Squaredeal Sten

The pre 1625 stuff is still playable but may not mix logically with newer adventures that assume the Lunar occupation of Sartar is over. However note that campaigns like Six Seasons in Sartar, available on Jonstown Compenduoum, span both pre and post 1625 periods. It is really not a big obstacle for a GM. Also. it is NOT forbidden to write new pre 1625 material. Go ahead and play!

Page 23 of The Earth Goddesses has the beginning of "The Husband-Protectors" on it, also an inset box defining Craft (brewing) and the last four lines of the Flowers rune spell from the Voria section. All this is in the Ernalda chapter.

Just thinking about that: I think "family" is the term that creates the problem. And family in Glorantha does not mean nuclear family of mom. dad, 2.5 children and a cat. nor is it equivalent to "household". As I read it: The RQiG ratio is one hide of land per household. not per nuclear family. The Heortling clan system basically does not deal with nuclear families. More important this usually multigenerational, multi-nuclear-family household owns a plow and ox team. No plow, no hide of land. (Obviously there is at least one canon exception, Apple Lane, where the dominant mode of land use is orchards. which do not need to be plowed.) Any cottars helping to farm that land are not part of the hide land allocation system. That;s why they have a Poor Standard of Living. References: I will work on references but - The first and oldest is in King of Sartar, Report on the Orlanthi, pages 238-250 in my edition. - Guide to Glorantha, pages 31-36 - but also RuneQuest In Gloraththa pages 315 occupation income table, 403 re. "household", 404 The hide of land, 416. I am surprised how much of this is in the now-deprecated HeroQuest publications. Perhaps it will be condensed and re-explained in the future GM book?. I am not surprised by how much of this is in Jeff's writings on Facebook & BRP forums and Well of Daliath: I find Facebook very hard to search. and the forums and Well of Daliath return mountains of links, which I have not had time to winnow, and some of which are links to those deprecated HeroQuest books..

And today Jeff gave the date on Facebook! https://www.facebook.com/groups/RuneQuest/permalink/2646377768871539/?mibextid=Nif5oz (Oct. 9th. so you don't have to try to search Facebook.) Congratulations on another landmark publication. What is next?

Which seems to me to reflect the well known Real World fertility of volcanic soils. So I don't know why Lodril doesn't have Fertilize. Or maybe he does and we will find out when the Pelorian book comes out.

So someone can adapt The Grapes of Wrath to Sartar late in the Lunar occupation? / Remember, that book has a depressing ending, so a heroic rewrite. or follow-on story, will be in order for MGF. In a way [spoiler] that situation is what Six Seasons series portrays. But as I recall. the women and children of the broken clan go to their relatives in other clans. Of course this fuels the rebellion, the men either leave Sartar or become guerrillas. Great adventure fuel.

Beautiful slick cover. I bought the full color version, first time i have done that. Interior map illustrations are pretty readable. The zoomed-in ones of sections of the city are very readable, a good thought. Colored backgrounds behind the text on all the pages make the text marginally less readable - though cataracts developing in my eyes don't help. (It could be worse, textured colored backgrounds would be really bad:: This effect of textured backgrounds is verified by an interesting real-life accidental experiment about 25 years ago.) I like the organization of the descriptions of parts of the city, 'From the north east", "From the Oslir river'. I like most of the illustrations of people. The Furthest map and Kingdom of Tarsh map on pages 6-7 and 77 needs a magnifying glass (which i have) or a really close look (my nose gets really close to the paper) , so I am ordering a poster, and it was a good thought to sell those through Redbubble. I like the Gazetteer Index! I like the hierarchy of headline fonts.

Received my hard copy of Furthest today. So 20 days from order to receipt via cheapest USPS.

