svensson

Would it be too much to ask to have the hero be a Rhino Rider? Yeah, probably. 😉

The problem with bards [besides the player that likes playing bards] is that the only thing they're good at is talking. If the player and the referee are both good at talking, it can be entertaining. In any other circumstance a bard is a spot in the party that could have been taken up with someone useful. See also: Monks. You've seen this before... you have 4 players at the table. Three players are smart enough to fill the needed roles... a tank, a healer, a dps guy. And then one clown decides he 'wants to play something different'. So, now we have a bard or monk in the party. Every single thing they can do is done better by someone else on the team, so they're almost useful at most things but not really competent at anything. This focus on the 'four food groups' is one of the reasons why I've totally abandoned class based systems altogether.

With hopefully less fake Arab-ish.... 😁

Well, I caught the new DnD flick. It wasn't bad. It had most of the tropes covered. The CGI wasn't too bad, although in some spots it was as bad as 47 Ronin. And it proves something d20 players have know since 3.0 came out: bards are useless. 😁 However, it DID really make me wish for a RuneQuest movie... You know, Troy with some Harryhausen thrown in doing Gloranthan themes... empowering Runes, Praxian beast nomads, and the rest of the stuff we love.

Getting back to the OP on this... The answer is simple. Conflict sells tickets. Violence to resolve conflict sells more tickets. Simple solutions to complex problems [i.e. Our Hero shooting up just one building with only one bad guy responsible for The Whole Stinking Mess] sells even more tickets. Society suddenly deciding to correct it's universal ills [a'la Star Trek] does not sell tickets.

What am I looking forward to? In a word, 'everything'. But clearing up some of the edition discrepancies will be nice too.

I was just trying to stay consistent with how the Sky pantheon is portrayed. They seem to have a distinctly 'Old Testament' vibe to them. Do we have a source on the retcon, or is that expected in the Dragon Pass sourcebook?

I passed the expulsion solution by because the Yelmalion faith seems to be particularly vulnerable to theological doctrines that can lead to societal dead ends. For Sky pantheon worshipers, the world seems to be a very binary place: yes or no not maybe, enemy or ally not neutral. The Yelmalio worldview doesn't easily allow for a third option for 'heathen Darkness worshipers'. Because the Kitori were from a diametrically opposed pantheon and then were conquered by the 'forces of Light and Right', the Sky pantheon viewpoint justifies the serfdom of engeshi for doctrinaire theological reasons. Light must defeat Darkness and constantly be seen to do so. To the Light Priests, the solution was either servitude or death. And because of that, the Sun County of Amber Fields must constantly keep a standing army at home to keep engeshi subservient.

Well, I got WM 15 and I have to say that @Jeff's article is VERY interesting. My concerns about chattel slavery are alleviated but Jeff's repeated use of the word 'serf'. Absolutely no disrespect is intended when I say that I'm assuming that Jeff knows the definitions [and most importantly the differences] between the terms 'slave', 'peasant' and 'serf'. A LOT of people confuse the terms and there are important legal distinctions. - A peasant is anyone, free or bound, who works the land and is somewhat backward. It isn't that they're stupid, necessarily, but 'book-learnin' isn't part of their upbringing. On the other hand ask them about every trail, hillock, boulder, and dell within 5 miles of their home and they'll give you chapter and verse on how to get there, what lives there, the local folklore about the place, and what you'll find there in every conceivable weather. - A serf is bound to the service of a landowner. They provide skilled labor in many trades including, farming, wood-copping, herding, veterinary, building, and carpentry. In exchange for their service they are provided with an equal share of the harvest [according to the acres they farm] after taxes, the protection of the landowner [both physical and legal], and have a specific 'place' in society. A serf is one of last people in a society to starve during a famine, for example, because the basis of property law entitles him to food even in famine. The urban poor have no such protections. - A slave is actual property, no different from an ox or pig. They can be bought, sold, fed slop, beaten with impunity. The Ergeshi are a conquered people and are not free, but the DO have rights of a sort and a specific place in society. They are not bought and sold and their families are not broken up for profit. Yes, I fully grant you that none of the is morally or ethically right in 2023 Earth. But in 1600ST Glorantha the only other option was to massacre the Kitori.

I'll look into WF 15, though I'm not a big fan of chattel slavery as practiced by the Lakadaimonians.. The other references I have read or own [including your own excellent Sandheart series]

Yeah, just passing references but that's it. I ask because Prax Sun County's harsh environment and isolation has made it a hard, stern, dare I say 'Islamic' or 'Arabic' styled state. Rigid social control has allowed the Praxian Yelmalions to survive, but I wonder where the rigidity of the cult ends and the society starts. Using my Islamic analogy again, it's difficult to separate the influences of Arabic culture, Bedouin culture, and the Muslim faith. All are inextricably linked. For that matter, good freaking luck separating Catholicism from Italian culture. So I'd like to see what a Sun County without the deprivation of the desert and the constant assault by the nomads might look like. I'd like to see the original Yelmalio culture that's more in tune with the 'frontier defender of the Sky pantheon among the hill barbarians' description we've seen in the past. After all, the Sun County of Prax is a transplanted religion the furthest away from its foundations in Peloria.

