Aldryami vs uz

[jajagappa]

14 minutes ago, jeffjerwin said:

the Stinking Forest

The Guide notes "Stinking Forest: Dense groves of trees cover hills and valleys haunted by elves, trolls, Tusk Riders, and bad memories. Within its confines stands the Ivory Plinth..."

Definitely both there.  But what the balance is between these groups is unclear.

[soltakss]

1 hour ago, jajagappa said:

We also don't know much about life in the Stinking Forest.  It was part of a greater elf forest, but clearly has been impacted by the presence of the Tusk Riders.  And trolls going from Halikiv to Dagori Inkarth are most likely to pass through there rather than going up Snakepipe Hollow.

Well, it's called the Stinking Forest because of the number of trolls there, at least it used to be. 

[Runeblogger]

Shannon Applecline published an article about the Vale of Flowers in Tradetalk #17. With nice art by Dario Corallo.

[Mankcam]

I kinda viewed The Stinking Forest a bit like Tolkien's Mirkwood - in Middle Earth that forest used to be The Greenwood back in the earlier era, before it was tainted by The Shadow, of which the presence of such made it a forboding place - hence it was renamed Mirkwood

I always felt that The Stinking Forest was a stand in for Fangorn or Mirkwood to an extent. It had become a more dangerous or foreboding place since the presence of Trolls and Tusk Riders had entered it, although pockets of Aldryami still exist there (no less dangerous or foreboding to humans in many ways). I  presented it with some physical impact of such that made it stink as well, perhaps sulphur laden waterholes etc that actually stink (like Rotorua in NZ).

Bad stuff happens there, disturbed adryami spirits haunt the place,  perhaps the result of tortured dryads or something like that. The taint of Chaos emanates from The Ivory Plinth. I view the Aldryami who remain to be in some kind of mythological struggle versus the presence of Chaos, embodied by the Tusk Riders. They may or may not be assisted with this by The Uz at times, although it is nothing akin to a amicable alliance.

Edited January 5, 2018 by Mankcam

[jeffjerwin]

1 minute ago, Mankcam said:

I kinda viewed it as a smaller Mirkwood - in Middle Earth that forest used to be The Greenwood back in the earlier era, before it was tainted by The Shadow, of which the presence of such made it a forboding place - hence it was renamed Mirkwood

I always felt that The Stinking Forest was a stand in for Fangorn or Mirkwood to an extent. It had become a more dangerous or foreboding place since the presence of Trolls and Tusk Riders had entered it, although pockets of Aldryami still exist there (no less dangerous of foreboding to humans in many ways). I kind presented it with some physical impact of such that made it stink as well, perhaps sulphur laden waterholes etc that actually stink (like Rotorua in NZ) 

I've long suspected that parts of Dragon Pass [and other parts of Glorantha, no doubt] are remnants of non-Gloranthan campaigns, or campaigns that veered out of GS canon when they were played. The Tusk Riders are basically orcs. The terrain around the Upland Marsh, Lismelder lands, Wintertop and the Grazelands is awfully similar to the central part of Arduin (there's even a "Howling Tower" there). I think it's been suspected that Carse/Karse and Refuge/Sanctuary are also interpolations from other worlds...

[Mankcam]

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Edited January 5, 2018 by Mankcam

[Mankcam]

13 minutes ago, jeffjerwin said:

I've long suspected that parts of Dragon Pass [and other parts of Glorantha, no doubt] are remnants of non-Gloranthan campaigns, or campaigns that veered out of GS canon when they were played. The Tusk Riders are basically orcs. The terrain around the Upland Marsh, Lismelder lands, Wintertop and the Grazelands is awfully similar to the central part of Arduin (there's even a "Howling Tower" there). I think it's been suspected that Carse/Karse and Refuge/Sanctuary are also interpolations from other worlds...

Totally agree. I think The Uz are used the same way that Star Trek uses Klingons, pre-Next Gen era. Not evil, although very brutal and often unfiendly, however the odd alliance can be forged with individuals at times. Also easy to present them as Orcs or like Howard's Picts as an inhuman enemy.

