Bohemond

That's great if we're all Bronze Age people just living our lives. But we're not. We're 21st century people playing a game. The kind of stories we choose to tell when we game have impacts on us and how we think about our lives and our world. Telling misogynistic stories encourages misogyny.

I don't see how this is an issue of Game Mechanics at all. I'm entirely concerned with the myth as it's written and how players are likely to respond to it. Yes, myths are questable and, as I say toward the end of that post, I'd like to see more myths that are questable from the feminine perspective, but I'm not really looking at how we translate the Wooing of Ernalda into the mechanics of a scenario. What I mean by 'framing' is that the story is not presented to the reader as an example of how Orlanth made a mistake and then later owned up to it (which is what I mean by 'screwing up'). There isn't an obvious moral here that 'Orlanth realized that he was abusing Ernalda and changed his ways'. Rather, the most obvious moral that I think one is likely to extract from this story is 'Yell at the woman you're interested in until she submits to you.' Even if we read it from the Ernaldan perspective, the moral seems to be 'Submit to a man's abuse until he marries you and then you'll have some control.'

One major component of slavery in most real world societies has to do with the degree to which slaves experience Social Death. Social Death means that the slave is no longer regarded as a human being in social terms--they do not receive the normal polite treatment people receive, they may be humiliated by not receiving proper clothing or food, they may lose their names, they may not be accorded the normal benefits of religion, and so on. In Graeco-Roman society, slaves were often referred to as if they were mere extensions of the owner's body. Republican Rome recognized two categories of slave, servi who experienced near complete social death and who, if freed, entered into a new social identity as a freedman/woman; and nexi (usually debt slaves) who did not experience full social death and who, when freed, returned to their previous social status. Nexum was abandoned after a scandal in which a nexus slave was forced to sexually service his owner---the idea that a man who was still in some sense a citizen could be used sexually was deemed unacceptable, so the entire practice of temporary debt slavery was legally abandoned. So I think to some extent the question this thread is looking at deals with the question of social death, but read through the magical lens of Glorantha. Does a slave suffer full social death in a particular Gloranthan culture? Sartarite thralls don't seem to--they seem to have at least some limited membership in the clan that owns them. They participate in at least some of the rituals of the clan and probably have some basic legal rights in terms of how they are treated--Babs Gor isn't going to allow female thralls to be raped, for example. But Lunar slaves probably do. The real world cultures that the Lunars are modeled on generally inflicted social death on most slaves, and plantation slavery generally seems to require a high degree of social death as a tool to keep the slaves in line. But in Glorantha, since ritual tends to pervade everything that happens, it's likely that the Lunars have ritual ways to reinforce Social Death. So perhaps there is a religious ritual that Lunar slaves are subjected to that essentially 'kills' them to their god. In other words, when Hengist is enslaved at a slave farm, he undergoes a ritual in which he is 'killed'. The effect of the ritual is that Orlanth is tricked into regarding Hengist as having died, meaning that Hengist can no longer contact Orlanth during the normal rituals, cannot access his runes for magical purposes, and so on. If asked through divination, Orlanth says that Hengist is dead. This is probably either Yanafali or Xaroni magic, a specialized form of Sever Spirit. Hengist can still be initiated into new cults, if he's permitted that option, so he's pushed into the cult of Danfive Xaron, a big part of whose function is to control problematic people like Sartarite slaves.

That's a good point. I agree. Making that sort of detail more explicit would help address the issue, especially if it were included in the myth. (As a side note, I said I'm laying the groundwork for a Gloranthan LARP. Having an actual marriage ceremony that PCs could enact at some point is the sort of detail that I would love to see developed.)

