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John Biles

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Posts posted by John Biles

  1.  Session 2:

    Okay, so the PCs joined the Blue Quartz and their allies the Green Snakes and fought some Tusk Riders.  The PCs invoked the Harmony rune to help the Clans cooperate, invoked the Man Rune to have some wandering trolls show up and eat some of the Boars of the Tusk Riders.  And used the Air rune to hamper enemy missile fire.

    The PCs had a fight with a bunch of footmen and that went reasonably well, save for Thumpson, the Wind Lord, forgetting to use his Sandals of Darkness.

    Afterwards, they went to go check on the boys and see if they made it to Uncle's Lodge, only to find that a group of outlaws had captured the boys and planned to haul them off to sell as slaves.

    An intense argument ensued in which the PCs decided to send Sanria, Priestess of Ernalda, to negotiate.  She scored a critical on her diplomatic roll and talks them into accepting a small fee for 'protecting the boys during their initiation' along with a bath and some food and moving on.

    It was the greatest moment of the night.

    We then skimmed over Sea Season in which they helped out with the sowing of crops and other clan tasks, then in Fire Season, they headed for Clearwine to trade loot from the Tusk Riders for Clearwine and special seeds for next year. 

    They encountered an area of burned chaos plants; the Trickster took some seeds because, well, Trickster.

    They then met a patrol which warned them that the Oak Leaves Clan was having huge internal discord and they might want to detour.

    Instead, they went in and found that a marriage to reconcile two clans had been disrupted because the bride was pregnant by a guy from a third clan.  The Ernalda Priestess talked them into reconciling and bringing a lawsuit against the third clan. 

    They beat some Stone Crabs, but the Trickster used the seeds as part of one of his flustering attacks.  This will come back.

    Then they reached Clearwine and the Issaries they escorted made the deals.

    The Priestesses asked the Ernalda Priestess and the Trickster to be part of a small Heroquest.  Because I had not planned enough, Ernalda now has a daughter named Cynthia, who they saved after Eurmal lost her in the woods.  They got lost trying to find her and had to save Barntar from an alligator.

    They talked the alligator into trading Barntar from fish; the Trickster dove into the water, caught a bunch in his mouth (he's a troll) and spat them into the alligator's mouth.  Greatest Troll moment.

    They found Cynthia and the new plant and brought her home.  A very simple quest.

    They started home and had to fight chaos vines where the Trickster used those seeds.  They burned the vines and hoped they'd fixed it and we ran out of time.

    That's where we stopped.

     

     

     

     

    On 3/11/2024 at 5:07 PM, John Biles said:

     

    Ignore this, I can't get rid of it.

     

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  2. Someone has to have theorized Nyzsalor used Thed's aid to cause the Curse of Kin as Thed's revenge on Kygor Litor.

    And connected, that his previous incarnation as Rashoran was infected with Chaos when the people who opened the way to Chaos murdered him, thus producing Gbaji.

    (Perhaps his ritual murder was part of opening the way to Chaos - Illuminating a patch of the world so it no longer resisted Chaos.)

     

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  3. 3 hours ago, Tatterdemalion Fox said:

    An excellent post in total — thank you for the video link, particularly — but this is what sparked the most thought on this end.

    There is an interesting tension in Gloranthan writing between the idea that it is a world that works as the world of our Bronze Age was believed to work, and the traces laid underneath that suggest otherwise. The tantalizing hints that the Great Darkness was actually a mythologized form of our own Year Without A Summer writ large; that Yelm himself is a composite figure made at the Sunstop in order to further Dara Happa’s imperial ambitions, later stitched into Theyalan mythology; that perhaps the Lightbringer’s Quest did not exist until Harmast laid out the way, quest by quest; that Orlanth himself is nothing more than the stories around Vingkot writ large enough to stretch across the sky, binding lesser gods and traditions to himself as plunder; that everything we have received about the Hero Wars is built upon centuries of mythic accretion, and that we can see that process in real time as the Red Goddess builds herself a pantheon.

    But I cannot take the final step. I am in love with the numinous; I want to believe that if we try to treat the gods as nothing more than the echoes of human belief, that we shall discover to our dismay that the powers and principalities of the world are not so easily dismissed. It is a mistake to too easily humanize them, but perhaps it is also a mistake to think of them as nothing more than what we have made of them— at least, for as long as we are telling the story.

