Ynneadwraith

Yep, I like that. Yes and some cultures have their own separate monomyth they're trying to wrest control of. I'm thinking about the various Sea/Water pantheons here who weren't all that much involved in the Sky/Air conflicts but surely have their own things they're interested in. And cultures who have just accepted their lower station in the monomyth of others (e.g. Lodrili). The psychology of human in-group politics suggest that might be a rather forlorn hope, though there's something of degrees here. There's a wide real world precedent for holding up a foreign culture as an example to your own people saying 'look how good these people are at X. We could be a lot better at X if we were more like them' (regardless of how factually accurate that assessment actually is). Not all cultures would source their legitimacy by claiming their gods' right to The Very Throne of the World. Perhaps their myths simply lend legitimacy to their ownership of their particular lands, or their way of life, or something similarly prosaic. While I agree that gets tiresome, for me it gets tiresome because they don't explain why they think they're the smartest and most clever people in the world. It's the different cultural viewpoints of what is right and wrong that fascinates me. What justifications they have for why their way is best (and why others are weird), and what that tells me about the way they think. The Deliberate Values Dissonance, or even Blue and Orange morality, of different groups of people, and what that might tell us about our own morals and values. That's my personal interest though, so I understand if people aren't so hell-bent on injecting that into their Glorantha! I'd suggest there might be. Not just from reactionary lynchings, but also from the mere presence of a culture claiming their divine Right to the Throne of the World. Once one bunch starts, you don't want yours to get left behind! Always. I have a rule in my own worldbuilding that anything I add has to raise more questions than it answers. If I can't achieve that, it gets left a mystery. Otherwise midichlorians...

Just want to say that I absolutely adore your take on the Ygglings' beliefs. It hits three major points I really want to see more of in Glorantha: Parallel mythic structures that different cultures use to legitimise themselves within the world More naval-focussed cultures Influences from beyond the Mediterranean Bronze Age. On the first point, it seems to me that the vast majority (f not all) cultures should have their own interpretation of mythic events to give themselves legitimacy. We may see a lot of the existing fluff as a heavily Theyalan/Pelorian-centric view of events, which I like, but to hammer that point home it's great to have alternative viewpoints as well. There's plenty of space for it with the myriad different cultures of Glorantha. Some further options for influences: Neolithic Scandinavian pitted ware culture. Less for material culture or beliefs, but more for the persistence of a mesolithic hunter-gatherer lifestyle due to the high calorie output of the ocean. If we apply this to the Ygglings, we can sever the IMHO unnecessary ties to Land goddesses and have a near-fully ocean-focussed culture. Of course there will be land goddesses of the islands they'll need to appease, but it's not so much of an agricultural relationship. More securing tenant's rights, while subsistence comes from the sea. With this I see no issue with wedding Ygg to a Sea goddess, despite him being born from the sea. Mythology (both real-world and Gloranthan) is chock full of oedipal connotations once you start connecting the dots properly. I doubt the Ygglings would see an issue. 'Oh yeah, well, it's a different Sea goddess. They're not that closely related'. The Chukchi of far-eastern Siberia For things like their warlike temperament, which fits well with the followers of Ygg, and their folklore. Their folklore has some neat points of difference with the usual fare of Indo-European/Near Eastern influences. Could offer some interesting mythic inspiration. One of the things I liked quite a lot is their concept for how they got to where they were: humans were once mice, who were curious and mischievous and crawled into the mighty Raven Kutkh's nose. This made him sneeze, which sent them flying to all corners of the earth. Could be a neat little myth for how the various Vadrudi came to be where they were (or even all the children of Storm). Perhaps they were crawling around Grandfather Vadrus, who sneezed and scattered them to the 6 corners of the lozenge. Pirate cultures in real life This one's more of a ramble, but there's a pervasive stereotype of cultures that engage in pirate activity that isn't quite true. It stems from most of our recorded history being written by cultures who were the victims of piracy: Rome and the Illyrians/Sicilians, England and the Norse etc. The stereotype is that 'pirate' is a whole culture in itself, rather than an activity that a culture partakes in occasionally. You see it in the current conceptualisation of 'The Vikings' as a culture. It boils down an entire complex culture that occasionally partook in raiding into a culture that is nothing but raiding. You see the same thing applied to nomadic cultures, where their entire culture gets boiled down to 'there's a murderous horde from the steppe coming our way'. To take 'The Vikings' as an example. The vast majority of the time, for the vast majority of the population, they were settled farmers. Of the ones who were naval, for the vast majority of the time they were riverine and North/Baltic sea traders. That's how they knew there were rich cities upriver to plunder in the first place. The same is true of pirates in the Bronze/early Iron Age Mediterranean. Most of the time they were shuttling goods from one stop to the next, with a little bit of piracy along the way if they were so inclined. It's also important to note that none of the above stopped them from being phenomenally violent a lot of the time. The dichotomy between 'peaceful civilian' and 'violent warrior' was a lot less crystallised than it is in our modern schema of things. So, to inch a little closer to the point I'm making, perhaps the view we have of the Wolf Pirates (and the Ygglings more broadly) is that of the settled nations they have been raiding. We don't see, or hear, from the cultures that they ply their regular trade with. Of course, it's fun to play at pirates so perhaps the Wolf Pirates should be left to their own devices a little, but for the rest of the Vadrudi it offers the potential of some much-needed nuance to their way of life.

