Hellhound Havoc

Sounds like a fun premise to a campaign: our wives and husbands left us, our kids are all grown up, so it's just us, booze, and the road to Pavis now! But seriously, amazing answer. I reached some similar conclusions in my response just 5 minutes ago but not to this degree of detail. I'd also forgotten about the city confederation thing, and yeah, historically speaking cities were population sinks needing constant migration from the rural areas - exactly these sons and daughters who didn't have anything to look for in the future.

True, but it takes pretty much just one Chalana Arroy and Asrelia or even Ernalda cultists to bless the birth, then the children, then hunt the disease spirits, and done, the bloodline is safe. That said, that myth really is quite applicable because I think that's basically it: if you're raised as a warrior and there's not enough land or cattle for you at home, either you very quickly steal some from the neighbouring clan (and since cattle raids are established as a regular summer thing, that's the most likely to me), or you go off on your own to make something for yourself with the blessings of your kin. The Orlanthi have a past of adventuring, after all, and that was a thing in viking society, which the Orlanthi borrowed quite a bit. So if your dad says "sorry bud, you're the 4th son and there's just not enough stuff here for you", I think it's reasonable to assume that the son will keep his chin up and go wander.

Sorry, could you expand a bit on what's up with the subcults? I know a bit about past history, but "current" events in Glorantha elude me a bit, and I got curious

Oh I wouldn't count on that if I were you! 😛

Wouldn't this make a Carl lineage into a Cottar lineage in like 3 generations? Say I'm a Carl, I hold 2 hides of land, I have 3 beautiful sons. I distribute these 2 between the oldest ones, and the third one works on one of his brothers farms. All of the three have kids, no one distinguishes themselves enough to have more land assigned to them, and maybe one of them finds success by going to the neighbouring clan or tribe and finding a woman of status willing to marry them, but if the sons of the third son don't do that, then they're basically out of the lineage, aren't they? And if they reach the majority while their father is still alive - hell, if I'M still alive - then where do they work? There's just not enough land or cattle to require all those hands. I can see, however, if my neighbour has a couple hides and doesn't have enough sons and needs someone to work that land because... well, someone's gotta plow. And that might be a mechanism of all the same families holding power, as you mentioned, but on a smaller scale, inside the clan.

I totally forgot about this, but it's absolutely true. The Orlanthi say it was Heort, and maybe it was, but the trolls in particular were also out there fighting. For all we know, the last hero was an uz, or a lone aldryami in the woods, or even a pack of plucky adventurers pulled together by the circumstance. Could have been a golden wheel dancer lol that would make everyone mad. This is a nice way to look at it. The Uz started being born in litters with the enlo, after all, and the existence of "Superior Trollkin" proves that, with enough time and effort, the curse doesn't have to be a curse forever. You could say it's just a phase of their species' story that has changed. We really are all uz. I wonder how that interacts with the I Fought We Won anti-chaos ideology, because the trollkin are essentially a product of chaos, so the hardliners anti-chaos wouldn't be able to reconcile it. At the same time, those who embrace the Lunar Way can do so either because they think the goddess can be regenerated like Sedenya and the curse can be averted, or because they think this is no curse at all and illumination is the only way to escape from the anti-chaos autogenocidal trap. To one side, the Uz live in a disciplined, cogent, top-down society. To the other majority side, the Uz live in a tyrannical, Spartan society on its way to oblivion because the Uzuz won't all live forever - not even the Only Old One could survive, after all.

