Joerg

I wonder whether the ego is annihilated or vastly inflated in this moment of unity. Given that Illumination through riddles is a brute force approach, you may be right about it being crushed and deflated. But then, in that moment the distinction between nothing and everything isn't exactly made. The reputation for insanity need not be tied to mystical insights. The Mad Sultanate suggests that severe trauma through exposure to naked Chaos without gaining any insights will induce this state of mind, so a lot of the weirder illuminates may border on Mad Sultanate membership. Neither does the Madness spell induce any insights. Recreational use of the Befuddle spell is even less likely to produce insights... I do wonder about the absence of Arkat in this list, then (not even as Gbaji). Sheng is her shadow, so not included in her statement (yet), but Arkat and Nysalor really come as a pair, too. By excluding that shadow, this list doesn't really prove an all-encompassing unity, but a selection of precursors.

Yes it is, supposition that started from around 1994 when the interchangeability of brass and bronze was touted (by Nick Brooke, IIRC, apparently following work he did on Carmania with Greg - look where to find the Brass Mountains, and look whose myths are dominant for that region - Turos). Lodril himself may be of pure sky origin, his mountain sons like Quivin or his worker sons (presumably by Oria) are mixed sky and earth, to say the least. So what metal would you expect from their bones? Some kind of bronze. When did this crop up? Probably even before the Biirth of Umath, Plentonic dating gives Lodril's descent for 25,000 YT and Umath's birth for 40,000 YT. (But then, it is entirely possible to regard Lodril's descent as Aether's insemination of Gata, leading to the birth of Umath just 15k pre-Time years later.) It is quite likely that the Mostali encountered brass (volcanic bronze) in the deep in that long time before the birth of Umath. That would explain why they have a brass caste, but not a bronze caste. Where do we find this? All over the place, where storm and mountain champions as well as rank and file battled it out - if they used RuneQuest rules, lost limbs would have been plenty. Orlanth is the only son of Umath with a known fondness for mountains due to his mother, compare Stormwalk and Storm Bull's history there. Bertalor's Lo-metal would be better named after Lorion rather than Lodril, IMO. While volcanoes may produce floating pumice now and then, there is no logical or mythological connection between them and floating Sea Metal, whether in liquid or in solid form. We have a couple such problematic names from the Lunar battalia. The Steel Sword legion, for instance. Evidence for Gloranthan steel, or just another name for expensive dwarven iron used to equip an entire bodyguard unit? I go for "just another name". A lot of ancient terrestrial alloys are missing from Gloranthan canon, like pewter (tin and lead, what you would expect from the outer world where the sky bowl and the underworld sky bowl meet), arsenic copper, electrum (equal parts gold and silver, the first metal coinage) or the yellow and red varieties of 18 karat gold (white followed a lot later, Donaldson's Lord Foul cycle nonwithstanding). So wood-cuts are a thing in North Sartar? Or would that have to be made with rolling sigils?

Brass is the mixture of sky metal with earth metal that resulted from Lodril's descent. It is not a copper-zunc compound (in terrestrial actuality an alloy of two such compounds) in Glorantha, just bronze with a different mythic background. Lodril wasn't necessarily born that way, but became so through his fusion with his wrestling partner or environment, but his sons inherited that trait. There are the Brass Mountains in Carmania, the main source for bronze in the western half of the Empire.. Alphostius would be the bucket-maker, for transport of mud and sludge that defies transport in baskets (the common container for carrying excavated material), probably scooping up the sludge directly with the bucket. The Ten Sons and Servants are the irrigation workers for the Dara Happan rice fields. I don't think that they are dwarves, their diminuitive size indicates their lowly status.

Windmills: The ones at Old Wind aren't. Things may be different in Brithini colonies, e.g. in God Forgot.

The Lightbringers' Quest as we know it from Cults of Prax and King of Sartar is that of the Heortlings, which (due to Harmast being a Heortling) is often regarded as the original one. Other hill barbarians who were encountered by the Lightbringer missionaries in the first and second century had stories different from what the Heortlings knew. The Seven Mothers' Quest may have used such a variant, possibly with variant participants, too. The closest somewhat Orlanthi folk to Torang are the raccoon-totem people from Imther.

In my simulationist days I thought about abandoning the combat round almost entirely, using a point cost for movement and combat actions, inspired by the Gunslinger board game where you played action cards to indicate your action, which would be revealed as the ticker proceded, if I recall that correctly from about 30 years ago. Abandoning a planned action would cost some re-orientation time. Basically I had a dial on which these actions would have been placed. This would offer a great tactical game on a hex grid, which could be done using your roleplaying characters. It would be quite a pain for each and every combat, however.

In my understanding, Osentalka the Perfect One could exist only in the timelessness of the Sunstop. When the sun returned to its path chained by time, only Nysalor was left. (And Arkat, half a world away.) I doubt it. While Deezola, Teelo Norri and possibly Jakaleel are candidates for certain phases of the Lunar goddess, I cannot see Yanafal, Irrippi or Danfive in those roles. Deezola was the ruler of Torang, a Rinliddi city not that far from the Blue Moon Plateau under which ancient Mernita is supposed to be buried. I don't see any bird connections for any of the Seven Mothers, so Deezola and her cabal are likely to have followed some other main idea. A deeper Hell. Deep as Subere, at least, way deeper than former Wonderhome where Bijiif (Ashes of Yelm) resides. Orlanth's chariot gets attacked by Jagrekriand, the Heortling name for Shargash. This should be reflected in a Dara Happan myth where Shargash or one of his sons attacks the vehicle of Rebellus Terminus. Possibly during his invasion of the sky, in which case Lunar Chronoportation might rip both questers from Orlanth's invasion to Umath's invasion, which ended fatally for Umath. The first Lunar Emperor ruled until he was slain for the second or third time by Sheng Seleris (3rd or 4th wane), so he saw the expansion through the Conquering Daughter in the 2nd wane, and had opportunity to interact with the Orlanthi of the conquered provinces, or even beyond. I don't think that an infiltration would have been possible, or desirable. To become more like Orlanth, even temporarily, would be to become less of Moonson.

Basically, it is a question of climate and resources. Where it is too cold for wood and bast to rot away quickly, wooden vessels rule - basically anywhere with a decent winter. So no barrels in Teshnos (despite easy access to highest quality wood, but not durable bast), and limited use of them where potters using imported charcoal don't use up valuable timber that is required for housing. It takes barbarians in the woods to waste timber for highways through wetlands, roof cover, or containers. Like gem-cutters do for diamond, you can grind down these hard materials with these hard materials - autogenous milling. It does take lots of patience and persistence to do it to the artistic degree shown in Egyptian statuary. To stirr this stuff, you can use shoe-like pieces of wood attached to a handle, which need replacement frequently. I am a bit in two minds whether Mostali should have this technology. On one hand, it could be used to make Stone into tools that would use icky grown matter among surface dwellers. On the other hand, I think that Mostali stone cutting or shaping techniques might be so developed that they don't need to lathe anything. One thing I feel Mostali technology should do is to work without the use of wood. Mostali axe handles should be forged. Crossbows traded to humans do use wood, but that's because the bow is a non-Mostali invention adapted by the Mostali. Mostali textiles should shun plant or animal fibres (ot skins), too, wherever possible. Use of such stuff might be extravaganza, like the unexplained demand for parrot plumage in Jrustela. Mostali should really be unable to cure leather, but then what can they use for their bellows and protective gear? Spinning and weaving should be known to them, possibly using glass or mineral fibre or wire. I would hate to have this happen. The wine should arrive in leather skins, and possibly drunk from them. The beer should be served in the cauldron, which may be a huge piece of charred pottery. And the heroes should wear leather-wraps rather than sandals, if they wear shoes at all. If I wanted to play Greek heroes, I'd play some sort of Mythic Greece, or Mythic Egypt with Greek mercenaries. All of them would be of coastal origin. To me, hill barbarian culture is definitely "transalpine" when viewed from the Ancient world. There is no Mediterranean and even less of an Aegaean anywhere on Glorantha, transalpine hill folk border directly to Mesopotamian irrigation culture. Vaguely Hellenistic influences may be available from Pelanda, but in a purely continental way. The coasts are mainly on the oceans, like the east African coast, with similar conditions. Coastal cultures from the Ancient World or the Dark Ages always feel wrong for most of Glorantha. I think that coastal Orlanthi are nearly unknown in Kethaela - most of the coastal population outside of cities probably are really Pelaskite in origin, both in Heortland and in Esrolia, although there appear to be (urban) Esvulari dabbling in fishing parts of Choralinthor Bay, as do God Forgotten. I see a role for Orlanthi crew in whaling and seal hunting, however, following the mythic precedent of the Vadrudi. The Ludoch of the region may have divided feelings about that, since they are the product of those encounters. And merchants go whereever there are profits to be made, which explains Esrolian and Heortland-run merchant vessels. Most of these will still have a good portion of Pelaskite sailors, or even more exotic personnel hired in distant ports.

