hipsterinspace

3 hours ago, Darius West said:

Now ALL Orlanthi culture derives from the Heortlands.  They may have headed north, but at their core they look to the Heortlands as the heartland of Orlanthi culture, because that is where the Orlanthi survivors of the Great Darkness came from and spread from.  In later ages Orlanthi from the north will go on pilgrimage to Kero Fin and the Temple of Old Wind and learn how to be proper Orlanthi. 

There are several Orlanthi groups who have been separate from the Heortlings since before time, before Heort, when they were all Vingkotling tribes. They’ve had contact, I’m sure there are even pilgrimages, but they haven’t been the same group or had the same cultural practices for thousands of years. They’ve been shaped by the contingent factors of their society and its location. Do you have a source for this claim that they went to the Heortlings to be re-educated on how to be “Proper Orlanthi”?

3 hours ago, Darius West said:

Elmal should be treated as a separate deity, even if he is a similar deity.  Elmal is a Thunder Brother and thus a distinct part of  Orlanth's pantheon.  Yelmalio clearly isn't.  Elmal and Yelmalio are culturally distinct religious practices and will continue to be separate whether or not they worship the same deity.  Ultimately it is the worshippers who will decide and they will do so based on politics, and that means most clans won't want the disloyal thane Yelmalio to walk among them.

Plenty of Orlanthi clans have Seven Mothers initiates among them, even in Sartar prior to the Dragonrise. It’s far from out of the ordinary in the Provinces and Tarsh. Whether or not you want to enforce a strong taboo against Yelmalio among your Orlanthi, it’s vastly more mythically problematic to have Seven Mothers around, but they’re still there in significant numbers.

3 hours ago, Darius West said:

This suggests to me that Elmal has retained his fire powers, which has long been part of my Elmal cult write-up.

Again, if you’d like to vary your Glorantha that way, you’re free to, but it has been made clear that this is not the case any longer.

5 hours ago, radmonger said:

Elmal is Yelmalio, so 'Yelmalio, not Elmal' is not really a thing. They would be more likely to say something like  'I'm a true Elmali, initiated at the Vaarntar temple. Not one of those idiots from up at Runegate'.

In the case of a Sairdite Orlanthi Yelmalion, they would know him as Yelmalio, explicitly the Little Yelm. This is what I mean. Many of them would be recognizable as clan-dwelling Dog Orlanthi, though since 1582 many have gone to the Sun Domes. There are places that recognize him as such but still follow the cultural lifeways of the broader Orlanthi.

4 hours ago, Darius West said:

Well, first up, Elmal is listed as a Thunder Brother in the Stafford Library's "The Book of Heortling Mythology".  The Thunder Brothers are all Orlanthi subcults.  Yelmalio is not.  I direct you to page 169 where the situation is laid out in the Yelmalio section.  Frankly I think Greg Stafford's own words are good enough for me.

Book of Heortling Mythology is an in-universe document of myths among the Heortlings from the First Age (note, specifically the Heortlings, not all Orlanthi). It’s an intentionally limited aperture that carries their particular biases, it isn’t representative of the cults and cultures as we know them in the Third Age. In contravention to Book of Heortling Mythology, some Orlanthi groups keep dogs (fittingly called Dog Orlanthi), some Orlanthi groups adhere to the Western caste system and worship the Invisible God in addition to the Lightbringer gods (prominently in Jonatela), and some Orlanthi have a significant minority of Yelmalio (as Yelmalio, not Elmal) worshippers within their clans.

It’s also been said that in the First Age it was possible to worship Humakt through Orlanth, for example, but that stopped being the case at some point, and I’m not going to argue that it should be the case in the Third Age over a thousand years later.

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

Not so imo.  Elmali have a very different set of myths about their god to those the Yelmalios have.  How many sects in our world claim to follow the One True God, and yet how many schismatic iterations of that god are there?  Aten, Ahura Mazda, Brahma, YHVH, El Elyon, Allah etc. etc.  People can be very selective about what they believe and how they worship.  They can also spin the so-called "Yelmalio Mythos" in a million different ways to tell the story they want to tell.   I think the Elmal Mythos tells a very different story, about how a brow-beaten soldier god from the Solar Pantheon learned a different and freer way to live from the constrained life that had been forced upon him, and ultimately repaid his new more lenient lord with faithful service against chaos in the Greater Darkness.

You’re free to vary your Glorantha as you please on this matter and any others, but that’s clearly what this is. You demand textual sources, are presented with them, and then totally disregard what they say. There’s been ample textual evidence presented, but you are committed to sticking with your own absolutist view of both cults and culture, one that does not line up with what has been presented in the guide or in the numerous articles about the subjects on Well of Daliath.

