scott-martin

Peredur is endlessly relatable and is in fact my old lady mentor's favorite. Some people have trouble with his rarefied cousin but the grails in question are arguably so different that comparisons break down. To cut back to the origin of the thread, I'm not convinced capital-H Heroes are that common even in Orlanthite history. On the WBRM map, the home team fields a total of one (1) with some friendly free agents . . . and this is the terminal third age, culmination of generations of cosmic tension, etc. etc. This might be because the WBRM epic actually drives other Heroes and Hero candidates away from the other guy's drama like magnets turned to the same polarity. They have their own shit to do and despite the allure of a good seat for all the drama ultimately end up doing said shit far from the noise. But someone like Garundyer manages to remain aloof long enough that he doesn't get a counter for the period of time the game covers. IMG most of the famous people of history are exemplary and extraordinary (and might aspire to a demigod role) without undertaking a visible "hero's journey." They innovate within their cultural framework (local heroplane) but rarely stray long or far beyond except to bring something necessary back . . . and once they retrieve it and incorporate it into their community, life goes on largely as before. They don't really transform or create. They renew. Many of them are actually inherently conservative (small c) in the sense that they spend their lives working to restore a world order that has broken down. They aren't really revolutionaries unless that world order has become the problem. Their heroquesting is largely conventional and devotional, and I think when we go to the way they are remembered by posterity their innovations were largely accidental and desperate. After all, deliberate innovators, luciferian or faustian figures, tend to be reviled as capital-V Villains like Loko or the EWF heavies. Orlanthites who follow them stop following Orlanth. I would consider Harmast a capital-H Hero and he is interesting because a lot of historical authorities have tried to limit him to the devotional role of a priest. However, having reviewed his hagiography, he emulates a figure he calls "Orlanth" at a time in Glorantha when that figure was banned and forgotten by everyone else. He basically has to make it up as he goes, drawing similar people in with him until they demonstrate the LBQ works. His god is alive. Others looking for a god can do as he did, the hero paths are open to those who would learn and follow. Contradictions and controversies have largely been closed off after centuries of initial debate and then near-universal veneration. His story is almost used up as a cultural force unless someone heroically feeds new life into it. That magnificent figure he invented is mostly just Orlanth now. I'm still weighing Sartar. A famous guy who changed the course of history, sure. But was he a capital-H Hero or just a genius in the right place at the right time? Was John the Baptist the messiah? Did he remake the universe in his own image or just put some tribes together? Where is the line? I think a lot of the people in the list really just put some tribes together, in one sense or another. Incremental disruption that leads to a higher-order system. Evolution. Maybe a few did it so well they are revered as demigods and receive collateral worship to this day, trading a unique subcult spell in return. I think Ethilrist would have something tart to say about that. Is Argrath good? Orlanthites consider bickering one of their religious rights. They'll bicker over it until they run out of breath or get distracted by a shiny object over the next hill. But I think the ones who follow in his shoes will stop worrying so much about whether they're even "orlanthi" any more. They wander off to the next thing. The ones left behind, happier with the status quo or at least not as willing to reach beyond, will shudder at his name. They don't live where I live. They're mostly interesting to me as distant abstractions, a half-forgotten dream.

I just realized we can probably code specialized Gloranthan "dream machines" to strobe and flicker and seed new meditative patterns of thought. How interesting!

ta, a tad distracted from our more trollish pursuits this week as Mother of Markets has us all on call. derivatives welcome, will pick up again soon. One thing I liked about this particular series is the way it interacted with a dream that told me how the death of the old sun to make way for nysalor and the current yelm relates to what we now call the ultimate rite of the northern hrestolic church . . . when things get too bad to resolve any other way, the king must die. (No overt comment on GBP intended.) Then there's another rite of the west that engineers a succession, a new birth. TLDR this looks like an artifact of the old sun, something impossibly archaic now but still vibrant. By which I mean "elfin."

Yeah, I came back here to ponder the notion of Gloranthan mystery cults pursuing runic combinations the orthodox magicians consider paradoxical or absurd. Maybe most apparently go nowhere but you never know if a particular combination will unlock the world. I like doing it with sacred geometry. New runes from old! On the other hand, the more systematic combinatorial thinkers got rolled up into the zistor program, leaving only the most idiosyncratic behind.

