from your jaw instead of your neck. You can really make it your own. See the illustrations in RQG if you haven't spotted them yet.

Nope, it will be part of another adventure collection which is, indeed, called "The Pegasus Plateau & Other Stories". I'm pretty sure it won't be long before we see its PDF surface and another tribal edit thread starts

Addendum: I was just checking the Dragon Pass board game map and it looks like Alone is actually an acceptable stop on the way to Ironspike (although why you'd go to Ironspike is another matter).

I'm not sure... maybe? I was working yesterday on getting a vague idea of the population in Alone. With a population of ~1000 (probably quite a bit more before 1611 when Harvar laid waste to it), and with somewhat small, isolationist tribes around it, you can't really "fill" it with too many sedentary locals (and I don't think there would be an urban clan there since this is a tribal capital?), but it's also a bit difficult to find anybody else to live or stay there. There's probably some temporary locals (coming to the permanent market, to deal with the local crafters, to visit the temples, etc.). Also some Lunar/Yelmalite barrack that's less than half full (except for special occasions), with mean, drunk soldiers who consider their post here a punishment (it many cases it might be). There might also be a few occasional travelers (like Joh Mith) who are on their way to the troll lands, visiting the Dragonewts, or some other obscure goal (who would want to go the Stinking Forest?), but that can't be more than a dozen people at any one point... and anybody passing by to visibly visit the trolls might get the stink eye, as local people don't like them (the Torkani are the only troll-friendly people around, but they're not part of the Alone confederation... they might still have to visit Alone every now and then for some reason though). So really I don't know if it will be very cosmopolitan... Alone isn't anywhere near the road between Prax and Alda-Chur -- you have to go to the other side of the Woods of the Dead (something not many people want to do), so it doesn't get any "foot traffic". Alone is a dead-end: if you don't have any business there specifically, you wouldn't go there. You're better off going to Alda-Chur (it will probably take you a similar time), unless you have reason to avoid that place (there are many... Alone is therefore a good springboard for Sartarite rebels to go lay low in the mountains). What's that revolt against Sartar? I don't think I've come across texts mentioning that. Yep, compared to their Sartarite neighbours, I think the Far Place tribes would have more Dark Earth sensibilities ("Earth Tarsh"), more matrilineal traditions, more Maran Gor initiates/shrines, etc. But probably not as much as the Wintertop Tarsh Exiles... after all, the Far Place was settled by Bagnot/Dunstop/etc. refugees, not hard core Shaker Temple people. If anything, before they left Tarsh in 1582, there was a tradition of love/hate relationship with the Shaker Temple AFAICT. It ended on a positive note, though, with the Shaker Temple being on their side at the Battle of Grizzly Peak, but still. I don't know if that would happen more than once a generation or so -- the giants would have to deviate quite a lot from their path. The Tovtaros and Tres tribes might be concerned, but not the Amad and Bachad. As a confederation, the Alone tribes are probably more concerned about Indigo Mountain and Dagori Inkarth trolls, the ghouls in the Woods of the Dead, the occasional Chaos incursion from Snakepipe Hollow, raids from Tusk Riders, etc... and of course their problems with the Lunars and Alda-Chur, their feuds with the Torkani and Dinacoli, etc. Heh, funny. I don't think the architecture style would fly by the new art direction standards, but that big stick is a nice idea. Where is that from?

Oh I see. The text from Cults of Prax phrases it like it's a 3rd Rune: "The Runes of Issaries are Mobility, Harmony, and “Issaries,” a Rune unknown or unused except in trade functions. Other than Issaries few spirits have it, save those who took it from him.". And since I assume you needed more Runes for HQG's mechanics, and because the Guide is based on those, we have Issaries with 3 Runes in the Guide as well. Are we now avoiding "uncommon" Runes (or hiding them between combinations of existing ones) because that would mess up RQG characters? (unlike with HQG, where new keywords are cheap) Asking for a potential Issaries player...

Ah great, thanks for the info! The bit about “agreements with dragonewts” is....interesting....

