scott-martin

Can't spell monopoly without M-O-O-N, laws yes. I'm sure that when the world is perfected the White Sea will be transformed into delicious lemonade. But then, by definition, we will have achieved Permanent Full and the periodic expansion/recession cycle will end. Until then, we all have other things to worry about!

I highlighted this part as prelude to saying I think you're both right. Formal monopolies aren't well entrenched within the Issaries establishment (the Great Sister system is different) but sweetheart deals and specialized knowledge can provide enough of a competitive edge for an especially ambitious merchant to theoretically push all rivals off the route. In practice, this doesn't seem to have happened lately because the texts suggest more fragmentation / less consolidation along the main line. I'm not fully (93%) convinced that the big players have explicitly gotten together to keep the road open to anybody who can pay the tolls . . . this might just as easily be lingering House of Sartar fair practice backed up by Geo and other utility providers who are probably deeply embedded with the big merchants anyway one way or another. Whatever the agenda, the syndicate operators IMG seem to want to keep the road open to every Harst hopeful with a shingle and some buttons. Thinking about it, this provides great protective cover for smugglers and other politically sensitive contraband the syndicates don't want to touch out in the open. They can work with some bandits more than others. Every bandit is different and has different material needs. Maybe in the near future the incentive to flood the zone recedes and the cartels can compete more aggressively for something like joint monopoly control of the road . . . unless of course the hero wars change the game too much in the meantime. And of course the best sweetheart deals and most specialized knowledge will continue to effectively provide monopolistic power to the merchants who care to cultivate unique routes, products or relationships. That stuff is too well documented in the literature and too much MGF to downplay. But I think it's the hungry ones who pursue these jackpot schemes because for whatever reason they've been forced out of the mainstream. Maybe they don't play well with others. Maybe there's some grudge or infraction only known within Mother Market. Every oddball is different. My question would be what religious impulse (profit motive) suppresses monopolistic competition around Dragon Pass in this era. Why are we so open to keeping the barrier to entry low enough to give the oddballs access to the greatest caravan route in the world at the tightest natural chokepoint? Absorbing what you guys have been saying gets me thinking that this is how the upland Issaries establishment runs munitions and supplies to the storm people (and friends) in Heortland all the way down to the sea as the 1620s get hot. The syndicates in Nochet and beyond may not be so passionate about this issue (sea power) but friends of the house of Sartar still has some pull. When and if the motive mix shifts, however, I think the line I quoted reveals how challenging it would be to truly monopolize trade down to the Holy Country. You can charge a toll to restrict access to a road . . . but the river is a whole lot more democratic (hard to police the entire bank) and does all the work. Once you have a boat, you don't really have to feed it. On the other hand, taking cargo up river again is going to be at least a little less easy. The Marsh and New River system altered the historical calculus on that front but either way it's been the status quo for 300 years now . . . I would not be surprised if Belintar didn't deliberately screw with that landscape to serve his own esoteric mercantile designs. Funny how we don't hear so much about Argan Argar and the Jeset Boatmen these days.

This raises a side question that might shed light on the original one. Who in 1625 venerates the Thunder Brothers as individual entities or even as a collective distinct from Adventurous? Skimming the material gets me thinking that the Sons & Fighting Daughter of Orlanth were once more central to everyday storm religion than they are now . . . maybe in pre-Belintar Heortland, maybe as some kind of Alakoring innovation or something we just don't know much about today. People who focused on Thunder Brothers might have viewed Orlanth Allfather (or whatever aspect you care to throw him here) as too remote for personal relationships. We can speculate about why that was. Maybe there was a priestly or Rex hierarchy who kept the paternal role for themselves and the commoners were left to their own devices developing the worship of smaller and subsidiary figures. In these communities, Vinga is understood as separate from Orlanth but dependent on him. Theoretically she can aspire to an independent cult but in practice the records we have associate her with "daddy." At some point the walls around Allfather are torn down and everyday people can initiate to Orlanth, pushing Thunder Brothers worship deeper into the background in the process. They're specialized, archaic, even a little weird. Vinga and a few other more prominent ones remain relevant in everyday life but as individual aspects of the larger Orlanth . . . "Orlanth As Woman" or whatever. This historical ambiguity provides a loophole for some "Thunder Brother" magic to defy restrictions on Orlanth proper because you can claim that your ritual patron is ultimately somebody else. During the turmoil when Orlanth proper was dead it probably came full circle with people trying to contact any living storm entity they could remember. Some of those efforts worked better than others. I think Vinga had her share of juice among some people. Rigsdal clearly worked out for a few people in high places. The imperial occupation also probably experimented with various substitutions to find a new cult the storm people would accept. (While we may see more successful versions of "Doburdun" or whoever in the remote provinces, sources are scant so far.) But I think most Thunder Brothers are too vestigial and abstract to make a lot of friends at this stage. Maybe later in the Hero Wars that will change and they'll become important again.