You are, of course, correct. Though both points are correct to degrees. Rome wasn't exceptional in having these mechanisms at all, but it was exceptional in the degree with which it embraced them. The Achaemenids were exceptional as well, as was China at various points through its history, and the Mongol Empire, and the Ottomans, and a handful of others that managed to unify great swathes of territory for meaningful periods of time. I get the impression you're judging the success of an Imperial regime against the very best the real world has ever produced. This is rareified company indeed. Compared to the thousands upon thousands of other polities that form the majority (including the Alexandrian successors), all of those mentioned above were exceptional. I suppose that's your point, that Dara Happa doesn't feel exceptional (despite them telling themselves that they are). I suspect that a fair bit of that is the weight of history behind an Orlanthi-centric viewpoint. I'm happy with the depiction of Dara Happa as it is, but I'd love to see it explored in as much depth as we can get. I don't think it will ever be an Imperial Power like you'd want it to be, but that doesn't make it less interesting. Of course, Glorantha is free to change as you desire. If you want a wildly successful Imperial Dara Happa (that's not the Lunar Empire), then make one!

@mfbrandi I do enjoy your streams of consciousness! Perhaps it was something even stranger, and Chaos broke the maths into what we know now. Not the Void, but Change. Umath was struck down, and rose again in a dozen different lesser forms. Is Kargan Tor the eldest of gods, created in the moment something was shorn from the primordial void and made something else? Is this why there are greater and lesser spirits? All were once far larger, but through NOTdeath were changed into something new, different and smaller. Is this why the spirits of mortals are so much lesser than Gods (and there's so many more of us)? If that's the case, can Uleria glue them back together again? Is this how you get Nysalor and the Red Goddess? What if you glue together two bits of different deities (other than getting Godlearnered off the face of the planet)? Hum...I wonder how many other Celestial Court members are hiding in plain sight, too scared to admit their failings... I like that. Considers that 'war' and 'death' were a sort of sport before death-proper became a thing. Perhaps Umath was just bitter he lost on penalties. Perhaps Orlanth's 'War Dance' in the Celestial Court was just him standing there shouting 'Who ate all the pies, who ate all the pies, you did you did, you ate all the pies'...

Humakt (Death) + Vivamort (Undeath) = Kargan Tor (Death without Death) Or, rather, the other way around. Both Death and Undeath as fractured, impure fragments of a more basal whole. Since it was split, the concept of what it was before has faded from memory to the point we have difficulty even conceptualising it. I sense an obscure apocryphal cult rising...

Aha! So it was an inside job...

