dumuzid

The Baboon Troop are a Praxian tribe, the Praxian character history options work just fine for them.

Well, I believe the phenomenon being discussed was sorcerers taking multiple rounds to power up major spells, which I would expect to look and sound rather different from a Humakti calling on Sword Trance in the span of a single strike rank, etc. Unlike theistic and spirit magic big, flashy uses of sorcery actually take enough time to cast to give enemies the chance to disrupt them mid-course. All that magic does take time though, especially if anyone fails or fumbles their casting rolls and has to re-attempt things. It's a major tactical issue if one side enters the fray with their Weapon Trances, Shield spells, spirit magic and so on already active, and the other enters the fight un-enhanced and desperately trying to put their defenses and buffs up. In a pitched battle situation you can reasonably assume that both sides will spend some time powering up before fighting actually begins; in an ambush situation, only one side has that expectation. Having supporters performing decoy 'magical' ceremonies could be a viable tactic in some situations, but opponents with access to Second Sight, Discern Magic and similar effects may be able to tell if MP or RP is actually being circulated, exchanged or expended. Someone with enough Illusion magic might even try to fake those exchanges to make decoy 'magicians' more attractive targets. At that point the defending sorcerer is wagering that their attempts at hiding the real source of dangerous magic will keep the opposition targeting phantoms long enough to let them launch their attack. So, reasonable tactic, if you put in the legwork and showmanship to really sell it--and you're willing to sacrifice those performers to the enemy's attempts at dealing with what they think is a decisive threat.

To add to icebrand's thoughtful comments on this: in the games I've played and am running, tactics like these aren't a matter of picking on someone, they're what happens when the game really starts to get tactically interesting. Like icebrand says, the answer to big extemporaneous sorcery is generally to stop it from going off. Once it goes off, the Strength of any sorcerous spell big enough to require several turns of casting is going to blast through most magic defenses, if the casting has happened successfully you've already failed to counter it. In the example that helped start this tangent, when my player character was the dark troll directing trollkin and other assets against a hostile sorcerer, if we'd not disrupted them the expected result was a casting of Moonburn that would've killed dozens of spear-trollkin and Grazelander horse archers, decisively swinging one element of a larger battle. When sorcery and comparably flashy, decisive magic (Sword/Axe Trance, for instance) are involved in a battle or skirmish, it's only logical and sensible for the opposition to try everything they can to negate them--and the question becomes, from the point of view of the sorcerer, how to foil those attempts at negating them. The sorcerer my trollkin harassed was a Thanatari, and made himself more difficult to disrupt by casting his Chaotic sorcery in full armor--all those sling stones pinged away, it was only a Yelornan firearrow that got through sufficiently to disrupt the casting. Other sorcerers might negate mundane attempts at disrupting them by only engaging in combat situations while discorporated, or with bodyguards (warriors and/or summoned beings) in close support, or by casting their magic through bound or allied spirits rater than appearing personally in the field, etc. A wizard who can be foiled by a bunch of trollkin slingers alone needs to re-evaluate how they're practicing their magic, and up their game. The challenge to the sorcerer and their companions is to keep them casting despite the best tricks the enemy can think of to shake them up. It's when you go a step further though, and players or their opposition start heroquesting to disrupt each other's magic in advance, that things really start to get interesting. Then you're getting into fifth dimensional combat, and RuneQuest is the only RPG that delivers it quite this way.

In addition to the gods you listed, the current form of the Blue Moon spends most of her time climbing up the outside of the Sky Dome. And wouldn't you know it, she's a premier oracular deity. Bozkatang, who looked into the Chaosium and learned the secrets to fighting Chaos in advance. And whose followers helped worship the Blue Moon into her current form...

Why stop at three? In one important battle I had a battery of dozens of them queued up to rain lead bolgs on an important enemy sorcerer. Turned out to be very important, only their sling harassment kept the sorcerer distracted long enough for my character's Yelornan sister-in-law to put a Firearrow into him and decisively fizzle the sorcerous shaping. He was casting a souped-up Moonburn too, according to my GM after the fact; if it had gone off, it would've changed the whole tempo of the battle.

