scott-martin

Everything solid melts into "air." Two gods, something like brothers, once had a reasonable claim on the birthright of the Larnste rune, so the ghosts of the Court declared a contest to determine which would be the best steward. When the time came, one brother, under the tutelage of Harana Ilor, came back with Movement, a system of exchange that had reached dynamic equilibrium. The ghosts of the Court decided it was good on the whole but despite all the permutations something was missing, some potential left untried. Maybe, the whisper came, it was a little boring in the end, wind going nowhere. The second brother, who had only the shock of a restless tectonic landscape to claim for a mountain mother, came back with Change, which is Larnste plus Disorder. This was something new at last, the ghosts of the Court determined as they awarded the second brother the prize: not just a power rune but his own element. And so the first brother recedes into his own system in stormy seasons, speaking every language but thunder. On the other hand versions of this story are told where everything solid melts into "light" and the second brother is banished. --[*]-- Elves are just a different type of archaic person in thrall to the great tree consciousness. As much as it pains them to acknowledge, they bleed like us, breed like us and die like us. Wooden bones venerated in museums and libraries are mostly devotional forgeries or, very rarely, a bona fide relic of a profound shamanic experience.

This is a great place to put characters who perform Plant focus but not necessarily undergo the full shamanic ordeal. Like a lot of runes, access to Plant has opened and closed across various communities. Almost seasonal, if you like.

By definition I suppose the Widow is the grandmother whose grandfather died and so she would be the site of the sorrow. But we probably need the hardcore Ernaldans to make these insinuations.

Taka Taka "Fal"

-ga Now that's a particle to conjure with, the abstract Great Goddess who anchors one corner of the earth square being elusive in the sources but theoretically linked to Cybele over here in our world. Hungry girl.

We call it "mother" market for a reason. No variant!

If you or your players are eager to chase a variant figure "Vin Gor" back into the shadows of mythology and then come back, your Glorantha can definitely vary. I used to think the benign/malign earth system was essential and eternal . . . just a technique the Esrolians use to distinguish between bicameral aspects of the feminine mystique, masks of goddess. Summer Queen / Winter Queen. Stepmother / Evil Stepmother. Soft Mother / Wire Mother. Good Girl / Bad Girl. Grandmother / Crone. The gor/kor particle signified that distinction like a detachable organ passed around a coffin floating down the Nile. But now I'm kind of thinking this was a separate pantheon or the vestiges of multiple pantheons assimilated into the modern great goddess cult like the vanir were absorbed into the aesir. In this scenario a lot of gors died before time. Some might come back. Baroshi may be a lost gor. Korang may have been a lost gor. It's the hero wars, ladies.

YGWV! This rare "genetic" explanatory framework is interesting because it hints at the Curse as totemic amplification, something that only really happens sustainably when normal breeding barriers are routinely transgressed in a dimorphic tribal system. Which is a lot of words for thinking about "natural" telmorite people giving birth to mixed litters of pups and peeps who need to learn special magic to cross over. Break a taboo or have it broken around you and some of the babies will be natural hybrid forms expressing the lurking lycanthropic taint as well as superpowers. The fan community has previously noted parallels between these lycanthropic forms and the special counters of the Nomad Gods cults . . . protectresses and ancestors . . . as well as embodied persistent hybrid forms like minotaurs, born in between and living their lives that way. RQ2 says that even when you get two of these rarefied entities together you're still going to generate mostly pups and peeps, effectively the raw moving parts of a new "natural" hsunchen community as long as someone will teach them the special magic of remembering how to cross over. These first-generation tribes, in turn, will rapidly outnumber the lycanthropes simply because even one "natural" parent will suppress the taint and you get normal pups and peeps. You need repeat transgression to generate an original lycanthrope (the rules are explicit, this is not contagious), much less the prospect of a second generation and even a mated pair will only dominate their territory if they make an effort to kill their natural offspring, which only suppresses gross fertility rates over time. But if all you're looking for is a renascence of Beast Rune people, this is a pretty good way to go. And I'm reminded of the non-dimorphic beast forms like satyrs who canonically do not have females but always breed true. I wonder what happens with a nymph in the mix.

