scott-martin

Funny you should mention "Arroin." The cosmic force we call Flamal is so archaic and so widespread that an entire ecosystem of younger cults with different names has sprouted to carve up his mythological portfolio. What's left behind lurking in the shrines of figures more easily approached by humans or elves is a sacred mystery, something like Arachne Solara behind Cragspider or the Red Goddess hiding above the Mothers. Even his remaining spell(s) are something of a tangible metaphor for what he really is and why he's important. Unless your players are very interested, I wouldn't worry about it. If they are, they'll find out in play and be richly rewarded. Most will approach through the elf gardener channel (only the first step) but there are always a few wild revelations, even among human-identifying people. But communion with him teaches a kind of cyclical immortality that is worth having even if it fits poorly on the character sheet.

Stand in the place where you live indeed. How exciting to see the entirety of the Harry Middleton Hyatt books up on the archive where they belong, accessible to all who know how to look. Here if you want to develop "teenage dirtbag tidewater Orlanth" and his blockbuster bride for local markets.

Great to see you again, how have you been?

I love these "Memnazons" too so maybe a little more detail from the Seshnegi Book of Foreigners (maybe 1967 so about five years before Sam Delany briefly wrote Wonder Woman) might trigger more inspiration. In this era, Greg believed that Teshnos and the islands were colonized by an agimori people out of what becomes Maslo. Bits of this saga resurface in Revealed Mythologies and other places, but there's also evidence that a few pages have been lost here and there and need to be reconstructed. What we have paints a complex picture of cross-continental exchange of people and ideas in the early imperial era (one marginal note has the Teshnos enclave settled around 700 ST). They seem to have been pretty good people, capable when pushed into a fight but otherwise content to enrich themselves and their allies through trade. One day, according to the primary account, the king and queen got in a big fight over concubines and the jealous queen bargained the "perpetual virginity" of all the "maidens" of the isle to the goddess. In return, the goddess killed all the dudes. A brief reference elsewhere claims that the women killed the dudes on their own against the backdrop of an intensification of the long struggle between regional tiger and turtle people. IMG both stories contain their truth and it's even possible that something like an amazon fever struck multiple colonies at various times in different circumstances as the imperial era unfurled. Some accounts forget about the god's warrior sister entirely, which might contain a secret in itself. The god and the goddess only act together three times in the fragments we have: being born, establishing themselves on the island and then again when both of them ensure that the now-piratical women of the island only come back with female captives. After that, the goddess recedes a little from the narrative and the god, who previously "did nothing," emerges as the more famous figure. If you want to get deep here they remind me of nothing so much as the Brigitte Lin character(s) in Ashes Of Time, 慕容嫣／慕容燕 (murong yin and murong yang) and might even be a Mask of Androgeus. Araslithos probably has the knowing of such things to the extent to which she takes after classical gender sage Tiresias, and why not really. When someone gives you Gender Island you naturally want to collect gender things there. But they do become pirates along with other dispossessed peoples around Fethlon and the islands. The failure of their sex raids might be how they remember the Closing, since this was the moment when the sea failed them and they needed a more exotic solution. The presence of foreign concubines suggests that they had a tradition of sex raiding before turning amazon, so this might simply be something they did on the island. Now that ships can go farther out again, Greg suggests that they are so hot to kill that they attach themselves to foreign wars just for the fun of it. If they didn't have good boats before, they have them now. And one last thing. The story of the origin of the god twins is garbled a little with the story of the royal couple's big fight. Right now, I think the foreign concubine they fight over (the details are vague, sports fans) is how the twin gods get to the island in the first place. Her name is "Urela," not 50 words after Greg commits a bit of a freudian slip by referring to "Uleria" as goddess of War. Whoever she was and wherever she came from, I think she brought the strange magic with her that then transformed island life. Later identification with Tolat and the spread of red planet cults is then left to be discovered in play.