I was one of two players in a recently-concluded campaign centered on the adventure book The Smoking Ruins that ran the gamut from small scale dungeon delving to high stakes politics, military actions and heroquesting. As the scope of the came expanded, and our little group's proficiency with the system increased (we'd also played in a shorter 3-player campaign a year or two before) we took on secondary characters prepared using the options for starting with more experience in the Adventurers chapter of the core rules. Running a campaign with fewer total players has some particular challenges covered very well in the posts above mine, but in terms of existing published material, according to my GM for that campaign we were able to use pretty much every resource in The Smoking Ruins by the time the campaign concluded, and had gone a fair ways beyond it.

Create Shadow for my money, it's a handy trick to use like that

Depends on the tradition/denomination. Some Malkioni consider Tapping immoral, or cosmically counterproductive. The Brithini and Vadeli both use it though, it's not fundamentally counter to all forms of Malkionism.

Wonderful book, so much rich detail. If you like it you'll probably enjoy The Unspoken Word #4: Uz, the equivalent classic HeroQuest publication. That has a glossary of troll terms for darksense sensations that I found very useful for roleplaying.

It also takes a round of the spell being active before those enemies start making CON rolls to keep their breath held. That gives someone time to dispel it even before suffocation checks start, especially if the target has a support caster behind them.

Mythically, peace will come to the land once she banishes the Storm King to settle down with a nice Argan Argar type.

Well, one of them got to set up shop in one of the more materially sophisticated and population-dense places in Glorantha, even after the Closing, while the other had to grow a marsh to hide in after the Dragonkill annihilated every major surrounding population center in a way that denied him the raw materials for most of his best tricks. If anything, Delecti probably curses the fate that saw him stuck in Dragon Pass, hemmed in by mostly-hostile Elder Races, while Archidomides is out there glutting himself on God Learner secrets and living like a god-emperor.

Going further on that line, the Undying bit could be the result of him body-swapping down the years, jumping into the skin of a descendant before his current flesh wears out. Which, combined with the magical city more-than-half in the Gods World to add @metcalph's speculation, would make him a bit of a Fornitian Belintar.

Thank you! Follow-up question: what about the next-most-famous children of the Blue Moon, the Zaranistangi? In mainline Glorantha an army of them appeared in Fonrit after the Red Moon first rose. They wore red robes, and led the Veldang in a decade of glorious liberation before mysteriously disappearing again. Has the new Blue Moon opened the path for them to become loper-hsunchen?

I'm curious about the Blue Moon Empire's relationship with Artmal, the Blue Moon's previous Moonson. Is he worshiped in the Empire? e: also, what effects the Blue Moon's return had on the Veldang of Pamaltela

He helped a character of mine achieve Draconic illumination, I've got no real gripes with the guy.

In reading up on the history of Fonrit for the RQG game I'm running, I've stumbled across something that's really piqued my curiosity. The overlord of Golden Kareeshtu, the most powerful confederation of city-states in Fonrit at the start of the Hero Wars, is a man called Archidomides the Undying. He is entitled the Vessel--high priest? avatar? actually possesed?--of Tondiji, the god of the city of the same name, said to be the most powerful city god in Glorantha at the end of the Third Age, and of Ikadz, the god of torture, a powerful and pervasive cult in Fonrit. The Guide is sparse on biographical detail for Archidomides. He's ruled Golden Kareeshtu openly since the collapse of the Confederation of Fonrit in the early-mid 1300s, and has an unnaturally prolonged lifespan. The gazetteer portion of the Guide to Glorantha covering Fonrit refers to him a few times in describing lands he rules, owns outright or conquered during his reign, but says little else directly about the man. What first got me interested in Archidomides was his name. It's such a classically Greek name for an area of Glorantha so heavily based on West Africa, it made me curious. And then I happened across this passage, from the Guide's description of the fall of the Middle Sea Empire in Fonrit, p. 554: Now maybe what I suggest next should've gone in the Dumbest Theory thread, because it's based on only scant evidence, but: isn't anyone else a little curious about the identity of that unnamed rebel MSE governor who led the Kareeshtan revolt? Wouldn't someone in the position of 'MSE imperial governor of Kareeshtu' have been in a splendid position to mine the secrets of, oh, the rites of Tondiji's city-cult, say, or the inner mysteries of the Ikadz torturers? For your consideration, I contend that this 10th Century imperial governor and His Holy Munificence Archidomides, the Heartless and Openhanded, are one and the same. I think he gobbled down enough power and secrets in his official capacity that when the Six-Legged Empire started to shake apart he saw the chance for unfettered autonomy and grasped it, 'going native' to lead the Kareeshtan revolt from a position of social and religious power as, say, the freshly anointed high priest of Tondiji. I reference Delecti in the thread title because he managed something similar on the other side of the ocean: in the wreck of the EWF, Delecti the Necromancer accumulated enough lore and power to secure his perpetual existence, if not his life, and a realm within which to exercise it. Delecti and Archidomides strike me as peers, atavisms sustained by the same magics they used to secure their survival through the fall of their former empires and the end of the Second Age. Or maybe there's just sources I'm unfamiliar with that throw a bucket of water on my little theory, there's always that possibility. If that's the case though, I'd love to see the citations and read the evidence myself. So, what do you think? Is it intriguing? Am I way off base?

