dumuzid

I have a question, or at least would like to solicit the tribal opinion, on 'modern' usage of Zolan Zubar. What form do you think the Zolan Zubar position took in RQG mechanical terms? Priest of the wyter of the Unity Council's armies as a whole? Head of a spirit cult? Zorak Zoran runelord-exclusive subcult? And does anyone have an opinion on the prospect of reviving the position in the Hero Wars? What it would take, and what the chief obstacles would likely be? For instance, how certain are we that Zolan Zubar and the Sky Bear now mastered by the Red Goddess are the same entity? Would reviving the Unity Council's death-wind-bear require rescuing him from Sedenyic conversion?

Ah, great, I need to find those articles. There's details in just that paragraph I haven't seen elsewhere.

Is anyone familiar with a location called Morbode to the north of Kethaela in the Darkness? Inhabited by a Chaos entity called Braznofstel?

found this in Book of Drastic Resolutions: Darkness, for whatever weight you give that.

This 'classic case' wasn't actually so: this anecdote here conflates two very different forms of involuntary sea voyaging, from pretty distant times. First, the 'thugs bash drunk blokes over the head' bit. You're referencing 'pressganging' here, a specific practice of the colonial-era British Royal Navy. The idea wasn't primarily that they grabbed any old fool off the streets, though that could sometimes happen. The waterfronts of Britain's 17th, 18th and 19th century port cities were ringed with boarding houses, taverns, brothels, and plenty of establishments that blended all three services. Sailors come in from a long haul, pocket full of money after months at sea, and they spend with some abandon. A lot of them spent themselves broke and ran up debts with the places they stayed. When it came time to pay up, and they couldn't, the sailors were sent to the local gaol while their fate was decided. The Royal Navy had the right to conscript able sailors through a number of means, including agreements that let them buy out the debts of the sailors and take them directly from the gaol to a waiting navy hulk. In the late 18th/early 19th the Royal Navy also started abducting British-citizen sailors on interdicted vessels from the newly independent United States, which was one of the causes for the United States to briefly and disastrously enter the Napoleonic Wars. Private British shipping companies and ship-owners involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade had near-identical deals with harborside gaols, to buy out sailors' debts and force them to work under indenture on the long, dangerous slaving routes. On many slaving voyages the only truly free people on-board were the captain and officers, everyone else were indentured sailors or slaves chained in the hold, and some of those ships saw the sailors mutiny, kill the free officers, and let the slaves out on a beach before turning pirate. In both cases, gaol-purchasing and sea abducting, the British weren't looking for any old whoever, but already trained sailors they could force into service. Mechanically, all people with some level of Shiphandling. I could see a lot of Third Age Gloranthan societies finding pretexts to pressgang sailors with riverine shiphandling experience to crew their new naval fleets, particularly just after the Opening reaches them. Second, the "chained to an oar at sea" bit. This did happen, but not often in the ancient world. As M Helsdon describes, in the Mediterranean world of the Bronze and Iron Ages galley rowers were free professionals, well-paid and in high demand. There are very few known instances of ancient galleys using slave rowers, despite most ancient Mediterranean societies practicing one form of slavery or another: one of the few examples is when the Athenians, facing an imminent naval threat, offered freedom to every slave who volunteered to join an emergency galley crew for the fight. It wasn't until much, much later, when Mediterranean galley fleets returned to prominence in the late medieval and early modern eras, that the stereotypical galley slave finally appears. Medieval religious warfare in the Middle East involved significant amounts of slave-taking and -selling by all sides. One of the causes for it, especially as those religious wars moved out from the actual Holy Land and onto the sea and coasts in the 15th and 16th centuries, was the nature of their ships. The maritime cities of Italy and the Middle East revived galley-building in this period, but their populations and economies were no longer structured to supply the thousands of paid professional sailors that made up an ancient fleet's rowing base. This is where the idea of galley slaves comes from. The only alternative to free rowers was unfree ones: sometimes condemned prisoners, but far more often slaves captured in naval raids on territories espousing the opposing religion. When the collapse of the Crusader States forced the surviving holy martial orders to set up new headquarters on Mediterranean islands like Rhodes, the Knights of St. John became some of the most notorious slavers of their age by attacking Muslim shipping and raiding seaside settlements for slaves to sell or power their own galleys. The need for galley slaves was ravenous too, because conditions down in the rowing banks were hellish. Rowers were really chained in place for their work, which was back-breaking, in near-lightless, filthy conditions. Naval galleys burned through human beings like steamships through coal, which ensured a constant demand for fresh captives to replace the dead. In those conditions in a Runequest game, I'd argue most rowers would simply use STR or CON attribute rolls; the people with Shiphandling involved in rowing a slave galley would be the officers responsible for directing the slave-rowers and keeping them in time with drums, whips etc. Fonritian galleys probably use a system like this, in which magic may or may not mitigate the high mortality rate among rowers. Certain cult elements of the Lunar imperial navy may as well (Danfive Xaron penal triremes). The Kralorelans apparently use a variation on this system, but with magically animated corpses rather than living slaves manning the oars.

Who were the Gold Wheel Dancers?

@Jeff I'm curious about the vision for the forthcoming mass combat rules. In running other systems I've found the main challenge of portraying mass combat is in making the battle as interactive to the players as possible without bogging play down by trying to model too much mechanically. Can you speak at all to the structure of mass combat? As in, where does it position the players and their characters, or how many distinct 'entities' does a battle typically model (and requires rolls for)?

Of course, by the time a dark troll projects their Darksense that far out they're dealing with ranges where their own eyesight is at par with a human's, praise be to Kyger Litor for her gifts to survive the Hurtplace.

