>Himm, I would have thought the scorpionmen would still have a
>'culture' on a par to gloranthan baboons or nomads.
Gloranthan baboons and nomads are significantly more intelligent than scorpion men, and presumably rely less on instinct and more on brainpower.
> Although chimpanzees make tools (twigs for picking grubs out of
>holes) and live in family groupings they don't actually fabricate
>even crude leather armour or manufacture shields and spears. Chimps
>so far as I know are not 2001 a space odessey material yet. \
Scorpion men are more intelligent than chimps. There is nothing really comparable on Earth, unless you count retarded humans. But that's not accurate, either -- a scorpion man will function more ably than a human with Downs Syndrome, because the former has instincts and emotions suited to his capability, while a retarded human still is "designed" for higher intelligence -- but cannot make full use of it.
Consider Homo erectus. He didn't manufacture bows or armor (that we know of), but if he lived today, I betcha a typical Homo erectus tribe would imitate nearby humans by trying to do this. If they couldn't master bowmaking on their own, they could at least see the value of it, and buy bows.
>> 4) Perhaps it takes significantly extra spirit proteins or
>> something to hatch out a being with a high POW -- most high POW
>> beings are either small and sickly like Elves (showing what they
>> paid for that high POW) or else they have an ungodly slow breeding
>> period like jack o'bears or wyrms (showing that it's hard for the
>> parent to produce a kid both strong _and_ magical).
>Good point, but if you take the case that nourishment of
>'power proteins' provides increased pow. Then races that eat a lot
>of 'powerful' sources would start to see their species pow increase?
No no no. It takes effort on the part of your body to manufacture and maintain your eyes. But eating eyeballs won't enhance your vision any. There are animals that have lost their eyes
>It's pretty remarkable that they're not more numerous
>considering their natural fighting ability and the points on rapid
>reproduction. There can't be too many crazy adventurers chasing
>after them, what keeps their numbers low? Lack of food facilitating
>egg laying?
Rapid reproduction doesn't do you any good if you're killed off as fast as you breed. Presumably every man's hand is raised against the scorpion man, which tends to keep numbers down. Also lack of food is probably a significantly factor -- they need meat to breed and lots of it, but they are not particularly well-designed as a hunting animal. (A _fighting_ animal, maybe -- but that's little good vs. a deer.)
Basically, when people or trolls or elves start fighting among each other too much, the scorpion men are able to expand their population. So watch it.
IMPORTANT SAFETY TIP: most biological cycles are naturally limiting. Rabbits breed fast, then die off. Natural processes almost always have the seeds of their end in their beginning. This does not hold true for Gloranthan chaotic life forms. Scorpion men obey ecological rules only up to a point. So far, scorpion folk have not been able to expand beyond a certain point -- they expand, ravage territory, then are attacked and knocked back down again. BUT, if they were able to expand too far, so far that they got to the point where the humans couldn't knock them back down again ... they would blanket the world -- or at least the continent (presuming they couldn't master ships). Bagog's goal to "eat the world" is no idle threat. All it takes is one scorpion village to get out of hand. Since a scorpion man population can double or triple in a single year, conditions being suitable, all Genertela could be destroyed in 13 years -- figuring 50 megaScorpionmen as "enough to destroy Genertela", and 20,000 scorpion men as sufficient to start the process -- such a number would be hard to defeat for any human nation on Earth.
>Looks like your R-type dandelion wannabes would be popping into
>human occupied areas often to find enough food to support the
>growing youngsters and to allow the queen to continue egg laying to
>replace numbers lost in action.
A result devoutly to be wished by any GM.
>Considering the scorpionmen come from one queen per village and that
>much of the genetic material (king who came from a queens egg) also
>comes from the queen isn't there going to be a tendancy for
>inbreeding to occur (explain the chaotic features). Even if eating
>other races inputs genetic material into the tribe it will only be
>found in one scorpionman if converted. Maybe a whole batch of eggs
>if it is incorporated into the genome of eggs.
