svensson

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.

9 hours ago, Joerg said:

Actually, that's what makes me think of somewhere not Sun County, with many lesser celestial entities worshiped. In a Sun Dome county, I would not expect mundane buildings to imitate the sacred architecture. How many of us live in church-like houses?

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.

45 minutes ago, Ian A. Thomson said:

 

I read this entirely as a bold statement of faith in, and appreciation for, the series, couched in humorous style

Thank you 🙂

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.

😁

10 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

That is pretty light to be desirable for Uz.  Looks like it is engineered to put sunlight on the center platform..  Do you have a concept for why the Uz would have a ceremony there?  Night only, originally to have been in the light of the Blue Moon?

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.

On 3/26/2023 at 4:43 PM, Bren said:

And not a recent thing. Japanese warrior monks could be quite violent and date back to the Heian period.

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 😁

On 3/24/2023 at 10:10 AM, soltakss said:

I am living in the dystopian future from my childhood.

• Walls built to keep poor people out of rich countries
• Refugees and migrants treated appallingly
• AI apparently stealing the livelihood from artists and writers
• Water shortages, widespread hunger
• Catastrophic climate events
• Paramilitary police everywhere
• Governments using extra-judicial killings with impunity
• Robots used for mundane tasks
• An underclass trapped by poverty and the privilege of others

 

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

46 minutes ago, EricW said:

The Shield of Time and other time patrol books by Poul Anderson.

Beautiful descriptions of historical settings and a surprisingly Gloranthan feel considering it’s a time travel book.

If you consider the distant future god like Danielans, who set up the time patrol, intervening to protect history as soon as time travel was invented, and journeys into the past as heroquests into myth which affect the present, then you will see why I say this.

And of course, the stories have several cases where the future is overthrown by criminals, or one disturbing case where the future just collapsed by itself, and had to be reconstructed.

I'll have to take a look at that.

14 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

Maybe Arachne Solara has a way to remove the taint?

Interesting idea.

Maybe, but if so that hasn't been revealed to us yet.

But then, everybody's Glorantha is different than everybody else's.

Half-trolls [Pertereg] show up quite a bit in MERP sources and a lot of follow-on creators and interpreters kind of ran with that.

MERP described them as smart as Uruk orcs [which were a different species of ork, not a tribal name] but larger, stronger, and not susceptible to sunlight like the Cave and Stone trolls were. Like the Uruks, these were wholly the invention of Sauron and not Morgoth.

I like to use photos to illustrate scenery for my faux-Atlantis game, especially to give a sense of technology and architecture.

Some of the photos from my illustrations folder

There has always been a certain pendulum in the public perception of 'the future' that is reflected in that culture's art.

Just look at some the letters written by monks at the turn of the Millennium in the late 900s and the similarities between those and and the media of 1990s.

Since about 1990 or so, the average person in the G-8 nations [the people that produce the culture-influencing art, the people that run the internet, the people that are writing the historical record] feels that corporatization and technology are devaluing everything that makes us human, that for every advance in technological capability there are two steps backwards in our appreciation for literature, poetry, and art. People are worried that they'll be replaced by AI's and robots in almost every sphere of human endeavor, from art to sex.

And no one with the power to effect things even seems to care. If it'll make them money, they'll do it and damn the consequences.

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

My own HeroQuest 

Well, as freeform HQ's go, that's actually a really good one, one of the better one's I've read come to think of it. It deals with God-Time myths, the 'Stafford-logic' of Glorantha, the malleability of Water as an element.... Yeah, that was good work.

@hipsterinspace Thanks for the link. That makes for interesting reading. The Q&A supports my contention that cleansing a being of Chaos is hugely difficult because it changes their basic nature at the most primal and basic levels. Though not entirely the way I originally conceived it.

5 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

i always thought the most dangerous sort of Broo is the Mallian witch born from herd men. They pass as human, are outcaste for being female, and thus are likely to be an actual "third column" threat for settled places in Prax (imagine the cursed Oases; imagine a Mallian in Pavis).

I have absolutely no doubt that there are Chaos cultists, including Mallians, in New Pavis. I don't see them as a large group or organized enough to be of much harm, but they are present. With a charismatic and intelligent leader, they could really cause a lot of damage, what with the Lunar suppression of Urox/Storm Bull, but such a leader does not seem to have arisen yet.

5 hours ago, soltakss said:

The Cleansed One subcult cannot purge a Chaos taint, but it teaches a difficult and dangerous HeroQuest that ends up with the Chaos taint removed. All you have to do is to swim naked along the whole river, avoiding the obstacles, monsters, Storm Bulls, Orlanthi, Yelmalians and other people hell-bent on stopping you, then you have to find another Chaos Creature, make it see itself as disgusting, then face the Guardian of the Seas and, finally, swim in the acidic salt sea as it burns the taint out of you. If you can survive that and regrow your skin then you are free of Chaos.

Do you have a source for that, Sol? I'd be interested in reading that.

50 minutes ago, DrGoth said:

Well, Alter Creature is a pretty drastic alteration, but nothing like removing a Chaos taint. It's also deeply bound up with the Praxian myths.

Well, I know that a beast raised to sentience by Alter Creature keeps their Beast Rune as their Form. I'd have to re-read the spell definition to find out what other Runes they might acquire and if those runes are influenced by the caster of the Alter Creature. For example, if a Lunar with a primary Moon Rune casts the spell, does the beast also gain the Moon Rune as well?

And another curve ball is herd-men. They keep their Man Rune, obviously, but what others might they affiliate with if given intelligence? Earth maybe?

My main point here is that no other magical procedures other than Cleansed One and KL Adoption Rite actually change a being FORM rune... the very basic nature of a being's concept of self. KL Adoptees certainly keep their Man Rune, but they see themselves as racially Uz forever afterwards. Alter Creature raises INT and CHA to sentient levels, but the recipient still maintains their basic Runic Form. But the 'Cleansed One ritual' can remove the Chaos Rune from a BROO.

Now, I would suppose that such a broo would remain in the shape of a broo, but all Chaos advantages would be removed. They would probably remain a hermaphrodite [such people are wholly natural, after all]. But the broo's concept of itself as a being in Glorantha would be changed on a basic level.

I've been greatly enjoying the two installments of @Ian A. Thomson's Pavis 1619 series. There's a lot of interesting, quirky, and fun ideas in it that will probably become part of MGU.

I have a question about it though.... I LIKE the shamanistic turn that the Zola Fel cult takes in the books but I'm wondering if the Cleansed One subcult is going to be addressed or was it purposely avoided? You have to admit that a subcult that can purge the Chaos taint from a worshiper would be a Pretty Big Freaking Deal [tm].

Insofar as I know, this is the ONLY ritual/HeroQuest/whatever can actually remove the Chaos Rune from someone's being, from their Form. The only other ritual that I know of that has similar power to so drastically alter a being's very nature is the Uz Adoption Rite of Kyger Litor.