In the game I run, one of the NPC companions traveling with the player characters in Prax on behalf of the White Bull Society is none other than Gabaryanga, the Veldang former slave and revolutionary destined (in the Guide to Glorantha) to raise a great rebellion against the slavocracy in Fonrit during the Hero Wars. Without getting into the plot details, Gabaryanga wound up in Prax at the end of a long quest through the Otherworlds that spat him out at the Pairing Stones during the Sacred Time of 1625-1626. He's a guest of Argrath White Bull, and the player characters are a cadre of Eaglebrown warlocks-in-training being put through a series of escalating magico-military field exercises by Argrath, one of several nascent hero bands he's training up for the 1627 campaigning in this Glorantha. He hopes their runic combination will interact with Gabaryanga's presence in illuminating ways, in as many senses of the word as possible. His most recent task for them, to that end, is a this-world heroquest from the Leaping Place Falls to the Zola Fel's estuary, retracing the river's march to the sea to aid Magasta's struggle against Chaos. Maneuvers like this send ripples through the Otherworlds, of course, and by accepting service from Gabaryanga in exchange for hospitality Argrath has mingled his cause in Genertela with the cosmic forces gathering to oppose each other in Fonrit. Given what we know of Argrath, and what he knows of Fonrit and Pamaltela as a former Wolf Pirate, this may have been deliberate on his part. What that means in practical terms for my players is that when the Otherworlds reach out to find opposition for them in their heroquesting, it's likely to bring them into contention with questers from Fonrit, specifically Afadjann where Gabaryanga was born, well before they'd ever meet Fonritians in the Middle World. My question for the tribe is: what sort of powers should a band of Afadjanni heroquesters be packing? From what I've read in the Guide and Revealed Mythologies the Fonritian slavers mingle theistic and sorcerous magic freely, combining perverse twists on Pamaltelan mythology with sorcerous lore picked up from the God Learners and Vadeli. Many gods considered heinous Chaos entities inimical to all life and sanity in the rest of the world are openly worshiped in Fonrit, with materially and politically powerful cults that sometimes rule whole cities. Ompalam is the obvious one but you've also got Gark, Seseine, and plenty more awful sorts. Thanatar seems a natural fit for Fonrit, for instance, in both the separated and conjoined cult forms. To start things off, my first consideration is just how the Fonritian slavery magic works as viewed through the prism of RQG's rules. From the Guide to Glorantha, p. 552: Mechanically, this sounds to me like Darleester grants a special form of the Command (Species) rune spell to their high priest, a Command (Slave) spell with a lifetime duration. That's...pretty scary, right there on its own, even if there's a resistance roll associated as normal. Does anyone have alternative interpretations for Darleester's compulsion magic, or ideas for other deviations of Fonritian magic from what we're used to in Genertela? I'm hoping specifically for suggestions regarding Afadjann, but if anyone has interesting ideas for the magical practices of Kareeshtu or other Fonritian polities I'd be game to hear that too.

In Pameltala lies Yngortu, the "Grimcity," ruled by the dual cult of "the Two Brothers, Orjethulut and Hanjethulut, who fought and killed off all their rivals, but made peace before slaying each other." The Yngortines do not recognize connections between their Two Brothers and outside cults, but according to the Guide most observers associate the Brothers with Humakt and Zorak Zoran. My dumb theory, with very little but some curious notes in descriptions of the death of Umath to back it up, is that while one of the Brothers is Zorak Zoran, the other is not Humakt, but a god that Genertelan travelers might mistake for Humakt in this context--I think the other brother is Shargash, mostly because I love the idea of a myth where Shargash and Zorak Zoran finally square off in the nadir of the Greater Darkness, only to recognize that they're nearly reflections of each other, then band together to whoop up on Chaos in the final battles of the Gods War.