The typical in-game explanation when my usually quite charismatic dark troll character fails his Charm or Sing tests is that he failed to calibrate his performance for the human audio range. Either Unspoken Word or the Trollpack also describes how a troll physically shows they're angry or aggressive: by laying their ears back tight over their skull and growling, initially at a register too low for humans to catch, but fully audible by the time the troll is properly enraged.

From the Guide, p. 95 The classic Trollpack goes more into much more detail on troll digestion than Darksense, but refers to "trolls' sonar" repeatedly. I've based my further understanding of it on the page-length writeup in The Unspoken Word #04: Trolls of Glorantha, p. 17, which includes a list of sense-words for Darksense without obvious human equivalents.

I'd answer no, on the basis that Darksense isn't sight. It's echolocation, it has nothing to do with perceiving light. A Farhear spirit magic spell might work, but echolocation isn't exactly hearing in the human sense either, which trolls are also capable of. I find it more likely that some bat spirits, dehori, maybe even dolphin or whale spirits, can teach a Farsense spell to sharpen Darksense, which would be completely useless to most non-trolls. Trolls have functional (if farsighted, colorblind) eyes, and access to the same sighted abilities as humans (with lower base values) for Farsight to work on, though I don't think halving the apparent distance between them and a target would actually help trolls see, since their vision is blurry and vague at anything closer than hundreds of yards. If anything Farsight as-written seems to me like it would impede uz sight, while doing nothing for their Darksense. The Darksense possessed by the Mistress Race is supposed to be much more powerful than the dark troll version. Uzuz darksense is supposedly capable of perceiving at much greater distances, of feeling within objects, even of killing among other qualities. Some of those tricks might be available to dark trolls as well through the Kyger Litor cult and the medium of a Mistress Race ancestor spirit.

Having done some raising of obsidian walls by magic in RQG recently, that sounds like the Palace of Black Glass on the Shadow Plateau

The less said about the elusive Eurmali heroband known only by an acronym, the LMFAO, the better e: Ezkankekko to open the Sea Gate of the Shadow Plateau, and drain the flood harmlessly into Ezdaroun the primal Underworld river.

The seas rising to swamp the land is one of several signs in the Norse Eddas that Ragnarok is here, caused by the restless coils of the World-serpent churning the oceans.

to be fair to the immediately post-Conquest Kethaelans, the last guy who raised meaningful resistance was killed and resurrected to preach Belintar's good news. I reckon the officially designated Sixths accepted their governors with a lot more docility after a visit from Andrin "the Renewed."

@M Helsdon Pertaining to your previous book, Armies & Enemies of Dragon Pass, in your coverage of Esrolia how deep did you go on the Kimantorings and the Kingdom of Night?

What about a Humakti with a mundane iron sword? Can they 'shred' spirits with just their cult magic and a blade?

The Argan Argar cult as it exists in the 1620s primarily emphasizes that you learn Darktongue and one other language to an extremely sophisticated level, making no particular requirements on which. I would expect the Argan Argar initiate or priest in charge of language training in a given 'modern' Kitori tula to focus on teaching the community's young people in whatever the dominant human language is and darktongue, along with learning to read and write in darktongue for those with the time and aptitude.

In contrast to the nuptial character of the Esrola rites, maybe there's an 'adoption of Choralinthor' myth here where Argan Argar proves himself to be a worthy stepfather to Choralinthor? The Mirrorsea is sullen and withdrawn from the land after the tantrums and abuse of Lodril's reign, disrupted by stronger foreign currents and unwilling to trust his mother's new husband. By selectively protecting Choralinthor from some problems and teaching him to overcome others himself, Argan Argar helps Choralinthor grow into a god who can help bridge all the peoples of Kethaela and learns about Water ways in the process. I expect Ezkankekko's Theyalan missionaries had a whole genre of Argan Argar "earnest stepfather wins over recalcitrant stepchild" myths to explain to different peoples how to live with trolls and vice versa, which was deliberately truncated by the several events that shrank the historical Kingdom of Night.

What if we withhold that assumption? Esrola wasn't Argan Argar's only consort, Ernalda and Asrelia are both closely connected to him as well. As the god of shadows, as Jeff said somewhat upthread, darkness-on-the-surface, I like the duality in Argan Argar having a high holy Earth Night, celebrating his successes in bringing harmony between Darkness and the Surface on land, and a Water Night, celebrating the same successes in relation to the seas and rivers. Someone had to negotiate with the sea gods and merfolk to fix the signs and exchanges that would let Jeset's and Kogag's ships ply the Storm Age seas.

Argan Argar's high holy days are Waterday and Clayday of Harmony Week in Darkness Season. Holy days are supposed to be associated with particular myths of the god, and I would guess that the Clayday festivities have to do with Esrola. What about Waterday though? Most of the written Argan Argar myth involves Earth and Fire, I'm not aware of any big known Argan Argar myths with Water as their central non-Darkness element. Does anyone have any thoughts about what the Waterday high holy day would pertain to, or insight into sources on relationships between Argan Argar and Water deities I'm unaware of?

Of the three example wyters in the Bestiary, two out of three have rune points in cults that they can spend for rune magic without having to burn their POW. They regain those points by worshiping on appropriate holy days the same as any other spirit with rune points.

Does the coverage of Ralios include any look at Guhan, or the historical Stygian Empire?

The group I play in gets by with just discord, but we have homemade dicebot and don't use many maps.

There's an old Greg story about Arkat when he was still a Brithini Horali, in Book of Drastic Resolutions: Darkness, that describes a night-long skirmish between trolls and Brithini troops. The Brithini switch between mechanical ocular nightsight devices mounted on their crossbows for mundane sight in the dark and magic-sight to perceive the trolls' spells. It's very Warhammer 40k, especially in how it demonstrates the Westerners having a mostly sound functional understanding of their troll opponents, but having zero understanding of the trolls' culture or internal life.