"Arolanit" is less a fixed geographical locale than it is a technical term for a type of cosmic beachhead or metastatic infection. While the familiar one seen on the Guide historical maps has been relatively persistent, its hold on that region hasn't been uninterrupted. And it isn't the only Arolanit either.

He wishes he could cure the scars When he forgets he sometimes cries He knows the use of ashes Love it. The wool stuff is especially welcome in our house.

Here for the soap as sacrifice story. The version I heard (maybe in a Norman O. Brown book?) was that people realized that runoff from funeral pyres had unusual chemical properties, got clothes clean, etc. Might have had something to do with the ascetics who hang around South Asian cremation fields but that might be another failed memory. Either way the symbolic economy is good for bronze age people to think. Corpses are uncanny so you need to get rid of them. Fire is a good way. Fire renders animal fat and produces ash. Introduce water (the sky is crying with us) and you get something good for eliminating stains, maybe it's also good against guilt and other psychic complaints. Then as you start figuring it out you deliberately sacrifice animals to the process and attribute everything to a god. The world capital of soap is probably Alkoth.

All "mostali" are cargo cultists. Otherwise they would have fixed ur-metal by now to kill humans as well as their other enemies. But they can't do that without making their own weapons toxic to themselves.

Mysteriously nobody can permanently die on the trollball pitch, which squarely places the game in otherworld territory. I'm not sure about the ball.

I agree, the text is frustratingly vague how far their vision is really accurate despite the "farsighted" description. Apparently a human can only detect a candle in the dark 2.5 km out (thanks google) so do we want troll vision to be better than that? I don't recall whether they can see the stars, which are farther up but much brighter. If I were making a ruling, I'd say the index of their vision is encoded in the ritual dimensions of the trollball pitch, so at 10 meters the sensory focus needs to flip to favor darksense (and deal with the audio countermeasures getting thrown at you) while beyond 51 meters accuracy one way or the other is somehow impaired and details become irrelevant. On the other hand, Vaneekara magic is stackable so a sling becomes accurate up to the normal limits of the weapon (400m? which isn't exactly a strong argument for more than two points stacked) or the caster's perception, whichever comes first. A kicked trollkin might go as far as 108m under normal conditions (strongest great troll possible), which would be out of bounds, at which point the game seems to deteriorate into full melee, the giants are swamped, etc. I don't think this counts as victory for the sponsors or they would simply kick the ball out as early as possible.

Feels like a lifetime ago! But yeah, I think sources agree that the prototrolls who came to the Blue Moon Plateau (with Boztakang as their favored chaos fighter, so already a divergent population, ZZ is only 2% of the cult table, I doubt they have much conventional trollball there but might play weird "basko games" instead) found the goddess waiting for them already, so they might be hers but she is not theirs. If so, they might be on the brink of getting booted from trolldom, especially if they stay even tentatively aligned with the empire. Nice hook for jazzing up the apocalyptic struggle between competing troll philosophies beyond "Dagori Inkarth bred a mistress, bow down or be eaten" . . . especially because KOS tells us trolls don't really survive in their current configuration.

Love it. Bit of trivia for you, at one point (c. 1991) Greg was convinced that map making was "a new art" as far as Slontos around 550 was concerned. Not a lot of context around that detail like whether the technology developed there or was imported, but as others on the thread have already noted, modern Gloranthan maps are free to be pretty good. Actually, am I misremembering or do some Avalon Hill era supplements have in-game "players map" handouts that the characters can buy?