The longer I think about this particular myth, I think the issue is that it's not framed very clearly. Most Gloranthan myths establish a cultural norm or value for the people who tell it. Orlanth doing X mythically is a statement that what Orlanth did is proper. He is the lawgiver for the Heortling people, after all. But there's this unusual element to some of Orlanth's myths that involve him screwing up and fixing what he broke--the slaying of Yelm is the obvious example. That serves to establish a cultural norm that men who screw up correct their mistake. For players, the myths help set the cultural values that they're expected to model in the game (although Lord knows players are famous for doing the 'weird' thing that no one else in the game culture would actually do). But nothing in this myth as it's written frames Orlanth's actions as a mistake. At no point does he apologize to Ernalda for mistreating her. The last verse of the poem that he speaks continues to accuse her of "tricks" and "deceit". In fact, Ernalda's last words in the myth "I am weak. I need help. I am yours." continue the frame for their interactions that Orlanth establishes at the start. The myth is introduced as simply "an entertaining tale", not as a myth in which Orlanth screws up, learns a lesson, and makes right what he has broken. The only hint that the reader is actually supposed to read the myth from Ernalda's perspective is the line in the last paragraph that Orlanth "accepted his fate", (a frame that has a long history in the real world as signaling a misogynist notion that marriage is a bad thing--think of all those 50s jokes about wives as 'the ball and chain'). There's a statement that he learns his wife's "sweet secrets", but I don't think that that makes clear that he's seen the error of his ways. He doesn't, for example, beg Ernalda's forgiveness the way he apologizes to Yelm in the Underworld. The idea that Orlanth moves from a stormy, violent, misogynist view of love and marriage to an earthy, calm, feminist view of seeing his wife as his equal is great. And If Greg is trying to offer an alternative model for masculinity here, that's a wonderful thing. But the myth as it's framed for us doesn't give readers many sign-posts that you're supposed to see it as falling into the 'Orlanth screws up and fixes what he broke' category. If you don't already know that that's a key element of Orlanth's mythic arc, I don't think you're going to spot it here (and even if you do know that, I think you may miss it). If you're a teenage/early 20s guy (and let's be honest, a sizable chunk of all gamers fall into that category), I think this myth is going to do the exact opposite--it's going to affirm Orlanth's toxic masculinity as normative for PCs and players. The reason I think it's important to discuss this is that gaming (among many other facets of nerd culture) has always had a serious problem with toxic masculinity and undervaluing women's perspectives--think about the harsh pushback during the whole Gamergate incident and the death threats that Anita Sarkesian received for just pointing out the misogyny in video games. One of the things I love about Glorantha is that as it's evolved, it's done a much better job of trying to incorporate women's perspectives than most other gaming systems I know. But I think it still struggles to really present the feminine perspective as a truly viable alternative.To the best of my knowledge, there's never been a published scenario specifically written for an Ernaldan PC and built around the 'other way' of resolving the problem. (Even These Women Need Help is written from the male perspective.) The Ernalda and Uralda quests (and the CA quest, although it's not specifically for women) in KoDP are pretty much the only written-up heroquests that present the feminine perspective as a tool for problem-solving. The Peace-Weaving sequence in Eleven Lights does present the other way, but it's just one piece of a larger scenario. If Sartarites really see women as equal to men, there should be more scenarios to reflect that. (But here I'm getting into a whole different facet of the issue than the topic of this thread--I just wanted to show that I think the problem is wider than just one poorly-written myth.) So instead of offering a myth that only hints that the Ernaldan perspective is better, why not simply have the myth come right out and say that Orlanth's initial approach was wrong and Ernalda taught him a better way to think about love and sex? Why should the women's perspective be hidden away as a sly wink?

I've had NUMEROUS conversations with gamer women about sexism and rape culture in gaming. It's not that women can't handle it. It's that they shouldn't have to handle it unless they explicitly say they want to. Given that rape is an ever-present real-world issue that most women live with (in the form of having to actually plan out how to stay safe at parties and bars and heading home from work, etc), most women I know don't want it to be an issue that comes up in their gaming.

That is a really good suggestion. Ragnaglar is basically the god of uncontrollable sexual urges, so it would make sense that he was the one urging Orlanth to be aggressive. And it would offer an indication that Orlanth's behavior is problematic, not normative.

"nobody is claiming that the storm gods are "good guys". " Given that most PCs (the males at least) gravitate toward Storm Gods--Orlanth in all his incarnations, Urox, Humakt, maybe Odayla and Yinkin, I'm pretty sure a large segment of the player base sees Orlanth and his kin as the good guys. And the game has generally taken an Anti-Lunar stance, which positions the Red Goddess' main opponent, Orlanth, as the hero in the meta-story.

