gamesmeister said:
What if they've already got the darkness rune integrated? Doesn't matter, there must be an excellent black market for unintegrated runes that people will pay good money for.
This is an important point, and one which seems to have been given next to no consideration when the rules were developed.
As you point out, Runes are an incentive to murder, since they can't be un-integrated by any process short of death. If you want to steal someone's Runes, you
must kill them.
Also, there's a continuity problem. So, we've got all these Runes manifesting in the Second Age - what happens to them by the Third Age, when there is no sign of them in the canon? Are they an artifact of God Learner interference?
The simplest solution as far as Glorantha is concerned may just be to ignore them completely and return to the use of Focuses, except that you'd have to have a separate Spellcasting roll for each spell just like Sorcery, since Runecasting becomes moot.
The compromise, which a lot of people have suggested and which I'd tend to go for, is to remove the requirement for Rune integration when casting cult spells and use Lore (specific theology) instead of Runecasting as the spellcasting skill. So those magic-using trollkin you meet will tend only to cast spells available from Argan Argar and Xiola Umbar, which makes sense, and they won't own any Runes - if they did, wouldn't the ZZ bullies just beat them to a pulp and take the Runes for themselves?
I'd also insert rules for "loss of integration" when Runes are removed from their owner for an extended period of time.
In this way manifested Runes become a useful curiosity rather than an absolutely essential plank of the magic system, in which role they don't fit very well into Glorantha.
