Squaredeal Sten

So are pneumatic and hydraulic mechanical effects visible in Glorantha? As examples, Can you blow up a bladder as a balloon, as used to be done in the RW? Does a hand held fan work to cool your face? Can you suck up water or beer in a straw? Can you squirt water from a bladder, bag, or a piston-and- tube arrangement? Does a blacksmith's bellows work to propel a jet of air, which causes a fire to blaze up? If I fan a fire with my hat, will it blaze up? If not, do Gloranthans have a harder time lighting fires than we did in the RW? If you invert a cup and lower it into a basin of water, then turn it upright. Will you observe an air bubble? Will a piston type pump work. for either air or water? Or are all ships' pumps chain and bucket pumps, or are there simply none?

I am pretty sure the Kitori are not dead. But note, their tribal land, the Troll Woods, is not really near the Heortland highway. So is not adjacent to Whitewall.

So let your player start with a 16 year old, just into adulthood, a lay member of some god's cult. Let the PC initiate in game when the player feels like it. Which will probably be soon because that is one of the major paths to advancement, but maybe the character wants to be a shaman and is not a Praxian with access to Waha. And Daka Fal seems to me to be only notionally a god. That is essentially the Six Seasons in Sartar plan. And it works for a campaign. Now, realize all of my players decided to initiate to a cult, though one of them waited for a cult not available in the home village. Staying a lay member doesn't seem to work for the aspiring adventurer. For reasons others discussed above. By the way, we are told that Sartar and maybe Prax are exceptional places in having the majority of the population initiate to some cult. Elsewhere on Genertela the median adult is a lay member. see https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/13494-how-many-lay-member-initiates-in-glorantha/#comment-210493 https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/14042-determining-cultic-rank/#comment-220545 https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/11046-what-is-the-proportion-of-initiates-among-a-population/page/3/#comment-165898 If you really want to play with the concept then locate your campaign in a different place. How about the West, or maybe Kralorela or even Pamaltela? Yes you will have to write more of your own adventures. But Guide to Glorantha offers many other regions. If you stick with it you might have something to publish.

And by the way though the similarity of Trollball to American football is unmistakable, the enthusiasm of the fans spans games and cultures. As someone else said in another thread, the Uz are the most human of the elder races. https://www.npr.org/2022/10/01/1126439213/indonesia-soccer-riot-fans-dead?sc=18&f=1001

Here is one way to approach it: What are the functions of a priest? Intermediary between man and god, to run and teach worship. To lead people to be better Orlanthi. To teach cult lore and cult magic to cult members, and occasionally to members of associated cults. Anything else is a function of your priest's personality and experience, his backstory, and should be a part of the story you want to tell and the adventure you want to push the PCs into. So first of all, what is that? Now as for the secondary issue, the priestly functions: as far as I can see what matters in this case is to be better Orlanthi. So my thoughts on your cases: (A) The hazia smoker and possible shamanist: Hazia is a bad habit and shamanism is a different path (though also useful) so helpfully steer him to divine magic. As I understand it a shaman is not going to make Wind Lord, so not a path for a priest to encourage. (B) The Lunar influence is counter to the cult compatibility table. Steer him away from this dangerous cult. Maybe divination to investigate whether it is a real threat. Or depending on the date, if the Lunars have banned Orlanth then your priest is late, and this Lunar sorcerer should have met a bad end yesterday, why hasn't the priest arranged that? This Lunar feeding someone is just a Lunar snare, and it cannot redeem him. (C) The Praxians may be a little rough but so is Orlanth, cult compatibility is OK, Orlanth pursued and gained by a wide circle of friends, so no cult problem here. We are not monotheistic, no problem associating. Rowdyism may be a clan problem but is not a cult problem. Let the clan chief worry about it.

According to Griffin Mountain, which is the source so far, the giants at Gonn Orta's castle don't live in or have much of a cave. Gonn Orta is too big for any cave I have seen, and I have seen Carlsbad Caverns. Boshbisil's stuff is not guarded by monsters - he is, essentially, a "monster" himself, though a civil one. And has friends, the biggest one being Gonn Orta himself. But if you want him to have a cave in your Glorantha, go for it. This one might be your model: https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/worlds-largest-cave

But normal doesn't make heroes. We are, most of us, pursuing heroic fantasy. Each cult"s god is an archetype of a hero that the adventurer wants to emulate. And emulation is rewarded with divine magic which makes it more likely to be a successful hero. This includes the heroic pacifist, the heroic scholar, the heroic merchant, as well as the heroic death dealer. The heroic farmer or sailor or (earth) mother as well as the adventurer lord. There are plenty of ideals to follow. Why sign up for the death dealing cult if you want to be the heroic farmer?

