Bohemond

I'm thinking about this because I'm working on making sure that female players in my eventual Sartar LARP campaign have quests that they can do that are as interesting as the one the male PCs get. But a lot of Ernalda's myths as published as things like "There was a problem. Ernalda taught the people how to do X. And that solved the problem." So, Ernalda saves Esrola by teaching people to do the Flax Dance, Goose Dance, and Sacrifice Dance. That's not a very dynamic myth to work with, compared to something like Orlanth Forms the Storm Tribe. It is -different- from Orlanth's quests, but teaching people isn't dramatically that interesting, so it's harder to figure out a way to make that fun for a PC to have to do. Not impossible, but harder. Its also perhaps a bit dramatically less interesting to have a character who gets other people to do things for her than just confronting a problem directly.

I was thinking about Ernalda myths today and realized something that's bugged me about the way Ernalda has been treated since Hero Wars. Orlanth is (and has always been presented as) a god who learns and grows. He kills the Emperor and later realizes that was a bad idea, so he goes and fixes it. He doesn't know what to do, so he asks Ernalda and tells him. He gets low-key manipulated by Ernalda periodically (she gets him to form the Storm Tribe, for example). So his stories show him changing and becoming wiser over time. In contrast, Ernalda doesn't really seem to change and grow. She's just always wise. She accomplishes things, but never learns anything because she already knows it. So her myths are kinda boring. She never gets any character development. It's an example of the unrealistic expectations men often have about women. She doesn't offer any sort of model for women who are imperfect in any way. So she's sort of the grown-up in a relationship with a kind of Storm Tribe bro that she needs to drag into maturity. If Orlanth and Ernalda are equals, shouldn't he occasionally be playing the role of guide and teacher for her? Shouldn't she have problems she needs to puzzle out?

Whenever I think about Glorantha, I try to avoid anything scientific. So I don't think elves 'gain metabolic energy from sunlight'. I think it's probably something more spiritual, like it allows them to regenerate their MPs (in RQ terms) or something like that.

So to explain where the Undead Aldryami question comes from, my PCs decided that they could weaken Delecti by killing Horalin, the corrupted dryad who is the source of the Blackthorn trees that Delecti uses to expand the Marsh. They put a lot of effort into this---they did a quest to get the ability to cleanse chaos from things, forced Polgo Hoarfoot into helping them find the EWF ruins in the Marsh, cleansed Horalin and then killed her (because they knew that since they couldn't move her, Delecti could just corrupt her again). As I considered Delecti's response, I hit on the idea of him reviving her as undead. She won't be able to provide any more Blackthorn rods for him since she and her tree are dead now, but I figured it was too macabre an idea to pass up. Not sure how they're gonna find out what he's done, but at some point, they probably will

So no one's ever managed to interact with the Wyter?

These all grew out of a gaming session, so they're not actually totally random, but they look like it. 1) Can the Aldryami be brought back as the Undead? 2) How do dryads reproduce? Will the seeds of their tree produce a dryad or is something more required? 3) Anyone have any idea what the wyter of the Jonstown Library is?

I thank you heartily for a cogent explanation and the detailed exegesis of the belts. I'm still kinda puzzled why he commissioned a bunch of belts as the repository of this information in a highly symbolic way when a written text would be so much clearer. But at least I've got something to work with. But isn't this sort of Choose Your Own Adventure approach to Heroquesting very God Learner-y?

That is indeed me. You're welcome. Feel free to use anything there that might help you with your campaign.

My campaign is getting close to 1621 (Spoilers ahead!) so I need to figure out something about the campaign that absolutely baffles me every time I read through it--the stuff around Minaryth's Belts. I have a LOT of questions: 1) What are these belts? Where did they come from? Why does the LM cult happen to have a series of apparently unrelated belts that act as a roadmap to the never-before performed quest that will save Sartar? Why does Minaryth think they are all about the same quest? I mean, if I grab 7 random articles of clothing (or even books), I wouldn't expect them to form a hero quest, so why is Minaryth so sure these belts have any connection at all? Or did Minaryth have these belts woven just to provide a handy portable copy of the info he's found, and if so, why did he have them made into belts instead of just writing them down on parchment? 2) If Minaryth has these belts, why does he need to send the PCs to the Orlmarth tula and Boldhome to examine the imagers there? What additional information do those two scenes provide that's not in the belts? 3) 11L, p. 114 says that the the Picture Door has details from the 5th belt. Is that a typo for the 4th belt? Because the 5th belt doesn't match the description Minaryth gives just 2 paragraphs later or his explanation of the 5th belt on page 116. 4) And what the hell do all the symbols on the belts actually mean? If I give these images to my PCs, which seems to be the point of having them, I will get minutely cross-examined by the PCs who will want Minaryth to explain, in detail, everything he sees in those symbols. If I don't give the PCs these images, what's the point of having the belts at all? Why not just have Minaryth say "here's the stuff I've figured out"? Bands 1, 2, and 6 don't make any obvious sense at all.

