Squaredeal Sten

Since the planned Gamemaster's guide / Gamemaster sourcebook is not yet published - what have you found works most satisfactorily as "minimum characteristics" methods for adventurer characteristics / adventurer generation? Or do you just have your players roll 3D6 and suck it up if they roll a 3? Pros and cons of that method? Context: The sidebar on p.53 of Runequest-Roleplaying in Glorantha: " ...Therefore it is Perfectly All Right to: Reroll any die result of 1... "

Ah well. Perhaps for a future publication.

So does this include family history timeline, cultural skills, and likely occupations for a character originating from Glamour?

Page 23, ship characteristics: Speed is listed as a characteristic, but none of the vessel types has a speed stat in the table on that page. I know this is a complex issue, because speed for galleys will depend on the rowers' stamina, and speed for sailing ships will depend on the speed and direction of the wind. Galleys with a sail set is a further complexity. Just a thought for a second edition.

And now that the Red Book of Magic is published (December 2020), Crel is proven correct: Sanctify is Duration (special) and " When the ceremonies cease, the spell effects expire. " So it's good for a ceremony of any length. But unless your ceremony is continuous it will expire some time. So it won't create a Temple. We need that wyter.

It strikes me that a letter on parchment would be a two step process: In step 1 the scribe takes dictation by writing with a stylus on a board covered with wax. (This is documented for the Romans, it was their equivalent of a notebook, there are even archaeological finds - but there is no reason to think this particular technology is not pre-Roman.) Any drafting and editing is done in this step. Erasures are done by smoothing the wax, cheap and easy. Alternatively this can be done on wet clay, but that makes your notebook less portable. In step 2 the scribe puts ink on the parchment. This is copying from the wax so there should not be many erasures.

I haven't paged through its 110 pages trying to compare every paragraph with the Guide to Glorantha. And I don't have the GTG memorized. Anyway this predates GTG, copyright 2007 vs. 2016. It's certainly got more material than the page and a fraction on Aldryami in Glorantha Sourcebook, and I haven't even verified that the mythology section matches the Sourcebook in every detail. My memory for pre-Time Gloranthan gods is pretty leaky. Anyway- A LOT of discussion and extrapolation of the psychology of a mobile, intelligent plant. Elf lifesense as a mental link to the forest which includes [but is not limited to] other Aldryami of all sorts from runners to dryads. The idea that over time lifesense allows a forest to reach consensus, and therefore elves don't usually make quick decisions. And most elves will not be familiar with economic concepts like ownership, purchase, and money - but instead live in vegetable communism. An elf communities section with four communities / villages. Enough to build on, not runnable adventures. A big section on Playing the Aldyami, but this doesn't necessarily match RQG stat generation, nor would I expect it to do so across editions. Aldryami professions, including "good leaf" = 'ambassador' which may not mean what you expect it to mean at first reading. A short list of plant poisons. A section on Actions & Emotions. I am sure that this section is not canon and I would not bet that character generation done with it will match any eventual Chaosium RQG Aldryami book, which as far as I know is NOT on the list of future publications. But it does have a touch of RQG's more extensive background generation compared with, say, RQ2. If you want your characters to have roots then Aldryami will be your ideal, since these elves can root and photosynthesize in a starvation situation. It would take a pretty dedicated roleplayer to do these Aldryami the way they are written up. A section on Aldryami religion which starts with canon but extrapolates - or was done with access to more Gloranthan references than I am familiar with. (Which would not be hard.) There is enough here to bear considerable re reading.

Thanks, Runeblogger. It took me a few months but this week I finally got a reasonably priced copy of that book. It is good stuff on Aldryami motivations and behavior, though not canon. Now if only Chaosium would find an author to expand on it with ready to play scenarios to bring its observations to life, as Trollpack does for trolls.

For some time I have wondered why that mask line doesn't include common cults like Issaries; and has "air runes" but not a mask with all of Orlanth's runes; but does have an unlikely combination like Xiola Umbar. I suppose it's a matter of an artist taking an interest.

