Ynneadwraith

Glad it came in handy! 🙂 they're really neat little folklore tales

This I really like! In my own creative works I've taken a lot of influence from Miyazaki, ATLA and folklore with 'little spirits'. Yeah the big powerful ones are fun and all, but to build a truly rich spiritual world I'd want to see a whole menagerie of little spirits doing little spirit things. One of my favourites are these sorts of blood demon that well up from the ground where battles have been fought. In actuality, they're tiny little earthworm spirits. Normally they spend their time guiding earthworms to little morsels of food just beneath the ground, but when their little world gets flooded with blood from battles they get really pissed. That lasts until the rain washes it all away, and they can get back to their regular routine. I feel like anyone wanting to make the Gloranthan spirit world rich and vibrant should add all sorts of these little folkloric/spirit critters 🙂 love the idea that Arachne Solara might be one of them (which explains why we never really hear of her before or after, because the gods are too self-important to pay attention to the little things...).

Now that's a beautifully Mostali way of looking at things. Or, perhaps, a distortion of Mostali philosophy through a human-centric viewpoint (which fits neatly with that being the origin of sorcery). Mostali heroquest to reforge the world engine (the One True Tool). That's the end-goal of Mostali sorcery. Try teaching that to a human student that's only half paying attention, spending the rest of the time daydreaming about being a conqueror, and you could get something like 'you can heroquest to reforge these so-called gods into tools you can use to further your own power'. I also like the insinuation that Orlanth is just an air conditioner that's got way above its station...

This is the way I see all interactions with gods in Glorantha happening (whether someone is a true believer or not). Providing magic to their followers is pretty much the only way they can still influence the world of Time, so they're going to use it to drive forward their agenda. All gods have an 'ask'. Some people are just so blinkered that they cannot fathom that their god's ask might be something that's not in their individual best interest... Though I do like my worldbuilding a little on the Lovecraftian side...

Yeah, I think I'm with Tatterdemalion in the other Thed thread that not only is this myth seemingly non-existent in the published materials for Glorantha (and was only ever tangentially attested), it's a rubbish myth with a thoroughly questionable message both in-universe and out that cheapens Thed's character from something that's quite complex and nuanced to 'Thed did evil things because Thed is just an evil baddie who does evil things'. As I said, cheapens a complex interesting character to a 2-dimensional baddie with no interesting facets. Disappointing. This touches on the 'questionable message' bit, as this myth veers way too close to 'victims of rape deserved it'. In an ideal world you could potentially hide behind the idea of it this being a fantasy world where it's ok to have evil villains who did evil things because they're evil, but there are a depressing number of people who will see this story and add it to their schema of how they conceptualise rape. If you can entertain the concept of 'some people deserve to get raped' then it is only the smallest of logical leaps to 'perhaps this person in front of me is someone who deserves to get raped'. If we're going to be discussing topics as sensitive and delicate as rape (and I think we should be), it behoves us to be really, really smart about deciding what it is we're saying about it. I much, much prefer the narrative arc of Thed without the addition of this poorly substantiated myth. Not a flat 'Thed did evil things because Thed's evil', but 'Thed did evil things because of a host of complex causes, some of which were in her control and some were not'. That in no way denies that the things that Thed did were evil (they absolutely were), but it invites a more nuanced and helpful conversation about how and where our 'heroes' were complicit in those evil acts. It also says some really rather clever things about cycles of abuse, and how they are easy to inadvertently perpetuate (both individually and institutionally) and difficult to break. Thed's story remains an example of 'the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth', which I personally find a far more compelling and useful story to tell.

They might not be happy, but in a pre-modern state their means of actually enforcing a trade ban is wholly inadequate. Traders will generally just keep doing their thing, though it will become somewhat riskier.

True, though I like throwing in differing inheritance customs to different people. It's surprising how far it changes the dynamics of a culture. You're right though, all it needs is for the inheritance rules to be unclear, which is something that is already the case. @Runeblogger Ooh this I like. Fits neatly into the idea of Gloranthan pre-history for me, with today's Hsunchen being relict populations of an earlier paleolithic mythic complex, and a fair chunk of the myths we know today being either misrememberings or fabrications echoed through a thousand year oral tradition.