Looking at the Quest of the Red Goddess, something struck me. The goddess isn't just doing great deeds here--she seems to be performing a heroquest. So is she following some earlier mythic sequence?

Thanks! That really helpful. So you don't think they try to quest the stories of the Seven Mothers? Does the fact that the 7M are Immortals but not exactly gods mean that their stories aren't questable? On the one hand, that makes a bit of sense, but on the other hand, we know that people quest events from the lives of heroes as well as gods.

I ran a Sartar High Council one-shot a few months ago. Here are a couple pics from that. The duck shaman is my favorite.

I am slowly gearing up to run a Glorantha LARP and one of the things I need to wrestle with is Lunar heroquests. So what do we actually know about Lunar heroquests, apart from the fact that the Lunars are really good at it? I mean, do we know any of the myths they quest? Do they quest incidents in the lives of the Seven Mothers, for example? Or do they mostly do heroquests from the cultures they've conquered, repurposing those stories like the God Learners did? I want to have at least a couple quests available for Lunar PCs.

A bit off topic, but evidence suggests that the mortality rate among Spartan 'initiates' was quite high. Although often presented as a coming of age ritual, the whipping at the Altar of Artemis was something boys underwent every year between age 7-8 and 20. Plutarch witnessed multiple boys dying during the ritual, and since Spartan boys were underfed and the weak ones were brutalized regularly, it's likely that the ritual was part of a strategy of culling the weak boys out. It's one of the reasons the number of Spartiate citizens declined steadily across the polis' existence. I doubt that most Gloranthan initiation rituals are quite that brutal (although perhaps among Maran Gor worshippers they might be).

I just bought this but haven't had a chance to read it yet. I'm definitely excited about the idea.

I'm very well aware of what pre-modern mortality rates were--I'm a professional medieval historian. While I don't study life expectancy directly, I do study medieval crime and violence, so this isn't totally outside my wheelhouse. If we start with the baseline of the ancient world, when we add in the various magical factors of Glorantha, do the pro-life factors (healing magic, crop fertility magic, etc) so decidedly outweigh the pro-death factors (killing magics like Sever Spirit, Malia's disease spirits, Chaos in general) that the overall life expectancy and survival rates rise dramatically compared to the real world? If the RW life expectancy at birth was around 30, do the overall balance of pro-life vs pro-death forces raise that life expectancy by 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? Are the people of Glorantha vastly better off than the people of the Roman Empire? What impact do the occasional magical catastrophes like the Dragonkill War, which have no obvious parallel in the RW, do to that calculation? My sense is that while Gloranthans are better off than the people of Ancient Rome, they don't enjoy anything like a modern life expectancy. I think the average life expectancy at birth is probably in around 40, not around 70. But again, YGMV from mine. If you want Sartarites with modern life expectancies, that's great. I get why someone might want to ignore the rather appalling mortality rates of the ancient and medieval world. It just doesn't quite work for me.

But for every priestess with healing magic, there's a warrior with killing magic to make their weapons more deadly. There is magic to fight disease, but there are also Chaos cultists who actively spread it, and wyters who get offended and withdraw their protection. There is fertility magic to encourage crops to grow, but there are trolls with their insatiable hunger. So while the details might shift a little bit, I don't think we should look at the survival rates in Glorantha as being drastically different than they were in the ancient world. And given that I'm actively positing cults that allow homosexual couples to reproduce, I don't think I'm being biologically determinist.

