Ian A. Thomson

Is there a list (canon or fan-ideas) of the names of any of Dorasar's companions when he founded New Pavis, other than Olgkarth?

I have decided to write some appendixes for the Rough Guide to Pavis City (894ST), and the Guide to Adari will be one of them. After doing a lot of research and writing the basic outline, I started to look at politics. Being allowed to be neutral by the EWF due to its value as a trading post, a dumping ground for dissidents, and somewhere its spies can lurk either watching the roads or travelling to and from Pavis City, I suddenly fell into the movie Cassablanca and am now in the process of rewriting the Adari Guide to make the place much more of a shady town where you have to watch your back. A genuinely neutral Issaries/Argan Argar council, a majority of traditionalist Orlanthi refugees from Orlanthland/EWF, an EWF garrison guard group that protects their consulate, the town watch that do their best to also be neutral but tend to favor the traditionalists, and of course some weird ancient magic. The place where EWF dissidents flee in order to arrange passage to Pavis City

VOLUNTEERS ARE AWESOME!! I do this from time to time, and I don't feel like stopping! This series has proved massively more work than I anticipated, and without the help of the volunteers of all sorts I would definitely have had to stop at least twice!!! As I put things in order for the final volumes and reflect on the work still to do (formatting, corrections, expansions, layout and the new articles) I am pausing to feel a LOT of gratitude for everyone who pitches in. This would all be impossible without you!!!

No it's pretty straightforward as you rightly suggest. I'm just struggling with the fact that spatially and structurally it fits better here. OK decision made. Only hints and clues in the Guide, though there may be some big ones. But not the whole reveals piece

Yes, this is a good point I think the bottom line is that I just don't want to limit people from buying the Guide who might then be Players. EG I can imagine keen Players buying the guide cos they love gaming in Pavis and are playing in a campaign, and so I dont want to block that by having major spoilers for the campaign within the guide

Finally collating all of the notes, finished pieces, and rough ideas about the Pavis Grand Plan is proving totally fascinating. Most awesome of all is that it all fits together. Even after all this time, a lot of the intricacies we discussed are still in my head, with only a small general piece collecting all of the foundational elements written back then (because Greg had asked me to keep it all secret when we were planning a Pavis Grand Plan official release so that task was still waiting when I finished the fanzines and moved on to other things). Greg himself abandoned the idea as Jeff has said, but at the time he was a machine in generating ideas about it all. I'd throw him questions and he'd sometimes immediately come back with a number of new questions and options that stimulated answers and new questions. I'd be like: 'How might this connect to this?" and he'd sometimes be all mystical and say 'Maybe that's not the right question, maybe XYZ is the right question?' And sometimes he was just very practical and gave me straight answers :) I was also delighted that the creation process was something of a synthesis, as I offered a few speculations that he jumped on and said 'Yes, perfect!' I am enjoying the process of discovering links between elements. How does X lead to Y? Why exactly is Z necessary and where does it fit into the plan? That kind of thing. But it is remarkably cohesive and also really fun to be recalling elements from 20 years ago that I never even elaborated on in writing back then. I'm lucky that my creative mind always works like that - filing away great ideas and bringing them back to awareness as needed. Although this is usually over weeks or months as I am creating something. Not usually after 20+ years!! The document is now up to 12 pages long and will probably gain a couple more before it's done. So I'm pondering the idea of adding it as an appendix to Vol. 06A (The Rough Guide to Pavis City). The original intention of it was to simply be the backdrop document to hang all of the discoveries from Vols. 4A onwards on consistently, with the Adventurers learning the individual elements as they go. But its now so well-formed that it would be a shame if it never saw the light of day. My reluctance is that anyone who buys the Guide will then know all of the secrets and so Players who read it will be deprived of that slow reveal. This means that the alternative is to add it as an appendix to the last book of the series, and I'm slightly favoring that at the moment. As I've said elsewhere, I'm not attempting to create a Grand Plan that 'everyone will agree with'. No doubt others will have very well-formed and excellent different ideas. I am however, doing as much online research as i can to review the many speculations over the years, and to build-in all of these that I can. But yes, we did have a clear outline back then, and so I am using that as the 'skeleton' for this piece. By the way, it is connected to the core theories that have been bandied about for years. There are a lot more subtleties and processes involved, but it's not some totally out of the blue brand new thing that's going to appear and make everyone go: 'What the....?' :) I'm doing my best to do that thing that a lot of movie franchises aren't doing these days - which is to respect the original characters and concepts. It can't be perfect, as these things can be interpreted different ways, but I'm giving it my best shot based on the original Pavis & Big Rubble material and early generation additions to that. I'm not sticking so closely to things that were created significantly after my collaborative time with Greg, as they moved in a different direction, but I am reviewing said sources to minimize the differences.

