One of the Top Ten Adventures that Changed the RPG World(?)

The virtual table top Quest Portal has just released on their website the ten most influential and game changing adventures in the history of TTRPG, and Six Seasons in Sartar made the list!

It sits alongside undisputed classics like Masks of Nyarlathotep, The Great Pendragon Campaign, Ravenloft, and one of my personal favorites, The Dracula Dossier.

My thanks to Quest Portal for thinking I made the cut. A tremendous honor to be included in such august company. 

Follow the link here.

 

 

The Sutra of Pale Leaves: Carcosa Manifest, Available at Gen Con in limited pre-release!

While I will not physically be at Gen Con, I will be there in sinister, psychedelic spirit. "Wonderland," which premiered in Nagoya, Japan just two weeks ago, will be available in The Sutra of Pale Leaves: Carcosa Manifest, in a limited Gen Con pre-release!

When a horrific and inexplicable act of self violence happens at a Tokyo high school, your Investigators fall down a rabbit hole where nothing makes sense and nothing and no one are what they seem. Play the Pale Prince's game... 

“93. In the Garden of Wonders, the Chosen Disciples remove the masks forced upon them in the womb. 94. There, in beds of black henbane and laughing mushroom, fevered reason lies dead and Self becomes a riddle that only silence can answer. 95. There the Chosen abandon themselves to the Court of the Pale Prince, laughing as they dance the Riddle of the Leaves. 96. These are those who know that the Court is the Garden, that the Garden is the Chosen, and that the Chosen are the Prince. 97. And in their dancing, only the Prince is there, dancing for the empty hall.”

—Sutra of Pale Leaves, 93–97

KaijuCon 2025, Nagoya Japan

 Signed copies of The Sutra of Pale Leaves today, including the second volume which has not been released yet but includes my first official Call of Cthulhu scenario, “Wonderland.” Then I ran a three hour session of Six Seasons in Sartar and a debut three-hour “Wonderland” session. 

Through the Looking Glass: "Wonderland" and The Sutra of Pale Leaves

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, and the ones that Mother gives you, don’t do anything at all…

My grandmother passed away just months before my birth.

Had I been female, I would have been named for her. But, born with a penis, I was an Andrew instead. 

I was almost an Alice.

No wonder Wonderland was always waiting for me.

And if you go, chasing rabbits, and you know you’re going to fall… 

Perhaps the best place to start is to remind ourselves that Hastur, Hali, Carcosa, and the King in Yellow were not created as part of the Cthulhu Mythos. 

They predated it.

All but the “King in Yellow” and the “Yellow Sign” first appear in the work of Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), whose “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” was published in 1886. Eerie, dream-like, and haunting, the protagonist of the tale wakes from a fever (we will be getting back to that) to find himself in an unfamiliar countryside. Meditating on the philosopher Hali, he thinks about the nature of death as he follows an ancient road to see where it leads. The land around him is littered with tombs and tombstones. When he arrives at last at the ruined city of Carcosa, he recalls that he was once a citizen there, and realizes that he is himself long dead.

But if Bierce would go on to be remembered for other things—“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” is one of the pre-eminent works of American literature, and The Devil’s Dictionary is a piece of satire that favorably compares with Voltaire—he was also Patient Zero of a virulent form of fever. 

Fevers are fascinating things. Frequently they spread, passed on from victim to victim. The skin is cold and clammy, there are chills, restlessness, edginess. In some cases hallucinations. We say that artists in the zone work “feverishly.” Lovers are called “feverish.” Intoxicated people resemble the fevered. And so do all those who have seen the Yellow Sign.

Only four of the nine short stories comprising Robert W. Chambers' (1865-1933) 1895 collection, The King in Yellow, can actually be categorized as horror or weird fiction, but those that are make an indelible mark on the genre. Here the Hastur we know really begins. Bierce was Patient Zero, but the virus he passed on to Chambers mutated. The stories in The King in Yellow are linked by three internal elements: an obscure book and play also called The King in Yellow that infects readers with a slowly growing madness, a symbol or sigil called the Yellow Sign that has much the same effect as the play, and the King in Yellow himself (aka the King in the Pallid Mask), a terrifying entity who seems to be both the essence and the manifestation of the book and the Sign. Masked (or IS he?), he recalls the Plague Doctors of 17th century Europe.

The Bierce connection comes in the borrowing of Hali, Carcosa, and Hastur. Chambers uses these as set pieces in little snippets of the play, The King in Yellow. Carcosa, on the shores of Lake Hali, is no longer on Earth but on a world with twin suns and black stars in or near the Hyades. Hastur is no longer a pastoral shepherd god but something decidedly more sinister. We don’t properly get much of the play, but what we do see recalls both Poe’s “The Masque of the Read Death” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” with an ancient royal dynasty seemingly meeting its fate at a masquerade.

H.P. Lovecraft read Chambers in 1927, caught the same virus, and named dropped The King and Yellow and Hastur in 1931’s “The Whisperer in the Darkness,” along with the Lake of Hali and the Yellow Sign. Lovecraft never actually wrote about Hastur and company, that was for disciples like August Derleth and Lin Carter to do, but he passed the fever on and made it part of the Mythos.

The fever we would seem to be tracing here then is kind of a viral meme, a set of names and concepts spread by language from one mind to the next. Its vectors—the living organisms that pass a virus along—were Bierce, Chambers, Lovecraft, Derleth, Carter, Blish, and many many others. Now you can add my name, and the names of all the authors of The Sutra of Pale Leaves (Damon Lang, Jason Sheets, and Yukihiro Terada), to the list of culprits as well.

When the men on the chessboard get up at tell you where to go... 

The Sutra of the Pale Leaves, the latest campaign to be released for Chaosium’s legendary game of cosmic horror, Call of Cthulhu, is a new take on Hastur and the Yellow Sign, at least so far as Call of Cthulhu is concerned. The King in Yellow has been part of the game since its initial publication in 1981, just about a century after the meme first appeared. Call of Cthulhu has tackled Hastur in campaigns like Tatters of the King and Ripples from Carcosa, but in a fairly traditional manner. Encountering him, reading The King in Yellow, and seeing the Yellow Sign are all accompanied by the game’s signature mechanic, SAN loss. The implication of this is that encountering Hastur is like encountering any other element of the Mythos, the human mind is damaged by learning too much about the true nature of the cosmos.   

But Hastur doesn’t quite work like that. At least not in Chambers. The King in Yellow infects. It gets under your skin. Reading the Necronomicon destroys the mind through revelation, but the dreaded tome is indifferent to you reading it. The King in Yellow by contrast wants to be read. It is inviting you to the dance. Reading The King in Yellow starts out as a fairly pleasant experience, innocent, lyrical. Only in the second act does the hammer come down, and by then it is too late. The play has you, like a drug trip that starts out fine but then goes very wrong, or Bierce’s protagonist who only realizes after that he is already dead. The play is sugar-coated. A razor blade hidden in a mound of cotton candy. It is a very different kind of evil.