Go with the Wonder Woman analogue if that fits Your Glorantha. Lynda Carter is definitely a figure to conjure with and there's nothing wrong with them having either inherited or developed uncanny magical munitions indistinguishable from the finest dwarf engineering. In a pinch I like the distributed supply chain @Effmentions. It reminds me of the way intricate clockwork manufacture was outsourced to cottage workers in Switzerland. On their own, no part-time dairy farmer could ever build a mechanical bird. But with the right guidance and logistics, it happens almost naturally. I wouldn't be surprised if they have a lot of other marvels beyond the crossbows circulating in the jungle. But the question of influence is interesting so I went down to the basement for a refresher course on what the Trowjang amazons were like in the earliest sources, back before Wonder Woman had reverted to a powerless catsuit karate model in order to compete directly with Diana Rigg. The island was named Eusbol back then and in a bit of trivia the inhabitants were of pamaltelan descent. Amazonism begins in a kind of reverse lysistrata in which the goddess (the god who becomes identified with Tolat has a twin sister, a virgin huntress, which makes the island something like Delos) kills the men and then the god consoles the now-thirsty ladies. In this early version they kill all their boy babies, which suggests that Arislithos is female (or excruciatingly crafty). From the tone, all of this transpired in Ancient Times such that we only remember men on the island from the earliest accounts. It has a shaggy dog Herodotan quality, but hey, amazons! It would be interesting if some faction of the original Eusbol colonists actually brought the Artmal pantheon with them and so made some effort to associate the local twin children of Love and War with gods they knew, contributing to the cult of someone we now call Tolat but on the island his name was something like "Tawar." Also I like them having a complex relationship with the dwarves because why not.

In my expanded awareness of the role of the Eurmal complex (a persistent 1% of the population across the barbarian belt), those touched by disorder and illusion are available to wear all masks not otherwise locally available. They can be death, the sun, a woman, the sea, Kalt Whoever He Is, other brother from another mother, anybody called for in the ritual whose role we need a warm body to fill. Very, very few are professional tricksters or have much in the way of real magic. The specifics vary dramatically . . . some are local "funny guys" who aren't satisfied with singing the same song everybody else does, others are pathetic scapegoats . . . but when under the auspices of the mask they are under the laughing god's care and messing too much with one in the execution of their duties is asking for wild trouble. For most, participation is its own reward because it lets you demonstrate your cleverness and maybe speak a little truth to local power without real consequences. Others get dragged into it out of desperation, bullying or just because they draw the short straw. Either way, the larger LB structure works behind the scenes to pay their bar bills and keep them mostly out of trouble because they're a useful ritual resource. As for Orlanth, my sense of the god's role in modern civil society might Vary but that's between me, the god and the gossips. Remember, I don't worship conventional Orlanth, so the notion of me having to send my kids to Orlanth Camp before they can legally drive a wagon or even be eligible for their trade stick raises an elegantly manicured eyebrow. We're happy to send our kids to camp for the networking and the experience but reserve the right to educate them in the important things ourselves. I'm sure the Sisters of Mercy and other minority cultists agree . . . the beard dads probably resent exposing the kids to all that alarming sunshine and fresh air., but it's good for them. Are we all Orlanthi All or aren't we? Here's a free idea, though: in areas that are really into O+E, send everybody to camp and they come back adults. Adventurous can keep some of them for a gap year or six. Thunderous takes a few weirdos. "Civil Orlanth" initiation is your wedding, when you transition from free adult to full representative of the O+E mystery. And if you don't settle down, Adventurous and Thunderous have their separate roads to travel so it's not like I'm pushing a heteronormative theogamic solution. If you wanna be free, be free. There's a million things to be, you know that there are.

This is one of the reasons we have this thread, thank you both for the revelations.

