Introduction

      As the campaign has progressed, three slightly different versions of Vinga have seen play. The original cult was based on Jane Williams’s work, with some of our own material and some borrowed from Julian Lord incorporated into it. As we found more information about the cult and Glorantha in general, this modified our perspective of it. Net write-ups by Brian Maloney, and David Dunham provided useful information, as did many net sources of myths and legends from Glorantha.

    The appearance of Hero Wars and Hero Quest, with their abundance of new cultural and religious information from Greg Stafford and others once again changed our understanding/picture of the cult.

    Essentially, our version of the cult was based on Jane Williams’ cult of Vinga for RQ3 but incorporated material from other versions of the cult as well as a fair bit of our own stuff. We used the subcults introduced in Hero Wars, mixed with our established stuff, to create a new version of the cult of Vinga. We feel keeps reasonably well to our campaign but that is not so far from the Hero Wars/Quest version that new material cannot be readily incorporated if desired. We use the RuneQuest system for cults and their organisation, but have modified it to incorporate new material from HeroWars and HeroQuest.

We use the cult mythos, ecology, and structure described in Storm Tribe, but have added other subcults of the goddess, most importantly the Vinga the Adventurer subcult. This is really just a chopped-down version of Jane Williams’ cult of Vinga, and was used to bridge the gap between RuneQuest and HeroWars by providing a way of incorporating ‘old-style’ Vingans into the revised version of the cult of Vinga (without having to totally change well-established characters and NPCs).

We have also included the Pathfinder and Uzfighter subcults described by Questlines, the Esrolian subcult of Vinga DarkStorm suggested by several net sources, and the cult of Voudisea (mentioned in the Heroquest Voices section on Esrolia).

The RuneQuest notion of associate cults has been kept, we feel it helps give players a closer understanding of how the cult interacts with the world, and closely represents a religion with extensive mythological links, introducing another level of complexity to play. It also helps them to learn more about the world of Glorantha; most players like to have some idea about the deity they are sacrificing their POW to.

The form and types of Vingan magics listed in various Hero Wars publications have been converted to RQ3 and adopted wholesale, only certain elements of the divine magic available to the cult in our previous version has been retained, but spirit magics remain largely unaffected. We have also used most of the cultural material about Vinga from Hero Wars and incorporated it into our version of the cult.

     Thanks to Simon Phipps and Nikk Effingham, their work provided a good basis for our conversion attempts, and they have converted many HeroWars cults and spells to RQ3 (which we have used largely unchanged in our campaign).

Vingan myths found on the net and in various publications were used widely, but only where they could be seen to fit it with the mythos presented in Storm Tribe and Thunder Rebels. We rejected for example, the (admittedly entertaining) notion that Vinga set Arkat on his path to infamy, or that she and Eurmal set up an illusory Dragonkill War and Red Moon, faking the events of the last eight hundred years or so, to trick Orlanth and the Lightbringers.

Thanks in particular to Jane Williams, you provided so much useful info via your site. Loved the Vinga finds Tarthcaer story, that’s the Vinga subcult that Serenity would have joined if she could have- Vinga the Teenager. Foot stamping and sheer bloody-mindedness rules!

The resulting mixture is our cult of Vinga. We feel that it fairly well captures the spirit of the cult as set out in Storm Tribe, but introduces  more variety to the cult; not all Vingans have pretty much the same abilities (a situation that seems to occur fairly frequently in HeroWars; no more “Oh! There’s a Vingan. Quick! Get her before she tries a Mile Javelin Throw!), and have to go to considerable effort to learn spells.

A range of spell access and different subcults helps to reflect the diversity in mythic practices and traditions said to operate on Glorantha (see the Questlines website for an excellent write-up on myth and its interpretation). We appreciate that the quantity of spell access for this cult is considerable, but then it should be so for many cults with a good quantity of mythical associations. It should be pointed out that the real issue is not accessiblity, but access, a factor entirely controlled by the GM.

Vingans have access to a broad range of magic through their cultic associations but this is more limited than it seems. It would take a considerable amount of effort, time, money, and travel to join more than one or two subcults or hero cults, something that puts this beyond the reach of most Vingans. Many of the spells can only be accessed through heroquests, and many of the Vingans most capable of surviving such adventures, the Daughters, are those with the least spare time for travel and new obligations.

A good example of this is Serenity Macleod, one of the main Vingan player characters in our campaign. She is wealthy, well travelled, well connected and an expert in cult lore. As an experienced heroquestor she is capable of undertaking many of the heroquests required for spell access. She is a notably competent spell caster, with a good range of magic from Vinga and her associated cults, and spent a good deal of time and effort to get them. In this case, a good range means about 60% of her subcult spells, and about 30% of the spells available to her through associate cults (most of which are one use). Hardly overpowered, especially when you consider that many of the spells concerned are not combat magics.

In short, Vingans have potential access to a very good range of spells; in practice, few have access to more than the spells of one or two subcults (or hero cults), or the opportunity to perform the heroquests needed to gain access to many of the associate and cult spells. Many spells from the cult lists are effectively unavailable in certain areas; it is not much use being allowed to sacrifice for a spell from Rigsdal as an associate cult if you have no access to a Rigsdal temple to sacrifice at.

As noted previously, this wite-up is highly likely to be revised, but suffices for the moment.