A few years ago I was approached about The Sutra of Pale Leaves to see if I wanted to contribute to it. I was intrigued because it was a campaign set here in Japan, and even better, set during the “Bubble Era” of the late 1980s. Japan--where I have made my home nearly a quarter century now--had one hell of a fever about a decade before I arrived. Between 1986 and 1991, the Japanese economy soared higher and faster than even the most severe febrility. If you were anywhere on the planet back then, Japan was the new buzzword. When I was a child, Japan was known mainly for cheap but reliable cars, cheap but reliable radios, and the plastic and rubber toys in our closets. By the time I was an adolescent, however, Japan seemed poised to inherit the world. The science fiction of the period--like Gibson's classic Neuromancer or in films like Blade Runner--depicted a distinctly Japanese future. Japanese anime was winning global fans, their video games were dominating the market, and they were terrifying American conservatives by buying up American landmarks. And all of this was nothing compared to what was actually going on back in the nation of Japan itself.

A deeply conservative culture, where restraint, frugality, and modesty are defining aspects, the Bubble (as this period came to be known) changed everything. Having leapt into position as the second largest economy on the planet, and with a super-charged yen, disposable income was plentiful and consumerism and materialism were rampant. The young began to flock to urban meccas like Tokyo for the excitement, the opportunities, and the nightlife, a trend that even today leaves rural Japan filled with ghost towns. It was the rage to carry and clothe yourself in expensive Western brands, to flaunt your wealth and status. Alcohol overuse and experimentation with drugs (unusual for this no tolerance nation) boomed. Sexual experimentation, taboo-breaking, and youth culture upended a society built on seniority first. The music, the entertainment, the clubs all became edgier and pushed the limits. In the Bubble, Japan was having a party, and it was a wild one.

It was the perfect setting for the King in Yellow to make an entrance.

Aside from the lure of the setting, the indie game studio behind the Sutra, Sons of the Singularity, was based here in Japan and already had a reputation for doing products that “got Asia right” (something we have not always seen from Call of Cthulhu products). There is a tendency to fetishize Japan, and while the Japanese do not get bent out of shape about it (they found all of the Yakuza running around with samurai swords in Kill Bill just as amusing as the rest of us), a great many Western-written game books get lost in the weeds of ninjas, geishas, and katanas. I knew from their previous work the Sons were not going to fall into that trap.

But what really got me hooked on the idea was the approach they were taking to the King in Yellow. 

Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know…

The Sutra of Pale Leaves is about an Eastern manifestation of the King in Yellow, the Pale Prince, and instead of a play the Prince is associated with a scripture known as the Sutra of Pale Leaves. The work originated in India and migrated east, first into China and later Japan. Unlike most Mythos tomes, the Sutra does not drive people mad by revealing incomprehensible cosmic truths. Instead, it is a virus. Rooted in the Japanese concept of kotodama, the idea that words possess their own living spirit and can possess the mind or alter reality, the Sutra is itself the principle antagonist of the campaign. Without giving the game away, The Sutra of Pale Leaves doesn’t blast SAN. Instead repeated exposure to it gives you a new statistic that increases with continued exposure. The Sutra gets inside you and grows.

This was far closer to my conception of Hastur and the King in Yellow than I had previously seen in Call of Cthulhu. Kenneth Hite had previously referred to the Mythos as mental plutonium, with exposure wasting and sickening the mind. The Sutra, however, was malware. I was on board right away.  

And I knew exactly what I was going to write.

When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead…

As the name “Wonderland” suggests I am brought Lewis Carroll into the mix.

Every since I was a child, the Alice stories have creeped me the fuck out. Somehow I inherited an old volume collecting both Alice stories, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, with all of the original illustrations. Pure. Nightmare. Fuel. If at the pallid heart of Chambers’ stories is a book that haunts people, that one certainly haunted me. And I was Mark Petrie, the weird little kid into horror. Still, Alice made my skin crawl.

I am hardly a pioneer in this territory. While Disney did its best to Technicolor the stories up, there were still a lot of people sensing an undercurrent of darkness there. American McGee released his dark Alice video game in 2000, following it up with Alice: Madness Returns a decade later. The immense popularity of these games spoke to the fact that many people knew there was some really dark $h!t hiding in those stories. L.L. McKinney’s A Blade So Black (2018) continued the plunge, ground-breaking in reimagining Alice as urban fantasy and a presenting a very nightmarish Wonderland. A certain game designer, He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named-Because-He-Was-Very-Canceled-And-I-Do-Not-Want-The-Headache-of-Putting-Up-With-the-Potential-Comments-His-Name-Might-Invoke, gave us a Wonderland ruled by vampires in A Red & Pleasant Land for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. It had, incidentally, the best in-game punishment (I mean “explantation”) for where characters go when their players don’t show up that session. We could go on. There is a lot of dark Alice out there, including The Matrix and Tim Burton’s treatment. But my “hook” for the scenario was a song. Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 “White Rabbit.” 

“White Rabbit” strikes me as the intersection between the King in Yellow and Alice. The song is, obviously, about psychedelics, and that it slid under the radar of the censors in the late 60s boggles the mind. Now there are accusations that Carroll was knowingly writing about drugs, but I have never particularly subscribed to them. In an era when opium was bought over the counter, people were drinking wormwood, and cocaine was in Coca Cola, drugs were thought about differently. But Jefferson Airplane’s song paints Alice as a kind of spirit guide into the psychedelic (go ask Alice, I think she’ll know). She knows that you can ingest things to become bigger or smaller. She’s chatted with hookah-smoking caterpillars and fallen down rabbit holes. The men on the chessboard got up and told her where to go, etc. She is being painted almost as a Decadent, a late 19th century artistic and philosophical movement embracing hedonism, breaking taboos, and fantasy over logic. They liked their laudanum. They liked their absinthe. They liked their opium. They liked anything that expanded their consciousness. Chambers made many characters in the Hastur stories Decadents, or members of the demimonde, the shadowy half-world on the liminal periphery of polite society. The King in Yellow is simply another drug they are ingesting. Subsequent writers would continue the theme. You come to The King in Yellow when you want logic and proportion to fall “sloppy dead.” Not just “dead,” folks. Sloppy dead. That’s a wet, messy death.

And bringing “Wonderland” to Japan is not as odd as it might seem.

There are, currently, five Alice in Wonderland themed bars, cafes, or clubs active in Tokyo. In the “Lolita” (ロリータ) subculture of Japan, where young girls wear Victorian or Rococo fashions, Alice is her own division of that subculture. It is not terribly uncommon to spot girls in blond wigs and powder blue Alice dress. Carroll’s work first hit these shores in 1899, with Through the Looking Glass appearing first as “Mirror World.” But Japan embraced Alice early. The stories have never been out of print here, and there have been numerous anime and manga adaptations or references. Netflix’s recent Alice in Borderland is just one of the latest. 