The original way to the Bath of Nelat was through the gates of Slon beyond ruined Jrustela. Since then, of course, the map of the world and sky has changed . . . but if you're looking for the oldest storm religion, seek it in what is now the southwest. As a bonus, this makes dwerulans a little more interesting. RAUSA: Ehilm? El nombre no significa nada para mí, tal vez sea un recién llegado. Sin embargo soy la nina del sol y la huérfana del mundo.

Modern lunar society keeps an uneasy space open for Gorgorma (and her associated figures) as a reservoir of feminine resentment but that's really a matter of last resort. I suspect the relatively wealthy and sophisticated can simply unravel a dendara bond . . . this probably has a literal textile component so all you have to do publicly is destroy the marital garment and legally go back to the old status quo, recover premarital property and eliminate any obligation to stand by your man. Like Nick says, everything has political consequences. His family and friends won't appreciate your lack of loyalty and the dendara establishment might not be happy either, but sometimes a girl's gotta do. No Reprisal is noted for Dendara in the material I've seen. If this is something that interests you, I suggest giving her a little sting to punish divorcees, since she is a jealous goddess who loves to police her sisters. Perhaps she'll never look at you again and you ritually become an entekos, which is only as bad as you want it to be.

What I really like about this thread is how well it demonstrates the rich readings that emerge when we treat these figures like Shakespearean roles embedded in a matrix of motivation, historical forces and the accidents of the audience itself. There's no definitive performance of King Lear or Coriolanus yet, only more or less resonant interactions with the text. So it goes with the Great Sartar Campaign. There are few wrong answers and an infinite number of worthwhile ones. We know how the key scenes have to stack up. We have almost complete freedom to explore why they stack that way and how easily they could stack differently if the dice roll another way. One day they might give out game convention prizes for the best Leika, the best Kallyr, the best Fazzur and we'd uncover world-class talent right here around the table.

Belintar had like a million ceremonial and metempsychotic titles that he would choose from depending on the specific context. Some were inherited from his host lives, others were won from the deep mythic landscape and I suspect all the best sages still can't figure out at least one or two that he kept particularly obscure. Maybe he brought them with him when he washed up, who knows? Anyhow "harshax" is one of these million titles that eventually becomes important in the post-erasure era. Maybe it was already in the landscape and reemerges as an independent force. Maybe it reflects a partial reconstruction of what the Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea (a/k/a the Man Who Sold The World, Gentleman Who Fell, Gypsy Sun etc.) put together. I don't know the details. They emerge in play. But I know that while deep gloranthan time always rhymes it never really repeats. Everything always comes back but different . . . this was part of the inner teaching of the MOLAD and it's why the survivors weren't terribly eager to put Humpty Dumpty back together again after the first few abortive attempts clued them in on what was really going on. There's a million things to be. Get on with life. Make your own country holy. That's what they did instead. And as a result, whatever happens after the erasure will be novel but nostalgic at the same time. So it goes!

I knew there was a reason I always liked her. The uh "wyrd" of this move may have been controversial among the desperate mobs but it shakes off the terrible stupor that fell after Kallyr's line ended in a dead end. Got to get moving again. Get some fresh air circulating, roll the dice, get on with the agony of history. Open some windows, open some doors, light a match. Turn the page. The Duke of Disorder was right to smile on old Betty with her tempers and her moods.

One of my not so "dumb" theories revolves around Issaries as a cyclical revival of Larnste, enemy of Krarsht, so this checks out. Games that want to explore the parallel rivalry between the syndicates can easily assign the gotti networks to that side of the ledger, in which case these are not nice people.

I love a lot of this (and will be reading CHILDREN OF HYKIM when I can) but just want to call this bit out as brilliant. This is exactly what we've known since earliest days the God Learners exploited . . . the spirit ecology and economy of the people they encountered, harvesting the various buffs available for short-term fun and profit. And before them, the hrestolic heathen busters. A little of that wonder regenerated but a lot of it went extinct. How The West Was Won.