There have been the regular cataclysms in Genertela west of the Shan Shan, which have reset the clock at each turn of the Ages. I think there is a pattern of catching up towards something of a plateau of civilization, then a spurt aiming to a new magical hype, and then the most advanced cultures collapsing hard. Kralorela, Vormain and the East Isles appear to be more static, but at least Kralorela saw heavy outsider occupation in both the Second and the Third Age (Shang-Hsa mhNbC and Sheng Seleris - a curse in itself), so there too will have been efforts to make things right again. Terrestrial history isn't much different. Apart from Byzantium, the achievements of the Roman empire were forgotten as Germanic kingdoms inherited the western half of the empire, even though they let themselves be Romanized. Then most of these Germanic kingdoms fell to new invaders, or made it through just barely. The eastern Romans saw their territory gobbled up by the new religion spreading from Arabia, and to the ever-changing populations in the Danubian corridor. The Renaissance was aptly named such because people started to raise their cultural and material level back to somewhere first century Rome had been, and mostly through the (involuntary) transfer of knowledge from the Crusades. While Alfred of Wessex aimed at a cultivated society at his court, with learning and literacy highly esteemed, his successors had to struggle to keep something of that alive. The Karolingians gave up on curiousness after Charlemagne and destroyed collections of knowledge, then began warring among themselves, bringing the Karolingian upturn down again, splitting their territory between the formerly Roman and the formerly barbarian parts, and a contested or independent belt in between. So basically, there isn't always an upward development in material or intellectual culture. Achievements of former leading cultures don't get taken over without a break, and often that happened even just with dynastic changes or changes in orthodoxy, like the loss of the Library of Alexandria under the Byzantines. Islam needed about two centuries to discover the Greek literature they had conquered for their own high culture. I think that this is more of a declaration despite all the facts. Glorantha was a Bronze Age world, but not measured by the change in technology or metallurgy in Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean, but in e.g. the eastern Baltic Sea, or even the Inkas. Major Bronze Age cultures, in contact with more advanced technology, that's how I see Glorantha. And Ian's summary is similar. And Glorantha has no inland seas. The Middle Sea Empire sort of projected an inland sea environment, but that was just under three centuries and under high sea conditions, not two millennia like in the eastern Mediterranean. A colonial empire much closer to the Portuguese endeavors than to anything the Phoenicians did, with magic rather than gun powder. It is hard to find a parallel to the Jrusteli in ancient history. The Thirteen Colonies may be a nod to US history, but that's mainly where the parallels end. The rest of the Jrusteli history is closer to the successors of George Washington liberating Napoleonic England without having had to fight red-frocked Hessians in their colonies. In the ancient time, Carthage is the one case where a colony outshined its founding cities. Homer himself comes from one of those trench periods between high points of cultivation. The heroic age of Homer belongs to myth, not history. We look at the Romans differently because we have historical facts in addition to myths, and then had our myths destroyed by the church. The Arthurian cycle and the Charlemagne cycle are returns to myth and heroism little different from Homeric stories. The Henriad is too recent, but has more mythic than historical format. On the continent, the Stauffer emperors were made into mythical figures, too, with Barbarossa waiting to return under a magical mountain. Yes, all of this is mediaeval or late mediaeval stuff. And in many ways it is more primitive than Philipp's Macedonia prior to the conquest of Greece. Ok. Pseudo-mediaeval more often than not is not mediaeval, either, apart from archaic weaponry and armor, but more at home in the 17th century otherwise. Just like Game of Thrones is post-Renaissance, never mediaeval. And many other concepts in standard fantasy come directly from the Wild West, minus colts. In both cases, the most archaic of the influences is claimed as the theme of the settings, because the more modern audience will have a hard time to recognize anachronisms. Prax and Pavis owe their popularity to being a Wild West setting at heart, with a few twists. I still would go for Hallstatt, disregarding what happened south of the Alps. The Etruscans as a metal-exporting civilization don't have to work in iron with the abundance of bronze or brass that we find in Glorantha, and are otherwise a perfect fit for the material culture of e.g. urban Safelster and Tanisor. The premise for Dara Happa in the Gray Age is a bit like a faltering (or rather failed Mesopotamia conquered by various horse nomads. Normally we associate that with the Persians. Earth's history has no Alkoth Demon period. (If it had, it wouldn't have produced us...) But this Mesopotamia is set on a reverse-flow Mississippi, climate-wise. Much of Genertela makes sense as a "what if northern America had had rich access to Bronze since the glaciers went away." There are no ziggurats, there are copies of Toltec pyramids. And things build up from there. As the wind flies, distances may be short. River travel along the Oslir will create short distances, but for traffic from Darjiin to neighboring Doblian the riverine route through Erinflarth, Oslir, Poralistor and Esel might be faster than travel through or around the Yolp chain overland. Moonboats are about as common in the Empire as Zeppelins were in the thirties of last century. Outside of the Empire, traffic would suffer from the same multitude of territorial borders (i.e. clan and tribal borders) as did the inside of the Holy Roman empire. Instituting central authorities in the Quivin region and in the Grazelands was what opened Dragon Pass for trade volume after the collapse of the Twin Dynasty , and while Old Tarsh may have kept Dragon Pass passable, the conquests in Saird and Tarsh resisting that made traffic from Tarsh to the expanding Lunar Empire highly hazardous, and then Sheng created turmoil. I don't see Peloria as technologically advanced, at least not outside of their core competences like everything to do with irrigation. There is one famous and fabulous road in the Empire, or rather in its provinces - the Daughter's Road. A processional, cutting off a slight bend in the Oslir, thus providing no actual trade advantage, but a definite troop deployment advantage. The main access to Glamour is the canal to the Oslir River. I think that most Pelorian rivers have lost their souls and their deities, and are mainly sources for irrigation and water retention. I think the last major river magician was Lokamayadon's wife Erilindia. Pelanda used to be a source of technology and innovation - in the Golden and Storm Age. The Turos expression of the volcanic maker is probably the most civilized of the deep fire cultures (in their own right, under their own administration). With the adoption of Dara Happan bureaucracy (a side effect of irrigation mastery), they got better organized, but their innovation was stifled. The Carmanians, at least under the Lion Shahs, brought a new impulse from pre-God Learner Fronela by replacing the Dara Happan bureaucracy with their own. A bit comparable with the Caliphate of Cordoba, and the Bull Shahs doing to that culture what the Almohads did to Spanish enlightenment, a destruction from the change of management. There is of course a more ancient parallel which works as well for Carmania - the Zoroastrian reforms. While not exactly Bronze Age, they brought an ideological change, and unlike Akhenaten's attempt, this one lasted. But then, the "western" origin of Syranthir's folk makes their culture a bit like the Hellenistic succcessor states in Asia, only lacking the previous Alexandrine empire. I wonder how effective the cuneiform literature and literacy was for Mesopotamia and adjacent territories. The sheer volume of literature that survived thanks to this less perishable medium looks like it promoted a rather quick dissemination of ideas, or at least ideas the elite wanted to distribute. The most standard mantras could be mass-produced through rolling seals, a technology suggested as origin of the Gods Wall. So, if an idea is concise enough to fit onto a rolling seal, its dissemination would be fairly easy. True. And then there is the classic trope of the mutilated or chained genius. Leonardo the Scientist is probably the only such genius who enjoys free movement. Wayland's drama of crippling or Daidalos incarceration are the reason why technological advances are limited to a small elite. The Lhankor Mhy cult is a cult of learning, not a cult of teaching. Yes, their temples will gather knowledge, and share it with the powers that are sufficiently strong to make the sages give that knowledge away. There are branches of Lhankor Mhy that put knowledge to practical uses, like perfumers, alchemists, jewellers, glass-makers. The only canonical use of concrete by dwarves are their floating castles. When they have stationary rock to work with, they shun this poured pseudo-stone, and create places like the Boldhome pockets or the Boldhome Royal Palace. I tend to blame the invention of concrete on the Kadeniti, and the dwarf use of this is a rare instance of technology transfer from humans to dwarves. Glass (in the sense of glass-blowing) is attested for Syran, a place as far away from dwarven influence as you can get in Genertela. Yes, the lead caste of mostali does pipes and glass (or glazing), so they may have access to this technology, too. But terrestrial glass technology starts in the early Bronze Age. Glass blowing is a lot more recent, but Roman glasswork had everything that its successors could do until the industrial revolution. Ironically, the archaeological evidence for glassware is fairly small because (like bronze) glass is recyclable, unlike pottery. There appears to be something of a consensus that dwarf technology is no steampunk, and possibly only very limited clockwork-punk. I am fairly disappointed with "Mostali just use water elementals to keep their underground dwellings dry," however. For their greatest strongholds, they probably don't need to lift the water. It would be sufficient to open ways for it to disappear below, as there are always deeper underworlds capable of taking up the downflow. I do see a big opportunity to give the dwarves Roman style or Georg Agricola style waterworks, only underground. And possibly replacing wood construction with masonry or metal. The crossbow is one of the other few cases of a technology transfer to the Mostali, either from the Sky cultures or from the elves, and then adapted and improved with a vengeance. The original concept of the bow is alien to the Mostali. Its warfare use against them made them adopt and improve it, starting with adding the cross-piece, then adding leverage and in the end magazines for repeater crossbows. I wonder about chains as technology, whether to lock access to harbors or rivers (as documented for Nochet), as filigrane jewelry (another technology that sees lots of recycling, but fortunately gets preserved for archaeologists as grave goods), or even as translator for motion. Also about bucket chains that don't require any looped metal bits but can work with rope technology. Dormal's achievement was to re-discover technologies and then put them together in a novel way that the Imperial Age sailors failed to do in order to sidestep the Closing. The technological discoveries for high sea sailing other than the furthest East Isles and Waertagi traditions were made by the Free Men of the Seas who had an almost 50 year advantage over the other coastal populations noticing the sudden absence of the Waertagi interdict. It is my working theory that the Free Men of the Seas somehow managed to translate Godswar cloudship designs (Helerings, Artmali) to vessels crafted by more conventional means. The Umathelan colonies (planted with the aid of the Waertagi) IMO provided the ancient clues, and the Olodo storm worshippers who make up the Umathelan "Orlanthi" probably are of Helering/Helerite origin, having some of the myths that enabled the Free Men of the Seas to parse those Godswar events. But that's deep "Jörg's theories" territory, even though more than twenty years old. To be honest, I fail to see the big difference between Yelmic bureaucrats ordering Lodril magics to be performed by the Lodrili priesthood possibly against the preferences of those deities (creating an accumulation of displeasure which then erupts in the Lodrili rebellions) and sorcerers commanding Lodril magics to be performed by godlings without interaction of a priesthood, taking the rebellion into account in the magical effort. Clear glass will be high technology. Primitive glass blowers pipes might even be made by potters, and glass bottles would be luxury items. Like I said above, the Syran glass workers are canon. No barrels with metal hoops, but metal hoops aren't necessary, and any culture that fits planks to boats will fit planks to containers. In all likelihood, the containers birthed the boats. It is a wonder that you didn't add axles and wheels to this list. A culture that has fire drills, possibly driven with a bow-like actuator, has access to rotation for manufacture of various kinds. This makes me think of these technologies as the signature Golden Age technologies, e.g. for improving spear shafts and arrows. I prefer "swords and barefoot" epic, or Ötzi- (Ice-mummy) style hay-bolstered soft leather foot wrappings for winter. Sandals as in "military boots" may be quite high technology. Sandal-like footwear is attested for Yelm the Golden Age, however. I see a majority of the hillfolk inhabiting neolithic-style longhouses. Which remained in use (with slight additions of innovations) until early in the 20th century, and which were developed independently by native Americans when faced with similar climate, or by Papuans despite quite different climate (but the same problem of keeping the rain away). Visitors to Jutland should take a tour through the Hjemsted Iron Age center on the road to Römö. They have Roman Iron Age pre-Anglo-Saxon migration longhouse reconstructions, but also a neolithic longhouse reconstruction. The main difference is the length of the house and the amount of livestock kept inside. So, when your senses are tickled "this looks so Viking", that's because Viking architecture followed an absolutely archaic model. The houses in the oppidum of Manching were the same basic layout, but used standardized building material so that beams could be re-used when a house that was too worn was dismantled. Anglo-Saxon and Viking housing was much more primitive in this respect. And that is true for terrestrial history just as well, and makes the difference between beaker culture farmsteads, urnfield farmsteads and Anglo-Saxon farmsteads negligible.

My worst disintegration of a book ever was my first King of Sartar paperback. The second one holds up quite well, however... Of my Avalon Hill boxed sets, only the Cults Book of Gods of Glorantha and the Genertela Book have lost their covers. For some unexplicable reason, my copy of Daughters of Darkness is still quite pristine... no charring yet, either.

Craftsmanship still should play a major role. Nobody without a good idea of what is needed and how to do it will be able to shape a perfect brick just from wanting to shape the perfect brick. Inferior qualities in some of the requirements might be caught up with heavier use of magic, but applying the same amount of magic to good qualities will create a masterpiece beyond that. A brick to inspire an entire wall, so to say... I hinted at a similar possible problem in a text that ended up as a sidebar box in Men of the Seas, when replacement parts from foreign lands tied to alien magics would have to be integrated into the composite unity of your vessel.

That link only leads to any user's own file page, and then complains that the folders don't exist. You would need to make the content of that folder public, but if there are copyrighted sources rather than collections of quotes, that would cause legal problems. But then my Spanish is non-existent, and my Latin isn't what it used to be any more, either, so any activity other than skimming the text inferring the meaning from similar languages would be impossible to me.

So basically, every material object has a shadow existence on the spirit plane, independent from the density of a material but dependent of the strength of the spirit bits inside them. Is it "everything has spirit", as an alchemist or a tapper would say, or is it "everything has a spirit"? With my alchemist (materialist) way of approaching the amounts of spirit in objects and observations of spontaneous or induced manifestation of identity, are there ways (like Tapping) that could render objects spirit-dead? Would such items or material be shunned, could they be healed or re-awakened? The "Stabilize <material>" divine Mostal spells appear to imbue matter with magical energy. Tapping basically draws magic from its targets, so acts as the opposite way. As a rule, western sorcerers appear to frown upon frivolously enslaving energy to be the servant of matter, but when it comes to sorcerous architecture, they appear to use similar techniques, like e.g. for the Tower of Xud in Kustria. Basically I argue that made things are made for a purpose. Which might using an item for a different purpose than intended by the maker a bit harder than usage according to that purpose, at least if the maker clearly communicated that purpose in the making. So "spirit" does not exactly describe entities, or big spirits are collective entities of smaller spirits? And can those partial/contributing spirits be extracted (by sorcerers or shamans) from a captured spirit entity? Like, selectively tapped, or excised/exorcised? (trying to keep this discussion material...) I would agree that for any kind of ceramics the fire can be regarded by Gloranthans as just the final agent to draw out the water. Master ceramicists (whether brickmaker or potters) probably know better. Also there will be buildings like ziggurats to celestial deities where the fire aspect will be celebrated rather than ignored. Brick is fairly simple because once you draw the water out, all the rest is just mud and possibly more organic soil (like cow dung, or dinosaur dung for more monumental architecture - possibly more quake-proof, too). But mixing runes to describe substances is what alchemy is about. You could reduce the runes to simple aggregate states and define that everything tangible enough to stop a finger is solid (earth), that which isn't but will collect in a vessel is liquid (water), and so on for air an fire. Darkness is a bit of a difficulty for this classification, though, and moon is just temporary pretention of existence. The dwarf food recipe in Elder Secrets ("I think it is too brainy, containing too much gold") does seem to work on the basis of a balance of elements. I was thinking of ritual perception, but basically that is covered by your reply, too. So, no, the dome doesn't become transparent, but the sun becomes visible inside it. As far as I remember, the spell was introduced with Yelmalio, so yes, definitely there. (Cloud Clear and Cloud Call used to be led ad absurdum by the RQ3 POW economy, and their presence as standard spell for a shrine still makes me want to give up on the cult of Orlanth. As instantly retrievable spell during such a rite it doesn't lead to gross weakening of the initiates, so might be possible.)

