scott-martin

I love this. Having taken a step back (in order to get a running start on a leap) I think Seshnela has its choice of dramatic roles in the terminal third age. The land, its human resources and mythic history can be used as a reservoir of exotic ideas and materials for the Dragon Pass hero war. People are driven east and their abilities are put to work. Whatever independent agenda they follow is not recorded in the documents we currently have. Meanwhile your tomb raiders and other opportunistic outsiders are raiding the area for secrets to deploy back home. Not much of this makes it into the Dragon Pass chronicles, which suggests that like many of the more interesting people fleeing Rokarist tyranny a lot of it actually ends up elsewhere, in somebody else's hero war we don't know about yet. A Hero War finds a use for things. While it's superficially tempting to imagine western resources flowing into the Lunar war effort, it's just too awkward a fit unless you look north beyond the Janube. The larger diaspora seems to flee along the more southerly corridors into Nochet and the islands, but there isn't a lot of documentation of Argrath finding a use for these people and their magic. They must go somewhere else. I think they ultimately go home to play out the real Seshnelan hero war, which is fought on the domestic symbolic territory in order to reveal the land to itself. In this version, the saga plays out a lot like the old Sartarite campaign, with exiles scattering across strange lands and gathering experience and resources along the way to make their return convincing. Some of these strange lands are foreign countries: the wreckage of Malkonwal, Black Horse Country, the apostate enclaves scattered hither and yon, the vast sleep of Umathela. Others are in the past now, buried treasure underfoot. A lot of these people are actually within the Wolf Pirates right now and so will feed into that epic, far from Argrath and the Moon.

The mountain story now called "The Rockwoods" is one of my obsessions so beware . . . surface may be slippery. Internal evidence suggests it was collected from the Arstola, which suggests that we're specifically talking about the Mislari twist in the range here. But I love your scrub goblins up there helping to ensure that nobody tries to cross. Maybe these elves are red, maybe they even retained a few echoes of the "lost" white elf way up above the tree line. Maybe we've been reminded over the years that it's easier to find a smart theory than a dumb one. However I love this one because it means that the Hound talks with the voice of [spoiler]StarScream[/spoiler], which is highly valuable character work.

The Japanese stuff is great. A tangent makes me desperate to give them an Algonquian ambience but haven't made it past "Da-shi" in Ojibwe, "the many" or "the quantity," "the collective." I love the notion of them being either very small or sometimes very large, the primal original inhabitants of the range. Since some stories suggest that the Mislari were made to separate Maker from proto-elf and proto-dwarf nations from each other, maybe the ones who survive into history have characteristics that we'd associate with both today. Either way, my gut is that Ethilrist got his "goblins" from somewhere.

One of the things I really like about this twist in the thread is the way it reinterprets Hon-Eel's magical crusade against the horse people as also a reform within the post-Sheng Pelorian narrative. From a certain point of view, proving herself as a better Bride Of The Sun in that era simultaneously rectifies the relation between the Yelm and the Dendara they had in the Celestial Empire's wake. Before that achievement, the narratives didn't agree. After that achievement, after centuries of divergent development, they did. She found the Pelorians a new way to think about Dendara that might also be the return of an ancient way. She found the horse people a new way too. Some settled down and became "lunarized." To quote Tight Indigo Pants, poet-prophetess of the white moon city, "Hon-Eel proved she was somebody's Dendara but not necessarily mine." Now what's exciting about this of course is that the memory of this becomes imbedded in the imperial state policy apparatus as something you can try to integrate someone else's mythic system into the lunar way. Most cultures have somebody like a Dendara so they tried it in the south. But the identity of Dendara with Ernalda is controversial so it didn't really work. FHQ in particular laughed it off. This frustrated, confused and maybe even scared certain people who relied on this particular expression of the Eel complex, the "third" inspiration and not the present inspiration. So they kept trying weirder solutions that we might hear about some day when someone explicates Red Earth and "husband switches" and so on . . . but ultimately they pushed too hard and the wind went away.