Tusk Riders are more extreme due to the Chaos taint, so they are definitely a great Goblinoid/Orc stand in for Glorantha. Instead of Wargs they ride large razorback boars, that's pretty similar and perhaps more intimidating. From a Tolkien point of view they are also a stand in for Dundlendings as well, being a 'swarthy' breed of humans with tusks and worshipers of a brutal religion (which sort of reminds me of Aztec blood sacrifices etc)

Dragon Pass is full of other influences from early house campaigns, perhaps that is why it still works as a gaming setting. Just outside the settled regions lies lots of fantasy adventuring opportunities.The RQ2 map tends to really bring out that flavour

[Atgxtg]

I agree. I think pretty much every fantasy or FRPG idea that Greg and his group liked and wanted to try out got incorporated into Glorantha/Dragon Pass. They just kept adding new things "down the road" a few miles, and then, eventually altered and adjusted things to make them fell more like a natural part of Glorantha and less like a transplant. I think it helped to give the cultures greater depth, as there was something of a layered approach to the cultures. First the original transplant, then adapting the it to RQ game mechanics, then "Gloanthizing" it, then finetuing things to better fit the area it wound up in, and finally letting it grow organically into something that "belonged" there. 

[jeffjerwin]

1 hour ago, Atgxtg said:

I agree. I think pretty much every fantasy or FRPG idea that Greg and his group liked and wanted to try out got incorporated into Glorantha/Dragon Pass. They just kept adding new things "down the road" a few miles, and then, eventually altered and adjusted things to make them fell more like a natural part of Glorantha and less like a transplant. I think it helped to give the cultures greater depth, as there was something of a layered approach to the cultures. First the original transplant, then adapting the it to RQ game mechanics, then "Gloanthizing" it, then finetuing things to better fit the area it wound up in, and finally letting it grow organically into something that "belonged" there. 

Though it also gives Dragon Pass that very old-school flavour... it's the one part of Glorantha that's well... kind of zany.

Ducks, for instance (Keets hardly count). Every single Elder Race in close proximity. A cr*p-ton of dangerous ruins. 

Edit: ... and, of course, Dragon Pass wasn't even part of Glorantha originally. It was retrofitted in when GS noticed it "filled a gap".

Edited January 6, 2018 by jeffjerwin

[jajagappa]

3 hours ago, jeffjerwin said:

I think it's been suspected that Carse/Karse and Refuge/Sanctuary are also interpolations from other worlds...

Those are known to be, not just suspected.  Chaosium published the Midkemia Press Carse from Raymond Feist's world and placed the city along the Mirrorsea as Karse.  They also did the Thieves' World Sanctuary and placed that into Glorantha as Refuge.  Karse has gone it's own way, and I don't know that anything has been carried over since.  As for Refuge, it began to evolve with the Guide, though I haven't gone back to see how/whether the original setting now translates.

[jeffjerwin]

Were Trolls and Elves in Glorantha always intended to be as unique as they are? I got a sense from RQ2 (pre-Trollpak) and Wyrm's Footnotes that they were more generic fantasy creatures originally, or were seen that way; I mean the old "Dark Troll" comics, for example, and the Tolkienesque elf art - was it in the main rules? I was a player then, so I may be inferring based on what I knew then, but the full-on Plant People depiction of the elves didn't really emerge until RQ3, I think. I remember finding it surprising. Dwarves also changed in how they seemed to be portrayed, but they never played a major role in the games I played so it was less obvious to me.

In any case, trolls living in woods doesn't seem odd at all to a person familiar to Northern European folklore. The inconsistency - or apparent inconsistency - was in Trollpak they were defined as truly omnivorous and hungry, which meant that forests were vast larders ready to be stripped of all fare - before Trollpak, Troll Woods and the Stinking Forest made more sense than not - trolls were imagined chiefly as monsters of the outer wilderness and underground, not as embodiments of hunger, ameliorated with intelligence.

 

Edit: the Tolkienesque elf was in the RQ1 and RQ2 rules and I think drawn by Luise Perrine.

Edited January 6, 2018 by jeffjerwin

[Joerg]

7 hours ago, jeffjerwin said:

I've long suspected that parts of Dragon Pass [and other parts of Glorantha, no doubt] are remnants of non-Gloranthan campaigns, or campaigns that veered out of GS canon when they were played. The Tusk Riders are basically orcs. The terrain around the Upland Marsh, Lismelder lands, Wintertop and the Grazelands is awfully similar to the central part of Arduin (there's even a "Howling Tower" there). I think it's been suspected that Carse/Karse and Refuge/Sanctuary are also interpolations from other worlds...

Features like the Ducks, Tusk Riders, the Dwarf etc. were present in White Bear and Red Moon, published in 1975, and developed and playtested earlier. I doubt very much that there were many roleplaying campaigns in place then, a year after the first D&D was published.