Love that these two versions portray the same event from subtly different perspectives. So subtle that if you read them each with a week or two intervening you might not even notice it, but stick them together and it's clear. Textbook unreliable narrator. I wonder what context each of those was written in. Who is it that was doing the telling in each situation? More of this please. Now this I am here for. What if...Ragnaglar isn't guilty. Ragnaglar is the fall guy. A scapegoat. Thrown to the wolves in place of the real culprit, lawless Storm Bull. Convenient, considering he himself is already a traumatised outcast, and it would be easy to convince the rest of the Storm Tribe that he did it. Would give another dimension to why Thed is all-caps PISSED OFF at Orlanth's 'justice', and willing to go scorched earth on the rest of creation. It would also give a new angle to why Storm Bull is so vehemently anti-chaos. Since the Greater Darkness it's been justified in the eyes of everyone else, but beneath it all is a kernel of rage covering self-loathing. No wonder Storm Bull is suicidal. Either that or he fought on til the bitter end because he knew that Thed was waiting for him afterwards... I don't even particularly care if this version is true or not (whatever truth means in Glorantha). Just having all these different competing versions of the truth is enough. Mystery is good.

Just awesome work all of this! Perhaps Tatterdemalion's interpretation of Thed is a broken remnant of her former self. A cosmic horror glimpse that the Thed of the Greater Darkness was even more terrifying. This I like. All it needs is a hint that the Storm Tribe of old used to practice ultimogeniture. Spin a myth that Umath did not want to inflict the hardships of his childhood on his own children. The eldest were strong enough to fight for a place within the world, but the youngest should be cared for with a place of their own ready for them (unlike his elder siblings Sky and Earth, who took all the space in the world and left none for him).* Add in the rest of the story and it gives a nicely Orlanthi-feeling parable about not following unsuitable leaders, even if the rules say you should. Yes Ragnaglar and Thed might be the rightful heirs, but...yeesh! Let's have someone else please... Add into the mix @Sir_Godspeed's varied Ygg worldview, where they believe that Ygg is the rightful heir (through Vadrus as eldest) and you get another neat Storm Tribe Falls Apart myth which feels very apropos to any culture that's ever had an unclear inheritance situation cause a succession crisis, as surely the Orlanthi have. *Though I would like to preserve the possibility that it's all a fabricated plot, because mystery

True, Chaos didn't. But did acts that are now considered chaotic still exist? I'd say clearly, seeing as Ragnaglar committed one. The timeline* would go something like: The Mad God invents rape->regular people start doing it too->Thed's trial->Thed's curse->people realise rape is bad->Ragnaglar's folk (Orlanth's kinsmen) turn into Broo And the rest is history.

Interesting. So what does that mean in a practical sense? Before that, were folks with chaotic features just a regular part of Orlanthi life? Were chaotic acts (like rape) not reviled? Did chaotic acts not produce chaotic features? Was it generally fine to do chaotic things because the outcomes weren't punished (i.e. chaotic features all had positive outcomes)? If so, no wonder people mourned the loss of Yelm's order. Pre Thed's chastening, Orlanthi sound horrendous!

And thus was born Kajabor... Interesting. So what is Thed's curse exactly? Did Thed spread rape into the world past Ragnaglar's one act? Was it already there, but Thed put the revulsion of it into the Man rune? Did she curse rapists to become the first Broo? Were the Broo originally Orlanthi aligned with Ragnaglar, and so Orlanth would mourn their loss? Man Thed is a good character.

I'd suggest that 'truth' is not quite the right word to use here. 'Truth' implies that there is one state that is fundamentally right and correct, simply obscured by untruths above it. The way I see it, 'fundamental truth' in Glorantha is editable. We don't really have a word for 'a reality that may not have been the same reality a generation ago, but is every bit as real now as that different reality used to be then', because real world physics don't function like Gloranthan metaphysics do. Perhaps it's better to talk about momentum more than truth. Some conceptualisations of a god have more momentum than others, and thus are harder to steer onto a different course. The Little Sun is Yelmalio seems to have been one that was relatively easier to shift. All it took was one proselytising fanatic to change the direction of the various Little Sun gods into a composite Yelmalio (or to reveal the 'truth' that they were Yelmalio all along, same difference). 'Orlanth in King of the Middle Air' seems to have a lot more momentum, and is taking the combined might of the entire Lunar Empire and a god outside of Time to shift. One part where the analogy breaks down is that these 'momentums' have personal agency about whether they want to be shifted somewhere else or not!

