Thinking of what would help the Hearthguard:
A way to deal with Super-combatants. As seen by the fights against both the Greater Slave Wyrm and the Shagow Meargh, the Hearthguard don't really have an answer for foes of that scale or calibre. This is where something like an adamant gronti would help. Probably a dwarf shaped one with a skill transfer item to leverage the Hearthguard's own skills.
Better intelligence gathering capabilities. Particularly demonstrated against the Shadow Meargh, but also relevant against the Greater Slave Wyrn. Something like the canon Rune of Fate would be invaluable - being given visions the night before a fight of the most likely way they would die would have made the Shadow Meargh much less of a threat. As lots of what the Hearthguard have to deal with are unknown threats, this would be particularly useful. As a non-master rune it's probably something that could be deployed to the Hearthguard on mass scale as part of different trios of runes.
Something to accelerate cross-training. Probably dependent on improving Mind of Things to get an even better version of the MEoBrotherhood.
Just being harder to kill doesn't actually solve the major problem. Something that the greater Shard Wyrm or Shadow Meargh would just do such an overwhelming amount of damage that they could just kill then through it.
Edit: on the topic of being harder to kill though:
Thinking some more about the Shadow Meargh in particular, what would we need to do to equip the Hearthguard to survive it.
Simple runed adamant articulated plate armour wouldn't be enough. Prehensile and sharp shadow constructs can go through eye holes or breathing holes. We'd need sealed runic adamant (power) armour.
And then, what would that need?
1) A way to transmit senses, so something like trying to make a helmet in the form of a hollow, slightly scaled up dwarf's head, inscribing it with the Rune of Forged 'Limb' to control the pseudo-muscles in the head and a Rune that allows breathing without air, and attaching appropriate sensory organs for a pair each of Runes of Forged Eye and Runes of Forged Ear, plus a Rune of Forged Nose. We know third eyes and arms work, so this should. That's six bars of adamant.
2) A fully sealed suit of armour. That would probably require the Rune of Waking and some metal shifting rune that merged the plates of the armour into one single piece of metal when activated.
Thinking of this, are we missing a trick here. Kazagar has the option:
[ ] Write-In, Host a Special Tournament:
Can we use this to crowdsource basic design work? Can we for example; set up a tournament like this:
[ ] Write-In, Host a Special Tournament:
-[] Complete Covering: the competition is to create an item or panoply of items that forms a suit of metal armour which fully seals a dwarf inside from the outside world with no gaps, while still allowing them to fully see, hear, touch and smell the outside world (in that priority order), with a stretch goal being enhancing the dwarf inside in other ways.
We can then see how the competitors approach the challenge and what combinations of runes and items they use to try and do so. If any look particularly good, we can then use them as a foundation for our own designs.
There are some other competitions Incan see value in, to try to get younger dwarves to try to develop regular runes or combos of regular runes that are valuable but we don't have time to work on.
Basically, like the Challenges of the Burudin at a much lower level.