I've been thinking about ideology in Glorantha. I don't mean our ideology, from our world, of course, but rather what sorts of ideologies might exist in a world such as this, and what would be the main factions, as well as what positions one might hold as important. We get clues from this every now and then, but I can't remember them all. So it goes something like this: Dwarfs - Probably the most straightforward. The Mostali are either Orthodox or Heretics, with Heretics being against the status quo either in a radically individualistic or open bent (Individualism and Openhandism) or in an extreme reactionary bent (Octamonism). Thus the main issues relating to a Mostali are: do you support the status quo? What should be our relationship to the outside world? Do you have a stance on the Iron dwarfs? In terms of goals, however, they all have the same one: restore the Machine God. That is in itself an ideology, though, because every one of these heresies are just different ways of restoring the Machine God. Elfs - I honestly don't know a lot about the Aldryami, but I'd imagine that their major split would probably be on the grounds of Reforestation, what that entails, and to what degree that should go, with extreme reforestators saying the Aldryami should cover the entire world in trees, while more moderate types would be ok with just islands of forest in other biomes, like Prax. Plus the question of old grudges and whether they should let go or keep it up. Trolls - The Uz seem to have the most cogent, almost disciplined and direct ideology of anyone, because they're basically fine with very little. As a species, they have basically one issue: their fertility goddess Korasting is dead and the children are being born weird now. Their stance on Chaos naturally stems from this, since it was Gbaji who did it. There's not a lot to divide the trolls; "should they contact this tribe or not" is an entirely practical matter, and there's just not enough people in your average troll clan to provide dissent, especially if there's an Uzuz nearby. I can see a faction forming, however, of Lunar-sided Trolls, who learned about how another deity, Sedenya, was brought back by ritual, so maybe they're investigating the matter and perhaps even reaching Illumination and letting go of past grudges? Lunar Empire - The main matter in Lunar lands is probably one of chaos. Aside from the "are you loyal or not" question, I imagine there are also pretenders or people who believe the Empire has gone too far away from their Carmanian origins and want to go back to that "golden age", when the women and barbarians knew their place. On the opposite end you have the White Moonies, who believe the Empire was never meant to have been created and the Empire must fizzle out. Orlanthi - The main matter with the Orlanthi is the Lunar Empire, but there's a bit more nuance there, because there are factions whose actions may look identical, but their motivations may be different. For instance, the Rebels aren't really unified, their single goal is to remove Lunar occupation, but I imagine there are those who fight to restore the Prince of Sartar exactly as it was before and keep the Orlanthi conservative, but there must also be those who reject Lunar occupation but think Orlanthi society needs to embody the spirit of Movement from Orlanth and be shaken up, perhaps to learn something from the Lunars. From those who support the Lunar Empire, and therefore reject the anti-Chaos Orlanthi ideology, there must also be White Moonies between them. And there's the Fazzurites and Phargenteites, which to me indicate different degrees of pro-Lunar fervour. Fazzur, for everything he's done, did save the citizens of Boldhome, and always gave me the vibe of "goddamn you rebels keep forcing my hand, I like this just as much as you do!", while Phargentes always struck me more as a power hungry guy with the spears to back it up. I don't know enough about Prax, Pavis, and the Holy Country to talk about them tbh, but what do you think? Are there or should there be some other factions? What else would someone in Glorantha believe is an important issue that should be addressed?

@svensson I understand the mechanics of Anglo-Saxon and Gael governance relatively well tbh, I just didn't think they'd play too much because those are very distinctly not Bronze Age peoples. We know so very little of the Germanic Bronze Age, all we can do is extrapolate from Roman Sources and from Late Antiquity / Early Medieval Christian monk sources. I thought Sartar was closer to Greece? And I'm not familiar with that to be sure, but now that I think of it, I'd expect to see more city-states, or the Mycenaean "quarters" or whatever was the name of the thing.

This makes sense to me, that trolls go by smell and that they would find different aromas more pleasant than others. That said, pages 13 and 14 of the Trollpak are an experiment to try and find troll food preferences, and the very first things are forms of leather, fruits, vegetables, and liquids. This isn't that different from human stuff, but I do understand that the combination prizes smells and what might appear to be "dirty" is actually carefully composed to smell nice. That said, those same pages of the Trollpak mentions that the dark troll never ate his own feces, nor the trollkin's, and that the trollkin only ate the dark troll poop but never his own - and it died of hunger. The Dark Troll preferred to ritually devour the trollkin and subsequently die of hunger rather than eat his poop, so that indicates to me that they do have some concept of what is dirty and what isn't; and surely it's inconvenient to have sticky stuff like wine all over the ground. And again, they herd beetles and trollkin. I understand that the preferred living of a rich troll would be to have a lot of food and other consumables laying around so he can eat whenever he gets peckish, but your average dark troll isn't that rich, and those beetles and trollkin gotta eat something, and I don't really see a dark troll wasting perfectly fine food on a trollkin or a beetle when they can very make do with least desirable food. That's exactly how humans have fed pigs for millennia. I have seen this claim numerous times, but only in these forums. I'd like to know where it originates from and if it's still canon. The Trollpak doesn't say anything about the trolls being constantly hungry, neither does HeroQuest 2e or even the Guide to Glorantha, despite repeat mentions that they can eat anything, they can extract food from anything. And there's the excerpt I put in my main post, which very clearly states "a sated troll", which seems to contradict the idea that the Uz are constantly hungry. It is implied that eating is very important to them, and that they eat whenever they get the chance, but to me that seems more along the lines of them being gourmands and deriving much pleasure from eating (which is explicitely said in the Trollpak) rather than hunger. The only place I've seen mention them being always hungry was in the Glorantha Bestiary, but the tone of the entry is very poetic rather than descriptive, and the more scientifically oriented Trollpak dissecates the Uz's entire digestive system but doesn't say anything of that sort. And it even emphasizes sometimes that certain trolls are hungry or go hungry, with mentions to sated trolls, which surely would make no sense if they were always hungry. If the definition of a troll is a Hungry Hungry Hippo, saying "hungry troll" makes no sense - starving troll would make more sense, yet it's almost impossible for a troll to starve in the wild.

Cave trolls and trollkin won't, I get that, but don't the dark trolls own the trollkin and the beetles like cattle? Wouldn't it make sense for them to feed them the refuse, leftovers, and dirt instead of actual food, since the trollkin can live off of Dark Troll refuse and litter? So wouldn't it make sense for, say, Dagori Inkarth to be tidy because all the dirt is the trollkins' food?

