While in general I feel deep down that any change that will make Glorantha more similar to the RW is a *bad thing* and thus in principle to be resisted, Im not sure that the full implications of this particular change have been thought through.
My main objection is that knowing what we know about Gloranthan history it is logically necessary for Gloranthan societies to have very high population growth rates and whatever they may have done to game balance the wide availability of healing and fertility magic provided a clear and simple explanation for this.
According to the latest Greg Sez conditions just before the Dawn were somewhat akin to a nuclear winter with isolated bands of survivors emerging from their shelters into a ruined and devastated world. This to me implies that outside of the handful of societies which had somehow managed to escape the worst effects of the Darkness, most of Glorantha was at a neolithic level of culture and that the population who were around to greet the Dawn cannot have been that much larger than that of the RW at the end of the last Ice Age.
My State of the World Atlas tells me that the total human population at around 10000 BC was only 4 million rising slowly to around 7 million by 4000 BC or so. Given that Glorantha has probably around one-third and certainly under half of the habitable area of the RW this means that the Glorantha population at the Dawn was at best in the low millions - say 1 million or so in Genertela.
Now IIRC by 1620 according to GCotHW the population of Genertela was roughly 50 million despite there having been the following catastrophes in the interval: The Gbaji Wars, the sinking of Large parts of Sehnela, Jrustela and Slontos, the rise and fall of the Dark Empire, the MSE and EWF, the Dragonkill War, the rise of the Lunar Empire, the depredations of Sheng Seleris etc - all of which would have had major demographic consequences.
Now my maths may be at fault here, but a fifty-fold increase in population in 1620 years presumably means that on average the Genertelan population has doubled in size roughly every 33 years. Now in the RW that sort of population growth rate can only be sustained by an industrialising society undergoing the demographic transition or revolution - That is to say a society where the birth rate is several times greater than the death rate due to radical improvements in public health on the one hand and a lack of any effective medical, social or economic limitations to fertility on the other.
This is made very evident when you consider that it took the pre-industrial RW over 10,000 years to achieve a fifty-fold population increase from a neolithic starting point (10000 BC: world pop = 4 million, 500 AD: 190 million) and that over the past 500 years the RW population has *only* increased tenfold (1500: 545m; 1993: 5506m).
So what is the Genertelan growth rate and what does it equate to in the RW ? Again according to the State of the World Atlas, an annual growth rate of 3% doubles the population in 23 years, 2% in 34 years, 1% in 67 years and so on.
If my estimate of 1 million Genertelans in 1 ST is a reasonable one this therefore means that for the past 1600 years population growth must have averaged 3% p.a. - a rate attained in the RW only by developing societies in their (generally relatively short in historical terms) phase of population explosion. For example in the 1990s Pakistan has a growth rate of 3%, Malaysia 2.4% India 2.1%, Mexico 1.8%, the USA 0.9% and the UK a mere 0.3%.
Id therefore suggest that if HW is going to make magical healing relatively uncommon we need to seriously consider what this means in demographic terms and come up with alternative explanations for the high population growth rates that catastrophe-prone Gloranthan societies need.
Frex, as we already *know* that disease functions differently in Glorantha lets make Glorantha a relatively disease-free world (as numerous parts of the world were before the arrival of Europeans and their diseases) and in particular that both childbirth and the early yeara of childhood are far less risky than in the pre-industrial RW and that in general in takes the appearance a Mallia Disease Master (who are relatively rare and have a relatively short life expectancy) in an area to produce anything like a normal RW level of disease.
This means that large families are more likely to the rule than in the RW and BTW makes the very large average holding assigned by KOS to the typical Orlanthi carl (80 acres - 32 hectares for continentals) rather more reasonable with each carl having to support an extended family of say 20+ rather than just himself, his wife and a handful of children (in comparison Mommsen calculated in the nineteenth century that a northern european farmer needed 20 acres to support a family of 5 and much smaller farmsteads appear to have been (and still are) viable further south with 5 acres being a viable holding for a Roman citizen-farmer of the late Republic .
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