I was a little vague calling Annilla a "troll goddess." She is a goddess of trolls but not a goddess who is a troll, much as the entries in Troll Gods are gods for trolls without on the whole being trollish themselves except for the ubiquitous KL and her various imputed descendants. We now know my brain blithering about whether trolls can be made (adopted, initiated) as well as born. I think this makes the KL adoption ceremony much more interesting because it makes her the mystery of how anyone can become one of uz, whether that entails physical birth or something more symbolic. In this model, the children of people like ZZ and AA (and Annilla and Gouger and . . . ) may not necessarily be born of troll mothers but they can still participate in the larger communion of trollishness. And as mentioned there, trollball has become interesting for me as the way these people figure out how to accept and even embrace the disorder of hurtplace. You want to disturb the tranquility of creation without letting the community devolve into self-perpetuating "chaos" . . . the goal is to create a rules-bounded space where just about anything can happen inside the lines but exit is carefully controlled and enforced. You're allowed to hurl stuff in. You're not allowed to hurl stuff out or else the referee (if any) will hurl you out hard. And those referees are touched with the disorder rune so their decisions are likely to be arbitrary, controversial and grossly unfair. This is where trolls learn that hurtplace is like that. Uz make rules for mutual boundaries but the rules are usually not biased in our favor. Some people's mothers are bigger than other people's mothers and they are all bigger than you. It seems to be primarily a ZZ franchise with Karrg grudgingly allowed to participate, or at best a partnership between these two cults. The mandated engagement of a XU priestess seems to argue in favor of a ZZ origin but I can see the argument going the other way if this is designed to be a kind of "punishment" (forced lesson or ordeal) to test the priestess's ability to endure the ball's suffering without actively trying to put it out of its misery. The fact that she is "beautiful" in this context may also be a ZZ artifact. Either way, the AA priesthood apparently does not participate in the organized sport and so probably didn't carry it in the AA darkbringer diaspora. If we can track the historical spread of trollball we might be able to locate the original cult center of ZZ and maybe XU (at least nearby). Personally, because the trollpak maps are so evocative, I think the mythic original for the game was the throwing of the thrown mountains in which the prototrolls learned a painful lesson about death at a distance. I guess this has been situated in the Elder Wilds somewhere? Zong is a much bigger deal there today, persisting where any original ZZ influence continued to migrate down to Shadows Dance. Zong is not a child of Korasting. Nor is he a brother to Boztakang, who went north and out of the central darkness tendency to abdicate his role to ZZ. Zong is the child of the hurler. He knows how to throw. Throwing is a big deal in the evolution of consciousness because when missile weapons emerge you are no longer simply extending your corporeal reach but translating it across empty space, projecting your violence toward a relatively distant target. Vaneekara doesn't necessarily need to hit anything. She simply extends your range. Aiming at a specific target is Zong's job. Either way, the mere act of projection establishes the intervening space between you and your desire, makes it meaningful. For humans, this is a matter of depth perception and the holographic perspective. We're generally visual people and our main projectile weapons are sky weapons. It's different for trolls, who need to build up their sense of the holographic landscape via sonar that has different parameters. Maybe they can see okay and can use sight to aim a sling or throw a pass. All you're doing is hurling at a fairly distant target. But to catch the ball, Zong can't really help you. We leave him behind in the Elder Wilds where other people throw things at uz. We need refined close-range sonar to make sure we're where the ball is going. And for that to work, we need a clear auditory field, which is not trollball. People are yelling and in particular they have what amounts to a ritual obligation (team spirit) to throw crap at the end zone where a long-range pass would otherwise be easiest and most effective to complete. The end zone is noise and again, fans of the enemy team hurling crap at you to hurt you and disrupt whatever sonar model of space you manage to maintain. I think the mysterious god of the game teaches catching. This might be an archaic role of Karrg if you believe trollball is not originally a ZZ ritual. Maybe that fits. Either way, it doesn't seem to be preserved in the conventional Karrg subcult so only comes up here. That's okay. No other troll really needs to be able to catch. But who are the catchers? On one hand, you have the offensive receivers whose job it is to make yardage. On the other hand, you have the goalie. The goalie is always in the red zone getting pelted with constant garbage. Maybe this person (strange how this seems to be a pastime for otherwise superfluous males except as a way to show off their mating desirability without killing each other but maybe uz women play? like the line in the virgin suicides, the boys' job and the job of trollball as an institution is "merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them") needs to develop the most acute combination of sensory awareness to catch under those conditions. You need to have pretty good vision for an uz as well as exquisite sonar to stay on top of the ball. And the red zone is red, which means it's ZZ territory. Again, I suspect the goalie is primarily Karrg and the runners are primarily ZZ but maybe the real symbolic situation is flipped. Either way, they can see red and they can smell blood. This is the death zone. I would not be surprised if this is their understanding of where babies come from. Whoever gets the package across the line is the father. On the other hand, maybe most trollball players are gay? It's complicated and I'm really just testing to see if you're still reading here, or am I. There are also "astronomical" elements (again, whatever passes for astronomy among the trolls) that I think ultimately get sublimated onto the ouranekki board (again, hinting at an eastern wilds origin, somewhere around the steppe nomad star lore) and reflected in Black Sun ceremonial combat on the far side. What unifies this part of the world is that it was once the Genertan empire, Genert being father of giants and thrower of mountains. I don't know if the use of giants as referees is simply an expedient because Gonn Orta is a patron of the game or something deeper, but it's strange how trolls and giants interact up there in those mountains so maybe there's a truly mind-melting link.

