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How many lay member / initiates in Glorantha?


Beorne

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Reading RQG I have not well understood how many adults are Initiates or only lay members to gods, it seems that almost everyone is Initiate to some God ..how much Lay members between adults, especially in Dragon Pass Area?

Thank you.

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15 minutes ago, Beorne said:

Reading RQG I have not well understood how many adults are Initiates or only lay members to gods, it seems that almost everyone is Initiate to some God ..how much Lay members between adults, especially in Dragon Pass Area?

 

Ooh you have opened a can of worms, let me grab some popcorn for this. 

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Oooh boy, watch out, this is a hotly debated topic. My superficial understanding of this is that Dragon Pass and Prax have a high percentage of initiates, with lower percentages elsewhere. Note that it's common for adults to be initiates to one cult while being lay members of another cult or two. Also note that some adults are initiates of two cults.... something to keep in mind when looking at numbers.

For more info, check out the cult population numbers of Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes (available in PDF while we wait for the RuneQuest Sartar Homeland book), this other topic here on BRP (warning: it's long), and this old answer from Jeff Richard on older forums (although he was mostly talking about the HeroQuest concept of initiates, not RuneQuest, if that makes a difference):

Quote

The cult numbers are supposed to add up to more people than there are adults. There is a significant number of Orlanthi who are initiated into two cults. Orlanth + something else, or Ernalda + something else is suprisingly common. And there are only 5000 Orlanth initiates who belong to the Barntar subcult. That’s about 13% of all Orlanth initiates, which does make that the largest Orlanth subcult (the next largest are Vinga and Heler, each with 1500 dedicated members). However, most farmers likely aren’t dedicated members of the Barntar subcult, but belong only to their clan Orlanth cult and worship Barntar as part of the ordinary cycle of festivals. If that seems pretty amorphous and not very cut and dry – again that is deliberate. Subcults are there to let players have plenty of minor variants of the cults if they want and to be a way that a Narrator can show of the diversity of worship that exists in a polytheistic religion if that is MGF for the group. At the same time, there are plenty of groups that drop subcults entirely and that is just fine!

This other article (from Greg Stafford), looking at Humakt initiates in particular, may also give some clues. Warning: this, and the quote above, are somewhat old, and sometimes the designers have changed their mind since... so take it with a grain of salt :)   As always, make your Glorantha your own, go with what feels right.

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48 minutes ago, Beorne said:

Reading RQG I have not well understood how many adults are Initiates or only lay members to gods, it seems that almost everyone is Initiate to some God ..how much Lay members between adults, especially in Dragon Pass Area?

Thank you.

Yeah, this should definitely be put in the books somewhere. 10-30% are the numbers I've seen in some threads, but I can't find an official answer.

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Just now, Bill the barbarian said:

Ooh you have opened a can of worms, let me grab some popcorn for this. 

Sweet or salted?

Anyway, take this with a grain of salt, or a few more.

Initiation to a cult is something of a norm, but in more recent publications cult initiation has been dialed back from formerly 85% in HeroQuest publications.

20-30% of the adults sounds like a number I would expect in the Lunar Empire, or as the number of Orlanthi devotees under HQ1 rules.  It is almost as if the definition of Initiate has changed somewhat again.

Orlanthi should have significantly higher numbers, and David Scott's numbers for the Praxians seem to assume 100% of the adults in some form of initiation.

The question is whether Ancestor Worship is included in those cult initiate numbers. Daka Fal is a special case. So are spirit cults and hero/regimental cults.

 

One thing I find interesting are the afterlife prospects of the non-initiated. Initiates expect to join their deity in their afterlife.

All humans go towards the judgement of Daka Fal after Death. (Not all may make it there if that bridge that kicks oath-breakers into the River of Swords is an obstacle... But then, all manner of ancestors can be summoned by Daka Fal, including a significant number of hostile ones, and presumably some oath-breakers as well.)

Afterwards, souls are resting in the halls of Ty Kora Tek until they are reborn. Their spirits are in a spirit world afterlife limbo. Either wait to be reborn.

 

Practically everybody is a lay member of numerous cults worshiped by their clan, or in their city. It is almost impossible to avoid lay worship of Ernalda, and outside of Lunar dominated lands, of Orlanth in one or more of his aspects. Visiting an Issaries market makes you a lay worshiper, as much as literacy makes you a lay worshiper of Lhankor Mhy. Inside Lunar lands, everybody is expected to be a lay worshiper of the Red Emperor and thereby the Red Goddess and Yelm. In the Provinces, the Seven Mothers cult may stand in for the emperor worship.