Yes. But we're 21st century people operating in a 21st century milieu. 21st century players, especially female players, may very well find this myth to be a real problem. Just because rape was a common occurrence in the ancient world doesn't mean it should get a pass in our fictional story-setting. There's nothing in this myth itself that identifies what Orlanth does to Ernalda to be a mistake that he grows past, which means that it's easy to read this myth as essentially championing Orlanth's behavior rather than undermining it. I'm very familiar with Glorantha (being playing in it since 1980 or so), including the whole 'Orlanth fixes his mistakes' thing and the idea that Ernalda has more control that it seems, and neither of those ideas emerged for me as I read through the myth a good dozen times. If I missed it, I'm pretty sure a whole lot of other people will miss it too. As I'm sure we're all aware, table-top gaming has a long history of not being very friendly to female players. Glorantha is, I think, a friendlier game world for women than a lot of the alternatives, but I know a couple of women who find the highly-gendered nature of Glorantha pretty uncomfortable, and a myth like this strikes me as likely to trigger female players who have experienced domestic violence or rape. I'm in the early stages of planning a large-scale Sartar LARP that will probably involve a fair number of female players, so I need to be thinking about how a myth like this is going to read to female players.

Am I the only one who finds the Wooing of Ernalda story (Glorantha Sourcebook, p. 115, but also in Heortling Mythology) incredibly creepy? Let's break this down. According to the myth, Orlanth goes to Ernalda and demands her earth from her. She agrees to a trade (earth for bullroarer), but when he goes back home, his brothers make fun of him. So he goes back to Ernalda and vehemently insults her for humiliating her (which she hasn't actually done). He threatens to attack her, so she calms him down by returning the bullroarer and having sex with him. He goes back to his brothers, who again mock him, so he goes back to Ernalda again "In a blind rage" and forces Ernalda to beg for mercy from him. Then he marries her. This looks an awful lot like domestic violence. The boyfriend gets mocked by his male friends for being gentle, so he demonstrates his physical power by attacking his girlfriend, who appeases him with sex and ultimately agrees to marry him because she's afraid to say no. His friends are taunting him into abusing his girlfriend, and he blames her for the fact that his friends are being dicks to him. This is literally exactly how toxic masculinity operates in the real world. I get that this is supposed to be a demonstration of how Earth calms Air. But it reads as a mythic justification for men engaging in violence against women.

So is battle rage an inherent part of the Horn quest?

Thanks to Soltakss, I found this paragraph in Wyrm's Footnotes 12, p. 9 "As he crossed the earth with great swaggering strides one day he encountered a most beautiful woman and became enamored of her. During those days of love and life she bore the Storm Bull a son who begat a race of half-man/half-beasts. Their father was called Minotaurs and their mother is a daughter of Uleria the Goddess of Love. This race, called Minotaur, inherited their grandfather's rage as a natural ability and are greatly feared for their battle fury." That doesn't give me a whole lot more to go on, but it's something. Thanks.

Thanks for that tip! I actually have most issues of Wyrm’s Footprints, but I rarely look at them these days. I’ll dig through them.

I’ve got a Uroxi PC who wants to do the Minotauros HQ. It’s mentioned in passingbin Storm Tribe, but there’s no detail whatsoever about it (other then that the quest prize is getting a pair of horns). Are there any other mentions of the quest anywhere or details about the myth?

Another good suggestion, and one that offers some good role-playing. Thanks!

That third party idea is a good one. It's exactly the sort of detail that might get left out of a myth that will create uncertainty for the PC about how to handle it. Thanks!

Yeah, those were all things I thought about. The bird was really just a toss-off bit of descriptive flavor that the player seized on. I put no thought into it at the time beyond 'what's an odd combination of animal traits I can put together?' This is one of the things I rather like about Glorantha. When players start taking the material and trying to add their own spin to it, it really pushes the GM to come up with new things.

