Bohemond

The way I think about marriage in Sartar is that it's driven by fertility concerns. Fertility is made likely by having the right sort of rune-souls. So Air runes marry Earth or Water runes, but never Sky or Air runes. Earth runes marry Air, Sky, or Water runes, but not Earth runes. What this means is that two men or two women cannot procreate if they both have the same rune-soul, but can if they have different rune-souls. So if two women want to marry, one of them needs to be a Vingan or a Helerite and might therefore have to do a quest to change their soul. Similarly, two Air rune men cannot marry, unless one of them becomes a Nandani. The Vingan acquires the ability to 'father' children, and the Nandani acquires the ability to bear them. So for me, Sartarite marriage and fertility isn''t about the sex of the body, it's about the gender of the soul. I'm a gay man, and historically, homosexual couples have usually had to find ways to work around the constraints of their society, repurposing different practices. For example, prior to the Windsor decision legalizing gay marriage in the US, one strategy that lesbian and gay couples sometimes used to simulate marriage was adoption--one partner adopted the other. So for me, I don't want a Sartarite society in which gay marriage is just like modern American marriage--I want my Sartar to feel like a very different culture. I prefer the idea that homosexual couples have to use a work-around, because it feels much more like what a homosexual couple might have had to do in the ancient world. But obviously, other LGBT gamers may want a Sartar in which LGBT love is totally normal and conventional, since it still isn't fully that way in the modern world. Sometimes we game to escape the shit we have to put up with in real life. (Which is why I'm always leery of forcing players to deal with 'grim' content in gaming. Sure, sexual assault was part of the ancient world, but it's still part of the modern world with distressing frequency, so it needs to be handled delicately if it all in gaming.)

That's a great idea for a scenario (I can totally see using that in one of my campaigns). We need published scenarios like this that can offer models for how to make women-centric stories as interesting, complex, and cool as the traditional male-violence stories we like playing.

I'm glad you liked what I said. These are things I've cared about for decades--I was raised pretty solidly to be a feminist, so I'm probably a bit more attuned to these issues in games than many male players. Female table-top players seem to generally take one of two broad approaches to fantasy gaming. 1) I want to do all the cool male stuff, but my character is female. 2) My character is female, and I want her to do cool women's things. The first type is essentially seeking equality with men by saying that women get to do the cool things male heroes do. They get to be the violent heroine of a story that is similar to traditional male-centric adventure. The second type is seeking equality with men by saying that women may do different things than men do, but those things are just as cool. They get to be the heroine of a new kind of story (perhaps one about child-bearing and motherhood, or about overcoming evil by addressing the villain's needs and bring him back into the community.) In other words, some women want to be Vinga and some women want to be Ernalda. Both approaches are valid for women players, and I've had female players who took both approaches. The problem is that the first type (the Vingans) are fairly easy to address--just write scenarios that allow the female players to do the violent ass-kicking. The second type, however, is harder to write for because we have fewer story-telling models to draw off of, and a long scenario about weaving a tapestry that is also a metaphor for bringing a community together is, on the surface, less 'cool' than ass-kicking, because we don't have a lot of stories that tell us how cool it is to weave a community together. Moana offers us one model for a scenario that isn't about victory through violent ass-kicking. But we need more. One interesting twist on your young boy wanders into female rites might be that he acquires an Earth-rune soul, which might cause Nandan (the god of men who worship Ernalda) to claim him.

Polyangry is already a pretty widespread thing in this world.

I agree that some of the nudity is very 'appropriate' in terms of its style. Some of it definitely has a nice Minoan style to it. But for some inexplicable reason, the few times that a more Graeco-Roman style has been used, it's included female nudes, but not male nudes, which are far more prevalent historically.

Another thing that's always bugged me a bit as a gay man is the rather sexist nature of art for Glorantha. There are lots of naked women, especially woman showing their breasts, and yet very little with naked men. Sure, I get it that most gamers are straight guys so they like the occasional titty-show with their gaming, but it's just another thing that says that this is primarily material for straight men, not women or gay men. But this is just me grousing a bit.