 

 

 

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Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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I think initiate count would vary depending on need.

For example, a tribe which lives in an area afflicted by undead, surely they would have loads of Humakt initiates.

I mean, imagine an army of say 50 Humakt initiates, all of whom have sacrificed for single use sever spirit. What a nightmare that would be to attack. That's at least 30 or so casualties on the opposite side pretty much whenever they want,  enough to punch a big hole through a defensive line. And if pressed in battle, what if a bunch of them have  successful divine interventions, and the power of Humakt turns a proportion of the half trained initiates into walking death machines? Who in their right mind would want to launch an attack against such a force?

Similarly a tribe which lives near a chaos nest, Humakt, Storm Bull, Orlanth, Oakfed, even Zorak Zoran - who could afford not to call on such powers in times of need?

People who try to farm in harsh regions like the edges of deserts, agriculture gods would receive a lot of love. But in climates where grain springs out of the ground as soon as the seed hits the Earth, let someone else tithe their produce.

Need would also provide plenty of opportunities for power ups, at least for combat related threats, and a fast track to priesthood or rune lord, so even initiates would have an opportunity to recharge their spells.

In quieter areas, surely there would be less compelling need. I mean why give some of your hard earned produce to a church? There's no real threat. Throw in a coin on holy days, watch the fireworks show.

The interesting implication of this, the Lunar heartlands could have a real problem with finding people willing to commit to one of the cults. Some of the people who follow the Lunar Way go insane - everyone would know someone or have heard terrifying stories of someone who lost their mind after contact with the mysteries. Having eliminated most immediate threats, surely most ordinary people would see little need to get excited about participating fully in Lunar religious life.  I mean they would turn up on holy days, but let priests and sorcerers do most of the heavy lifting. Unless there was an imminent threat of course, such as a major loss on the borders of the empire, or an incursion, in which case lots more people might commit out of patriotism or fear.

Edited by EricW
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7 minutes ago, EricW said:

I think initiate count would vary depending on need.

For example, a tribe which lives in an area afflicted by undead, surely they would have loads of Humakt initiates

Yahtzee!
And there ya going being all reasonable and smart all over again!

Edited by Bill the barbarian
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... remember, with a TARDIS, one is never late for breakfast!

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From the "20-30% initiates" it looks like a Humakti regiment has at best 50% initiates of the Death God, with the rest being hangers-on or prospects, allowed to wear the insignia on their cut-off vests, or riding along without having any colors to show, or a few neutral/allied cultists.

The fifty Humakti in the royal Sartarite bodyguard are a big issue, a military power able to hold one of the lesser cities of Sartar for a week on their own against anything but massed magicians or capital H heroes. But then they rarely appear in full strength, and used to spread among the various acknowledged members of the royal lineage. Ten of these bodyguards at once are already a strong diplomatic statement that the Prince means business. Two dozen are almost a declaration of war.

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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  • Beorne changed the title to How many lay member / initiates in Glorantha?

It's very tricky and recent sources (at leat to my interpretation) show contradictions. Lets visit some of the recent adventures for RQ:RPiG sall we? (I will not make spoilers about the stories)

First, every single person who lives in Apple Lane (GM Screen Pack) is initiated to something and most are also lay members of other cult. There are other people who live in hamlets aroud the village who have no stats and thus we cannot know if they are initiated or not.

In Cattle Raid (GM Screen Pack) we are given a group of young herders. They are all on their teens or early 20s, and have all been initiated into Orlanth adventurous (yes, even the women! Shouldn't they be vingans? Idk). They seem to have been initiated not long ago, around 16, a couple of years later of their adulthood, which usually comes aroud 14.

By this facts, you might think that all sartarites start a series of adulthood rites depending on their prefered roles and cult, which start at 14 with clan-related adulthood ceremonies and end at their 20s when they are fully initiated (have 3 rune points by game terms, which seems to be the "basic" initiate status).

BUTT then you go and read the adventures on the Pegasus Plateau book, and everything gets turned aroud. When the typical NPCs of the Greyrock clan is described with a stat table, they are Barntar lay members! So a majority of the people of the clan are not actually initiated into anything, and this pattern repeats when some average praxians appear in Pairing Stones, they are lay members of Eiritha (at least one of them is clearly stated to be a man btw). But the locals of Renekot's Hope do seem to be always initiated OTOH, which is even weirder.