51 minutes ago, HreshtIronBorne said:

I guess I have to come up with an Agimori Ancestor worshiper's view of the spirit plane from whole cloth, then populate some of the charts from the core rules with spirits befitting that realm? On the note of Agimori Shaman, could an ancestor worshipping Agimori get magic from Lodril through Ancestor Worship? 

As a people descended from fire and still very directly connected to it, I would think Oakfed will get some pretty significant veneration from such a tradition, as both one of the most important Fire spirits of Prax and as a son of Lodril and brother to their people.

As the primary god/spirit followed by their people, Foundchild probably gets veneration from shamans for teaching them how to hunt to survive, and if the old material is anything to go by, probably offers Sureshot as a spirit cult. I don’t know that the Men-and-a-Half use dogs, but Brother Dog is spiritually and mythically important to Foundchild’s cult and practices, and offers the rune spell Conquer Beast.

Perhaps a particularly powerful ancestor shaman might be able to connect with one of the great spirits/gods from their old home in Pamaltela to get access to Soulspear from Vangono or Fleetfoot from Jmijie, something like that, but that would probably be difficult to mythically reconcile in Prax where many of their analogues were destroyed by chaos.

7 hours ago, Darius West said:

Here I must disagree.  Yelmalios are phalangites and Orlanthi don't have Yelmalios among them; they aren't friendly cults.  The Heortland is the origin point of Orlanthi belief and Elmal spreads out from there.  Also, just because a region is conquered by the Lunars doesn't mean they automatically adopt Yelmalio and chuck out Elmal.  It just doesn't work.

Plenty of Neutral cults coexist within societies, even Orlanthi society. Yelmalio isn’t hostile to Orlanth, he has the same level of relationship that Waha has to Orlanth, neutral, and the two of them get along just fine inside of very insular Praxian tribes. Yelmalio and Orlanth both coexist inside of Praxian tribes without trouble. They share the same level of relationship that is shared between plenty of cults that coexist without trouble inside of Orlanthi society, they just don’t typically share rites, that’s what Neutral means.

Maybe more important than Yelmalio’s relationship with Orlanth, which again is Neutral, not Hostile, is his Associate relationship with Ernalda, who is also Yelmalio’s wife. The cults can easily be given that basis to coexist in the same social order through the centrality of the Earth religion in the places that the now-Tarshites departed from. The Bell Temple in Filichet is one of the biggest Earth temples around, and as the article shows, there’s plenty of important Earth worship to tie Orlanth and Yelmalio together there.

You’re free to disagree with what has been written, but it’s made clear that Elmal is a Heortling take on Yelmalio rather than Yelmalio being a Solar corruption of Elmal. People who immigrated from north of Dragon Pass into Tarsh brought with them their own native Yelmalio tradition. Yelmalio is perhaps more their god than anyone else’s. The Lunars didn’t convert them to Yelmalio, they had worshipped Yelmalio from before the Dawn, and for some that was probably a big reason why they left when the Lunars conquered their homeland, after all, the Red Goddess and Yelmalio are Hostile.

As for your description of Yelmalio as a god of phalangites, that’s disputed here:

One mistaken assumption is that Yelmalio is the god of pike warfare. He’s not, although the Spear and the Arrow are his weapons. His temples developed a means of fighting in an organised and disciplined manner for their own mundane survival, but that is a historical development, and not something from Yelmalio’s deeds.

Elsewhere, Yelmalio is a god of herders, farmers, and cavalry. If you want a specific god of phalanxes, that’s probably a title that best belongs to Polaris more than Yelmalio.

1 hour ago, davecake said:

Again, while it’s a cool idea, it doesn’t seem to fit all of even the small number of Superheroes we know about - Jar-Eel has been an incarnation of the Red Goddess since birth, or at least childhood, and it’s hard to think of any notable myths that she has created independent of being an avatar of the goddess. 

Yeah, I think every superhero seems to be defined by being almost inseparable from the divine persona they’re identified with. Jar-eel is the Red Goddess. Harrek is the White Bear. Androgeus seems like a special case because they actually used to be a god way back when. Arkat, as maybe the most powerful heroquester of all time, seems to defy this on some level, but some of that might be wrapped up in the being Brithini, in being the avatar of two other gods, or in being born as the shadow of Nysalor. Harder to say with the Seven Mothers, they fully apotheosized after reassembling the moon, but certainly most of them were also prolific heroquesters given their accomplishments.