You're right, it does say 'the caster'. That also seems to me to be an additional limit on someone wanting to go into the spell trading business in a big way: To eventually sell your spell, you need to risk a fumble a second time. And of course you have to spend two rune points to get the spell and another two to sell it. Despite the weekly market holy day, which will restore 4 RPs on average, that does seem to me to limit the size of the business: It's only one such sale and resale per week. And that assumes the adventurer won't have other uses for the rune points. When did we ever see an adventurer who didn't have other uses for the rune points?

Yes. However it does have dpwnsides: (1) As I read it this is oriented to trades between two other parties, facilitated by the Issarirs priest. (2) If the IIssaries trades spells on his own account, my own question is whether and how he is limited by his CHA, as he is with his inventory of his own kmown Issaries spells. (3) It has some risk: If the person castng the spell fumbles. it is cast on the recipient rather than traded. That's just a financial loss if the spell was Bless Pregnancy, but could be fatal if it was 3 points of Ligtming.

Wheel Shield , Adding Yelmalio and AA will involve you in rewriting what sounds like the male initiation chapter, which indicates cult choice. I guess both those players are male, just a guess. -and should also have effects on interactions with the Ring NPCs in later chapters, -also with the PCs and players' identification with what is going on in the final chapter. I can see that neither of those cults would necessarily care about defending an open air Orlanth temple. But the Black Stag initiation should provide motivation. Plus when and if you get into Company of the Dragon, Yelmalio identification will have effects on at least one possible adventure. and Argan Argar identification will affect that one too in a different - opposite - way. I don't want to throw out a mess of spoilers here. But they should end up rolling vs. conflicting Loyalty passions where other characters would not. Yes access to holy rites / local shrines, would require that you do some rewriting of the Haraborn clan and their local map. It is a small clan and I am pretty sure it can't account for enough worshipers for either cult having a temple there. This implies road trips to Temples as Jajagappa wrote. Neither is an associated cult with Orlanth, so no dual initiations. Maybe the Vale can support a Site, which is less than a Shrine. But if you really want to, you can handwave that. Anything less than a Temple will only teach one Rune spell, though, RAW. And if you give them frequent trips to the nearest outside temples of these cults you will lose the inexperienced rural kids vibe that is part of the current story.

Just to read background, both history and myth, you might get the Glorantha Sourcebook. https://www.chaosium.com/the-glorantha-sourcebook-hardcover/. To get some of the original RQ2 charm, buy Cults of Prax and read Biturian's adventures. Yes some of the cults are in there and it's generally a good orientation on them also, but those RQ2 writeups are being superceded by the RQiG cults books as they come out. But a lot of the setting is included in the RuneQuest in Glorantha rules, which are not just rules. Have you studied the homelands section of that yet? Just asking what you have read to date.

Wow! A complex yet cogent explanation of the various Malkioni sects and their geography. I hope something like this with an accompanying map will be in the Sorcery book.

re Cottars who farm work someone else's land and the "someone else" owns the plow and oxen as well as the hide of land. They are the agricultural laborers who are not members of the steadholder's family. They may actually guide the plow or goad the oxen, they hoe the weeds, they swing the sickle and bind the sheaves. They get paid with use of enough land for a hut plus a garden, which is worked with a hoe or even a digging stick. and probably are paid wages and fed in busy seasons. They may get their cash money from selling garden vegetables. (Glorantha appears to have no modern style itinerant farm laborers, so the farmhands have to be provided for somehow and are members of the clan, meaning they have more rights in practice than your itinerant laborer even though they cannot vote. Tom Joad is not born yet.) Cottars who herd, don't need a plow team. These are many of your shepherds and cowherds. In summer they are expected to camp near the flock in the high pastures. In winter they have a hut at the stead or the village, and if they are lucky they are employed feeding hay to the herd. Maybe they also helped cut that hay. Otherwise like many other peasants in winter, cottars eke out a living as generic crafters. Maybe also as construction laborers; When your Adventurers buy land improvements IAW W&E, who do you think makes the adobe bricks or digs post holes and hauls logs for a palisade?