So are all sartarites initiated? Are they not? How many? In RQ:RPiG terms it's impossible to tell, as sources seem to contradict eachother. 

How does it work in MG? I make orlanthi society more stratified than it seems to be in canon. Carls are almost always initiated, while cottars and other lower status classes like stickpickers are mostly not initiated, this is bc for initiating you have to make sacrifices, you have to donate possessions to the temple, and to leave you family for some time in order to learn the secrects, and many cottar families simply can't afford this anytime. No one is going to literally stop them if they have the resources, and many poor carl families may find themselves in the same situation, but that which I have described earlier is the average situation, and the logical consequence of the societal norms of the heortlings . Slaves are not allowed to initiate to anything, as they are not part of the clan (I do not do the canon thrall thing where children of slaves are adopted, in MG a thrall can be freed if the owner family wishes so, and it's pretty common, but if they don't he and every children he or she is allowed to have is going to be a slave too).

I know that system does not equate to setting but we mostly want to know the setting to apply it to games and the fact that game sources seem to contradict does not help.

Edited by Jape_Vicho
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For my part, I came into Glorantha through HeroQuest (well, King of Dragon Pass and then HQ), and I've never really gotten deep into the RuneQuest mechanics, including the ones regarding cults and worship. So, I tend to just go with what seemed to be the case in the stuff I was introduced to the setting through, which is that most every free Sartarite (or Praxian) is an initiate into a rune cult or spirit tradition, though it strikes me as a good bet that "stickpickers" of all stripes (that is, the not-enslaved but very marginal folk, whether that be a charcoal-burner in Sartar or a day laborer in Pavis) are usually stuck as laity because they can't really afford to give 10% of their time and income to a cult.

2 hours ago, EricW said:

The interesting implication of this, the Lunar heartlands could have a real problem with finding people willing to commit to one of the cults. Some of the people who follow the Lunar Way go insane - everyone would know someone or have heard terrifying stories of someone who lost their mind after contact with the mysteries. Having eliminated most immediate threats, surely most ordinary people would see little need to get excited about participating fully in Lunar religious life.  I mean they would turn up on holy days, but let priests and sorcerers do most of the heavy lifting. Unless there was an imminent threat of course, such as a major loss on the borders of the empire, or an incursion, in which case lots more people might commit out of patriotism or fear.

I personally got the feeling that that's exactly why the "Little Sister" cults exist. They provide extremely limited forms of the Seven Mothers' magic, but don't require any Kindling rites and each one still provides useful and practical magic for a given relatively high-status profession (namely soldiers, healers, clerks, and temple attendants), so for a modestly ambitious Heartlander looking to move up in the world rather than seek deep spiritual truths or entrance into the echelons of the great and powerful, they're a less demanding route toward reasonable upward mobility in service to the empire.

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The perhaps cynical take here is that there are many initiates when the point is to emphasize how common magic is in Glorantha and how directly people experience the numinous in everyday life there, and there are few initiates when people start thinking about what a society where a substantial fraction of people over the age of sixteen could throw lightning would look like and whether that's consistent with the antiquity feel Glorantha aims for. So the overall answer I have is that there are just enough initiates for most people in central Genertela to have experienced Godtime, the Eternal Return, etc. without there being a society where random people on the street could summon up a gale from a light breeze if they wanted. 

2 hours ago, Jape_Vicho said:

In Cattle Raid (GM Screen Pack) we are given a group of young herders. They are all on their teens or early 20s, and have all been initiated into Orlanth adventurous (yes, even the women! Shouldn't they be vingans? Idk). They seem to have been initiated not long ago, around 16, a couple of years later of their adulthood, which usually comes aroud 14.

Small-v vingans or capital-V Vingans? In the latter case, Vinga is now a warrior lodge cult of (what I firmly believe to be) stereotypical jocks who call people "dork" and punch them in the arm affectionately a lot, etc. etc.

In the former case, well, that gets into some thorny, troublesome territory, potentially a full labyrinth of pronouns and gender definitions and all that. So I'm not surprised that official Chaosium material hasn't given us many, if any, direct examples of vingan/nandan/helering/non-gendered human characters. But it's a "not surprised" with a rueful shake of the head.

Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

"I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban," -Greg Stafford, January 7th, 2010

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2 hours ago, Eff said:

The perhaps cynical take here is that there are many initiates when the point is to emphasize how common magic is in Glorantha and how directly people experience the numinous in everyday life there, and there are few initiates when people start thinking about what a society where a substantial fraction of people over the age of sixteen could throw lightning would look like and whether that's consistent with the antiquity feel Glorantha aims for. So the overall answer I have is that there are just enough initiates for most people in central Genertela to have experienced Godtime, the Eternal Return, etc. without there being a society where random people on the street could summon up a gale from a light breeze if they wanted. 

In Heroquest, Initiates couldn't do any *blatant* magic.  Just about everyone in Dragon Pass was an initiate, but it meant they could use magic to boost mundane things.  Use the Earth Rune to give your axe a keener edge, use the Fire Rune to boost your endurance of heat, and so on.

In Runequest, Inititiates can do some limited blatant magic but not huge amounts of it, as starting PCs, anyway.  The rulebook also explicitly says nearly every adult (in the lands the rules cover, anyway) is an iniitiate.  With three points of Rune Magic, an Argan Argar Initiate might start out able to summon Darkness Elementals.  A Babeester Gor might start with magical berserking.  And so on.

I think part of the answer, though, is that the cults PCs join are not the cults that most of the population is joining, or at least not the subcult.  The average Orlanthi farmer has rune magics that let him make his crops better and his bulls plow more land.  The average Ernalda head of household has magics that lets her stretch her barley reserve and turn bad meat into good meat, or let her somehow sew three dresses from enough cloth for one.

People with 'bash 'em and dash 'em' magic are the people who need it on a regular basis, like thanes, wandering bands of heroes, and so on.

 

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3 minutes ago, John Biles said:

In Heroquest, Initiates couldn't do any *blatant* magic.  Just about everyone in Dragon Pass was an initiate, but it meant they could use magic to boost mundane things.  Use the Earth Rune to give your axe a keener edge, use the Fire Rune to boost your endurance of heat, and so on.

Unless you're describing how it was in earlier editions (I never really bothered reading the mechanical stuff in those, since HQG was already out by then), that's actually more in line with what HeroQuest called "natural" or "basic" magic. As HeroQuest: Glorantha describes:

Quote

Basic Magic

Some level of magic is available to nearly everyone in Glorantha. Upon completion of the rites that mark you as an adult member of your community, you can use your Runes to augment another ability, but cannot use them directly as an ability until you are an initiate of a cult. You cannot do anything overtly supernatural with it; you simply get magically better (in a manner consistent with the description of the Rune) at doing ordinary things.

For example, a hero with the Movement Rune might use that Rune to augment his fighting by attacking with “blinding speed”. Or a hero with the Darkness Rune might use that Rune to augment her ability to sneak past the temple guards by “staying in the shadows”.

Meanwhile, becoming an initiate allows you to use whatever Runes you share with your god as a normal ability, and to do blatantly magical things, just so long as it's something in line with your god's deeds and abilities.

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7 hours ago, EricW said:

For example, a tribe which lives in an area afflicted by undead, surely they would have loads of Humakt initiates.

Or more of their initiates would be Humakti, at any rate.

 

7 hours ago, EricW said:

The interesting implication of this, the Lunar heartlands could have a real problem with finding people willing to commit to one of the cults. Some of the people who follow the Lunar Way go insane - everyone would know someone or have heard terrifying stories of someone who lost their mind after contact with the mysteries.

But most people in the Heartlands who are initiates, aren't initiates of Lunar cults as such anyway.  Or are of cults that are Lunar just in the sense that they're seen as 'healed' -- you don't need to become or even attempt to become Illuminated to join Etyries, say.  But most people in will still belong to (to whatever degree) a 'local culture' religion, rather than the Imperial overlay one -- the Solar pantheon, and so on.  Though I suspect levels of initiation are lower for other reasons.

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6 hours ago, Jape_Vicho said:

So are all sartarites initiated? Are they not? How many? In RQ:RPiG terms it's impossible to tell, as sources seem to contradict eachother.

I think "Orlanthi all" are, at any rate.  Adulthood and cultic initiation are parts of the same process, so you're a community member in good standing, you became one a couple of years after puberty for women(-path people), somewhat later for men(-path people).  If you're not, you're the social equivalent of a child, stranger, weirdo, or combination thereof.

Sartar might be just about Peak Initiate.  Lots of the rest of the world isn't theistic at all. Or is more of a mix, pushing the numbers down immediately (unless we're juking the stats by working out what initiate-equivalent is in other money).  Even their former homelands like Heortland, things are a little less old-school, due to varying amounts of Western influence.