“Wonderland,” then, was my ode to the song, to Carroll, to Alice haunting the fringes of subculture, and especially to Chambers. Appearing in the second volume, Carcosa Manifest (the first volume of the Sutra, Twin Suns Rising, is already out), “Wonderland” is about an attempt to make the Sutra of Pale Leaves go viral in ways only modern memes can, taking advantage of a new technology emerging during that period. It is about another kind of Decadent, or resident of the demimonde, that was also emerging in Bubble Era Japan, the otaku or “geek.” These were Japanese who retreated into their own realms of fantasy, namely anime, manga, models, and games. It is also a sly nod at another brand of insanity that was spreading in Bubble Era Japan, a hobby that would eventually come to be known as table top roleplay playing games, shared hallucinations that some of us are addicted to.

Feed your head. 

Feed your head.

Dungeons & Heroquests

RuneQuest is not the only game I play, despite all the time I have spent writing about it and for it. Call of Cthulhu has always been a favorite of mine, and I have a scenario for it in the upcoming campaign, The Sutra of the Pale Leaves. I've written here, here, and here about my love for Nephilim, and here about Pendragon. And those are just the Chaosium games. I've blogged about my campaigns for Numenera and The Dracula Dossier, and reviewed tons of other games, including Vampire, Old Gods of Appalachia, Spire, Kult Divinity Lost, Vurt, Nobilis, and so on. RuneQuest and I have just been a bit stapled together since Six Seasons in Sartar appeared, and I am good with that.

Like so many Gen X brats, I actually started playing RPGs with Dungeons & Dragons. I was in the 5th grade and drafted into my public school's GATE program, mainly because I was that mutant species of weird kid who spent all his time alone writing stories. The school psychologist, who ran the program, had read in a journal about a professor of neurology who had just revised and written a new edition of D&D, John Eric Holmes. Holmes asserted that the game taught communicative and critical thinking skills, and was a way for pre-adolescents to exercise social, math, and creative abilities. So she bought a set, and assigned me the task of reading it and being the Dungeon Master for the other kids in the program. Ironically, the same school district that introduced me to RPGs would ban them just a few years later as the political winds shifted and the Satanic Panic reared its shaggy head.

I ran D&D throughout the 5th and 6th grades, expanding into the Moldvay and Cook Basic and Expert sets, and then the eldritch dweomercraft of the High Gygaxian AD&D trilogy. It wasn't until I arrived in junior high school, and joined the "D&D club," that I was informed they were playing something called RuneQuest. That was the end of D&D for me. Sort of. I would later run a little of 2nd edition AD&D, and the same copy of the Rules Cycopedia that I bought in the college book store in 1991 still sits on my shelf now. But RuneQuest, Chaosium's other titles, and an ever-expanding circle of RPGs kept me occupied for decades.

When I did peek in on post-2000 D&D it was a game I no longer recognized. I am not saying it was bad or that earlier editions were better--I don't really have a dog in that fight--but the game increasingly had more to do with Star Wars, video games, Japanese anime, and the MCU than it did with the survival horror, Conan/Elric/Fafhrd-inspired sword and sorcery game I used to run. I was, however, intrigued by the rise of the retro-clones, games like OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, and Swords and Wizardry, which attempted to keep older editions of the game alive. As this bloomed into the OSR (another rabbit hole I don't want to meander down here), with games like Lamentations of the Flame Princess, MÖRK BORG, and ShadowDark, I found myself playing them, revisiting dungeons once again (more on the OSR and these games here).

I say all this because in my recent running of dungeon crawls once more, alongside my continuing RuneQuest campaigns, I have noticed something I hadn't noticed before. 

Dungeon crawls are heroquests, and heroquests are dungeon crawls.

Let Me Explain

Right now you are probably asking "what the deuce are you on about, Montgomery?" I'd wager the wording is a bit different, unless you actually are a 19th century upper class Brit, but that general sort of question.

As per Cults of RuneQuest, Mythology, a heroquest is "a direct interaction by mortals with the divine realm of myth and archetypes...participants enter the realm of legend and myth to interact with heroes and gods, gambling precious life force to gain miraculous powers and bring back magic" (p. 14). In other words, adventurers leave behind the world they know, enter a shadowy otherworld known only through stories and legends, to risk their lives and bring back wondrous treasures.

Sounds suspiciously like a dungeon crawl to me.

"The Shadowdark," Kelsey Dionne tells us, "is any place where danger and darkness hold sway. It clutches ancient secrets and dusty treasures...daring fortune seekers to tempt their fates...if you survive, you'll bring back untold riches plucked from the jaws of death itself" (ShadowDark, p. 7). In other words adventurers follow stories and legend into the unknown, into a lost world strange and dangerous, where they are tested. If they survive, they bring back wonders. If there is any real distinction between that a heroquest, it is one of degree and not of kind.

The line gets even blurrier when you stop and consider what a fantasy RPG dungeon is... it's the underworld, one of the oldest archetypes of the Other Side there is. Journeys by heroes into the underworld are so common we have a name for them, "katabasis." In classical mythology, the ability to enter the underworld and return is the very definition of a hero. Aeneas enters the underworld seeking knowledge of the future. Ovid describes Juno descending into underworld, reminding us of Inanna/Ishtar doing the same. Ovid also famously describes Orpheus entering the underworld to try and bring back his dead wife Eurydice, as did Indra to bring back the Dawn (also the goal of Orlanth and the Lightbringers). Heracles enters the underworld as his 12th labor, Pwyll entered in Welsh mythology, and so on. We can argue that the Shadowdark (my new favorite term for the fantasy dungeon) is not literally the world of the dead, but it is a lightless realm where death waits. Even the grandfather of all RPG megadungeons, Tolkien's mines of Moria, blur the line between mundane and myth. In those lost halls the fellowship encounters the Balrog, "a demon of the ancient world," a mythic divine being, and against it Gandalf falls only to return from the dead, much as Jesus did after his descent into hell.

Again, differences of degree, not of kind.

Old Tools, New Uses

As I started replaying old school dungeon crawls alongside RQ, it started to change the way I ran and constructed heroquests. In both Six Seasons in Sartar and The Company of the Dragon, I presented rules for heroquesting. But by the time I wrote a full heroquest chapter for The Seven Tailed Wolf, something had changed.

I had added a map.