One of the other players kept urging him to kill the bird and take an Animal Charm from it, but Veslmus' player thought that would be ungrateful. So I need to decide what consequences this extinct bird coming back might have. The Odaylans might wind up making a pact of some sort with it or something like that.

I'm working on a Chalana Arroy heroquest, and since this forum did a great job helping me work the kinks out of an Odalyan heroquest, I thought I'd see if people could help me with this one. Here's the set-up: I'm running the Red Cow campaign, and one PC is a Chalanan. They discovered a place in the Staglands that is conducive to healing magic (basically +3 to healing magic tests). So Eindred (the Chalanan) wants to establish a shrine to Chalana Arroy there. (He's working on a way to keep the shrine safe, so we don't need to deal with that problem). He's thinking about doing a heroquest to prove that this spot is the place where Chalana Arroy performed one of her feats, the Hundred Healing, which I think is a nice use of a heroquest to strength the connection between a place and a specific myth. One of the problems that I think Chalanan quests run into is finding a way to make healing and peacemaking interesting in game terms. Healing is largely abstracted as a roll on the Harmony rune, so we need to add things to the framework or else the healing roll seems boring and mechanical. So that's one of the things I'm trying to accomplish here. Here's what I've got so far in terms of a myth: The Hundred Healing During the Lesser Darkness, when the Sun was dead but Chaos had not yet entered the world, Chalana the Peacemaker traveled the world, seeking to bring healing and peace to a world rocked with violence and feuding. Once, she came upon a dying man. With her soothing hands, she tended his wounds and saved him from death. While he was still weak, he told her that his people, the Red Wolves, had a mortal enemy, the Green Bears, who hated them because they were jealous that the Red Wolves hunted in packs while the Green Bears had to hunt alone. The Green Bears agreed that they would work together just once to kill the Red Wolves, and they had found him and forced him to tell them where they could find the Red Wolf tula, so that they could slaughter all the Red Wolves. He was too weak to warn his people, and so he begged her to find them and warn them. Chalana agreed that it was good to protect people from unexpected violence, and so she said that she would. She followed his directions, although the way was not easy, and eventually she came to the Red Wolf tula. It was too late to warn them, because the Green Bears had already begun their attack. There were many who were dying. Chalana the Healer could not stand by and allow the injured to die. So she healed the wounded that she found. The Green Bears saw what she was doing and told her “You must stop healing the Red Wolves, because we want them to die. They have been our enemies for generations. If you do not stop healing them, we will kill you.” But Chalana the Calmer was unafraid and refused to stop her work. She said, “I do not heal them because your claim has no merit. I heal them because all life is precious and I cannot bear to see it end. Death roams the world and it will devour Life until there is none left if we do not do all we can to keep Life in the world. If you kill me, there will be no one left to stop Death when it comes from you.” And the Green Bear chieftain was ashamed of what he had said and lost his will to kill her. Soon the Red Wolves were strong enough to fight back, and they attacked the Green Bears. Because the Green Bears were unaccustomed to fighting as a pack, the Red Wolves began to turn the tide, and soon there were many Green Bears dying and the Red Wolves were mocking their enemies. But Chalana the Healer could not stand by and allow the injured to die. So she healed the wounded Green Bears that she found. The Red Wolf chieftain saw what she was doing and told her, “You must stop healing the Green Bears, because we want them to die. They have attacked us when we have done nothing against them. It is wrong to heal those who attacked us without provocation. If you do not stop healing them, we will kill you.” But Chalana the Calmer was unafraid and refused to stop her work. “I have come to heal all who need it, and I did not heal you because I wished for you to win this fight. I healed you because every death makes the Darkness around us deeper and stronger, and I have pledged to bring light into the Darkness. If you kill me, there will be no one left to heal you when you need it.” And the Red Wolf chieftain was ashamed of what he had said and lost his will to kill her. And so as the Green Bears and the Red Wolves fought, Chalana the Healer healed the wounded on both sides, until she had healed one hundred warriors and none had died. Finally the Green Bear chieftain said to her, “Every time we defeat one of the Red Wolves, you heal him so that he may continue fighting us. They outnumber us and we cannot win this fight.” And the Red Wolf chieftain said, “The Green Bears are much stronger than us. One of their warriors can fight three of ours. Every time we defeat one, you heal him so that he may continue fighting us. We cannot win this fight.” Chalana the Peacemaker said, “Then if neither of you can win this fight, why are you still fighting? If you cannot win and cannot lose, you waste your efforts. The wise leader should find a way to resolve this.” The two chieftains saw that there was no point in continuing the struggle, and so they asked her “How can we make peace? There has been enmity between us for generations?” And Chalana the Peacemaker showed them that there was no need to fight each other at all. So my myth tries to provide a framework of stations that aren't all just 'heal the person'. A couple of the stations are (heal the first guy, heal the Red Wolves, heal the Green Bears) but she also needs to resist two efforts to intimidate her. I think the last healing is more of an endurance test, to find the energy to continue amidst the violence. And then she has to make peace by showing them that they don't need to fight. What I'm struggling with is two-fold. 1) the myth feels more like a folk-tale than a Gloranthan myth. It doesn't have any of the strange myth-logic that we find in the myths in KoDP (other than wolves and bears fighting and having to peace-make, which I stole from Issaries the Conciliator--when I run it, they will be literal animals). I'd like to make sure that it has a distinctly Gloranthan feel to it, but I'm not coming up with very much. Any thoughts about how to make it a bit more Gloranthan in its flavor? A second thing I'm wrestling with is that it's very linear. It has a very Do Thing 1, then Do Thing 2 feeling to it. Obviously myths are linear narratives as told, but I'd like to work in the HQ principle that heroquests don't always follow linear order, sometimes have metaphorical rather than literal stations, and so on. But once the quester gets to the fight, I don't see any way to vary the sequence of events or make them metaphorical without things getting really bizarre and abstract. For example, one suggested curveball for heroquests is to have the stations out of order or have a station missing, and I can't see a way to do that. Since this group of players is a bit novice (the Chalanan is totally new to Glorantha), I don't want things to get totally bizarre, but I would like have a decent curveball to offer them. Any ideas?