There must be females or male impregnation scenarios worthy of Amazon's print-on-demand back categories because The genes for lycanthropy are recessive, so that only matings between lycanthropes will breed true. Most children of two lycanthropes are either animal or human without shapechanging ability.

IMG multiple nations across history have been afflicted with RQ2-style lycanthropy, with the wolf empire only being the best known and most "successful" in the sense that all but isolated "normal" clans in Dorastor have now died out. Most are something like a surgical strike on the totemic leadership of a regional beast system . . . the top of the food chain as it were: Bear feel like survivors of the White Bear Empire, an achievement of Loskalmite anathema experts and then stranded on the wrong side of the ban. (I don't think many lycanthropes survive in modern Fronela. This is probably part of what's at stake in Harrek's totemic assimilation of White Bear and the resulting religious upheavals in the north.) At least there's a place for them within the lunar way. Boar come from the wreckage of Slontos and their story distinct from "normal" swine totem people has yet to be told. There aren't a lot of other beast people in that part of the world so this might have been the most absolute of the curses, vilifying the entire local hsunchen ecology. Might well be an ongoing project of Ramalian sorcery to create shock troops from an otherwise wretched population. Some may have escaped. Thankfully the curse is "recessive" and so they don't breed true across the pig belt. Hsa are the least attested. My best intuition from the deep sources is that they emerged in either a failed Kralorelan korgatsu revolt or the losing side of a dynastic struggle (dragon versus tiger) but until someone wants to go to the east and come back and tell us, it's a question mark. It's interesting to postulate other top-tier shamanic leadership totems being cursed in this way but I'm not sure history really attests for lycanthropic Basmolites (cults of prax would have told us) or Pralorites (although the were-stag or "horned man" is an evocative figure in his own right). "Normal" Vrimakites seem to have died out, leaving various monster forms behind. Werehorses recur under ecological pressure but again, I don't think this is a curse. There may be chaotic bull walkers in the West Reaches and something like lycanthropy lurking in Charg. And then more explicitly "reptilian" totems (serpent brotherhood and so on) seem to have an ability to digest and shed curses and other taints. This is probably what happens to abandoned Pamaltelan totems, getting wrapped in the horned serpent complex instead of rejected as atavistic "chaos."

How funny, this just came up elsewhere! RQ2 was explicit: Shape changers are a lonely breed, tainted with Chaos, and disdainful of civilization . . . On nights of the full moon, which happens once a week in Glorantha, the lycanthropes must change to its beast form and roam the countryside. Their Chaotic nature gives them their abilities of shape change and invulnerability to impure metals. They do not receive any of the Chaotic features. This would then lead the question of what historical circumstance applies across the modern lycanthropic tribes while excluding "normal" hsunchen. The elusiveness of true weretigers and wereboars in the modern materials makes a single origin tricky unless you reinsert them into the Dorastor narrative. Chaos-tainted bear people may of course be a phenomenon of the lunar way. Or all of this may be an artifact of the game setting's implied future . . . right now the telmorites are the only cursed shapeshifters but that will change fast and soon.

RQ2 would never deliberately lie to us, would it. Some bits of it just haven't happened yet . . . after all, there's a lot of ruin in an empire and almost infinite hero war potential. Sheng or somebody might also pivot the north jumper and northern Pent blooms. "False plenty," the traditionalists scowl but opportunistic riders say it tastes great. In separate work I'm reminded of the impact Robert Eisler's Man Into Wolf had on the occult late '70s when it got a mass-market reprint. Given the grindhouse texture the world takes on in the far northeastern verges something like totemic biker gangs might not be out of place. "Heavy" altamont vibes.