Thank you! I've been fortunate that in my 40+ years of table-topping, the vast majority of the gaming groups I've had have had at least one female player (and about 50% have had more than one), which has really helped me make sense of some of these issues. I'm in the process of organizing a Sartar-focused LARP campaign, and I expect to have roughly 50% female players, so I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to address some of the deeper issues. I've also been writing myths/quests that focus on non-violent goddesses just because we need more of them. You can find them here and here. The OP might find these

Thank you! I've been fortunate that in my 40+ years of table-topping, the vast majority of the gaming groups I've had have had at least one female player (and about 50% have had more than one), which has really helped me make sense of some of these issues. I'm in the process of organizing a Sartar-focused LARP campaign, and I expect to have roughly 50% female players, so I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to address some of the deeper issues. I've also been writing myths/quests that focus on non-violent goddesses just because we need more of them. You can find them here and here. @HeartQuintessence might find these two myths useful. I've got a third one, for Ernalda, that I've been thinking of building a scenario around for publication.

I'm very late to this party--been offline for a couple of days--and I really love this whole thread. It seems to me that there are a couple of inter-related issues going on with Glorantha in terms of gender. 1) A majority of those who have played in Glorantha are male because the gaming community skews male (although I think that imbalance is slowly evening out). Male gamers have tended to focus on violent conflict as the interesting story to tell. So the published scenarios have often focused on violent conflict as the obvious solution. Ernalda's 'Other Way' to resolve problems has often been an after-thought in scenarios, where it was considered at all. The number of published quests that are essentially non-violent is much lower than the number of quests that culminate in some sort of violence. For example, the three major non-violent cults of the Storm Tribe (Lhankor Mhy, Chalana Arroy, and Issaries) have one published quest each, whereas the violent cults have at least 7 that I can think of off the top of my head--Orlanth has at least 4 (more than all the earth cults combined). 2) Fantasy literature (particularly male-centric stories) have compounded this tendency (although again, this has improved as fantasy has matured as a genre). When the average gamer thinks of fantasy stories, they probably picture orc-killing and the like. Women are usually positioned as healers and earth priestesses who need rescuing more than they rescue everyone else. Women are situated as 'home', which men leave and return to, defend, and procreate with, and the assumption that what women do at home when men aren't around is the boring stuff like cooking. So we have a lot of models for how to make male-centric activity (violence, mostly) interesting and few models for how to make women-centric activity interesting. RQ's elaborate rules focus on combat and hand-waving focus on things like cooking (the former is a long, drawn-out process with many steps, whereas the latter is a single roll) nudges us in this direction much more than HQ's system, which resolves all forms of challenging activity the same way (a Cooking challenge could as easily be an Extended Contest as a fight with a band of Broo might be). 3) The majority of people who created Glorantha (in terms of published material) have been men, and consequently their notion of what a truly gender-egalitarian society/religion looks like has been filtered through male assumptions about such things. That's not meant as a slight to Greg or MOB or Jeff Richards or anyone else--just as an observation. For example, Sartar becomes King of Dragon Pass by pleasing the FHQ and 'marrying the earth'. This nominally situates the feminine principle as superior--the Earth Queen chooses her king. But it's still the male Sartar who's doing all the cool stuff and the FHQ is just choosing from a slate of potential candidates, not going out and making herself the ruler of the Kingdom of Sartar. The whole ruling line of Sartar is men. Kallyr is an impressive female candidate for Prince of Sartar (apparently the first one), but her story is ultimately one of valiant failure, followed by the male Argrath succeeding. A truly gender-egalitarian society would have produced at least one Princess of Sartar in 150+ years. The 'active' earth goddesses--the ones who go out and get things done instead of finding men to do it for them--are both depicted as semi-monstrous figures. The Babeester Gor write-up in Sartar Companion positions her worshippers as nearly psychotic anger-ridden ball-busters (the classic trope of the Angry Woman in fantasy literature) and both she and Maran Gor engage in cannibalism (IIRC, MGs cannibalize their own children, another classic misogynist trope). It was left to Jane Wiliams to find a way to present a female warrior goddess who was actually a fully-playable and non-stereotypical idea of what a warrior woman might be. (Again, this isn't meant as a slam to any of the men who mapped out Glorantha. It's more a testament to the difficulties men have in viewing the world the way women view it.) 4) The decision to frame Sartarite women's religion as 'secrets' is problematic--it's discouraged the publication of myths/quest from the women's PoV. For example, the Making of the Storm Tribe myth is written so that it's clear that Ernalda was doing things behind the scenes, but we've never gotten a myth about how Ernalda Forms the Storm Tribe (although it seems that we've gotten a few peaks at it in Six Ages). If women are 50% of the population, their myths and quests aren't 'secrets'--they're just gender-specific knowledge, like how to weave. None of this is to say that we need to tear Glorantha down to the studs and make it gender-blind. One of the things I love about it is how deeply gendered the universe, because it's such a breath of fresh air from the Generic Fantasy Europe that most other fantasy RPGs are descended from. I love that instead of saying 'women can act like men', it's trying to create a game world in which men and women generally act differently. You can see a lot of this in the scenario that gave us the Humakt, Raven, and Wolf myth (off the top of my head, I'm forgetting the name of the scenario and don't want to bother to look it up). The magic spindle that the women need to perform a key clan ritual has been stolen. The solution is to do a violence-focused quest to get the ability to locate and kill the baddies that took it. If all goes well, the spindle is returned to the women, who then walk off-stage to perform the clan ritual that is supposedly the most important thing in the scenario. So the Spindle and the Mahomravrand ritual are actually MacGuffins--the thing the characters care about that the audience doesn't care about--and the quest and violence, which are nominally just the agents through which the ritual is saved, are actually the interesting bit of the scenario. There is no option for the women questing to get a new spindle. There is no option for Babeester Gor to go and get it violently (using her ability to track those who have offended the earth). There's no sequence in which the women actually perform the ritual, perhaps struggling to bring the clan back into full harmony. My point here isn't to beat up the author of that scenario for not writing a different one--it's a good scenario and I've run it three times. My point is that the way we conceptualize a lot of what happens in scenarios (therefore shaping our sense of what happens in Glorantha) generally defaults to male-centric patterns. If we want a more gender-balanced Sartar (and a Sartar that is therefore a bit more friendly to female players in general), we have to swim upstream against strong currents.