Yes, interesting. So the shield skill is a later thought, after an initial intent to just make shield parry % the same as weapon parry %. Perhaps a result of later playtesting after the initial design notes? Personally i live well with the shield parry rules as they are. It doesn't rub me the wrong way. And when i learned to fence it was foil fencing, no shield, so it's "obvious" to me that shield parry skill is NOT always linked to weapon parry skill.

Congratulations to Jaye on the new job. Did Chaosium not have a dedicated art director before?

I don't understand the assumption that the elemental will turn on you. I was under the impression that it would follow its own preferences,"acts in accordance with its nature" but those might be to wander off rather than to fight. The Bestiary p.177 says "fire elementals burn flammable materials within reach, earth elementals sink into the soil, darkness elementals flee light, and air elementals breeze around." also p.176 inset, "An elemental will not move unless told to do so. However, an elemental automatically attacks anything caught within or on top of it." Therefore it seems to me that if you don't summon it on top of yourself you should be fairly safe.

Real World, for what it's worth - I get the impression that a scale mail hauberk was a one- size -fits- most item. Probably +/- more than two SIZ points. It's essentially a metal reinforced overcoat. Think large - average- or small. Helmets would be worn with a leather or cloth cap or liner, to cushion the head when someone actually hits the helmet. Adjust the thickness of your liner and you have re-sized the helmet. Helmets were actually mass produced at least once in historical but still ancient times (Roman empire, production in Gaul) and I doubt they had exact sizes like modern hats.

It might be in order to do a Divination first, asking whether the uncle is alive or dead. How to do that would depend on what cult the uncle is in, since Divination can only tell you what is known to your god. I would assume that a god would know whether one of his own cultists was alive. Perhaps this would be the shaman's professional advice. Kind of a "You need to consult a specialist" answer. If the uncle is dead then the shaman could search for the uncle's spirit to question it, if someone wanted to know when, where, or how the uncle died. If alive of course that would be a fruitless search, and how would the shaman know when to call the search off? I would say it's the GM's call how difficult the shaman sees a search for a specific spirit being. Me, I've never personally searched for any spirit.

So then, to partly answer the original question, the minimum hides to support a shrine are zero, because it doesn't need to have full time staff. Not even necessarily a god-talker, though that appears to be the norm ("Usually staffed only by a god-talker"). This does indicate a couple of questions that come up in my mind, see below: God-talker appears to be a non-salaried ? but may have a stipend in kind? volunteer position, "although they are provided with food and board by the temple, they typically must maintain another occupation" (RQG p.278). A God-talker position is also evidently open to initiates as well as to priests. Anyway, a site needs someone with income to pay for its maintenance, so will never have an endowment of land. The incentive for maintaining it is that the maintainer can replenish rune points there, unlike the other cult members [lay and initiates] who can worship there and only sacrifice magic points. I suppose the other cult members' incentive for doing so is that they have worship obligations and it may be convenient to them. But it only takes 10 initiates worshiping there to have a site. The "shrine" of Issaries in Apple Lane would appear to be a site then. No one in particular is in charge of it. There appears to be some wiggle room regarding land or other endowments for shrines, the step above sites, because if they are staffed by a god-talker, the god-talker has room and board paid, but typically will work a job. So Question #1: From whom does that god-talker collect the room and board? I can see the room being a house adjacent to the shrine, but how about the board? Do you think sacrifices will be frequent enough to live on? With 75 lay members, who can replenish rune points there. Question #2: Can a mere initiate perform a Worship ritual, rather than Worship being a function reserved for priests? It appears to me the answer is yes - because if an initiate can be a god-talker and run a shrine, and people can replenish rune points there, then someone is leading and performing that worship that is required to replenish the rune points (p.271). also, (p.278) "A god-talker can replenish rune points be leading Sacred time and holy-day sacrifices,..." Your thoughts?

Spell training time is defined in RQG: For spirit magic, page 277: "This occupies a week of ritual and training during which nothing else may be done..." Gaining rune magic would technically appear to happen when POW is sacrificed for it (p.314) but p.313 says "the sacrifice requires a full week of prayer and meditation in the temple. at the end of the which the adventurer sacrifices 1 or more POW points and gains an equal number of rune points".. so that's a week also.