Hey there I’m bumping this thread because I’m curious if the Cults book will reintroduce some of the lesser Runes? For instance AFAICT Issaries always had its own special “Trade” rune which isn’t mentioned in RQG.

Oops yeah sorry, I got confused. Yep, I agree, their POW is their current MP, I think.

No the Battle skill is for being part of, well, a battle. As in: being just one person in a whole army, as opposed to being in a party of half a dozen or less people involved in a quick skirmish. Jeff mentioned that some Battle-skill-related rules were coming in the GM book, and that they let you figure out what was your experience of the battle (as opposed to figuring out who won the battle, which is up to whoever is in charge of the higher level strategy and all that).

Hello and welcome! Vampires have CHA -- see RQB p106. If you don't have the Bestiary, it just says that they have their CHA as per their original species' stats. Disease Spirits might not be meant to deal spirit damage. Instead, they just try to infect their opponent with a disease, and then flee (see RQB p166). The wording p169 indicates that they "can" do that, which seems to imply that they could also just elect to deal normal spirit damage, but I get the feeling it's a wording problem more than a lack of spirit damage stats.

By "open" I meant "less obstructed by terrain". The Tres live (partially/mostly) in the Sheep of Luck Hills, whereas the Bachad live not only at the bottom of the Indigo Mountains, they also are centered around a thing called "Hidden Valley", which tells me there's a bunch of much steeper hills there that would keep groups of people more separate in hard-to-get-to areas. Yeah it makes sense. WF15 didn't seem very plausible on that specific matter (and it had a few obvious typos in other areas, which makes me take it with an increasing amount of salt). Good point -- I hadn't realized that 80% of the clan actually lives in Clearwine and works the lands immediately around it. Interesting. In other news, I'm working on some maps and I'm facing a problem with the map Jeff posted in this topic, in that the scale seems wrong. It puts for instance the Contemplative Rest Dragonewt city at 13.5km from Alone. The Guide and AAA maps have 5 miles-wide hexes, so the distance between the 2 should be about 13 miles. Is there a kilometer/mile mix-up somewhere? Another weird thing is that Alone is more than 6km away from the Solfint river. I understand that it's a seasonal river that's prone to flooding, but that feels like too big a distance for that (and impractical for daily life? a seasonal river is still useful most of the time). Besides, my understanding is that people would have typically looked for a hill to build a settlement anyway, so Alone should probably be built at a spot where it's high enough above the river and surrounding lands to be practical and defensible, shouldn't it? IIRC there's some story about the original WB&RM hex-based maps not being able to support a city on a river, because they had to be on 2 adjacent hexes. Maybe this is a consequence of that?

I did think about it as I was writing my last post, but then I started thinking about the various ramifications of doing such a thing... even if it's just once every few encounters, it does raise a bunch of questions about which skills are worth spending points into, investment in spells and magic items, how to figure out how badly hurt any character is after the encounter, etc... I realized that, to be fair to the players, you'd have to come up with "proper" rules for quick encounters, but then you might end up re-inventing HQG, but at the same time having this weird thing where the "resolution" (in the "granularity" sense) of scenes would vary a LOT (from 2 rolls to 1 hour's worth of rolling!) and that it might make the system so schizophrenic that you would realize you're really trying to play 2 different games at the same time and maybe your players' expectations are actually not compatible and aaaaaargh so I stopped thinking about it and I deleted a whole paragraph but now I kinda had to write it again and aaaaargh (but yes, on paper, you could do that very occasionally as needed)