Do give them Hataborn information including who is on the clan ring. Stuff that anyone in the clan will know. It's a small clan and they will have seen the Ring members all their lives. IMG The Ernalda priestess knew my PCs since they were born, literally midwifed them. Told embarrassing baby stories to one. Remember. they don't choose cults and get initiated into cults until after the adulthood initiation, The Riddle chapter for girls and Rites of Passage chapter for boys. For me this meant that I interrupted my players' character creation after step 4 and choice of parents' occupation in step 5. They don't get the cult skills and magic until later. Nor the weapons, they do the initiation essentially naked. See RQiG page 25 box on "inexperienced adventurers". So they start out young, without the experience (skills and magic) ordinarily credited to ages 16-21. They will gain some of this in subsequent chapters. I assumed accelerated adulthood training by the clan will give them more of that up front, rather than evenly distributed across five years, so they got free training each season. That is essentially the step 7 personal skill bonuses plus the step 5 occupational and step 6 cult stuff. Note that role playing this as Haraborn will make it hard to begin with the Heavy Cavalryman occupation, for example, or Lankhor Mhy library use. Instead my players had to essentially get a job, and the choice of jobs was limited by the situation. But when the 6th season ends they will still need four of their five years to age 21. So think now about what you will do after the 6th season. You can go directly to Company of the Dragon. But note that ALM's advice and plan in COD is that within limits you as GM choose from a menu of adventures, and you can inject your own. Do write the COD adventure sequence out (on ALM's runic form) because many of these build on each other. My own choice, (since COD was not quite out yet but was imminent) was to send the group out of Sartar for a game year of seasoning, and I worked in some classic RQ2 material as well as an adaptation from the Heroquest Sartar Companion for their return. Now is when they can try to get other jobs. Lots of choices for you as GM here and your Glorantha will vary. Good luck. It's fun!

In my opinion it is too much trouble - and takes too much time - to re-calculate the skill category modifiers for temporary and situational things like this. So I would only apply it to rolls against the raw charisma score.

That maternal death figure seems low considering the anecdotal info in biographies. Yes it is anecdotal. But there is this info: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3511335/ and this https://www.brandeis.edu/now/2023/may/mothers-day.html#:~:text=Most historians agree that child,from complications related to childbirth. indicates a 30% cumulative probability of death in childbirth in ancient Greece. Of course the rate per individual pregnancy is much lower. But if I assume fertility from age 16 to 35 and pregnancy one third of the time, that would be about 7 pregnancies in a full life, which seems to match your child survival rate and replacement assumptions fairly well. That indicates a per- birth rate of maternal death over 4%. Anyway the 30% cumulative is pretty daunting for me, a man. And reminds me unpleasantly of my wife's experience with our first child: a 10 hour labor and Caesarian, she (the baby) wasn't turned right. So Bless Childbirth seems to me to be very desirable, not magic whose acquisition would be minimized in the fashion that large corporations have been minimizing hospital beds to minimize " excess capacity" in the RW. Which turned out to be unexpectedly risky in recent years, indicating that minimizing investment does not minimize tragedy.

I have read more about Malkionism than I absorbed, so I don't pose as an authority. But there seem to be strict and loose sects of Malkioni. The strict ones not dealing with gods, and the loose ones using gods. I can see at least three possibilities: 1- Strict Malkionism with No childbirth magic. Worse childbirth outcomes limit the sect's population growth and recovery from disasters. Sect has limited influence in the world. People who see that there are better ways to live, leave, perhaps to be less strict, perhaps to be theists or shamanists. 2- Strict Malkionism, but Wizards create childbirth sorcery. (Not in RQiG rules example spells, but we have been told what is in the rulebook is a truncated version of sorcery for Lhankor Mhy.) 3- Loose Malkionists worship Ernalda, or know someone who does. They use what works for them. This practicality gives us the Esvulari of Heortland, if I understand them correctly.