Within the modern monomyth (aka Belintar orthodoxy) they're the daughters of Gata and Genert, which implies a secret story behind the origin of agriculture as opposed to other expressions of Earth Rune. But other people might recollect it differently.

ISSARIES: Who would steal a cow when the milk flows free? I'm a hustler, not a rustler. ULERIA: Sure, the commodity may be free but the fetish is what we charge for. It's extra.

These theories are the same theory, only cast in different language for different styles of game! Furthermore Thinking about hard assets, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Gold Wheel Dancer glinting somewhere in the mix. Be careful who you pray to!

"Gold Gotti" is a ceremonial role or hero cult buried within the Issaries cult complex and carrying endless historical baggage of pretenders, frauds, rival claims, confidence schemes, bluffs and counterbluffs, eschatological implications, messianic longings, deathbed confessions, funky ponchos and elaborate hats. For most of the third age the title has been mostly latent because nobody seriously wanted to claim it . . . but with the Hero Wars looming on the horizon, a few serious and not-so-serious contenders are stepping up. Recent claimants include that heretical Esrolian (who argued among other things that as Gold Gotti he was immune to Raw Greed and even wore the priceless jewel of infinite price in a filigree cage around his neck), a couple of Aeolians (also heretical, it goes without saying) and "the other guy." The new one, the pirate king, is a question mark. Some people deep inside Mother Market roll their eyes and say he can't possibly understand what the title entails, that he just asked our word for "richest" and that's what he wanted to be called. Others who've talked to him say he knows exactly what it means and this scares them. If they're right, they say, expect a flurry of Gogo Gambino / Gaga Gambino sightings to herald the end of the secular age. Nobody outside Mother Market has any references here. It's just part of our thing.

It is interesting to see free Enjoreli at that relatively late date and a proto-Halikiv so early. The latter in particular must have been a real PITA for the Council to work around . . . I forget, which uz community adopted Arkat, do we remember? The forests seem to be taking their time as well. Or maybe they've already made up their mind and only Rist and the Elf Sea communities are left to complete the purge.

Oh yeah. That's the calculation that makes the recent past (say 1616-24) feel like the default status quo for the merchants we see in the books. It's not as fun as the old days. You have more headaches and margins are narrow because one way or another you have to spend to deal with them. But anyone still in the business after a decade of upheaval has figured out how to persist in that environment. People who didn't have had a decade to hit the exit one way or another. And to those people in the business when the curtain goes up on 1625, this is "normal." You've been doing it for years, in the words of the immortal Kate Bush. IMG "normal" persists for a couple of years. The Grazer route destabilizes somewhat, creating challenges as well as disruptive opportunities. The Boldhome route remains marginally more comfortable but the return profile deteriorates: you've lost access to a lot of valuable stuff in the north that is worth money if you get it on a ship, and the local customer base is in shall we say flux. Maybe for a couple of years you're reduced to touring homesteads for scraps of knitting to send down to the sailors or gambling a stamp on exotic fringe routes like what the Miths have. You're used to this kind of thing. It's not wonderful but the last decade has not been wonderful. From all accounts it starts feeling like a boom around 1627. Maybe this was once "normal" but after so many years of mediocre it feels like up. Weird stuff starts flooding out of the desert. Stuff that's boring to you starts flooding into the desert because it's exotic to them. In a couple of years, you make the right contacts and stuff that only the Red Hair Trackers used to be able to get for you and schlep all the way uphill from Peloria becomes available. Everybody wants to be a Desert Tracker now. It's a fashion craze, a religious revival. Hyena futures go contango for the first time since time. Again, maybe this is "normal" when you factor out all the bandits and flash floods and world war and smog and whatnot . . . but to the people you meet in the game, there's always bandits and smog. As you note here, some of your best customers are bandits and smog.

We definitely don't hear much about the Grazers beyond a certain point. What this means for traders who stayed on that route, I don't know.

