Ormi Phengaria

Why should it be a justification at all? "And so" is what the rationalists understand: cause, then effect. "Mystery, and then my actions." What we cannot speak about to others who have not seen what we have seen we can still speak around plenty, and this is a skill required to genuinely engage with and understand perspectives which are alien to us. This defines Arkat.

There is no abdication of mortal agency to the gods in the Hero, and yet they are participants in divine power and drama. That is exactly their terror and their liberation.

(All as I understand it.) The basic economic unit of rural Orlanthi life in Dragon Pass is the household (the "stead"). This is a small cluster of larger homes, fields, gardens, pasturage, cottages, whatever other features or improvements. The important thing to emphasize is that this is again a single economic unit of people who have mixed social statuses and roles. It may not be completely self-sufficient in meeting all of its members' needs, but it's usually the most significant contributor to their material well-being. The household is where you will tend to get your food, clothing, shelter, and basic mutual assistance. Traditionally, social status and mobility within this unit (and within the clan itself) cleaves closely to age. Younger people are more often half-free, mostly just producing enough for themselves and trying to build their personal wealth. They might actually seek out tenancies, because they add new calves into their own herds. The free members have at least enough to be able to plow the fields of their household and feed themselves off of that while ideally producing a surplus. The half-nobles/thanes/horsemen have farming tenants, using the half-noble's plows and oxen and managing their herds. Nobody owns land in this arrangement. The clan owns the land together, and parcels it out in the perceived collective interest. Free people are parceled land on the basis of being able to farm it, and half-nobles are parceled land to support them in their services to the clan. On its own, this system doesn't produce much inequality, and that which is there tends to not be transgenerational. The institutional problems really start when the household economy begins to lose its interdependent quality, when the half-nobles can take their product in kind, sell it, and support themselves by the commercial economy instead. This is a big hit to the bargaining power of everyone else, and over time the proportion of people who can only possess their land in tenancy will grow. I suspect that process is well underway in Sartar, and so would be quite mature in Tarsh.

Damned unruly Alkothite, killing Ernalda too! And being so conveniently culpable!

Asrelia has the Luck Rune, and that always made me think of a bunch of grannies playing mahjong.

Sometimes even seemingly honest accounts can seem like crude and mean-spirited portrayals simply because we lack the perspective to really understand them. Trolls might be the closest elder race to humans in terms of their basic drives and culture, which kind of exacerbates this problem, but the troll umwelt is still not something humans can readily understand just by looking at them. They feel space and sound in three high-fidelity dimensions with their face. Their vision is black and white, but also with sharply contrasted reds. Tastes and scents are whole other worlds unto themselves. Trollpak gets into and hints at a lot of this (and also makes the perspective you are reading it from much more front-and-center than introductory materials may seem.) Possibly an important insight: elves grow in the same way that gardeners grow. They are active shapers of the world and not passive recipients of biomass. That's completely valid. The Aldryami are not representatives of "nature". Nature is a spider-woman who will chew you up and spit you out. Aldryami are rather representatives of woody plants and forest ecosystems particularly, with grasses and sedges and rushes and all sorts of others being more closely associated to Ernalda and land goddesses. Even there you have a slant, though in this case you'd strain yourself to see it. The star seers in central Genertela have the most complete knowledge of the sky lore among anyone, but many others still know things about the sky that they do not, and the star seers themselves know things they don't share with outsiders. But you get enough to use as an overview, and careful study of that can reveal further questions to push you along. It's also the PoV of people reading into very limited, scarce records and clues of the Great Darkness and making inferences about a subject (Chaos) which is notoriously difficult to pin down with true precision.

Ah, on the contrary, it is well known in certain exclusive circles how humans trace their origins back to the single ancestral figure of Pink Monkey, a foolish being who traded his brachiation for a larger penis-to-body-weight ratio, his mighty screaming for whispered gibberish, and his spirit parts for spectacular magical powers, all of which he was bad at. All humans also share a deep, inexorable connection to the Thumb Rune.