Time to take away the punch bowl on this party! The book rule on fires appears reasonable. It will probably disappoint players who think they've found a great 20th century RW weapon to use in the Bronze Age. But if you want to rain on that particular parade, you might point out some nasty old RW reality: - A pint of olive oil or even of whiskey has a lot less energy in it (and a lot more water in it) than a pint of gasoline. Yes you might start a house fire with it, no you will not kill anyone in a melee round or two. It's like unattended candles or smoking in bed, not instant but just risky. - And there is no evidence in RQG that the Gloranthans have discovered distilling, let alone distilling gasoline from crude oil or even distilling alcohol. It's not a RW bronze age technology, it's iron age technology at earliest. And requires several tech advances to do well. (How do I know? My grandpa made a still coil during prohibition, told me how and what to be careful of; Wife has bootleggers in the family tree). Its earliest forms were not particularly efficient, so you wouldn't get pure alcohol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distillation#History. - 20th century Molotov cocktails themselves are easily over-rated. Actually a clever weapon of desperation, and not really likely to destroy a tank: the successes appear to have been because of their novelty, smoke sucked in by engine fans fooling the inexperienced crews into thinking they were on fire and so bailing out. Much smaller effective bursting radius than a grenade, so against personnel you're really throwing water balloons only with oil. A clay jar used in that manner will likely bounce off a man and break on the floor nearby. And the more flammable your liquid, the more dangerous it is to light if you use the rag- in- bottle type of ignition. If they are the white phosphorus ignition type, they are dangerous to carry (and WP is definitely not bronze age chemistry.). If Molotov cocktails were so great then why would the Soviets have gone on to invent shaped charge antitank grenades in WWII, which are also recognizable as weapons of desperation?

Yes. For example Yelmalio in accord with Cults of Prax. " Thus he insists that Initiates of the Adventuring Path accept a gift and take on a geas, as in the manner of Humakt. Only one gift and the concomitant number of geases are given at the Initiate level. " I expect this will persist in the to-be-produced RQG cults book, since it's pretty vital to any existing Yelmalio character.

It would probably be more fun if it were a Summon matrix, which any adventurer could use, rather than saying it could be used to bind an elemental when and if they could summon one, which would not be much use to a non-Earth cultist. Noting that unless they have the rune spell it's good for one use and then needs the spell cast into it again, it wouldn't seem to be over-powered.

The pawnshop is just a big house, so the repairs should be affordable. Note that there is a difference between working in stone, wood, and wattle-and-daub: There is no indication that masons are available any closer than Clearwine, and as someone else pointed out earlier there is one known carpenter in Apple Lane. What are most of the cottars' houses made of? That's what the local labor will know how to do. By the way where i live construction projects never seem to finish on time. That's just a thought. As far as a trip to Clearwine, there is a very recently published supplement 'The dregs of Clearwine" that has a mason in it and might interest you. But the wall around the town: That's a much bigger project, because the drawing in the GM material shows the buildings are very spaced out. Not a one year project at all in the circumstances. That area looks as though it might actually enclose a real [small] city: if the density of inhabitants was greatly increased it might be about half as large as a small German walled city I have been to, that survives from medieval times. Which, by the way, enclosed enough people to defend itself but they lived in multi story housing, close together. And you need to clarify with your players whether they are building a 4-foot garden wall or a real fortification. Make them do drawings! Or import a specialist engineer from.. where? Boldhome? or a Mostali? Who will be paid at a Noble rate. Then tell them they can't buy truckloads of concrete blocks from Home Depot, this is the bronze age. I don't recall an indication that anyone is running a brick kiln anywhere in Colymar territory. They might do adobe blocks, and dig a ditch. Not your little roadside ditch or an irrigation ditch, but a ditch deep enough and steep enough to be a serious obstacle itself, use the dug out dirt to make a berm at least twelve feet tall. Maybe put a palisade on top, or an adobe wall. Figure one man can dig a cubic meter of dirt in a day (which I understand was a Stalinist norm for the Gulag.) Transporting that dirt is extra. And the local work force is basically farmers, and not many of them, who need to spend most of their time farming or they and the players starve together. IMHO unless your players bring in a lot of labor, a real walled fortification that size is a project for generations. By the way it needs annual maintenance. Your specialist engineer might break that news to them after he charges them for the drawings. Now if they just want to fortify the Thane's house that would be a different proposition.

