dumuzid

Surely she offers the Summon Geese rune magic spell?

They're probably referring to these lines from p. 39 of the Sourcebook, which I wouldn't mind some explication on myself: "Among the Kitori, a little bright light was snuffed out, and a demon that had many sharp mouths was let out of its skin. It sought vengeance, and fell upon the army of King Broyan while they slept. The king could not keep it away, because he had betrayed the City of Wonders, and the Great King was killed there, with his army." I took this to mean that someone (probably Lunar agents) snuffed out a warding light keeping a Darkness-based spirit of vengeance from Belintar's reign quiescent, which sought out and killed Broyan on pre-set orders to pursue anyone attempting to usurp Belintar the way he deposed Ezkankekko. Is there an intended interpretation?

You'd need quite the heroquest to retrieve him after the ending of Beneath the...

in-game, my Argan Argar troll usually communicates peaceful intent by making the Harmony rune with three fingers

Oh, yes, one of my players is a duck assistant shaman (SIZ 3) studying with Argrath, the first scene with the whole group together was his audience chamber. I've assumed he set up shop in the old Count's Palace in Oldtown after evicting the Lunars who'd been using it as their headquarters.

So, I just finished running my first session of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha from the GM's side. The game began in New Pavis, first day of Sea Season 1626. I'm basing the game primarily off materials in the classic Pavis & Big Rubble and the more recent Pavis: Gateway to Adventure, with a last helping from the Jonstown Compendium work Rubble Runners, from which Kars the Prophet and his entourage have already appeared. A challenge I've anticipated in using Pavis as a setting for RQ:G is probably obvious to those familiar with the books I'm using: the old Pavis materials only extend chronologically into the final years of the Lunar Occupation. I've had to develop post-Liberation Pavis from those materials, and honestly it's been pleasant and rewarding. I'm curious: has anyone else here done some work, fan, Jonstown or official, on updating Pavis for the post-Liberation timeline that they'd like to share? I'm happy to open with my own contribution. The first original development in Pavis that my players encountered is my replacement for Moonlighters, the club that catered to Lunar officers in Oldtown during the occupation. I've decided that after the Liberation of Pavis the old management of Moonlighters is either dead or fled, so Argrath granted the establishment to one of his supporters with a background in club promotion: an Argan Argar dark troll from Nochet, Hargro Brightbite, and his crew of scruffy Nochet trolls and trollkin, who now run the Blind Lamp Club in Moonlighters' old building, offering thumping percussive dance music, trollkin gogo dancers of dubious skill but tremendous enthusiasm, and a dining menu catered by the in-house Thunderbreath Gobbleguts franchise. My premise being that Argan Argar invented nightclubs in the Storm Age after observing that "humans do most of the things they like best in the dark, and are happy to pay for the privilege."

Serves them right for thinking of it in terms of the Lightbringers quest, not Lifebringers. Shame on Harmast for forgetting it was no human who gathered the Unity Army to vanquish Wakboth's horde. Shame on his companions for forgetting the debt all humans owe to Ezkankekko and the Darkness people, less than five hundred years since the Dawn.

Argrath has his own setbacks. The Red Emperor takes Boldhome back in the 1640s, according to the TakenEgi Stele. Argrath and his companions spend a stretch hiding in Broyan's otherworld hall. I think he and Harrek have already had their duel by then, after Gunda died in the sack of Boldhome. His fortunes take a few wild swings before he embarks on the quest to free Sheng.

Thank you for all of this. Phew, those stats. Granted, I have no RQ3 experience, so I don't know how exactly those write-ups would translate to RQG, but still. Follow-up question: what are the caste restrictions of the Browns and Reds?

The right move after that was probably for Leika (or a PC) to re-light the Sartar brazier, not Argrath, yeah.

Argrath becoming the King of Dragon Pass is a colossal miscalculation and intimately linked with why his war against the Moon spirals so horribly out of control. To fulfill his correct role in the Hero Wars, Argrath needed to embrace more fully his position as the White Bull, preparatory to embodying Storm Bull, not Orlanth. A healthy transition to 4th Age requires that Orlanth and Yelm make peace in Hell, while Storm Bull and the Unity Hero defeat embodied Chaos in the Middle World. Argrath was supposed to be Storm Bull while Broyan was supposed to be Orlanth, but him dying to that darkness demon in 1624 put paid to that plan. Argrath tried to synthesize the Orlanth and Storm Bull roles in Broyan's unavoidable absence, but ended up with an Orlanth who never fully gives up lordship to venture with his companions into the Underworld etc. He stays in the Middle World for the final battle, like Storm Bull did, then tries to turn the Unity Battle into the Great Compromise...and the results are not pretty. The Unity Hero is one or several PCs in this scheme.

Well I think we can all agree on this one.