Agreed. I was trying to think of a way of wording it that wouldn't come off as 'there's no point searching for truth because absolutely anything can be fabricated', and more 'the fact that things can be fabricated needs to be taken into account'. I think you've done a better job at getting that across than I have. While you're right that the simpler approach is to take it at face value, and thus that's more likely to be true, the opposite is also a plausible possibility. Seeking to destabilise a contemporary society by removing their source of legitimacy is something that's happened a fair few times, both in Glorantha and the real world. Take Lunar Tarsh and 'Old Gusty'. Or proselytising Christianity with their 'one true God...and all those other gods you've been worshipping must have been angels the whole time'. The difference with Glorantha, as I see it, is that if you convince those pagan folks that their gods actually were angels...they actually become angels (because they exist outside the restraints of Time). It's gloriously messy. No wonder the godlearners wanted to inject some semblance of order into things. You do raise some good points though (especially about maintaining morale in the face of the potentially limitless complexity).

Oh yeah, I didn't doubt that for a second! I mainly thought 'this Joerg guy gets it' 😉

Or, their empire already existed and someone post-hoc edited a portion of mythic history into existence to describe how it became (mythology adores its just so stories). Debating Gloranthan pre-history is doubly complicated because it's a past that's editable from the present.

This. My interpretation of mythology in Glorantha is that it's a little on the lovecraftian side. Not in terms of tentacles and fish-hybrids (though it's not necessarily averse to those), but in terms of it being the interpretation of events by mortals that simply aren't equipped to comprehend what they're seeing. This is not entirely dissimilar to how real-world polytheism works. Unknowable phenomena like the sun moving across the sky gets interpreted as a dude riding a chariot that's on fire. Whether these unknowable phenomena are actually 'people' is the dividing line between sorcery and theistic worship, as far as I see it. The evidence we can see suggests that they are, but considering they're people who can be 'edited' (Heroquesting generally, and Godlearnerism overtly), and have been for centuries, who knows what actually happened. Not that it's not fun to try and unpick. Just that we should be wary of drawing too confident conclusions. We don't even know if there even is one single story of what happened, or whether that's a consequence of Godlearner (or even Theyalan or Dara Happan) monomythism/syncretism, combining multiple completely unrelated stories into one single coherent one.

I haven't read the rest of the comment yet, but I just want to challenge this notion as it's not really true for the vast majority of pre-modern empires. If your main conception of pre-modern empires is the Roman Empire then it's understandable that that's the schema you've come away with though (I'll explain that in a mo). What actually happens is the ruling elite usually try everything they can get away with to prevent 'everyone else' having any modicum of power at all. The Alexandrian successor states are an obvious example of this. In no successor state in any of the years the Greeks were in power did the ruling class let anyone non-Greek in, or divest any of the power they had to non-Greeks. What they set up was a Greek/Macedonian ruling class, in which no positions of power were available to non-Greeks. This was the norm for pre-modern empires, and was why dynasty changes were such a big/common thing. It was frequently the only way to shift the power balance within a state. This is reflected all the way down the 'social complexity' ladder, with Greek city states generally having extremely closed citizen voting bodies, in which to have citizen status you must have a citizen mother and father. There was some degree of flexibility to this over time and in some places e.g. some city states when they had shortages of manpower managed to extend their enfranchisement to people like half-citizen underclasses, though often this failed as there was significant social pushback from 'full-citizens'. You are correct in your assumption that this is not the best way to run an empire. However, people rarely make decisions on what it objectively best for the society they find themselves in once those social structures exceed certain levels of complexity (to the point that we need all sorts of societal propaganda to get it to work). Instead, they largely make decisions to improve their own lot (and/or the lots of their families and friends) within a set of traditional mechanisms of how a society functions. The Romans One of, if not the major advantage the Romans had is they produced a different set of assumptions to how the vast majority of empires work. Instead of making their citizenship body exclusive, they went out of their way to make it possible for non-citizens to gain citizenship status. This wasn't some magnanimous offer, it was a product of a bit of luck and a lot of trauma. On the luck side, Rome started its life as a border town on the edge of ethnic Latin territory and next to ethnic Umbrian and ethnic Etruscan territory, and likely involved an initial citizenship body comprised of all three ethnicities. This gave them a bit more of a multicultural outlook than a mono-ethnic Greek city state to begin with. On the trauma side, Brennus and the Senones sacked Rome in 390BC which left a major impression on its citizens. Pretty much all of Rome's weird decisions from that point on can be viewed as a determination to NEVER LET THAT HAPPEN AGAIN. Rome mobilised a much larger proportion of its citizens for war from that point on. When it joined a war alongside its allies, instead of just pillaging the loser it forcibly co-opted it into its allies network (the socii), making the point to call it an 'ally' instead of a conquered people. It broadened the already liberal ability to gain Roman citizenship to allow enfranchisement through armed service, or marriage between a Roman citizen and a Socii one. Again, this wasn't a move of intentional Imperialism, or some nation-building idea of uniting everyone in Italy. The sole motivation was to get more soldiers on the field. This continues throughout Rome's history, with various additional enfranchisements taking place in the response to military crises (e.g. Hannibal, various migrations from outside the empire). Until, for various complicated reasons, it stops. The latest wave of Germanic migrations doesn't get resettled into the empire under Roman structures and with the full 'Roman package' of being able to participate in the Roman political system. Instead, they get incorporated as 'Foederati' and this sets of a whole load of unhelpful things that contribute to the fall of the Western Empire. So, be careful of applying the Roman model to other Empires. Rome was weird. That's one of the reasons it was so successful. Imperial China was weird too, though I'm less au fait with precisely how and why. In fact, this is one of the ways in which the Lunars do actually resemble Rome. It largely doesn't matter who you are, you can be a Lunar as well.