I do wonder whether this is true down to the mud brick, unless "spirit" is also a description of latent magical potential. While the source of the clay certainly has its collective entity and had better be asked nicely (or commanded firmly, if you are of a sorcerous persuasion) to give you the material, I would think that a man-made object isn't immediately imbued with an anima, although there will be of course some latent essence, or space for it. A greater construction made of these bricks probably will be imbued with an identifiable spirit through the dedication rites, drawing on the spirit potential of the bricks (and other component parts). If each brick had an anima with an individual idea of purpose, it could be harder to form a collective out of that. But then the main purpose of a brick is to join with others into a collective, so maybe brick, tile or plank spirits are primed for giving up identity to a greater whole. I talked about purpose before - this is an idea what a construction made from many parts should do, a projection of object identity by the maker. Some of this goes into the making of a brick from clay and other material, and may get sealed by stamping and firing the brick (but then that fire is a component that is required to make the brick what it is). In that case, also through cloud cover? Probably should - the golden cupola moves the interior of the building close to the sky. Is the visibility open to all visitors of the interior (even intruding raiders of hostile deities), or is congregation membership required? I doubt there are many dragon-proof edifices in Glorantha...

If that's good for your Glorantha, go for it. YGMV. Gravity isn't necessary when being heavy pulls something down. Arches are stable because they conform to the stasis rune? Fine, go with that. (Wouldn't it be more correct to say that gravity and phyiscs are God Learner orthodoxies?) The moon is the embodiment of balance between the heaviness of earth and dark and the upward trend of light. Look at its rune. Where else could it be? (Not: where else should it be - that's what the Hero Wars are for.) And it should be atmohemisphere, and the sun only goes around the Inner World, at an average speed of about 1000 miles per hour, much less in summer when it's strong, much faster in winter when it's weak. (Faster if you calculate its speed against the rotating sky dome which forces it to take a loopy detour.) There is plenty of sea and even some outlying land that is outside of its path. There is a hungry darkness at the bottom of the universe, drawing things towards it, and a worse hunger in the void beyond that. It is this pull which makes things heavy. Why is gold so heavy? First of all it is a metal, and metals are heavy. But yes, gold may well have used to be the lightest metal, but Yelm's stay in Hell in the Darkness would have changed that and lent a heaviness to the metal of light. So basically Gloranthan physics are more or less effects like Newtons laws explained by myths (note the plural, there may be multiple stories contributing to the status quo of the world). Something which Sir Isaac seems to have pursued himself in his later years with his studies of alchemy and manifestation of symbols. The magic in Glorantha isn't any more what it used to be in the early ages of the world. In Godtime, some material representation and a purpose backed by creative power were all that was needed for a technology. Those are the original tools of Mostal. They brought order and stability into a realm of phantastic possibilities, channeling those possibilities, narrowing them. In the early Golden Age, everything was moving towards an orderly cycle of repetition. A glorious state of motion bound to stasis was within reach. But then Umath was born (not made, and why should he have been made, as there was no space left for another element?) and new creativity was released, leading to new growth. In hindsight, it was a mistake to set up things to let a male sky rub against the female earth, without a lubricant and protective layer. Something new and unforeseen was sparked and grew inside the Earth, then burst forth and lifted the moving parts out of alignment. Other flaws which seemingly had been contained broke free, too, and there was no contingency plan for that, only plans for limited countermeasures, which the mostali activated. More damage reports came in, then the damage reporting system broke down. So yes, there used to be a Glorantha where will and purpose were enough to effect something. On occasion, glimpses of this become available to the Gloranthans, whether through the emanations of the Pseudocosmic Egg which changed Gloranthan reality within Nysalor's Bright Empire, breaking open the access to the Hero Planes by the God Learners, dreaming the Dragon Dream in the EWF, or emerging from destruction and Chaos like the Red Goddess. But these bursts of activity and creativity feed on the magic of the world, and leave a world behind that has to struggle ever harder to gain access to the magic of Godtime. That's why purpose and handwaving aren't enough any more. To address your initial comment again: It is not like the God Learners were big fans of gravity or physics. Not even the Zistorites with their Machine worship. They aimed to transcend those restrictions. For a while they succeeded.

Cogwheels translating horizontally rotating (quicksilver-powered) waterwheels into a vertically rotating representation of the Sky Dome (complete with a mechanism duplicating the tilt) are documented for Kuchawn, away from the eyes of any Mostali as the octamonist Babadi don't leave their mountain. Materials and technologies used for architecture and infrastructure: We know about poured concrete, opus caementitium, which will also allow mortar more durable than the usual (central-European) sand/calcinated chalk mixture. (But then, the durability of Portland cement concrete isn't quite what the bridge-builders of the 70ies thought it would be, either). There won't be steel-reinforced concrete for lack of steel and unsuitability of brass or bronze, although stabilizing the base of a dome with a chain inside the concrete might be known. The Sun Dome temples with their hemispherical domes take some fairly advanced architectural knowledge, and that knowledge must have been around already in the Dawn Age as the design was spread in the Gbaji Wars. We don't hear of such domes collapsing due to earthquakes, either (excepting unusual ones like Vestkarthan's shudder in 1050 which devastated most architecture in Maniria) or dragonfire capable of melting walls and armies to glass (see Glasswall). Rural or backwoods Sun Dome temples like the Dykene one are simple stone vaults, probably plastered and frescoed with a suitable yellow pigment. (Real world cadmium sulphide, for instance.) These domes would be quite massive, built in the usual way above a wooden support. The big ones like the two in Prax or the new one in Vanntar look like they approach the size of e.g. the Pantheon in Rome or precursors of the central dome of the Hagia Sophia. The Pantheon with its windowed concrete dome manages because of the tuff addition to the material, giving it an exceptional lightness. A stone construction like the Hagia Sophia, even on a smaller scale, requires significant buttressing, cleverly hidden in the Hagia Sophia in hemicircular side domes, but no such are shown in the map of the Sun Dome. There is always the possibility of a wooden construction, with gold foil inside, and possibly outside as well. Given a suitable preservation and climate, such wooden constructions can last for better than a millennium. When the roof beams of the Basilica in Trier finally were replaced, 1600 years had passed, and while single beams may have been replaced over time, the general construction last that long. However, in order to get that much lifetime, such a wooden dome needs to be double-shelled, with enough space in between for repair and maintenance crew to get to work, and to bring in replacement parts. There is a possibility that the Praxian domes and the one in Sartar are exceptional in their workmanship among the newer temples, and that they used dwarven architectural secrets - Flintnail cultists in Prax, and the inheritance of Saronil for Vanntar. The original ones from the Bright Empire may have used Greatway masons, too. (The Balazar citadel ones may have had dwarf support, too). But that leaves Domanand and its EWF era daughter temples elsewhere but Prax in a period when Greatway Openhandism was actively pursued and interdicted by the Nidan decamony. A precursor architecture to the Sun Domes would have been the Anaxial-Era Star Towers of Yuthuppa, that have star dome representations on their tops. The text tells us that they are hollow, but have spiralling staircases on the insides. I wonder whether they also have balconies and vertical compartmentalisation like Buserian's Frame. However, that frame is said to reflect the construction scheme of a horse nomad yurt, a culture which came into contact with Yuthuppa only under Jenarong. The biggest dome of all was of course Manarlavus' Dome covering "all of Dara Happa" (at least Raibanth, although the map claims that it covered Yuthuppa and Alkoth, too), protecting it from the advancing glacier. This was shaped like the hull of Anaxial's Ark, and built of bricks and stones (part of which were stolen by Darjiinians). But as a Godtime construction that did not survive into the ravages of Time, we can use it only as an ideal, not as an actual technology. It still is a contender for the greatest construction ever made by humans (and demigods). Cyclopean walls are a feature of Godtime Glorantha, and survived in a number of places into History - parts of the Nochet Wall and the wall of abandoned Old Karse are of this type, and this may have been used on Vingkotling fortifications like Whitewall, too. These could be like the mortarless can't-fit-a-blade-between masonry of the Inka at Macchu Picchu. Basements of Ziggurats in Kerofinela and Kethaela may use this, too. These might be the work of (elder) giants (or possibly Faceless-statue sized Jolanti) - giants as builders appear in Orlanthi myths, too (Aedin's Wall), and even Balazar's children went to giants for their archtecturally somewhat inferior citadels at the end of the Second Age (not the layout, but the workmanship). Malkioni masonry inherits from the Kadeniti (who might have been the inventors of concrete as used by humans), and from the Likita earth temple builders (which would be related to those of Hrelar Amali, Ezel and the Paps), but the Middle Sea Empire added technologies and more importantly styles from other cultures like Teshnos, Kralorela or Fonrit, and left this inheritage in those places plus Maniria, too. There are a number of metal buildings in Glorantha, all of them magical in origin - the brass citadel of Sogolotha Mambrola, the Silver Bridge of Glamour, the Iron Forts of Kralorela. Other divine/hero plane architecture in the Middle World included Akez Loradak, a huge spire shaped from volcanic glass, shattered in 1318, or Belintar's towers in the City of Wonders. The three dwarf-made pockets and the royal palace of Boldhome border on this, too - even when cutting from virgin stone, the dwarves must have stabilized naturally occurring fault lines in that rock with their magic. I would assume that the entrances to Greatway look fairly similar to the Boldhome Pockets. The entrance to Dwarf Mine is another such place. Godtime ruins or buildings may use other exotic material, like the postulated violet-cloud material used in the first landing site of the Artmali. Sculpted (as in sculpting putty) earth or rock would be frequent where earth cultures or Lodril-cognates were at work.

As I understand it, a wyter is an other side being that coordinates the community magic and that has a physical presence in its community. The Pavis Temple crystal could be said to be such a physical presence, but it might just as well only be the centerpiece of the congregational building, acting as a conduit to the Ohter Side. Being the source for a grimoire doesn't necessarily mean that Pavis exists in some sorcerous state only, or that he doesn't have any theist divine attributes. Pavis, Dormal and a few other non-Lunar apotheosized mortals are hard to categorize. If you compare Hauberk Jon, the wyter of Jonstown, you will find that he didn't undergo an apotheosis to leave the world of the living but died a natural death. Somehow his heroic soul could be contacted there, and be convinced to take over the duties of whichever entity was asked to perform this duty when the city was founded. It appears to be a pattern that a founder takes over the role of the community spirit after death or after apotheosis. For lesser entities, that is all that they are, but entities who have a greater magical potential might have roles beyond that of a wyter.

Ah, the Londario angle was what I missed in my recollection - I haven't touched these Fourth Age speculations for a long time, and I don't feel inclined to re-open those boxes of worms. A simple jump then. The library found by Londario would have been the inheritance of one of the libraries of Argrath's realm, which means access to material from the Royal Library where the non-spell aspects of these building techniques would have been documented. Then there was a debate about Saronil I had among others with Peter Metcalfe, prior to the publication of WF 15 IIRC, and whenever Peter and I manage not to disagree on something I tend to see that as an indication of Gloranthan factuality. Though not canon.