The group I play in gathered a good old-fashioned Unity Army to purge and resettle the Smoking Ruins. Here are the answers to those points from that campaign: 1) We had an Ernalda noble in the party, and an apparition of Ernalda welcomed her into mastery of the temple personally. Its guardians were two Snake Daughters, and its temple defenses were treated as being dormant until our Ernaldan took the mantle of high priestess. 2) His spirit was still there in our game. His tomb held grave goods, but since we hoped to integrate him into the new community we left those untouched. We'd already been resident in the ruins for a few seasons before we approached Korol directly, and had already done considerable work in renovating and repopulating them. He was sufficiently pleased with developments that he only needed the oath of the town ring's chieftain to refurbish and maintain a dragonewt site in the ruins before he gave the new community his blessing. 3) The Unity Army our group led was raised specifically to free all the spirits trapped in the Smoking Ruins, including those in the eye-necklace, and using a combination of approaches (including my troll character eating the eye-necklace) this was accomplished. A Zorak Zoran berserker purified the temple by devouring all Vamargic's accouterments, and a Kyger Litor/Korasting shaman-priestess re-sanctified the space to the troll gods. As for other places of interest, consider the stream that flows through the Ernalda temple gardens and over the cliff. That stream joins the southernmost reaches of the great Oslir River down on the valley floor. My GM is a big afficionado of Solar mythology, so he made that stream the daughter of the dragon-river Oslira and Shargash. She woke up in Sea or Fire of 1627, and we had a nice tense time managing that situation.

There's an Ernaldan in the game I play in. She's not a front-line fighter in any real way, though she's got the magic to be pretty durable, and she's very important in our fights as a support caster and healer. The Charisma rune spell is her most tactically effective magic though, it pushes her already formidable social skills through the roof and makes her a very effective spirit combatant. That spell's been a component to most of the group's important diplomatic successes and heroquests.

To be fair, I seem to recall she died while, ahem, sacking Boldhome with Harrek and the boys.

Theory: Argrath's role in destroying the world in the Hero Wars comes about when he turns away from fighting "a new Battle of Doom"--or rather, because mythically he shouldn't be fighting it, but needs someone to. By embodying Orlanth (with draconic elements) he did effectively set himself up to orchestrate a new Great Compromise, but Orlanth wasn't there for, and didn't lead, the Unity Battle. It was Ezkankekko who gathered up the last survivors of the living world into the Unity Army that vanquished the Devil's Chaos horde and sent him fleeing to Prax, to face Storm Bull and the descending Block. Argrath's Lightbringers Quest goes astray in part because he's staging it at the critical moment without a Unity Hero to rally and lead the apparently hopeless struggle against Chaos in the Middle World, and the mythic resonances go all lopsided. Without a Unity Hero working separately but together with Orlanth Lightbringer, the cosmos-shattering conclusion of Argrath's quest was inevitable, and possibly exactly what the Devil intended to make his victory in the next age that much surer.

I'm going to be GMing a new game soon, and I'd like to feature a Red Vadeli as an NPC involved in an adventure around Corflu. I have the Guide and Revealed Mythologies to inform myself of Vadeli myth and lore. Are there any other obvious sources on their myths, culture etc. I could avail myself of? And especially, are there any good sources for mechanical portrayals of the Vadeli, of any caste, in previous editions of RuneQuest? I'd also be happy to hear about anyone else's experiencing running or playing games that involved interaction with the Vadeli, and any general pointers on using them in the setting and system.

As you rightly guess, the first thing to interest trolls in a bargain will always be food. The Rockwoods trolls have old affiliations with the Shadow Plateau and Argan Argar though, whoever's negotiating for them would only only offer to buy children if there were obvious slaves around, and even then maybe not depending on their relationships with neighboring humans--getting a reputation as child-eaters is the sort of thing that gets Orlanthi looking for troll-fighting specialists like the Night Leapers. They'll want interesting or magical food first and foremost, followed by useful tools, followed possibly by slaves. they like cooked food, but only weird Gablad troll redsmiths are willing to work with fire, so pre-cooked food (smoked etc.) could be a high-value trade. most human-raised animals are useless to them save as food, most kinds of livestock react to an approaching troll the way they'd react to a bear or tiger, and sensibly so. if Argan Argar traders are responsible for the bargaining their goal will be to end with the parties exchanging goods of equal value, an 'Equal Exchange.' Though they like lead they will not normally trade for it, it's too easy to come by in their caves. A courtesy gift of lead from the humans before trade begins would likely be well-received though. They don't care for or use gold, but they're often in a position to loot it from humans, same with other precious metals. They probably wouldn't carry iron weapons or tools with them, but if they know the location of a cache of iron goods they might trade the information. wood and other organic materials don't survive long among trolls, but stone and metal objects tend to, and they may have a wide variety of such things they have no use for to trade.

Mythically, to effect this reconciliation, wouldn't Orlanth need to assume Yelm's role in their own myths? Be slain, meet Sedenya in the Underworld, and forgive her in exchange for concessions? Might this have been a goal of certain Lunar or other mystics in the Wind-stop, intended to facilitate Sedenya's evolution through an Underworld confrontation of the living goddess and the defeated god, that was disrupted by Broyan and the Eleven Lights?