1 hour ago, davecake said:

I don’t think it’s defining, but one thing I do think is true of all Superheroes but not all Heroes - they are capable (either directly, or via their close companions or magic allies ) of heroic level feats dealing with all four forms of magic/all four other worlds,  including being Illuminated and having significant mystic ability, though not necessarily by the conventional method. They have no magical ‘weak points’, are able to deal with dragons etc in part using mystic means, and need not acknowledge the gods as their superiors. 

I would agree that many heroes and all superheroes are illuminated: heroquest to enough strange places and things probably start to move in that direction, especially with the dangerous, experimental kind that Jar-eel and Harrek are both said to be very adept at. I don’t know whether that would be the source of their immunity to most magic, I’d think it’s more that they exist so fully on the other side that most magic doesn’t really touch them, but it certainly helps with navigating otherwise fraught mythic relationships to find new powers.

Harrek is also mentioned as being a self-initiated shaman, which is terrifying, doubly so when his fetch is probably his god who he slew and bound (Argrath did something similar with the White Bull). Jar-eel, on the other hand, has her own Glowspot, something shared with the Silver Shadow of the Red Goddess and the Crimson Bat, making her both a powerful magician in her own right and greatly increasing the power of all Lunar magic in her presence. I wouldn’t think either one of them are sorcerers, though Arkat was, and if anyone had mastered all forms of magic it was probably him in his final form, if not as an illuminated mistress race troll (who are said to have sorcerer-shaman-priestesses among their number).

45 minutes ago, radmonger said:

Yes, they have 14 great temples, compared to the 0 to 2 remaining minor temples to the Elmal subcult in dragon pass.

Given the relatively short distances involved, along a major trade route, and the (since Monrogh) mutual cross-recognition of initiation between temples, there is really no plausible way for those temples not to know and teach every myth known to the Elmal subcult that they find useful.

I get the sense that they wouldn’t find “Elmal’s myths” useful because Monrogh’s main contention is that Elmal’s myths are Yelmalio’s myths, but that his cult’s disconnection from Yelm and mythic and temporal subordination to Orlanth hamstrung them. Whether that’s true or not is another question, but in effect, Monrogh knew everything they knew and then said he knew some more, which he then spread as his revelation.

13 minutes ago, radmonger said:

I think that's the wrong way to read what Jeff writes. To him, Elmal is entirely and 100% Yelmalio, just as orlanth thunderous is 100% orlanth adventerous. So when he says 'Yelmalio', you cannot conclude form that 'not Elmal'. 

To most Glorantha lore fiends, Yelmalio worshipped as orlanth's sidekick, married to Redalda, is Elmal. Just as to Police fans, Gordon Sumner on stage singing _Message in a Bottle_  is Sting. if someone decides 'he is a pretentious prick and i am not going to do him the honor of using that silly name', that doesn't imply 'Sting is somewhere else, not on stage'.

A deity by any other name is still going to be able to stab you with a big spear.

All Great Temples to Yelmalio will provide, by the RQ;G rules, access to all Yelmalio subcults. if they don't do that, they are merely major, not great. So at all of the 15 canonical sun domes, the version of yelmalio for which he is an exile working as a horse patroller is as mythically available as the ones where he is son of the sun, or the cold sun in his own right.

This is natural; the distances involved are not that great, and Yelmalio is relatively formally organised as cults go. So as soon as cross-initiation was demonstrated to be possible (by Monrogh), all magical secrets would have been disseminated to all 15 great temples within a decade at most.

 

The big point there in what Jeff posted seems to be that, in contrast to the Pelorian tradition, Elmal is a mythically constrained version of Yelmalio. Sure, they are effectively the same god, but only the Elmal group gets associate status with Orlanth, who grants Shield, something that’s contingent on his befriending and ultimately becoming a hanger-on to Orlanth. I don’t think they refer to him as a Thunder Brother in any of the canon material, but that would make him even more directly subservient to Orlanth.

In contrast, Pelorian Yelmalio cult gets Shield from Yelm, alongside one-use Sunspear for rune levels, a gift from father to son. Mythically they are independent, not subservient to Orlanth in any capacity, but also not subservient to Yelm. For Hendriki and Heortlanders, cut off from the broader Solar mythic complex, it makes a lot of sense to tie him to what is nearby and accessible, there were probably a bunch of heroquesters who made friends with or swore loyalty to Orlanth at the Hill of Gold (Elmal’s trading shields myth), but for the others it’s unnecessary to make that kind of compromise, and I’m sure they would see it as a compromise.