As an aside, I adore this as a conceptualisation of how different patterns of leadership evolved in Storm Vs Solar Vs Earth cultures. Probably a question for another topic, but I wonder what the offers of magic from other pantheons (or foreign variations of familiar pantheons) might game out to in interactions like this...

Yep I think that would be a good way to organise it! I used the word seen mainly to impress the fact that Ernaldan authority needs to be physically present with the army, but I suppose a deeper dive into that would be helpful! Leadership, especially in the pre-modern world (but more than you think in the modern world too), isn't really something you do. It's something that you perform. Leaders need to be visibly seen acting like leaders, or they don't get to be leaders for long. What the expectation of what makes a 'good leader' varies culture-to-culture. Some examples: A Hittite leader is expected to be seen racing around in a chariot ahead of the army, shooting arrows and challenging the other chariot-borne champions of their enemies. An Anglo-saxon leader is expected to fight on foot, side-by side with his men in the shield-wall. A Norman leader is expected to be mounted and fight among the knights, though still in the thick of the fighting. A Roman leader is expected to be situated just behind the battle lines, overseeing the battle as it develops. A WW2 leader is expected to be situated a long way back out of artillery range, planning battle strategy. If you put an Anglo-saxon leader behind the battle line, his bravery and commitment will be called into question. If you put a Roman leader in the shield wall, he's going to be seen as reckless and foolhardy. I made the point quite strongly about wartime hierarchies mirroring peacetime hierarchies (to the point that pre-modern societies that didn't maintain a professional army saw no distinction between the two). However, the differing expectations of what 'performed leadership' looks like gives a little flexibility to this. Perhaps how the Esrolians see 'performed leadership during war' is with a council of Ernaldans 'keeping the war-leaders on task'. This would be sufficient, so long as they're seen by everyone around them to be doing so. That's seen by all levels of the hierarchy as well. To a footslogger, he wants to know wise decisions are being made that won't get him killed unnecessarily. To an Argan Argar leader, he wants to know the Yelmite leader isn't going to hang him out to dry when the battle comes (replace this with any leader and any other leader, considering there will be power struggles within cults as well). To an Ernaldan, she wants everyone else to know that she's the ultimate authority (largely because if she doesn't, another Ernaldan will). As you rightly say, there are many different levels of leadership, and who is expected to do what can vary. The important thing is that, in the pre-modern world at least, all the layers need to be visible and seen performing leadership at important times. Leading armies is definitely one of those times.