Ah interesting, thanks. It's hard to tell... maybe 5 for Amad, 6 for Bachad, 9 for Tres? That would be 2500, 3000, and 4500 respectively. Jeff's map and copy/paste of info contradict each other for the Amad (I assume it's merely a typo), one putting them at 2000, the other at 3000... either way that fits. Bachad are at 3000 so that seems to line up too. The Tres are listed at 2500, however, so they seem to have a very low population density, and/or were particularly badly hit by Harvar's troops, the Great Winter, etc. Interesting... Wyrm Footnotes #15 had put the Amad at 2 clans, and I was wondering if that was viable. Did you get this info from somewhere, or is that just common sense? S:KoH says a clan would be between 500 and 2000, but in RQG material the Anmangarn and Varmandi indeed go down to 450. On the upper side, the Arnoring have 1400 people, and the Ernaldori have 1600, with a few others around the 1200 mark. I think it would make sense to have the Amad split in 3 clans, the Bachad in 3 or 4 clans (Highwall Inn establishes the fact that one of the original Bachad clans was wiped out by Redstone Cavern trolls by the way). Living in small valleys, these tribes would tend to gather in smaller clans (800 people or less) rather than bigger ones. The Tres seem to have more open terrain, which could sustain bigger clans, but they also have a more fractured origin (if we adhere to the story that they formed from unaffiliated groups of Tarsh refugees), so they might also have a bias towards many smaller clans. So maybe 4 or 5 clans for the Tres in 1610, possibly dramatically down to 3 or 4 by 1625. Right, good point. For some reason I thought S:KoH was post-Windstop but it looks like it's mostly set in 1613. Huh, I think I've heard this before but had forgotten. What's the story there? Were the maps held by Avalon Hill or something?

Hey Jeff, happy new year A couple questions probably fell of your busy radar: Do you have info on the number of clans in each tribe? Are the big numbers on your map here the population numbers, and if so, is there any reason they're quite lower than the numbers in S:KoH? Thanks

I somewhat agree -- to me, the difference between casting "Command Elemental" or not is whether the player plays the NPC, or the GM play it. I can't really picture the GM making the elemental turn on the caster unless there's a very good reason. Worst case the elemental is useless. But an elemental is a spirit, and can therefore be communicated with. I would probably at first summon the elemental, ask it nicely, and only cast a command spell if it starts to misbehave... but pretty quickly I would sacrifice POW for a Binding Enchantment and bind an elemental to a bracelet or other item. Remember that if you spend the Rune points for a "Command Elemental" spell when you release the bound elemental, it succeeds automatically. That will help @Rodney Dangerduck's player in having a reliable elemental to throw at enemies -- plus, it can have a cute pet name at that point. That's really awesome! If the players don't want more politics and intrigue, then that's awesome: less work for the GM! Players who just want pizza and some fun dungeon crawling are the easiest (unless they're rules lawyers or whatever of course). But the OP is about making Ernalda characters shine, and one thing that Ernalda is good at is politics and intrigue, so there's a good chance the Ernalda character's player would be happy with that. Building and managing an Earth temple like in @galafrone's campaign could actually even be part-politics and part-management -- and sure, I know many players who would be appalled if I brought a resource management simulator to the table... but then again I know a few who would love it. Of course, Ernalda isn't all about politics so it's fair to look at how Ernalda characters can kick ass at combat and weaving and heroquesting and crop management or whatever. Blessing stuff or protecting households are a common thing people ask of Earth priestesses so that's a good way to get NPCs to do more work for your party. Playing a whole adventure around Sacred Time or the Earth season harvest/ritual, leading into limited heroquesting could also have the Ernalda character at the forefront. But really, "how to make Ernalda characters shine" is as much of an open-ended question as "how to make a PC shine". It really depends on what the payer controlling the character wants/likes. For one it might be micro-management of an Earth temple, while for another it would be Ernaldan/Aldryami joint magic to kill monsters with plants and earth spirits. Back to politics: I don't think it's that difficult to GM or play. It's indeed overwhelming when you get something like the Red Cow clan book thrown in your face, but it's a lot easier when the GM does it herself, NPC by NPC, choice by choice, adventure by adventure. Really, "playing politics" is about giving players non-black-and-white choices -- something that RQ has had in its DNA since the beginning by the way. When D&D was all about helping the villagers by killing the goblins raiding their fields, RQ was already saying that the goblins trolls maybe have a good reason, maybe they're pushed to do that by Scorpionmen and Cacodemon priests, and they have families to feed, and they're not just "monsters"... so you already have a choice between killing the trolls, or looking deeper, creating relationships between factions, getting the trolls to rebel, etc. Then, you add some more layers: some of the villagers are Elmali and hate trolls, or the nearby Yelmalio faction is coming around to ask what the fuck is this about people being friends to trolls now. But the Yelmalio faction needs to be kept happy because the villagers are hiring them every now and then to fight off Praxians or Tusk Raiders or whatever. And the tribe chieftain suddenly shows up because one of his thanes (secretly a Cacodemon follower) told him a lie to mess up the situation some more because he's upset the trolls (with help from the PCs) have killed his buddies in the original adventure and destroyed his temple. All of this can be done without any violence on the PCs' part, and all of it can be driven by an Earth priestess who will eventually replace the corrupt thane or something. And all of this can be done one "layer" at a time without having to plan it all in advance: I actually wrote each sentence without knowing yet what would be the next one. It's really just "Yes, and..." improvisation. I'll argue that it's easier in HQ because of the ruleset, not because of the published scenarios. If you want to keep the spotlight on politics, it's easy: if there's a combat, make one roll, move on. The aftermath of the fight might be this tense negotiation of compensations that requires an extended context... on the other hand, with RQ, the combat would be at least a 30min affair (if not 3 times that), taking the spotlight away from the following negotiation (which can still be a tense, multiple-opposed-rolls scene, but which will always be shorter than a fully simulated combat).