Gloranthan cultures aren't Mediterranean cultures. And your examples are middle Iron Age examples, not Bronze Age. Thus, your Kyrenia-type ship is irrelevant. The ship you describe is the size of a hanseatic cog, regardless of its underwater construction. The crew size and the crew duties are largely the same. And I have been on a rebuild of the Hanseatic cog found at Bremen, but I have not been on any reconstruction of Bronze Age ships, so I use that for a frame of reference. That Cog was about the size of the Gokstad ship, whch I have at least walked around, as I have done for the Kyrenia ship. Similar in size and presumably in cargo capacity. Speaking of Cyprus, the coastal conditions there haven't shown me anything I haven't seen in the Baltic or the leeward parts of the north sea. Your Esrolian merchantman. Grain being the prominent export item of Esrolia. Haven't we been discussing grain transport for the Lunar army, indeed for a city-sized siege force around Whitewall? Or river transport of grain down the Oslir? Grain trade is a fact of Gloranthan naval trade. Big surprise. There weren't any Romans or Phoenicians in the Bronze Age. Nor any Kyrenia type ships. What we have in the way of evidence is the Uluburun shipwreck from 1400 BC with its shell-first mortice-and-tenon hull, and similar Egyptian designs from the Red Sea. We don't have many archaeological evidence for the extent of naval activities west of the Aegaean prior to the Phoenicians, even though we assume that groups of the Sea Folk may have turned there. Shipwreck sites like the Salcombe, Devon find dating from roughly 900 BC are identified by the surviving items of cargo, without any material evidence for the vessel. There were Minoan boats, which we don't know much about except some wall paintings. Similar evidence for Sea Folk vessels, which gives us the weird bird dragons. Some better evidence for Egyptian vessels, both from models and from finds in a cave-like arsenal on the Red Sea, and some logistics apparently in papyrii. All the other stuff comes from about 1000 years after the local onset of the Iron Age. How do we know that? The Uluburun shipwreck did yield some remains of grain due to charring, suggesting that these came from preparing a meal, but otherwise nothing remained. Part of the Uluburun cargo corresponded to the official pharaonic gifts list that documented trade in the papyrii, but the rest of the cargo differed from those royal records, and whatever local records there may have been have been lost, as well as any other cargo the ship may have picked up along the way. Egypt wouldn't import grain any more than Esrolia would, but sent grain to the temple granaries. By ox cart, or over the Nile? Grain tends to be perishable, so the few finds at Uluburun are only thanks to charring. Storage solutions like baskets are little better preserved - finding even a fragment of baskets, ropes or textiles from a shipwreck is considered an archaeological miracle. Shelters, yes. Ports, no. The art direction may have used such reconstructions because there is darn little physical evidence and only very symbolic depictions outside of the model shios found in Egyptian tombs, but your insistence on Greek and Phoenician vessels goes way beyond what actually is said in the Guide. There is evidence for maritime trade on the Atlantic coast, but the oldest actual ship finds come from ship sacrifices in peat bogs (Hjortspring, Nydam) or from ship burials (Sutton Hoo, Oseberg, Gokstad) of the Iron Age. The earliest useful finds of ship parts in the western Mediterranean appear to stem from the first Punic War, but there can be little doubt that there was naval contact between the Baleares and the mainland prior to the arrival of the Phoenicians - the megalith builders didn't walk there. In fact, the various megalithic cultures are spread in patterns which suggest sea travel. Gloranthan naval history is much different. While there are contunuous coastal boating cultures like the Sofali or the Pelaskites, they did suffer serious loss of habitat in the Darkness era when the Faralinthor Sea disappeared, and Choralinthor was reduced to "a puddle".. It took the breaking of the Spke to return the seas tto the south of Genertela, and unless they managed to survive in what was left of Choralinthor and possibly a similar remnant site at Erenplose, the ancestors of the current population of Ludoch for Kethaela and the Mournsea. The Waertagi accompanied that return of the seas, and they claimed the open oceans for their own territroey. This left non-Waertagi naval activities restrained to coastal waters. Still, galleys for warfare like Penteconters or longships appear to have been developed already during the Waertagi domination, and possibly even before the Dawn. Finding evidence for trade ships in the myths is a lot harder. We assume that the Froalar exodus and similar crossings of the Neliomi happened on Waertagi vessels rather than a homegrown naval tradition, but these colonies shared their new lands with an indigenous population that may have indulged in fishing earlier. It is unclear whether there still were some of the western Sofali left when the Brithini colonnies were founded. The journey on turtleback in the Lightbringers' Journey west indicates that there would have been Sofali Diroti at some earlier point in the Godtime. Zzabur boasts to have vanquished three naval assaults - that of the Banthites who managed to occupy a Danmalastan peninsula on the Neliomi for some time, the Helerites of the Churkenos Sea, and the Beakies of the Solkathi torrent. We tend to identify the Churkenos Helerites with the Helerings that later made landfall in Maniria, where it came to the brothering of Orlanth and Heler rather than the set battle both sides expected. (Given the ubiquity of Heler aspects in earlier Orlanthi imths, like Vadrus vs. Enkoshons, I a inclined to qualify the above event with "aspects of Orlanth and Heler" who had not met in any way before.) These Helerites brought their cloud-originated naval tradition with them, and may have passed that on to the local fisherfolk, including the Pelaskites. As the magic faded, more material solutions replaced the magical concepts, and the Pelaskites turned to Orstan the carpenter for aid with their wooden vessels. Asking a carpenter to imitate a ship from a ship-buildign traditon that was unknown (rather than having become unworkable due to the deterioration of magic) is something which happened in terrestrial history. This is the origin story of the Hanseatic cogs, built in imitation of the Viking vessels but without access to their ship-building traditions and lore. The platiarism succeeded after several false starts, and later other designs were imitated by these master woodworkers who had by then acquired a ship-building tradition of their own. When the sources tell us about the expert boat makers of Karse, I cannot help comparing the story of (storm-born) Pelaskos and Orstan with the success story of the Hanseatic ship-builders. I would look at the background of Argos, the mythical builder of the Argo, too, but there appears to be much disagreement about his person, and whether the Argos of the Argo crew (who apparently was picked up along the journey, which would be strange for the builder of the ship - so no mythical precedent for this. The Hanseatic league's push to the sea is quite attractive in its parallel of a land-locked culture discovering naval trade from almost zero to dominating a sea. It is the best and oldest real world parallel I know for Dormal's Opening of the Seas. Yes, it happened significantly after the Bronze Age. But it happened emerging from a Dark Age. The Waertagi interdict to human (or uz, newtling or duck) high sea traffic reached all the way to Maslo (see the Edrenlin population) and Prax (Sog's Ruins, one of the few access points to the coast from the plateau), but doesn't seem to have extended to the East Isles or Kahar's Sea. Teleos and Teshnos are unclear. There is a similar such push to the sea with the victory of the Free Men of the Sea over the Waertagi/Triolini alliance at Tanian's Victory. Without Waertagi suppression, the upscaling of coastal designs for open seas trade became feasible. It is unclear whether the populations of Slontos or Kethaela took to high sea trade before the Middle Sea Empire took control. Given the lure of exotic stuff from Teshnos, there is a high likelihood that they did. The Free Men of the Sea produced a (radically?) new type of ship to battle the Waertagi. Without their cataclysmic summons of Tanien those ships would still have had no chance against the Waertagi navy, but apparently the vessels were fast enough and had good enough detection to avoid contact with Waertagi patrols or other (more peaceful) presence for their test runs to Umathela and back. Yet there is grain trade away from Esrolia and from Tarsh, and there is a miltary logistics network in the Lunar Empire directing grain transport to support the troops - using water ways. There is also the canal connecting Glamour with the Oslir river, providing a shipping route for grain and other foodstuff to that metropolis without any sufficient source of food nearby, requiring logistics comparable only to the pyramid building or feeding overpopulated places like Rome, Bagdad or Byzantium. Accept that grain transport on waterways is a reality in Glorantha, and look at historical examples how that was made to happen. Which does lead us to Roman grain transports from North Africa, or to Hanseatic grain deliveries in exchange for stockfish or furs. Hanseatic technology was hardly more advanced than Roman engineering, so either provides an idea how that would be done. I happen to have good access to details of Hanseatic grain transportations mentioning sailors' duties on a grain transport, but I don't have such sources for Roman grain transport. Do you? Until I see some, I will continue to use what the Hanseatics did and retrofit that to earlier transportation, too. It is not like the Hanseatic merchants invented the trade routes they used, they only went at it systematically and in greater volumes than earlier traders like native Scandinavians (e.g. Ottar) or Frisians. Apart from feeding Rome or the fisherfolk of the cod grounds of Norway, grain and other food was usually exported processed rather than as raw grain. Probably half of the Hanseatic grain exports were in the shape of beer. We know of the waste product of soused herring aka matjes aka spekesild, the garum fish sauce, being traded in significant quantities in antiquity. The Uluburun shipwreck (the one which did provide findings of grain against all the odds of chemical decomposition) transported resin fermented from pistacias. Wine was traded in bulk quantities. I recently had the realisation that the trade with ostentatious luxuries was in no way a pampering to the elites but a flow of indispensible resources to support the magic of authority and identity of those communities. We might be closer to the economic necessities of the ancient world if we treat such exotic jewelry as their equivalent of microchips or other "essential" components for the upscale necessities of a population. That's where my Hanseatic sources come in handy. Dust explosions don't seem to have been a problem on the grain ships, rather the opposite: humidity and resulting moulding or germination was to be avoided, so the sailors' duties on a grain barge included a constant regime of shoveling the grain in the hold to get optimal aeration. Getting the balancing readjusted in the process was a side benefit, but shows that this was a task that needed some expertise, at least for the person overseeing it. It is quite surprising what areas of expertise there were in the old times. The handling of barrels especially up or down from cellars was a specialist profession, avoiding injuries or loss of barrels coming down uncontrolled. The German name for these people was "Schröter", and it became a quite common surname, see e.g. our last chancellor. I would expect a similar degree of experience and knowledge necessary for handling amphorae, but I don't know if there are any documentations of such. Hands up who hasn't read "Midshipman Hornblower"? That was a cargo of rice, though, which is a lot worse than wheat or peas in this regard. Duh. Yes, naval trade would be at a navigable shore, and not at the cliff directly below a palace site (unless someone put a quay there). No, that doesn't make sheltered beach elsewhere outside of the vicinity of palaces ports. And still relevant because it shows how trade is organized. It would have been possible to thread a path through existing Vendref hamlets collecting their production en route as an alternative, but Sartar's institution of trade posts gave the Grazer overlords some extra measure of control over their Vendref traders' activities. The road network in Sartar basically is the extension of the riverine trade route from Nochet or the access route to the port of Karse, so it is related to those ports - even in the time of the Closing. You are looking at it. I have been in constructive disagreement with Martin Hawley over his treatment of Pelaskite culture on the Choralinthor shores, as well as a few ongoing amiable differences with Jeff, and they are a subject that I have been writing about since before my old website on the Holy Country went online. A few of the phrasings of that website can be found in the Guide. I have had to reassess some of my assumptions for new directions that canon took, but my old core document for playing in Glorantha (besides King of Sartar and the Dragon Pass boardgame) was the Holy Country description in the RuneQuest Companion. I have seen numerous cases of new additions to canon veering away from that info and then swinging back into a more coherent picture. So forgive me if I don't look at Gloranthan canon as something static, especially when dealing with this area. I am waiting in both happy anticipation and a sense of dread for MOB's work on the Holy Country. Just consider: Seapolis is one of three places in Glorantha where the mermen can enter the dry land (Nochet and the City of Wonders being the other two, I don't see this happen in the Backford terminus of the Fish Roads.) Nobody is considering the Fish Roads as a trade route, although I think it would be quite hilarious to play out a cattle drive from Backford to Nochet on the bottom of the Mirrorsea Bay. Seapolis is the port for the Rightarm isles. Rightarm islanders own boats like other folk own pairs of shoes, but most of their dwellings are on small elevations above the giant crane-picked tidal flats of that peninsula/archipelago. There will be tidal rivulets providing sort of permanent boat access to their settlements' landing sites, but those are nothing that ships of seagoing size can reach. Seapolis is very much like Venice - a group of artificial and maybe a few natural islands on a reliable deep water canal in the middle of a muddy lagoon full of opportunities for all kinds of sea-food related activities. But unlike self-governing Venice, the Rightarmers are subjects of the Ludoch tribe surrounding their peninsula/archipelago, more so than their kinsfolk inhabiting coastal an estuary Esrolia and Heortland. Their representative in the City of Wonders is a mermaid, daughter of the Ludoch king, as of 1616. This makes their situation quite comparable to that of the Vendref factors who oversee the international trade through the Grazelands. Are there other spots on the Rightarm Isles with permanent deep water channels? Yes, a few, like e.g. Ironfort, but that place is a sealed city, without contact to the rest of the world, and the small fisherfolk community next to it doesn't have much worth trading. We have no information who sealed that city. We know that both mostali and uz have magics capable of sealing a place, but it may have been some other party involved in the