Yes, but would you drink it if it were manufactured with human blood instead of water? Remember, BG gets drunk on the -blood- of her enemies. For her cult, this is part of the 'sacred cannibalism' rituals. But the rest of Heortling society is very uncomfortable with this aspect of the Dark Earth.

I think that's a very 21st century way of thinking about the issue. We want there to be a clear before/after cause/effect dynamic here. But that's very much a way of thinking conditioned by science. That's probably the way the God Learners wanted things to work. But I don't think that's the way Sartarites think about these things. An instructive example is the issue of how the Pharaoh become the embodiment of Horus in the late Pharonic period. The Egyptians of the period believed that the Pharaoh was fathered by the god Amun. But Egyptian pharaohs had multiple wives and therefore multiple sons. They did not have a system of primogeniture, so when the old Pharaoh is alive, there was no obvious (to us) way to say for certain which of the Pharaoh's sons were normal mortals and which one had been fathered by Amun. But when the old Pharaoh died and one of his sons emerged as the new Pharaoh, it became clear that he was the one who had been fathered by Amun. Similarly, if the clan's wyter is a sacred snake, the snake doesn't 'become' the wyter when the old one dies and the new one is chosen. It has always been the wyter, and the act of choosing it is more about recognizing the truth of the situation rather than making the snake something it wasn't. So I think RQG is explaining it for us scientific-minded moderns, not explaining how the Sartarites would see it.

I don't think you should look at wyters as Bound Spirits in RQ terms. I think they are much closer to Allied Spirits. A Bound Spirit is essentially a thrall. It has lost the use of its will and simply does what its master/holder/owner dictates (it cannot cast magic on its own, merely act as a POW battery). Wyters are presented as beings that have their own agenda, free will, and desires. They have to be kept happy and can withdraw their favor if the clan does something problematic.The clan founder usually has to negotiate a deal of some sort--sacrifice and worship in exchange for divine patronage and protection. All of that suggests that the clan essentially allies the Wyter and renews the relationship regularly.

Yeah, but remember, in the myths, BG brews with human blood.

Given the nature of the materials that the goddess uses when she produces alcohol, and the way she acts when drunk, would anyone actually want these liquors?

What does one do for a clan like the Hillhaven, who worship spirits more than gods?

Clearly, they failed to properly perform Ernalda's community-weaving rituals. One day, everyone just decided to move away.

That is a GREAT idea. I am totally going to steal that at some point.