Much of what mystically sensitive people in Dragon Pass lived through in the years leading to 1625 cannot be objectively substantiated by the geological or archaeological record but instead had more the character of a long nightmare or prophetic experience, a kind of long communal dream. For them, it "happened" . . . but then again, from outside, it didn't. Think of the prophetic visions of Matthias Stormberger, a sense of moving forward through time while the profane world froze solid. A chance to gather symbolic insight that would become essential in the apocalyptic future to come, a kind of pre-opening-night preview for friends of the theatre whose input might be useful when tickets go on sale. They dreamed years of search and tribulation. And then, depending on your point of view, either they woke up or the outer world joined them, the dream became contagious, a shadow projected backward in time as the dragon pressed snooze. Have I already done this one?

This makes so much sense they must've already tried it in the early wanes and then for some reason adopted / returned to the theyalan 5x8 + 2. I wonder what went wrong.

This is my struggle as well as far as "adulthood is an initiation sponsored by the supermajority cult but is different from supermajority cult initiation" goes, but we can take that up in greater intensity later. I like the associate rune spell as mechanical solution . . . and love all this Eurmal talk for shedding great light on that cult's function in the larger ritual landscape. Maybe a parallel route to answers is what happens when the other pits fail. I'm running a couple of kids through the system and something goes terribly wrong. What rune spell do those kids get?

"From a grammatological perspective, 'star captain' is neither a singular or collective noun but demonstrates instead the characteristics of a verb . . . less a fossil pantheon fragmented solar tempora and more of a primeval technology of the soul that survives in a pulverized state like letters in the alphabet shuffled into the words that live. When the soul in extremis calls out, this is the angelic order that hears and suddenly clasps the petitioner to his heart. The petitioner does not always survive the experience. Every Star Captain, in the final analysis, is terrifying." - Geleron Purple, "Crystal Blood, Alloy Bones"

I think this is important to reiterate. While Kallyr might have tried really hard to make Polestar happen in Sartar, it never really took off as a sustainable Orlanth alternative. Instead, her life ended with an exploration of the deep proprietary Orlanth mysteries and not any new revelation to share with her nation. Other approaches might have worked and might still work . . . but as yet, it's all hypothetical, we don't know until people roll the dice. At least one Trick Star was probably among the expressions gathered in Slontos and now mostly lost to the surface world. Such an entity might have looked a little like "storm" to people who had a different sense of the sky / sun / star taxonomy and so been conflated with Worlath and/or the Ring that ultimately converges on the Pole Star on the way up and out . . . but the records were shall we say poorly preserved.

The god Yelm mutilated and chained was Lodril. The god Orlanth murdered was Polaris. At a certain point these stories are synopticised differently.

I hate to ask how this happens with Herd Men unless through some inversion . . . ball of tails, ball of thumbs. Probably a lot of tail shame around the moro people in general.

As a small child, an old friend came up with a very simple and memorable definition of church: "first they take the money, then they do the magic trick." Since he was raised Congregationalist and their minister at the time happened to be an amateur sleight-of-hand man there truly was some weekly flimflam designed to dazzle the eye and maybe open the heart . . . even if few magic points were ever transferred. When we were a little older and more sophisticated the broader insight into "the central mystery of our faith" became something a little more profound. Strip out all the singing and all the talking and first they take the money and then they perform what amounts to a magic trick. Then they let you go. IMG every western service will have a very different hymnal and read different texts across divergent liturgical cycles but the core structure remains remarkably consistent. They get people together. There's some preliminaries that function to get individuals thinking and feeling along a communal track, often punctuated with smaller side bits of business and administration. At a certain point, the celebrant collects the "money" through whatever sorcerous apparatus they like in that corner of the world and then some of that collective effervescence is burned off to run the "magic trick," which can run the gamut from nebulous "keep the world alive" cosmological برك or baraka to more specific کرامات like healing the sick, shielding the troops, what have you. A lot of the local and sectarian variance depends on how much of the money is immediately burned off in community support and how much gets banked to do the work of higher authorities or the celebrants themselves. Over the years of publishing the sources have taken different perspectives on the optimal math here but to me I suspect the "malkioni all" releases roughly as many magic points back into the community over a typical liturgical cycle as theists can capture in their rites. That's the threshold you need in Glorantha to perpetuate a community without having your money dry up as people die, get fed up, seek alternative consolations or otherwise become hardened to the blandishments. Places like sinister Ramalia will off course pursue seriously unbalanced relationships . . . all money, no magic trick for the masses . . . but historically these kinds of arrangements rarely persist before the system fails. Isolated sectarian enclaves, on the other hand, probably burn a lot more of the money on the regular miracles because there isn't much hierarchy around to perpetuate much in the way of long-term esoteric ritual agendas or be tempted into short-term gratification magic. I suspect everyone on this thread is correct for some community at some stage of historical development.