Machine War, or it may have been the sorcerer population inside that put up those seals. All of that happened more than 700 years ago. The place is still sealed, but I doubt anyone but obscure scholars has an idea about what happened. (The scenario potential here is basically writing itself, isn't it? A locked treasure trove full of forbidden and forgotten magics like Pavis under troll domination before the Dragonewts Dream, only here you are getting the first picks like Saronil's sons and nephews most likely had in the Rubble.) There is one other good deepwater access at Zoo island, no human population given. If you want a monster island and cannot be bothered to sail around Magasta's Pool to Loral, look no farther than this place. I have postulated shipyard beaches away from Seapolis for my own campaign and character background, so yes, there will be other places that will attract the occasional cargo ship. Most likely these will be the home harbors of the original crew of those vessels, visited not for trade, but for layovers, repairs, and some family time. Small seaports next to major ones exist mainly for one reason: tarriff evasion, aka smuggling, possibly paired with harboring local pirates, or at least wreckers. Sailors on regular trade vessels often prefer to avoid such places. Quite a lot of them grew up in places like that and know exactly what happens to beached crew in the way of volunteer salvage parties, and they want nothing of that. And yes, these are the very same people that you meet on the trading sites who you trade and drink with, and share the local women with. Once a vessel turns into salvage, it becomes the prospective property of the locals, and the crew might be considered collateral damage or even additional trade goods. Communities of wreckers are highly competitive with their neighbors, as speed is of utmost importance in establishing a claim on the salvage. This goes as far as to the joke when one recently deceased member of a wrecker community finds paradise overpopulated by folk from the neighboring community and is not allowed to enter, he shouts out "shipwreck", and all of the dead people of the neighboring community rush out, providing lots of space in paradise. When I cited the loss numbers for the Jutland coast, at least the first third of that period will have included ships actively lured onto a dangerous beach. A change in this approach to sea salvage happened less than 150 years ago with the introduction of organisations like DGzRS, the German society for saving wrecked sailors, which recruited their crews from these very wrecker communities since they were the ones with the expert local knowledge. I cannot imagine that ancient coastal dwellers were any different from that. The Jutland coast was so dangerous because there were few safe spots between Esbjerg and Skagen, with the Limfjord and the Ringköbing Fjord the major exceptions, and neither offering a very safe entry once the storm has caught up with you. This tells me that there is a huge difference between what is desirable for a merchant vessel and what is available. The North Frisian islands further south offer some leeward positions, but they are the very homes of the wreckers I mentioned above. The Mirrorsea bay with its magically calm surface even under strong storms may be the safest water to be in case of bad weather. Your vessel may be driven onto the sands, but there will be no waves shattering your hull, so all you have to do is to avoid the rocky bits of the coastline while driven ashore. No such luck anywhere else on the southern Genertelan coast, which has a mythical past as the Trembling Shore that the waters are only too happy to re-enact. There is a certain likelihood that the presence of Eastern sages may neutralize the worst effects of a raging sea or even the Closing. The Teshnan expedition to the Zola Fel mouth made its way despite the Closing, and the Seleric expedition to Vormain only was caught up with all the symptoms of the Closing when they came into the zone of rival sages, possibly cancelling out the effect of Sheng's disciples. (And no, there are no sources for anything of this. All of this are my conclusions.) To me, your presentation is an Esrolian grain barge (barge denoting the flat bottom, grain the major bulk export of Esrolia - all of the other goods that were mentioned get imported to Esrolia). True - no Ormen lange (of Olav Tryggvason's fleet) or Byzantine dromon (roughly contemporary to those outsized long ships, of similar size, but with two decks of rowers) ec To use wise words already thrown at me on this forum, the problem is although the Genertelan ships may look similar to Mediterranean models that similar is taken as being the same as, meaning that inappropriate geography, sea behavior, construction methods and material are taken as being Gloranthan. Your proposal for Kethaelan triremes looks and feels like a copy and paste for Athenian triremes, down to the last details. This has no relation to Jeff's statement that the ship builders started out upscaling local boat building technology to seagoing size. The Kingdom of Night and its successor the Holy Country may have had more than just small vessels even during the Closing. To my knowledge, Choralinthor Bay wasn't hit by a devastating sweeping front like Ozur Bay, so they would have had whatever fleet and trade vessels that were inside when the seas outside of Troll Strait became impassable, and given the attitude of the Beast Valley inhabitants to trespassing humans, the only useful connection between Heortland and Esrolia was across the bay, so a fleet of merchant ships and a few patrol vessels would have been kept in operation. Possibly more than just a few patrol craft during the Readjustment Wars. And then there is that hidden inlet to a semi-flooded grotto at the foot of Shadow plateau, hidden behind a layer of floating vegetation indistinguishable from the soggy marsh to either side, where a fleet of black troll galleys is preserved for a time of re-emergence. Or used ot be preserved - it is possible that upkeep has been neglected after the fall of Akez Loradak, that the entry passage has sanded up, or that it left subsequent to the Opening and now operates from Jruztela. Yes. The tides not only are fairly slow in the rising, they are extremely fast in the falling, faster even than our daily tides, creating Saltstraumen-like conditions in places like the Troll Strait upon exit. Never on the entry, however. Tidal beaching relies on the 12 hour rhythm of terrestrial lunar tides. Run in with a high tide, do your business during low tide, run out again with the next high tide. The change in water levels does most of the heavy lifting for you, at no charge. Waertagi used directed tidal waves for their beaching (or entry into dry docks). Those waves are not subject to the Annilla tides, but water entities of (second or third generation) divine calibre. Smaller than the Kyrenian ship you used for your model, then? That vessel has the capacity to carry the annual surplus produced by a 1000 inhabitant settlement in a single run, unless you add bulk cargo like grain for the overlord's granaries. Then maybe two such runs. Ports at rivermouths provide access to the output of many such settlements in their hinterland, however. Rhigos may be a metropolis of 25000 souls, but its river network brings in surplus from about 1.5 million souls - more than half of Esrolia, a good portion of Caladraland, all of Porthomeka, and most of Ditaliland. Nochet with the New River connecting to the Sartar road network and the Esrolian river ports as transshipping places for the Grazeland route into the Oslir Valley maybe fewer people whose surplus goes to Nochet, but in addition to that the lion's share of the speciality trade from Peloria (although Karse has quite a bit of that, too, if not by river any more). The other ports of Heortland are mainly access points to the local economy of their hinterland - worth 50,000 souls or so each, but a lot less lucrative. Seapolis is a place where ships returning from long, exotic journeys will lay over (or exchange crews) for some family time.Just enough of that lifestyle that the sailors itch to get the ocean under their keel again. That will give it a higher proportion of exotic overseas goods than you would expect from a tidal marsh dwelling folk of seafood gatherers. The premier port for things magical and exotic has been closed off since 1616. Nochet managed to scoop up much of that trade in addition to the amount that it already had thanks to its role as access point to the Pelorian market. The hanseatic cog was a fairly small ship. It had a higher board and deeper draft than Viking ships except the biggest Iceland merchants, but was shorter than most. The bigger designs of the later Hanseatic period were holks or caravels, some of which sported extra masts. Modern vernacular still calls them cogs because they were Hanseatic ships, but the shipwrights made those distinctions. But then, already Phoenician or polis Greek vessels are the oversized anachronism already. Minoan ships appear to have been well suited to sail major rivers. And I have serious doubts about the use of penteconters for the Troy venture or the Argo journey. A trentaconter like the one used by the experimental archaeologists would do. (Which brings us to Hjortspring boat size, to bring me back into my comfort zone of non-Mediterranean sailing with more hostile seas.) The use of triremes by the Kethaelan navies for overseas missions is jarring with everything that I would expect Dormal's cabal's research coming up with. Triremes are singularly ill suited for travel outside of the Aegaean waters, there is a reason why Romans and Phoenicians used biremes to claim the Mare Nostrum. The trireme is an oared ram designed to cripple enemy ships. A bireme allows some space for marines and necessities on patrol missions, even without the Roman invention of the Corvus to egalize their lack in seamanship. Your inclusion of bireme ships in the Kethaelan navy makes a lot of sense, but is in no way supported by the source material. Much like Dorestad on the Rhine estuary during the Frisian domination of the North Sea (following the lack of Saxon sea presence) or the beginnings of Bergen prior to Hanseatic arrival. Hedeby had a single wooden pier - hardly the only place where cargo would be loaded or offloaded, only the most convenient one. The Bergen piers were a slow development, picking up in speed as the warehouse space spread towards the former coast line, and ever deeper blockhouse-like supports for the planked pier along the bay were constructed, until finally there was Bryggen, an exclave part of the city run by foreign merchants riding high on the dried cod trade. So yes, a pier is what people associate with Bergen, but the initial establishment of the port as the major transshipping port between the Nordland sailors and the continental sailors had no such amenities (or any exclave rights). Of the Halogaland ports, only Skrova had something like piers - the island is shaped like a C, providing an interior anchorage next to steep rocks. Steigen has some of the most beautiful sand beaches I have visited, unfortunately in a climate that doesn't quite invite lazing on those beaches. So yes, I am perfectly aware that piers are luxury amenities. But so is tidal beaching, especially in tidal funnels like the Channel coast. Your Democratic Greece era naval constructions don't either. The ships need to be more archaic, and they don't have the Egyptian technology of Rhamesis era to inherit. Yes, the mention of triremes does steer us to an unpleasant anachronism. I find triremes to be an order of magnitude more anachronistic and problematic than Viking or Hanseatic era ships, not because of the year number associated, but because of the order of organisation involved. Already Harald Finehair's military reform that led him to commanding a fleet of about 100 long ships upon the rare occasion of a full muster is an order of magnitude too big. Agamemnon's nominal command over a bunch of individual fleets resembles the Great Viking Fleet that pestered Britan and France, the Mediterranean and even deep upriver cities in the 9th century has a volunteers for plunder structure with dozens of sea kings uniting under a council of more charismatic individuals among them is rather similar to the force described in the Ilias. The streamlined naval milita of Belintar along with a core of vessels constantly under direct command of his admiral is way more like Harald Finehair's model than Agamemnon's fleet, but not quite on the level of the Attic League. I would be way more willing to believe that with ships and tactics that allow somewhat less professionalism and more enthusiasm than triremes. I cannot picture the Alatan war fought with triremes. Armed merchantman/explorer vessels slightly less tubby than the grain barges, yes - these are the first years into the Opening, so everybody tries to stick as closely to the Dormal's original building plan as the building material allows. Given the use of naturally branching or twisted branches or trunks for ribs and bracing, no two wooden ships would be exact copies of one another. A shipwright's art was to combine and modify these naturally formed shapes into the sleekest lines possible with that material. Designing the ribs from what weird shaped lumber the foresters brought in was the real art. Straight logs would still be sought after for planking or masts, but the real supply bottleneck were the timbers for the ship skeleton, whether building ribs first or shell first. What is your reason for adopting the shell first approach for Kethaelan boat building? Yes, boat building, as in fisherman's skiffs or river boats. It is that art which is famed in Karse and other Pelaskite sites, and which was expanded into full-blown ships when it became clear that Dormal's prototype wasn't the only shape of vessel that would be able to do the Opening rites. Why would Orstan the Carpenter, a profession where you start with the frame and add planks or wattle and daub, go about building a boat shell first? Why would a design inherited from fancy cloud ships that would appear as big dugouts when in water (if the similar Artmali sailing history applies to the Helerites, too) result in a shell-first construction? While we need to look at a sleuth of archaic ships from various millennia of sailing with rather small ships from all over the world, we mustn't forget the mythical and then historical developments of sailing in Glorantha. And that may mean a breakdown by cultures and points of cross-pollination. There must be a reason why the Kethaelan fleet jumps from three-man fishing boats or 6-man trade or harvest boats to triremes, or there must have been some gradual development. Why triremes, and not the easier to build and coordinate biremes? Or if there was an intermediate step of biremes, when and why did those fall out of favor? Due to the Waertagi interdict and the Closing, we have two rather narrow windows where coastal Genertela was likely to develop and perfect bigger craft. In Kethaela, that period is even shorter because of the Slontan domination of the waterways for the second half of the 9th century with their weird specialized craft in addition to whatever native or Seshnelan standard architecture they used. Seshnelan sailors in turn inherited the innovations that the Free Men of the Seas had led into battle against the Waertagi. So I am asking what new designs were brought by the Free Men of the Seas, and what native designs did theiy have to work on? And what made Dormal's new construction so special that he couldn't just have modified one of the surviving Choralinthor Bay trade vessels? Even without a regular series of innovation, these two events which started their respective periods of high seas sailing are what shaped historical Gloranthan ship-building.