Trolls: It's not so much their proclivities towards eating other sapient beings which can cause issues. They're well aware that killing someone to eat them is considered rude at best. It's that they most often do so because their hunger just never goes away. Understand, first and foremost, that a troll is never truly satiated; they will always eat as much as they have the strength and willpower to eat. So without a method of controlling this hunger, they'll eat the food you give them, and then the food you didn't give them, and then the seed corn, and then the immature crop, and the trees, etc. This is of course self-destructive, but the hunger doesn't care. Every troll you meet who is genuinely interested in trade and peaceful relations is already exercising more discipline than you can really be aware of. Aldryami vs. Mostali: "Just religion" accounts for a lot, especially because both of them have experience of being immanent parts of Aldrya and Mostal, respectively. By and large, they are both striving to make the world a place where the other is enslaved to their will if not completely destroyed, and have begun to put those plans into action. At its heart, this is a primordial conflict between Growing and Making, and the failure of First Age compromise. But some say they are each the scions of Grower and Maker both. Aldryami x Humans and Trolls: Aldryami do recognize that humans and other animals use plant life for shelter and food, but they do not need shelter themselves and avoid killing plants for nourishment whenever possible. Aldryami have often been willing to compromise with humans, but consider that humans and trolls can destroy a forest in a few seasons which took centuries to grow to resplendent maturity. Imagine the perspective of beings with lifespans as long as those trees: some may be true elf-friends, but you can never trust their kin, nor humans as a whole, because they might act completely differently. The hardline Reforesters have a point, in that respect. Dragonewts x Others: Dragonewts don't have any particular enmity for others, at least in terms of a grand agenda. Other beings are mostly distractions, sometimes useful tools for advancing their consciousness, but more often obstacles and entanglements. Now, the Inhuman King and his Priests might have deeper intrigues, but if that's the case, most dragonewts are as ignorant as anyone else. Why are the humans separated into cultures but the Elder Races aren't: They are, in truth. Nearly all Gloranthan material is written from a (particular, scholastic) human point of view, with limited information on those kinds of intricacies. And the information which is gleaned is further limited by the kind of people interacting with humans in this manner. "Trolls" means kygerlithic trolls, dominated by Dagori Inkarth and Halikiv and to a lesser extent the Shadow Plateau, with others being largely unknown save for the most basic details. "Dwarfs" means orthodox Decamonists. Elves don't really have any detailed, reductive representation, and there may be more elves in "human cults" than any other elder race, but all of them are much more secretive as to their deeper natures, because they are made of plant rather than meat as are dwarfs or trolls. And "dragonewts" most definitely does not include New Wyrmish or other such oddities. Basically, the things you are reading are very useful, but they're limited by the very perspective which makes them useful. And this is applicable to many humans, too.

In the sense of some singular abstract higher power of all the universe wearing the mask of God and making a conscious, willful decision against one party, yes, it's very different. But that's also not really what it means. The cosmos is Glorantha and her Cosmic Court, it's all of the greater gods of the world in their many relationships, it's the Great Compromise. Many gods actively accept the Red Goddess, many more are netural to her existence, and a handful possess irreconcilable enmity. This arrangement is stable up until the conflict between the Red Goddess and Orlanth exceeds its boundaries, things begin breaking down, and new arrangements become possible. Her hand is seen in the deaths of both Orlanth (Enemy) and Ernalda (Neutral!) in the Great Winter. The previous world, with the relationships plotted out at Castle Blue, was no longer tenable. Thus it is the opening shot of the Hero Wars.

Because what is given can be taken away. If the status quo remained as it was after Castle Blue, there would be no Hero Wars. But that peace has been broken by the hands of mortals, so the conflict between the Old Gods and Sedenya returns. To be a little more specific, when two cults (mortal worshippers) are Enemies, they do not abide one another's existence. Each will completely destroy the other given the opportunity. But with the gods themselves, it's different in an important way— that conflict is is a part of their eternal identities, it is a part of what makes up the world of Time and the Cosmic Compromise. If given the power to overcome and vanquish their foe in that struggle, they will, because they can do nothing else. But this outcome is identical to the Gods War returning to the world.

See also: From The Red Book of Magic.

Sorry for the double notification, but I want to try to condense things down here in case you thought I was just being obstinate toward the premise. Rape and cannibalism are near-universally held examples of moral evil in Glorantha. With cannibalism, it's more clear that the nearness of that universalism is meaningful. Chaos is associated to evil, and that association continues to be meaningful even as not all chaos is evil and not all evil is chaos. Everyone has a different perspective on what evil is, and it is clear that different people experience similar acts very differently in terms of whether or not they are chaotic. The Devil is the moral evil of the world and the chief representative figure of chaos. All of these things are true, and despite that, Wakboth's moral evil remains neither relative nor absolute in its content. Wakboth is the very idea of moral evil itself. The masks and faces he wears are what differ across societies and mythologies, as do his names and actions. But the masks are not the chaos: the Devil is.