I had gotten into the habit by then of making maps for my OSR games, something I have always found immensely stimulating to do. And doing this drives home the difference between a dungeon crawl and a story-oriented game. The latter is a linear thing, in which scene 1 is followed by scene 2, then scene 3, and so on. The characters are simply moved down the line through each. The pejorative term is "railroading." But in the former, each room of the dungeon is, in fact, a "scene." It has a setting, it has characters (NPCs and monsters), it has challenges and stakes. The crucial difference is that it isn't linear. Whether you turn right or left decides whether you walk into the goblin lair or down the hall with the pit trap. Both are scenes, but this time the adventurers have to make a choice and those choices have genuine consequences. Pick the southern passage and you stumble right into the lost shrine of the relic you were seeking. Just fight the final boss and it's yours. Go north or west, however, and you encounter a half a dozen other scenes, wearing you down, making the final boss encounter--if you even live to arrive at it--all the harder.

In The Seven Tailed Wolf I introduce the myth of the founding of the Haraborn vale. The Black Stag arrives at this mountain valley and falls in love with Running Doe. He proposes marriage, but she refused. The valley is the hunting ground of the Seven Tailed Wolf, and she will not marry and have children just for the Wolf to eat them. So the Stag vows to drive the Wolf off, and along the way (just as Dorothy Gale and Momotaro did) he meets others to aid him in his final battle.

This could be run as a story. Scene One, the characters meet Running Doe and vow to fight the Wolf off. Scene Two, they meet the Weaving Sister, and need to recruit her. Scene Three they meet the Night-Winged Bird. Scene Four, the strange hairless beast that walks upright. Scene Five they encounter the Hissing Wyrm, and so on.

Yet it is all much more interesting if you throw away the linear script, and spread the scenes out like rooms in a dungeon. After they make their vow to Running Deer, what next? Do they seek out the hole where the Weaving Sister lives? Do they scale the high cliffs to find the Night-Winged Bird? Do they follow the stream to the Field-Not-Yet-A-Hill? Or do they simply go straight to meet the Wolf head on, not bothering with allies? They have options now, and they have agency. Their choices shape the narrative.

And that is all fairly simple. Old school games had tons of dungeon building tools that can make heroquests more interesting. 

For example, think about the "secret door." The Weaving Sister lives in the Riddle, a sacred Earth temple which earlier in The Seven Tailed Wolf we learn was the place where Ernalda would come to speak with her aunt, Ty Kora Tek. Here they would talk and sing songs to each other, Ernalda just outside the Riddle, Ty Kora Tek just within. Imagine setting up this up as a hidden scene. When encountering the Weaving Sister, if one of them sings into the Riddle into opens a new path into the Ernalda/Ty Kora Tek myth. There they can meet Ernalda and perhaps get additional magic to fight the Wolf... but only if they answer Ty Kora Tek's riddles first. It is a separate myth, and has nothing to do with the Seven Tailed Wolf myth, but the Riddle links both. Maybe the adventurers never think to try singing into the Riddle and never find the other myth. That is fine too. It's a secret door.

Another interesting notion is the "wandering monster." When traveling from one scene to the next, they might encounter beings that have nothing to do with the myth they are exploring. Maybe they find a party of other heroquesters, and now either have to ally with them or compete. Maybe they come across beings from other stories, Broo from the Devil's legion, the dead who are wandering lost an aimless, etc. Setting up a random encounters table appropriate to the Age the adventurers are exploring is a fun way to liven up the game.

Finally, don't be squeamish about letting them get lost. The adventurers find a path up the mountain side, but it forks. Go right, and they eventually come to the Night-Winged Bird and are on the right track. Go left and they arrive at the Dragonewt nest of High Wyrm, and enter a draconic myth. Getting lost was a big part of old school dungeon crawls.

Mythology is a terrific resource for all of this, especially the Mythic Maps. Imagine the adventurers are in the Golden Age, pp. 86-90. They are seeking Aldrya's Tree. While crossing the Yellow Forest their choices might take them to Oslira who has already been tamed and redeemed, or face-to-snout with Sshorg the Blue River, itching for a fight. These are neighboring locations on the map, and two very different scenes. 

So the next time you are running a heroquest, trying drawing an old school map of it first. Be devious. Give it lots of choices and directions, dead ends and wrong turns. Detail each scene like you would stock the room of a dungeon, then let the dice roll and the games begin. 

WANDERERS IN THE WASTES: The Nomads of Glorantha

THE FINAL RIDDLE is out at long last, and while it is mainly concerned with Illumination, Chaos, and the Wastes themselves, by necessity it also reveals many of my thoughts on the Wastes' famed inhabitants, the Animal Nomads.

Perhaps second only to the infamous and iconic Ducks, the Animal Nomads seem to be the thing that non-RuneQuest gamers know about Glorantha. "Wait, is that the game where people ride zebras and bison and stuff?" Why yes, it is. These are, as the name implies, nomadic peoples who ride and herd an exotic range of non-bovine and non-equine beasts. The largest tribes are the Impala, Bison, Sable, and High Llama riders, as well as a non-human species the Morokanth that herds humans (more on that later).  There are smaller tribes where the mounts get even more exotic, such as rhinos, ostriches and lizards. These Animal Nomads predate RuneQuest: they are mentioned in 1975's White Bear and Red Moon and take center stage in 1977's Nomad Gods, and it is that latter board game that most shapes my ideas about them. There is a reductionist tendency to try and associate RuneQuest's cultures with terrestrial ones, which I see as a mistake. Nomad Gods makes this particularly hard to do. 

You see, here on the orb we call Earth, the concept of "nomad" is primarily defined by the idea of "pasture." Most definitions define "nomad" as "a member of a people with no permanent home that travels from place to place seeking fresh pastures for its herds." The English word itself comes from the Greek nomos, or "pasture." This is accurate for the nomads we know, who tend to exist in regions where there is a scarcity of resources, such as tundra, plains, or deserts. But on the lozenge we call Glorantha, the Animal Nomads are defined by a very different geography indeed... the Wastes.

Ancient civilizations once thrived here but were buried forever under divine barbarism... The God's War left much of the world a ruin, but the Plaines of Prax were the worst struck and the slowest to recover. There the dirt you walk upon is hostile to the men who once plundered it... (a)ncient spirits and deposed gods roam over the ruin of their extinguished civilization...

Nomad Gods, p. 1

Yes, the Animal Nomads have herds that they need to pasture. But these are not the ancient Hebrews, the Plains Indians, the Mongols, the Sami, or the Bedouins. These are the roaming, scavenging gangs of Mad Max. Their home is a post-apocalyptic hellscape, a region blasted and bent by Chaos. The Eternal Battle--a gaping hole into God Time in which the gods struggle eternally against the Devil--drifts around here like a sandstorm. Parts of the Devil still slither around. Reality, in the Wastes, is broken. The Animal Nomads hunt and gather, not only food and water but ancient magics and relics of lost civilizations. I have often thought that the defining ethos of the Nomads is right there in Greg Stafford's dedication:

This game is dedicated to my brothers and sisters, of blood and spirit, who have trod upon the Experience of Ruin and striven to pass beyond frailties into the magics of the Other Side.