I love the lazy pragmatism of turning a local pain point into somebody else's problem. Out of sight, out of mind . . . and for the darkness peoples, "out of sight" isn't really all that far away. Reviewing how trollball works got me thinking harder about Vaneekara because the game revolves around completing a pass (or punt, either way you have to be able to catch the ball to make much yardage). Throwing and kicking are pretty easy. Catching is a more complex situation. But this is not a trollball thread! One of the things I love about reading "Three Curious Spirits" in uh light of modern understanding is that we don't necessarily know which ancestral light is being born here. Yes, the story says "Aether," but this is one of the names driven by earthly elemental terminology that feels deprecated today, a placeholder for some entity unique to Glorantha and rooted in the Gloranthan religious experience. And we know now that some people remember a succession of suns, so this story could primarily refer to one of them or have been stitched together from multiple encounters. After all, we know ZZ primarily interacts with light/fire/sky in the form of the Theyalan sun god, whereas AA interacts with a local Lodril and XU is a little more nebulous unless you build out connections to "Umbarist" mysticism and/or Spolitism first. Three curious spirits. Three encounters with three lights. It reminds me of the revelation of Night And Day where participants interpret a single event in three different ways and three different gods emerge. Maybe this is the troll version of that revelation, what three factions of darkness saw and how they responded. The story has to come from somewhere. It's definitely not a conventional Dara Happan story. Maybe it's what they tell in Guhan or Yolp where these three cults are roughly equally represented and they're relatively close to the intricacies of the syncretic solar pantheon. This question of origins is important to me because I am increasingly thinking what we now call the universal "uzko" type is an invention, the end product of centuries of cultural exchange and male migration between originally unique and isolated exile communities, each descended from a different pool of ancestral deities that historically converge into something like a unified KL with persistent local variations. (This is why the KL cult needs to be reprinted again and again.) In this model, various darkness peoples of the diaspora remember their origins in different ways and maintain different magical repertoires for coping with life in a sad bright world. Each has a favorite "curious spirit," in other words, who is forced to coexist with an unpleasant truth and finds a different way to do it. Some of these people were close to the uzko type when time begins. Others might have been uzhim or romal or muri or tamali or kitori or digijelm or the demons of Alkoth or the children of the blue moon or any of the other myriad apparently interfertile mutations along the dark/man continuum. Over time, most of the really exotic forms have either died out or been hybridized into the hegemonic uzko system . . . they've been either replaced or magically reshaped to conform. That conformation is a big part of what we call the universal Kyger Litor, the recognition that you and me may come from different shadows but "we are both uz." We can imagine a parallel missionary movement of "darkbringers" running from heath to heath "reminding" the local darkness cultures of their shared experience if not shared ancestry. Maybe these were AA people preaching a shadowy IFWW, combing local survival stories to find commonalities. I don't know enough about this era yet and all of this is still only a dumb theory. But I do think the Gbaji Wars catalyzed whatever convergent processes were already going on. A diversity of darkness peoples goes into the Council and come out as uzko bemoaning the curse of kin. Some, too distant or divergent to either attract the missionaries or suffer the curse, remain different. Dark Arkat, friend of the stygian teachings, is also a factor. Arkat. Born in the shadow between suns, at the moment when some people say an archaic sun died and a more modern one was born. This is why the timing of his illumination relative to the three curious spirits is so interesting. He was clearly illuminated after a sun was born but while illumination can have weird retroactive impacts I doubt his story assumes he was enough of a