Tabor

As someone who's only played RQG, I'd say Erithea is not being brought up enough. She's just Ernalda but worse. However, the real answer is the worst cult is the one I'm currently playing and the best one is the one the person in my group I hate is playing (just kidding I like you all).

Polestar need not be foreign. He saved a lot of people during the great darkness, maybe one of them was your grazelander clan. Besides, any solar enough culture is going to have a name and great respect for one of the most important stars.

Death is more honest than life, but that doesn't make it preferable. Snodal recognized Siglat as his son with Damosel of the Black Veil. If Siglat's Gbaji then something is seriously up with the Altinelans, they would have had to let him in and bring him to Snodal. Perhaps the Red Goddess is right and chaos is a necessary part of the world, hmm? But some of you aren't ready for that conversation, you storm people are barely literate in New Pelorian.

I would assume the Kargzant gets the bird, though a particularly tricky Other could use a summoning to worm their way back into the material plane.

Finally back home, pretty tired tonight but I will say that my own opinion is that the God Learners probably did pretty good in exterminating Arkati sects in Frontem. I'd think that if any Arkat worship remains in the country, it would probably be very secret and underground. However, they'd probably be rather quick in reviving it as soon as they encounter any remaining cults in Fronela - a likely candidate is Zemstown. They need anything they can get to fight the Kingdom of War, after all.

Thanks for the responses, everyone. I only get one post a day at the moment and I'm hitting the road tomorrow so I'm gonna try to make this one count. Pretty sure it's yours, yeah. Thanks fo Interesting. The way I see Solace is that it's a logical understanding of one's place in the world that brings relief from suffering. It might be highly complex, but once one is walked through the syllogisms or equations and comprehends it, one has it. I also think it has a lot of overlap with the Mostali and their conception of the world-machine, following your caste duties to heal the world, etc. What's interesting to is that Solace was revealed by Zzabur, and we know that the people that still live in Zzabur's society don't believe in an afterlife (which may or may not be canon, can't find a source but it certainly seems to be a popular belief, as @Nick Brooke mentions it in his post), so I think the idea of Solace being a place of refuge in the afterlife is a later addition that came about once enough people had experienced Solace that it became a more prominent place in the Otherworld. Does it function that way now? Maybe, but I don't think it did when Zzabur first revealed it. Plus, it was first experienced before the dawn. Though it all follows logically, many of the original concepts, runes, and lemmas have now been fundamentally changed or destroyed by time and chaos. It's probably a lot more work to reach Solace in the third age, having to be like "OK so before the sunstop light used to have a speed of x and hue of y so when you plug those in instead of their modern values then you z." On the other hand Joy is a far more emotional experience of the Invisible God, and once you've touched it and felt its awareness (and, inversely, it has also touched you and been made aware of you), you are certain that the IG has a plan for you. No need to logic it all out, your god knows about you and you've felt it in your bones. I've always been interested in Hrestol's time in the Vadeli Isles and thought it would make a fun myth. Something like he tries to be fair and moral but the Vadeli twist all his judgments to suit themselves and do evil with them. Fun little narrative. Also interesting is how it parallels Dragonewts and their philosophy. They slowly become dragons through reincarnating through their own set of castes, having many different emotional experiences. While mystic truth is never a guarantee, it certainly seems that having a lot of experience in different areas of life is a big help in receiving it. A lesson for us all. This would seem to line up with my impressions of the frequency of Joy among the different castes. I'd say the "big names" all have experienced it regularly- Meriatan, Penthea, Gundreken, the Council of the Wise. Many Nobles too, some Wizards, but as you get to the Loskalmi Men-of-All, Guardians, and Dronars it becomes a vanishingly small percentage of people. While Joy can come at any time, I do think it's more likely to come at some times than others and that the Loskalmi ordering of society and progression through caste is meant to make it far easier for it to come. I'm sure they also have some meditative practices and texts to contemplate for it as well, else Meriatan wouldn't be shutting himself away in a monastery before the coming of the Kingdom of War. I disagree pretty strongly with this. The Guide seems to use the word Guardian pretty interchangeably with Soldier in the sections on Loskalm, measuring battalions in terms of Guardians, Men-of-All, etc. Which would lead me to believe that in addition to being a town militia, a guardian is a standing occupation for someone, more akin to an Orlanthi thane than just a Dronar with a pitchfork. Besides, we know that under the original Malkioni law it was forbidden for Dronar to fight or be harmed in war. While Loskalm is casting off a lot of old beliefs, I would still think there's a pretty sharp divide between someone who is a trained soldier and someone who is any other Dronar job. Horali and Men-of-All coexisted alongside each other during Hrestol's era as well, so I don't think the two would be merged together.

