Or how I destroyed all of Sartar in 2 minutes.
M.A.D. Moonfire Assured Destruction. That's what ended the Hero Wars. You see, shortly after the Dragonrise the Red Emperor got a hold of the new RQG spell Moonfire and when he read how ridiculously OP it was he decided to end the threat of Sartar once and for all. He started a 10 year plan, the Mad Hatter Project. He formed a group of sevened sorcerers. That way they could gain power quickly having so many holy days. They spent that power over a 10 year period building up their Moonfire inscriptions to have 13 pts into range. Enough to destroy a 5 mile hex on the argan argar map and be outside of the moonfire. Then, he had them put excess points into the strength of the spell. He only used sorcerers of high intelligence (16+).
He only needed 110 of them.
They worked in groups of 5. Each group could nuke an entire 5 mile hex on the Argan Argar Atlas. 5 men in a 25 square mile area don't get any notice. put 5 men in each hex for 22 hexes and you need 110 men. Then the adjacent hex gets hit for 5d6 damage for 5 minutes. All life extinguished save for the toughest of beings. They move forward and do the next hex row. Five miles deep, 110 miles wide. 16 castings of the spell and all of Sartar was destroyed in less than a week.
The empire threw all its magical resources into keeping those 110 men alive from any retaliation. From invisibility to detection blanks, you name it. Power crystals, the works.
At that point, Meriaten said wtf, wt actual f? Why didn't MY wizards think of that?
And thus all the surviving nations of Glorantha began building Wizards of Mass Destruction. Those that had wizards that is. They became superpowers, conquering all their wizardless neighbors in short order.
Eventually, the worlds superpowers signed accords, ending the Hero Wars. Each side could retaliate upon the other so the term M.A.D. was coined. Moonfire Assured Destruction. If one side used Wizards of Mass Destruction, then the other side would retaliate in kind. People who had once believed RQ3 sorcery was broken realized that suddenly it was a brave new world and pined for the good old days when it took the Sorcerer Supreme to inflict that kind of damage.
That's how the Hero Wars ended. The reason everyone believes differently today is because at some unknown point in time HQers from a rogue terrorist outfit, brought down WMDs on the Lhankor Mhy god, destroying literacy and the ability to cast Moonfire. That, in fact, was the entire purpose of the dark ages when literacy was lost. To wipe the world of all knowledge of the spell. This is why the histories of the time are all a collection of lies and misinformation. To keep anyone from realizing how totally and completely broken this one spell was and how it single handedly managed to change the world.