Aurelius

I don't -- but if there's a story related to the topic of the thread, I'd like to hear it! I've seen the academia from the inside and escaped with my life and my sanity. Nothing anyone can say will get me back in.

Thank you very much again @Nick Brooke . This stuff is tricky to figure out from a great distance, and I’m hesitant to make assertions myself because people get a bit touchy when an outsider tries to unpack all those real world influences. I don’t have the Bormandy kind of ammunition ready for debate. 😅 I wish Glorantha had an energetic PhD student looking at dusty manuscripts and interviewing the early creators before too much is lost.

From the Lords of Terror thread.... Can anyone shed light into the story of how the Orlanthi ended up being like the Celts, why Greg changed his mind, and so forth? They still do bless the woad, but are there some particular Celtishnesses that were thrown out the window when they became ex-Celts, and was there some other inspiration replacing it? I also have a bit of a gut feeling that the Viking influences predated the Celt influences, but I have nothing to substantiate that, but I'm also curious if anyone can say something about when the Orlanthi stopped being landlocked Vikings as well?

My favourite kind of RPG magic is often like this: messy, inconvenient, and powerful. But Thanatar is so meta it gets inconvenient: they might have anything, because little of what makes Thanatar Thanatar is cast during play.

I haven't read source materials about Than Ulbar, but I don't think that's even a difficult problem in the context of Glorantha -- just add some Cragspider. By that I mean Glorantha is jam-packed with heroic individuals, unique phenomena and weird ancient aberrations that explain all sorts of craziness ranging from individuals conquering lands basically alone to walls separating kingdoms for generations to giant cradles floating on rivers to weird stone wheels just rolling around because. If we don't know how Than Ulbar came to exist, its basically just a matter of adding one exemplary hero. If we don't know why it hasn't been mowed down, just keep that hero's head around and have it blast whomever tries to get in. ...and that's why I don't have any issue with individual oddities in Glorantha, but I'm keen to understand the ecology that makes stuff keep on keeping on.

I guess from this angle we should treat stuff like the complex temple hierarchy (of CoT) as either an aspirational pipe dream thanatari tell their initiates pretending there is a bigger glorious future for them somewhere, a blueprint of how Than Ulbar temple works, or a historical curiosity of how it worked Way Back When, when being sorted to House Thanatar wasn’t about drawing a really short straw for your lot in life. On that note, whats the current take on books in Glorantha? I suppose Sartarite thanatari, if any, have to satisfy thenselves devouring scrolls, except if they dare try their magic on runes carved by trolls and such? But are books going away together with scimitars, or are they still in? Or going with something like an early Roman codex, which I believe was basically a couple of sheets of papyros (?) between wooden covers?

Thinking of the Thanatari in the Empire I realized two added complications. Even if you are illuminated, your heads reek of chaos, so you are not safe in Lunar Pavis, or anywhere else where uroxi might get stupid. ...except if you stick to head of illuminates which do not stink, and that little-known factoid might make the cult even less welcome in the Empire. Even so, I'd say Moonson retains a thanatari adviser, perhaps gifted by Ralzakark, but such unique individuals have nothing to do with the larger ecology of the cult. (In my view, cults like Thed are not technically illegal, but are practically illegal, in the Empire. Worship of the goddess of rape is dogmatically fine, but everyone knows that you have to be a felon to do so. But this is a bit regional and contextual, as a good lawyer can argue that its (disgustingly) maybe not illegal to rape one's own slaves in some parts of the empire.)

Also... as described for Runequest, the temptation is not there -- I have very hard time seeing the Thanatari approach a random students on the knowledge temple campus like they were recruiting informers for the Soviet Union. And there are no quick and easy and skulking ways in which Thanatar could even help that new recruit to swallow the bait, it tends to go into the ritual end of rune magic. ...and when they get smashed, it's extremely hard to start a new one. As far as I understand, burning bushes don't really entice aspiring occultists to found new Cults, there's no Necronomicon making readers lose their sanity and start worshipping Cthulhu, there is no Dark One sending you dreams where you swear your soul to evil. In Glorantha, the way almost everyone joins a cult is by being initiated by a priest and sacrificing a point of POW in a ceremony. So, in practice the new sect must be founded by a missionary, probably a missionary whose condition for priesthood is leaving the previous temple and founding a new one somewhere. And even then that will be a lonely dark windowless cavern where you run your rites with a tiny congregation, spending most of your time chatting with severed heads of people who hate you more than anything. And that's an angle on Thanatar I do like: the miserable side where you are already too deep to quit, and then they send you to Pavis to found a sect, but live in constant fear that some random uroxi will smell your heads. You have to grow the congregation to get your shrine to function the way you want, but every new initiate increases the risk of being found out. At least you don't have to navigate the complicated hierarchy of the bigger temple that sent you out, as risk of losing your head is always present in there. But even that missionary almost has to be an illuminate -- as pretty much everyone has a cult affiliation, you have to have one too. And outside the Lunar pantheon its very hard to obtain one that would not conflict with your nighttime practices.