When the group I played with got the Smoking Ruin to stop smoking, it was under the following circumstances: 1) The draconic curse of Atonement on the troll ghosts there was fully resolved. Kajak-ab's tribe was danced off into the Underworld en masse, and Vamargic's tribe was released once he relinquished control of his undead slaves and surrendered to death. 2) Vamargic was defeated by a Unity Battle, a this-world heroquest of the mythic battle in the Greater Darkness when Only Old One led the many peoples of Dragon Pass to defeat the Devil's horde outside the ruins of Nochet. Orlanthi, Old Tarshites, Grazelanders, Beastpeople, elves, trolls and trollkin all participated. All spirits bound to the eye-necklace were freed, and the necklace itself destroyed (via troll stomach). 3) The fragment of Ernalda's mirror was discovered in the player characters' first scouting of the ruins and taken to the Clearwine Earth temple, where it still resided at the time of the Smoking Ruin Unity Battle. The result was a little pocket of the world that started to feel a lot like Silver Age Esrolia. The resulting community was home to Earth-worshiping humans from Old Tarsh and Sartar, Shadow Plateau dark trolls from a variety of Darkness cults, swarms of Lost Valley trollkin whose leaders were initiated into the worship of Argan Argar and Humakt by the player characters, elves resettled from the Clearwine grove, and a nomadic population of Beast Valley people (mostly centaurs and minotaurs) who made the new site a part of their seasonal round. Its dominant runic influences were Earth, embodied in the great Earth Temple beneath the Ernalda garden; Darkness, embodied in the Kyger Litor Dancing Grounds; and Harmony, shared by the Ernalda and Argan Argar cults that directed the Earth and Darkness communities respectively. The community's wyter was a spirit of Darkness and Harmony from Storm Age Korolstead, summoned with the help of Urvantan from Lost Valley immediately after the Unity Battle. The community was not meant to be a revival of Korolstead: it was a new thing, named Ashen Rise by its new Earth priestess. The wyter bound itself to the lance of the Argan Argar warrior who began the Unity Battle quest, and he became the first king of Ashen Rise. The Orlanthi contingent of the Unity Army either died in the battle (under the charge of Vamargic's centaur skeleton cavalry) or chose not to settle afterward; when more Orlanthi (mostly from Clearwine) arrived to join the community, they refurbished Orlanth Hill and brought Air back into prominence in the runic mix of the settlement, though subordinated to Earth and Darkness. The Grazelanders, who were not fighting far from home, did not choose to settle in the new community, but their participation created friendly initial relations between Ashen Rise and the Grazelander Queendom. In the weeks after the battle and the community's founding, its Earth priestess negotiated a sharing agreement for the fragment of Ernalda's mirror with the Clearwine temple: the mirror would spend the first half of each year in Clearwine and the second half in Ashen Rise. changing hands after Sacred Time and during Earth Season respectively. The mirror was thus present for the community's first Sacred Time heroquest, "The Wooing of Esrola," in which Argan Argar and Ernalda rescued Esrola from her confinement with Lodril. Its success combined with the power of the community's Earth temple, the work of Ashen Rise's elves in their new grove, and the presence of the mirror to bring intense fertility magic to the plateau and the valley beneath it. The same quest also compelled Lodril to magically dig irrigation canals in the valley floor and rebuild much of the old Korolstead entirely ruins in obsidian. Within a year of settlement the community had grown to several hundreds, and become the chokepoint of a new roadless troll caravan route permitted by the Beast Valley centaurs between Duck Point and the Grazelands. Trolls and trollkin lived in its expanded caves, humans on its rebuilt surface, and elves in their regrown woods around the Earth temple and on the valley floor. Politically, the community's relations with the major powers to its east and west were resolved by marriage and negotiation: its Earth priestess accepted the courtship of a Clearwine Orlanthi runelord, while its king arranged a marriage to a daughter of the chieftain of the Four Gifts tribe--the Feathered Horse Queen blessed the latter marriage in person, in the community's Earth temple. Magically, Ashen Rise developed relationships with new spirits: the town's magicians made contact with the oreiad of the mountain behind it, a great Darkness bear came back with the town's warriors from fighting for the Feathered Horse Queen in Tarsh, and the stream that flows from the Ernalda garden woke up. That stream proved to be a daughter of the Oslir river dragon and Shargash, rousing for the first time from a sleep that began during the Golden Age, and she was integrated into the community as a truly frightful demigoddess of war. The place was governed by a city ring composed of the king, Earth priestess, and a representative for each of its constituent communities: trolls, trollkin, beastpeople, Tarshites, Sartarites, elves, etc. The ghost of old King Korol Kandaros sometimes appears at legal functions, having given his official blessing to Ashen Rise as a successor community to Korolstead.