In the Lunar Empire, and I think even more especially in its subject and precursor cultures, initiation per se isn't such a common thing, and theism is less of a mystery religion/personal emulation thing, and is more of a sacrificial/collective worship thing.  So if your local problem were 'large outbreak of undead', rather than having many villagers tool up individually with rune magic, the whole village engages in a common magical effort to solve the problem.  Though I'm not sure if any ruleset really captures that distinction, even if it still is (or ever was!) officially part of the world.  Headcanon for me, though.

Lots of initiates might be minimally committed, of course.  Or indeed 'behind in their dues', in either time or income commitment.  But some of each is in effect "deducted at source" -- if you're a bog-standard Orlanthi female/male-path person, your Ernalda/Orlanth cult responsibilities and your occupational and social ones are distinguished at best fuzzily, and often not at all.

Edited by Alex
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29 minutes ago, Leingod said:

Unless you're describing how it was in earlier editions (I never really bothered reading the mechanical stuff in those, since HQG was already out by then), that's actually more in line with what HeroQuest called "natural" or "basic" magic. As HeroQuest: Glorantha describes:

Meanwhile, becoming an initiate allows you to use whatever Runes you share with your god as a normal ability, and to do blatantly magical things, just so long as it's something in line with your god's deeds and abilities.

On the other hand, the equivalent of Rune Spells in HeroQuest seems to be more like Feats, given how both are described. (Channelling full power of the god, becoming them manifest in the world, never an invisible act, connected with a particular myth.)

This fits given how sparingly Rune Magic was given out to initiates in older editions. So HQ Initiates are far more like Lay Members in RQ:G, access to cult spirit magic, but no Rune Spells.

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6 hours ago, Jape_Vicho said:

They are all on their teens or early 20s, and have all been initiated into Orlanth adventurous (yes, even the women! Shouldn't they be vingans? Idk).

Same thing, I believe.  'Vingan' is just a shorthand for 'female OA initiate', or in some cases (critical mass of such types, or a cultically important site, etc) a particular form of the cult.  Local terminology and customs may vary, but in magical terms they get 'full recip'.  Gets a little fuzzier for the Thunderous and Rex aspects, but Vinga is the route-in in those cases too, to whatever degree it actually occurs.

 

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1 hour ago, John Biles said:

In Heroquest, Initiates couldn't do any *blatant* magic.  Just about everyone in Dragon Pass was an initiate, but it meant they could use magic to boost mundane things.  Use the Earth Rune to give your axe a keener edge, use the Fire Rune to boost your endurance of heat, and so on.

In Runequest, Inititiates can do some limited blatant magic but not huge amounts of it, as starting PCs, anyway.  The rulebook also explicitly says nearly every adult (in the lands the rules cover, anyway) is an iniitiate.  With three points of Rune Magic, an Argan Argar Initiate might start out able to summon Darkness Elementals.  A Babeester Gor might start with magical berserking.  And so on.

I think part of the answer, though, is that the cults PCs join are not the cults that most of the population is joining, or at least not the subcult.  The average Orlanthi farmer has rune magics that let him make his crops better and his bulls plow more land.  The average Ernalda head of household has magics that lets her stretch her barley reserve and turn bad meat into good meat, or let her somehow sew three dresses from enough cloth for one.

People with 'bash 'em and dash 'em' magic are the people who need it on a regular basis, like thanes, wandering bands of heroes, and so on.

 

I mean, you don't need to go this far. You could just say most people have the kind of tenuous connection with the divine represented by having one or two Rune Points, just enough their magic is usually devoted to non-adventurer tasks, and it's the exceptional adventurers who are drawn to pull themselves closer to the divine. 

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Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

"I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban," -Greg Stafford, January 7th, 2010

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10 hours ago, Eff said:

The perhaps cynical take here is that there are many initiates when the point is to emphasize how common magic is in Glorantha and how directly people experience the numinous in everyday life there, and there are few initiates when people start thinking about what a society where a substantial fraction of people over the age of sixteen could throw lightning would look like and whether that's consistent with the antiquity feel Glorantha aims for. So the overall answer I have is that there are just enough initiates for most people in central Genertela to have experienced Godtime, the Eternal Return, etc. without there being a society where random people on the street could summon up a gale from a light breeze if they wanted. 

Small-v vingans or capital-V Vingans? In the latter case, Vinga is now a warrior lodge cult of (what I firmly believe to be) stereotypical jocks who call people "dork" and punch them in the arm affectionately a lot, etc. etc.