WBRM had the most whimsical unit names ever. The middle of the duck triplets "Ducks, and" probably stands the test of time.

There certainly was a bleed-over in the roleplaying material since. Chaosium playtested its products in their house campaign, which was set on Glorantha. Karse and Refuge definitely were playtest sites.

Glorantha canon does include non-Gloranthan stuff, like Redbird, the character who led the party producing Prince Temertain in 1613. Quite a bit of the campaign reports don't sound that terribly "canonical" but made it into canon somehow.

The twisted Teleri elf origin of Tolkien's orcs and goblins was unpublished before 1977 (The Silmarillion), so the remark about "basically orcs" is fair enough. Before Trollpak, there wasn't that much definition to the Gloranthan darkmen, either, though enough to populate the Pavis Rubble.

[Atgxtg]

9 hours ago, jeffjerwin said:

Were Trolls and Elves in Glorantha always intended to be as unique as they are? I got a sense from RQ2 (pre-Trollpak) and Wyrm's Footnotes that they were more generic fantasy creatures originally, or were seen that way; I mean the old "Dark Troll" comics, for example, and the Tolkienesque elf art - was it in the main rules? I was a player then, so I may be inferring based on what I knew then, but the full-on Plant People depiction of the elves didn't really emerge until RQ3, I think. I remember finding it surprising. Dwarves also changed in how they seemed to be portrayed, but they never played a major role in the games I played so it was less obvious to me.[/quote]

I believe so, it was just that there wasn't much room in the core rules for such info.

 

9 hours ago, jeffjerwin said:

Edit: the Tolkienesque elf was in the RQ1 and RQ2 rules and I think drawn by Luise Perrine.

Yeah, and I think that is a major reason why the elder races looked the way they did. It was more a case of artistic license and interpretation rather than a true representation of how such beings were supposed to look. It was probably something along the lines of getting an elf drawing for the book. Plus I doubt Greg really had how the looks locked down. He might have planned for elves to be plant people, but there are lots of ways for that to look. 

[Atgxtg]

11 hours ago, jeffjerwin said:

Edit: ... and, of course, Dragon Pass wasn't even part of Glorantha originally. It was retrofitted in when GS noticed it "filled a gap".

I wansn't aware of that.

[jajagappa]

6 hours ago, Joerg said:

Before Trollpak, there wasn't that much definition to the Gloranthan darkmen, either

IIRC Sandy Petersen, as a biologist, was the one who really transformed the trolls from a generic fantasy creature into the concept we now know as the uz in Trollpack.  What Cults of Prax did in changing the way we perceived religion and the gods in Glorantha, Trollpack did in changing the way we perceived other species.  

10 hours ago, jeffjerwin said:

Dwarves also changed in how they seemed to be portrayed, but they never played a major role in the games I played so it was less obvious to me.

You have to go to Greg's article in DW 24(?) "Why I hate the Mostali", to see the transformation of the dwarves into the caste-oriented, World Machine-dominated species they have become.

And while dragonewts were already weird in RQ1/RQ2, it was the article on them in WF14 that showed how really strange they were.

[Joerg]

10 hours ago, jeffjerwin said:

Were Trolls and Elves in Glorantha always intended to be as unique as they are? I got a sense from RQ2 (pre-Trollpak) and Wyrm's Footnotes that they were more generic fantasy creatures originally, or were seen that way; I mean the old "Dark Troll" comics, for example, and the Tolkienesque elf art - was it in the main rules? I was a player then, so I may be inferring based on what I knew then, but the full-on Plant People depiction of the elves didn't really emerge until RQ3, I think. I remember finding it surprising. Dwarves also changed in how they seemed to be portrayed, but they never played a major role in the games I played so it was less obvious to me.

I think that Troll Pak and the Different Worlds issue about the Mostali were groundbreaking in defining the otherness of the Elder Races, but the "kin of trees" concept may have been a lot older. Leaves for hair and wood for bone are from Troll Pak, but the presentation in RQ1 makes it clear that they are just one aspect of the aldryami, and offers dryads, runners and small stuff alongside. A careful rereading of Cults of Prax still enables Tolkienesque or Andersonesque elves, having any kind of nymph for a parent doesn't make you an elemental of that nymph's domain. (Achilles for instance had no notable water powers.)

