Nell

I have just barely not gotten to the Mythic Maps section, so my mind may very well change, but I was a little dissapointed by the monomyth, only because I thought it was a little bare. I was hoping for more, as well as God and cult relationship charts. 

On 10/5/2023 at 3:57 AM, Joerg said:

Often said village (or nomadic clan) will be where they were supported. Chaos slaying doesn't really pay well, unless you create communities who become indebted to you. Killing these at the slightest suspicion soon leaves you starving and out of resources.

This is the lesson. Uroxi are, and have always been really, mafiasos, not Klansmen. 

On 10/3/2023 at 3:50 PM, g33k said:

Given the resurgence of real-life white-supremicist / neo-nazi / alt-right groups over the past few years, I'm more than a little unhappy with explicitly casting one of the PC'able options explicitly as them.

I understand why you do so -- I think -- but IMHO it's better for us to work on differentiating SB's from KKK/etc, than to just see a first-glance similarity, and jump on that train to help shovel coal...

I'd hate for that crowd to come to Glorantha in droves because we're that sort of game.  That's already happened, a bit, with WHFRP (some of whose communities can get pretty vile). 

And just an insultingly inaccurate analogy the vulgarly uses references to very real atrocities. SBs are violently intolerant bullies, but they aren't genocidally racist or attempting to uphold a racial hierarchy. 

On 9/21/2023 at 3:31 PM, g33k said:

Well, at least you liked the breathy, over dramatic faux Cate Blanchett female narration in Lord of the Rings!

It's true I did. Felt it was original and tonally appropriate, as well as fitting the world and the character. 

Now I 100% could be wrong, but I was under the impression that recent historical study has found that the brutality and thouroughness of the sack of Baghdad has been greatly exaggerated, like many famous sacks of important religious centers, Constantinople being another example. 

Almost a year late, but it looks good I think. I super don't dig the breathy, over dramatic  faux Cate Blanchett female narration. It's a VERY tired trope, and was really only done well in Lord of the Rings. Obviously a nit pick, but it still annoys me. 

Just got into the podcast. Always good stuff. 

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Nothing of what follows is in the spirit of “I am right; you are wrong” — I am likely very, very wrong, but this is what I was trying to do and why …

The bit about Yahweh as storm god was just a lure to get the hook into the fish. I was not trying to hark back to a pre-monotheistic Yahweh. I was trying to pull focus from the god to the religion. It seems to me that there is more to religion than a god’s vital statistics and a list of their deeds. I know that when I was reading translations of the Greek myths as a child, I was left with no real idea of what it would be like to be a practitioner of the old Greek religion.

Although it is usual to pitch the Red Goddess as bringing the new thing and the Orlanthi as being dreadful stick-in-the-muds, I was trying to sell the idea of the situation’s being more complex than that: of there being a strand of “democracy” and directness in the Orlanthi religion & society (which IRL may have been new with mono-Yahwism) and of old-school elitism and mediation in the Lunar–Solar religion & state. That this would be reflected in the way the respective societies were organised and behaved. And after all — as @Eff likes to remind us — the Sartar rebels are the Taliban.

That whole “project” may have been misconceived — idiotic, even — but that was what I was attempting. Not “if you look at the nature and deeds of Orlanth, you will see they are more like Yahweh’s than they are like those of [insert Indo-European thunder god here].”

Fair enough. 

17 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

A storm god, you know, like Yahweh. And I hope it is fair to say that like Yahweh, Orlanth is a god with a relationship with his people, and if you breathe the air, he will let you into his cult. So if you think of the Orlanthi as the Israelites of the Hebrew Bible, it might be productive. In this respect, the Orlanthi religion is “modern”. Watch out for windy prophets and wannabe messiahs — they are trouble.

Whereas the top gods of the Lunar Empire — the Moon & the Sun — are rather more distant from “their” people: the Emperor worships and maybe is the Sun but hoi polloi do not (think Akhenaten?); mystics in the religious elite are initiated to the Moon, not Waynetta Slob on the street and not even your average Lunar missionary. The Lunar/Solar religion is “old-school” in that an elite — including the ruler himself — stands between the people and the supreme godhead. But this situation is not stable.

This is an attempt at an alternative to the usual explanations: don’t swallow it, just chew it for the bitter flavour (and the psychoactive drugs) and then spit it out.

This seems like a bad comparison to me. Yahweh was a classical storm god, but comparatively little of Yahweh's career as a local storm god (especially in regards to being a member of a pantheon, Yahweh certainly was, and even had a wife, but compared to Odin, Zeus and a later example, this part of his divine life is a bit bare) remains and even in the educated mind his later myths hang over his old identity. Meanwhile, Indra fits the bill FAR better, being unusual already to western layman's ear, but having a far richer (and more accurate to Orlanth's own journeys and stories) tapestry of myth to pull from.

Awesome news. Hope it grows from there.

This is really good stuff.