The CA adventurer I referred to earlier was started in a Six Seasons based campaign, as a pre- initiation Orlanthi. The player wanted a CA and I said there is no CA here in the Vale to teach him. You can go talk to the Ernalda priestess about learning healing. This is like you're born in some little Kansas farm town and you want to learn to be a physician. You can't do that at home, you need to go to a university. Your character will have to go to a city like Jonstown where there is a famous hospital / CA temple if you want to join CA. Basically I made him work for it. Under the old RQ2 requirements to initiate into CA, not the new RQiG 'sincerity only' test. The Ernalda priestess interviewed him, went on about how cute he had been as a baby, and agreed to teach him First Aid and eventually gave him a letter to the Jonstown hospital. So the Adventurer did just that: We played through Six Seasons while he worked on learning First Aid and a couple of points of Healing. During Six Seasons, When Six Seasons wrapped up I segued to Griffin Mountain. At this point the campaign lost a couple of players who had just been curious about Six Seasons, but didn't like playing via Zoom. The Adventurers went through Jonstown as Kallyr's folks had arranged the party's escape from Sartar, since they were wanted - "You need to get out of Sartar for a while or you'll end up crucified on the edge of the road." They made an Underground Railroad style journey to Jonstown by a circuitous route. The wannabe CA hired on with Jo Mith as a muleteer, and the rest of the party mostly passed the skill test to be guards (at a higher rate of pay). In Jonstown the campaign picked up two locals, an Issaries and a Lhankor Mhy, both going to Balazar, who also made the group better balanced and got my PC count back up to six. The trip to Balazar grazed Brangbane's ghouls, did not enter Snakepipe Hollow (but passing by is dangerous enough) took a dip into Trollpack on the way, et cetera. Then we actually did a year of Griffin Mountain, with plenty of opportunities for character and skill development. In Balazar the character joined CA as a lay member since there is a CA priestess in Trilus. During this year the party picked up a very interesting item on a minor Issaries heroquest, which they entrusted to the would be healer. (No, that heroquest is not in Griffin Mountain. It's a sandbox campaign and I played in the sandbox.) On the return from Balazar, they quit Mith's caravan upon arrival in Jonstown. That was the Adventurer's chance and place to actually initiate into CA. At this point, as a fairly well developed character. I segued through the Heroquest version of Apple Lane, to Company of the Dragon, and we played through all that. but the rest of the PCs were the Ring, so it was still not a non-violent campaign. But a lot of Company of the Dragon does not encourage excessive violence, it's not a murder hobo campaign, and our Healer was perfectly good at getting though various adventures vs. opponents against whom violence is maybe not the smartest option. Plenty of work for a healer, but also some disease spirits that the now-Powerful healer beat and milked for POW. So he was the party's most POWerful, though non lethal, magic user. By the end of COD of course all these folks are pretty powerful. Sartar freed, more or less.... the battle of Dangerford, Rebuilding the Vale, a segue into The Smoking Ruin, (which definitely gets them noticed by Leika), and more rebuilding the Vale. The Battle of Queens, in which our CA had occasion to heal and our more violent Adventurers had combat. Burning Kallyr's body. And we are up to more or less current campaign events, about which I will write little as I am alternating between Seven Tailed Wolf and a project of my own, which stretches the calendar a little. Anyway, I have presented to you a campaign without any murder hobo activity. Persecuted peasants, refugees, merchants, freedom fighters, heroquesters , being sent on missions by Temples and in the interest of their clan, yes - but never murder hoboes.

So let's say, theoretically, that while the Adventurer is discorporate someone steals his matrix from his left- behind body.. Now we have two matrices: The one in the shaman's spirit hands and the one carried away by the thief. How do you resolve that when the shaman returns to his body? How do you resolve that before the shaman returns to his body? For example what if the thief uses the matrix?

If an adventurer or adventurers discorporate and enter the spirit world (let's assume this is under the guidance of a shaman) Then can they use magical matrices? I am inclined to say no. If they want to use such magic items that are on their bodies then they need to use them before they discorporate. Once they are in the spirit world and away from their bodies they can't use the matrix. I can see this issue coming up soon, so want to check this opinion.

My own mental image runs to a very large crystal building which will accommodate hundreds or thousands. While it would have spires it would not be a spire.

Unquestionably yes. They are a variety of Keet so presumably they talk. It is in the Guide to Glorantha see the index. For instance 80 000 keeps in the East Isles.

Griffin Mountain indicated that the giants as a group eat infrequently. The elves appear to provide an annual caravan of greens, and Praxians sometimes trade a herd of meat. But it says nothing about Gonn Orta's individual appetite. I suspect that the frequency of giants' meals is inverse to their size, maybe an exponential function. So Gonn Orta might eat every decade or every century or two. At the other extreme a small giant only as tall as a two story house, such as you might meet walking the path by Snakepipe Hollow, might say "Fee, fi. Fo, fum" and eat you.