Love it. TLDR answer from me is that the unique strategic nature of Nochet as hub of maritime trade still outweighs the incremental risks and challenges of plugging your caravan into that network. If you have stuff north of Nochet, you want to move it south. If you have stuff west of Nochet, you want to move it east. Once you get it to Nochet, you want to sell it, buy new stuff there and then come home to start the cycle again. The last few decades have been crazy but nothing in the literature suggests it got crazy enough to do more than temporarily interrupt that flow of people, ideas, stuff and money. Where it changes from year to year is what you carry, who you work with and the route you use. Like sven says, Dragon Pass was always a hairy enough run that you didn't want to bother shipping bulk goods across it. Keep it small, keep it light, keep it extremely valuable. Crystals. Artifacts. Scrolls. Iron. As the route gets more or less hairy, your mix might adjust. Some classes of trade good might be embargoed on one side or another for political reasons . . . then you decide if you're a trader or a smuggler. The story of that decision is the story of trade in the 1600s and 1610s. It needs to be told and will be some day. IMG the early 1620s are superficially similar despite all the upheavals. Then Kallyr is actually bad for business by making it complicated (less pleasant if not actively illegal) to trade with Peloria through Boldhome while not replacing that established customer base with much of anything. No problem, everyone with a northern interest books a room in Queens Post instead and people, ideas, stuff and money keep flowing. Again, the customer base and the things you carry shifts from year to year. Some markets are getting cold. Others are too hot to handle. Red Earth in the south is simpatico with Red Moon in the north and they love to send each other lavish presents. Argrath is the one who really changes the game by making the Pavis route important. Stuff and money flow across the wastes. It needs to go through Boldhome. It can't go through Queens Post. As long as Argrath tells you Pavis is important, you keep investing resources on that side. You don't need to go up past Furthest any more. In theory, enough of you break on through to fabled Kralorela and the Eest that you retire like mythic kings. Nochet needs silk. Nochet gets a trickle of Seshnegite iron among other things. You can afford that iron and everyone on the trail wants a taste. If the Seas Close (and I have not seen the truth of this yet personally, it might be an allegory or a nightmare, something meant to be read metaphorically), Boldhome becomes the end of the road and Nochet recedes to become a kind of agricultural hinterland, where the crops that feed the armies come from. Boldhome doesn't make anything much beside power and a few rustic local handicrafts. All the world's treasure flows in and the caravans leave empty of everything but coinage and information. But it's hard to project that far out without being proved wrong.

Gruesome when any proximate holy realm crashes and fails its sacred time reboot. Probably a lot of these "realms of beauty [now] lost" scattered around the lozenge . . . at the bottom of mountain lakes, in desolate gullies, poison forests, waste lands. Chaos nests. Lucky the Holy Country has avoided that one so far.

Ladies, gentlemen, demivirgins of all pronouns: may I present the inner teaching of the Red Earth Alliance. If you'll just take one of these traditional wooden charms from the shingle (imported at great cost from the new colonies) you'll understand that the husband protector complex is obsolete in the new world here now. Say farewell to all others who failed to satisfy. All you need is one god, he is a fun god and most importantly a red god, he is portable and he likes the moon. You have nothing to lose but your marital chains and a modest donation duty free.

Red Swords for everyone! Hey, it's the Hero Wars

The Lightbringers are an esoteric demonstration of Orlanth's mastery similar to the Four Weapons subcults but this time reflecting his alliances with the four directional approaches to deep magic. The bearded god is obviously sorcery from the west. Chalana's inner cult maintains the eastern secrets of meditation and transcendence we here on earth lump into the "tara" or other "buddhas of compassion." The remaining dudes are sometimes worshipped collectively as "the stanza of issaries" (or the hyena gospel) and in that form provide access to all the phases of northern spirituality from the most archaic animism through persistent shamanistic traditions and finally something like mainline theism. But that last part is a secret and only diehard HQ fans care about the parts in the middle. The important part is probably what it does for Chalana.

This is very interesting because I previously thought about the Heortling "neuter" as a fourth positive sexual expression different from M+F-, M-F+ and M+F+ . . . a theoretical spectrum for anyone set up along different lines from the binary that prevails here on earth, kind of like how they see in more than three primary colors in The Voyage To Arcturus or how Gold Wheels play a crucial role in giant reproduction. (For "cradle" read "ovipositor.") In this model "neuter" people might read M-F- to outsiders but actually be performing M-F-G+ or M-F-R+ or M-F-G+S+ or whatever multidimensional hanky codes exist in one's fantasy lozenge. Of course someone might also be most fully described as F+G+ or M+F+S+ or any combination but the bronze age rubes from the video game aren't really equipped or interested in handling the rarefied terminology and concepts, so the system functionally tops out at four. But in the absence of these exotic experiences, "neuter" as true "none" also reads as uninitiated or non-initiable. I guess this formally includes children and foreigners who might not have the adulthood ordeals where they come from . . . or members of minority cults that participate in the community but remain aloof from the O+E mysteries? And again, assignment in edge cases becomes a challenge for the initiators as you point out. I think I really like this as a description of how it works practically in modern Sartar. It has ramifications for child rearing though, with I guess voria / voriof being more about the way household labor is gendered . . . "boys" can simply be those juvenile neuters who work outside and "girls" staying closer to the house, no matter what sex they end up initiating into. It's tricky. Likewise, I think Androgeus is a tricky figure here because the original model wasn't so much persistent M+F+ as the possibility of reassignment . . . the pronouns flow, never "they" (Greg had access to early efforts toward non-binary vocabulary and didn't use them here) but a succession of "he" and then "she" and then "him" again. I wonder who the children of Androgeus are in modern Sartar and how they fit into the O+E hegemony. Shamanism may be a cleaner fit . . . and as the original post suggests, shamanic initiation tends to be intimate and unique, you truly don't know who you're going to encounter or what they're going to reveal about the shape of your life. Think of all the spirit sexes and all the roles people play. It's exciting.