So I finally got to run this Heroquest last night. The PC, Veslmus, performed a ritual battle which ended with him 'being killed', after which they conducted him and the chieftain he was trying to heal to a sacred cave and 'buried' them. As they were performing the ritual, a cold wind blew out of the cave, and the Ty Kora Tek priestess declared that the wind of the Underworld was blowing and would keep blowing until the quest was completed. That meant that dead things could come back. That detail meant that while Veslmus was on the quest, the other PCs had things to keep them busy, including a sacred Lunar bearskin that reanimated and tried to regrow its body, and an attack by two Dancers of Darkness hoping to steal the power coming out from the cave. The quest itself ran mostly as written. Veslmus crossed the Plains of Dust without forgetting his humanity (if he had, he would have turned into a bear for the duration of the quest). He paid Jeset to ferry him across the Styx. He rescued Hedgehog from a skeletal fox-thing and learned the words to say to the Judge of the Dead to get a chance to prove he wasn't dead. The Dead Earth Witch captured him and dragged him back to her stead. He found the Dead Ember and escaped her net, and tried to climb out of the stead through the smoke hole. Here there was a nice digression. The stead was festooned with all sorts of dead animals, including some that no longer exist in Glorantha. He decided to make off with a strange bird with a long tail, and decided that while he was climbing he tucked the ember into his armpit along with the bird. The result was that the bird came back to life and helped him escape from the Dead Earth Witch by flying him out through the smoke hole. He released the bird. (After he returned, he discovered that this bird was beginning to populate his clan's tula.) He found that path to Haran Vor, and then had to confront all the prey animals that were trying to convince him that he was now prey too. Veslmus has a Fox Charm, so it was the Fox that confronted him. He used his "Eat Anything" ability to swallow it whole and intimidate the other animals into fleeing. Then he hit the Heroquest surprise. Krarsht's mouth appeared and tried to swallow him. He avoided that and fought off a krarshtkid. When he got to Haran Vor, he wanted to see if he could find his ancestors' banquet table. The PCs who stayed behind had decided that they wanted to conduct a sacrifice to their ancestors to make sure their ancestors were feasting well, and that gave him a bonus to finding the ancestors. They gave him a blessing and a prophecy that opportunities for great deeds and a chance at a great marriage were coming (that's setting things up for the Colymar Campaign). Then he met with the Judge of the Dead and said the words Hedgehog had taught him. To prove he wasn't dead, he showed that he could still dream. That woke him up back in the Mundane world. The chieftain was mostly healed, but Veslmus discovered that he had become a woman, having birthed someone else back to life. The player took that in good stride, although he asked that he get a chance to change his sex back again eventually. So I'll have to see what I can come up with for that. He decided to spend a HP to acquire the Dead Ember as an Ability. He said "what can I do with this?" and I said "We'll have to see." Thanks again for all the helpful advice! When I write gaming stuff, I often find it helpful to just have people to bounce ideas off, so this thread was great. Actually, I'm going to post another thread about Heroquesting, for a Chalanan heroquest I'm not satisfied with.