John Mith kept a house in Jonstown for some time before 1615ST / Griffin Mountain, and per the Starter Set is High Priest of Issaries in Jonstown in 1626. So he apparently started from one of the tribes of the Jonstown confederation. Therefore I would say yes. His base was always Jonstown even though in his youth he would not have owned a house there. He would have stopped making the Balazar trip in early 1626 after the Dragonrise, assuming his annual trip pattern which was to winter in Balazar and return to Jonstown when the mountain passes thawed. His first trip date is not given but in roughly 1615 he had been doing it for several years, indicated by his owning a house in Trilus. He may have traded to Prax as a young man but we don't know where he met his wife, who is from Pavis. Possibly they met in Pavis but possibly she met him in Sartar. Zix Porub is younger than Joh, and has been married to Joh for 11 years in Griffin Mountain, but that book has no definite Gloranthan date so you can say marriage in 1603 or 1604. But maybe he first did the trip before they married. So maybe as early as 1599? As for the Yellow Bear inn I doubt that anyone has published detail. Why would the player character go berserk? MAKING him go berserk sounds railroadish, in the absence of a reason. If the question is whether one can have a mounted werebear head or would the were revert to a human face on death, the Bestiary says nothing about it, in fact the only canon were are Telmori. The non Gloranthan trope is reversion. If you follow the telmori example then you might have it both ways, either the Chaos shape change persisting or a rune spell shape change reverting after 15 minutes. So whatever you think is fun.

"Learn". On the other hand in my Glorantha, we have a (male) Chalana Arroy who joined the cult during play. So he has Orlanth / farmer skill history from his youth / character generation and a little experience. He is not currently learning combat skills, but has used the old skill levels vs. Undead. And I see no reason he couldn't parry with a staff although his staff skill is beginner level.

From the back of the W&E book: Walktapus hide gloves. Long lasting and heat resistant, useful to smiths and other Gustbran cultists. Magically stabilized so the walktapus will not regenerate.

That particular point is probably not true for Aldryami: That is, while they are not going to get cholera, they may get plant diseases from decomposing plants. Example: In the Real World, the Texas freeze of 2021 damaged my fig trees and that summer I found a fungus on them which destroyed bark. It grew quickly. MANY branches died. I sought advice from the agricultural extension service and was told there is no cure, you should remove pruned branches from the area and probably burn them, and disinfect your pruning tools, else these will infect the healthy part of your trees. In such a circumstance infected Aldryami corpses would endanger others, and a good Gardener might indeed burn them instead of burying them.

Griffin Mountain has player handout maps. They are route sketch maps. I will check A/H Trollpack when I get home, think there is at least one. OK, from the A/H (RQ3) Trollpack - there are three pieces of player handouts. They contain lots of text, a sketch of an Uz village, at least two cave/dungeon sketches, and this (upload below) is a scan of a map for a journey, about 4"x3" in the original.

It depends on what the Yelmalian surveyors were surveying for. Without knowing, I would guess surveying fields. Establishing boundaries for ownership and calculating area for taxation. The ancient Egyptians had that down. They may well have had local maps if only as an index to the tax records. But if that is the case, that doesn't indicate possession of accurate large scale maps to find your way cross country by. I definitely agree that the GM's maps will and should be better than anything the players buy in campaign.

There have been generations , very long generations, in mapping techniques. Before aerial photography (and no, flying on your hippogriff wont give you aerial photos) maps were harder to make and in the early industrial age were done with a combination of survey and a mapping table. As I understand the mapping table a very good draftsman would set up a table on a high point, orient it carefully, mark his location as a center point, and then carefully mark the lines of sight to ends of a ridge and sketch it in. Same with road junctions, woods. Towns. Continue until you have all the terrain features that you consider important. Do this from two or three intervisible places nearby and you can be pretty accurate about distances. That is the way that outstanding mapmakers did small scale maps during the American Civil War. I will look for a link that might help you visualize it. Here are a couple; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedediah_Hotchkiss https://oldmapgallery.com/products/ma-nantucket-nantucket-harbor?pr_prod_strat=description&pr_rec_id=51709e792&pr_rec_pid=6727210369206&pr_ref_pid=6727210270902&pr_seq=uniform But that is a technique for small scale maps. And I don't know of any evidence that this technique goes back anywhere close to the bronze age. So while it could have been done earlier, the evidence I have seen indicates either not done at all or rarer and cruder. If you look at pre industrial revolution maps they look much cruder. The best are large scale maps based on measured latitudes but they have inaccurate longitude. Coastlines are sometimes pretty good sketches done by skilled navigators. Other times they bear little relation to modern maps of the same areas. Before measurement of latitude was done well, you would have done better to navigate use books of sailing directions. And that is what sailors actually did in the 1500s and 1600s. Maps were for strategic planning, not for actually going anywhere. So far I haven't gone back anywhere close to the bronze age. We should all be grateful for the clay tablet map above. I will look for an article reporting a Celtic bronze age map of a single small kingdom, basically one watershed, carved into a stone slab. It is cool but also rare and not portable. Here it is! https://www.archaeology.org/news/9580-210407-bronze-age-map Anyway, another series of developments is the symbols used to represent land forms. Now we expect topographic maps to use contour lines. Go back 100-300 years and they used hachures to indicate the slopes of hills and mountains Before that things are much cruder. That clay map tablet pictured above uses different symbols that we are not used to interpreting. But that also held less information. Look at this article too: https://www.archaeology.org/issues/337-1905/features/7542-ancient-maps which shows different Real world styles of mapping from different times and places. A third difference between the modern era and ancient times is map reproduction. Maps used to be rare and precious things. Even a good map will lose accuracy if it is hand copied a few times. There are neither xerography nor offset presses on Glorantha. To get back to Glorantha: No, I doubt that they would have acceptable maps by modern standards or even 17th century standards.. A hide with landmarks and turn directions painted on it, or a piece of wood like that Inuit coastline map. Basically notes to remind someone who had been to a place before, is what I would expect. More of a visual aid for a verbal explanation, than what we think of as a map.