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

I have now read multiple different and conflicting things about where the settlers in far Point came from.  I strongly doubt that ANY Orlanthi tradition regards Yelmalio as part of their pantheon.  Elmal is a Thunder Brother, while Yelmalio are those odd solar outsiders whom they have little to do with.  I don't think Sairdite Orlanthi have a different tradition to Heortlanders on this matter.  Proof of this is the lack of a Sun Dome temple in Alda Chur.  After Harvar Ironfist comes to power one will be built, but not before.  Yelmalio is simply not culturally part of Orlanthi society, and the Yelmalio cult hierarchy doesn't want to be part of Orlanthi society, in fact they are disdainful of it, and the reverse is equally true.  Sairdite Orlanthi will have an Elmali tradition and will believe that Yelmalio is a separate deity with similar powers.  This is not a matter similar to Catholics and protestants who admit they worship the same god; this is more like "Ahura Mazda is not Yahweh and is not Allah, and we have been fighting those other religions for years".  All Orlanthi culture comes from the South in the Heortlands and moves north Before Time, and then subsequently during the First and Second Ages.  This is when the Elmal cult is established in the Barbarian Belt in the lands north of Tarsh.  Elmal exists in the Heortlands Before Time and goes north with the Barbarians.   The various sun dome cults are small and insular by comparison and view themselves as separate from the Orlanthi.  Elmali living among the Orlanthi do not see themselves as the same as these Solar Cultists.  I have never seen anything on paper that says that Tarshite Orlanthi have no Elmal cult and instead embrace Yelmalio or Antirius, and I don't accept that any Orlanthi societies have a Yelmalio cult.   Sun Domers are the frontier cult of the Solar Pantheon who exist to fight the Orlanthi on behalf of the Solar Gods, not befriend them.  Each Sun Dome Temple is an incursion of Solar Worship into Orlanthi lands and is not seen in a friendly way.  It might be tolerated, but it will not be liked, and relations are always strained.

The settlers at Far Point speak Tarshite. Tarshites are the Orlanthi of what is now the Lunar Provinces and lowland Peloria. They have had long and often productive contact with Solar cultures, in contrast to the Southern Theyalan groups who were cut off for hundreds of years after the Dragonkill War and lived under the dominion of Darkness, Ezkankekko, paying tribute to his trolls prior to the rise of Belintar. While there are a bunch of Sun Domes in lowland Peloria, especially in Saird (plus two in Tarsh), Yelmalio certainly has minor temples, and there are undoubtedly clan and tribal temples that exist along the exact same lines as those of Orlanth in Sartarite tribes. The Sun Domes were important once, in the early Second Age, but by the start of the Third Age their importance had declined and most Yelmalio worshipers were farmers from regular clans.

From the article I linked to further up-thread, conveniently linked again here:

For almost 200 years [after 956, the defeat of the EWF in Saird], Saird was a melting point of Yelmalion, Orlanthi, Dara Happan, and Carmanian cultures. Chaos and dragons were identified with Ganesatarus the Devil, the Lodril cult was imported but Dendara did not take, every man was the Last Light against the dragons, and Yelm and Orlanth were viewed as the Rival Brothers – who would naturally quarrel unless held together for a greater purpose (usually by Yelmalio).

….

But you can see from this, Yelmalio has been around in Peloria since the beginning.

The only weird thing was the Hendriki Tribe that worshiped a limited and constrained version of Yelmalio…

When you tell the story from this perspective, the Praxian Sun Dome Temple is just a weird footnote (“did you know that Yelmalio made it all the way to Prax in the Second Age, and there is a weird little colony of them still there! Wow!”), and the whole Elmal-Yelmalio thing becomes another footnote (“did you know that the rebellious Hendriking tribe had a weird little Yelmalio variant that was tolerated by the trolls and the Only Old One, but it died out in the 1550s when they embraced the larger Yelmalio cult?”).

In short, they don’t have Elmal. When they migrated south after their homelands were conquered by Hwarin Dalthippa and the Lunars, they almost certainly brought those traditions with them.

21 minutes ago, Darius West said:

I don't think you understood my position at all.  I don't contest the idea that there are various Sun Dome cults coming out of Saird and Peloria.  My issue is that the victory of Monrogh in the Elmal War within South Sartar/North Hendrikiland  doesn't suddenly mean that all the Elmal worshippers in Sartar will suddenly give up on their Elmal traditions and become Yelmalio hoplites.  I am also pointin out that Far Point, which is a very isolated part of Sartar, on a troll haunted border with terrain inhospitable to hoplite tactics, is in no hurry to adopt a style of Solar warfare that is not appropriate for their environment, and will be in no rush to adopt Yelmalio beliefs from the south.  Most Far Pointer will likely see such acts as a slap in the face to everything they believe about their god, Elmal the Thunder Brother, and his place in the world.