Apologies for bringing it up! Not because it isn't an interesting topic of conversation, but you are right that it has only the slightest tangential relationship with Mostali trade practices.

Now isn't that interesting... I'd probably see that as making it even more likely that any given Esrolian army would have an Ernaldan as it's head (regardless of whether Ernalda is a war deity or not). Take a read of this article from military historian Bret Devereaux (it's fun! It discusses the armies of Rohan and Isengard in the buildup to Helms Deep from a military history perspective). It argues, quite convincingly, that there are two ways to make an effective fighting force: replicate the civilian power structure in your armed forces, or expend more energy creating a de-racinated professional army with its own dedicated hierarchy. The former works well for a number of reasons. Firstly it's a lot cheaper (you don't need to maintain a whole parallel professional military culture). Secondly everyone already knows who is giving the orders, and there's less time wasted jockying for position as you create new power structures. Thirdly it promotes cohesion as the social pressure not to abandon your peers (in front of your immediate social superiors/inferiors) is an extremely strong motivator. As such, it has been by far the most common way of organising an army throughout history. To the point that most cultures did not see a distinction between their peacetime and wartime command structures. There was the command structure, and did peacetime or wartime activities. So, if Ernalda is the most important god to everyone, she had better be seen leading the army (even if she doesn't actually do any of the fighting). The husband-protectors will have their roles as they are important too, but they must be seen as being subservient to Ernalda, lest they disrupt societal expectations of the power structure. The need for this is probably best demonstrated by a quick (simplified) scenario. Rhigosian Army A is marching to intercept a Praxian raiding force. As Esrolia is a cosmopolitan place, the army is comprised of a majority of Orlanthi militiamen (say 60%), but with a substantial proportion of Yelmite militia (20%) and Argan Argar milita (15%). The remaining 5% is made up of minor subcults. Now, the main thing that bonds these militiamen to one another is their relationship, and subservience to, Ernalda. Otherwise their gods are largely adversarial, and each individual person will be most loyal to the people they're marching right next to (their fellow cultists), because that's how these armies are structured. Cue a contentious disagreement (of which there would be many en route). Could be a decision around tactics. Could be how to settle a dispute between two cultists. Could be an argument over which cult was chosen to be the Champion. Could be anything where tensions get fraught, and we're on the warpath so tensions are fraught a lot. Without the presence of a strong unifying force, it would be very, very easy for this mixed army to lose cohesion. To lose the will and determination to fight and die alongside one another. Shedding portions of your fighting force to internal disagreements en route is a very poor way to win a battle. So, it would be imperative to have an Ernaldan figurehead at the top very visibly tying the whole lot together. The leaders of the husband-protectors should be seen being subservient to the Ernaldan, to remind everyone that they have important oaths to serve Ernalda and not screw over all the other people who rub them up the wrong way. When there are disputes that fracture between cults, you need a strong mediator present to sort it out. You might correctly point out that Ernalda isn't a war goddess, and her representative is likely to make a poor military leader. You'd be right! A lot of pre-modern generals were truly catastrophic, and very poorly prepared. That's why war councils were such an important thing. So the people who actually knew what they were doing had the chance to course-correct the person who is actually making the decisions. That's a shame. I rather liked fathoming out the societal changes that would radiate into. It gives Esrolia it's own unique flavour within Heortling society. I don't think it would be mutually exclusive with Esrolia being a Heortling society. Their cultural attitudes could well be a cultural relic of an earlier form of Esrolian civilisation (or another society that merged into the Esrolians). These things tend to ripple down through history in odd little ways, even without a literal goddess reinforcing them. Take gavelkind from my neck of the woods (a practice of partible inheritance, so inheritance is split between heirs). This is likely a holdover from earlier anglo-saxon inheritance practices. While the entire rest of England used primogeniture (picked up from the Normans), Kent carried on with gavelkind all way to 1925! The apocryphal tale is that William the Conqueror made concessions to the people of Kent to help make his beachead easier, and one of those things was preserving Kentish law. The slightly different gavelkind in Wales and Ireland likely harks back even further to pre-Roman Celtic practices, so very nearly 1900 years of customary practice!