That can be highly contextual. Personal wargear is usually up for grabs; battle ransom is a blood-price, an exchange of a community or family's goods for the life of one of its members. What they were carrying on them at the time of their capture is usually forfeit to the victor, the same as if they'd killed the captive outright. If something the captive was carrying was really magically powerful the people ransoming them may be interested in paying extra to get the item back, especially if the object in question is significant to a cult. Returning anything that significant for free along with the ransomed person is the sort of gesture you'd make to treat the vanquished magnanimously after a win. A character I played was responsible for ransoming back the corpse of the champion of the Yarandros hero-cult in Tarsh for resurrection, and returning the champion's ceremonial skull-helmet was a significant point of contention in the ransom negotiations.

We played out the hand-off of some Praxian prisoners, animal rustlers captured in the Desolation Hills, in a game I run. The caught thieves were Bolo Lizard riders. A Sable Rider player character rode up onto an eminence and made signs the nearby Bolo Lizard clan couldn't miss to call for a ransom exchange. WIthin a few hours a lone lizard rider approached the player party to negotiate, with an unknown number of their clanspeople lying in wait just out of sight. The player characters were more interested in dispensing with their prisoners than bickering over the price, so the 'negotiation' was more a clarification of terms: the price to be exchanged, the place and manner of the exchange. The lizard riders left the ransom as a cache further along the party's line of march. Lizard riders watched the site, and by agreement would not approach to retrieve their prisoners until the player party had left. The player characters are a mostly honorable lot, and were in a hurry to get out of the Desolation Hills and on to their goal, so they stuck to the letter and spirit of the ransom agreement. They stopped at the cache site, tethered their prisoners with their lizard mounts, retrieved the ransom and went on their way. The whole affair amounted to a year's bonus pay for the group's animal rider warriors.

I have a Lunar sorcerer player character in the game I run, and the two main applications they've had for their magic was powering up a spell to push their INT up to 26 for a year, and conjuring up the occasional wall or field of fire when the situation calls for it. He still makes a point of staying behind the fighting line while he casts though.

