mfbrandi

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.

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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?

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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?