In particularly bad stretches of the Greater Darkness the people of Nochet were saved by armies of unintelligent geese, the sacred animal of the elder Earth goddess Imarja though anyone who's dealt with geese must concur that a whole army of them would be frightful, intelligent or no

As Jeorg goes into, the first human to take Ezkankekko up on the full measure of his offer to teach the secrets of Darkness was Varzor Kitor. 'Kitori' didn't always mean the distinct Heortling tribe that exists in northern Esrolia in the 1600s, back in the Silver Age and early Dawn it seems to have been used as a term for all the subjects of the Kingdom of Night, but the modern Kitori tribe considers Varzor their founding ancestor. As for Kimantor, 10K seems to make the identification of Kimantor and Ezkankekko. The Esrolian Military article, p. 8, which is written as a reader's-eye-view document rather than an in-universe one like the myths in the book, makes no distinction between Ezkankekko and Kimantor: In the myths, the first direct mention of Kimantor is in the Norinel and Kimantor myth: (p. 30) (") That establishes Kimantor's kinship with the uz and night, but doesn't necessarily show whether he and Ezkankekko were the same being. If we skip on to the Battle of Nochet myth though, after Norinel and Kimantor lead the fighting retreat from Nochet to the Palace of Black Glass atop the Shadow Plateau: (p. 32) (") Under the name Lord Victory Nightbrother he goes on to gather the Unity Army and fight the Unity Battle against the Devil's horde. Then he and Norinel lead the refounding of Nochet and their first son, Desdel, becomes his father's first high priest at his first temple, the Kimantor Armory of Nochet's Citadel. Throughout the mythic sections of 10k, which are written from an in-universe Esrolian perspective, the name 'Ezkankekko' does not appear once. There is no physical demigod residing at the Palace when Norinel and Kimantor get the refugees there. From the myth it seems Chaos monsters held the Plateau and even the interior of the Palace against them. The only elder figure Kimantor pays homage to in the whole myth is the absent god of the Palace, Argan Argar, who is supposed to have departed for the Underworld not long after Esrola died/fell into hibernation. Then Kimantor took on his new name and began the preparations that culminated in the Unity Battle and again, there's no elder figure he's taking orders from, he's the fellow in charge. I don't know of any source that claims Ezkankekko's son gathered the Unity Army. The most conclusive evidence that Kimantor and Ezkankekko are one and the same comes at the very end of Battle of Nochet: (p. 32) (") The Esrolians themselves seem to have no notion that Kimantor's parents were other than Argan Argar and Esrola, and the text makes no reference to any father of Kimantor other than Argan Argar. There's no concept in the text of a second lord of darkness up on the Shadow Plateau separate from Kimantor other than the absent Argan Argar. As for how Kimantor and Norinel had human children, leaving aside the miraculous possibilities of divine heritage and Imarjan fertility rites, one of Ezkankekko's most well-attested powers was his ability to take on the form of any sentient people he met. I'm sure the Queen of Nochet and a shapeshifting husband could work something out.

In the campaign I play in Kallyr died as normal, but Leika went on to complete the quests to make her Prince of Sartar the next year. Argrath showed up to Boldhome and, since he couldn't relight the Sartar brazier himself, set to wooing the new prince. I'm not sure whether they plan to marry before or after the Alda-Chur campaign.

I maintain my argument from my own thread several months ago that Argan Argar is the product of a discrete liaison between Yelm and Xentha, and that his ultimate confrontation with Lodril was a 'Sword in the Stone' moment when he proved his right to kingship to his uncle.

There is an existing Esrolian term for a 'kingly' husband-protector: Kimantor, or Lord Kimantor. It was Ezkankekko's first name among Esrolian humans and is supposed to mean "the man you cannot see," it became the title of the chief priest in each Esrolian city to the Kimantor, Ezkankekko himself. The Kimantor of Nochet was Ezkankekko's designated field commander for the Kimantorings, the professional army of the Kingdom of Night that originated from E's household guard in the Greater Darkness. The Kimantorings weren't disestablished by Belintar, just relegated to an entirely defensive force for the Esrolian Sixth, and the martial temples that supplied Kimantoring recruits simply drafted more soldiers to Belintar's new standing regiments. The Belintaran professional army collapsed during and after the debacles of 1618, and most of its veterans were drafted into the house guards of the noble houses during the Esrolian Civil War, but presumably the Kimantor temples and Kimantorings survive, at least on paper and/or lead. If Dur-Gaddi Leadfoot isn't already initiated into the Ezkankekko subcult of Argan Argar worship, 1 RP is all that stands between him and being the Kimantor of Sylthi in even the classical sense. My own uzko adventurer-cum-chieftain from the Blackwell has revived the title for his position as warlord for a new community at the edge of the Grazelands circa 1627, along with the name Kimantorings for its professional fighters.

When the Liquify Metal sorcery bound into the teeth is active it's plenty efficacious. and better at wounding than killing, which ensures fresh bribes for the Malasp and shark spirits at battle's end.