Double post

That's not necessarily a different view (so thanks for explaining a nuance better!). It is the man that is 'being married out', just as princesses were 'married out' to secure allegiances in the real world. In terms of emancipation, it matters who decides who does the marrying. None of this is to say that men would have no role in out-group politics (it's not as if women in the real world had no role either). It's more about the underlying social expectations of who is supposed to do what job. How strictly codified that is is a matter of culture, with some being relatively more egalitarian than others. I suppose that decision of how strict it is, is for each person to define for their Glorantha. I bloody knew I should have written 'queens' 😄 I meant 'foreign policy' in the loosest of terms. Less of 'this is the written policy of the United States towards Germany', and more 'politics conducted with foreign powers generally' (again with a broad use of the terms 'foreign' and 'politics'). Perhaps not, I can see the myths of the husband-protectors going different ways depending on how they interact with the 'women are in charge of out-politics' thing. You could see it as them delegating the task of war to men (most of the time) because that's seen as their job mythically. Alternatively, you could see it as women should be making the important decisions, and the men are just there to provide dumb muscle to make those decisions happen. Or anywhere inbetween I suppose! Also, I don't think I've articulated my point very well with the phrase 'decides where the army goes'. That should probably have read something like 'decides what the army sets out to achieve'. It's the 'Political/Grand Strategy' and 'Strategic' levels of Clauswitz' four operations of war, or perhaps even just the grand strategy level.

Yeah Esrolia is quite a nuanced take on a matriarchal society, and it could probably go either way depending on how you want your Glorantha to look. I see Esrolia as a place where the large bulk of gender divisions of labour remain the same. Men till fields, women weave textiles. Men fill out the bulk of the army etc. However, the social construct of which of those things are more prestigious is flipped on its head. Textile-making is seen as more important than agricultural work. This naturally makes it easier for women to be found in traditionally 'male' lines of work, because there's less of a social barrier for them to do so. So you would expect to find a higher proportion of female generals in the army than other cultures. However, there is one key gender division of labour that is flipped on its head from most patriarchal structures: women conduct business with outsiders, and men conduct domestic business (with the main caveat being childrearing). In most patriarchal structures this is the other way around. Women's role is head of the domestic, and men's is head of how their domestic unit interacts with outsiders. Take the example of Priam (the literal King of Troy), who heads Troy's negotiations with the Achaeans, yet asks his wife permission for access to the household finances. This is portrayed without any character judgement on Priam. It's simply portrayed as an expected domestic division of authority. So, for Esrolia, it's the Queen who decides what the foreign policy is. The matriarch of each household conducts negotiations with other households. It will be a female general who decides where the army goes, and will meet the parlay before a battle. For leadership of the army, you could have that go either way. Either it's seen as a fully 'out-politics' effort, and thus it should be women doing it. Or there's some blend, with a military structure we don't particularly see in patriarchal martial organisation (pre-modern system ones at least). In this option you'd have female 'generals' who do all of the deciding of how the army in question deals with other armies/cities (friendly or not). Then you'd have a male 'sub-general' whose job is not to think about what the army wants to achieve, but to do the dogsbody organisation/running around/hitting people with clubs to achieve that goal. That structure of 'female decision-maker, male dogsbody' could be replicated all the way down the chain of command. That would make for some neat little politics between different officers in the army, which could produce some fun roleplaying scenarios. Ultimately, military structures mirror civilian structures, so whatever way you characterise power in Esrolia should probably be replicated in their army.

A little off topic, but in my mind this is why I've never been a 'dwarf person'. I've mostly found them uncompelling. Most fantasy depictions just have them as gruff short blokes who live underground and mine things. They miss the core tenet at the core of traditional 'dwarfishness': that they should be a diaspora. It doesn't particularly matter which diaspora you choose to base them on. The Jewish one was topical at the time when Tolkein was writing (for a grossly understated use of the word 'topical'), but any will do. So long as they're the scattered remnants of a once-proud nation, scratching a living in the worlds of others you're good. That only really 'clicked' for me after this scene in The Hobbit movie (of all things) where Bilbo talks about the dwarves not having a home, and it being taken from them. That's why I've found dwarves uncompelling, because broadly their most compelling aspect just doesn't feature in most depictions. It's a narrative somewhat tarnished by the current goings-on in the middle east, but I think we can agree it's a compelling narrative either way. Just the real-world implications of enacting it are more complicated than at first glance. Now this doesn't fit particularly well with Glorantha's left-field iteration of dwarves, nor what they would want to trade for, but it's useful background for what made dwarves a good story in the first place.