prodigy to get his mortal third eye opened in infancy, which rules out his experience happening simultaneous with Night And Day. But this gets messy and breaks the compromise in key ways anyway, since one of the core tenets of the compromise is Time. Right now I like the idea that the people who illuminated Arkat were the inheritors of an older sun displaced in the God Project and that was why they filled his head with such vindictiveness. There are many pockets of "old sun" belief scattered around Glorantha. The Kingdom of Ignorance is of course one and you can find traces of it deeply buried in Pamaltelan mythology as well. We do not yet know what manner of sun Vith was. We do know that Arkat gravitated toward the cult we now call ZZ because they were the best haters. Maybe back then they primarily hated what we now call "chaos." Maybe Arkat came to that cult bearing a larger notion of the enemy and a mutual recognition took place. Either way, ZZ now loathes light as he did in the Curious Spirits story but really hates "chaos." The Nysaloreans, on the other hand, identified what we now call "chaos" with light. Only one of these viewpoints really survived. However, ZZ is not the only chaos fighter the trolls know. They have at least two choices, one being Boztakang, who has receded to the fringes of the pantheon, presumably as ZZ's profile expanded under Arkat patronage. Boztakang is directly related to KL. ZZ is not. It looks like at least two dark god families have been somewhat imperfectly fused, leaving faint echoes of original duplication of entities behind. (We also see this duplication with the two generations of blessed ancestors, one emerging directly from the entity now identified as Kyger Litor and the other emerging from another maternal ancestor figure, Korasting whose womb is blasted under contradictory circumstances and who is no longer really important except in matters of woe. Was there once a nation of prototrolls that adored KL and another nation that acknowledge Korasting as mistress of mistresses . . . only something happened to the Korasting people that fostered their integration / adoption into KL as a subordinate group? Likewise, were XU and ZZ originally siblings or were they brought together around a larger negotiation with the emergent KL hegemony that displaced Boztakang as primary chaos fighter in favor of ZZ? Who is XU really if not another variation on the KL theme pushed into a subordinate role, always the midwife never the momma? And where the hell are Gore and Gash in the ranks of Sacred Ancestors, while figures peripheral to Dagori Inkarth like Jeset appear instead?) So what I think is going on in Curious Spirits is that the "darkness" constituency of the council was itself a relatively new and fluid coalition of cultures reflected in the discontinuities that haunt "Troll Legends & Natural History," another of Minaryth Purple's money laundering schemes. When the God Project reconstituted the light element, a new and artificial sense of the sun was born. Call it "aether" or some other theogonic placeholder name. The darkness seat has no syncretic way to negotiate this and so disintegrates into its own constituent principles, with AA, XU and ZZ leading the way. These are the primary ancestors of the darkness peoples who joined together and joined the council. Each in their way failed to address the problem satisfactorily. ZZ, the last to respond, is wounded in the encounter and his wounds make him angry as well as strong. Korasting is crippled, again either at Night And Day or when the sun enters the womb of darkness. An old sun is murdered. A new sun gestates. Either way, this aspect of troll fertility breaks down and we get wretched enlo now if we didn't before. There may be links between Korasting and ZZ's mother or lover. I don't want to get out too far. XU survives as patron of enlo, other mothers' children. She doesn't coddle them but her maternal drive needs an outlet. AA cult focus wanders vaguely westward, up to Halikiv possibly seeking allies. And in the pain of these three incomplete responses to the challenge of Nysalor, an entity called Kyger Litor manifests in the world. Afterward, she is the majority cult of a unified people, the uzko. "Seven" disparate ancestors have united into an eighth. She can't heal the wounds that have already been suffered, but she offers a new covenant and a way for once-isolated shadows to start coming back together. And so it goes.