I think we’re talking past each other. My point is that the people in Far Point are Tarshites who are from Saird. The Northern Theyalan-speaking groups originate from the Barbarian Belt and crossed into Dragon Pass from the North, Elmal is the foreign tradition from the south. They come from a place with native Yelmalio tradition that has persisted largely uninterrupted (though in several different forms) throughout time. They were able to travel to the Hill of Gold when the Heortlings were cut off by the crossline and inhuman occupation. That means that they have no need to convert to being something they already are. They would still know him as Yelmalio even if they aren’t phalangites.

Yelmalio in whatever form is also pretty well known for fighting trolls, certainly moreso than the Heortling Elmal cult, who for centuries were seemingly content to live in a place ruled over by darkness, paying tribute to Ezkankekko and his Kitori.

On 4/15/2023 at 3:52 AM, DrGoth said:

Well, they may have been Yelmalio already, but that doesn't mean they always were. Check Wyrms Footnoters #15, page 41, which is in the article on the Far Place. 

"The Aldachuri gave the Golden Spearman a shrine in the Elmal Temple"

That means they had an Elmal temple. Now that was somewhere in the period 1455-1490, so some time before the present setting.  A little later in that article it has "In the mid-1500s, Lunar magicians proved to the tribal priests that the Golden Spearman was a son of Emperor Yelm and an enemy of Orlanth."  It also talks about Monrogh around there. It also says the Elmali at Alda-Chur recognised Yelmalio, but those at Ironspike stuck with Elmal.  So lots went over to Yelmalio, but by 1625 there might (maybe) be some old-style hangers on.

They’ve definitely retconned several things from WF15, even changing some things in a way that that doesn’t seem to make sense, like getting rid of the Ergeshi helots that the Sun Domers ruled over (being a professional warrior means it’s a lot harder to farm). Either way, the thing that they have emphasized strongly is that Elmal is a Heortling/Hendriki thing, and the people of Far Place are of Tarshite/Sairdite origins, the place Yelmalio comes from, they wouldn’t need the Lunar magicians to lead them astray. I like Elmal, I think that conflict is interesting, I just don’t think it’s going to play out among people who had continued contact with Solar cultures.

4 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

i mean, i might if that was the table standard. some people like to play a little more... idk, 1978 D&D table? I don't know if there is a term for these kinds of styles of play. I don't think Runequest has a very strong play profile, in contrast to many newer game systems. In Mörk Borg, your characters are like tissues ("soft, strong, and disposable" - Ms White), in other games you explicitly discuss out-of-character things more like ... writing a novel? So it might be fine to be "hostile" at your Runequest player table.

I usually hear this style referred to as OSR, Old School Roleplaying. It’s generally used for people who want to run everything like a hex/dungeon crawl, for which there are much better systems than RQ.

I’m of the same mind as many here, I’d never give a player character a chaos taint based on the capriciousness of the dice. I wouldn’t want to rob my players of their agency like that.

52 minutes ago, svensson said:

I put Oath and Detect Truth in the spell lists to acknowledge Elmal's ties with the Truth Rune and I don't feel Oath is as 'Humakt-ish' as, say, Sever Spirit. I think of Oath as a spell to bind strangers into an honorable pact, thereby building the trust that is essential to a clan, so I included it in Elmal's portfolio. My thought was that in the Great Darkness, many strangers were guided to safety by Elmal's Light. Trust had to be built and the Oath spell illustrates that process.

Crucially, Sever Spirit is integrated into the Oath spell: if you break your oath you get hit with a Sever Spirit with an effective POW of the magic points stacked into it.

Given that he has Hastatus the spear god as a subservient cult, I have to imagine the Polaris cult in the upcoming Solar cults book is probably going to look a lot like what some people wish the canonical Elmal or Yelmalio was in terms of magic.

2 hours ago, svensson said:

Rune Magic: Command Horse, Shield. Sunbrighten, Sure Shot, True Spear 

Associate Cult Magics:  

-- Orlanth provides Cloud Clear and Lightning 

-- Chalana Arroy provides Restore Health 

 

If you want Sartar Kingdom of Heroes Elmal I’d change the list to:

Rune Magic: All common, plus Clear Sight, Cloud Clear, Sunbright, Sureshot, True Spear.

Subservient cults

- Beren provides Command Horse

- Redalda (shared with Ernalda) provides Speak to Horse and training in the skill Understand Horse (Magic, 00%)

- Urzani provide Dismiss and Summon Fire Elemental (small)

Associate cults

- Chalana Arroy provides Restore Vision

- Ernalda provides Heal Body

- Esrola provides Bless Crops

- Orlanth provides Shield

3 hours ago, radmonger said:

It also justifies why 7 mothers is a city-based religion; their shrines suck. No clan chief would feel a pull towards establishing a 7M shrine to get access to Reflection. So 7M is  all about city-based temples.