 

10 hours ago, jeffjerwin said:

In any case, trolls living in woods doesn't seem odd at all to a person familiar to Northern European folklore. The inconsistency - or apparent inconsistency - was in Trollpak they were defined as truly omnivorous and hungry, which meant that forests were vast larders ready to be stripped of all fare - before Trollpak, Troll Woods and the Stinking Forest made more sense than not - trolls were imagined chiefly as monsters of the outer wilderness and underground, not as embodiments of hunger, ameliorated with intelligence.

Trolls in the woods is not a problem when trolls feed on rock or humans, but eschew feeding on trees. However, the uz like their salad with crunchy bits.

The Stinking Forest received its name because of the mess of pigs inhabiting it, even before their riders took on physical characteristics of the pigs they rode. We used to think that it was called the Tallseed before, but now the Tallseed forest marks the northernmost end of Genert's former garden before it botches its re-awakening. (My theory for that northern forest still is that they were a brown elf forest awakening in the decidedly wrong climate.)

 

10 hours ago, jeffjerwin said:

Edit: the Tolkienesque elf was in the RQ1 and RQ2 rules and I think drawn by Luise Perrine.

Not quite Tolkienesque. It is a common misconception that Tolkien's elves had pointed ears, but there is not a single mention of this in the books anywhere.  (Nor for the halflings, for that matter. The Khazad might have them as well, from what we see in Tolkien's books.) When did Santa's elves get invented, and did they have those pixie ears from the beginning?

Tolkien's elves are revealed in the Silmarillion (1977) to be something much closer to the Brithini than the Aldryami. If anything, that pixie-eared archer in the branches resembles the fairy folk in Poul Anderson's Broken Sword, the other great book on elves published in 1954.

I wonder which mythology RQ3 Vikings inherited the hollow-backed wood wife aldryami from - might be related to the leshyi. The Vikings box alfar are something quite different from the aldryami, and rarely take physical form in the middle world.

Tolkien once described his relevation of the ents stemming from a thorough disappointment at the fulfilment of the prophecy in Macbeth, and the scene in the aftermath of Helm's Deep was his way of showing up the playwright how such a thing is done properly.

[jeffjerwin]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

 

I wonder which mythology RQ3 Vikings inherited the hollow-backed wood wife aldryami from - might be related to the leshyi. The Vikings box alfar are something quite different from the aldryami, and rarely take physical form in the middle world.

 

(technically, "leaf-shaped ears" appear in Tolkien in his elves, but that's kind of obscure... see here: http://tolkien.slimy.com/essays/Ears.html. (I wrote Lindon (publication, unfortunately was cancelled because of the licensing issues...) for ICE, so, I guess I still remember some these little bits of trivia).

 

Edit: Chiefly, by "Tolkienesque" I mean tall and slender, rather than small and goblinish.

The hollow-backed Huldra-folk are part of Danish folklore.

 

Edited January 6, 2018 by jeffjerwin

[Paid a bod yn dwp]

I have to admit to being left cold by many of the attempted depictions of Aldryami  

Frouds work combines elements of intense observation of natural forms realised through his great draughtsmanship, with a subdued palette, which seems to me to be the most effective way of tapping into the aesthetic possibilities of Aldryami. Natural forms, with a earthy inspired palette. Without that keen observation of natural plant/tree forms the concept of the Aldryami falls flat. Not saying Froud is it, but he's hitting on elements that make the concept work

Edited January 6, 2018 by Paid a bod yn dwp

[Pentallion]

On 1/1/2018 at 12:54 PM, Runeblogger said:

Interesting. So the same players who first played the all elf campaign then played the all troll campaign, right? It would have been cool if the two campaigns had taken place simultaneously with different players on each side! 
Can you tell us any cool stories from the elf campaign? What was their goal? How different were the elf PCs?

No, only one player played both campaigns.  They all knew each other well and when he said the trolls would die and I agreed they passed on it.

The elves preferred to be an all elf team.  Having even a single human made life rough.  One funny thing happened.  They hid in a tree from some trolls who had been chasing them.  The trolls circled the tree.  The players wanted to know how the trolls knew they were in that tree.  I said dudes its the only tree for miles....

[Joerg]

6 hours ago, jajagappa said:

IIRC Sandy Petersen, as a biologist, was the one who really transformed the trolls from a generic fantasy creature into the concept we now know as the uz in Trollpack.  What Cults of Prax did in changing the way we perceived religion and the gods in Glorantha, Trollpack did in changing the way we perceived other species.  