Nomad Gods

What Greg chose to capitalize is telling: the Experience of Ruin and the Other Side. In working on The Final Riddle the last few years, I have put together notes and started toying with the idea of a sort of Six Seasons in Sartar set in the Wastes, coming of age amongst the Animal Nomads. In trying to get into the psychology of these people then, I keep circling back to those two phrases. If I had to put it into a sentence it right now it might be "This world is a cursed ruin, to survive it, look to the spirit world." Magic--not the "sophisticated spells available to more cultured magicians" but the "crude and brutal" summoning of various spirits--is a resource as important to these peoples as fuel is in Mad Max and water on Arrakis. Probably more than any other RuneQuest campaign, I think a Nomad campaign should include scavenging ruins for precious resources (mundane and magical), the constant presence of spirits, and the endless threat of Chaos.

Not that herding and raiding is not a feature of Nomad existence, we know that it is. Two of the primary deities or Great Spirits worshipped among the Nomads are Eiritha and Waha, the former being the goddess of herd beasts and the latter being the founder of Nomad society. The story goes that originally two-legged and four-legged animals lived alongside one another more or less equitably, but when the Devil blasted the land it became clear sacrifices needed to be made. Waha--Eiritha's son--essentially brokered the new order of things. Both sides drew lots to see who would become property of the other. In most cases the animals got the raw end of the deal. They would give their milk, hides, meat, and bones to the humans, and serve as their mounts. In return the animals would receive protection from Chaos (Waha's father, the Chaos-hating Storm Bull, had died killing the Devil and was no longer around to protect them). Among the tapir-like Morokanth, however, they won the gamble, and humans became their herd beast. These herd men lacked, or perhaps lost, sentience. Waha taught the "winners" how to care for and butcher their herds and organized Nomad society around the practice. Raiding other tribes for their herds was a part of that society--it is always better to eat someone else's cattle than your own--but the Wastes are a Very Big Place.  Unlike the Orlanthi, who live alongside other clans, outside of Prax the Animal Nomads frequently wander alone. When the opportunity to raid presents itself, that is one thing, but deep in the Wastes there are other concerns.

Two other Great Spirits of the Nomads indicate what those concerns are. The Storm Bull or "Desert Wind" exists for one reason and one reason only: the destruction of Chaos, and his cult is widespread among the Nomads for obvious reasons. Daka Fal, often regarded outside of the Wastes solely as Judge of the Dead, is also the patron of shamans and the one who taught the Nomads how to deal with the spirit world. With the exception of powerful gods like Storm Bull and Eiritha, the Nomads tend to have shamans rather than priests, as they live in a place where all the gods are dead, while countless ghosts and lost spirits roam the land. Daka Fal's Runes are Spirit and Man--not Death--and he is in fact one of the owners of the Spirit Rune. Among the Animal Nomads I tend to think the line between Daka Fal and Horned Man (who is also a co-owner of the Spirit Rune) is blurred, and I often have the Animal Nomads depict Daka Fal with horns. They live in a place where "dead" has a much wider meaning than just human death. In the Wastes it is almost universally applicable.

Were I running a campaign centered primarily in Prax--a comparatively small and crowded piece of real estate--I would probably focus more on herding and raiding. And to be fair, this is how most of us encounter the Nomads, in Prax. But in a Wastes campaign I would run it more like Battlestar Galactica, a long trek across empty spaces, constantly on the look out for supplies, under fire from hostile enemies. Just with more spirits and fewer Cylons.   

 

THE SACRED TIME, An Episode

Every year, in the final weeks of Storm Season, the tension grows. The violence of the weather intensifies. Days range from sudden thunderstorms and gales to fist-sized hail stones, flash floods, and the occasional cyclone. Even earthquakes are more frequent. Then, as Sacred Time dawns, a stillness falls over it all. A silence. And in that silence, there is an intensity. Every adult Sartarite knows the danger. They know the sudden stillness does not mean peace or salvation from the violent weather, but rather the triumph of entropy. The silence that comes at Sacred Time is the silence of the Void, the silence of Death. At the end of the year the cosmos itself ends, and it is up to the gods to make it anew. 

Mortals must help them. The two weeks of Sacred Time bear the names Luck and Fate, because it will take both for the new year to dawn.

The Seven Tailed Wolf, p. 18

In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin for "threshold") denotes the middle stage of a rite of passage. In a liminal stage, you are no longer what you were, but not yet what you will become. This lack of definition is ritually disorienting and  dangerous. Order has been suspended and you are in a chaotic state. In coming of age and initiation ceremonies, this is where the candidates face trials and ordeals, often with a serious chance of harm or failure. In folklore this is when the infant--born but not yet baptized--is at the greatest danger of being snatched by fairies, and it is at liminal times (midnight) and places (at the crossroads) that the Devil appears.

Liminality manifests in Glorantha in all sorts of ways. Cults have their initiation rites, shamans confront the Bad Man, the Orlanthi perform the Summons of Evil in their worship rites. They, like us, have their rites of passage: birth, adolescence, marriage, death. Yet these experiences are personal or local rather than collective and universal. The single greatest example of liminality in Glorantha, when the entire cosmos enters the liminal state, is the Sacred Time. 

Sacred Time is a two-week period when normal activity halts, and the world ritually and really re-enacts the death and rebirth of the cosmos to replenish the world, for incorporating the entropy of Chaos into the world is part of the Great Compromise. To live, one must descend into death and be reborn. The participation of all beings in these annual ceremonies and their commitment to them integrates the participants with unconscious understanding of the cosmic balance—a major factor in the high level of magic generation and use in Glorantha.

RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha, p. 420

Time and Sacred Time

One of my favorite things about Glorantha is the calendar.

There are several out there--the Brithini, Lunars, Dara Happans, Kralorelans, and Pamaltelans all have theirs--but I refer specifically to the Theyalan calendar spread by the Lightbringers with the Dawn.

While many players and GMs don't give it much thought, it is very clear that Greg Stafford did. It is, first and foremost, a timekeeping device, and I invite you to think about that word a little differently. We use it to mean something that lets us know what time it is. But in Glorantha, the only thing holding the world together, the only thing keeping the Devil out, is Time. Keeping Time takes on a whole new meaning. The world had died. Chaos had conquered it. But the Great Compromise bound the cosmos and themselves in the Web of Time. The calendar tells you that story.

The week. Look closely at any given week. 

  

What you see here is a microcosm of the Gods Age. Darkness emerges from Chaos (Freezeday), then come the Waters. Gata the Primal Earth emerges from these. Waterday and Clayday. Now as we know, Fire/Sky came next, but when Umath was born the Primal Air ripped Earth and Sky apart to make a place for himself, thus the week has Windsday between Clayday and Fireday. But look what happens next...