This one got me to jump because while looking at fragmentary accounts of the ancient empire of Elamle I misremembered there being a "nose" people hanging around the Maslo. So let's roll with it if we want the zaranistangi to bring up an entire survival covenant along with their eye lopers: * "nose" lopers . . . a variety of mutant troll from the Mari highlands, maybe a "hot troll" or something entirely different (the text says tamali) and mercifully lost to history * "ear" lopers . . . jel-mre literally means "big ears," Greg was in a linguistic phase at the time * "leaper" lopers . . . at the time these were the pel-mre who might or might not have been recycled later in the lore * "hular" . . . mysterious, "nearly mindless," practically legendary even at this stage and maybe others escaping from the ultimate collapse of the blue empire. Some breeding stock might have survived in the northern continent as bizarre disorderly oddities of the waste. Others might still get pumped out of the Mother of Monsters, whose secret is that she's what happened to their "herd mother," ramping the Dumb Theory energy up another notch. Poor dumb Eiritha of the far southeast, gigantic, mindless and fecund. When survival covenants go bad. See also: Gaggle (Chaos); Terror (Sky); Tyram

I hear that! Not trying to be deliberately obscure . . . it's just that my relationship to the "deities of vegetation" has varied from the mainstream Glorantha where most people have to play, which can make my blithering less than constructive here. But here's two or three things I know about him, his worship and how he fits into GOG. 1. Falamal signifies a strategic perspective on death, change and time that predates what we consider modern bronze age Man Rune consciousness. All the primal runes are like this in their own way. He is the patron of coming back just like Rashoran(a) is the patron of a different essential and transformative insight about life & how to live it. Most of his surviving manifestations have plant bodies nowadays so we call him Plant Rune, but in the morning of the world he was a larger ecosystem, a green world unto himself that survives in mystic places like the deep Jhostrobbios. We might classify him as an elder "water" god, the original bridegroom of the world in a prior cycle. 2. "Grisly portions" or discrete mysteries of Falamal are incorporated into cults as widely separated as Yelm, Pamalt, Caladra Aurelion / Chaladra Arroin and various Yelmalio precursors, not to mention many entities no longer actively worshipped. If you squint the right way, you can see the iconography everywhere. ("Green" Issaries, "Red" Moon.) A lot of the good parts currently exist inside the bellies of nominally hostile "eater" cults as well. This is all part of the cyclical nature of Falamal, who is constantly disintegrating and constantly always coming home, constantly dying somewhere and constantly being born. Nowadays Plant Rune is not so much a mythological character as a type of diacritical mark that hovers around various phenomena, a moving line that alters the meaning of everything around it . . . a portable technology of the soul reminiscent of the lunar way but ultimately incompatible with it. Reminiscent of Rashoran but a little less incompatible. 3. Anybody who studies plants is a half step on the road to Falamal initiation. Elves are the people who literally forgot the forest to be the trees. Their occasional veneration of Falamal as Plant is as garbled as everyone else's. Most plants are barely conscious, like dreams from the green world, a kind of "shadows dance." (Some shadows are painted with green paint. Some are purple.) Elves are as neotenic or transitional as dragonewts but to the extent to which they emulate "Aldrya" or Man Rune Mother and she is conceptualized as a tree they are forgetting Falamal and on the road to becoming people dreaming that they are plants. Falamal is the other way around. "For the father nothing." Let them go, let them come and go. The secret of Falamal is mastery of one of the ways things can come and go. EDIT and it strikes me that we know the name of the god on the threshold between dark and sea but not much is said about the transition from sea to soil beyond the fact that it was tasty eating.