Why the metal hoops for the barrels? I thought there was an agreement that those would be unlikely for the amount of metal available in Glorantha. I miss baskets on your list of packaging items, both in hard (stackable) and soft varieties. Also common are strong boxes for valuable cargo (the Argan Argar cult provides a spell for those, too). Having worked with consignments put together by specialist packers, the dimensions of cargo items are an issue, too. Especially if you propose fully decked vessels. Density of cargo items are a big deal when loading a ship, too. Metal ingots, millstone raws and similar heavy stuff doubles as ballast near the keel line (provided the vessel has such). Light but voluminous stuff goes on top. This may require some additional work if you are unloading only part of your cargo at a given stop. Some of the perhaps weirdest cargo to package are shipbuilding timbers that have natural (or artificially enforced) shapes suitable for ribbing. I reckognize that you wrote this for personal use, but the rare occasions when I see terms like "gallon", I draw a blank just as much as when I see biblical measurements like shekels or Greek distances given in stadia.

Gears and cogs are part and parcel of the Mostali mythology as we have been presented it. That makes me somewhat reluctant to have them readily available for mundane human use. Leonardo the Scientist uses pedals and some form of transmission (no data whether chain or leather belt) to power his pedalcopter, so the advanced alchemical sorcerer will have access to mechanics like those pictured in the woodcuts to Agricola's book on mining. Horizontal windmills that don't need any translation might be acceptable. Possibly as wheel mills like in the olive pressing industry. Pulleys are a logical extension of blocks, once someone has the genius idea to pull a rope through a series of these. Legend ascribes this knowledge to Archimedes, in a wager that he would be able to pull a warship out of the water all on his own, a feat worthy of Hercules. Unless you used pulleys... Saronil used winches in his cranes, which angered the Mostali when he applied those to his Orlanth temple. It isn't clear whether this natural philosophy was secret royal magic or made freely available to all the builders employed by the dynasty. Given the ability to finish their projects despite sometimes very short reigns, I tend to freely available, which means that Dormal could have known about pulleys and winches when he started the re-discovery of the seas, and all his imitators might have inherited such technology alongside the Opening (and might regard that as part of the Opening package). I wouldn't worry too much about strange material in a setting. It is like the small size of the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings movies - in the first movie, Peter Jackson pulled all sorts of optical tricks to make the hobbits and Gimli appear smaller than the rest of the cast. In the later movies, the size of the hobbits had been established and was sort of projected by the watcher's mind with only the occasional nudge to memory. If you look at the material culture of e.g. Raymond Feist's Kelewan, the metal-poor parallel world invading Midkemia, their material industry serves for a few plot points and then disappears in the background. I know very few people who started thinking about the atomic number of Mithril when discussing Tolkien's Middle Earth. If enchanted gold or lead can obtain the hardness and tensile strength of bronze, we have left conventional material science anyway, and nobody is upset, so what is the big broohaha about tools and weapons that traditionally cast terrestrial bronze cannot produce in stable variations? If we just state that the comparable gloranthan item requires a process involving alchemy or other such magic to provide a viable item, what is the difference to enchanted gold or lead? There are plenty outwardly mundane materials produced in Glorantha with the help of magic, like most crops. Sometimes the mind boggles at other weirdness, like the concept of items as re-usable sacrificial gifts to the god. Quite nifty, such an item that receives a ritual marring which may be removed after some pious waiting time until it can be sacrificed again. And again, and again, and again, with no significant material investment, for good magic. Other sacrificial components double as ingredients for the holy feast. That's not really limited to Glorantha. There are some ritual food sacrifices at a volcano IIRC on Java where there are people descending into the caldera of the (active!) volcano to catch some of these sacrifices for food. The sacrificer doesn't mind, the sacrifice seems to lie in the tossing of the gift, not in what happens to it afterwards, and the volcano hopefully remains placated.

Beetle wing windows: Possible sources: Pavis, Nochet, Boldhome, Naskorion - basically any place where trolls and humans cohabitate for them to recognize a "get wealthy and influential" opportunity. I am with the Martins (Hawley and Helsdon) on this topic - something like that has to exist, and will in all likelihood be an outright plague in the Sea of Worms. The Middle Sea Empire will have spread this across the known shores, if the Waertagi have not done so before to thwart their wooden-hulled wanna-be rivals. Western ships will have sorcery dedicated to deal with this threat, Kethaela has troll cooperation. Secure it on the rib-heads supporting the railing, like a hide stretched over a model. I don't see evidence for the use of nails in Kethaelan ship-building, so nailing it on (as would have to be done with metal sheeting) doesn't seem likely. You were the one to point me towards giant insect (or crab) legs for innovative materials. The only use I envisioned earlier were giant crab legs for spear shafts in my Volcanic Cave Under the Glacier setting that was discussed on the HeroQuest Yahoogroup just before there was a Glorantha Yahoogroup, a technology contributed by the Vadrudi males/selkie wives portion of that trapped population. All of which not canonical at all, and not yet written up in a gameable format. If you are a yahoogroup member (I never cancelled my membership and got Yahoogroups to react very surprised at me revisiting these old hunting grounds of mine), here's a direct link that should work once you are logged in: https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/HeroQuest-RPG/conversations/topics/16980 That thread discusses a few other innovative use of materials in a situation of exctreme scarcity, too, like lava cast into ice moulds.

A ship the size of a Hanseatic Cog would not stop for a delivery for a hamlet of 60 souls unless enough people form the crew hail from there. Viking merchants did use piers where present, but their keeled craft would beach on sandy beaches next to significant settlements or markets where available or stay out of the flats (depending on the coast they found). They wouldn't make the tour to each and every single stead on an island like Hinnöya in the Vesteralen (sorry about the wrong umlauts), leaving that to locals with smaller boats that could be pulled up even at rocky shores. Tubs the size of the grain ship would stop for full-sized colony cities that had something to offer. They wouldn't stop for five amphorae of olive harvest at some small isolated beach. That's what boats are for. Or donkey backs, or carts. In Greece, the portion of the local harvest set aside for trade (or rent/taxation) would be transported to the polis, which is where the trade ship would stop. The local potentates (or democratic councils acting as such) wouldn't have it any other way. Your idea of the Tramp Steamer making stop after stop at individual island hamlets isn't how such harvests are collected. Small vessels similar in capacity to river boats would be sent to central market places where the big ships would visit. A few smaller "ports" nearby might be used for tarriff evasion, but usually by smaller vessels and not by the "big liners". Ships would make regular stops at freshwater sources regardless whether there were habitations there or not, for instance, but calling such places ports is like calling highway parking lots or fuel stations in the wilderness cities. So yes, there is a call for being able to approach a more or less featureless coast that provides a know resource, like freshwater. But no, that's not a port. Now that's a different term than port. Harbor, anchorage, wind shadow - places where you would re-provision, sit out bad weather, or hide from pirates are a necessity. And if you do it on a boat operated by two people, with enough cargo space for the entire production of that place, and some to add, that's what you do rather than send a ship that requires almost a dozen crew plus "dock handlers" to beach and unbeach. Using existing waterways is always the cheapest form of transportation, and in the absence of other infrastructure usually the fastest way, too, unless two otherwise distant bodies of water are separated by only a rather short stretch of overland journey. There is only one caveat here. In order to require the capacity for bulk transportation, you need goods in bulk amounts. You don't stop the ocean-going ship for each barrel or amphora of local produce, but you let smaller boats do that, and collect from central places, which are usually controlled by the local authority and taxed and tarrifed accordingly (or, in less modern words, you had to gift the local ruler to get his blessing for trading with his subjects). That's the function of the proto-urban centers that spring up in the late Bronze Age, sometimes from local concentration, sometimes from foreigners establishing a colony polis in previously uncharted land. Timber was another major bulk cargo, while marble and similarly sought after stone probably was more of a rare luxury transport. Rome was dependent on outside imports, having outgrown the food producing capacity of the neighborhood with a few days of transportation. Athens with its tribute payments from the Attic League members may have been in a similar position, but apparently managed to survive a long siege (without a functioning sea blockade) for years without any access to production in its direct neighborhood, too. Thank you very much for that authoritative suggestion. May I suggest some advanced reading on the formation of proto-urban structures north of the Alps for your delectation? What's the social and economic unit in Maniria? The clan, of about 500 people. That unit will have a communal place where the harvest (surplus) is gathered, and where the clan authorities or their deputies will make deals with outside merchants interested in bulk. A small time peddlar who has maybe a donkey but more likely just the basket he bears on his back might be allowed to do his minuscule business directly (after declaring his business to the clan council or their deputies), but a major trader cannot just visit all the outlying steads, bid for the local harvest, and leave the clan center's storages empty for that year. Germanic social units may have been smaller if you go by the term "hundreds", though I doubt that. For individual farmsteads or fisherman's steads acting as their own economic unit you need some form of isolation, and even then trade was centralized by the chiefs or kings of that outback region, like the Steigen or Skrova kings on the Vestfjord. No bulk trader ever approached the inner Tysfjord. Delegations of the local kings went there to collect tribute and trade, then dealt with the traders interested in bulk. If I look at the settlement structure on Crete, for instance, I don't see evidence for such isolated beach sites. The "palaces" are the local centers of commerce, and any trader would visit those for trade goods, leaving isolated shepherd places maybe as a place where to refresh the water containers, but never to take on significant amounts of export goods. A spot to disembark a hunting or water party is not a port in anybody's vocabulary. North of the Celtic language region, trade was conducted in the Viks - harbor places where the local goods would be accumulated through local transport. In the Danubian region, the Fürstensitz had the same function. On the Mediterranean, the colonies, whether Greek or Punic. Of the Etruscan cities, there were only three or four port sites. Those had quite significant industrial activity, as the thousands of tons of iron slag testified that were put into recycling in the 19th and 20th century, at times up to five meters high. But those goods were collected in those three of four spots, and overseas traders went there, not to the individual smelter. That's what a port means. Everywhere where overseas merchants went, they sought out centers created by the locals, Where the locals didn't provide such centers, they created them - which is why the Vikings are responsible for most of the coastal cities of Ireland. And you find exactly this reflected in the activities of Sartar when he instituted his cities or the three trade posts in the Grazelands. The issue of Gloranthan sea ports is one of a 600 year interdict, the Closing. Places like Kethaela with their inland sea or the Quinpolic islands kept at least local trade, but similar places like the Mournsea stopped all naval activities except fishing. Ramalia has demonized everything approaching from the sea and doesn't even allow fishing. If anything, this has created a greater reliance on smaller vessels collecting local goods and transporting them to the cities. There is no place or rather function for grain-barge sized ships on the coast of Heortland except in the places that are shown in the Guide. They even show Sklar, a glorified fisherman's hamlet that might be of interest for smugglers, but never for bulk traders. And places like Jansholm or Durengard may be approachable for smaller vessels, but not for those grain tubs - those will use the transshipping places on the flats in the estuaries. On the Esrolian side, you might have a point about not all places that might warrant a port being shown on the map. However, tell me this: Where can you load grain? Only in Nochet or Rhigos. Places like Pedastal don't have that privilege, and it takes a Lunar forward base there to change that. The Rightarm Isles funnel their foreign trade through Seapolis, where their Ludoch overlords can observe the transactions. Other places might have facilities or amenities, but no wares to speak of. Stopping for longer than it takes to take on fresh water and food or to spend the night will most like put the locals into deep trouble with their authorities. You are correct that a vessel like the grain barge may be too small to have more of a dinghy than a tug or watering skiff. But you overlook that people on the coast will have boats of their own. A popular anchorage off the Tangle below the Shadow Plateau will in all likelihood see local hagglers making a decent profit out of bringing fresh goods to the anchored ships, creating a bit of the Sansibar atmosphere where friendly locals in colorful boats greet the sailors on their big overseas ships. Even if those locals are amhibian or beaked rather than exotic human. But those places are just provisioning stops. If any transshipment occurs, it is directly from big vessel to local small vessel. Where you don't have tides twice a day (like everywhere on Glorantha), you avoid beaching your vessel, unless you are fine waiting out the next two to five days without being able to leave. Getting stuck that way in Nochet is fine, your crew will probably need that time. Getting stuck ike that in a shithole like Sklar might mean that you need to hire new crew in the next decent port. And a stop to take on fresh water for the next two or three days had better not last that long, or the entire point of making that stop would be sort of moot. In many ways, the Baltic Sea with its absence of tides except for level changes caused by constant strong wind models the Gloranthan seas better than the Mediterranean. Beaching in Glorantha means you better do that at the highest tide, or the continuouos rise in water level will carry off your vessel in the middle of unloading. Beaching at the highest tide means a wait of at least two days until the water gets high enough to leave the beach again. So, where is the benefit of a flat-bottomed ship able to beach? If you need water, you set off the skiff with enough containers and maybe three of your crew while the rest of the crew holds position with the help of anchor and occasional poling or rowing, or you take the friendly locals up on their offer to do the water run for you for a small payment. If you want to load significant amounts of cargo, you better find a decent port with better amenities or at least enough manpower to put water under your non-keel again. Everything else, a smaller vessel gets alongside your ship, and you heave stuff over the railing.