Wildday is marked by the Luck Rune. No right-thinking Orlanthi is going to mark something with the Chaos Rune. But this is the day of the full moon in Dragon Pass, and the day when the powers of Chaos are strongest, and it falls after Fireday. Luck, like Chaos, suggests randomness. It falls here because Chaos entered the world after Orlanth slew the Sun. 

The final day, Godsday, embodies the Great Compromise that held Chaos at bay. It is marked by the Fate Rune, largely thought to be the Web of Arachne Solara, the Web of Time.

Each week then is a talisman, a ritual ordering of Time that repeats the story of the Gods Age and the salvation from Chaos.

The year. The five seasons of the Glorantha year tell the exact same story, just a tad differently because it focus on the Ages of the God Time rather than the emergence of the Runes. Sea Season is the Green Age, the birth and youth of the world. Fire Season and Earth Season are the Golden Age, their reign of the Solar Emperor. But his murder brings the Lesser and Greater Darknesses, Dark Season and Storm Season respectively. The destruction of the world. 

We are being told a story here. The same story. The only story that matters.

Sacred Time. The five seasons each have eight weeks marked by members of the Celestial Court. This gives the Gloranthan Year 280 days. 

I do not think that is a mistake. 280 days is the average gestation of a human being, and at the end of the Gloranthan year we witness a birth, or rebirth. The birth of Time. This occurs--hopefully--during the two-week period known as Sacred Time.

Sacred Time does not belong to one year or the next. It is outside of them, outside of Time, a cosmic and universal liminality. The previous year has died, and the world with it. The next year is not coming...it needs to be brought. Shoulder to shoulder you stand with the gods performing the rites that will ensnare Chaos and lead the world back to the light.

The two weeks of Sacred Time are unique. While all seasons have weeks marked by the same Runes, only Sacred Time has Luck Week and Fate Week. Thus the end of a year and the beginning of the next is marked by the same Runes that mark the end of the week and the start of the next. Again. We are being told a story. Luck and Fate. In Sacred Time, the Devil must be bound.

Just a quick word on "Sacred Time"

In our world, the term "Sacred Time" was coined by Romanian philosopher and historian Mircea Eliade. Building on the work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim, Eliade proposed that "traditional man" (i.e. humanity prior to the Enlightenment period and industrialization) recognized two levels of existence...the Sacred and the Profane. The Sacred was the realm of gods, myths, and heroes. It existed outside of time and was eternal. Sacred Time was the essential, the hub around which the cosmos turned. The Profane was the mundane, everyday world, the world of history and time. Through rites and rituals, through hearing myths, traditional man could "return" to the Sacred Time, and experience timeless, universal truths first hand. In other words, in Glorantha Eliade's "Sacred Time" is in fact the "Gods Age." 

It is probably not coincidence or error that Greg Stafford borrowed the term to apply to the two weeks between Gloranthan years, however. Gloranthan Sacred Time exists, just like the God's Age, outside of time. Here the Web of Time unravels, here the veil between worlds is thin. This is why so many heroquests are performed in this two-week period...it is easier to reach the Other Side. The gods and their world are closer to Mundane Glorantha in this period, standing together with mortal beings to save the world from Chaos once more.

Playing Through Sacred Time

The core RuneQuest rules abstract Sacred Time in the "Between Adventures" chapter, pp. 420-427. But there is no reason, given their prominence in the life of the adventurers, not to play through the rites and rituals of Sacred Time. This is probably more true if the adventurers are community leaders, and would take a more active role in leading this ceremonies.

The rituals of Sacred Time are all heroquests. Broadly speaking participation in them can be divided into two roles: the heroquesters, who take on the roles of gods and heroes, and the worshippers who provide magical support. As a frame of reference, I will be using the heroquest rules from The Company of the Dragon (pp 164-170) but those in Six Seasons in Sartar can be used as well.

Communities spend the entire year preparing for these rites, setting aside offerings and sacrifices, building up magical resources, making costumes and props, practicing the dances, the piping, the drumming, etc. 

 

In the week leading up to Sacred Time, people engage in ritual purification, abstaining from sexual congress, the use of intoxicants, etc. This varies from culture to culture and cult to cult, however. I like to imagine the worshippers of the Storm Bull having a Mardi Gras like orgy of sex and intoxication before the final battle with Chaos comes. 

The entire adult community takes part in the rituals, unless they are too infirm or injured. Children are excluded. They witness the rites, but do not magically contribute to them. The solemnity of these rituals are impressed upon them, however, and they watch wide-eyed and in wonder as they are performed. 

For the entire two weeks the myth of "how the world was saved" is re-enacted. Among the Orlanthi this is the Lightbringers' Quest. Yet among the Dara Happans and Pelorians we might imagine the murder of Murharzarm, Yelm's descent into Hell, the Rebel Gods coming and begging at his feet, the trials and tests he set for them, and his glorious re-ascent replacing the Lightbringers' tale. In the Lunar Empire, local myths are likely observed, but in the most Lunarized and urban eras the quest of the Red Goddess might be re-enacted (she saved the world by "reinventing" Time). Yet universally what is being re-enacted is the saving of the world. For simplicity, we will focus on the Lightbringers here.

The Orlanthi day begins at sunset, not midnight, so the Sacred Time rituals are performed then. In Disorder Week they are conducted each night from sunset to past midnight, symbolizing the descent of the Lightbringers into the Underworld. In Fate Week, they are conducted from before dawn to late morning, symbolizing the return. A number of cults have their holy days here, and these usually happen from midday into the afternoon. Adventurers who participate in both Sacred Time rites and worship rites probably end the day exhausted!

Mechanics & Procedures

Sacred Time rituals are "community" level heroquests, designed to bring a boon to the community. The success of each individual community contributes cumulatively to saving the world, but for the sake of your gaming table, focus on your clan, neighborhood, or community.

The Boon: the Boon being sought during Sacred Time is continued existence. Time has died and you are rebirthing it. Succeed and the world is reborn. Fail, and entropy reigns. 

To model this, replace the "Omens" table on p. 421 with the following. The community will perform a heroquest. Successfully passing each stage results in a cumulative +5% bonus. Failing a stage results is a cumulative -5% penalty. These cancel each other out, so if you pass four stages and fail two, you end up with a +10%.

This number replaces the Harvest modifier on the Omens table. If you are using the Community Characteristics rules from The Company of the Dragon, this modifier is additionally applied to all Community Characteristic rolls made the next year. For example, a clan with a Community CHA of 12 is negotiating with a neighboring clan. Unfortunately, they have a -15% penalty from Sacred Time. Instead of rolling against 60% (12 x 5) they now role against 45%.

If none of the stages are passed, disaster befalls the community. For example, the harvest is threatened by grain blight. Heavy rains cause flooding and landslides. Lack of rain threatens famine and drought. The cattle are plagued by particularly powerful disease spirits. The community wyter falls silent and cannot be contacted. No children are conceived that entire year, etc, etc. This is in addition to the penalty mentioned above. 

