Lordabdul

I imagine most of the village or stead shows up because that's what's expected of everybody -- even if you've never stepped into an Ernaldan ceremony, you would help the local Ernalda temple if they need it, because they're the people who bless the crops you eat, and the pregancies you have. To me the crux of the question is more in terms of gameplay mechanics and worldbuilding -- if most Orlanthi are "initiates" (in the HQG/RQG sense of the word), then most people in the village have access to Rune magic, do regular donations to their temple, participate in worships, etc. This in turn has implications in the kind of army you can raise from a typical village, how wealthy an Orlanthi temple is, and how much magic the priests have access to (since I think lay members don't sacrifice any POW, and only give money when they need a specific service like skill/spell training, as opposed to giving a percentage of their earnings).

I'm not sure what you're asking --- if you're wondering what you can actually do with a bound spirit, then I think the main answer is that you can (1) use its magic points to cast spells and (2) order it to cast its own spells or do various tasks.

😲😍 Yeah there are some fun things happening when you add the extra crunch for weapon range. If you want one more option, you can steal a rule from GURPS where you can change your "grip" on a weapon to adjust the range -- like fighting with a quarterstaff where you switching between holding it from the end or holding it in the middle. Same thing with a spear, although it might give you some penalties if the weapon isn't meant to be used that way (but it might still be better than losing it, or spending a turn to put it away).

I just searched for "lay member" in my PDFs and: S:KoH says that people coming out of the Orlanthi adult rites are lay members (p76). It does however mean that the term "lay member" is in use in HQG (even though HQG mentions that it's not a term used by the Orlanthi themselves -- it's a God Learner term).... so it still means that the Red Cow numbers have everybody as an initiate in the clan (p15) From some passing mentions in HQG, the reason Lunars are more often lay members than initiates might be because few people have the Moon Rune at the required level, or at all... (so instead people initiate into other cults, or into the "Little Sisters" sub/associated cults).

I think it's just because RQG is biased towards adventurers. We will probably get more info on what full-time farmers worship in the upcoming Cults book (especially the Barntar sub-cult). Then again, there is the fact that, to some degree, all Orlanthi farmers are actually adventurers -- at least, they go raiding, join the rebellion, participate in battles, etc... and then come back to their farm. That's technically what the "downtime" represents between seasonal adventures, no? True but they have to pay full price for it. Even as an initiate you only get the spell for half-price. Not many people might have the money or time to spend, so I don't imagine they have many spells at their disposal. Isn't the whole adulthood ritual in Orlanthi culture about getting initiated into an Orlanthi cult? At least that's what I understood from Jeff's descriptions and some HQ books. But yeah, it can also probably work fine if they merely come out as lay members. Thinking about the Red Cow stats again, I'm actually not even sure HQG makes a difference between lay members and initiates? (I think they only distinguish between Rune Lord and the rest?) So I'm not sure how to interpret those numbers, come to think of it...

I went to check in the Cults Compendium, and it says: The worshippers of the cult can look forward to a special section of Hell reserved for them to practice their and prepare for the Final Days, or at least the next full-scale War of the Gods. By doing this they also protect Hell from in-roads by Chaos. Humakt worshippers are never Resurrected. I don't know if that's still canon though.

RQ3's method is a little more elegant than RQG's clunky tables, but I don't think it results in smaller modifiers? RQG seems to have just "rounded it up" so that you only get increments of 5% as category modifiers -- but those increments are mostly sitting around the same curve as RQ3 (so it's smaller/bigger depending on where the rounding falls). Generally speaking I do like the idea of using the CoC movement rules, and I had the same thoughts when I originally read RQG's flat movement rate. Looking forward to see what comes out of this thread!