Wow, someone else writes diatribes as long as mine... Ok, go into that crocodile nest to get some eggs while the mother watches. I'll happily sit by and mop up the remains... Not all reptilians are like sea turtles. But then, dragonewts are not reptilian. They are warm-blooded. One might classify them as a variant branch of the dinosaurs, one that eschewed the feathers. (Note that during the ages of the dinosaurs, lots of other big tetrapodes with more reptilian traits existed, too. Neither ichtyosaurs nor mosasaurs nor pterosaurs are any close relation to the ancestors of our birds. And there were monster-sized crocodilians, too.) Forget about reptilians. The dragonewts are evolutionary as far from the rock lizards as are birds or mammals if you insist on putting them onto the same evolutionary tree as terrestrial organisms. A relationship that doesn't work for Glorantha, anyway, but I'll play along since I have used dragonewts in a RQ setting of mine which did obey evolution for the most part. And what is racial memory that slowly emerges through learned things proven wrong by this. My first encounter with these critters was the Dragon Pass boardgame. I might confuse this with the Glorantha booklet of the RQ3 DeLuxe box, but I think it said they were the neotenic offspring of immature (True) dragons. RQ2 misleadingly talks about warm-blooded reptiles, but that was not in the original source. I think that Lawrence Whitaker did have some short insider notes when he wrote the MRQ book on dragonewts. One of the better MRQ publications, and while some interpretations may have since been re-visited and some details never confirmed, I think that that presentation of the last-born and horny female dragon that left clutches of neotenic dragonewts all over the place may be Word from Greg, or possibly word from Stephen Martin who had fairly full access to Greg's Glorantha notes at the time. I suppose they hatch for (not so) good, destroying their egg in the process. Dragon Pass had something about some of them redeeming themselves spinning a cocoon like an egg, from which they emerge as Pteranodons, to an almost dragon-like existance. No idea about the magisaurs, though, which start out effectively as defect scouts. That's one of the draconic traits that they lost. Dinosaurs don't emanate anything (the Trachodon/giant magisaur regimental spirits in the boardgame are something different). New OS: Mostali aren't computers or Pratchett-style golems, either. What I meant by this comparison is that the new incarnation has a difference in basic outlooks and thought processes. A lot of identity (and especially dragonewt social identity) is retained, but if the individual progressed as supposed, it works closer to the draconic Absolute. In my model the physical form is an expression of the slowly forming mind, so we aren't that far apart in that aspect. Comparison to human development of personality and mental capacities as age groups: Oh, I agree. The analogy is far from 100%, it is just a hint at the mental and moral capacity of the developing mind. Better than two thirds of the Genertelans plus the Teleosans have heard about the dragonewts. The original Malkioni colonies may be the great exception, but they too were involved in the opposition to the Middle Sea Empire by the EWF. While the EWF wasn't dragonewts but began as humans imitating dragonewts, some memory of that plus the world-wide experience of dragons rising everywhere, even where you never expected any, to fly to Dragon Pass would be in the common lore. Pamaltelan's might wonder why all those ginormous beasts suddenly manifesting flew north without knowing anything about dragonewts. Vithelans might be less ignorant, but only slightly so. In Pelanda, far from any living dragonewt nest, where the last contact with that species was the Dragonkill war, there are nonetheless mentions of dragonewts in their myth how humans failed to participate in immortality. If one can believe the numbers, there was one invading soldier for each human inhabitant of Dragon Pass. Yes, a few humans found refuge as slaves of Isidilian, and Delecti's magic unmade an entire piece of the land, but apart from that, the human lands were scoured for good. The wilderness obviously a lot less, which explains how the Aramites (stalwart warriors for the EWF in the Machine War) held out. First time I see this claim. The EWF inherited the location of their council from the council of Orlanthland, the entity which started into the Second Age receiving tribute from occupied Dara Happa. It is quite possible that that council met at an itinerary of holy mountains around Dragon Pass, according to the Season. These holy men (the chief priests) would likely have been accomplished flyers. Sure. When the dragons struck, all humans were targets. Those who were friendly had fled or perished otherwise, or were waiting for worse fates, like slavery. Sure. There will have been individuals from most clans in Nochet or in similar mundane places of Kethaela at any time, who may have had some half-correct family tradition about what was forgotten 78 years earlier. In comparison, that's the memory how the US got dragged into World War 2, from now. What do you know about the conditions at that time, about the political constellations and the rivalries? And that's without a total manhunt which not even the Katharan crusade or the elimination of the Knights Templar achieved. No, that was the human (or rather yet human, though already quite draconic in look and habit - think Elderlings from Robin Hobb's Golden Fool / Living Ships series) population of Dragon Pass who now had this strange crop instead of the good old Ernaldan food. Which they returned to after 1042, which possibly was made easier because quite a large portion of their population did not survive that assassination. That lizard thing again... and while there are a lot of insectivores among the smaller reptiles and prominent predators among the larger ones, there are also tortoises and sea turtles, iguanas and Galapagos sea dragons which are strictly herbivorous. Scouts are herbivorous gatherers, and provide for the omnivorous higher stages above warrior (mainly tailed priests, winged priests spend most of their existence in meditation which obviates such trivialities as intake of food). There is no evidence of any pastoral or herding activity apart from keeping demibird steeds and exerting some control over the "wild" dinosaur herds. Those may be as "wild" as the reindeer in Scandinavia (meaning they all belong to herds that have registered owners, even when they appear solitary in the wild). Even if this was true for Dragon's Eye (which I don't think it is), how would they do something similar in the lesser cities in such different locations like the city among the Quivin Peaks, in the Stinkwood, at the foot of the Indigo Mountains or opposite of Dunstop? Eating the dead bodies of their utuma'ed or otherwise demised fellow newts might be a thing, although I find the concept of autophagy - the newly hatched newt devours what is left of its previous body - as irritatingly different. Something like this was hinted at in connection to those dragonewt armor stories. Sign here, here, and this property release form. Gouging out someone's eyes will alter that person's perceptions, too... Those awakened jolanti of Aggar are the least of my doubts. How did they hope to make the Elder Giants of the Easter Rockwoods comply? From what I have read about the EWF mystics, utuma was a one time only option, preferably when you achieved True Dragonhood. At least that's how the most successful draconic mystic, Obduran the Flyer, did it. Obduran was the first Wyrm's Mind Collective leader who was an Orlanthi, but there were quite a lot of draconic mystics who had been at their meditations and transformations before him. Obduran may have overtaken them, but I think only a minority of the most advanced draconic mystics participated in the Third Council, leaving someone comprably junior like Ingolf Dragonfriend to take that position with all its entanglements. According to the Dragon Pass rules, Pteranodons are redeemed dinosaurs. Still not quite dragons, but way better than e.g. brontos or triceratopi (or however you form the plural). Somehow it is important that the dragon follows unnoticed. Which may be a way to say that it is Orlanth's Other, the imperceptible part of one's self that one cannot acknowledge without mystical realisation, like Yelm's shadow. Or, in opposed pairs like Rufelza and Sheng Seleris or Arkat and Nysalor, which they can acknowledge only through masks even with mystical awareness. An experiment gone wrong, so one eradicates the ant farm. "This is not how to proceed, even though that Obduran specimen performed brilliantly." Cragspider may have a primeval understanding of the world beyond so irritating things like facts through her one-ness with Arachne Solara. The ancestors of the dragons may have met the Goddess Glorantha during Creation, and they may have come to an agreement for the goddess to serve as the nesting ground (for eggs that hatch as True Dragons, without that neotenic nonsense). Possibly two such agendas. The Kralori dragonewts elevate a human exarch to their functional equivalent of the Inhuman King (like currently Godunya). Their experiment with Immanent Mastery (the path also pursued by Isgangdrang aka Drang the Diamond Storm Dragon) backfired just like the one in Dragon pass did, in the person of Shang-Hsa May-his-Name-be-Cursed. Their correction of that mistake took longer than the 1042 assassination. Sandy Petersen once said that in order for new Dragonewt eggs to be produced, individuals from all age stages need to participate, which puts a stopper on expansion of dragonet-less populations, and puts Godunya into a strange sexual position. If this was the case, so what about the dragonet-less Kralori 'newts? No new eggs for them? Not to my knowledge, and the dinosaur-born nomadic nests of the Elder Wilds may also be more of a rumor than a fact - while dragonewts are repeatedly mentioned in the history of the Elder Wilds, none are mentioned for the now of the place, and they don't appear in the population listing, either. The only dragonet apart from the Inhuman King of Dragon Pass that I know about is the ruler of Ryzel on the border to Ramalia. Interesting theory. But then equating Rashoran (the Godtime incarnation of Nysalor) with Metsyla is kind of obvious. Why would there have been dragonewts in Hell? A dragonewt whose body dies goes straight to the egg, and doesn't receive 400$ for passing the start field. No detour through Hell required. That would be Death,