There are mythic examples of such. One is in the Entekosiad's Hunter Tales, and it does not result in the victims sprouting extra limbs or eyes etc. because of it. Just torment and despair and incomprehension at the act that had been committed. Then, it transforms into comprehension, power, and conciliation. That is how the hunter gods made peace with their life. Now, if they continually refused to see how the proverbial sausage was made, I would be very confident in the chaos of their actions.

Not particularly. If it's the literalism of "gaining" a taint by being born with it, I'm not really interested in grabbing a pair of tweezers and entertaining it. Broos have the chaos taint because they are a chaos taint, of Glorantha if you'd like, they are chaos in the same way the Howling Void was chaos. Their existence is a wound.

Yes, but in the sense that whether I annihilate you by eating every part of your being or annihilate you by burning your soul to ash for light and heat, I am still annihilating you. It's not a matter of social mores, which is why there remains a distinction between chaos and other maligned actions. Actions differ in their chaos across societies because they differ in their consequences across societies. It's not enough to just state the fact of the difference: we must seriously consider uz society, who is most often killed to be eaten there, and what the consequences of this are for uz and the world.

Not accidental ("devouring chaos is a deliberate partaking of chaos.") They are also estimates owing to being given the benefit of the doubt with not understanding what you are doing. But this is also besides the point, because volition just speeds your way to the taint, and is not its ultimate cause. Yes. They are the products of chaos. When given even the possibility of ethical consideration and understanding from other beings, and then reflecting upon their own existence, their typical reaction is to kill themselves. This is tragic. It's understandable and noble to want to heal this affliction. It's not feasible to do so by pretending that they are something they are not. Yes. Again, chaos is not any specified form of moral evil, which is why these dilemmas will fail to capture it into our presumed intuitions. This is the argument of Chalana Arroy and Arroin; in the struggle of the Gods War, Chalana chose action (and perfidy), and Arroin chose purity and passivity. Both are well-loved, but Chalana had to redeem herself and also redeemed the world, while Arroin stayed behind and bled himself into nothing eternal. It's a cosmic phenomenon, which is reflected by cult, which is in turn reflected by society.

This is where trying to tie the taint of chaos into specific moralities falls apart, because nobody in Glorantha will gain a chaos taint owing to other people harming the innocent. As much as everyone else regrets it, that violence and suffering is a part of the world, and you are not required to take bodhisattva vows to be free of the taint of chaos. We can't avoid the interconnectedness here. Cannibalism for most Gloranthan humans is chaotic because chaos is the consequence of that act as it is situated in the world. Orlanthi society is the mediation of violence by honour and kinship obligations, but when the violence people commit against one another is motivated by a hunger the earth cannot abate, there's no way to stop the coming destruction, either turned inward upon themselves or outward upon everyone else. And acting as an agent of annihilation makes you chaotic. Even within this context, not all cannibalism results in a chaotic taint. The Kitori know of how Ivarne sustained her children with her own frostbitten flesh. It just runs a great risk. If you make it a habit across feast and famine years, you've pretty clearly lost any benefit of the doubt. If you feel compelled to repeat cannibalism in the absence of any hope for an alternative, you've also lost the benefit of the doubt. And even transgressing just once may taint you, if you immediately embrace your actions as natural and acceptable (maybe you've always been more of an ogre than you know). As an aside, there's only one method of completely coercive chaos taints, which is Corruption. This spell reaches into someone's soul and dissolves it. The visible effects are merely a reflection of the horror that represents.

Rather, the necessity of one's actions does not annul their consequences. And as a matter of course, chaos brings with it necessity. Glorantha was born by necessity, grown by necessity, limited by necessity, and driven into the Gods War by necessity. The world ended by necessity. But it was reborn by mutual recognition and compromise. That's what I want to emphasize: chaos was each and every being fighting the Gods War. The mutant goat-men, half-scorpions and slimes aren't chaotic because of their shape or even their specific actions, but because they never stopped fighting. Thed never stopped fighting.