Oh agreed. Like John Biles I don't particularly view them as passive recipients of this process. They may be conglomerations of people's stories about them, but there's a ghost in the machine. They're conscious, thinking things with agency of their own. I view it a bit like the proverbial boiling frog (even if I do find the analogy grotesque). Raise the temperature too quickly and the frog realises and jumps out. Raise the temperature gradually and it doesn't realise what's happening until it's too late. Before you know it, Shargash the Slash-and-Burn-Agriculture God is Shargash the War Demon. Most people don't realise they're changing the water temperature at all. I suggest the God Learners found out what happens when the frog realises it's being boiled... One could make a fairly convincing mythic argument that rape wouldn't be a sin in Glorantha without Thed's story. Thed's story articulates it as one of the Cardinal Sins that led to the creation of chaos (along with the child molestation that drove Ragnaglar mad). Thed's trauma doesn't excuse her later actions, but nor do her later actions absolve the crimes Ragnaglar perpetrated against her. I suspect Yelm would apply Justice by totting up the crimes perpetrated by Thed and the crimes perpetrated to Thed, see which scale is heavier and then sentence her. I suspect Orlanth attempted to do the same, but was sidetracked by familial obligations to Ragnaglar. Me? Sod Justice. That's just the thinnest of civilised veneers plastered atop barbarous Vengeance. I think the best possibly 'judge' would have been Chalana Arroy. I don't care about punishment, I care about the healing of wounds. But I appreciate other people have different views, and it all gets very complicated when you butt up against things that cannot be healed. One of these things is not like the others. Thed is a victim. Thed also perpetrated evil things. These things are not mutually exclusive.

Now that I love, mainly because it hints at the idea of an earlier animal-based mythic complex preserved by relict Hsunchen populations. I don't particularly like the idea that Orlanthi storm-barbarians have always been storm-barbarians from the day dot. I much prefer the more real-world idea of culture layered upon culture layered upon culture, obscuring the history of peoples. Perhaps what we now know of as 'Orlanthi' peoples originated as a confederacy of various animal-totem people, within which cat-totem people became pre-eminent, before all of that was adapted in response to the new mythic complex of anthropomorphised gods. Similar to how there's potential evidence of a bull-totem complex stretching stretching from Prax through Carmania into Fronela. Oh agreed. This excellent video gives a wonderful insight into how the oral tradition of the Trojan War we have recorded in the Iliad is likely a snapshot of a point in time of a long and evolving oral storytelling tradition of the falls of a great city (which city varies depending on who is telling the story). It talks a lot about how these stories evolved over time, and were adapted to different audiences. For the Greeks, they wanted to hear about their mighty and warlike heroes triumphing over the Trojans. For the Hittites (who were in the same audience!), they wanted to hear about the tragic interpersonal stories of the last days of the Trojan elite. So we ended up with this beautiful balanced narrative. On the intentional side of things, the video talks about a particular section of the Iliad in which Aphrodite tries to intervene, gets wounded, and is told 'not for you are these works of warfare...this shall be left for Athena and sudden Ares'. This being an adaptation Greeks made to the earlier Mesopotamian narrative upon which the Iliad is based in which Aphrodite's Mesopotamian equivalent (Inanna) was a martial god. It's a bit of a cheeky Greek in-joke of 'yeah well this is our version of the story and our war gods are Athena and Ares'. I'd go further than that, though I acknowledge I might be a bit of a Gloranthan extremist. The gods are what people have made them. Whatever they were before is mostly lost to thousands of years of deliberate and accidental editing. The idea being that God Time is edited each and every time a mortal enters it and re-enacts a myth, twisting it ever so slightly to conform to whatever narrative is expected by the mortal doing the re-enacting (and the gods with it). Do this enough times and what becomes the reality of God Time changes, even without all of the deliberate editing by people like the God-Learners and syncretisers like the Theyalans and Monrogh, or the rewriting of mythic narratives to fulfil mortal propaganda needs. I think that gels pretty well with the evolutionary nature of oral storytelling.

