Wyters (page 286)

Correction

The origins of an individual wyters varies,

*

• A wyter is incapable of recovering its own magic points. Instead, the community worships the wyter and gives it magic points on the wyter’s season holy days.

page 287

• A wyter may receive sacrifices of characteristic POW from its members up to an upper limit based on the size and age of the community (see Wyter Size table).

page 287

When playing and gamemastering in Glorantha, let your imagination go wild. Ignore that voice that demands rational thought and empirical data, and draw upon your unconscious fantasies. Draw upon dreams, folklore, and mythology.

Keeping it Fantastic, page 11

So you have a maximum POW wyter for your example, rather than the normal 27 POW, CHA 14. This is obviously SUPER-clan, whose wyter is some god.

Your wyter has 42 points of POW. In theory, it could blow 41 points of POW to cast Rune spells, but that is stupid unless this is a murder-hobo wyter. That wyter’s POW has all sorts of other functions, like being the spiritual force of the community, keeping hostile spirits out of the clan sacred lands, etc. Reducing the POW of the community spirit weakens your community – this should go without saying (and not something that should need clockwork mechanical things). Why are the other clan members going to give up their POW – their SOUL – just so that our rules-lawyer chieftain can feel super-swell?

Reduce your wyter to POW 1, and maybe just it gets captured by a hostile shaman. Maybe some weak hate ghost with POW 15 decides to take its vengeance. Maybe a ritual enemy that normally is obeisance now can manifest.

I mean the more I think about this, the more I would absolutely ruin a chief or high priest who tried to do this. You broke our ancestral god – OUR ANCESTRAL GOD! – to do what? Our clan is dying, we have kin slaughter and more than half the community left to form a new clan, so that you be invulnerable? We have summoned the assembly and have decided to strip you from that office so that we might survive.

If you spend 40 POW of that wyter, that wyter isn’t going to be terribly magically powerful until some big ceremony could be held to replenish its POW. If I was the GM, I’d probably say that needs to happen during Sacred Time or the high holy day of the wyter. This isn’t the sort of event that should be done casually.

In the meantime, that wyter is spiritually weak. Who cares if you have 40 nigh-invulnerable warriors for a year, if your wyter is gone. The cosmos tends to react strongly against rules-lawyers who abuse the spirit of the rules.

I for one would be very reluctant to let the wyter spend more than 10-15% of its POW without an existential threat to the community.

The max POW of a wyter is whatever the gamemaster decides is the appropriate limit for that particular wyter. The Ernaldori are a very powerful clan that has been around for three centuries. They are the royal clan of the oldest and most powerful Orlanth tribe in Dragon Pass. Normally its POW is 32, but if player characters want to sacrifice up to 10 points of their personal POW, they can increase it up to 42. But that is their call. As the GM, I’m not going to let NPCs do that for them.

I included enough on wyters in the Core rules so that people could include them in their games. The wyter rules are there so that that the gamemaster can use them in their game as a special resource and not to play mental exercises with about how those rules could be theoretically minimaxed by NPCs.

As I said, the rules were there to provide additional resources and ideas for gamemasters. If one of the player characters became the wyter-speaker (perhaps for a Heroquest), and in order to fulfill part of their quest they needed to create a few magical items with the wyter, I’d likely allow it. Because that is their function – they are a pool of POW and magic that might make all the difference in a dangerous quest, but at the risk of weakening the community’s magic.

Their function is not mass produce magical items or any such thing, and I really didn’t think I’d need even raise that point.

Often it is preferable just to get a concept out there, with the assumption that enough information is there that people can start including them in their games. And then we can wait a bit for a later opportunity to handle some of the deeper nuances. For 95% of the games, what is in the core rules about wyters is likely enough. The RQ Campaign Book gives an opportunity for a little GM facing nuance.

As an aside, that is a key bit of my own design philosophy. The rules are designed for modelling the player interaction with the setting – it is intended for running RPG games. They are not intended to be a clockwork machine running in the background, determining how NPCs interact with NPCs. Or as I have said on more than one occasion to my line editors – “The GM should not be rolling dice against themself!”

Notes on Wyters from the unpublished RQ Campaign book

Wyters are intended to be a potential resource for player characters and their community. The description of wyters in RuneQuest Glorantha (pages 286-287) provide a useful overview of wyters. A wyter is the spirit of a given community. Weakening the wyter weakens the community. When a wyter weakens itself through expenditure of points of POW to cast Rune spells, it weakens the spiritual health of the community. If the wyter reduces its POW by half, the community may begin to collapse. Additionally, the wyter must be persuaded that using the magic is appropriate for itself. No wyter will endanger its community simply to function as a rechargeable POW battery for its priest!

The wyter is responsible for the spiritual well-being of the community, and among its important roles are protecting the community from hostile spirits, vengeful ghosts, enemy gods, and more. Although such things trouble even those communities with a powerful wyter, this happens far more frequently when the wyter is weakened. Pity the doomed community whose wyter becomes weak enough to be defeated by an ordinary spirit or enemy shaman!

Although members of the community may sacrifice points of characteristic POW to the wyter, this is in practice more complicated than the RQG rules might suggest. Normally such sacrifices only occur on the high holy day of the wyter, although a kindly gamemaster might allow an adventurer to sacrifice a point of personal POW to prevent the wyter from being extinguished. It is perfectly reasonable for the gamemaster to only allow adventurers to make such sacrifices – perhaps that the wyter’s characteristics assume that other community members are already making whatever the sacrifices that community can be expected to make. Alternatively, the gamemaster may decide that any community that has been significantly weakened by the wyter’s loss of POW is too spiritually weak to sacrifice POW for the wyter unless that sacrifice comes from the player characters.

RQ Campaign book, unpublished, 2021

The wyter can cast any Rune spell or spirit magic spell known by its priest (assuming the priest is within range of the wyter). A wyter spends points of its characteristic POW instead of Rune points when casting Rune spells, with a chance of success equal to its CHA×5.

RQG, page 286