Hellhound Havoc

I can definitely see a metaphorical interpretation for Orlanth's death. Broyan was the Vingkot king, he was a chosen one, maybe they meant Orlanth's... essence or whatever and someone went there and used magic to ~~~ it or something. ...I can also see a metal interpretation, to which I'm partial, where there is an actual, eldritch-looking beating heart underneath Whitewall, and a guy went there and YOINKED it. I'm not sure I can see a metaphorical interpretation for Ernalda's, though? Because it refers to her sleeping, and that doesn't seem like the sort of detail they'd put in if they meant just her essence. What's going on there?

Whoa for real? I had no idea, though I had heard about Kyger Litor. Where can I read about this? Is it in the History of the Heortlings?

I've recently pivoted my campaign to HeroQuest - Glorantha and I've been loving it. I've picked up the Sartar Companion and noticed that not only it includes a very detailed random encounters table, it also features travel times and a rumours table. This is very interesting to me because these are things that narrative games usually avoid or fully abstract. I don't remember the last narrative-oriented game that provided me with travel times; even though it's something I appreciate and enjoy because I like to keep track of time. So, has anyone run a straight up sandbox game with the whole kit and caboodle? How does the game behave? I imagine it can be a bit strange to receive a full on +9 bonus on a complete victory just because you bodied a couple of bandits a bit harder than you probably should've. But then again, if you and your buddies really did finish off a bunch of bandits while strolling casually through the woods then yeah, maybe that does warrant a status boost after all.

This is a very interesting thought, and also gives a different meaning to the Hero Wars "bringing end to history as we know", if that means severing the God Time fully. ...I have absolutely no idea what repercussions that might have, though. Magic would probably just cease existing innit? Since it exists by the friction between the God Time and Time.

Amazing comment, thanks a lot fo the indication and for the thoughtfulness, I'll take a look at To Hunt a God. Your point about the hardline reforestation being similar to the eucalyptus plantations really gives me a different spin on it, I hadn't considered that there might be an ideological component to the whole thing. Cheers!

Your entire comment is really good, but this part is the one that sticks with me. Probably the part I like the most out of any in Glorantha's history is the I Fought We Won, the Unity Battle. It's such a beautiful piece of worldbuilding that to think that it could never happen again because there are metaphysical and unsurpassable reasons for everyone to bloody hate one another is pretty disheartening. I don't mind the idea that it might be hard. Like, reconciling the Orlanthi and the Lunars will be very hard because there's mythological opposition there regarding Chaos, but it is possible through compromise. An Uz can compromise and try to exert self control, a dwarf can compromise through fairness, but the position of "no tree should be felled" is such an absolute that I couldn't see any compromise. However, people have mentioned that elfs have compromised in the past, and that there have been alliances and whatnot, so it's bothering me less and less. Like, as hard as it is, there's hope in that notion. Not the bloody, individualistic sort of hope that "an argrath will come and wipe the moonies from the face of the earth", but rather hope that if everyone can be sensible for a little bit, things will be all right. I think that's at the heart of Glorantha in a way, just as you said, there's that civil rights vibe that it's delicate but it's possible. An emblem of this is when Annstad falls in love with Jar-Eel - which I'm not sure where it comes from because I've only seen it in the Glorantha wiki and don't remember that in King of Sartar, but I think it's a nice thought.

Very well-written, thank you. I had the broad strokes of this story (the Only Old One came down to Esrolia, he was looking for unity to deal, etc), but I didn't know the finer details. That made more sense. EDIT: Oh also, part of what got me wondering about this was a thread from a couple years ago that showed up in my readings where you delineated some of the possibly optimistic outcomes from the Hero Wars. I've read this a couple times now and I thought I could come up with a different 4th Age "ending" so to speak where the races didn't really need to vanish into the woods and "leave the world for the humans", but the more I read in this very thread, the harder it seems for that to happen. Which doesn't bode well for when Wakboth comes. I do wonder if they're right about that sometimes. Kyger Litor was a goddess but also an ancestor, after all, what if she really is there but can't do anything due to the Great Compromise? Very spooky to think about. Thanks for the answer Jeff! This is a pretty sad bit of worldbuilding, tbh. But that last part does strengthen my White Moonie inclinations; truly the only way to break this cycle would be by some form of illumination or another, I suppose. Very well put. I do feel like - and I haven't really finished King of Sartar but I'm pretty sure I'm incorrect in this assumption - but I feel like the future coming of Wakboth will only be defeated if compatibility and compromise is found, however tenuous. And I get the impression that this compromise will turn up in the Hero Wars. But yeah, that's material for a game session for sure! 🙂 Yeah I understand that, I guess it's just my personal vendetta speaking out loud against them because I really do dislike the "walking trees who protect the forest" thing. no real logical reason either, but I'm slowly growing to appreciate them. Semi unrelated, but I do wonder if Waha or Storm Bull feel similarly about protecting the migrations of the Praxian Beasts. Mammal migrations are hugely important for ecosystems, and Lunars putting a toll booth in the wrong place or some well-intentioned Pavisite deciding to dig irrigation out into the plains could be a serious disruption. I have this (very barebones) concept of pretending like Greg Stafford translated incomplete Godlearners documents, and Genertela is actually in the west side of the rectangle instead of the north side. Valind and the great fire desert are still there, though, which would mean the "forests of Sartar" actually into rainforests, partially fed by dust drummed up from the Wastelands by the Desert Winds of the Storm Bull. I think I'd like the elfs more if they were in a position such as this, where they can't be the relatively easy moral position to defend of "we're also protecting life, you can simply not chop down trees!" and sorta need to protect the grasslands too. I don't know, it's late in my country and I'm rambling at this point. Thanks again everyone for the very informative responses, this gives me quite a bit to think about as to how to tweak my home game - and how not to, too, as I realise I wasn't taking a lot of info in consideration.