     

    The gods being real and the gods being shaped by human belief are not on the same axis.  They can be both. 

    My own line of thought is that humanity didn't create the gods; they existed before Time, but without time, they couldn't be the kind of solid, locked down beings that time requires.  And they remain beings who are in a sense, living probabilities rather than living certainties and thus remain subject to change because of the reciprocal interaction between them and believers, whose beliefs lock them down by re-enacting specific versions of the myths in a given location.  Think of it as quantum metaphysics. 

    But there are limits to what belief can do without pushing too far, as shown by the Godlearners.  Not every possibility is equally true and some are rare, high energy states and when the state crashes, that energy may well go into you.

    One clan sees the Little Sun as Elmal.  Another sees it as Yelmalio, a third thinks they're brothers.  That's not too far.  But the one who says Yelmalio is a potato with delusions of grandeur and that Mostal is Uleria's husband is probably in trouble.

     

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  4. The Party, all young adults initiated two years earlier:

    1.  Robby Flay, Troll Trickster searching to recreate the perfect meal he had during his initiation

    2.  Mercutio, A Seshnelan whose village was wiped by raiders and ended up in Dragon Pass as a priest of Lhankor Mhy (home brew class posted on this forum.)  His purified grimoire gave him reskinned Magic Missile as an at-will, which he used a LOT. 

    3.  Bill, a Duck Humakti whose father, a great Duck General, was slain by the Lunars during the Duck Hunt

    4.  Sanria, an Elf raised by the Ernalda Priestesses, who is now an Ernalda Priestess

    5.  Thumpson, Half-Orc Wind Lord, who was found in a mysterious cosmic egg as a baby and no one knows what a 'half-orc' is, since he seems to be entirely present. 

    What ensued was a scenario where everyone tried to figure out their abilities and I, the DM, screwed up and had made encounters too brutal for them, though technically not overpowered.

    I had created weaker Tusk Riders, but they came in a pair of a level 1 troop and a large level 2 troop.   So two riders and two boars and that was far more brutal than I realized.

    The PCs had to scout in the woods around the men's initiation for the year, protecting five boys.

    They stumbled on the tracks of two tusk riders and their mounts, who they followed and ambushed.  Sandals of Darkness proved a brutal power for Thumpson, as he basically vanished just before the attack and on round 1, cut one of the riders in half.  A brutal fight ensued in which we learned:

    The lower access to healing was brutal.  The trickster, the windlord, and the humakti all got knocked out at least once.

    Feckless strike is a really good power.  Tricksters in general seem very effective.

    The Earth Priestess basically sucked.  Possibly none of us understood how to use her, but she was mostly worthless unless she used a daily.  She was awesome at negotiations, though (Charisma 18 and a +3 relevant background.)

    All the other PCs did well, but I'd made the encounters too hard.

    They did win, alert the Blue Quartz Clan, and get help from another clan; next time, I'm going to add a healing oriented NPC (a reskinned cleric of Chalanna Arroy) to help them and avoid any large creatures until they have more HP.

     

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  5. 2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

    As for the mind link, I am imagining Spock–Sedenya engaged in Bat-whispering and the Bat each unsure whether she is a goddess dreaming she is a Chaos monster dreaming she is a hummingbird, or a hummingbird dreaming she is a Chaos monster dreaming she is a goddess, or a lump of rock dreaming she is a pterosaur dreaming she is a bat dreaming she is a moth dreaming … Perhaps neither of them has been quite sure at any time since.

    Bat-whispering is a pretty good description for what the Bat-handlers do and I can totally see that basically being how it works.

     

    Going back to the original topic of this - Illumination is a cheat code that lets you abuse divine power.  Nothing could be more in the spirit of illumination than being illuminated, initiating to Storm Bull, then using chaos detection to have sexy hookups with Chaos creatures.

    Sure, this means you're occulted and doing wrong, but doing wrong seems much more common than doing it right.

     

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  6. I hate Tex-Mex food; much of it makes me ill just to look at it.

    If I was illuminated, I would stop hating it, but I would still be able to tell the difference between that and Italian cuisine.