Not just a mystic . . . not just a crazed mystic. A crazed dental mystic. EDIT also he could be adopted. maybe all the children of Androgeus come to the family in noteworthy ways.

My sense of this has evolved since that 2017 thread. So, thank God, has my style! I think the canonical children of Androgeus listed in WBRM are more like in-crowd references or jokes than anything intrinsic to Gloranthan reality, which means that if you're exploring their nature in play, you're approaching the fringes of the world itself. The answers should be strange, confusing, a little cosmic and maybe even contradictory. Now this particular flavor does not pair well with what a lot of people like about Jaldon, but if you want to run with it on your own, it might be fun to highlight the apocalyptic psychedelic metal album cover aspects of ruined Prax and the Plateau of Statues, emphasizing the strangeness around Jaldon in order to find a better fit with the mysteries of Androgeus. Jaldon may be very different when he's with his "family" than he is from his cultists' perspective. Perversely, you might look for the other known children first and worry about Goldtooth later.

To piggyback the great things everyone else is saying, only from a ritual ecology POV: Most village level initiators do not worry too much about special cases. Their job is to transition as many local kids as possible into adult members of the community without messing them up. After all, you're going to have to deal with them and their families afterward and a lot of the time their family is your family so the stakes are about as high as it gets. If you break one, you've got a tough conversation ahead of you. This means you're going to prepare as well as you can in advance to bias the ordeal in their favor. It's serious business. You coach them, put them on a special fortifying diet, clean the site to eliminate strange influences. Recent writing suggests that people have figured out how to test the kids in advance to identify obvious outliers . . . someone who is better suited to one of the specialty lightbringers or other associated cult. I suspect that's a little fancy for most clans historically, but in that scenario these kids aren't Orlanth's problem. You're running an Orlanth initiation and that means everyone follows Orlanth's role in the story. You talk about the brothers and everybody learns from that, but you only really run Strange Gods. Arguably learning where the brothers are coming from and what they're all about is one of the secret keys to Strange Gods, for that matter. You sit with them until they make it through Strange Gods together. Arguably this is another secret that makes Orlanth special. Somebody is always paying close attention and usually has the tools to catch kids who look like they're going too far off script. Enforcement here is a personal call. All them ultra-traditionalist clans you read about are probably really strict about when they eject a kid from the ordeal but in modern times I think a typical ritual expert will give the kids more space to splash around in the myth. Maybe that's what the runic identification testing thing is all about, who knows. This might mean a kid picks up a few fleeting experiences with somebody else's pit and the points on the character sheet adjust accordingly. If you get a truly bad kid at this stage, you really haven't been keeping your eyes open while the kid was growing up. You already had a lot of chances to intervene in their trajectory. It takes a village to raise a bad kid. A lot of bad kids are just masks of Strange Gods you don't even know about, so you should be working with that kid to identify the god and find people who can help you out. I think a lot of these kids are the ones people in this thread are talking about. Maybe down in Esrolia for example they know how to negotiate the Sex Pit successfully. You and your people have no idea. Maybe it scares you because that's where the devil comes from. Send the kid to the specialists for guidance and keep running Strange Gods. In a year or two the kid comes back with specialized knowledge or doesn't come back at all. You run Strange Gods not for the Strange Gods but for Orlanth. Most (85%) of your kids are not all that Strange in themselves. You're teaching them how to cooperate with other people and turn each other's individual differences into a collective asset. Your brothers and your other others have their own pits to climb out of. This one is yours.