While that's perfectly fine for your game, there is canonical precedent that, indeed, pretty much every adult in Orlanthi society is an initiate of a cult (for instance, see the Red Cow books, they have detailed numbers). However, that doesn't mean all farmers can fly and shoot lightning bolts -- that's for Orlanth Adventurous initiates. Most farmers might be initiates of the main Orlanth cult, or some other subcult like Barntar, and therefore have more "utility-oriented" Rune magic that they can use a couple times per season to help with herding or hunting or whatever (I don't imagine they have, on average, more than 1 or 2 Rune points). What they do all have though, as initiates, is spirit magic, and that's why an army of Orlanthi "farmers" is still going to be a dangerous mob of Fanaticism-enhanced, Bladesharp-wielding people. They might not have all the spirit magic spells, because frankly they have better things to do than spend days in the local temple learning about that stuff, but they probably still have some.

AFAIK Chaos isn't a non-issue for Humakti -- don't they have a special place in the Underworld so that they can train and defend the afterlife from Chaos? I think Humakti dislike Chaos as much as your average person, but it's just that their focus is on death-related issues -- they're single issue voters, so to speak. With Humakt as the guy who kind-of-invented death, it makes sense they consider it super important and dislike anybody who tries to reverse the one cool thing their god did, and everything else is secondary. The Cult Compendium/Cults of Prax mentions that Chaos creatures can technically be part of the cult if they follow the rules and principles, but I'm not sure how often that happens (the books mention it's pretty rare)... and if it does happen, I'm not even sure Chaos members mix with "normal" members anyway... the rare Humakti Broo and Scorpionman Humakti would probably worship on their own, around some shrine hidden away in a cave. That seems more straightforward to me -- it's the good old "necessary evil" line of thought. Or the "diseases don't kill people -- people summoning disease spirits on other people do" line of thought. I seems to me that the Lunars are super pragmatic and see Chaotic powers as a tool without inherent intent, and just because some people use it for evil doesn't mean it can't be used for "good". Plus, some of the Chaos cults justify their existence as a necessary thing in the first place -- for instance, Mallia cultists see their cult as a necessary force under the Compromise in order to regulate the population of mortal races, for those individuals that somehow avoid any other life-ending fate. In some ways, Mallia is a lot more useful to the world than, say Maran Gor, who somehow isn't considered "evil" even given all the fucked up thing she does (double standard much? Just because she's related to Ernalda?). So... yeah, it's just stigma against Mallia because people are grossed out by pus and vomit and diarrhea, man!

As a relative newcomer to Glorantha I can say that I'm also a bit confused about how the solar and lunar cults co-exist (and especially how solars make up the lunar noblesse), but it's definitely not based on GRoY or anything (I haven't read it) -- it's just based on a few bits of RQ/HQ material where I can find NPC descriptions of Lunar Empire nobles and military officers. I frankly didn't look into it because, as a new RQ convert, I figured I'll just start with a couple of "classic" Sartarite campaigns....so with the main point of view being Orlanthi or Praxian, it's easy to put Yelmites/Lunars in one big bucket labelled "bad guys" and forget about it... I'm looking forward to some clarification on the matter though!

Oh and I guess I forgot to mention that, for your proposed house rules: a) In case it wasn't clear in my previous post, my honest opinion is that there's no problem there, it's just a matter of interpretation of what's going on in a round. b) I would be careful with that rule. If you choose to let anybody attack multiple times, I think it should be an up front penalty that applies to all attacks (which is the case if you make people split their skill)... because if you apply cumulative penalties, then there's no downside to attacking more times than not. Not only does it not totally make sense (being reckless and forcing more openings to strike should come at the detriment of good openings, so the first attack shouldn't have been at full skill), but most importantly all players will just choose to attack as many times as they can all the time -- sure the percentage rolls will be shit but it just goes to waste if they don't do it, right? That's going to get tedious quickly.