I don’t think they’d think about it in those terms. They would have a shrine if they had enough initiates around, that’s probably the problem much of the time. In cities there is pressure to convert for the preferential trade, tax breaks, social advantages, and sometimes genuine religious experience. In the countryside there’s probably more pressure to do as your clan and kin do. Some might embrace the advantages of the empire, but I’d imagine people would be more suspicious.

41 minutes ago, radmonger said:

One thing I am not clear on is whether you can have a shrine to the seven mothers collectively, or if they are only unified at the temple level. Isn't a 7m temple really just a collection of shrines to mutually associated deities, with the typical central god left out?

I’d imagine you can, the RQ3 write up has shrines to the Seven Mothers that provide Madness. They seem to worship the Seven Mothers as a collective entity, a composite cult that reflects their deed of putting together the Red Goddess. It’s possible to worship just one of the individual mothers, it’s even possible to transfer initiations from the Seven Mothers cult into to one of the individual cults, but we won’t have rules for that until next year.

41 minutes ago, radmonger said:

iirc, Etyries is accepted as both a subcult of Issaries, and one of the seven mothers. If a clan wants to avoid internal religious strife, with two clashing ceremonies and conflict over which to go to, that seems the most likely compromise. The trade routes to the north stay open as armies come and go, and your trader needs to have a stand at the market where the wagons stop.

Etyries isn’t one of the Seven Mothers, but she is a fellow Lunar cult. She is said to be a daughter of Issaries and is an associate of both. According to Well of Daliath a lot of her cult are dual initiated into Issaries.

I’d argue that Vasana is more likely to be placed into the role of Larnste than anything else, especially given that her god Orlanth, in his guise as Larnsti, has mastered the magic of change. That’s likely to be something that requires illumination or some other kind of mystical consciousness to really take advantage of, but it opens a door for that primordial mythic link without having to experimentally create something new from whole cloth. On some level every venture into the Green Age is going to be an experimental heroquest, there aren’t a lot of myths that people know of that time, but you probably want to minimize potential problems when the risks are so high.

If you’re looking at the pregens, the one with the much bigger problem is probably going to be Vishi, where the conditions of his god’s mythology have not happened and should absolutely be avoided, killing Genert in the Green Age would be very bad.

59 minutes ago, DrGoth said:

That's where Alda Chur and Jonstown differ, at least according to Jeff's figures. The 'other tribes' total 1200 between, so not many in each clan. But tribes around Alda Chur have 500 each in addition to the 500 in Alda-chur.  It's a much higher number in the countryside there than elsewhere in Sartar,  Once you get numbers that high, how the clan remains a single community becomes an issue.  Do we have clans where being an initiate of one and a lay member of the other is just what happens?

The Coming Storm and Eleven Lights material is pre-Dragonrise, starting in 1618, so there hasn’t been the big exodus of Lunar cultists that happens after the Empire are ousted in 1625. I’d imagine it looks a lot different demographically when there’s a Lunar garrison in Jonstown of (at least on paper) multiple thousands.

The Emerald Sword, the clan used to represent the hated Dinacoli in The Coming Storm, are at the level where they have more Lunar cultists than Orlanth worshippers, with the biggest cults being Ernalda, Barntar (in place of Orlanth), and the Seven Mothers. They’re all part of the same clan, which probably papers over religious differences with the bonds of kin, but the chief and his household are majority Lunar cultists despite having a “Lightbringer ring”. Ironically, the only Orlanth cultist on their ring is the representative of Eurmal.

6 hours ago, DrGoth said:

So going back to where I started this thread, with some figures from Jeff about Seven Mothers Initiates in Sartar. The numbers included some clans with 500 initiates.  I don't think they would be concentrated in a single clan.  So they are spread over a few clans, forming a not insignificant minority. So what happens with these clans come sacred time? Those clans are going to need some sort of Sacred Time ceremony where they come together as a community. At least if they want to stay a community.  Which I assume these clans do.

I find it unlikely that the Seven Mothers initiates are going to be welcome in the Lightbringer ceremonies (or want to take part). Maybe (big maybe to me) some are both Seven Mothers and Lightbringer initiates, but I actually find that unlikely. The Seven Mothers will obviously have its own Sacred Time rituals.  Which the Seven Mothers initiates will want to take part in.  And which, conversely, the Lightbringer initiates won't and won't be welcome at.