If all stages are passed, the community is blessed. Add 1D3+1 to three Community Characteristics. Add the bonus to all "Childbirth" and "Child Survival" rolls for community members that year. The GM may add any other blessings they desire.

The Myth: for simplicity's sake we will assume our community is an Orlanthi clan and the Myth being enacted is the Lightbringers' Quest.

There are several versions of this now available in print. For example, pages 12 and 13 of The Lightbringers or pages 45-47 of Mythology. It is critical to understand, however, that different tribes, different clans, different cities, will all have slightly different versions, and the episodes of the myth they re-enact will differ. Feel free to embellish, modify, and alter to create a version unique to your community.

The Hero's Journey: as described on page 169 of The Company of the Dragon, your heroquest will begin with "The Call to Adventure," a series of trials and tests, a "Supreme Ordeal," and "The Return." 

On pages 19 to 25 of The Seven Tailed Wolf I present a version of this, portraying Kallyr's disastrous attempt at a nationwide Lightbringers' quest. On Freezeday of Luck Week, the "Call to Adventure" begins with Orlanth recognizing the danger the world is in and vowing to set it right. On each subsequent day I stage a different episode drawn from the myth. 

For your Sacred Time re-enactments, I recommend starting the same. "The Call to Adventure" can simply be Orlanth vowing to set things right. After, you will want about 4 scenes or episodes from the Lightbringers' Quest to provide the trials and tests, each performed on subsequent days. Then comes the Supreme Ordeal, the gods confronting the Devil in the Underworld, the forging of the Great Compromise, and the birth of Time. The Return is the final day, with the Lightbringers returning through the gates of Dawn.

This totals 7 scenes. Obviously Sacred Time is 14 days in length, but unless you are feeling really ambitious or really masochistic, I don't suggest 14 full scenes. Assume that other re-enactments are going on the other 7 days, but don't weigh yourself down (particularly at first). Note also that in Mythology, in the description "What Happens in Sacred Time?" (pp. 51-52), the Lightbringers' Quest lasts only 7 days. The other days are given to other gods. If you wish to conform to that outline, you can still use all of the following to portray the Lightbringers' Quest. 

Also, focus on the player characters. If you have an Orlanthi, a Lhankor Mhy, and an Issaries in the group, make sure to pick episodes from the Lightbringers' Quest that showcase these deities. 

Following the Lightbringers' Quest as presented in Mythology, your re-enactments might look something like this:

Day 1: The Call to Adventure. Orlanth looks upon his blasted and empty hall and vows to set the world to rights.

Day 2. Orlanth heads west and gathers the Lightbringers. They cross the sea on the back of the Turtle God and confront the purple-skinned Luathelans and the bloody goddess of Dusk, finally finding the entrance to the Underworld.

Day 3. They descend into the Underworld, facing terrible trials and ordeals.

Day 4. The Lightbringers seek the Halls of the Dead, confronting wraiths and shades, darkness spirits, and finally King Griffin, who they must challenge to enter.

Day 5. Orlanth confronts Yelm at last. The Lightbringers endure the requirement of Proof, and Trial by Combat.

Day 6. The gods swear the Great Compromise and perform the Ritual of the Net. The Devil is faced, defeated, and devoured by Arachne Solara.

Day 7. The gods make the dangerous return journey, this time with Yelm and other dead gods. They endure further tests and challenges before returning victorious through the Gates of Dawn. 

This is the structure. Now let's focus on the performance.

Performance: at sunset on Freezeday, Luck Week, the entire clan gathers. Community leaders and important members have been selected to portray the roles of the Lightbringers, Yelm, and other important characters. They will be costumed, painted, and dressed as these gods. For the next two weeks they will not be referred to by their names. Instead they will be called by the name of the god they embody.

The rest of the community will lend magical support, watching the re-enactment of the quest, singing along with the verses of the story, performing ritual gestures at critical moments, and the like.

On that first sunset sacrifices are offered. A prized bull. Jewelry. Beloved possessions. Locks of hair. If the last year was particularly bad omened, they might even sacrifice a horse. 

Following the sacrifice, prayers are offered to the gods. Player characters must make Worship rolls. If you are using the Community Characteristic system, Community POW and CON are rolled to represent the magical and material sacrifices being made. The entire community sings and dances. If the player characters are supporting the rites, and not playing the roles of gods, they must all make Dance and Sing rolls, and sacrifice at least 2 magic points.

Start keeping track of who succeeds and who fails. Those who succeed most of their rolls should be awarded a blessing at the end of the day. Those who fail most of their rolls gain a bane. See the boxed text on page 171 of The Company of the Dragon for details. Keep track of the total number of rolls as well...do most pass or fail? This is important to test and see if the community passes the stage. 

If player characters are portraying the gods, they must come out, costumed, and deliver their lines. Have them make Act, Sing, or Orate rolls (the myths are ritually chanted along with drumming and piping). They cross over to the Other Side and now speak and think as the god they portray.

As a very general rule, I have the group face 2 or 3 tests each stage (day) of the quest, 1 or 2 if there is a combat. This is because I run following the "1 Season 1 Adventure" rule and am counting all of Sacred Time as a single adventure. Further, I like to play one adventure per game session, so I try to keep things moving. There is no reason why you cannot increase the number of challenges faced each day, however. Also, I try to think of broad tests that everyone can face, but also ones that spotlight specific cults and characters. Give Chalana Arroy, Issaries, Lhankor Mhy, Eurmal, and the others a chance to shine. 

Looking back at our myth what is being re-enacted here is "Orlanth Vowing to set the World to Rights." I presented a version of it in The Seven Tailed Wolf  page 19, drawn from Stafford's Book of Heortling Mythology with my own elaborations. Present it however you like, but this opening session should be briefer and less challenging than the trials ahead. You are merely setting the stage, and a number of rolls have already been made, enough to calculate the results of the day.

If the majority of rolls pass, the community gains +5% that day. If not, -5%.

The second day (assume Clayday, Luck week, skipping every other day) we have "The Westfaring," Orlanth heading west and gathering the Lightbringers as outlined in the myth above. The community gathers at sunset, and after songs and prayers are offered, the quest resumes.

This is the first of the trials and testing stages of the heroquest. In Company of the Dragon I broke these down into three: facing a foe, making an ally, and beating a challenge. There are plenty of opportunities to make allies as Orlanth encounters and recruits each of the Lightbringers. They then must convince the Turtle God to carry them across the sea. This is probably beating a challenge. They confront the Luathelans, leading to either facing a foe or beating a challenge, and then the bloody goddess of the Dusk, whom they must convince to let them into the underworld. This is probably beating a challenge. 

At this point, however, it might be best if we digress for a second. Consider the following a "sidebar."