The RQG campaign I was a player in reached its finale last night, and it involved Ethilrist centrally. In our Glorantha he was convinced at the Second Battle of Moonbroth that Argrath was going to bring about the doom of Glorantha. Our characters had been sent on earlier operations with Ethilrist and his troop by the Feathered Horse Queen, during which his blasé attitude towards what we regarded as terrible dangers (he nearly threatened to smash a True Dragon's egg before a tailed priest while we were with him) gave us a healthy wariness of him. In early 1628, when the joint armies of Sartar and Prax were mustering under Leika Black-Spear and her consort Argrath to settle accounts in Tarsh, Ethilrist set in motion a scheme to cripple both sides and remove Argrath from the board. He and his sorcerers developed a spell, fueled by the forced veneration of Muse Roost's peasant population, to rouse the dragon of the Oslir River, whose true name both Ethilrist and our player characters learned while working together. Their plan was to raise the dragon's jaws beneath all of Kordros Island in Tarsh during the height of the fighting around Dunstop to swallow all the combined forces and heroes of the White Bull movement, Sartar and Lunar Tarsh. He managed to keep his intentions secret from his intended victims, and began the Battle of Dunstop on the Sartarite side, leading his Black Horse Troop and magically arrived Waertagi allies. Back in Sea Season the player characters, all members of the city ring of a new settlement on the eastern edge of the Grazelands, were invited to a Western-style tourney at Muse Roost, and managed to gain Ethilrist's trust sufficiently that he obliquely revealed some of his plan, after swearing us into his confidence. Through previous interactions with dragons and dragonewts our characters had learned enough to anticipate manipulation of the Oslir dragon, and were already making preparations to visit the God Time and prevent them. In a heroquest that stretched on for weeks in the mortal world a few of our characters ventured into the Greater Darkness gods' realm, where where they cut deals with Shargash, entered under the Dome, visited the Hill of Gold, and finally ascended Yelm's Footstool. Previous heroquests undertaken by our characters had revealed that Yelmalio had once coupled with Xentha, the Night, to father Argan Argar. My troll character, portraying Argan Argar in the God Time, claimed the right to take the Ten Tests and be acknowledged Emperor of Dara Happa on that basis. Our questers dethroned Kazkurtum, the Empty Emperor, and my troll (an illuminate of the House of Black Arkat, transformed into a human through Argan Argar magic for the occasion) took the throne to summon Oslir as the rightful emperor. She did not come. In the Middle World, the battle of Dunstop had reached its height. Ethilrist began the sorcerous shaping that would raise the Oslir's jaws beneath Kodros island as his troops and Waertagi turned on their erstwhile allies and drove for Heruvernalda, the greatest Earth temple in Tarsh and the only Earth power on the island capable of resisting the waking dragon for long. Others of our player characters were brought through the hero planes to defend Heruvernalda from inside, rallying the axe maidens and guardian spirits to withstand the Black Horse troop. Our earth priestess briefly became one with the island to coordinate the Earth power against Ethilrist's dragonrise. The Oslira did not answer in the Gods Realm because she was being drawn back fully into the Middle World. Our heroquesters returned from the Gods Realm riding Kargzant down from the Sky, and a ferocious martial and magical battle unfolded at the gates of Heruvernalda. Our reunited characters managed to throw back the Black Horse troop and sufficiently disrupt Ethilrist's magic that the Dara Happan Emperor's song of power overwhelmed the Western sorcery's claim on the dragon's attention. The Oslira relaxed her jaws and sunk back into sleep, sparing the island and everyone on it--but not before her great tongue lashed out from the river, wrapped around Ethilrist's waist, and dragged him beneath the water and into her gullet. Which was poetic, since it was her egg he'd nearly smashed the year before. In the epilogue of the game we learned that Ethilrist managed to get back to the Underworld after that, but he kept finding his way back to the Middle World blocked. Old allies refused him, old paths were closed. His final scene ended when his shade was confronted down there by the chief war spirit of our player characters' community, Igeyorlm, the demigoddess daughter of Shargash and the Oslir dragon. She brandished her green stone warclub and flashed him her fangs, before presumably dragging him off to her father's hell. The Black Horses were offered sanctuary at our characters' community, along with as many of their human riders as they cared to bring with them. Obviously just my group's version, but that's one way Ethilrist could meet his end in the Hero Wars.