Yep, I imagine the Alda-Churi tribes, especially the Princeros and Vantaros, might have a fresh batch of slaves as per around 1610. Between the new Yelmalio government of Harvar Ironfist and the Lunar support, that's a lot of people in charge who enjoy keeping slaves chained around. For the Alone tribes, I think that since they're historically from Tarsh, it's very likely that they're totally OK keeping slaves. But like I said, they might have "reset" back to zero (or very few) slaves in 1582 when they setup camp in the Far Place, and they might only have a few ones kicking around, as per debt slaves, temporary prisoners from ongoing ransom/compensation negotations, and a few other edge cases like these. As mentioned before, it makes for interesting narrative tension, I think: between the bloodline that used to be slaves back in Tarsh but got freed in exchange for help with the exodus and installation in Alone (including building the city) and who would obviously be opposed to thrall-keeping, the bloodline that insists on capturing and keeping slaves themselves to "honour the traditions", the ancestor ghosts being angry that there are not enough slaves around, the anti-Lunars and newer generation who say that only Lunar assholes keep slaves, etc. I think it's going to be pretty fun to make these various faction argue at every tribal moot.

Oh right, duh. Thanks. So it might be that Wilmskirk is actually the only Orlanthi city with slave barracks...

It might be, but if you roll under it, you are compelled to give the Chaotic creature a stern look, pointing your finger at it, and then walking backwards slowly to safety

That's the part that I was wondering about when talking about the cost of keeping slaves, as in: the cost of having guards, locked buildings, escort back and forth, etc. The Sambari tribe (the "Thrallholders") might have some special "slave shepherd" roles, accommodations, processes, and even maybe magic to manage their large number of slaves. Lunars have slave barracks and labour camps and soldier guards, and therefore probably manage their slaves in the way we might be most familiar with from movies and books about, say, the Roman Empire (whips and chains and kicking them down in the dirt and all). The Grazelanders' vendref are semi-free and live in villages -- they're kept in check mostly from the fact that they have no access to weapons and riding beasts, and every now and then some Grazelanders come around to remind them of their place. Anybody trying to escape will possibly be caught, and their head of a spike brought back to their village. Generations of semi-free status also cements people's "place" in their minds, and they really might have no concept of the fact they could be "free" if they lived elsewhere. For Orlanthi thralls, though I'm less sure. First, S:KoH says that the practice to keep thralls is in decline ever since the Lunars have been the "bad guys", enslaving everybody that stands in their way (it's bad when they do it!). S:KoH further says: "Most of the thralls we know about are either debt slaves or criminals, though there is also the occasional recalcitrant war prisoner". I'm not sure what a "debt slave" is? Probably someone who goes to work for someone else because they can't pay back a loan, ransom, or other type of compensation for a past crime/offense? So they're effectively slaves for a pre-agreed amount of time? Also, it's probably different between cities and rural lands. Cities might have enough resources to keep slave pens/barracks... Wilmskirk has one, but Swenstown doesn't seem to, for instance. But like I said, for rural areas it might not be very economical to guard/manage slaves as closely, apart from the occasional slave pen in a clan centre or chieftain household. It's possible that a few farmsteads have slaves (a handful at most for ~20 adults), but don't keep a particularly close eye on them -- if they escape, they will either die in the wilderness, or be captured before they leave the tribal lands, or have spirits sent after them... although that probably means (unless you go the "spirit" route) that such slaves are marked somehow -- either with a bracelet or collar they can't remove themselves, or with a tattoo.