Ah, but remember that not all scorpion folk live in the villages. A fair number live in those small raiding bands out in the hills. And lots of exchange of group members occurs between these bands, which when they return to the nest are going to be potential kings. ALSO, remember that scorpion men perform the Ritual of Devouring as well, which alters them mentally and spiritually and sometimes physically -- presumably altering whatever passes for scorpion man genes.
So a scorpion man's genetic material probably changes significantly during his own life, as is the queen's, and so the egglaying continues apace without fear of inbreeding.
>For a genetically heterogeneous community you need around 200
>individuals to ensure long term survival (reason why a few south
sea >islander communities died out).
This depends on the species, and the variability of the environment. The relatively benign south seas may have needed only 200 folk, but in northern Europe I bet you need more. And there are always exceptions. There are species of mice in the Orkney and Shetland islands who all evolved from (it is believed) a single mother mouse, brought in by the Vikings. They survive, but they don't have a heck of a lot of genetic variability. No doubt if mouse distemper came along, they'd all die.
>Sorry, I'm obviously not understood rituals of rebirth, yeah all the
>knowledge abilities would be there but I didn't realise that pow
>would be 'previous species values' Would then INT paticulary and
>other stats be 'retained'? Knowledge retained but behaviour changed?
> Horrible thought's of giant scorpionmen if the queen could eat that
>much.
Yes, the player's stats all stay the same, really. Just his hit locations change (and he gets 3 point armor on the lower part of his body). I don't think his SIZ increases, or his DEX, or his STR. So most scorpion-man converts tend to be smaller than the average dude. But since they're smarter and highly skilled they fit in.
A giant scorpion man vampire made its way into one of the great Solo Adventures. He wasn't really there -- but he was on one of the pages, with all his stats. If you were cheating, thumbing through the pages looking at stuff you weren't supposed to, there he was. At the end of his encounter it said something like "serves you right for cheating."
Graydon
>in the Glorantha I use, days are 30 hours long, so the year is
about >the same length (in hours) as the earthly year. (Otherwise,
>Gloranthan humans age very fast.)
Come now, humans live the same number of years as on Earth. The years are just shorter in a non-intrusive way.
The shortened human lifespan is easily explained within Gloranthan mythology, too. Note that everyone agrees they were robbed and "time was different" after the Sunstop.
Storing information in Truestone
>(mutters darkly about adamantine mortar and pestles). It wouldn't be
>written info would it? I imagine all they could do was to store
>memories and stuff like that.
Yes. Or skills. If you stored the memory of reading "King of Sartar", presumably it would overlap in utility with actual written information. Of course, you'd probably need to store the skill of Read English as well.
>> the Blue Moon cycles are _not_ random, but can be predicted as
far >>in advance as anyone cares to figger.
>This is news to me. How do they predict the cycle? And secondly I
>was complaining about the suddenness of the tides. Imagine being
>in a boat and suddenly falling 2 meters as the Blue Moon plunged
>into Hell.
They predict the cycles the same way a cunning astronomer can predict the tides on Earth, or eclipses, all that sort of stuff. Greg and I didn't go into the details, but presumably they look at where Orlanth's Ring is, and the time of year. No doubt the entire cycle repeats every 12,987 days or something and there are long turgid books of epicycles or whatever.
In my campaign I just roll 1d6+1. If the players need to know the tides several weeks in advance, I roll the 1d6+1 several times, figuring all the tides between now and then, and give them the numbers. I roll the dice quite openly.
I don't think the tides fall quite as rapidly as you've indicated. My understanding is that they take 2-7 days to rise, and then fall in a single day or part of a day. Only very rarely would the tides fall the full distance in as little as a single hour. But it _would_ happen on those rare occasions. Might even fall as fast as a single minute every century or so (probably followed by a tsunami).
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