I've been reading Trollpak and understanding a lot more about the trolls, and how they seem to be these weird brutish creatures but there's a lot of sense in how they act and think. Well, as much as can be in a race of weird shadow hippo demons that escaped from Not!Hell and were cursed. But later on, describing their living quarters, they're described as slovenly, and this keeps coming up. How their hovels are ramshackle, how they keep refuse to the side apparently unbothered, etc. But I don't get why though. Also they can be poisoned, so surely they're also prone to illness, and living in abject squalor can't be healthy. Even the recent Glorantha Bestiary says: If anything, you'd think that the trolls would actually be quite tidy, because they have two equivalents of pigs to eat their refuse and even their dirt and poop (trollkin and beetles, which are notorious FOR being decomposers in nature). I understand being disorganized or even having different habits of cleanliness but squalor? Plus, page 30 has this little box: Which implies both that trolls can get their bellies full and think about things other than eating and mating (or else they'd just be wild animals, like the cave trolls or the broo), and also that they can care about comfort. So why are they always referred to as dirty, slovenly, living in filth and squalor, etc?

I DMed Six Seasons in Sartar a while back and one of the players decided to be a young noblewoman. However, the more we thought about it, the more it seemed like the "noble" is just a Warrior with more cash. To my understanding, the Sartarite organisation is: Kingdom of Sartar, composed of many tribes, which are composed of many clans. On the most local level, the basic unit - the "village" - is the Clan, right? Like the Red Cow clan, which is part of the Colymar tribe, which is part of Sartar. So the tribal king of Colymar has his loyal retainers, the thanes, and these men are considered nobles. But each of the clan leaders also has a retinue, and they're also thanes, and they also count as nobles, but all of this seems to be hand picked guardsmen. That is, nobles just seem like knights, or the Anglo-Saxon thane itself - but that is a social class, their occupation would have been "warrior" because the main job of the knight and the Anglo-Saxon thane is to protect their land and their suzerain's lands. Yet in RQ it is mentioned that the thane "coordinate and speak for their people". So how far down does this goes? Let me give a practical example. King Sartar gave King Colymar X amount of lands. King Colymar gave the clan Haraborn Y amount of lands. Out of this, a quarter belongs to the chief personally and a quarter to the temple. So the chief distributes his hides, let's say these are 80 hides from a 200 hide clan. The chief can't till all of that alone, and he has 3 sons, so he distributes 40 hides among them (20 for the firstborn, 10 for each brother) so they're not destitute in the event of his death. But these sons can't till that alone either, so they dole them out to other men and so on and so forth. At one point, someone down the line is going to live as a cottar or a free man. My point here is that these thanes aren't "speaking for their people", they're just protect the land alloted to them, so their occupation is that of Warrior, and their social class is that of Noble. The only true Nobles, it seems to me, are the clan leadership, which can be hereditary so these are people who actually grow apart from other freemen and are groomed to rule. King Colymar's son and Clan Chief Haraborn's son have both more in common with one another than with their free neighbours' sons. So what am I missing here? Why is Noble a distinct occupation with their own skills?

Great questions, you see: the Morocanth would love to lounge around in the fresh water and humidity of the rainforest - they don't need it but hey, who doesn't love a great soaking? However, it's tougher to herd their precious herdmen through the dense jungle. Also, the Sartarites and other tribes harass them too much for it to be worth their while, so instead their migrations take them to the River of Cradles during flood season so the herdmen can tamp on the soft earth and eat those delicious riverine plants they love so much. These grow not due to Genert's influence or lack thereof, but rather because of the god of the river and his magnificent bounty. There are, of course, Morocanth who do periodic pilgrimages back to Dragon Pass as a way o homage their freshwater ancestors and sink a bit on the rivers, but they've grown hard and distant and most of them can't swim, so they're a bit afraid of the water. Also I've literally just found out that tapirs also inhabit dryland forests, and there is mention of chaparral and shrubland in Prax, so it isn't a leap to say that their ancestral home as tapirs actually is the Wastes and that they never had a proper freshwater thingie. How did they arrive there if that area wasn't dry in the Godtime before Genert's death? That's a question that puzzles the Morokanth loremasters for centuries now, but their memory from before the Covenant is tricky. Some Morocanth are actually in the process of finding a HeroQuest that would remind them of their origins. Some say they should let sleeping tapirs lie, though. Who knows what one may find in such a distant past. What kind of sin was committed by or to them to confine them to such place? In my opinion, there is no sin at all. Prax is hard but life grows everywhere, and they're children of the Wastes through and through. They should, instead, invest in creating mud pits like the Sudd in Sudan so they and their herds can take mud baths and soak in the cool sucking mud. And of course the Incafied Lunars wouldn't march under such a silly banner, this is borderline disrespectful to them and to this whole concept. Such a suggestion... ...They would, of course, say it in Quechua instead! 😛

Very true, it's just that the Grazelanders are so horse centric that it's hard to fit them in a South American flavour. I think only the Mapuche, maybe?

the lostest tribe of Prax. they got so lost that they left Prax lol