mfbrandi

I must admit that my first thought was of an Eurmali PC giving birth after return to mundanity, but this works, too — Trickster as drug child mule or sensitive crocodile parent. I am not a huge fan of “because the GM says so”, but I see no reason for the child or mother to suffer just to generate a spurious patina of realism. The grimmest thing isn’t always the truest thing, and although it is sometimes MGF, not for everyone and not all the time. I suppose one thing to be considered is whether the child is divine/semi-divine, at all. If we assume the PC mother is a mortal in some sense playing a divine rôle and that she contributes mortal DNA, what about the guardian of the gate? Could that be an NPC “playing” Kaldar/Sinjota? That could avert godling-on-the-loose but still allow the child to be a symbol of hope (“yes, you brought back light to the world …” — vegan sausage roll & manger optional) and to generate plot points: what species is the other parent? what sex is the other parent? who is the other parent, and is it looking for its child? does the kid have a messiah complex — possibly because of the attitudes/mistaken beliefs of the adults around it — but lack the magical oomph to back it up? Isn’t there a “special” child in the Wooden Sword way back in Wyrm’s Footnotes? (Too long ago, don’t remember.)

But where is the memo I missed? The Guide, the Sourcebook, and the Well of Daliath still tell the familiar story from the 1980s (and possibly further back — I didn’t check past the Gods of Glorantha red box). It is true that “Kajabor is mistakenly called ‘the Devil’ in some older documents, confusing him with Wakboth” (Guide, p. 119) does look like it could be some kind of lame arse covering (in-world or otherwise), and it is soon followed (p. 120) by the cagier: But — sentimental fool that I am — if I had to take Occam’s razor to the chaos pantheon, I would rule that Evil is a whole lot more boring than Entropy, and I would throw Wakboth under the bus. But, you know, let a hundred devils bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend — I can fit them all on the head of this pin. Of course, in Gloranthan myth, one is always happy with teasing are they?/aren’t they? games like Arkat is/isn’t Nysalor, but that at least seems motivated — and I am failing to see it with Entropy = Evil. I am probably playing with half a jigsaw. And I never bought that Entropy/Kajabor = Chaos while Eurmal/Disorder != Entropy, so Eurmal conspiring with Arachne Solara to get the Ritual of the Net right the second(?) time around — having failed to keep the gods from meddling with the mundane world previously, it is time to feed them to the god killer/black hole/swallow of no return — with Argrath the know-nothing stooge facilitating the utuma (as per Nick Brooke on the destruction of the Red Moon) of (cough!) “Kajabor” as worm/dragon. So Ragnarok recapitulates the Draconic creation myth, which is as it should be, right? Now, where did I put my anti-psychotics? Nurse! Nurse!

And although that adds a touch of irony to “friend of men”, there would seem to be a case for Death, Time (incorporating our old friends Chaos and the void), and indeed the progressive “thinning” of Glorantha (first hobble the gods and then get rid of them and the elder races) all being friends of humans. Roll on the Fourth Age. (Although, I would quite like the 4th Age to be a “blank land”.) BTW, what happened to Kajabor (rather than Wakboth) as god killer and father of Time? Were we never supposed to buy Kajabor != Wakboth, or is giving Wakboth this rôle a retcon (possibly following “Argrath & the Devil”)?

No, that seems about 80% appropriate, but gulp, don’t chomp. Less messy. For the follower of a God who engineered the murder of the sun/emperor of everything, what is swallowing just one little baby? I mean, killing the sun worked out just fine in the long run — who would want to live in eternal day? — and it is just one child, and it’s wafer thin. I guess it depends on how you feel about letting the divine manifest inside time. I am totally relaxed about Sedenya and Nysalor, but more uptight others might see their shenanigans as a breach of the capital-C Compromise. Others might say, “It is only a demigod; what could possibly go wrong? Harrek? Never heard of him.” or “What is theistic magic but the gods violating the Compromise, anyway? Happens all the time.” Me? What do I say? I am just going to go hide under this rock, OK?