Is there any information detailing the Sun County next to the Lismelder Tribe in Dragon Pass? I've looked, but I haven't found any reference.

The domes in desert architecture are there to collect heat and vent it upwards. It helps keep the ground floor cooler. Because of that, I could see domed roofs in Sun County in the desert. In a more verdant, temperate climate like Dragon Pass, maybe not. This is something I hope is addressed in Glorantha's future... how life is lived near Sun Dome Temples NOT in Prax. I'd like to see an article or Jonstown supplement detailing the Sun County neighboring the Lismelders at the edge of Sartar. EDIT: Started a topic on the Sun County outside of Prax thing.

Ok, I'll use words... I appreciate and look forward to further work. I had expected this to be a relatively short series, a trilogy or maybe 4 volumes. Ten was wholly unexpected! To everyone involved with the project, my congratulations on delivering yet another way to see Glorantha... a way in which the boundaries of magical definition are a lot blurrier and cults do not always match casual definition.

😁

A cenote [sen-oh-teh] is a terrain feature of Central America where the local limestone soaks up all available water. Because of this, there are no streams in the area because the water is collected in underground reservoirs. What often happens is the roof of a close-the-surface cenote is worn thin by time and erosion and will collapse into the cave underneath, creating an open well. That is why you have that lighting effect.

An amazing image came across my feed today Suytun Cenote, near Vallalodid, Yucatan, Mexico Anybody seeing an Uz or Water cult ceremony here?

And getting back to the point of the thread... Anybody seeing Sun County in these? A desert fortress town, CGI by Stephen Dove

Building on @Darius West's comment, Um, isn't corporatization bringing some of Cyberpunk future nihilism into our society now? And how much worse will it be for our children. As for Marx/Lenin/Stalin/Maoism's fears of capitalism, THEY wrecked their own environment just as badly as the capitalist West did theirs. The cleanup that Germany had to undertake in the former DDR after unification was mindblowing [unsecured nuclear reactor waste, for example] and the US paid for a lot of that cleanup [roughly 1/3 the total costs]. And there are entire cities in Russia and China that, were they in the West, would have been condemned and leveled as a hazmat site [Magnitogorsk, Russia for example]. So I think it's a misnomer to call the whole cyberpunk genre a nightmare of the Communists when it was the Communists that created a far nastier dystopia in their zones of control.

There's Buddhist v. Hindu v. Sikh violence today in India. Something we all need to remember is that extreme belief [in anything, but in this case religion] and violence go hand in hand. Groups of Humans are not all that different from the monkey troops we are descended from... we divide the world in to Us [my people] and Them [whoever the Hell those people are over there] and it is our instinct to compete with and dominate them, just as they are driven to dominate us. The world is filled with finite resources and the more I have, the less you get. Have your beliefs, but remember that the other guy has the right have his as well. And your vote counts for precisely the same amount that mine does.

Switching gears a little bit, this interesting article just popped up on my feed... "Eating Kosher in the Ancient World" https://getpocket.com/explore/item/what-archaeology-tells-us-about-the-ancient-history-of-eating-kosher

I've looked and have not found an MSRP for the God of Glorantha series of books. Has that been announced yet? If so, where can I find it and if not do we have an ETA on that information? The 'Minister of Finance' would like to know 😁

Your points are well-taken, Sol, but it must be said that most of your points are historically 'normal'. Hunger/Thirst, unemployment, population migration, a trapped underclass, etc. have all been conditions that have existed since forever. It should also be noted that more food and more clean water have been available than ever before, but population growth has exceeded those gains by a large margin. Add to this the politicization of want... where hunger and thirst are being used as methods of control... that we put a modern spin on it. It is the part where technology isn't solving the problems, it's contributing to them that we reach the 'dystopian' levels.

@mfbrandi I think when you get right down to it, most of the street-level believers of any faith are 'just plain folks'. They're grounded in the reality of holding jobs, raising kids, and figuring out what's for dinner. They're not involved in religious politics [theological or temporal] because their day to day lives keep them firmly grounded in the world of the possible. I know several Sikhs and Bahai'i that are very much like the Jains you describe, plus of course the local menu of Abrahamic faiths. It's when money and power get involved that almost every believer's Achilles heel get exposed and they turn into doctrinaire jerks.

This image, from wikipedia commons, just came up today and seems singularly appropriate to the discussion. Aerial top-down view of the Central Shrine of the Somapura Mahavari temple complex, Naogaon Bangladesh. World UNESCO site 1985