If I go even more brutally to the barebone ecology: To sustain itself in the survival of the fittest, all cults requires food, shelter, and recruits. Thanatar has hard time with all three. As thanatari are not producing food or services, they must enjoy patronage (Ralzakark or extremely depraved lunari dart war generals) or oppress some other group (some random gaggle of broos?) Shelter is hard too, because basically everyone is out to get them. Sure, a livrary of heads can be extremely powerful magical force until it runs out of rune points it cannot replenish, but unless you have patronage or masses of minions, once you pull out the heads you must run: a thanatar temple is mighty in a battle but sucks in a war. Recruits are hard to come by. Unless you are lurking in a metropolis, its hard to find the material. Tribal illiterate broos and savage Dorastor monsters are not ideal for a god of knowledge. Sure, yes for one interested in education, but not for one interested in exploitation. The contradiction is … - Too hideous to thrive in civilization - Too civilized to thrive in wilderness - Too organized to build a sustainable terrorist cell structure - Too selfish to sacrifice for the greater good of the cult The only configuration I can see for a functioning a greater temple requires a leeching relationship where the temple is in wilderness protected by minions or patronage, but close enough to a metropolis to leech recruits and knowledge from the city. But even for that I have hard time finding the ideology and inner motivation for going through all that trouble.

Out of all the cults of Glorantha, Thanatar is the one I cannot wrap my head around. The problem is somewhat straightforward, but I don't understand what kind of people would end up worshipping Thanatar, and where in Glorantha that would even work out. As a civilized knowledge-hunting cult it sort of has to operate in the big cities of the civilized world, but at the same time nothing is as un-subtle as leaving behind a trail of headless bodies. Cannibals and blood-drinkers can take street rabble, but the Thanatari would really prefer the head priest of Buserian. The cult has no magical way of luring worshippers in, and there's no species that would inherently worship Thanatar, like Cacodemon, and as it is not a spirit cult, it has no inherent tribal function like Thed. They can't lie in their hidey-holes eternally, like certain worshippers of Vivamort, and it's not a force of nature like Primal Chaos. Even the wisest lunari illuminates are likely to take an issue potentially going after their heads, regardless of whether chaos is an inherently evil element or not. So ... where are the largest temples of Thanatar, and how large are they? How do they recruit, and why would anyone join? Or the entire cult just a 80s misstep that has hard time fitting in Glorantha -- in a way where it would have been better to leave Tien, Than and Atyar as mythological beings that don't receive much worship anymore.

Just to be sure, my reference on "this thread" was to the thread about how Glorantha has changed over RL time, "heresy" being a jocular way of expressing the things that go against canon -- in that thread particularly the things that once were canonical but in 2024 are not. That said, injecting Elmal can of worms to that thread was my bad -- I should have known better. That said, I did it precisely because often it is important to understand real world history of canonical changes in order to understand older texts in newer contexts.

Googling around being curious about Joerg’s question I discovered a lively piece on Elmal-related design behind-the-scenes from Jeff.

Glorantha is madness. To interpolate between the more or less canonic points we have, you gotta understand the method to the madness. I'm being a bit difficult in this thread because I want to understand why and how some things were declared by heresies and replaced by more purist truths. So ... just join me on this path where we seek to build a nuanced understanding of heresy, as that is our path to the light of truth. 😈 Speaking as a fan of many of your works on the Lunar Empire, I hope it doesn't take murder to seriously figure them out. That said, I can appreciate that as a very thanatarian angle.

If it's any consolation, Glorantha has suffered very little from audiovisual mass media hijacking its canon, compared to, say, Middle-Earth... Thanks for sharing all the history, here and in the Manifesto, it is much appreciated.

If I had ever been to a Lore Auction, I would have asked Greg to contemplate on this precise question. The difficulty is, perhaps, that from an anthropological perspective, it is strange to have air people fight sun people, because all sun people breathe air and all air people eat foods grown in sun. And if I understand correctly Greg's early masks were more about history and fantasy, and later masks were more about anthropology and shamanism. (I'd buy a leatherette gold leaf collector's edition of a well-written Greg Stafford biography, and I never buy collector's editions of anything.)