What is actually happening here?

Always keep in mind that this is a re-enactment, a performance. The performers have one foot in this world and one in the Other Side, so they actually see and experience the myth as if it were real. For example, in confronting the Luathelans above, the questers see towering, purple-skinned demigods looming over them on the God Plane. When they fight, Orlanth hurls his Lightning Spear at one with a terrible flash of light and crash of thunder...

...but at the same time, those "Luathelans" are fellow clansmen painted purple, and the Lightning Spear Orlanth carries is a prop. The entire clan is looking on, chanting, cheering, lending magical support to the gods. 

You are not, then, actually testing the character's Javelin or Spear skill. They are not attempting to wound or kill their clansmen! So what are we testing then?

As a general rule, you primarily want to test Rune affinities, performance skills like Act, Dance, Orate, and Sing, and knowledge skills like Cult Lore. Passions come into play when appropriate (Devotion to the god you are personifying, Hate of an enemy you are facing). Magical skills like Worship and Spirit Combat are also common. Most other skills are irrelevant. This is a magical and religious ceremony, not a physical adventure. 

Continuing our example, then, when Orlanth throws the Lighting Spear at the Luathelan, the character might...

...test Orate, as they declare "And lo He Who Wields the Thunderbolt did unleash his Spear of Lightning, and smote his enemy in wrath."

...test Dance as in the performance they dash gracefully around the Luathelan in circles, tapping them with the Lightning Spear prop.

...test Act as the performer bellow and roars so convincingly that the audience sees Orlanth before them.

...test the Air Rune affinity or Devotion Orlanth, as the performing calls upon their god's magic to smite the enemy on the God Plane.

There are exceptions to this. In The Seven Tailed Wolf to simulate the Turtle God bearing the Lightbringers over the sea, clansmen portrayed the Turtle by carrying the Lightbringers on shields raised over their heads, while other clansmen played the roll of the sea (!!!) throwing buckets of water at them trying to make them drop the Lightbringers. Meanwhile the Lightbringers had to stand on the shields and try not to fall. These were tests of STR, CON, and DEX, with a few other physical skills as well. But the primary thing is that it was a ritualized game, not an actual fight.

Also, there may be times (as we will see when we reach "The Supreme Ordeal" stage below) that actual fighting may occur. In The Company of the Dragon I talked about a Storm Bull initiation ritual in which the initiate had to act out Storm Bull's destruction of the Devil. This was done by placing the initiate into a ring with a captured Chaos creature (typically a Broo) and having them fight. There are similar episodes in The Seven Tailed Wolf. Further, the Orlanth use of "Summons of Evil" also brings real danger to the test.

To sum up, 90% of the time you want to test magical and performance skills. There will be times, especially in those who focus all of their attention on their character's weapon skills, when players complain about this. I like to remind them characters in RuneQuest are not only fighters, they are also magic-users, and that even the deadliest samurai practiced poetry, noh, and flower-arranging!

Now back to our quest...

Day three falls on Fireday, Luck Week. Again, at sunset, the clan gathers at the ritual space around the performers. Prayers are sung, and the drumming and piping begins.

In this stage, the Lightbringers descend into the Underworld, facing trials and tests as they go. There are any number of options here. The safe path must be found (Issaries or Eurmal might test Devotion to their god, Issaries as the Pathfinder and Eurmal as the one who knows the way into Hell). The Lightbringers might be attacked by Underworld demons or the Dead. The performers may have to test their Darkness Rune affinities to not get lost in the blackness, or their Water Rune affinities to cross the Styx. They might meet Darkness spirits they might ally as a guide (Orate, Act, etc). 

Day four falls on Godday, Luck Week. As usual, the clan gathers at sunset, prayers are offered, the music begins. On this day the Lightbringers cross the Underworld, seeking the Halls of Yelm, and must pass King Griffin to enter. Perhaps Chalana Arroy must heal the blind and hungry dead so that the Lightbringers may pass (Devotion or Worship Chalana Arroy, or test the Harmony or Fertility Rune). Maybe Eurmal must trick the way past them. Maybe Flesh Man finds his father amongst them and must convince his father to aid them (test the Man Rune affinity). Whatever the case, the journey ends with King Griffin. They must persuade him to let them pass (Orate, Act, Sing) or answer his riddles (Cult Lore).

Day five falls on Waterday, Fate Week. This time the clan assembles at dawn, and will for the rest of the days. After the usual opening, the re-enactment begins. At this stage they must face Yelm in his Halls. 

Mythology is pretty specific here (p. 47) in what they face, and it is mostly Orlanth centered. It beings with a tense series of negotiations with Yelm, and these could be re-enacted by having the Orlanth performer and a fellow clansmen skilled in oratory "orate" against one another (a rap battle!). Or a clansmen with a high Fire/Sky Rune and the Orlanth performer might have a Rune Affinity contest.   

After this Orlanth endures the "acidic hatred" of his assembled enemies. Perhaps the Orlanth performer is splashed with a bucket of lye water (yes, we know it is a base and not an acid, but I doubt the Orlanthi make such a distinction) and must dodge it (a time the actual Dodge skill is used) or suffer a certain amount of actual damage (a low amount, say 1D3...the performer has failed the test which was the point, not blinding or burning them). Alternatively it could be handled the usual ways (contests of skills such as Orate, Sing, or Act against one another). 

Then comes trial by combat. Again this could be pure performance (a Dance contest), or non-lethal fighting to first blood using Fist or Grapple). If Orlanth is wounded, give Chalana Arroy the chance to heal him (another test).

Day six comes Windsday, Fate Week. This is the Supreme Ordeal, the confrontation with the Devil in Hell, his devouring and binding, and the swearing of the Great Compromise. The clan gathers at dawn and after the usual rites the tests begin. 

This is a perfect example of when actual combat might occur. "Summons of Evil" might be used, or a captured Chaotic foe might have to be fought and defeated to re-enact the defeat of the Devil. Once defeated, the ritual of the Net might be performed, with each performer holding threads, weaving in and out of one another to form an elaborate web (all must pass Dance tests). 

The seventh and final day falls on Wildday, Fate Week. It begins again at dawn. After the opening rites and rituals the performers re-enact the return of the Lightbringers, with Yelm, to the world.

The final day of Sacred Time, Godday, Fate Week, is a time for celebration, feasting, and rejoicing (tempered by how well the rites were performed!).  

Final Notes

None of this, of course, is a full scenario, just an outline to give individual GMs ideas. As mentioned, I give full scenario examples in The Seven Tailed Wolf (though these are Kallyr's larger pilgrimage version of the rites) for further ideas. 

Also this post focuses solely on the Lightbringers' Quest, and if your group is made up mainly of members of other cults, take a look at Mythology, "What Happens in Sacred Time?" (pp. 51-52) for ideas on things they might be doing.