I've developed a scheme for the disposition of Artmal's skeleton. Don't know if my players will ultimately choose to join Gabaryanga on the world-crossing quest to restore Artmal, but they encountered the resting place of his skull in Fire Season of 1626. The following is material for an active RQG campaign, and is now a pretty solid blend of actual 'canon' from the Guide and other sources, and new or expanded ideas I've added. I decided to partition Artmal seven ways, Pelorian Lunar fashion, with the pieces falling thusly: Legs - Shape - Physicality - Jrustela (Eradinthanos). These originally landed northeast of Jrustela in the open ocean, where they were a source of Movement and Tidal magic for the region's merfolk at the Dawn. The bones were seized by Jrusteli wizards soon after the Battle of Tanian's Victory, but the Legbones of Artmal and their guardian spirit resisted all attempts at magical coercion while the God Learners reigned. After the cataclysms, when the wilderness around Eradinthanos was settled by aldryami in the Third Age their dryads received powerful visions of Veldrya, the long-lost elf goddess of Blue Moon vegetation. Since then the elves have kept careful guard around the God Learner ruins that still house the legbones, convinced that they play some mysterious role in the Reforesting to come. Ribs - Warmth - Life force - Tarien (Sky Crater). The Ribs of Artmal still rest in the crater where they fell to earth in the Storm Age. Since the Dawn humans have come to the crater to learn the secrets of sacred battle-rage and swordsmanship (a very rare skill this far south in Pamaltela) from the Madman of the Crater, the spirit of the Ribs, whose deepest gifts allow his followers to draw shining swords of lurid purple jade from the crater walls. With the Slarges increasing their pressure on the tribes neighboring Sky Crater the berserker cult of the Madman and the Ribs grows in importance and influence. None of the warriors and magicians who now hear the Madman's whispers in their dreams have yet agreed to his offers of even greater secrets, in exchange for human sacrifice. Hips - Beast - Fertility - Seshnela (Fralos). This site has come up before in this thread, though I planned to rest different bones there earlier. Artmal's hips landed in Seshnela, and now lie at the foundations of the talar ruling citadel of Fralos, a mid-sized city in Estaurenic, Seshnela. The lion-headed spirit of the Hips is the guardian spirit of its city, and serves loyally so long as Fralos is ruled by an unmarried woman of the native talar dynasty. Attempts by Malkioni wizards to compel the spirit to behave otherwise date back to the First Age, and have all falled. No modern members of the ruling family know the full truth, that they descend through Dawn Age Basmoli nobility from Artmal's mythical wife Cathora (a daughter of Fralar, king of carnivores, and Sehna Likita). The spirit of the Hips would probably accept a unmarried female ruler from any of the local Malkioni castes, or indeed an infidel, as long as they could trace their descent back to Cathora. Skull - Bird - Intellect - Prax (Blue Sable Altar). Artmal's Skull came to earth northeast of the headwaters of the Zola Fel. Its resting place was a mesa that became a core sacred site of the earliest Sable Riders, a portion of whom renamed themselves the Blue Clan and dedicated themselves to the Skull and its spirit as an oracle. The Blue Clan were extinct by the Dawn, and most of the deepest secrets of interacting with the Skull lost, though surviving Sable clans maintained the purity of the site and guarded it against mortal intrusion. The spirit of the Skull appears as a crippled old Veldang man draped in soiled rags, who rests in the pooled mineral water of the salt-crystal caverns that now house the Skull deep beneath its mesa. The Raging Serpent Path, a seasonal river that pours from the Blue Sable Altar, is in fact the water of the great Tanier River in Seshnela: the tears of Sesha Likita, shed for her fallen son-in-law and released onto the Praxian plains through the tidal influence of his birth mother, the Blue Moon. Its magically-charged waters give rise to elemental and immaterial snake spirits, uniformly ornery entities lashing out in confusion at finding themselves transported from Seshnela to the Praxian plains. The Impala Bone clan of Sable Riders specializes in hunting these tidal spirit-snakes. Shadow - Dark Side - Figurative Shadow - Blue Moon Plateau. The Shadow of Artmal fled to the greatest resting place of his mother's remains, the Blue Moon Plateau in Peloria. Like his mother, the aspect of Artmal at the Blue Moon Plateau has been fed and shaped by its resident trolls since the Darkness. The spirit of the Shadow of Artmal and Artal Argar, the Son of Mahaquata worshiped by the Blue Moon trolls, are interchangeable. The spirit, usually depicted (and appearing) as a portly, bat-winged male troll wearing rich clothing and carrying a sheathed sword, is worshiped among the Blue Moon uz as the patron of explorers, warleaders, and statestrolls. His cult provides unique skills and magic that greatly aid long-distance flight and navigation. Probably the 'healthiest' of the parts of Artmal thanks to the trolls' worship, though the most different from its original form as a result. Eyes - Sight - Awareness - Afadjann (Faladje). The Eyes of Artmal fell to earth in land that was later settled by followers of Jarkaru, the Artmali hero who refounded the Artmali Empire after Artmal's defeat