In the former case, well, that gets into some thorny, troublesome territory, potentially a full labyrinth of pronouns and gender definitions and all that. So I'm not surprised that official Chaosium material hasn't given us many, if any, direct examples of vingan/nandan/helering/non-gendered human characters. But it's a "not surprised" with a rueful shake of the head.

I don't really get the difference you make between them. The pre-gen character Vasana for exemple is clearly stated to be member of Vinga Adventurous for exemple. What I draw from recent material is that females can be perfectly initiated into Orlanth Adventurous, and men in Ernalda, and the Vingan and Nandans are not just initiates of the non typical gender but a specialized order inside the cult, who are subjected to a certain set of rites, customs, and so on, and are much more "devoted" to the cults than your run of the mill sartarites.

:50-power-truth::50-sub-light::50-power-truth:

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  • There's a couple of answers in the Q&A here.
  • Secondly don't confuse the rules as being a guide as to how the whole world is modelled. Adventures only usually give as much info as is needed to NPCs. For example in the GM screen pack, all of the those NPCs are major players in the adventures. We need to know all of their info as they are the basis on which to build cult and personal relationships. The Rock residents are in my mind a result of the adventure setting which to me explains why they are only lay members, along with they have just come out from under the Lunar yoke where Orlanth was forbidden. They are NPC shorthand for "ineffective".  The Renekot’s Hope Residents are a similar example of a group of people that are not so important to the game. In this case the writer filled them out a bit more.
  • Look at the Sartar:KoH chapter, the Cults of Sartar. It details numbers (and other info) for each cult in Sartar in 1618
Quote

Humakt. Sacrifice. Deity (some claim Great God), 1000 [Lismelder tribe, Malani tribe, Boldhome]

Kero Fin. Sacrifice. Deity. 250 [Wintertop]

Kolat. Ecstatic Adoration. Spirit. 1000

The numbers will be updated for future RQG products (to 1625) in a similar style to Cults of Prax, appendix C, but these are a great starting point.

see here for an example: https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/4291-pol-joni-guide-to-glorantha/page/2/?tab=comments#comment-176738

 

Edited by David Scott
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55 minutes ago, Jape_Vicho said:

I don't really get the difference you make between them. The pre-gen character Vasana for exemple is clearly stated to be member of Vinga Adventurous for exemple. What I draw from recent material is that females can be perfectly initiated into Orlanth Adventurous, and men in Ernalda, and the Vingan and Nandans are not just initiates of the non typical gender but a specialized order inside the cult, who are subjected to a certain set of rites, customs, and so on, and are much more "devoted" to the cults than your run of the mill sartarites.

Well, yes. Orlanth and Ernalda are not gender-restricted cults in RQG (and in practical terms they weren't that much more gender-restricted in their implied situation even in the Hero Wars days). Vinga is specifically held up as a subcult of Orlanth with a defined social body etc. and Nandan might well be the same in the GaGoG (Bagog's non-Chaotic twin).

And the genders (non-capitalized) are something that have an independent existence, but the vingan and nandan genders as they have been described in more detail by Chaosium people ought to be showing up in what Sartarites would normally consider "men's" or "women's" situations, like going out and herding some sheep while the alynx that hangs around your family is very visibly laughing at you, or staying in and doing some extreme weaving. And they're not that evident in such situations where they should be salient, or in general, but there are some very obvious and very good reasons why that's not happening. Perhaps it falls to Jonstown Compendium products to produce overwound gender knots at the moment.

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Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

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1 hour ago, Eff said:

even in the Hero Wars days

And to emphasise, further back too. The full cult writeup of Ernalda (Book 5 of RQ3, 1984), had no restrictions on the gender of Ernalda initiates. Only women could be priests, but Gods of Glorantha introduced Acolytes who could be men, RQG call them Godtalkers.

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1 minute ago, David Scott said:

And to emphasise, further back too. The full cult writeup of Ernalda (Book 5 of RQ3, 1984), had no restrictions on the gender of Ernalda initiates. Only women could be priests, but Gods of Glorantha introduced Acolytes who could be men, RQG call them Godtalkers.

Ah, yeah, I breezed over the 1970s and 80s days having a similar lack of restrictions to modern RQG, with the 90s/2000s as a peak of textual "gender is restricted" and subtextual "(but not really)". 

Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

"I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban," -Greg Stafford, January 7th, 2010

Eight Arms and the Mask

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