Bohemond

This is what I was wondering. Perhaps they sent an expedition to Teshnos to build ships and sail them back to Corflu?

The first known photo of a Hound of Tindalos.

Any word about the long-rumored Prax Pak?

Another complication--my Chalanan cannot kill people. But the 3NS ritual requires animal sacrifice, and of course the battle of Dangerford requires the new cult to use its magic to kill. Any thoughts about how to handle that? Does the fact that the Chalanan PC is bound to gods with violent magic give him an odd exception to CA's ban on violence? Does it change the magic they get at the battle, like giving them a healing rain of fire? I'm sure that the PCs will have thoughts about this, but I'm curious what everyone thinks

So we're playing Eleven Lights (spoiler alert) and my PCs have gotten through the Three New Stars quest. And I've got a few questions. Once the PCs create the cult of the 3NS, it says (p.143) they can work magic through the 3NS. Does that only apply to Orlanth's magic? Or can they work magic that would be unique to the 3NS as individual deities. For example, my PCs brought back Oonil the Skilful. Oonil has the Harmony rune, which Oonil presumably uses to work trade and craft magics. Does this mean that my Ernaldan and my Chalanan can now use their Harmony runes to work trade and craft magic? Or does Oonil only allow the PCs to work Orlanth's Mastery magic, for example, through their Harmony runes? Or does this only allow the one Orlanthi PC to work his magic? Similarly, they brought back Tanian, who presumably has the Water rune, since he's a god of fiery rain. Can my Helerite now use his Water rune to conjure a rain of fire?

Yes--my players have made a couple half-hearted attempts to find out where it might be. The downside here is that if they succeed, it could send the campaign seriously out of canon (which is not automatically a bad thing, but it does require rethinking a lot of later events).

But if multiple clans traditionally marry amongst themselves using female exogamy, what will happen within a few generations is that the clans are all woven together. I'm in Bloodline A. My sister marries out of the Bluerock Clan into the Greenrock clan. A generation later, her Greenrock daughter marries into Bloodline B of the Bluerocks. That means that My grandson is now a member of Bloodline B but has ties to me through his mother. So Bloodline A and Bloodline B are now cousins. Over time the Bloodlines are going to be pretty tight, with everyone's aunt being someone else's cousins.

Another way to read plowing is not as the violent violation of the earth but as a response to the earth goddess 'opening her legs' to receive the male phallus/plow. So one could posit a ritual in which the priest(ess) asks the earth to receive the plow and the goddess responds by blessing the ritual. Also, there may be a plowing ritual in which the plower apologizes for breaking the earth open (the way Orlanthi men apologize for having to cut down Esrola in Earth Season). So it's all in how a particular clan frames the action. The former feels more Peace clan to me, while perhaps a Balanced clan does the latter.

Yeah, I ran across that too, although I can't remember where. In my version of the Orlmarth campaign, which started several years before 1618 to help players learn the game world, Leika became queen and undertook a raid into Snakepipe Hollow, but in her absence the Lunars arranged for the Armring of Friendship to be stolen. When Leika returned, she was challenged to display the Armring and had to admit that she couldn't. The tribal Lawspeaker then reluctantly ruled that by failing to safeguard part of the tribal regalia, she had harmed the tribe and was no longer qualified to be queen. That gave Kangharl the opening he needed to declare that he would be king instead. So that was my attempt to make a coherent narrative of the various details about Leika and Kangharl.

From Orlanth's POV, the Middle Air is his property and Rufelza is claiming it as hers. So imagine that you have your house--it's bought and paid for and legally yours (the Great Compromise)-- and one day some woman shows up and just moves her stuff in and says that the house is actually hers. She manages to defeat you in a fist fight (the battle of Castle Blue) and then her buddies (the Lunar Empire) just move into your whole neighborhood and start forcing your friends to stop talking to you (the banning of the worship of Orlanth), and then she locks you in your bedroom and tries to starve you to death (the Chaining of Orlanth). Oh, and she's a big-time drug dealer (Chaos) whose customers are threatening to trash your house and start it on fire. Are you ever going to agree that she can live in your house and that legally you and she will share it and you'll be friends? Or are you going to go to court to prove the house is actually yours and tell her to get the fuck out?

I was looking specifically at the Sartarites, not Heortlings in general. The Sartarites lost touch with some deities when they migrated (at least in KoDP and Six Ages, that's a risk of migration), and it makes sense that the gods of more urbanized activities would have been much more hard for them to maintain relationships with. By the time Sartar came, city life was out of living memory for them (barring the occasional supernaturally long-lived migrant). Why continue to worship a god (or an aspect of a god) who doesn't provide a service your culture needs? The Roman were incredibly conservatives about such things and continued performing rituals they no longer understood, but the Sartarites are more change-prone, and jettisoning rituals and cult relationships they don't have a use for would make sense for them.