as an aggressive, colonial maritime empire. The Artmali colonists wielded the Eyes as aids to scrying and oracular projects. As the Storm Age worsened and the empire's patron deities died off, the Artmali used the Eyes to seek with increasing desperation for new sources and paths to power. They were in active use when great Pamalt tilted the Sky Dome to rain heavenly fire on the core of Pamaltela's Chaos irruption, which included the heartlands of the corrupted Artmali Empire. When colonists from the Vadeli Empire of Chir arrived to conquer the isolated Artmali, they found the Eyes unresponsive and their spirit nonexistent. After the Vadeli Empire was destroyed in the Darkness only post-urban Veldang tribes lived in the adjacent wilderness, shunning the ruins. When the expanding Gargandites conquered the region centuries after the Dawn they leveled the Artmali ruins to found Faladje atop them, destroyed what ghosts they could and bound the rest, and rediscovered the Eyes. Centuries within Time had only allowed the spirit of the Eyes to recuperate to a whisper of power, and the Eyes themselves were still seared dark. The first jann of Faladje sealed the Eyes away as something they could not use but might incite the Veldang slaves. They rested in the royal vaults until the God Learners came, and the Eyes were rediscovered in an imperial audit. The Western wizards were unable to establish any functional connection with the Eyes before the Six-Legged Empire they were part of collapsed, but the first post-imperial janns of Faladje were the beneficiaries of their research. The Eyes became scrying tools of Faladje's royal court, their crippled spirit enslaved to the will of each ruling jann in succession. They were in active use the day the Red Moon rose to the north, and reflected the glint of her light through the otherworlds. That caught the attention of an army of Zaranistangi, trapped in the God Time since their confrontation with Seshnelan wizards of the early Middle Sea Empire, freed at last with the Moon's rising. The Zaranistangi traveled directly to Faladje, overthrew the ruling slavers, and led the liberated slaves in a war that ended only when Afadjanni heroquesters offered the Zaranistangi a priceless ransom in exchange for truce: the soul of Artmal, captured and enslaved by Garangordos himself a thousand years earlier in the quests that founded Fonritian civilization. The Zaranistangi withdrew to their home realm in the God Time with Artmal's liberated soul, to wait till conditions in the Middle World allow their truce with the janns to expire. When Faladje was reconquered its new slaver rulers found the Eyes only lightly filmed with darkness, and their once-enslaved spirit absent. The new masirin of Faladje hid the Eyes in the deep vaults, lest they attract more dangerous otherworld cousins of the Veldang slaves. Seventh - Mystic - Soul - God Time (Coborandra). After Artmal's defeat his Soul haunted the ancient palace of his son Yeetai, the first mortal emperor of the Artmali, on Pamaltela's far southern coast. The broken god's Soul was treated as an inexpressibly honored, if invalid, guest of the emperors who followed Jarkaru, and Yeetai's Palace was maintained as a tomb and temple to the seventh part of Artmal while his descendants' empire lasted. The Palace lay within Pamalt's Firefall, which scoured it of life and sundered its walls. For the rest of the Darkness, and for centuries into Time, Artmal's Soul haunted those ruins at the edge of the Sea of Fire. Travelers through the Nargan Desert sometimes heard the Soul's voice on the wind, accompanied by the strings of a kora, in songs that briefly made the Blue Moon visible to mortals on her journey through the sky. Garangordos the Cruel, the founding hero of Fonrit, sought and battled Artmal's soul in one of many quests he carried out in the Middle World and otherworlds to create his new society. He bound the soul in a casket of iron and lead that he forced his first enslaved Veldang warriors to carry into battle like a priest's litter. With Artmal's Soul and Darleester the Noose both under his power, and incorporated into the society of magically-reinforced slavery he created with his hero band the Glorious Ones, Garangordos and his many successors were able to bind the descendants of the Artmali to the foundation of their society with chains that held fast through many worlds. The casket lay among the treasures of the Great Temple of Garangordos in Garguna until the Zaranistangi invasion. Like some other Blue Moon influences, the Zaranistangi were able to negate the hold of Fonritian slavery-enforcing magic over the Veldang, but on a repeatable and reliable basis never faced by the slavers before. Fonritian civilization itself seemed on the verge of collapse, with Zaranistangi striking from nowhere at will and liberating Veldang slaves en masse, when a hero band seized the casket of Armtal's Soul from Garguna and offered it to the invaders--with the threat that should they be refused, the Afadjanni would open the casket themselves and cast Artmal's Soul into the maw of Chaos. The Zaranistangi accepted a truce and rode from the Middle World with the casket in tow. They opened it on the slopes of the Spike in Coborandra, their home within the Gods World. The Seventh Part of Artmal rests as a guest among his cousins still, waiting for mortal Artmali to gather the rest of him together in the Sea of Fire, reunite him with his Red Sword, and restore him fully to his place among the gods.