Oh that one's easy: Kra Lor getting back to basics. There are whole dynasties over there the dragon-centric history presented to foreigners doesn't mention. Odds are pretty good one of them seeds this one . . . lucky they probably aren't bird people.

It would be interesting if the Nomad Gods map actually reflects the Shadow Moon Empire era . . .

Shudder. If I were the empire I would post a reward (cash and tax rebates) amounting to a multiple of the ransom of the ambushed dead, which is probably a multiple of the ransom the players can normally fall back on if they get in trouble with the community. For especially egregious crimes (interfering with a priestess and other sacrilege) I might go up to 7X and then let the community shake itself apart to get the prize. Meanwhile the arcane arms of the moon will pursue their own weird justice.

Nomad Gods! Which means that its "inaccuracies" and "enigmas" may be true in the nebulous near future it shares with White Bear + Red Moon. I found it revelatory because I never thought of Redhair Place as anything more than a specific spot cut into the steppe where the existing tribe goes to collect fresh hostages and start raising them as its own. The Caravan, meanwhile, is constantly on the move. Maybe it stops there to hand over the next leg westward to other merchant networks, in which case there would be significant permanent market infrastructure on site. But I never got that feeling from the Genertela box text . . . the sense is that this is less of a commercial hub with fixed hostels and warehouses and banks and clip shops, more of a ritual location that's only special on days the nomads pay their tithe. The "great changes" are rarely discussed beyond noting the rise of Storm within Pentan religion. I wonder if something happens within the Redhair to (a) end the tithe and (b) spin out an independent trade network that if successful would rapidly require its own hub. In that scenario, Redhair Place goes away. Hello Trading Ground. And the people who will bring it to you are probably the Desert Trackers among others.

While referring to an early map of a possible near future I found a detail to conjure with. No idea who sets up the Trading Ground (beyond the usual suspects) or what their target market might be . . . but it seems to be a fairly extensive and permanent establishment separate from historical lunar routes. Definitely worth sending an expedition now to prepare the site and reserve a sweet spot upwind from the latrines but not too far away. In my dream it's the biggest flea market tribal land will ever support, all kinds of great junk liberated from the Crack, the giant's stash, Orathorn, other worlds.

Rumor has it 2.0 will bring that one back as something a little more woke or at least responsive. I've seen prototypes they're shopping around Mother Market, what do you think of the redesign