    It's not that an illuminate thinks they're the *same* in every way.  It's that he stops hating chaos (or law, if he was an illuminate chaos critter.)

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  7. On 2/18/2024 at 9:07 AM, Joerg said:

    The tribal deities (or spirits) seem to have been available already prior to the Hero Wars. Nomad Gods is about the Jaldon games, communal training exercises/holy ritualized warfare between the tribes.

    No idea whether bringing along the tribal deities would work outside of Sacred Prax and/or the Wastes. The oasis spirits are localized entities which may be unavailable outside of the Praxian theater.

    People incarnating Jaldon can raid Sartar, so I would assume Waha could ride you all the way to plunder Glamour if you didn't die first.

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  8. I'd suggest that the closer you get to the exact frontier or beyond, the less control the Emperor has except in the vague sense that if he gets interested in the Po-Dunk clan's Seven Mother missionaries south of Wilmskirk, he can have a big influence while his eye is focused there.  Being missionairies, some don't even operate inside the Empire.

    Some past face of the Emperor set the theology but right now, he's too busy brooding and singing Suspicious Minds to care.

     

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  9. 40 minutes ago, Baron said:

    "I HATE the Romans! A LOT!"

    Now imagining a young Argath painting anti-Lunar slogans on the walls of Pavis and a Lunar minor officer comes and corrects his writing.

     

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  10. 20 minutes ago, Jeff said:

    Ramona is also a not uncommon female name in parts of the US. Nonetheless it is fine as the name for city. After all its etymology is (fem.) "wise protector".

    Like Ramona Quimby, star of her own book series.

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  11. Make it a former tax collecting station from the period of trolls charging Orlanthi taxes for protection.   You could find ancient weapons, armor and ancient coins as treasure, troll tax records and darkness creatures who still hang out here.

    I love the idea of a big 'poster' of the Great Old One (a big rectangular hunk of stone with carved art)

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  12. 8 hours ago, g33k said:


    I can very easily imagine someone whose "adulthood" rite strayed unintentionally into a Cultic initiation.  It wouldn't be a common thing, by any means!  But "always" means something very different in Glorantha, than we moderns think of.

    That's part of the premise of an ongoing fanfic series of mine.

  13. 5 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

    While some people were really angry at the movie for including tomatoes. Which seems a bit odd since the New World ship had already long past sailed with potatoes (like you say) and tobacco.

    Interestingly, this was a Tolkien retcon - early writings had tomatoes, which were then excised for unclear reasons (Tom Shippey speculates that it's the word Tolkien didn't like).

    Pomatoes would probably cause him to immolate.

  14. 7 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

    Collective feeding/rationing makes bronze-age sense, but I'm concerned about what it does for fast-food places in cities, which are surely MGF to include?

    In Citizens of the Lunar Empire (a Jonstown Compendium product which i super-recommend), the average city person lives in a multi-story apartment and business complex with a bar that also serves hot food and it's one of two places to get your grain dole (the other is a baker).  You have paperwork that indicates the level your family is getting and the bar tracks how much everyone in the building has used each week; you can also buy things with cash.

     

  15. 2 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

    I would suggest a myth about how potatoes once grew as fruits in the air, but had to hide in the Earth during the Darkness, and never emerged from there until harvested by men.

    The Solar myth of potatoes would be that they were the result of Lodril crashing into the Earth and surrendering to the lusts of the Earth Goddesses, thus engendering the whole family of the root vegetables, the favored foods of lowly peasants and too unclean for the noble leaders of the Solars.

     

  16. 24 minutes ago, Richard S. said:

    Yelm is very much still in charge. The Red Emperor - Yelm's representative - rules, not his mother. She gave mortals the tools to change the world, but she doesn't care what is done with those tools. Jar-Eel is the closest thing to a mortal representative of the Goddess, and she definitely takes orders from the emperor.

    That's the scam which keeps Dara Happa in line.

    But in practice, Yelm isn't really in charge of anything and certainly the Red Emperor is not really taking orders from Yelm or his cult.

    The Lunar cults control the Empire and the Red Emperor is closer to them than to Yelm. 

    But this isn't the first time a cuckoo took over the Dara Happans as the Draconic Emperor pulled pretty much the same scam.

     

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