There's a bunch to unpack here I think, but the usual disclaimers apply (your game will vary, different people like different levels of crunch for different things, etc.) 1. As you probably already know, it's not about only being to attack/parry once every 12 seconds. Just like in D&D and most other games with large combat rounds, it's more along the lines of "the 2 characters engaged in melee are spending 12 seconds trading blows, pausing, evaluating, trading blows again, and it only resolves to one significant blow in that span of time". Hell, you could even consider that it represents several blows that are factored into the same damage roll. So it's really how you interpret it. 2. As a result, "multiple attacks" really means being so good (>100%) that you manage to find more than one opening, not that you're striking more often. 3. This can happen in GURPS too, only the system starts from the opposite baseline: you have a base skill but you get bonuses if you spend turns Evaluating, or doing a Feint (thus "reducing" the number of hits in an equivalent span of 12 seconds). If you attack every turn, you get more chances of striking at a lesser percentage. Another difference is that GURPS assumes you have all your wits available to you when fighting (unless you use some optional rules for Will in combat), so you can constantly re-evaluate your tactical choices on a per-second basis. RQ however makes a difference between "engaged in melee" and "not engaged" -- when you're not engaged, you can do much more things, including multiple things per round. When in melee, though, it assumes you can only make significant tactical decisions once or twice every dozen seconds or so, because of the mental overhead of being in a life-or-death situation. Whether that's realistic or even just to your liking is another matter, but let's just say that's the kind of "flavour" that RQ is going for. 4. Incidentally, as I understand it, that's how RQ3 worked, or at least how people interpreted it: they resolved SRs one by one, effectively taking it down to a 1-second-turn similar to GURPS (although I'd argue GURPS does it much better), but kinda grouped in 12 second batches. 5. As for your corollary, that's actually how Steve Perrin himself runs it, as far as I understand. He only uses Strike Rank for "first contact" (when 2 characters get engaged in their first round of melee), and then only goes by DEX SR after that. That's to me the most elegant way to solve the problem with weapon reach in melee -- it doesn't add any rules, it removes one, and keeps the overall combat experience at a consistent "crunch level" as the rest.

Ah OK. What do people typically call the broader category of "working for a governmental organization" then?

Those are still "federal agents" AFAIK. But yes, that's what I meant when I mentioned "wide variety" of PCs. After playing the usual FBI/DEA/ATF agent, the people I've played with then tend to branch out to military police, CDC researcher, EPA analyst, bureaucrat from some DOD or similar office, etc.... many of which don't necessarily have any law enforcement power, or access to firearms, but they're still federal agents (or state agents in the case of state police or the one time I had a forest guard...). But yes, civilians can work too -- I'm just saying that it hasn't happened a lot in my campaign, and DG lore tends to focus on federal agent characters (although I haven't read too much of the new books yet).

That's what I would instinctively do at first... even for non-combat trips to the Spirit World, really. Things start off looking like the mundane world, only with, you know, glowing things here and there and nature spirits looking at you from the trees, kinda like what a Miyazaki movie looks. And then things get more dream-like and surreal as you stay longer and go deeper. So for combat, I would start with combatants that each look like whatever their spirit-self looks like (they might look like ghosts, they might look solid, they might be animals or weird monsters or whatever), but as the combat continues, what started off as "mundane-looking" blows start becoming more abstract or surreal, and eventually maybe purely conceptual. On the first round, the enemy spirit might look like they're striking your character with a clawed paw, one second round the paw and claws extended into a long appendix with tendrils at the end, trying to wrap your spirit self to squeeze it and split it in pieces, on the third round the claw-tendrils are destroying the environment from one of your character's childhood memory, on the fourth round the claw-matrix is slicing across your love for your clan, or raising your fear of famine brought by a long dark season, and on the fifth round it's manipulating the concept of helplessness and trying to wrap that around your spirit self. Or something. Drugs might help. Spirits will also all have their own themes. Battling a disease spirit might be an exercise in increasing body horror tropes, until you reach pure corruption concepts. If you're against a water spirit, it might start with increasingly primal water lifeforms fighting you (weird proto fish are cool) and descend into either suffocation phobia or the fear of change getting away from you or whatever. If fighting a ghost, it might just be a matter of being dragged into the ghost's memories and past, losing a grip on where/when the combat started, and maybe even on what you're supposed to look like (as you realize your spirit self now looks like an enemy of the ghost from the Vingkotling age or something). It might also be a good idea to make the weirdness/conceptualism go up and down to represent how the fight is going: when the PC is winning, they can force the combat back to a more mundane representation that they can keep control of. When the PC is losing, things are dragged into less understandable lands.

