Ladygolem

1 hour ago, g33k said:

</geekmode>

Username checks out!

Weird, must be a Firefox thing. Opened it in Edge (came with my laptop, don't have Chrome installed) and works fine - weird!

Anyway, great artwork! She looks like a total badass!

I think your image link might have broke, @Runeblogger . Sounds like an interesting character!

26 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

In the Gods War game, these are all the War Gods

Maran Gor is actually Earth's magic god and Babeester Gor the war god in the board game.

I'm sorry, this whole "necklace of severed penises" seems absurd, as the illustration very clearly shows a necklace of fingers. You can even compare them to the fingers on the severed hands right below! They're completely the wrong size and shape to be dicks. You really think they'd get away with publishing a book with a necklace of severed cocks  on the cover? C'mon.

5 hours ago, Jeff said:

Orlanth is openly recognised and acknowledged as one of Ernalda's husbands (and often the main one); and worshiped by many of the farmers.

Aren't vendref forbidden from worshipping Orlanth, and worship Barntar instead? Maybe they worship Orlanth in secret?

Very very cool! I like his hat, reminds me of the Berlin Gold Hat but like, in a form that functions as a helmet in battle as well. The shield design is lovely too!

27 minutes ago, dumuzid said:

there's always the Sumerian gur, which was the amount of a given substance that could be safely loaded onto a donkey's back

That could really recontextualise the definition of "a cow's worth of goods"...

On 2/8/2021 at 1:57 PM, Ned said:

In other Heat-related thinking... can anyone suggest candidates for animals associated with or sacred to Lodril?

Given recent evidence from the Cults of Glorantha previews, I think there's a case for making Lodril's sacred animal the bear 😉

Whatever those furry antlered things are, they are the most adorable things I have ever seen! I'm expecting plushie versions in the Chaosium store any day now.

So what are they, anyhow?

28 minutes ago, ZedAlpha said:

As far as I’m concerned, Ladygolem, that’s Caladraland’s ass!

It's definitely a great booty, but I was talking about his, you know, fiery spear.

Anyway, enough obscenity! The art is very, very good, and I'm really looking forward to this book! I might even shell out for a physical copy (I'm more of a .pdf gal). I'm particularly fond of all the stylized backgrounds - ZZ's creepy eyeball cloud and Uleria's art nouveau border being my favorites.

Will every cult have a full illustration like this? I initially assumed it'd just be the "big" ones, but we have beautiful full-size pieces for relatively minor deities like the grain goddesses and Aram, which is enticing!

Wait, is that Lodril's... it totally is! Nice!

5 hours ago, Brootse said:

Yeah, the ENC system is one of the weaknesses of RQG. The mass of the object depends on its shape. If a 1 ENC metal bar is made into coins its mass is 1kg, if it's made into a sword its mass is 1.5kg, and if it's made into an armor its mass is about 2.5kg. And a sack filled with 10kg of coins is as hard to lift as a person whose mass is 60kg.

I wouldn't describe it as a weakness of the system - it's certainly more convenient mechanically than calculating weight in lbs, then factoring in the volume in cubic inches, shape etc etc etc. It's an abstraction which is fine for a role-playing game for the same reason as we don't play with Dwarf Fortress level wound simulation ("You bash the Broo Spearman in the lower right arm with your (bronze mace), bruising the fat and fracturing the bone!")

Rather, I would say that it is inconvienent for translating into exact IRL weights... which simply isn't something it's designed to do.

I wonder if the Pavis wheel ruts might also be a reference to these in Sicily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misraħ_Għar_il-Kbir

Well, that's pretty cut and dry, then. It's no stretch to assume that the "patron spirit" mentioned is a form of wyter.

Just wanted to stop by and say both games are really beautiful! It's a breath of fresh air (literally, in the case of Dreams in 3D) to see these kind of narrative based approaches to the setting, which is where I think Glorantha shines. I immediately realized Journey would be perfect for my partner and I's Heroquest campaign - it's basically a travellogue around Prax, and while the usual combat and mythic wars and struggles aren't absent from our story, they're far from the focus. I can see trying to combine it with some of the encounter tables you find in Pavis & Big Rubble or Griffin Mountain - the sourcebook could determine what sort of creature of person is met, then Journey determines the nature of the encounter. Overall, really great stuff, and I look forward to seeing what you create in the future as well!

Multiple elders per guild?

Half the adult urban population in a guild of some kind doesn't seem to crazy, honestly. People in cities are either going to be some kind of skilled worker or soldiers/priests/administrators/adventurers, because otherwise they'd be farmers living in rural areas. A fifty/fifty split between the two doesn't sound too crazy at first glance.

Maybe it would have been revealed in later books that never happened? (Just going off the wiki here, I've never read Sartar Rising.)

Otherwise Dormal sounds plausible. Maybe it's Argrath, because when in doubt, assume everything is always Argrath somehow.

39 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Wouldn't that absolutely tank the gold value regionally though? Or is the fact that you're putting it directly to a construction project that otherwise wouldn't have been completed helping stabilize it?