Part of Sartar's work was to bring the (soon to be) Sartarites together by getting them to build cities. The strategy he chose is pretty odd. He got tribes to join into confederations, with each confederation maintaining a city. Then they had to figure out how to govern these weird communities that cut across clan and tribal boundaries, and they did it by creating a town ring, which was a new thing adapted from an old thing. He had to recruit wyters for the towns (Hauberk Jon, Wilm, and Swen) because the Sartarites had no deities who could naturally play that function for them. The residents of these new communities don't quite fit into the normal clan and tribal communities--they're not really members of any of the clans or tribes--members of those tribes don't stay with kinsmen in the town, but instead stay at tribal halls maintained for them. KoDP (which I realize isn't canonical) presents the creation of the town as something new and weird and requiring a willingness to do something new. To me, all of that looks like improvisation Sartar is doing. He's adapting and modifying existing concepts and practices because there's nothing there that directly corresponds to what he needs to make this new thing. The best the Sartarites have before him is tribal forts, which seem to be much simpler things than towns. Sartar's a Larnsting, so he's good at changing things to make new things.

Rather than seeing this as part of Gustbran's work (which to me feels like a stretch, since mining and masonry aren't really tasks that require fire except incidentally to see), I think it's more likely that the Sartarites simply don't have any gods who do this. Not every Glorantha society has a deity for every possible function, and as a result they are much better at some things than other things. Sartarites are pretty good at war and pretty good at cattle-raising, but kinda crappy at a lot of the things required for cities in part because they have gods for war and cattle-tending, but not for city-making. Sartar had to teach them even the concept of the city and it was such a stretch that it didn't really work very well. These are a people slowly making the transition to urban life, and in many ways they're not really ready for it yet.

Thank you. The issues in this thread are one of my top interests in Glorantha these days, so I'm glad to see this get bumped back to the front of the line. And I had missed this detail. I think another facet of Compassion for Ernalda is Generosity--she gives freely of her bounty because nurtures her children. Hospitality would also come in here--compassion for travelers and strangers. As mistress of the stead, these would be extremely important virtues. I think your analysis of this is spot-on, especially that point about it creating a blind spot. Now I'm trying to think of a myth where Ernalda learns that sometimes violence is the correct option. The point I made months ago (right at the top of the thread) about Ernalda not getting a chance to learn and grow ties in very nicely here. Among other things, I think that one of Ernalda's lessons during her time at the court of the Bright Emperor is that sometimes compassion and harmony can't get you out a bad situation. Sometimes you need Orlanth to kill the Emperor. If a broken leg sets badly, sometimes you have to break it again to allow Harmony to do its work. I think Filial Piety may also be the place where supporting women and avenging the wrongs done to them comes in. Babeester Gor is Ernalda's Filial Piety made manifest and active when the worst case situation occurs. I feel like the source misses the point here. Harmony is one of Ernalda's runes, so saying that Harmony is one of her virtues kinda feels like cheating. It's like saying that one of Orlanth's virtues is Mastery. Well, yes, but what does that mean? I think rather than Harmony, the appropriate virtue is Community--Ernalda is the goddess who binds communities together--families and clans. In a sense, she's the wyter of the family, the thing that makes a family a unit rather than just a collection of individuals. She is also the wyter of the marriage--the thing that binds a husband and wife together (or an Earth rune soul with an Air, Fire, Water, or Darkness rune soul). This is why adultery is so offensive to Ernalda--it's a direct slap in the face to the 'third member' of the marriage.

I'm not very good at accents, so I generally don't do them very much. But my newtlings sound kind of like Winston Churchill. For some reason, my players LOVE this. They have actively begged me to have them run into newtlings so I'll have to do 'the Newtling Voice'.

The cult write-up in Sartar Companion describes BGs as "seek[ing] murderous vengeance...hard, cold, and dangerous women intent upon the sacred duty of revenge" who "must never love, make love...or even fake affection with anything but their goddess" and who are "cut off from society". In my opinion that's unplayable as a PC, and it feels very much like a misogynist stereotype of feminine anger. I had to re-write the cult write-up to make it less extreme.

* Babeester Gori are not psychotic man-hating lesbians. Some of them may be, but many are simply warriors. * Foundchild is a shamanistic cult, just like Waha and Eiritha. Its survival skills are secondary to Waha and Eiritha's, but still very important for surviving in the wastes. Similarly, Helpwoman is somewhat more prominent as well. * Praxian men's names don't all use 'Waha'. * Morokanths are omnivores. Praxian society views them as people but not humans, while gern are human but not people. * Kallyr Starbrow might manage to become Prince of Sartar--still haven't had to make up my mind about that. * Sartarites recognize three sexes: male, female, and Helerite. Sexless, intersex and hermaphrodite people freak them out and seem Chaotic. Helerites are sex-fluid, but not genderfluid (they present as either male or female as feels right to them, but abide by the male/female dichotomy). * Dara Happa is misogynistic, but not quite as oppressive toward women. Yelornans are a thing, although most Dara Happens dislike them. * Sartarite cities are mostly hill forts, not Minoan/Mycenaean citadels.