Speaking of timelines, what I don't know of is a source for family history tables suitable for non humans. It is my understanding that for many events the non humans wouldn't be involved or the effects would be different. Of course anyone would see and feel the Dragonrise. But the Aldryami would not be involved in the Lunar conquest and loss of Sartar until the Great Winter, and then I would expect them to go inactive. Where humans have die rolls for conflict with neighboring clans, Aldryami should have a chance of Uz raids and conflict with neighboring humans. But maybe not in the same years. So when you get to that stage of character creation you will have to improvise or skip it. That stage usually yields some passions, perhaps some assets, and some skill increases. Overall I think a character gains by it. Think about replacing a loyalty: clan with a loyalty: forest. A bigger issue for me is what would start an Aldryami adventuring with a group of humans. I understand two possibilities; an elf born (sprouted?) with missing empathetic tie with the forest, or an elf performing a diplomatic and trade function. An Aldryami should be uncomfortable around humans. They burn trees for firewood and cut down trees for houses. Imagine living around people who routinely burn piles of what is to you corpses, in their houses! The stench should put you off.

It is interesting that the Glorantha Bestiary lists giant wasps, beetles, dragonflies praying mantises, and bees - but not ants. However it does list giant ant lions. I wonder: What do the giant ant lions live on? Besides Adventurers. Are ants intentionally omitted because an ant colony would be too tough to fight?

I will make the correction. And that's a good thought about the double eagle.

You have listed a number of good reasons why it would be rare even within the cult. Another reason it should be rare, IMHO, is that the priest doing the enchanting has to put one of his own POW points in at a minimum. So he is not going to be mass producing enchanted rain barrels or whatever. One more reason: 200 L per POW, (edit) 10 Wheels, is standard annual pay for a noble. So the number of staff the clan or the temple can keep will be limited by such paid production: They don't have a lot of discretionary cash, not on that scale of expenditure. And look at the income figures occasionslly listed for clans and temples. That could cut into the patronage jobs. Despite all this I agree with a previous poster that it makes sense for a clan to make some powerful magic items for "clan magic." It depends on how strategic they are, or how much they have to live from hand to mouth. I also have misgivings about the high price of POW, as follows: Usually I am the one being told not to extrapolate "the real Glorantha" from game mechanics, but now I am saying it. 200L per point of POW is derived from setting a cost for one-time Rune spells. But that is really for parties of adventurers who don't know anyone in town and have a pressing need for help. In "the real Glorantha" most use of rune magic probably is done not on a financial basis but on a social basis. For example a female farmer initiate of Ernalda, with a Free SOL of 60L for her entire household, does not get rich casting Bless Crops at 20L a point. Even though she can replenish RP at weekly Ernalda holy days. Instead she blesses her own family's crops and then helps her neighbors out. That is why Gloranthan farming is so productive. She doesn't do it for pay and they can't afford to pay her that much, it's more cash than a Poor or even a Free family has on hand. She gets social benefits: They owe her favors, she has status in the community, she is working toward God Talker, that's why she is worth so much ransom, she is a more desirable wife. And if you cross her she just may not bless your crops. And she is also being a better Ernaldan, perfecting her imitation of her archetype goddess.

And as I understand it the Argrath innovation is to mix types of magicians. Some shamans, some Rune priests, some sorcerers. If we look at availability with Argrath's base in Prax, a unit of 50 might be 20 -25 shamans, 20 rune priests, 5-10 sorcerers. Draconic magic would be a 4th category, YGMV. So he doesn't need to recruit large numbers of Esvulari.