A lot to say in this thread later but just for now I think there's a reason trolls are now considered staunch "chaos" fighters that might or might not intersect with the reason the historical Arkat joined the cult of getting ugly.

Yikes. I won't tell Alan Moore! But this is indeed the certificate, beyond which I am unwilling to say much to evade notice from the vesper assassins. Well, one thing: Vaneekara becomes extremely interesting as a bridge from trollball to whatever exotic "astronomical" knowledge the uz have. How does the old philological puzzle put it? "Jupiter throws, Saturn falls." Vaneekara hurled. Annilla was hurled. And so we have a universe today in which to talk about it.

I was nodding along with all of you with wisps of "the mesoamerican ballgame" roiling around my head and then this detail got me thinking about the running field of forbidden sport and how they made Annilla (formally a troll goddess) suffer as the original ball. I couldn't profane the mysteries here if I tried but if one of the mothers will protect me I could try. Corn. Blood. Pain. Tolat. Shargash. The Blue Badger. The Trollkin Curse. Nomad Storm. Nomad Sky. Nomad Moon. Wherever ZZ and his sister come from and how the modern Karrg establishment negotiates that. Potatoes?

I bet Jennelle Jaquays would be a fantastic guest on Griffin Mountain as well as the cults books.

Of course this is astounding. I love it best because when we squint this way those archaic Dara Happan characters show up in the strangest places. From Sarmatian heraldry to the zodiac!

ISIDILIAN'S DREAM

OPEN MOSTAL 10 GET $DWARF 11 $MOSTAL = "MORTAL"+1 12 IF $MOSTAL>65312 THEN 20 13 GOTO 11 20 IF $DWARF = "MORTAL" GOTO 60 30 PRINT "EGREGORIC ENTITY OBSERVED" 40 PRINT "MOSTALI (LITTLE MACHINE) 50 $MOSTAL=$DWARF 55 GOTO 10 60 PRINT "JUSTADWARF" SAVE MOSTAL RENAME MOSTAL, MOSTALI BYE

A backroom bargain with the Necromancer would indeed explain his supernatural expertise and create a model for exotic diplomacy later in the hero wars.

A trumpet, eh? Separated from its imperial provenance and dispersed into the nomadic outback, eh? Maybe the "Gold Wheel Dancers" are a lot farther from extinction than people believe. Or maybe they weren't the only species within their overall taxonomy . . . the mysterious "artifacts" of the Fel-Dichi people could have been another expression of their strange object transience or, as others have speculated in the past, the Fel-Dichi didn't die out so much as survive in the form of their artifacts. https://basicroleplaying.org/topic/6965-bits-of-glorantha-you-ignore/#comment-98555 I'm also reminded of the persistence of runic tools in the early materials, the archetypal Sword and Cup and Harp and Torch and so forth. Yet another panoply of cosmic entities? Not as mechanically sophisticated as the Sacred Bundles of Prax or the Fel-Dichi artifacts, but I don't know if that makes a difference as far as their politics are concerned.

Start with that spell. Sometimes Vinga is described as the original source of Fearless. She's that portion of Adventurous who pursues its course in the the face of extreme and even cosmic resistance if need be. You can't tell this wind "no." Other winds tend to go around a problem. Vinga has learned how to push through. That is not a gendered trait but can be represented as the struggle to defy gender or other social conventions. Someone could develop this into a Glorantha where any determined would-be Orlanth initiate who has unusual trouble with the examiners (exotic background, unlucky roll) and keeps trying after initial failure ends up with a personal relationship with "Vinga." Maybe you don't even need cult approval to go this route, as blasphemous as it might seem. You just want it badly enough and you go for it, no matter what anyone tells you. You're Fearless. In the relatively recent past, this was routinized for women in particular to establish social parameters for this "exception." But if you're going in this direction, it's actually about the spell and the attitude. The Fearless emulate Vinga. Other initiates emulate other aspects of the Orlanth complex.

Oh you know, there was a long moment when the avuncular relationship was considered essential to male transmission before ideas of paternity took over. I'm sure a lot of the details been deprecated now anthropologically but it was even trendy in my family within my lifetime.