Orlanth steals the Sandals of Darkness as a courtship gift for Ernalda, so in my Glorantha, a pair of slippers or sandals is a traditional courtship gift. (And in fact, in early Germanic culture, slippers were given during the engagement ceremony, which was actually the binding moment of the marriage).

Does that not essentially mean that Mallia is, in origin at least, a Dehori?

I don't think that breathing would be related to fire, at least in Heortling culture, since breathing is Air and fire is, well, Fire. But I like the drumming option. The nice thing about that last station is that there can easily be multiple ways to prove that one is alive.

If we're talking about heroquests in film, Moana is almost explicitly a heroquest. Grandmother Tala issues a call to adventure and shows Moana the secret cave (crossing into the hero plane) where she discovers a lost truth, that her people were once seafarers. She sails the ocean and finds Maui, but Maui refuses to return Ta Fiti's stolen heart. They have to fight off the Kakamora and she realizes that Maui needs to recover his fish-hook, which requires them to defeat Tamatao in the Realm of Monsters (the Underworld?). Maui then teaches her the secret of sea-faring. Together they sail to confront Ta Fiti, and Moana realizes the secret that Ta Fiti is the benevolent Te Ka without her heart. Restoring the stolen heart heals Te Ka, who in turn heals the oceans of the blight that has poisoned them. Moana returns, establishing herself as chieftain, sea-farer, and culture hero. It couldn't have been any more a heroquest if it had been written by someone at Chaosium. The crossing over point is obvious and the stations are clearly defined. It seems likely that the fight with Tamatao is the Heroquest Challenge (it's because of that success that Moana acquires the ability to sea-fare, although not directly from Tamatao). One might imagine that the Kakamora are clan enemies of the Motonui people, pulled into the quest by Moana's involvement. And it's a really nice example of a women's quest, where the secret is the villain is not violently defeated but rather restored to benevolence (Ernalda's Other Way principle).

While we're talking about this, are the Goodhavens part of the Cinsina or the Cubrea? In Coming Storm, p. 69, it says "The Goodhaven clan of the Culbrea has grown rich from the trade that passes through their lands between Jonstown and Boldhome." That seems to mean that they are currently Culbrea. Most of the other references to the Goodhavens treat them as former Culbrea and current Cinsina. On p. 92 it says "The Goodhaven clan of the Cinsina has grown rich from the trade that passes through their lands between Jonstown and Boldhome." Note that the two sentences are identical except for which tribe they are in. On page 11, the Goodhavens are described as being one of the "other old Culbrea clans", and on p. 95 some of the Two-Pines consider them turncoats. But the odd thing is that the Goodhavens are located to the west of Dwarf Ridge, completely isolated from all the other Culbrea clans. To get from the Culbrea lands to the Goodhavens, you would have to go through the Frithan tula or over Dwarf Ridge. How would they have joined the Culbrea if they're geographically separated from them like that? Is the reference on p. 69 a typo and I'm just missing something about the geography that would make the Goodhavens being part of the Culbrea logical?