That makes sense, but it's been what, at least 40 generations since then? Surely the culture has changed, what with them being so close to humans in the meantime. I understand that Zorak Zoran's influence and such might be powerful, but it feels a bit strange that every single of all trolls would keep that tradition from so long ago. Especially in Dragon Pass, where The Only Old One integrated to the point of even looking human. But as you say, their matriarchs are long-lived and there was the Tax Slaughter... but that was still a thousand years ago. And the trollkin had no one's involvement, right? It was just Chaos, Gbaji being a bastard. And all of this just makes the Unity Council seem weirder, like: Because on the one hand, there are metaphysical and centuries-long reasons for these peoples to hate one another... then how the hell did the Unity Council form in the first place? Especially since it was so close to the Great Darkness and all the evils that happened there. Like, I get cultural conflict, I'm not advocating for that - the Lunar Empire faces Sartar and that's cool. I just don't see what's fun about them treating one another monolithically, so to speak. Sidenote, but it feels so strange to me to read "phenotype" just a couple of paragraphs away from "and these guys are the sons of the gods" lol like could you take a bit of earth from the ground and extract Ernalda's DNA? Pretty bonkers. But anyway: This makes sense and I hadn't really considered that. Like, it's one thing to have 40 dead generations of your clan being just... dead. It's a whole different ball game when those 40 generations can and will scream at your face for cooperating with "our ancient enemy." Thanks for the response!

Thank you @Ormi Phengaria for such an indepth answer. I'll respond to you and @Joerg in different ones because it'll be confusing otherwise. This is an interesting read of them, and if so then I totally get how and why they'd have serious grievances with most other people, but I never had the impression that they're always hungry, just that they're kinda dumb and crude - according to the human-centric book, that is. Like, to take the Glorantha Bestiary: To me, this sounds more like they're a race of big dumb brutes rather than perpetually hungry; but it'd make sense if they were, because this reads almost like anti-Uz propaganda tbh. As to the Aldryami and Mostali, yeah I understand... mostly. I understand why the dwarfs have an issue, but I'm not sure why the elfs would. Like, the elfs simply grow, it's the Mostali who live forever and probably want to avenge Stone and whatnot. Still, I'd like there to be some room for them to put that behind them, it feels a bit exceedingly deterministic that they're bound to kill and die for this, but that's not a flaw or anything, just my personal preference. Honestly, I don't like the Aldryami a whole lot and I think that's colouring my perception of them. I just resent the perception that "nature and growing = trees and forest." You can see that too in Prax, as it's described as a grassland because the god who lived there died. It bothers me in part because one of the most important biomes where I live is a form of grassland / savannah similar to Prax, and it's hugely important for the ecosystem, so having the elfs just existing to yabber about cutting down trees but not having a similar people to yabber about animals eating grass- with the implication that the forest is somehow "more alive" than the grassland and chaparral - just makes me a bit angry at them. This is an interesting, if a bit funny notion, thank you for bringing it up. I wondered about this, but I feel like it's a bit inconsistent. Like, sometimes it feels like the writing in the books are very firmly "from outside". When the guide describes the stars in the night sky and the constellations, it's being reliable; but when it describes things other than humans, often it isn't. For instance, this paragraph from the Glorantha Sourcebook: Bringing up that humans mistook the Peoples of Darkness for Chaos is interesting, but that feels like something from the trolls' POV, doesn't it?

Thanks everyone for the responses, it's much clearer now. Ah, I see. In terms of HeroQuest these would be the Feats, then. Thanks for these quotations.