I will say that Bless Crops must be what accounts for the productivity of Gloranthan agriculture , and applying this rule to the Blessing spells means that every stead had better have an Ernaldan or two with Bless Crops, - or really needs a generous neighbor who will extend her blessings. Those blessings should return big obligations and social status too. An Ernaldan in the farming occupation who does not take the blessing rune spells first, seems to me to be a power gamer from that time forward. As for the warrior's / thane's / chieftain's wife, she really needs Bless Champion and/or Earth Shield, and enough RPs to cast Extension, if she does not want to be a widow. Add in blessing crops for the tenants of five hides, and blessing pregnancies, maybe Healing Body, a Household Guardian, , and she should sacrifice a lot of POWer. We are not talking about 1-point initiates here. The other side of this is that NPC Ernaldans' MPs should normally be lower than their POW.

Thanks, Phil Hibbs.

We have been told that temples will have shrines to associated gods. So Ernakda temples will have shrines to Babeester Gor. Therefore doesn't it seem reasonable that Axe Hall, as the foremost BG temple, would have a shrine to Ernalda? And since it is on the edge of Esrolia, perhaps shrines to other Earth goddesses, all of whose cults BG initiates protect? This should give enough access to Fertility that Axe Hall can have associated garden and farm areas. So they need not haul every bite they eat up from Esrolia below the plateau.

It is hard for us to deal with the mystically different pre-Time situation. To me, no time also implies no sequence and no causation. But obviously in Gloranthan myth that is not so, because there is plenty of causation and even sequence in the myths. There is no need to imagine freezing your own blood supply, clearly that was not the ore Time situation. Orlanth uses Death to kill Yelm, that is causation. Orlanth's contests with Yelm precede that killing, so there is sequence. So I am left with Time as the ordering of the actions of men, just as you might start with a basket full of pieces of yarn all tangled, and then you might take them out, straighten them and lay them out side by side or end to end or in a matrix and weave them together. But the godtime myths, being generally pre Time, seem to stay in the basket. Even though in myth we clearly have divine parentage: Umath is the father if Orlanth, so there is sequence and causation. We have a young Orlanth put in a pit by his bad uncles, and a later Orlanth who has learned his capabilities. . I suppose that " no time" means that in the godtime that was not necessarily before or after Orlanth's contests with Yelm. but any two strands legend could cross anywhere. So I understand the God Kearners' impulse to order myth, because now in Time that is the only way we can understand things.

I think of the Tarpit, where the Only Old One was killed, and which Is a blocked access to the Underworld basement passage, as in the former palace of black glass. Which would have been big, but would not even come close to covering the whole plateau. That would have left a lot of land for the Uz to live off of, which they would have needed with the larger pre-destruction population. Axe Hall at the other end of the plateau would not have been involved in the falling palace. Sand blowing in later, yes, but no big chunks falling from the sky at Axe Hall.

I have seen it confidently and repeatedly stated that while a rune spell is "up and running", in other words a spell with duration is in effect, the rune point(s) used for it cannot all be replenished. This raises its head not only when the adventurers are worshiping under a Sanctify spell, but also when spells such as Bless Pregnancy, Bless Crops, or Bless Champion are cast. Also, presumably when an Issaries Create Market is cast. But i cannot reference that assertion in the RQiG rues, nor in the Q&A in Well of Daliath. Not in RQiG page 315 Replenishing Rune points. Not on page 244 under Worship. Is that just someone's house rule, or is it actually an official written rule, or derivable from the written rules? If so, how and where?

There is no reason to assume that there is not potentially fertile soil under the fragments of obsidian. Volcanic activity often comes up through weak points in sedimentary rock layers. So when the Palace of Black Glass was intact the rest of the plateau may have been a fertile place. A little volcanic debris from the Gods Age would probably add to its fertility. If you scrape off the black sand you may still have fairly good soil under it.