Now that I love! Mostali: Bring me moon crescents. Human: ...huh? Mostali: Moon crescents. Digital shields. Ten of them, departed from the whole periodically. Or twenty, I suppose, if you can reach them from your height. You rarely need them once departed. The trade is beneficial for us both. Human: ...that's made it worse not better... Mostali: This is the translated version. It is comprehensive. You should comprehend.

Yeah my take on Mostali is that the things they want are primarily components they need to fix the world machine. I'm thinking a cross between the Collectors from Mass Effect (creepy stuff like '2 dozen sets of identical twins...nevermind what for'), the dwarves of norse mythology (breath of fishes, roots of mountains etc.), and a little bit fae (just your name please sir). Also agreed that they'd likely just take what they need, but I expect there would be a lot of things that they can't get themselves so would need to stoop to this 'trade' muck. Also like the idea that the mostali mainly trade when they want to give you something. Flips the assumption of trade on its head, and offers good narrative uses for mostali giving 'gifts' that benefit them but not you Trojan Horse style.

@Ageha while I think you're being a bit strong in your assertion (as the greek example demonstrated, imperial hegemony is not the only...or even the best method of securing a legacy), I do get where you're coming from. I wonder if in my Glorantha I'll pop a smattering of Dara Happan colonies and ex-colonies across Genertela, and perhaps model in a more obvious way the influence the Dara Happan system of governance has had on their neighbouring cultures. Perhaps by showing a radiation of the idea that 'legitimacy stems from direct descent from the head of the pantheon' in adjacent cultures.

I think I get what you're saying now. Perhaps a better mirror for them would be the Greeks. Now I expect I'm going to offend a great many Greeks by saying this, but the ancient Greeks did incredibly poorly as an imperial power in their own right. They may have provided democratic foundations for the modern world, and had an enormous cultural impact, but Greek polities largely barely got out of their own shadow. The Spartans, despite having an overwhelming advantage in real estate, never built a hegemony that reached further than their own back garden. The Athenians did a little better by bringing together the Delian League, though that was only better by a shade. Again it was barely out of their metaphorical back garden, and lasted for a grand total of 74 years. Not particularly impressive. Their greatest imperial achievement (Alexander's conquests) was accomplished by an ethnic Macedonian (in those days seen as more Greek-adjacent), and lasted a colossal 15 years as an imperial polity. His successors did a little better, though still pale into insignificance compared to the 1546 year stretch of the Roman Empire (if you count the Byzantine empire as an unbroken continuation, which there's no reason not to other than orientalism). Where the Greeks did excel, however, was in their leading participation within other imperial polities. There were countless leading Greeks driving forward both the West and East Roman Empires, as well as providing mercenaries and philosophers to countless other empires across the Mediterranean. So, while Dara Happa might have few emperors themselves, it's likely they would have been borne on a unending continuum of Dara Happan shoulders. Legitimised by Dara Happan schools of thought. However, I do get your point. I would be pleased to see a little more Dara Happan weight in the cultural world of Glorantha. If only because I think they're fascinating.

I'd agree that atonement>apology. Let's say I set fire to my neighbours fence. I can apologise for it, and be fully sincere, but their fence will still be burnt. Atonement would be me actually replacing the fence. Or performing some other task to rectify my actions. I'd be a happy man if we could get our politicians to atone for their actions rather than merely apologise (if they even do that).

Seems an astute assessment, with Orlanth portrayed in such close (almost romantic) proximity to Heler, rather than as husband to the most important of Earth Goddesses. Seems like an attempt to drive a wedge between the divine pairing.