Let's have a look at the given canon associations of the Chaos Rune in current publications. The only place I could find this listed is in the RQG Starter Set. After the name and its type (Form), we have the associations: Not off to a good start. Of these, annihilation we can be pretty confident about. Chaos is oblivion. This is often gravely misunderstood, but it does need to be recognized. "Perversion of the other Runes" leaves open the questions of how and into what, because "chaos" and "annihilation" don't seem to be answers. So, evil. People in Glorantha have as many varying ideas of good and evil as do the people of Earth. Sure, there are often commonalities and some beliefs may be more prominent than others, but none of that can possibly be absolute, essential, and atomic in the way that a Rune requires. So it must be a very abstract consideration of evil: the universal force of moral opposition itself. Everyone has the idea of evil, but differ in what they place within that empty space. To add a twist here, though, chaos taint hardly seems correlated to guilt over one's actions. Even among the dedicated chaotics (without chaos features, let's add), I strongly suspect that very few of them would identify themselves as evil, consciously or otherwise. They see their transgressions as correct or necessary. There is no physical/spiritual divide to Chaos specifically. Overt chaos features are manifestations from the non-hole. We know this to be the case because it's very possible to gain chaos features without gaining a chaos taint: the rune spell Conversion of Chaos does just this. The extra arm is just an arm. What makes it chaotic is the chaotic soul it's grown upon. Considering all of the above, let's again compare ogres and the Cannibal Cult of the Wastes. The Cannibal Cult serves hungry ghosts; Cacodemon initiates serve themselves and whoever can coerce them into service. The Cannibal Cult has some link to the Survival Covenant (they may just be a part of it!); Fiends are disassembled parts of the Devil which roam freely. The Survival Covenant is a part of the world; Cacodemon is the part of Wakboth that exists outside of the Compromise. The Cannibal Cult are not a part of any social order with their prey, but they seem to be a part of the cosmic order, and that's what makes the difference. Acting against the cosmic order is chaotic. If your actions are in line with the cosmic order, integrated with it, performing some function within it, they are not chaotic. Even if they might strike someone as being worse, looked at another way.

That would put you in the company of unbonded and unsanctioned tricksters, which might actually be a step down in social acceptability. So I suppose it checks out from that angle, at least.

There is also the existence of the eku ponies in Maniria and Ralios around the Mislari foothills and valleys. This isn't just an ancient population of wild horses, but the descendants of horses which refused to serve Kargzant and be ridden. The Rockwoods and the Mislari are often hinted to be less impassable than presumed, and I'd say that certainly riders could have crossed the Mislari if the ponies can. Those secrets are just lost to us. Whether riding came across the Rockwoods as Hyalor isn't really as important as acknowledging that there were riders in western Genertela in the Godtime (though it is my belief that it did).

Eh, close enough. Sure. I am also certified to attend and assist home or field deliveries and assess potentially dangerous reproductive health situations. Here's what pops out to me about Bless Pregnancy: That can mean a lot of things, but because this spell explicitly stacks with Birthing, which specifies it grants "safe and painless pregnancy", I will assume that Bless Pregnancy is talking about the typically unavoidable miseries, difficulties, and inconveniences of pregnancy itself rather than other reproductive problems. In a choice between Bless Pregnancy and Birthing, you should always choose Birthing. This spell is miraculous: not only does it safely heal someone of an ectopic pregnancy, it changes that pregnancy into a healthy uterine pregnancy, it prevents any of the serious complications involved in labour and even prevents any possibility of stillbirth. No deep vein thrombosis or risk of embolism. Probably the greatest spell of life/fertility in Glorantha. Bless Pregnancy's +50% to the childbirth roll also guarantees live birth, but also increases the likelihood of twins, if I understand it correctly? The main attraction of this spell is avoiding debilitating impairment, but like the health risks of pregnancy and labour to the mother, RuneQuest doesn't come with any rules or guidelines on playing that out. Nonetheless, pregnancy comes with the risk of not being able to do much work for up to about two seasons, and losing a single person's contributions can be painful to a premodern agricultural community. Bad timing can be even worse. Bless Pregnancy solves both of those issues, and so is probably more common than a direct comparison with other Rune Spells may suggest.