I've been doing a fair bit of reading on the West, and as I've been studying the Guide, Revealed Mythologies, and the Middle Sea Empire book, I've run into a bit of a snag in my understanding of the central concepts of Joy and Men of All. In order to explain, let me first elaborate my own understanding, and then ask a couple of questions. So, Hrestol is the first to experience Joy, and he creates the Man-of-All caste by teaching it to others. At this stage the two seem inextricably linked: having Joy is what makes one a Man-of-All. Being able to experience Joy also seems to come from having been a member of every caste first, though of course it was spontaneous for Hrestol himself. Presumably he either changed caste membership several times on his accidental Heroquest, or was just particularly primed for this mystic-ish enlightenment through luck, his own philosophizing, what have you. The Glorantha wiki entry on Joy seems to agree that Joy is what makes someone a Man-of-All, and though I can't find an exact citation in the Guide or Revealed Mythologies, my own reading of the passages on Hrestol and Arkat seems to line up with this idea. So, question one: How exactly did Hrestol lay out how to achieve Joy, and am I correct in thinking that Joy was necessary to be a Man-of-All in his time? Skipping over the second age and the God Learners, we wind up in Loskalm, who have their own Man-of-All caste. The Loskalmi promote someone to a Man-of-All straight from the Guardian caste, and before someone has been a Wizard or Noble. In fact, membership in the M-o-As is a necessary prerequisite for becoming a Wizard as well as a Noble. So, there's an issue here, because the concepts of Joy and Men-of-All are now decoupled a bit, leading me to believe that a Loskalmi Man-of-All is not the same thing as a first age M-o-A. Which would make sense to me, as a Loskalmi Wizard is different from a Zzaburi, etc. If it's necessary to experience every caste before achieving Joy (which is my understanding), then a Loskalmi Man-of-All is someone who is preparing themselves to achieve Joy, but has not actually experienced it yet. It may also be the case that my understanding of Joy is incorrect, and Joy is actually what allows you to change caste in the first place. In that case though, a Loskalmi M-o-A has already changed caste once before, from a Dronar/Worker to a Holiri/Guardian. In that case they would all have already achieved Joy a good time before becoming Men-of-All, which just seems absurd and also would mean that Loskalm has tens of thousands of enlightened mystics running around in it, which is Lunar Empire levels of crazy. Question two: When exactly in the procession of castes do Loskalmi expect to experience Joy, if it can be expected at all? Then, we have Ascended Masters. The Guide blurb on them simply defines them as people who have "achieved complete unity with the Invisible God." Now, Joy is defined as a union with the Invisible God, which would seem to imply that anyone who has received Joy is an Ascended Master, but that feels wrong to me. Ascended Masters seem rather rare, and more on the level of Gods or Heroes. The wiki even calls them the Malkioni equivalent of heroes, and though I can't find any support in the Guide for this it makes more sense to me. My own guess is that while Joy is a unity with the Invisible God, it's not a complete unity. We know that Solace is related to the 3rd action and Joy to the 2nd, so that would imply that there is an as-of-yet unknown mental state/revelation connected to the First Action (Illumination?). Maybe the Ascended Masters are people who have experienced that. Which brings me to my third question: what separates an Ascended Master from a Man-of-All from someone who has experienced Joy? Laying it all out, I think my confusion is caused by the fact that we have two names for things: Man-of-All and Ascended Master, but three different things. There's someone who is seeking Joy, someone who has experienced Joy, and someone who is beyond the world. The term Man-of-All seems to overlap the first two, and Ascended Master the last two. It really makes me want to bring back the word Knight, which I understand was cut from the game line for having too many real world connotations, but it would make a lot more sense to me though if Knight was the Loskalmi word for their not-yet-Joyful mounted warrior/wizard caste and if Man-of-All was specifically a term for someone who had experienced Joy. It would fit with how the Loskalmi simplified the other caste names, presumably an effort by Siglat to modernize their language. Still that's based on a lot of assumptions that - as I've already outlined - may be wrong. Thanks for taking the time to read this and hopefully you can help me clear this up.