I feel like saying that Ernalda has the same cool things makes them less interesting and sort of collapses the differences between them. Canonically, she's not shown reciting poetry, whereas Orlanth produced short verses a lot, especially in the earlier phases of Glorantha's evolution. Orlanth's Six Virtues are Courage, Wisdom, Justice, Generosity, Honor, and Piety. (I thought Hospitality was in there, but I just looked up the list and it's not. Hmmm...) Wisdom and Generosity are as appropriate for Ernalda as Orlanth, and maybe Piety as well, although I don't really know why the gods need piety. But Courage is a martial virtue, so I think whatever Ernalda has would express bravery in a very different way, like Steadfastness. Ernalda doesn't seem concerned with Honor to anything like the degree Orlanth is--the sort of thing that gets men angry when it's affronted and makes them willing to fight over it. What is the feminine equivalent of that--what idea gets women willing to compete because some deep principle is involved?

One thing I've wrestled with in terms of making women's stuff dynamic and interesting for players is the fact that Orlanth has lots of 'cool bits'. For example, he's associated with poetry (and I wrote a myth about how Orlanth Stole the Ale of Poetry from the Bright Emperor). One can do a variety of neat things with the idea of Orlanthi poetry--like Bronze Age rap battles and so on. Orlanth has his Six Virtues--Hospitality gives us a chance to do the Greeting Ritual. Generosity allows things like Beowulf-style ring giving. But Ernalda doesn't seem to have a lot of comparable things to that--things that would make players say "wow, that's neat! I wanna be able to do that!" For Ernalda to be really equal in terms of playability, it seems to me that Ernalda needs similar cool bits. She doesn't, for example, have a comparable list of Virtues and practices connected to them. In other words, stuff that adds to 'on-stage' play and makes an Ernaldan player feel like she's in a Norse saga or something comparable. So what cool bits does Ernalda have? Any thoughts?

I LOVE it when stuff like that happens, when players really get the mythic side of things and integrate it into their play!

Does Sartarite society even have much information about Genert? Are there any male Earth-rune cults other than Nandan in Sartar? I don't know of one. And I'm not trying to suggest that all of Glorantha thinks this way. It's what makes sense to me in terms of how -Sartarites- specifically think. Nearly all the major fertile divine couples that actively figure in Heortling mythology seems to be Air rune/Earth rune pairs. Or a Water rune with either Air or Earth. Is there a fertile divine pair who are both Air rune?

In any society in which fertility (crops, livestock, children) is a primary concern, heteronormativity has to be the standard. Given high rates of infant mortality, high rates of death during childbirth, high rates of violent death, and high rates of death from disease, most people have no choice except to procreate, and society needs to mandate procreation. If the vast majority of people aren't reproducing, there's a good chance the community will either die out or be overwhelmed by their enemies. The ancient Greeks, who were probably the most 'gay-friendly' (to use an anachronistic term) society in human history, still expected all men to get married and procreate. Had I been born back then, I fully accept that I would have been considered a freak and I would have had to marry a woman against my inclination. I'm a gay man, but I'm also an historian, and I need my fantasy cultures to make sense to me sociologically, economically, and so on. It's another reason I hate Generic Fantasy Europe. And I'm not saying that everyone's Glorantha has to work this way. It's what makes sense -for my Glorantha-. Edit: Also, I'm way more interested in obstacles as story-telling aids than letting everything run smoothly. A story where true love gets what it wants without any difficulty is a story people won't tell for generations.

Both terms are used. They are two different ways to conceive of what is essentially the same thing, a series of marriages with one spouse at a time but which result in a sequence of spouses over a lifetime.

Yes, Nandan is the god of men with Earth rune souls. Whereas most men have Air rune souls, a small number will have Earth rune souls and will therefore be drawn to traditionally feminine roles, just as Vingans are women who have Air rune souls and are drawn to traditionally masculine roles. We know that Nandani are men who give birth. So as I see it, this is one way that homosexual men can establish a marriage. And if both men have Air rune souls, one must quest to change his soul. I agree--Nandani might be the equivalent of a trans woman today, but they can also be masculine-presenting but still have a feminine soul. I don't think Sartarite concepts of gender and sex directly map onto our concepts. I don't see Sartarites as polygamous, although I'm pretty sure that powerful Esrolian woman are polyandrous. Rather I think they are serial polygamous--one spouse at a time but divorce readily available so they can have several spouses over a lifetime.

And I think it's said somewhere that while women usually marry out of their birth clan, there are 'Esrolian marriages', where a woman who is higher status or more wealthy than her husband remains in her clan and he married out of his birth clan.