The feminist element of Moana is one of the things I really loved about it. The Princess and the Frog has some nice bits to inspire shamanic Glorantha, btw. It's very clear that Dr Facilier is bargaining with his 'Friends' and not commanding them. As a kid, I always loved the fairy tales that featured girls, like East of the Sun, West of the Moon. Somehow those stories always seemed more heroic to me than the ones like Jack and the Beanstalk, maybe because since girls weren't supposed to be warriors, they had to be extra clever instead. As a nerdy kid from an early age, I think the idea of winning purely on wits appealed to me. A lot of fairy tales have very heroquest-y elements to them,

One thing I've done in that vein is create the Troublesome Ewes, three of Navala's daughters who refused to come when their mother or Ernalda call them and so Ernalda cursed them to be trouble-makers and always unhappy. They plague the Orlmarth flocks because you cannot easily see which of the ewes are descended from the Troublesome Ewes. They wander off, they get themselves hurt, they lead stampedes (basically,. they're Sheep Juvenile Delinquents). Even their wool is difficult to work and requires special songs to be able to card and spin and weave it easily.

Thanks! I was fairly satisfied with the way it all worked out. What I mean is that traditional gaming has tended to privilege masculine adventure stories over other possible options. It draws off fantasy tropes that involve the (male) Hero's Journey, Conan, Tolkien (esp. given the way TSR rampantly violated copyright in the 70s), and similar material. And while Glorantha has made huge strides toward gender inclusion, there is still a tendency for the new material to tend to favor the masculine adventure format. Yes, I agree that in the past decade or so many new approaches to game have opened up. And I agree A Quiet Year is an awesome game, though not an RPG in the traditional sense. Canonically, Barntar has Air rather than Earth. I like the idea that Barntar is the Earth equivalent of Vinga, but that's what the consensus is, The idea I'm contemplating is how you make the the act of weaving as dramatically interested as fighting broo. We have lots of examples of how to combat dramatic, but few examples of how to build a scenario that climaxes in weaving (or a similar 'domestic' activity like that). There is a lot of emphasis on Ernaldan weaving, both in terms of the Mundane World and the God Plane, but we're given no scenarios to translate that into game play. The Chalanan myth about the Hundred Healing that I posted half a year ago was my attempt to make the act of healing dramatically interesting enough to center a scenario on it.

Speaking as a professional historian (medieval Europe with occasional excursions into classical Greece and Rome), I do think women's reproductive capacity and the things connected to it were the central element for society's understanding of women in the Classical and Early Medieval periods--women tended to be defined by qualities relating to reproduction (virginity, marriage, loyalty to husband and children, etc). Women who were infertility or whose sexual history made control over their reproduction problematic were generally lower status. One simple example--in the first written English law code (Aethelberht of Kent's), nearly every mention of women has something to do with sex or marriage. That said, it wasn't their only function--cloth production is heavily emphasized across almost all these cultures, for example. Women in early Greek writing are often discussed in conjunction with housework. And one can always find examples of women who broke the rules through adultery, public protest, doing things only men were supposed to do, etc. (And my female students are always startled and kind of excited that I give whole lectures on women's experiences in the ancient and medieval world.) There is a small amount of evidence from Norse culture of women using weapons and Roman gladiators were at least occasionally women. I think for me, the biggest challenge is finding ways to write scenarios that center on women that A) don't just treat the women as substitute men--the violent hero is a Vingan! B ) find ways to make non-martial challenges interesting to play through--"Ok, I made my Heal Wounds role, now what?", and C) are stories that female players would find fun and interesting--sure, reproduction is a hugely important concept, but do women want to play through stories about being pregnant? Is Ernaldan spirituality actually something women want to explore in a game, or is likely to make them feel relegated to the traditional domestic role that a lot of them get pressured into in real life? Obviously the answer will vary from player to player, so asking your female players what they want is important. The Odaylan who get pregnant (mentioned above) was a male player's PC, and initially he was a bit iffy about playing a temporarily female character. But he rolled with it and after the PC got pregnant, we had some fun with him trying to get insight into what having a Sky godling's baby might involve. He had to track down a Redaldan known for her skill at foaling who gave the character some decisions to make--did want this baby to take after its mother or its father? The PC decided she wanted it to take after her, meaning it would be a physical being, not a disembodied deity to be worshipped. During a quest into the Underworld, a Darkness deity tried to demand the baby in exchange for passage, and the player had to decide just how important the baby was. When it came time to give birth, the male characters had to fight a Hollri that was assailing the Loom House (spirits of cold wanted to destroy the baby, which was after all associated with Fire) while the Darkness deity reappeared in the Loom House and tried to take the baby, which allowed the PC to defy it again and then gave the Babeester Gori a chance to fight to defend her. And when after birth the PC was able to decide which sex they would be, the player chose to stay the baby's mother. It was a fun sequence to play through and it felt like I was making the process of childbirth feel as important as fighting a battle. But whether a female player would have enjoyed it as much as a male player, I'm not sure. He enjoyed it in part because it was a very different experience than he as a man was used to having in an RPG. I think one issue is that it's easy to satisfy male players because they have a lot of models for male-centered storytelling--most fantasy stories they've seen are centered on male and feature traditional male preoccupations. And the vast majority of scenarios offer a wide range of models. Nor does society button-hole and restrict them in ways that make these stories seem dull ("Aw man! Another story where I have to kill the trolls and rescue the kidnapped woman?") But women are much more limited in the range of stories we've traditionally told about them. Some women respond to those limits by wanting female characters who get to be the violent protagonist. Others want stories that feel distinctly different from violent confrontation because violence feels too much like male preoccupation that doesn't connect to their interests--some women are genuinely interested in stories of heroic motherhood or community-building or Jane Austin-style romantic concerns. But we don't have a lot of models for how to translate those concerns into the fantasy RPG, and just making the stories about reproduction is going to make some female players feel button-holed into the traditional female role. So how do you make a task like weaving a tapestry as interesting as fighting a band of broo? I haven't tried to tackle that yet, but I have a few ideas. (Sorry, it's early morning, I haven't had my caffeine yet, so I'm at risk of just letting my brain meander through everything that's bobbing to the surface. I'll be quiet now.)