Bienvenue! Good point, but I still, narratively speaking, like the idea that a well-prepared sorcerer can do amazing things. I would probably rule that you can pre-store MPs in advance, which means that the first casting is immediate (or almost immediate) and free (as you're using the stored MP in the inscribed spell). So kinda like a POW storage crystal, but without the need to spend SRs to transfer the MP "out" of the crystal and into the casting (because they're "already there"). Any subsequent casting of the (now "empty") inscribed spell requires MP expenditure from the caster. So for the first few turns, the sorcerer can use his various tablets and accessories and bling-bling, but if his opponents survive, things get a bit tougher as the spells suddenly take extra turns to cast and need MP.

The Q&A are just copy/pasted replies by Jason. A hypothetical "RuneQuest Revised" rulebook would mainly be about rephrasing many of the rules in a clearer way (using more strictly defined terminology), adding more examples to help clear things further, and maybe (if page count allows it) incorporating a few new spells and a chapter or two (like, say, the chapter on crystals).

I think that probably happens, yes. Social and political pressure from inside (people marrying into the clan) and from outside (neighbouring clans in the same tribe) could potentially make a given clan change their stance on keeping non-free people. I could see it happening either way, but with the combination of Hendriki sensibilities and the fact that the "new bad guys" (the Lunars) also engage in slavery, it means there's probably a recent bias towards stopping the traditions of having non-free people, at least in the core of Sartar. There might also be big events in the clan's history that change things. For instance, the tribes of the Alone confederation (Amad, Bachad, Tres) were formed by previously Tarsh people who moved to Alone after the Battle of Grizzly Peak. Although they are likely to have historically had thralls, they also probably didn't move them over to to the Far Place (they wouldn't have had the resources to make sure they didn't escape or rebel). I could actually imagine some non-free people getting liberated on the condition that they follow their previous owners and help them build the city of Alone and get setup in the Far Place. That's bound to create some interesting historical tensions between bloodlines in those tribes... And while the clan leaders might want to get new thralls as soon as possible, as is their tradition, they might not be able to do that much because, well, they just got setup and are probably lacking the resources to raid their neighbours and keep an eye on prisoners. That's also bound to make ancestor spirits happy, especially after a generation of complacency on the topic... Mmmmh... it opens up some questions about what it takes to capture someone and turn them into a thrall (I suppose they need to be supervised 24/7 for at least a couple years, if not more?), but this gives me a bunch of ideas for my Bachad campaign, and that's nice.

Yeah I saw these, which is what I meant by "arbitrary"... you answer the questionnaire and it's really up to you to decide one way or the other, with zero hint as to whether your clan will stand out among your tribe/neighbours or not.

Yeah I know but it's still nice to have PDFs updated, since I very frequently use the PDFs to search for keywords, spell names, etc. The Well of Daliath should be for rules clarification... not for errata. (but at this point, like I said, I would frankly prefer to see a "RuneQuest Revised" rulebook produced, much like what Zweihander or GURPS 3e or several others did in the past)

Not disappointing at all -- it makes sense to me that the cultural taboo or acceptance of slavery mostly comes from a clan's ancestral origins. What are your references for this though? (I'm trying to figure out how likely it would be for clans of Tarsh origin to have slaves...)