While Sandy is to blame for the details of troll and elf biology in Troll Pak, the deep mythology of the trolls predates his involvement - the cult of Kyger Litor has the tragical troll history already in RQ2 (not yet in RQ1, though), and quite likely before as part of Arkat's Saga. Xem the Troll featured in Jonat's saga.

 

Troll Pak is also the first publication to give a fairly complete (if troll centered) history and pre-history of the world. With RQ2 publications being mythical artefacts where and when I started playing RQ, it was Troll Pak which made me understand how Griffin Island was ripped out of Glorantha.

 

Speaking of Griffin Mountain, that publication's coverage of mostali and aldryami is very much generic, fitting generic pastiches like Shannara (which has, to my memory, pointy-eared elves). But in all fairness, that was before DW 24, and the Greatway dwarves are renowned to be the least orthodox mostali in Glorantha. They did receive overseers from Nida to keep them in line, but enough dwarves are alive to remember the good work shifts of the Unity Council and the not so good work shifts when the EWF corrupted itself.

6 hours ago, jajagappa said:

You have to go to Greg's article in DW 24(?) "Why I hate the Mostali", to see the transformation of the dwarves into the caste-oriented, World Machine-dominated species they have become.

At least that's the first publication of that aspect of Greg's Glorantha. It may have been implicit earlier on.

The`Dwarf of Dwarf Run was published with WBRM, and his gifts were quite unlike anything done by other famous dwarves from mythology. 

Tolkien's writings had one similar case of magical technology, coming from the pits of Angband at the Fall of Gondolin. I prefer the Book of Lost Tales version over the heavily redacted Silmarillion version, it has dragon war-machines with orc marines spilling out of the big scaled mechanized creatures - a vision as weird and wonderful as the Waertagi dragonships or the Dwarf of Dwarf Run. (It is one of three epic fantasy siege descriptions which end in the fall of the fortress (unlike the siege of Minas Tirith which doesn't succeed), along with Gemmel's Legend and Feist's fall of Armengar in A Darkness at Sethanon which create my gold standard for such epics.)

6 hours ago, jajagappa said:

And while dragonewts were already weird in RQ1/RQ2, it was the article on them in WF14 that showed how really strange they were.

The EWF is mentioned in the Sartarite backstory in White Bear and Red Moon, and the dragonewt weirdness of re-hatching from the same egg over and over again stems from that game, too.

While I am confident that Greg's original notes did not have these details, it isn't quite clear whether the stories he had not published or finished did allude to such alienness. Glorantha began with a lot of syncreticism long before role-playing games and their clichéed fantasy races came to the fore, but by the time of Troll Pak I feel that it had left its Arthurian and likewise roots far behind. Not so sure about the time of publication of WBRM, but that definitely predates the effect roleplaying games had on our perception of standard fantasy.

None of my games ever featured aldryami, although I had isolated dryads. But then that was for geographical reasons mainly - eastern Kethaela and southern Sartar don't have them. My Balmyr game had dragonewts, and my Heortland campaign originating southwest of Jansholm had indirect contact with uz. One of my fanzine-published scenarios set in the neighborhood of the German RQ3 Glorantha scenarios in Malani lands has Dinacoli possessed by vengeful dragonewt dreams north of the Creek as opponents. (That one was requested as "do a scenario about dragonewt weirdness to be used with our recent publications," which I sort of delivered while keeping the game from confronting the dragonewts directly.)

I wonder a bit if the concept of elves and trolls started out a bit like the various fey folk in E.R. Eddison's "The Worm Ouroboros", where all the various fantasy-creature named fey apparently are simply somewhat alien but non-twisted variations of the human building plan (all within Star Trek rubber forehead variations). Eddison doesn't go deeply into physical differences between his folk, either, bbut clearly has psychological variations between them. And Tolkien called his Noldor elves "gnomes" or deep ones (apparently independently from what we associate with Innsmouth) - tune into the spin-off of our "they don't exist in my Glorantha" thread over on rpg net to read on the popular appeal of gnomes.

Biological otherness other than unlimited longevity and a special bond to their forest possibly wasn't much on the table. We have learned about greater mutability of troll types since, too, after the (great) illustrations of rather uniform, long snouted humans in Troll Pak led us to assume some uniformity.