So let me pull and be pulled, it's that kind of day. The Feldichi. Sources are lacking. To read them, we must read from context. Starting with the surrounding regions: On the other side of the Rockwoods, we have the Enerali. Dorastor lies between the western and eastern horse peoples. Parts of the Enerali become friendly with both elves and, most interestingly, unicorns, spurious and anachronistic as it is. Other than that, the Enerali and the Feldichi seem to have little in common. Towards Peloria either northeast or southeast, there is another spurious and anachronistic link in the form of the Gold Wheel Dancers, who are their own set of unknowns. They are also linked to fabulous creations and fading from Time, and both historic named Yardoni seemed invested in the Unity which Dorastor represented. North is where it gets interesting. This is the land of Keftavar and the Plow, Vanstal, between the Esel and Doresel rivers. Here there are contests with the Metal Shapers, and Keftavar gains the Plow. There is food for everyone now, but they castrate his brother (perhaps over winning the contest) and in return Keftavar stamps the ground into hard earth, making them need the plow. Here was a tribe called Enelvi. It split in half, one remaining in Vanstal and the other following the hero Kereus to fight the Orendanarans who were mistreating the Enelvi's Wendarian kin. They won, becoming kings of Bindle and establishing suzerainty over the blue peoples of the Sweet Sea and its rivers. Later the bulls headed east to Lake Oronin to fight Yargan and his Kingdom of Logic(!), again succeeding. Bisos killed Yargan, but fascinatingly brings him back to life. He respects his opponent that much. The Cannibal God. There are other blue peoples, who fled the bull to live beneath the water, or made distant mountains for themselves, or perhaps went elsewhere. But it's reasonable to assume that this empire still contained many Logicians, and the descendants of the Metal Shapers (the ancient Wendarian men), and the bull-folk, and the Oroninae, and Naverians with their Jernotian Way. That's quite the suggestive mix for this search. Anyway, the bulls win by violence and everything is perfect and wonderful, we eat the food of the gods, and so on. What happens next is almost farcical in its implications. It's short but I won't reproduce it here. "The Bad Gods" in the Bisos Cycle of the Entekosiad. After those terrible gods have their way, the world is growing colder. Food isn't growing so well. Obviously, the answer is for the bulls to invade their own ancestral lands of Vanstal. They kill the False King and take his warmer lands. And everything is better again! We aren't told where the ancient other half of the Enelvi or the river people go. Some ages later, the Theyalans find Dorastor a land of ruins and hard-packed earth, but no people. It is settled by the Plow Clan. [e: I forgot Yargan's (or his god's) taste for human life.]

That's very dubious to me. Most likely, Hyalor means "horse-riders". The specificity of the horse-riders or the name of their founder hero is immaterial to a tale post-dating Belintar. Also, if they were coming from future Dorastor, what sea would they be fleeing across? Addendum: That's not to say that the Feldichi don't have some kind of distant relationship here. Friendly with Aldryami, hostile with Mostali, founded by a being identified in Talastar as Eurmal who is also called the father of ogres. There are a lot of threads to trace. If they do have a Western heritage on some level, I'd expect them to have come from the north, after the Flood Age.

Let's see what happens when we read "A God Forgot Story" as a recollection of Western wanderings, the Speaking Tour and the Expulsion Walk. First is the ancestors of God Forgot living with their god. Second we have the Kachisti. In this view, they are wandering to find their god. If they understand their god as communication, that's already compatible with the Speaking Tour. Third, they settle with the help of a goddess. This is most likely a land goddess, and I think the only viable candidate if we are to name one is Seshna Likita. They are driven from this place by unnamed waves of invaders. Nidan Mostali, Vadeli, Aerlithi, Banthe, or others. Fourth, they settle with the help of a son. Their god dies to Trickster and they are driven away by Hyalor. This seems to me as pointing inland to Tanisor, Ralios, and the Enerali. Fifth, a Chaos place, with another son. There's a loose inference this is New Malkonwal. Most interesting here is the mention of their god becoming imprisoned by Argan Argar. Later, we we would know such a god as being named Veskarthan, Caladra, or Lodril. Here I recall the Malkion of the Fifth Action being Elmalkion, Malkion the (G)Old. The foes of his people became the Demons of Matter and the Krjalki of Entropy. They spread everywhere. Malkion died, and the Tower of Reason crumbled. The survivors found their only refuge in the Caves of Instinct. Lastly, they fled to the Leftarm Islands. I once discovered something interesting here, in the Greater Darkness: moving southeast from Heortland, the Pole Star vanishes behind Kero Fin, and the archipelago is bereft even of that flickering light.