Could be that, could also be that avoiding widespread economic collapse is why such extraorbitant prices are charged in the first place. It's not like the dwarves need the money for anything.

2 minutes ago, Joerg said:

So, will a Pavisite alchemist be a member of the Pavisite Alchemist guild (in all likelihood way too small to form a wyter), or will that more be the Pavis chapter of the Kethaelan Guild of Alchemists, and associated to the omnibus guild of tanners, dyers, perfumers and other businesses dealing with unpleasant substances?

It would depend on the profession, no? Widespread organisations are probably more likely for professions that require a lot of travel or inter-city connections, or ones that are particularly dangerous, specialized or lucrative. How vulnerable the industry is to unwelcome competition? How important formal training is to perform the job well? Do the workers have a particularly strong need to organize themselves against abusive bosses, or conversely, do the bosses need to aid each other to prevent their workers gaining too much autonomy?

These are questions off the top of my head. One could consult historical sources to see which industries were more likely to form guilds and why. The royal guilds of London are particularly well documented, in part because many survive to this day, and would make a good place to start.

If you're interested in community as character mechanics, I'd recommend checking out Blades in the Dark and Legacy: Life Among the Ruins (and the multiple offshoots of both - I particularly like Legacy: Free From the Yoke, set in a fantastical Rus after the defeat of the Golden Horde). Both have a sort "dual character sheet" approach.

Blades takes the approach of a "crew" sheet that represents your party's resources, standing, allies etc. which would work well for the type of game where you're playing as members of a single clan like a more traditional Runequest or Heroquest campaign. It's a cruchier, dicepool-based take on the Powered by the Apocalypse system/genre. The narrative approach is TV-like - each session is episodic, and the way the game works obviates or expedites almost all of the tedious (to some) prep and planning stages that can take up significant chunks of a RPG session. It's a very different approach than the simulationist RQ:G, falling closer to the HQ side of the scale. I'm not exactly recommending using the whole system for a Glorantha campaign, but the faction mechanics should be interesting.

 Legacy's approach has every player controlling a separate faction, that aren't necessarily allied or even friendly but do share some overall goal, usually dealing with an overarching common threat or trying to reconstructing society. Each player creates their own faction and a character from that faction (or multiple), and the game switches between scales - zooming out to explore alliances, wars and policy, zooming in when it comes down to the actions of individuals, like a crucial battle or tense diplomatic negotiations. This approach would work best for a bigger scale game - maybe the story of a Sartarite tribe's struggle between resistance and assimilation to the Lunar Empire full of squabbling clans, or maybe the aftermath of Belintar's death, with each player taking the role of on of the former Sixths of the Holy Country.  Legacy also assumes a much grander timescale, with the expectation of multiple generations of heroes shaping the course of history over decades.

Anyway, both games are very fun in their own right, and I heartily recommend taking a look, even if it's just to see how other authors tackle the issue of broader mechanical scope.

PS. I can't believe I didn't mention it earlier, but Legacy: Godsend is perfect for Glorantha - you play as Greek-style gods vying for power granting powers and guidance to mortal heroes to further your agenda on the physical plane. Perfect for playing a campaign set during the Gods War!

1 hour ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

- How big is Kethaela, again? Isn't it about the size of England or Southern California or something? That would make it roughly similar to something like the Bronze Age "empires" in southern Mesopotamia, which is pretty fitting, I suppose. 

There's no hard figures of course, but a while ago I did some calculations based on the Argan Argar Atlas. Genertela seems to be more or less the size of the continental United States or Europe, funnily enough. Each page in the AAA is about the area of Arizona, Prax is about the size of West Virginia I think it was? The Holy Country seems to be smaller than that. Again, official sources vary (not least because there has been confusion on whether certain maps have their scale in miles or km)

I love the illustration of the Foreigner's Gate, even in such a simple style it has a really good sense of scale and use of shape! I can picture how badass the relief would look even now! The whole thing has a really grounded feel, like this could be a reconstruction of an RW archaeological site.

Well, he's husband to more than one goddess. That's not the same thing as cheating, since he's legitimately married to all of them.

46 minutes ago, Beoferret said:

I almost forgot! Princess Mononoke has a number of aspects that feel very Gloranthan to me. Deer-riding warriors! Demonic/Chaos-taint! Massive godbeasts (e.g., the boar in the beginning)! But especially the depiction of the spirits in the ancient forest. It's strongly influenced how I imagine the spirit world. 

Clearly it did for the people behind RQ:G too - the illustration on p.364 introducing the chapter "Spirits and the Spirit World" features some familiar looking characters. I spot a giant boar covered in warpaint, a human-faced stag with giant antlers, and several little potato-faced humanoids running about...

On the topic of animated movies, Tomm Moore/Cartoon Saloon's The Book of Kells, Song of the Sea, and the truly incredible Wolfwalkers have the perfect mythical tone, full of spirits and folklore presented absolutely beautifully. Wolfwalkers in particular strongly informs how I look at hsunchen. (It also made me bawl like a goddamn baby by the end - please, if you take one thing thing from anything I've ever posted, please watch Wolfwalkers!)