I came into Glorantha only after the vegetable nature of the elves had been set in wood and meat by Troll Pak, and I never was comfortable naming them elves. My own RQ3-Viking based setting had a variety of elves and trolls based on RQ but thoroughly different from Glorantha, with their vulnerabiity to iron thoroughly grounded in their original nature as spirit-realm creatures manifesting a body in the physical world. My world's spectrum of elves ran from only semi-manifest elemental creatures of starlight, twilight or moonlight towards mound-dwelling sidhe and Midkemia-like forest dweller elves. None of these were humanoid plants, aka mini-ents. I had a place for those creatures, too, in woodlands inheriting from slavic mythology, but not as one of the great civilizations.

Coming from the generic rules of RQ3, which had yet a different description of elves as non-plant humanoids with pupil-less eyes and also stats for orcs as a twisted variation of elves in the original Tolkien sense (the probably best adaptation of Tolkien's orc origin myth in any rpg, quite ironically given the lack of use they saw), didn't help me to come to peace with the term "elves" for these plant-man bowslingers.

Reading WARP's Elfquest at the time didn't help much, either.

All of this means I was pretty much from the beginning in the man-sized ent camp of man-rune aldryami in my vision of Glorantha, embracing their difference from the elves that populated my world. While their bodies were separate plants, their self was more like a hive-entity of their aspect of forest. (That's why I don't gain much from the Id Ego Superego triad that was forwarded to explain the Elder Races.)

I still mean to ask Sandy whether the muscle cells of aldryami are supposed to have a separating layer of cellulose outside of their phospholipid membranes... not that I am in any way sure that any living body in Glorantha has cells. Galen's balance of the humors might be more correct, with each humor addressing an elemental quality.

[jeffjerwin]

I am myself quite happy that Aldryami are all wood. I do love Ents too, so their strangeness doesn't bother me. I think the association was Elves = people of the wood. And there are many connections between trees and fairies in European myth - as much as water and wells and all that.

Because of the old kinship of Ernalda and Aldrya, though, they have useful parts to play in a humanocentric campaign. But while not as weird as dragonewts or as mechanical as dwarves, they can be rather mystical and strange.

When I was young and sad and scared I used to run into the woods behind my family's house, than ran on for miles, and find my favorite trees and watch the deer move cautiously by, find the pellets of owls, and dig in the ruins of old houses consumed by the forest. Sometimes I would stay all day. Whatever part of me that was supposed to be a savannah dweller seems to have been substituted with an arboreal creature. So the idea of ents or huldra seems quite appealing...

The old enemies of elves ought to be rot, and insects, and wildfire, and most of all, men with axes and fire. Shadow is sometimes quite part and parcel of the forest.

[Mankcam]

On 1/7/2018 at 8:17 AM, Paid a bod yn dwp said:

I have to admit to being left cold by many of the attempted depictions of Aldryami  

Frouds work combines elements of intense observation of natural forms realised through his great draughtsmanship, with a subdued palette, which seems to me to be the most effective way of tapping into the aesthetic possibilities of Aldryami. Natural forms, with a earthy inspired palette. Without that keen observation of natural plant/tree forms the concept of the Aldryami falls flat. Not saying Froud is it, but he's hitting on elements that make the concept work

Yeah totally agree with this interpretation of Aldryami. It's almost still too human in a way, but the organic flavour is really there

Edited January 8, 2018 by Mankcam

[Yelm's Light]

10 hours ago, Joerg said:

Speaking of Griffin Mountain, that publication's coverage of mostali and aldryami is very much generic, fitting generic pastiches like Shannara (which has, to my memory, pointy-eared elves).

Bah.  Shannara is so plainly a ripoff of LotR that I wouldn't use it as an authority for anything.

[styopa]

Personally, I very much liked the visual representation of elves from Guild Wars 2 for aldryami in RQ: certainly vegetal, with more-or-less humaniform features (but not too much; nobody would ever mistake them for human from any angle).

What I also found tangentially interesting was own reluctance to use them...it seems odd to want to source pnp FRPG ideas from video-game material, somehow, despite video games' tenure being only slightly shorter than FRPGs themselves.  Certainly some ... cross-pollination in that direction can be viable?

[Paid a bod yn dwp]

The presentation of RQ3 Elder secrets left a lot to be desired I’m sure all agree, but one thing I remember feeling after reading about the Aldryami was that formula for the cult write up felt conceptually at odds with the nature of Aldryami. Too rigid and mechanical.Too formulaic, too mostali. 

I guess it wasn’t helped by the dry presentation and poor art direction. 

Still i’m really intrigued to see where Chaosium will take the Aldryami. They have found a good fit with the artist Andre Festov.