Thanks for all the good suggestions! I'm not entirely against the idea of the Vibrant Womb--one of the PCs is an Ernaldan and another is an Odaylan man who accidentally got a sex change as the result of a quest, then got pregnant by a minor Star-godling, gave birth and could have chosen to return to being a man but decided to remain the child's mother. Both of them might well groove on the idea of a Vibrant Womb. But the third PC is a Babeester Gori, who clearly needs something else. On a deeper level, though, I think having female PCs default to their womb as their source of greatest strength is problematic because it centers them on their reproductive capacity. That might be historically appropriate, but Glorantha isn't historical and while some female gamers would really groove on that, others will find it a tired fantasy trope and want something quite different. What I found surprising when I ran into that detail in the campaign is that the Star Heart is essentially a men's principle (Vingans counting as men mythically), which means that the scenario is assuming all the PCs are male (though not necessarily all the players). That's a problem I think the campaign has already--the Orlanthi hero gets to do great deeds for a woman, and some male PC gets to sleep with Estel Donge. It would be really nice to see a campaign, or even just a solid scenario, that is written with the assumption the central PC is an Ernaldan and that the adventure is aimed at female players/characters.

I'm currently running the Colymar Campaign and I'm preparing for the Third Impossible Task. When the characters are alone in the dark of the Hell Pit, they need to find themselves by finding their Star Hearts. But only Sartarite men have Star Hearts. Sartarite women have their Secret Souls, but that's a rather different concept. Is that how female PCs (of which I have three, so I need to figure this out) deal with being alone in the Pit?

On the issue of indexing, keep in mind that this is very hard to do with scrolls, because no two pieces of paper (I'll just use that as the general term for the various writing surfaces) are exactly the same size and shape, and scrolls are made by sewing or gluing pages together. This means that no two scrolls will be identical, especially because hand-writing will cause the amount of text per page to vary from one copy of a work to another. One copy of a text will run to 30 sheets of paper while another may be 28. Some scrolls will be written continuously on one side (the recto) and then flipped over to write on the other side (the verso), while others will be written on the recto of a sheet, then the verso of that sheet, then the recto of the next sheet, which gets sewed on as needed. That's why the ancient world never developed this concept. It just wasn't something that makes sense with scrolls. Indexes more or less require codices (what we call books, rather than scrolls). The first indices weren't used until the 13th century, and they were invented to help inquisitors keep track of whether people had relapsed into heresy or not. So they had a very practical use, rather than a scholarly use. Scholar indexing wasn't invented until the printing press had allowed the production of dozens of essentially identical copies of a particular book. That meant that when a scholar made a note to check p.42 of a book, every copy of that book would have the same info on page 42. So while indexing books seems an obvious thing to us, it's not an obvious idea to pre-modern people.

My PCs found a heroquest that enables an Ernaldan to get the ability to purify something of chaos. They're building a plan to invade the Marsh, located the corrupted dryad who produces the Blackthorn trees, purify her of Delecti's corruption, and then kill her so that Delecti cannot produce any more of the blackthorn trees. Then they can attack the trees one at a time to shrink the Marsh.