Rashoran as a marriage counsellor? Terrifying, but possibly still a better option than early-days Orlanth (petulant) or even Yelm (repressive)... 'When' and 'before' might be complex questions when it comes to the world before linear Time. Unless it's something different, when Time has always existed and Arachne Solara actually ejected GodTime outside of it. I wonder, did causality exist before Time? Or because we're children of Time do we find it difficult to conceptualise causality outside of a linear framework (so the question still stands about whether Rashoran was involved as a cause or an effect).

This. Perhaps its my love of cosmic horror, but I think people over-anthropomorphise Gloranthan gods (easy to do). Gods are not people, and do not behave as such. They are a halfway-house between a human and an abstract Rune. Incomprehensible (but not impersonal) forces interpreted by inadequate mortal minds as people with families and relationships, because they are not capable of understanding their true natures. Not that I dislike the highly personal take on Gloranthan gods. It's one of the main draws of the setting! But we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the relationships between different gods isn't like the fixed biological relationship between a father and a son. It's more like a Lamarckian thematic relationship between phenomena. It's less a family tree and more a culturally variable venn diagram. That's not even considering the tampering conducted by the God Learners (and to a lesser extent Theyalans and Monrogh). Not that it isn't fun to fathom out these sorts of relationships 🙂 True dat. Though cheap victim-blaming seems to be a popular pastime of our favourite windy hill barbarians. Reminds me of a thread/blog post I read somewhere about a gaming group who decided their campaign should be about redeeming Thed. Massive Heroquest into basal Orlanthi Godtime to act as Thed's representative in the trial. I seem to remember it gaming out as having something to do with the genesis of Argrath, which I thought wasn't a satisfying thematic ending to the saga (though I've never liked Argrath as a historic development). Would rather have seen it having a significant effect on the Broo, or something like that (or perhaps being the genesis of that Chalona Arroyan Broo healer).

My take is, that like a lot of real world instances of unclear succession, it become a fictional tautology. If someone successfully heroquests to receive the Sword and Helm of Vingkot, then clearly they must have been an heir all along. Regardless of whether it's actually true or not. Through heroquesting they become one (or just through convincing everyone else that they must have been one anyway).

Aye, though the Yelmic bods are having none of that! The compromise the Orlanthi made in this hypothetical was acknowledging that Orlanth did it all because Yelm told him so. No-one can make you do anything, but you can choose to do as you're told. Ooh, I sense a Lunar illumination-through-death cult brewing as well...

Interesting idea. Syncretisation of Yelmic and Orlanthi beliefs into a shared narrative where Orlanth is both murderer and saviour. Both the cause of the sun's setting each night, but also its rising with the dawn. Yelm's most loyal servant, who dared to follow his Lord's orders and slay the Relentless Sun, providing the respite of night to his baking mortal subjects. Well that ended up a bit more Gospel of Judas rather than Set, but interesting to think about anyway!

Now there's an Esrolian heresy for you!

Not devour, embrace. The crushing, smothering love of an overbearing parent. Chaos loves you. That's why it gives you gifts so readily. Now be grateful and say thankyou for the extra tentacles...

I hope so! For me, coming from a country so steeped in maritime traditions (the UK), it feels as though Glorantha is sorely in need of cultures with a maritime geographical perspective. Where places and things are connected by the sea (or rivers), not separated by it. It is land that is the barrier, not water. There's plenty of opportunity! I hope it isn't just Mer-people gods for Mer-people. Too 'othering' for my tastes. Apologies, this is probably getting a little off topic. Do we know the history of the Dragon Pass ducks? Were they part of the same migration that brought the rest of the Sartarites in, or a parallel migration from a different place (or even survivors of the Dragonkill War). Depending on the answer, they could be: Sartarite through and through Sartaritised culture layered atop something older, giving some regional quirks to their cultural practices Barely Sartarised at all, with most of their cultural practices remaining the same, just rebranded

I'm sure Illumination teaches many things in many different ways by many different tutors. Many of those things will not necessarily be true, but serve to open one's mind to different possibilities. Can you tell I like preserving mystery wherever possible? 😄 It's a wonderful tool for building the illusion of depth and complexity.

I like the idea of working more Water into the mix. As a pantheon they definitely seem like the poor relation to their Air/Sky/Dark/Lunar companions. I expect this is in a large part a function of time and attention of course, but I wonder, did Greg and Jeff et al. grow up in a landlocked state? It certainly doesn't feel like they have the sea in their bones given its tangential role to everything else going on.