No one has picked this up, so perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to inject a little context. Apologies for everything I am about to get wrong. Guide to Glorantha, page 162: Guide to Glorantha, page 373: I am guessing that the context is a PC Lightbringer quest. The metaphysics of heroquests is above my pay grade. Do they normally multiply entities? That is, if the Godtime original event caused something to come into being, does the recapitulation of the event in a heroquest cause a new thing to come into being? If not, can’t the child just be Yomat? The worry is if the quest goes off piste and a trickster PC (any sex) gets pregnant and gives birth back in the mundane world? I would suggest Swallowing the thing and hoping it finds its way back to the Great Darkness. Or “your quest has indeed brought light back to the world; bow down before … Nysalor!” Now, no one can tell the right kind of riddle from the wrong kind — or even remember that there was supposed to be a difference. Probably missed the point entirely.

[deleted]

I think he just nicked it from Mesopotamian religion whose “basic operating premise … is that humans were created and placed on earth so the gods did not have to work” (Tammi j. Schneider, An Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion). The flying saucers he nicked from somewhere else.

Is there current canon on who their parents are?

[deleted]

Of course, from the gods’ perspective, this isn’t so: humans are their magical agribots, their ultimate labour-saving devices.

Though perhaps “paradise” — a walled enclosure/garden, an orchard, a vegetable patch, etc. — is not the word the free-living people would pick to describe their preferred state.

Yeah, but that Wikipedia page just refers us back to the Anchor Brewing Co., so it cannot settle the question of whether the Anchor Brewing Co. was right to include honey in their recipe, can it? (I don’t think the people at the brewing company would pretend to be experts (“Sumeria”?) or that their beer was authentic, just that it was a fun thing to make — which is true.) My thought was that if honey was a luxury import and beer was a domestic staple, it was unlikely that honey was an ingredient for early Sumerian beer, but I am not going to pretend to know the truth in this matter. Again, I wouldn’t swear to this, but I don’t think barley needs insects for pollination — which is not to say bees cannot pollinate barley — but check with a botanist.

That sounds like a better approach than writing a bunch of house rules for encumbrance. 😉

Hello, again. (Gene Wolfe/RQ fiction thread.) Do we buy honey in early Sumerian beer if (from the paper quoted in the original post) “Except in emergency situations, the import of foodstuffs was rare. Luxuries such as wine and honey were not produced in Babylonia, but reached the land in small quantities from the northwest”? I know nothing about the history and practice of brewing, but it begins to seem unlikely.

Academia.edu is a useful and legitimate source of stuff likely of interest to some Gloranthaphiles. This — from The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture — dropped into my inbox today: “Agriculture as Civilization: Sages, Farmers, and Barbarians” Frans Wiggermann Even if that doesn’t fascinate, it quotes from a “Sumerian disputation”, Ewe and Wheat, which might find in-game use: The people of those distant days Knew not bread to eat, They knew not cloth to wear; They went about in the land with naked limbs Eating grass with their mouths like sheep, And drinking water from the ditches … For Wheat the gods made a field, And bestowed on her plow and yoke and team. Ewe, standing in her sheepfold, Was a shepherd full of the sheepfold’s splendor; Wheat, standing in her furrow, Was a shapely girl radiating beauty Lifting her noble head high above the field She was suffused with bounty from the skies. Thus both Ewe and Wheat were radiant in appearance, And among the gathered people they caused abundance, And in the land they brought well-being.

Have you had any luck with this? I don’t have Quark, but Scribus claims some Quark support — “scribus 1.5 has a basic xtg import ability for Quark Xpress” — and is free. If you have a sample file or two, I am willing to give the import a go to see whether it gives access to the embedded images.

Thanks for reminding me to pull out my copy for a reread. Or perhaps I reread it yesterday and forgot. ;¬) There are two sequels — Soldier of Arete (New York: Tor, 1989), Soldier of Sidon (New York: Tor, 2006) — but I can’t comment on their quality.

Apologies for answering at a tangent — just ignore me, if this is irritating — but is this even desirable? Would a popular novelist capable of writing something engaging want to labour under the not inconsiderable weight of Gloranthan lore? Probably, their work would be declared non-canon, anyway. In terms of popular fiction, I was primed for RQ2 by Robert Graves’ I, Claudius and by Mary Renault’s The Bull from the Sea. Those and some myths in translation and I lapped up the lore sections of RQ publications. I don’t say those books would suit the tone or content of your campaign, but surely there is a book you already know and love which would serve to get your nieces on the hook. The Glorantha-specific detail doesn’t have to come from something pretending to be a novel, does it?