Provenance and nomenclature aside, I really like the notion of alien survival covenants migrating into Eiritha Country with their exotic adaptations. Good for story and gives the loper people a little more ecological heft while testing the limits of the Prax system in play. What does it take to be children of Eiritha? How does adoption work? Does the process go both ways?

It's a sad thing really because I translate that one a little more floridly as "The life within is the law without: that which you have rejected will save you whereas he who clingeth to the letter of it shall become a corpse and be eaten." Whatever that might mean in one's Glorantha of course!

Giants! And little "tailors."

I have a line on the Third Bean but will let it get a little dumber before we're sure.

One interesting detail that emerges right away is that Hrestol initiation functions a lot like "illumination" already here. On the quest, very little fruit is forbidden, and with that in mind I suspect this has been an attractive historical option for many people who identify as sorcerers as well as everyone else. Questing sorcerers are, for example, free to be their own boss and not settle for a support role in their own lives. This is important in zzabur politics where there are constraints that must be obeyed or subverted. Riddler consciousness and other rashoranic states open up additional moral flexibility as jajagappa notes. Outside the hrestol framework, everything is permitted and a sorcerer (or anyone) can follow desire wherever it goes. This means that the reception of the riddlers in the West was probably a lot more complicated than current research suggests, but [SCENE MISSING]. At the very least we know that elements of the hrestol cult resisted the new approach well enough to attract Arkat's early interest, so they weren't considered perfectly compatible by everyone at the time. It's interesting to consider the classic arkat system as a kind of illuminated or perfected hrestolism with slightly more prominent stygian and aeolian trappings, but at that point caste becomes something more individual, like the various menus of geasa and gifts . . . just another array of player options for customizing the character that is your life. Again, much of this has since been suppressed so there's a little conjecture here. In my experience immortals who are worried about their status do not willingly investigate any teaching that might interfere with their immortality. The potential price is literally infinite and so the rewards of innovation almost never compensate for the risk. This makes riddler illumination something like a plague without a cure in places like the island where nervous immortals would retreat from centres of pestilence and eliminate the infected from a safe distance. You brew up some horals and launch a crusade. But for me brithini immortality is theoretical anyway. We just won't know who had the best system until time is over, and until then there's still plenty of opportunity to make mistakes. In theory an immortal who receives illumination transcends the fear of non-existence and can get on with a new way of life, which may or may not be objectively long or short, it no longer matters quite so much. And an immortal who hears a riddle and remains unchanged remains as immortal as ever. I do know Theoblanc keeps a lot of people busy brewing medicine so the only thing a rokarist has to lose is whatever form of solace they aspire to over there, and I was taught you can't get to solace without dying anyway.

I blame Facebook. I just saw a compelling argument that while the archaic proto-Heortish æʃəˈri commonly referred to the tally some irregularities in the grammar actually point back to a more botanical origin . . . something like a Praxite "bean." this makes sense when you consider that a primordial "bean" cult or dealer would need some permanent way to remember accounts and inventory, and so created the tattoo as a reminder after the feel-groovy trance receded. (Not to be boring but there are reasons to suspect the equally archaic arhwō, arhwɔɪn was originally a separate "bean" later associated with an anthropomorphic entity and cult.) In this emergent model it is Caarith who actually invented modern universal "Issaries" as the vehicle for her particular commodity distribution network and later, under its influence, started consolidating local and regional variants under its double-bowl "peace pipe" rune. Turns out the Desert Trackers aren't the trash kicked to the corners but the secret origins of our thing.

In that scenario not a whole lot changes except I suspect the fighting style becomes more refined. Maybe this pleases them in the great sword schools . . . those who reject it can develop the rapier.