I don't know that I'm actually trying to persuade anyone of this. I just find it...amusing. Kero Fin is the most obviously phallic deity in Glorantha that I can think of. I mean, 8 miles of stone dick is really hard to miss, and yet somehow no one's noticed this before. And you're right that it doesn't seem to explain anything we already know. I'm more spitballing an idea here and see what emerges from it. That's how I do a lot of my best thinking. Don't apologize. These kinds of conversations need to happen in the gaming world, which is often a bastion of sexist assumptions simply because no one ever points them out. Glorantha is an amazing setting for thinking about issues around sex and gender--it somehow manages to be both profoundly about fertility and gender and yet has room for a lot of really different takes on sex and gender. It's a good reminder that there are a lot of different ways to think about these issues than the way contemporary Western culture does.

Sometimes a giant stone dick sticking up for miles into the air is just a mountain? I'm a bit skeptical, especially given the rather profoundly gendered and fertility-driven nature of Glorantha.

Wait, so Kero Fin pegged Umath and Orlanth was born. So which of them actually had the baby?....

Something unusual just occurred to me. In Smoldering Ruin, Kero Fin is described as "rising higher" to meet Umath. That rather curiously inverts what is usually described as the gender dynamic of Earth and Sky--Air lies upon Earth and rains down on her. But here, Kero Fin is literally penetrating Umath in their copulation. She's an enormous penis thrusting up from the earth into the air. This suggests that maybe Kero Fin has a masculine side to her.

Any chance we'll see a PraxPack some day soon?

Dear God! The wyter of the Library is a duck?! I think Illumination is the way to answer that question.

(Cutting out a lot of smart points...) I think you've hit the nail on the head. A lot of Gloranthan myths fall into this pattern simply because it's the patterns we have for telling mythic stories, and this stuff shapes our thought processes so deeply it's hard to see around it when we want to come up with myths. One reason I like Moana so much is it's basically a heroquest with a female protagonist and a female 'villain' who needs to be defeated not through force but through a recognition of the harm that's been done to her. To me, that strikes me as a very Ernaldan story. I just need to figure out who it's told about.

(I'm kinda thinking out loud here--trying to figure out why it's so much harder to make these myths into something interesting to game with. I don't really have an argument I'm making so much as just trying to make sense of the problem.) That myth presents the dances as something Ernalda either knows or invents--they're central to her worship. This is what I mean about the problem of Ernalda's myths. Orlanth's myths involve him going off and learning what he needs in order to do something. Ernalda's just involve her intrinsic knowledge or essence, which is something that is nearly impossible to dramatize in a LARPing situation. If we say that the deeper story is her learning how to do those dances, we've just sort of pushed the problem down a level--we need myths about her learning those dances, which renders the myth of saving Esrola a sort of meta-quest--a quest you can't do until you do other quests. Western culture has a strong tendency to present women as a sort of 'home base' for men, from which men go out and have adventures, and then they return home to their woman. Think about all the songs in which a man declares a woman to be his home, or where the man sings about 'moving on' or so on. The woman never has to learn to be a man's home--she just is. And I think that's a big part of the problem with how the stories of Ernalda have been framed. She's Orlanth's home base and the myths give almost no consideration to what the woman's challenges in serving as a home base are. Maybe it all starts with the Odyssey--Penelope is the home base to which Odyssey is trying to get back, and she's just there faithfully waiting for him. Her challenge--keeping those damn suitors from marrying her--doesn't really work for Ernalda, since she's presented as simply the most powerful goddess around. Wouldn't she just tell unwanted suitors to piss off? Greek myth does present a woman leaving home--Helen of Troy--but with the exception of one of Sappho's poems, virtually all of Greek literature presents what Helen did as a terrible thing done by a terrible woman. So a big piece of the problem here is that Western culture simply doesn't give us the mythic building blocks to tell these stories about women, and as the framework for Gloranthan myth got laid out, it doesn't leave a lot of room for Ernalda to develop. As @dumuzid has pointed out, most of the myths we have are from stages 3-5 of her life (and really mostly stages 4-5). Ernalda's chance to grow is in the Green Age, when there aren't a lot of options for conflict because Death and Chaos haven't entered the world yet. That seems to leave us with stories in which Ernalda encounters a problem and just has to puzzle it out because the world is so young no one knows anything yet. And the Green Age is framed as being incredibly hard and dangerous to quest to because its formlessness makes it hard for humans to wrap their heads around. Again, sorry that this is sort of a jumble of thoughts instead of a clear point to make.