If trollkin were clever and savvy enough to hack a laptop, I'd say we could put that squad of trollkin to work on the books themselves! Actually, maybe that's what the Chaosium offices look like -- a handful of people ordering trollkin around to make books. Btw I gotta ask @Rick Meints -- those special RQ playtest notes and unfinished works that were scanned for the RQ2 Kickstarter, there wouldn't be any few spare ones lying around that I could throw my disposable wealth at? Or some PDF release in a far future where, indeed, there have been many boring family meetings?

I got 3 of the books from Chaosium and eBay, but the 1st one (Pavis & Big Rubble) is impossible to find at non-outlandish prices, so I got the PDF printed into a similar perfect bound softcover as the other ones (hopefully that's OK with Chaosium for a single private copy). Anyway... I can attest that it's very usable. AFAICT, there's only 1 map that comes out badly, and another one that doesn't look great but is still usable (I think there's only 1 label that's hard to read on it). Then there's a handful of maps and illustrations that appear to lack some resolution (they look a bit blurry) but it's not really an issue compared to, you know, being able to hold a book. At that point, dropping the PDF in Lulu would still make some people happy, but the problem might be to figure out a price point for a product that not only Chaosium would not consider up to their quality standard, but also just doesn't come out 100% professional-looking (a few pages look more like scans than like a proper thing). I suppose our only hope is that, at some point, Rick will have some family reunion that is reaaaally boring and, by some incredible chance, the only thing on his laptop are the Gloranthan Classic files

Yeah you can indeed play other characters with other background, but IME it's fairly uncommon. Non-agents tend to be just "friendlies", i.e. assets that DG occasionally calls upon when they have some expertise that might be useful for a particular mission. As such, they tend to be limited to NPCs. I think in all my campaigns I only ever had one or two non-agent PCs (but of course your campaign may vary). I've had a wide variety of PCs from a bunch of not-so-common agencies and occupations though. Just start with Need to Know, and if that seems interesting but you don't want to sink 100$ in the 2 core books, just get one of the scenario collections (Control Group, or A Night At The Opera) -- since I believe Need to Know has everything you need in terms of character creation and game system rules. This way you can run a handful of adventures -- way enough to know if your group will want to play it long term. Worse case, you will only have spent ~40$ and had fun for a few weeks.

And also that they're all available only as PDF unless you go find them on eBay or whatever... but I assume the OP is aware of that.

Hi and welcome! The very, very short elevator pitch is (assuming you're old enough to have watched 90s' TV series): "it's like the X-Files, only Mulder and Scully are up against Cthulhu Mythos threats, and also it's much more dangerous and dark and they probably die a horrible death every few episodes". The way it differs from Call of Cthulhu is: It's modern day (although Delta Green has a history dating back to the 1930s so you could technically play during any time in between... in fact, The Fall of Delta Green is played in the 1960s using the Gumshoe engine) Everybody plays Federal Agents (or other people in government organizations if you play in a different country than the USA). The original DG was a sourcebook for CoC. The new (2nd edition) DG is a standalone game with a BRP based mechanic that differs in several ways from CoC 7th ed., but it will be extremely familiar. It does add a few cool rules to Sanity for handling how you can get "hardened" against certain types of things like violence, and how having family and friends ("Bonds") help you cope with the job, at the cost of those relationships. It's bleak Originally, DG was created to solve the problem of "Dave The Butler was just killed by a Shoggoth, we'll need a replacement character... errr... how about we recruit John the Hotel Clerk and keep going? Maybe he's interested in fighting monsters?". So DG offered a secret organization where members get killed or go insane all the time, and so you can always pick a new member of that organization who gets assigned to your team. It basically simplified all the meta-gameplay stuff and let you just keep on doing the fun bits. CoC 7th ed took that idea and now offers "Character Organizations" in the main book -- although DG's core idea also adds the benefit that, being all federal agents, you can wave a badge or get access to shotguns and grenades (more or less). There's an emphasis on conspiracies and intrigue. DG tends to be more serious, with a bias towards lethal missions and heavy mental health topics. It lends itself less to "pulp horror" gameplay than CoC as a result. I think that's it for now! Feel free to ask more specific questions. Feel free to grab the Need to Know starter set (it's free!) to get an idea of the game. It's one of my absolute favourite RPGs ever.