@David Scottbeat me to this topic. I did a little research on this, and found this interesting article (though I differ on a couple of points made in it): https://www.tor.com/2017/09/25/using-archaeology-in-fantasy-fiction/ Basically, much like the other aspects of history, a lot of the technology of Glorantha is based on mythic precedents. The iconic sailors of Glorantha all use weird material. The Waertagi use "living bodies of slain sea dragons", the Sendereven cut their outrigger catamarans from special rocks (sounds rather similar to creating Moai), dwarf paddle-wheeled floating castles use opus caementitium (aka concrete), a material also attested in use for Pelandan architecture (as per Entekosiad), and the elves breed and grow special trees into boat shape. The original Artmali and Helerite boats and ships were solidified clouds, purple for the Artmali and tan blue for the Helerites. I already speculated in another thread about the architectural possibilities in such a material. In face to face conversation with @Jeff I learned (or at least got the impression) that at least some of the earliest seagoing vessels in myth were little more than a good-sized piece of barch for a hull, a huge leaf for a sail and a branch for a mast, held together by the will (and creative power) of the creator and sailor. If you look at the first boat myths, we get the Sofali Diros with his sea-turtle shell, we get Kogag with his giant beetle carapace, and Varanorlanth too. We have reed boats from riverine Peloria and Maniria (including the Zola Fel valley here) which are almost dully normal. There should be humungous dugouts, possibly in the Maslo copies of the Sendereven design. Possibly widened through application of superheated steam - a technology apparently already known to mesolithich spear-makers, which requires water, fire-heated rocks, animal skins, and more fire-heated rocks. If you manage to heat timber to 120 degrees or more, it becomes malleable like putty without losing its year-ring lamination. Manipulating something that hot requires some ingenuity, but that's a quite commonplace quality in humanity. Malkioni really should be (or have been) using coracle-based technology rather than planked hulls, in imitation of the Waertagi hulls. The Free Men of the Seas might have changed that with their radically new designs, leaning on Manirian knowledge acquired from the Olodo. Likewise the Yggites with their access to seal skin. The earliest naval activities occurred on the "coastal parts" of Sramak's River. In the west, the experiences of the Waertagi have survived the Gods War. In the East, the wager of the Prosandara and Venperesha (Revealed Mythologies p.74) created land in the seas and sea in the lands before any other water invaded the land. These outermost islands were soon populated, and whether the people were created in loco or ferried there, they soon started taking to the seas and to meet the neighbors. It is from this oldest tradition the Sendereven came. The Keets appear to have been drawn to the beaches of the southwestern corner of the world, which is how the sea gods were enraged by the "blessing" bestowed by the keet sage who was trod upon by the dancing sea god who received lightness and couldn't return to his sea any more. (Sounds somewhat similar to the myth of Heler...) Rivers are there in the Golden Age, IMO this starts with the Birth of Umath, which pushed his mother down and his father upward. The ever-hungry waters were only too happy to return to the sixth side of the Earth Cube which had been inaccessible to them for too long. Rivers expanded into lakes, wetlands and smaller seas, providing opportunities for the earliest boating above drowned land (seas, rather than bottomless oceans). The God Learner maps show the Solkathi current that goes around the Spike meeting the Neliomi current, establishing the sea north of the Spike even before the Great Flood that followed (and that covered highlands with huge standing waves). In a way, the dry lands of Kerofinela and Kethaela (and Saird) may have been the result of a huge downward wind blowing the waters to either sides of these lands. Those extremes retreated, and some balance of sea and land was found on the surface of the cube, until the seas dried up later in the lesser Darkness - possibly through the agency of Valind building his glacier, possibly for other reasons. The mermen as we know them are the youngest of the Elder Races, younger than mankind. They were born when the Vadrudi ravaged the invading seas, picking wives from the waves without asking for consent. The earliest Diros stories would come from this period, too, as they require an interaction with Sea above Former Lands. (At least that's how I see this. Others might disagree.) This puts the start of naval history outside of the outermost East Isles and the Waertagi coast (or at least surviving and accessible memories thereof) in the Storm Age. One problem with assessing which technologies were conceived (or willed into being) way back when is that narrators of a mmore modern age will replace terms that they don't really understand with technological terms they are familiar with. That's how the ceramic storage vessel that Diogenes inhabited when he was met by Alexander has become a cooper's barrel in western European tradition and imagery. The same goes for mention of other technological inventions for ages past. Even when avoiding the route of von Däniken and his ilk, there are tantalizing images and models of things that would not have survived as material leavings because they were made of perishable substances. We infer the archaeology of textiles from weights that we assume were required for a hanging loom. We have not the slightest idea when baskets or basket-held skin containers were first used. Unlike ceramics, these didn't survive. Finding copper-age Ötzi as an ice mummy has expanded our knowledge of earliest textiles by 100%. Similarly well-preserved remains are only known from bog finds or salt mines, and usually younger by millennia. For other data the textile archaeologists look at depictions in durable materials, like ceramic dolls or fresco paintings like those of the "Minoan" culture, or possibly wall paintings invisible to the naked eye but detectable with modern spectroscopy and datable by analyzing minuscule chalk crusts forming over them, like the recent discovery of definitely Neanderthal wall paintings about 15000 years before the arrival of the African immigrants that provide the majority of our European DNA. So, let's examine our discussion whether certain technologies are bronze age or not (and keep in mind that bronze age didn't end simultaneously everywhere - in my mind, the Bronze Age lasted until about 500 BC, regardless of early iron industries e.g. by the Etruscans starting well before 800 BC - and yes, I am aware that BC isn't the politically correct term, but I'll use it nonetheless). "Barrels require metal hoops, so they are definitely not a Bronze Age thing." Paraphrasing from a comment here lauding the insistence on amphorae as standardized containers. Probably well and true for the Mediterranean, but when a Roman author testifies the use of barrels in transalpine Gaul, he describes a well-established technology of the La Tene people, and quite likely stretching back to the Hallstatt culture or even its precursor. We don't have any literature about that. Oral tradition is treacherous, as the Diogenes in a Barrel misconception shows (quite on topic), but that doesn't prove a negative. It is extremely likely that the army that attacked at the Tollense crossing came from a barrel and bucket-using material culture, just not proven. And that battle predates Khadesh, and hints at having a similar scale, so we are looking at a huge organized human endeavor in a region that historians relying on Greek and Roman authors have labeled benighted Barbaria, and that label has stuck even to modern pre-historians. When we find durable evidence for a culture in that region, it can be stunning, like the gold hats or the Nebra disk. But most of that culture's activities appear to have been made in perishable material. Human remains are among the less perishable material from that region, as are certain grave gifts. Unfortunately, body burials were rather few in that time, and remains in urns have seen thorough destruction. So basically, a culture of great recyclers has recycled allmost all the evidence for their activities. Post holes can only attest for what was within the soil. But it is that period that means "Bronze Age" to me. Whenever I see Greek Hoplite armor, it shouts anachronism to me. To everyone in the Anglophone world this seems to shout "Bronze Age", but it (and contemporary ship building) is about as period appropriate as the late mediaeval armor in that Arthur flick with Connery as Artus and Richard Gere as Lancelot for events that are set in the crumbeling remains of Roman culture in Latinized Britain - off by a millennium. So, if there was a coracle or paddled canoe-based advanced naval technology on the Atlantic and Baltic shores, we don't have much evidence of that. We get the Hjortspring Boat dating from around 400-300BC, and it was accompanied by presumed contemporary iron weaponry - that's La Tene culture further south, the Iron Age successor of the Late Bronze Age Hallstatt culture. We see rock carvings that are somehow (no idea how exactly) dated to 2000 BC, give or take a millennium, which show objects with double protuding stems very similar to the shape of the Hjortspring boat, so one might assume that there was such a naval culture in the northern seas. We don't have any findings from this period, though. But we know those were warmer times, with a local climate comparable to Tuscany now, so it is possible that the boreworm (which started the discussion below) was native in those waters back then. While the Baltic Sea has a few anoxic pockets where wooden remains might have survived, no such lucky find has been made yet in those much smaller areas than the vast anoxic underbody of the Black Sea with its very own story of flooding preserved in an environment hostile to all surface life. Varchulanga's realm, only without the big organisms escaping. Or possibly some other deity of darkness and deep sea trapped in a locked bottom of aerated water. Think of a (possibly shapeless) marine vampire lifeform (or undead, or chaotic) whose vulnerability is aerated water rather than sunlight. Something like this must exist somewhere on the sea floor of the Homeward Ocean... and it might guard some lost holy Earth place to rival Ezel or Seshna's Temple. Food for a merman campaign, maybe. Once you start looking at giant-sized insects as source for construction material, quite a few weird ideas might work. Who needs glass windows when you can frame the transparent wings of giant insects and put those in the wall openings? Surely better than parchment. The carapace shielding doesn't have to be water-tight - it needs to be bore-worm proof. And it might only work in combination with those charmed bait boards (think galvanic anodes in modern ships and containers for liquids, like warm water reservoirs) that end up on the menu of the troll providers. Silky cocoons are produced by quite a number of pupae, and while that stuff won't necessarily be up to par with bast or spider silk for tensile strength, the sticky bits of these might be just the material to be put between overlapping pieces of carapace lashed together with some stronger fibre. Or maybe someone has found a way to use insect legs for rivets - put a thinner one from the outside into a wider one on the inside and put a splint into a hollow through both of these. That recorder played by the troll wind lord in the 13G illustrations? I would bet that it is made from an insect leg rather than a bone. Take enough hollow insect legs, and you might get useful tubing. Then there are insect excretions based on specific feeds, like e.g. laquer. Troll giant insect herders might be able to produce this on (ancient) industrial scale. There has to be a reason why cities like Nochet or Boldhome tolerate man-eating monsters in their midst. This might be it. Then there is the perennial "Gloranthan metals aren't quite their terrestrial equivalents". Gloranthan metals probably corrode differently than terrestrial ones. Still, I like to suggest sulfidic corrosion associated with Darkness, and oxidic corrosion associated with Sea and Storm. Earth and Sky might claim that they don't corrode but transmute to something better, but then I am fairly certain that sulfidic corroded metal can be quite tasty to uz palate. The standard metal is brass or bronze, a naturally occurring alloy of earth metal and sky metal, either of volcanic or of storm origin. Lodril's descent created the first brass, and that's how mostali metallurgists will classify this kind of alloy. Brass is solidified liquid, whereas bronze (at least in gods' bones) has growth rings, something anathema to Maker dwarves even though it provides an additional durability. As far as my theory of metals goes. You can melt air-descended bronze, and after cooling you will get a metal undistinguishable from brass, and probably one that suffers all the weaknesses we associate with bronze vs (contemporary) iron (although few of those have been proven - the main consequence of the introduction of iron may have been a much greater availabiity of metal objects from local production, although usually inferior unless it underwent the refining hinted at in the Wayland myth re-melting the sword he made in contest with the King's previous smith). Storm-descended bronze will be of a better quality than brass much like normal (non-refined through oxidizing) steel is inferior to damascened, layered terrestrial iron, for IMO the same mechanical reasons. What else do we have in anachronistic material? Let's ignore iron, it is as fantasy a metal as is Mithril in Tolkien's Middle Earth, and from a very similar source (dwarves delving deep, then too deep). But we have glass, and more to the point, we have glass-blowing, and we had that for centuries, already in the time of the Autarchy. Possibly even earlier. But again, the Mostali had it way before that. Already their second caste, the lead dwarves, know the secrets of molten rock not returning to its mineral graining. That means glazing (and implies ceramics), although blown glass possibly might have had to wait until the brass mostali provided the non-unique tools for heating a glass drop and then pushing exhaust gas (not necessarily "Air", as Mostali tend to dislike that concept) into it. Whenever the humans develop something that has been pre-empted by Mostal the Maker, the mostali and dwarves accuse the humans of theft, or of unlicensed plagiarism and duplication (which, if one believes Hollywood's lawyers, is a crime with higher damage sums than all the homicides and bodily harm with guns in total). Once a concept has been imprinted on Gloranthan reality, it cannot be unmade. It may be suppressed in some form for extended times, possibly requiring huge rituals or cataclysmic spells, but it will creep back. Take Nysaloran illumination, or take writing (as per the Fourth Age or late Hero Wars Illiteracy curse in King of Sartar). Is the God Learner secret really gone for good? Or do the de-deifying events of the late Hero Wars render it without any meaningful material to work upon? I wouldn't be outraged if the Umathelans somehow managed to re-discover that secret and use it against the mostali advance, making that cataclysm even greater.