So, to GM the interactions with the Hiording and Lysang clans and a Birne's Squeeze trip... . People have already written something involving the Hiording, and an earlier Lysang adventure set was recently published. I never was able to find much written on Birne's Squeeze, drafted a couple of ideas. Interestingly the clan boundary more or less bisects the squeeze. Past history of Lysang will have them estranged from the Colymar tribe, maybe that's why there seems to be no cooperation vs. the bandits. If your Thane attempts to clear the whole Squeeze will the Lysang consider that an unwelcome intrusion? There is room for politics here, not just chasing bandits.

In my humble opinion Apple lane doesn't currently have enough population in town to defend walls if they were built. The strategic challenge for the town is to add population and economic base. Yes, clearing Birne's Squeeze and restoring trade would be important to that. Currently several of the cottars are refugees from recent bad events - seems reasonable - and there is no large scale map of the immediate area, so you are free to assume whatever your GM will allow. Seems to me Apple Lane had more population a few years ago and so has the land to absorb more now. The town needs an export to bring in cash. Of course the Uleria temple does that too, Right now the economic strength may be the eponymous apple orchards. So think about what you can do with that. If you go into the hard cider business you will have a lower class of customer than Clearwine - but the gods must love the poor because they made so many of them. Figure what is needed to support such business and where your markets might be. Infrastructure might include a potter, someone has to make amphorae for you to fill them. As for defense - a ditch and / or palisade would slow down charging tusk riders, but fortifications need to be defended. That takes you back to building up a town militia which takes you back to enough people. You might also consider what your relations with the local clan are - bringing in more refugees would have to be OK with them.

Feedback? I'm glad to get the benefit of your experience, as I want to do a similar function. I wouldn't have the group vote on it - that's too much like voting each other off the island.

I've been reading... Michael Hudson's book, "and forgive them their debts": In ancient Babylonian society, and its predecessor Tigris / Euphrates city states, land ownership was originally vested in the family or village. There was no provision for selling it, it was just inheritance and bloodline. That's your late neolithic and early bronze age situation. But then someone had a bright idea: Pay some poor and aging head of household to adopt you and name you heir. The adoptee contracted to support the adopter as a parent, in principle. Evidently with very specific written terms, according to tablets that survive today. Eventually the adoptee would inherit. A second method of obtaining private ownership of land outside of tradition was in form a lease in exchange for a loan, but the original owner of the land would seldom be able to redeem it because the loan rates were usurious, 33% or 50% annually. This would be easy to do in famine years, a take it or leave it situation. And the heirs would inherit ownership in form, but they also inherited the debt. The heirs became tenant farmers in actual fact, and the "lender" was entitled to the agricultural production of the land minus whatever he gave the tenants. If they weren't satisfied with that they could leave and become homeless. Thus alienation of the land for cash (or trade goods, grain in famine years) was originated. It took generations, but these two methods were how big private landholding originated, outside of the previous methods of hereditary high priesthood of a temple or of kingship. And the concentration of wealth begot more wealth, and tenant farming for rent, which weakened the society: Where previously the king raised his army and collected taxes from the land holding peasant families, there was a shortage of such peasant families, therefore weaker monarchies unable to defend their city-state, and the city state went down to invasion. It was a cycle. It became a virtuous act for kings to declare a cancellation of debts and reversion of land to the original families: a jubilee. When the private large landholders grew too powerful for the kings to do that, the city state went down. So, back to Glorantha: In principle your character wanting to obtain land could use one of those methods. But beware, the Babylonian societies of the bronze age didn't like them, they were cheating outside of the traditional social contract. And jubilees were popular. What will your Sartarite society think?

It traditionally was done by using unglazed clay pots, so water from the inside would constantly be percolating through and evaporating from the outside. Now in a Gloranthan context, if you could keep an air elemental at the task, you could keep a lot of air movement going and in principle get a pretty good chill in summer. Alternatively at high elevations in Sartar and elsewhere you seem to get real winter. Ice can be cut and stored in ice cellars.