I'd say he's 'normally' a GG 'Orlanth' divinity, just a slightly off-beat one. Depends partly on the cultural context of the worship.
I wasn't at all sad to see this 5 runes stuff (largely) dropped from the rulebook. Most of the information in the first three runes is either blitheringly obvious, or serves no real purpose besides a mania for categorisation. But if people find it helpful, I'll be glad to be proved wrong.
Great God runes are best understood as 'initiatory path', IMO. Thus, a Heortling female Yinkini hunter, to take a completely non-hypothetical example, would normally be:
[Theism] [Storm] [Ernalda] [Yinkin]
rather than GG Orlanth, as most (male) Yinkini would be.
> Why shoudn't I let them start as devotees? I wouldn't
> for a bunch of initiated newbies
Why not, though? It'd be unusual, perhaps, but not impossible. Devotion is a matter of depth of commitment, not of skill or experience. (OK, I take your point: teenager, commitment -- have you two met? <g>)
> What is wrong with generic skills? Everytime you use them there is an
> improv penalty, and they are expensive to develop (rarely count as
> "actively used"). And my RW experience is that languages do group
> together. French and Korean is a bad example, but
> French/Spanish/Italian with improv penalities works for me.
Not really, for me. Now, I was able to use my 'extensive' knowledge of French in Veneto, I admit -- by finding someone who spoke French. You'd be hard pressed to argue that HW 'simulates' the difficulty of 'Speak Generic Romance Language'. Making it more expensive is something of a rules ad-lib, and not a very effective one, IMO. The improv. penalties may or may not hurt enough to make this non-viable. Basically, gaming groups are going to have to be self-policing about these things. As other people have observed, it _does_ make sense to allow 'unrealistically' broad abilities at a single rating, where those things aren't individually very vital, narratively speaking. That's kinda the point of the ability system, after all -- _you_ (collectively, the player and GM) decide what's 'narratively significant', rather than struggling on with a fixed set of skills and what-not that don't really fit either the character conception, or the narrative style of the game. Thus if you wanted to have 'Know every obscure fact about Pamaltela' in my Elkenval game, I'd not bat an eyelid... Though if the campaign then subsequently relocated en mass to Jolar, I might 'revisit' this. ;-)
> ObRedirect:
> Have you looked at the lists on eGroups? The GD is more for "how
> Glorantha works", and is fairly rule free. hw-rules_at_egroups.com
> (http://www.egroups.com/group/hw-rules) is for rulesy stuff like your
> post. There is also HeroWars_at_egroups.com
> (http://www.egroups.com/group/HeroWars) for using the rules in
> Glorantha. I'm not so keen on three Glorantha lists (four if you count
> the one for King of Dragon Pass), but this is how it stands right now.
Indeed. What we have here is in no way a systematised division of labour, but basically three somewhat ad hoc pieces of individuated creation, to a greater or lesser extent. Whether Issaries 'officially considers' hw-rules to be a better place to discuss HW than here, I know not. (Though I bet you money that Issaries, Inc still doesn't read any of 'em...)
Much as I hate to say a good word about Digests, as a technology, I must also note that hw-rules in particular does very much have that 'undigested list look and feel'. (i.e., 50 messages per day of messages of highly variable quality and degree of 'didn't bother reading your message, or properly editing mine'.)
I _still_ hate Digests, mind you...
Cheers,
Alex.
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