Sure, so would people from the neighboring clans (or even clans from a few lands away) come on a regular basis to this big temple, or would they typically stay at their own shrines and small temples, only coming to Clearwine for special occasions/specific missions? I assume they're still going to be stopped by the local clan's weaponthanes, requiring to declare their identity and intentions? If they're coming from a clan currently in very poor standing, the chieftain might allow them access to the temple but at a hefty toll to be allowed to travel to it or something? But basically I'm trying to figure out how much regular traveling there is between clan lands. There's enough examples and information on occasional traveling (like when the PCs are on a mission or something), but I haven't found much about what seasonal activity looks like besides tribal moots.

While I'm totally open to this interpretation, there are precedents in Glorantha for things being embodied with a spirit/deity when, before, it wasn't. These precedents are Rune magic and heroquests. When you perform Rune magic, you are your god for a little bit. You weren't before, and you aren't after either. Similarly, when performing a heroquest, you do take on the role of a deity or other God Time entity. So the wyter spirit inhabiting a corn snake or horse or spear can be as much one interpretation or the other... I think both can fit anyone's Glorantha, and their Orlanthi mindset.

As far as I can tell, yes. RQG, p287: If the wyter’s sacred object is destroyed or killed, the wyter is released, requiring a new heroquest to return the wyter to the community. Often when the wyter is bound to a living thing, it is ritually killed or destroyed allowing the wyter to be transferred to a new object without the need for a heroquest. For example, the wyter of the Enhyli Clan is bound to a sacred white stallion. When the horse reaches a specific age, it is sacrificed during a day-long ceremony, and the wyter is transferred to a younger stallion.

When you look at the Sartar maps, you see a bunch of special/important holy sites (Orlanth's Hill, Humakt's Hill, Old Wind, or even the Clearwine Earth temple). Are these exclusive to the clans whose tula they're on? Exclusive to the tribe? In which case do other clans in the same tribe come there often for worship? Would they have to go through the usual Orlanthi etiquette every time? (greetings, promise of non-harm/politeness, gifts to the chieftain, etc.) Or would they have a "special pass" with an agreed upon path they can use at pre-defined times of year or something? Or are these sites special enough that tribes from all around gather there on special occasions? (I imagine that would be a big fucking deal, like the Woodstock or Burning Man of Orlanthi religion) When you consider friendly/associated cults, how do you deal with potentially "offensive" practices. For example, some Orlanthi organize a yearly bear hunt as a sacred ritual. What do the Odayla initiates in the clan have to say about that? (in that specific example, I know that Odayla is supposed to be both a bear hunter and the bear itself so it might be a bit more complicated, but you know what I mean)

Errr I'm not sure if you're just making a poetic narrative statement, but in practical terms, no, the wyter is bound into the animal. There was a normal animal (generally raised specifically for the purpose of hosting the animal), and then there was a ritual, and then the wyter took residence in the animal. When the animal gets old, they have another animal prepared to transfer the wyter to.