Oh absolutely. Greg also mentioned to take a look at Gurdjieff. Not for exact parallels, but for inspiration for elements of his background

It's certainly interesting writing up stuff that was more flexible when we ran it Vol. 05 has some more clues and will be out soon I am currently writing the plan up from all my scattered notes and great ideas I am researching. Its not just the plan, but the whole backdrop to it. But yeh, sadly won't likely be published until the last book in the series next year

I am of course only talking about what Greg and I put together, which can have been Gregged, or shot down by canon 1000x by now. However, it was that Flintnail and Shelbaris created Ginkizzie (and others) as part of a series of projects. Flintnail & Shelbaris were not conventional partners but scientists, and she didn't give birth to him. (It was a continuation of the same project that produced Pavis.) Just one of the many alternate realities of Pavis with a slight benefit that Greg for a time was totally behind the idea, and then later abandoned all of the Grand Plan idea. I'm nonetheless continuing to work on what we discussed back then, and ignoring some things that have become reality or otherwise are now strongly believed since that time

At the time Greg and I were talking, he said that Pavis was an initiate of Issaries Conciliator, and I have a feeling I've seen somewhere else written that he worshipped Issaries, but maybe not. Greg also said that Pavis was based in that cult originally, but then moved on to study less conventional things (for the 1610s/20s) in the EWF. As people mention, Greg has Gregged himself various times, so this is just what he told me as part of our Gran Plan backdrop at that time.

I'm doing a family tree at the moment and while a half-elf was significantly involved in the creation of Ginkizzie, what seems more likely in the P&BRC campaign is that he is half-dwarf and half non-specifically-differentiated Man Rune being

Interesting. What's the reference for this?

The Rough Guide to Pavis City was the first book in the series that I worked on, and it is well-advanced. There was a possibility to release it first as the uber-plan was being designed, but in discussion with Nick, he suggested (and I agreed) that it might be better to put later in the order as it would likely include a bunch of Grand Plan reveals (which it does) I'm also working on it intensely now, as writing the backdrop is great support for adding in clues and hints to Vols. 05 & 06 and giving me the chance to really clarify the key elements of the Grand Plan (since it was all active projects in 894 (which is partly why we chose that specific year) Which brings me to why I slightly expanded the topic of this thread. The discussions on these groups continue to be extremely helpful, both the ones I read that already exist, and those that people engage in specifically as regards the Pavis series. So I thought I'd throw out this particular query CULTS OF THE EWF I'm chomping through the creation of the Cults section of the Rough Guide to Pavis City, and so far we have several campaign specific ones (Pavis variants etc), and also: Orlanth Dragonfriend, Issaries Dragontalker, Issaries the Conciliator, Uleria, and a version of Ernalda that is still under consideration/design I'm interested in input on these points if anyone has any: 1) Any ideas for cults that would have been popular back then but don't exist anymore 2) Any ideas for cults that are still known in the 1600s but in the later stages of the EWF are significantly or totally different from the 1600s versions already available in the rules. (E.G. the two Issaries versions above) 3) Any ideas for minority cults of the EWF that don't exist today and weren't necessarily well-known in the EWF, but would be excellent for Adventurer PCs or for interesting GMCs Oh, also is Malkion written up somewhere official and/or creative unofficial? I guess I should have a Jrusteli cult or cults, since they have a minority presence in Pavis City. All constructive suggestions welcome If anyone already has cult write-ups from that time, or notes they are interested to put into as write-up, I'd be happy to talk also and see if they would be a good fit for the Guide. I think we have enough ideas, but the book will be one of the shorter ones, so there is an opportunity to extend sections Cheers

My sense of this (my Glorantha of course, not any kind of canon statement) is that occasional use of draconic mysticism for practical purposes (rather then for showing off or having unfair advantage over someone) is a reasonable part of life in Pavis City. Perhaps influenced by MGF of course, in that occasional draconic things happening in daily life in Pavis City just appeals. Also, in my mind's eye the person flapping down the stairs was an older person for whom the trip might otherwise have been challenging. (I might even extend the wordage to clarify that - Edit- done).

Spire covered in great detail in Vol. 05 (most likely out at the start of November) My understanding (based on chats with Greg, not necessarily on anything canon) is this is Windwhistler, and he has returned since the Dragonewts Dream reopened the Rubble From the Pavis book: "Rune Priests of Pavis wear the costume of the Empire of the Wyrm’s Friends on official occasions, though the city was never an official part of that empire." My take on this is that Pavis disagreed with significant elements of the EWF approach to draconic mysticism, and furthermore that this was part of why he founded his own city. However, as someone in favor of peace and tolerance he was accepted by the EWF despite their disagreements, and therefore many people thought it was part of the EWF I'm deep in writing the new version of the Rough Guide to Pavis City now. Certain mystics (and there are plenty in Pavis City) would indeed converse in this, but it was more for formal, mystical practice, and not for casual chats in pubs. Highbrow scholars and mystics might use it a lot professionally though Easiest way to answer the rest is a snippet from the Guide... "Basically, this all means that a proportion of citizens and residents of Pavis City (3-5%) know 1-5 draconic ‘sorcery’ cantrips, and a smaller number (0.5%) know more significant spells. In daily life as you travel around the city you might well occasionally see someone light a fire with a snap of their fingers, or an older person flap down from the top of the huge step-pyramid Pavis Temple in City East on faint leathery wings, rather than the arduous effort of walking down the stairs. Or have faintly-glowing yellow or green eyes as they examine a magical trinket in the marketplace. You are less likely to see someone manifesting scale armor across their body, bounding fifty yards in a single leap on ghostly reptile legs, frying an annoying neighbor with their flaming breath, or slicing an avaricious shop-keeper in half with a huge talon that suddenly replaces their hand. Not only since such is inappropriate for normal city living, but also because most people would view all of this as unseemly showing off." Just my humorous (hopefully) way of illustrating the very answer to questions like yours