The flip answer is that even a fake cosmic monopoly can be useful. The standard runes have nominal "owners" but access is still relatively open to any cult that manages to cultivate a relationship. Trade is our intellectual property. We can rent it to people we like or withdraw the rights. And to the extent to which people can be convinced that Trade is a fundamental building block of the cosmos, we get an implicit seat on the big table alongside the primary Powers and Elements. What does it do that Harmony and Movement don't? Not much . . . but the act of bundling them together is itself the value add, the novelty we can sell people who are already invested in Harmony and/or Movement in exchange for something a little more tangible like initiation fees or access to a joint wyter. Maybe it's a shell game in terms of game mechanical impacts. All zero-sum trades really are. So if you like Trade, keep it on the catalog of runes available and see who buys in. It doesn't have to do anything special. Charge them double what a normal Power would cost because they're getting two linked Powers in a single transaction. It's exotic. Rare. Prestigious. Desirable. It's a thing even the most destitute merchant can always sell at a reasonable markup because we made it up: inventory is inexhaustible and input costs are as low as it gets. Who wants one? Who will buy? The longer answer is that the deprecation of Trade as a separate rune in the late early hero wars period is clearly a plot signal that something is going on within the trade god ecosystem. A decade ago the people running the show worked pretty hard to make the separate rune happen, for reasons that might be only vaguely hinted at in the game materials we have. Merchants started displaying this sign and educating strangers on what it meant . . . maybe in conjunction with Harmony In Motion, maybe replacing old signs that had both runes together. And then around 1625 they stop. The magic is more or less the same. Only the iconography shifts. Iconography carries politics, aspiration, more than a whiff of the intangible. The relatively brief fad for Trade reveals a kind of mysterious process going on in the dream life of money, even an uncanny spectral experience. "Animal spirits." And then it resolves . . . but not all at once. Some signs keep Trade longer. Some argue more passionately than ever that this is the one true rune of the god. Others can't paint over it fast enough. Every merchant is different. Every sign is overdetermined: there are external political and economic forces to weigh, grudges of dogma, pure inspiration weighing in on the particularities of preference. That inspiration tells you where the story goes in your game. Maybe the old traders simply laugh it off as something that happened, a shaggy dog story, that time we sold people a logo that was the brand. The god is the god of tattoo parlors after all. Maybe the trade cult is preparing for one kind of evolution or another. Trade may have only been the prototype for something else, a new and better synthetic rune that builds on what we learned that time. Something more dangerous, more useful, more real or some combination of the three. Or the trade cult itself may be sublimating into a different kind of something else, separating back into its constituent powers after the transaction that brought us together concludes. We might be spinning something out. We might be consolidating something else. And if we're doing it, I doubt we're alone among the great cults of Glorantha. It's the end times. Everybody needs to stop shuffling the cards and start playing. In ten years, for example, some of us might abandon the sentimental relationship with the Air and go back to where we came from before that . . . Equal Exchange returns to the larger library of sorcerous and quasi-sorcerous techniques, Malkion welcomes the prodigal home. Or all that we know is eclipsed by the moon. Or whatever. Others may find new affinities with the Air and decoupling Trade liberates resources to pursue Change in the absence of Harmony. Everything solid might melt into Air. They'll need Changers for that and the father of god is the change god.

It's like Dumbest Theory lurched right into the advanced hero wars workshop! "Every rune is infinite but follows its own different shape in getting there." - Tight Indigo Pants

I endorse the dissolution of Trade as a shadow of somebody's looming hero war agenda. A kind of mid-game feint within the syndics. The sudden absence of Law in the wake of the disastrous final synod may be something similar but is probably just a really bad omen: thou hast turned thy face from the law of malkion, o my generations, therefore let the face of the law be withdrawn from thy sight. Maybe the right quests will get it put back on the character sheet. And maybe the syndics have been hiding Trade all along in plain sight and will return it to circulation when the time is right. Or maybe we just don't need it any more, let it go. P.S. I love the notion of multiple primary sources on the Brithos diaspora . . . who were all objectively "there" at the time . . . disagreeing on the details. How many ships? How many ur-castes? Male, female, aristocratic, proletarian, somewhere in between? Funny how nobody can remember quite the same story. Yon wheeling of great stars Hath cast a silver web around my heart Upon an Elfin-Sea

Knowing her fate, Atlantis sent out ships to all corners of the Earth. On board were the Twelve: The poet, the physician, the farmer, the scientist, The magician and the other so-called Gods of our legends.

Working as a team I think you all have just solved the enigma of the birth of zzabur or "malkionite lbq." Representatives of the secular castes (including women) come together and collectively produce the social conditions required to support institutional sorcery. There were other castes in those days of course but the flashman and the elspeth were amply represented in the rite.

Love it. Flip the "dragon" rune Wings fall off, tap root unfurls Flamal has returned! -- Shirao Seeds drift on the wind The root achieved its mission. "Dragon" time starts now. -- Basho

EWF actually stood for "Energy Without Force" and turns out it was a cognate of the goddess we now call Brastalos . . . the kind of thing you end up worshipping when you approach an absence from a theistic perspective, a kind of high storm with scales. This explained many things from the dearth of "dragon" influences across much of historical Glorantha to the working of the sacred storm mountains to the role of the Black Sun in the elemental system of the Kra Lor emperors to the persistence of the entity Lokamayadon followed to why Magasta is father of kaiju.