Interlude in Pavis

I started a RQ Classic campaign recently, with four players who have been
playing mostly a AD&D 1e campaign and an old grognard who primarily
played RQ in college in the early 80s.

For a setting, I'm using Pavis & The Big Rubble.  The characters started
off at Old Fort at the confluence of the Scritha and East Scritha at Sacred
Time of 1610, just after the Lunar occupation begins.

To introduce the newcomers to the system, I started them with answering the
KoDP clan questionnaire, followed by a ‘how the clan survived’ heroquest to
demonstrate how skills are used and advanced and give the players a taste of
how spiritual as well as physical quests mix in Glorantha.  

In the Great Darkness the Brothers left the village to search for food.

First Brother came to a barren field, from it he heard voices calling out to him. Digging in the field he found Ernalda's children and brought them back to the village where they grew into crops.

Second Brother came to a cave where a giant lived with his cattle. Second Brother disguised himself as a cow and joined the herd when they went into the cave. When the giant fell asleep, he led the herd out and back to the village.

Third Brother was walking along the stream when he saw a strange girl drowning under the water. He leapt in, swam down and saved her. She taught him how to catch fish.

Fourth Brother found a set of tracks and followed them up a windswept hill. At the top he found an alynx with it's fur matted and ribs showing. He fed it all the food he had, in return it followed him back to the village and kept Ernalda's children free from rats and chaos vermin.

Fifth Brother was lost in the forest, finally he began to climb the largest tree in the wood. He climbed all the way to the top where he beheld the first sunrise. Foolishly, he climbed the sun's rays until he disappeared into the sky.

The heroquest also functioned as a divination for the coming year. Based on their rolls, their village will probably be wiped out by famine.   

A couple of side quests, where I split the group by family relationships, had
most of them tracking down a prize bull that had been stolen by a nomad.  
Even though I gave them all some ability to speak Praxian, no one
understood what he was saying, so it ended in combat. The other character
is a son of a carpetbagger who returned from Tarsh with the Lunars.  He
went out on a patrol with the Marble Phalanx detachment and was introduced
to the Morokanth slavers, baboons, trollkin and herdmen through the
Borderlands Scouting the Area encounter.

Then they set out for Pavis, losing a character in a drinking contest during an
encounter with a Troll caravan.  A quick trip into the Rubble cost another
character half an arm and put most of them in bad odor with the local Mostali.
 They then signed up at a variety of temples for training before we called it a
night.

Overall the new players seemed to enjoy it.  The lethality surprised them, but I
had made a batch of pre-gens so they didn't get bogged down in character
creation.

One thing that went over well was I had grabbed pictures from a number of the
PDFs I've picked up, so I could show them a morokanth, a trollkin or the gate
at Pavis