In the material for the Red Cow clan from The Coming Storm and Eleven Lights, the 7 Mothers converts in the clan (and likely whole Cinsina tribe) share temples with the Lunar garrisons at the tribal center of Red Cow and intertribal city of Jonstown (a minor and major temple respectively). The Lunar Way is said to be more represented in the cities than in the rural clans, with temples of their own. In places where conversion was more widespread, I’d imagine it might be like parts of Tarsh, where the 7 Mothers rites are effectively syncretized and laid over their original Orlanthi cultural customs.

6 minutes ago, EricW said:

A visit to the green age, where now dead gods like Genert walk untroubled, spreading their bounty and giving their gifts freely, where the people never age, where the authority of Yelm is absolute, where the Spike is the center of the world.

The Green Age is prior to the Sun’s domination, that was Yelm’s Golden Age. The gods and people of the Green Age were benevolently provided for by the goddess Ga(ta) and her children, the deities of life and the earth. It was a period of experimentation, novelty, creation, and bounty rather than the fixed order of Yelm’s rigid cosmic paradigm.

It’s said to be extremely dangerous to visit, so wonderful and idyllic that it is difficult to leave once there. Any who don’t—or can’t—leave are likely lost forever. The powers of life, creation, generation, and the earth are going to be the main reasons someone heroquests to the Green Age. There will probably be a lot of strange flora and fauna, some of which might be able to be learned of or carried back into time as a boon. Dipping that far back into creation probably requires the quester to be illuminated.

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

On the contrary, Orlanthi don't fight in formations like Yelmalio hoplites, and this is who settled Far Point.  Elmal is a spear and cavalry thane, but not a formation fighting hoplite.  Hoplite tactics are utterly useless in the terrain of Far Point which is famously rainy, full of forested hills and bogs, where the Orlanthi often live in crannogs.

Also Yelmalio societies are notoriously insular and overly structured, and are not a good fit with Orlanthi societies.  While there is the Sun Dome temple at Goldedge in Tarsh, I can't find information on when Goldedge was settled; only that it provides mercenaries to the Lunars, which is not the same as saying it has friendly ties to the Orlanthi in Far Point. 

What I do not see is a Sun Dome temple in Far Point, and there isn't one until Harvar Ironfist shows up.

If you read the article linked in the text you quoted, a bunch of clan-dwelling (i.e. Orlanthi barbarian not Sun Domer) Yelmalio worshippers from the place where Yelmalio’s cult began, Saird, migrated south into Dragon Pass centuries before, when their homeland was conquered by the Lunars under Hwarin Dalthippa.

There are several Sun Domes in Saird, Mirin’s Cross was the center of the Yelmalio cult in the Second Age, but before 1582 they weren’t organized into Monrogh’s familiar temple phalanxes, nobody was (at least outside of Sartar and Prax). They still worshipped a god they call Yelmalio, they know of his Hill of Gold and could always travel there, they have his gifts and geases. Just because they’re not phalangites doesn’t mean they’re Elmal worshippers, they clearly aren’t, they’re not from the places where his cult existed in Heortland and Hendrikiland.

52 minutes ago, Darius West said:

I disagree.  Kargzant is Hyaloring Yelm and Yu-Kargzant is Grazelander Yelm.  Jardan is the Grazelander's little sun, and is the Son of the Sun and the Earth, which is consistent with Yelmalio.

Kargzant is explicitly Lightfore/Yelmalio. The Grazelanders are the Hyalorings. They do not have a Little Sun; they are Pure Horse and have Yelm instead, there is no need for a Little Sun cult as long as they have the Vendref around to herd lesser beasts and farm for them. The Solar Pentans, on the other hand, are not Pure Horse and lack both the unbroken ancestal link and a group like the Vendref that would enable them to be Pure Horse, so instead they have both Yu-Kargzant and Kargzant, with the former being the god of nobles and their priestly caste, it strikes me as a similar arrangement to that of Yelm and Lodril in Dara Happa.

Jardan is Yelm the Archer (and the Golden Bow), Jasad is Yelm the Elder, Henird is the Sun Lord, Dastal is Yelm the Youth; their descriptions match the Yu-Kargzant subcults in the core book.

52 minutes ago, Darius West said:

Again, I disagree.  I think that the people of Far Point live on the edge of Troll Territory, and the value of Elmal in fighting trolls cannot be underestimated.  Having light powers is also extremely valuable when battling Chaos in Snakepipe Hollow.  Back in RQ2 when there was only Yelmalio, and we didn't have an Elmal yet as the lore wasn't developed, I have watched how effective Yelmalio characters were in fighting Thanatari, and it was impressive, but it did involve making collapsible socket spears for climbing through narrow spaces first.  As to Harvar not needing to convert anyone, I am quite sure I have read something very different, where Harvar suppresses Orlanth, then suppressed both Barntar and Elmal, but mainly Elmal as Harvar is a Yelmalio, and had great plans to make Far Point into a new Sun Country.