So recently I read up on why exactly are the Elder Races at war with one another for a thousand years and a half, and... I'm just not entirely sure why. But beyond that, I'm not sure what that adds to the setting. Why can't the Uz just be another kind of "people" who live around, for instance? I feel like it's meant to be taken as a sort of justification for something but idk, fantasy racism never jived well with me. But maybe I'm misunderstanding something, so here's what I understood from reading a bit on why each of these hate one another. Trolls x the rest - From what I got, folks in-world generally hate the trolls because a) they sometimes eat them, and b) their arrival in the world during the Great Darkness was pretty traumatic. The Glorantha Sourcebook says that a lot of stuff that folks thought was the trolls doing, was actually Chaos. This strikes me as odd because I haven't seen anything to indicate that the trolls are stupid or amoral. Like, humans lived with them under the Only Old One, they can literally eat anything, I don't get why they would choose to make the people they're living with angry just to have a nice meal. And besides, they're not particularly long lived so at least between them, humans, and dragonewts, whatever beef they had 1600 years ago must have surely died down, right? Aldryami x Mostali - This one I kinda get, but it seems to me like it should be more one-sided. Elves don't live forever, but the Mostali do, so there are many Mostali alive today who probably were there to see the hijinks of the Elf King and Stone. Still, in Dragon Pass the Mostali are generally chiller, and I don't really see them interacting in any meaningful way. It's not like there's resources for them to compete over, is it just religion at this point? It must not be in the Aldryami's best interests to have the Mostali as enemies. Aldryami x Humans and Trolls - It says that "elves don't like humans because they tear down the trees to make shelter, and the Uz eat the trees and also the elves." And like, I get that the elves would strongly dislike people chopping down trees, but these guys are vegetarians. Surely they understand the meaning of basic necessities, and that humans and Uz need that wood to survive just like they need to eat those leaves for them to survive. This also calls back to "the trolls are dumb stupid monsters who will just eat other folks and antagonize them for no better reason than to fill their bellies when they could very well just eat literally anything else in the world, including the enemies of the elves." Dragonewts x Others - I didn't find much on the dragonewts' relationship to the others. Humans are scared of them because dragons are spooky, I can't say it doesn't make sense after the whole EWF debacle. All in all, I'm not entirely sure why it's still a status quo that they hate one another a thousand years later. Another thing that I'm not entirely in love with, but I understand why it's the case, is why are the humans separated into cultures but the Elder Races aren't. Like, humans are divided into Praxians, Heortlings, Tarshites, etc. And then you have Trolls who are just... Trolls. Am I meant to believe that the trolls in the Shadow Plateau, with a long and proud history of serving a demigod for a thousand years, have more in common with the trolls on the other side of Genertela than with the Heortling clans who fought and bled at their side during their exile from Dragon Pass? Don't they speak different languages and have different cultural practices? Why are the trolls who live in the southern continent called "Jungle Trolls" while the humans who do the same aren't called "Jungle Fellas"? I wouldn't normally have an issue with this. Like, Tolkien's orcs are just evil baddie magical creatures who are that way because they're magically evil and created by one guy for that purpose. But Glorantha does so much to make everything else feel alive that it just strikes me as strange when entire races are treated as being kinda monolithical, at least in culture. But I get why that's the case, there's only so much you can write about a setting after all, and maybe Greg Stafford and other folks wanted to expand on this but just had more pressing books to write. That's totally understandable, but still, it's a part of the setting. I hope I haven't come across as combative, I'm genuinely not sure if I have the full picture here, and a lot of this is just a matter of taste. If having the Elder Races hate one another is cool to you, that's great. I feel the need to highlight that because I'm not here in bad faith or to yuck someone's yum.

For instance, Ernalda is said to "live in" Esrolia, and Orlanth is said to "live in" that storm in the middle of Kero Fin. But at the same time it's said that he lives in the big storm that circulates the world, and also in Orlanth's Ring, the stars that appear in the sky. Is this one of the good ol' "well ya know, mythology is convoluted" things? Or do the gods of Glorantha legit live under the sky dome with the rest of us? Like, is Waha running around Prax physically? Or like, Issaries and those other gods who aren't exactly tied to natural phenomena like the Storm Bull and Heler? Or do they "live" (as much as it can be called life) in the God Time, in the background of existence?

Hello! I've been reading HeroQuest - Glorantha and planning on pivoting my game to it, but I'm not sure I understand why Breakout Abilities exist. So, if I understood correctly, suppose my occupational keyword is Noble 17. I can use that to do a lot of things, let's say reading and writing is one of them. When a challenge comes up that can be solved through reading and writing, I can roll up my Noble 17 and that's that. But I can also have a Breakout Ability of "Reading and Writing +3", so instead of rolling Noble 17, I'd roll Noble 20 for challenges involving that. What's the benefit, then, of having the Breakout Ability instead of simply investing those points in the main keyword to have a broader skill? Is it just so you can customize your character or are there any advantages? Cheers! EDIT: Nevermind, I got it reading ahead.