There's a Yelmalio cult to the north of Dragon Pass that remained in contact with the Pelorian Solar traditions for the centuries where the Heortlings to the south were cut off from them by the crossline and inhuman occupation. They wouldn't need to have Elmal because they already had Yelmalio. For them it was Yelmalio the entire time, even if they weren't organized along Sun Dome lines. Why would they need to have a revelation to convert them to a god they already worship and know the inner secrets of?

There's also this, which goes into how Harvar took over The Far Place:

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So how, you might ask, could 1700 Yelmalio cultists dominate a tribal confederation with 5300 Orlanth cultists? Three things:

1. The Yelmalio cult was more centrally organized, with Harvar able to gain their support and defeat foes piecemeal.
2. Harvar had strong Lunar support. Money, mercenaries, you name it.
3. His rule was pretty tenuous once you got outside of Alda-Chur and the Vantaros tribal lands. The other tribes paid tribute and stayed out of trouble.

It makes it clear that they don't have Elmal to worry about, at this point nobody really has Elmal to worry about, at least if you're not from the Enhyli or Narri clans of the Colymar.

1 hour ago, SDLeary said:

I can't see anything that mentions the Impala are any less focused on Waha and Eiritha than any other tribe. Even in the Guide. Can you point me to the reference? Of course they would be focused on light cavalry. And if fighting along side the Domers, they would probably be in support of the phalanx. 

From here:

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There are about as many Yelmalio cultists in Sartar as there are in Praxian Sun County. And about twice as many in Tarsh or among the Praxian tribes as there are in either Sartar or Praxian Sun County.
...
There are Yelmalio worshippers out in the various tribes too (esp the Impalas), almost as many in fact as the sedentary farmers in the Cradle Valley. The Nomad Yelmalions have a slightly different form of the cult with only Light Sons and no temple structure per se. The nomad Yelmalions come at certain predetermined days to worship at the Great Sun Dome of Mo Baustra.
...
There’s more Yelmalio cultists among just the Impala Tribe than there are in [Praxian Sun County].

They're said to get along with one another to a degree, but they aren't part of the Sun Domes or settled Yelmalio cult, they remain part of their tribe and follow Praxian nomadic ways (see the Yelmalio section from Cults of Prax). They fought when the original Sun Domers appeared in the Second Age (again, Cults of Prax). The Impalas were some of the most enthusiastic followers of the White Bull in the Third Age, alongside the Bison Tribe, so I'd imagine some of them fought the Sun Domers when they acted as Lunar Mercenaries, and again as part of Argrath's host when he attempted a conquest of Sun County.

There's also this, from here:

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Yellow-Face (born 1594) is the martial leader of the Yelmalio cult for the Impala Nation. He maintains stiffly formal relationships with the Yelmalio cult leaders in Pavis and Sun County, holding them in private disdain.

 

2 minutes ago, Eff said:

I think it's a perfectly reasonable assertion to make, but as things are textually, there are no differences in the Yelmalio cult across the cultures of the core book that are represented in the core book, and the way in which extratextual commentary adjusts them to accommodate people who are pastoral impala and ostrich herders is simply to remove the Pike skill and not replace it with anything, and also to remove Rune Priests from their cult.

They appear to replace Pike with their relevant Ride skill, something of far greater use to their way of life than a pike phalanx. As for the removal of priests, they are a warrior society within a tribe of pastoral nomads with a strong shamanic cultural bent, not a rigid social order based entirely around a temple and its hierarchy. The way the cult fits into their way of life doesn’t seem to call for a dedicated priesthood, and if they do find they have a need for someone in that role, it seems like that’s what shamans of the Sky Gazers society are for.

10 minutes ago, SDLeary said:

Based on what we know of Yelmalio Cult at the moment, that would mean a Hoplite/Phalangite, or someone that supports a Phalanx formation, whether they live at the temple, or is a farmer on the farmlands that surround the temple (as seems to be Jeff's interpretation at the moment). Thus, an independent corporate organization, rather than something that is well integrated into the Clan/Tribe.

One of the biggest Yelmalio cults among any playable group in the currently available material is in Prax among Impala Tribe, pygmy nomads. They are not hoplites by any stretch, given their stature they would probably struggle if placed in that role, but they clearly worship Yelmalio all the same. In the Lunar Provinces there are said to be Yelmalio clans in Aggar, Imther, Holay, and Vanch from a tradition significantly influenced by their horse-riding ancestors. In the various Sun Domes they might all be hoplites who fight in a pike phalanx, but that is clearly not the only way to worship their god.