We can actually have it both ways if in your Glorantha the Carmanian occupation brought new aristocratic naming conditions into the Pelorian bowl as well as their interpretation of Western zoology. The "romanoid" families today would be old and conservative, flaunting their antique lineages even though the actual lunar elite and true Dara Happan old money would both roll their eyes in different directions at the comic pretense of it. They're probably most prevalent in the working imperial services and so you find them in the officer corps, bureaucracy and so on. Not so much the Western Reaches where the elites had already moved past these trappings before the moon ever even rose. A slightly less flattering version of this story is that when the Carmanians came in, broken post-Kill lineages were assigned artificial sorcerous names just like newly discovered wild animals in need of a working genealogy. Pelorians being who they are, a surprising number of them liked it and still use the names today.

This will come as a shock in the right quarters. I love it.

Once you're off the beaten track you can end up all kinds of hundred-letter thunder places, oh yeah. The trick is reconnecting with the timeline afterward. I suspect a shocking number of people didn't.

The challenge with pivoting to other lightbringers is that historically those cults didn't provide the O+E magic that maintains the vibrant world. Initiates and converts alike will try their utmost to make it happen . . . maybe they'll get partial results or recover strange buried mysteries, but on the whole full success eludes them. The best they can do is deploy their specialized magic to keep the world more or less alive. You're going to remember variant survival stories in a hurry. Even people who want to remain faithful to O+E will be tempted in extremis to resort to suppressed variants that were excised from the normal cults long ago but never really went away. Gagarth comes back with a literal vengeance. People undoubtedly get mixed up in (Sor)Ana Gor in the mother belt. All the questing may reopen deep questions about other ways to venerate Storm and Earth that people discarded in historical times. Maybe some of them work more or less. The fringe results will be surprising and shocking. IMG this period is increasingly more of a deep communal dream or nightmare than anything empirical. In this model the seeds still sprout, the winds still blow the rain in, the crops still mature . . . but none of the people can see it or feel connected to the cycle in any meaningful way. It's the Waste Land vision, the death of god experience, the dark night of the world soul. The inner gates of heroquesting slam open and whole nations are cast to wander the spiritual desert in search of the same answers your players are looking for. How do you fix the world, where is god ,what does the grail king need--

This thread has convinced me that the mythic system of Kanthor's Isles contains a somewhat different mix + that based on the sedrali of Ralios this might be where you go to find the human heads. I think they would definitely have lion forms based on the regional history. Giving them wings is a slightly tougher proposition but possible . . . a lot we don't know about lion empire religion.

I love it but might as well count every flower in the field and then in Esrolia there's always another field. Agreed that the "land of 10000 goddesses" formula reads like somebody's religious program . . . maybe it's a line in the old mother catechism that drifts in and out of obscurity within time and rises to the surface in the doctrinal struggles of the 1620s. I think it's probably an Ernaldist slogan establishing that that particular goddess is For All Women (orlanthi all, orlanthi women) and contrasting her universal church to whatever multitudes they offer in the Paps or Peloria (10000 is 100x100, literally the entirety of the gods wall system squared and the square is the earth shape) or wherever. If you can name a goddess there's probably room for her somewhere in the long list and then you have been coopted into the Ernalda Complex. Ironically there's a minor achilles heel in this magical program much like the City of 10000 Magicians, which might share its history. Once you establish that there are no more than 100x100 slots available, every one you fill takes you closer to the moment when you need to revise the list or admit that you're done. This might be an apocalyptic scenario somewhere but I don't think it's much of a problem in practical terms. Hon-Eel didn't try to stuff the list and Jar-Eel doesn't seem interested. I think Deezola understood it with her comb and strange rune but she's long gone now. And in her day Nochet must have seemed impossibly far away . . . better to focus on where she was standing and let the strange land goddesses circulate, she had other things to do. Local theologians know they have enough wiggle room to establish a few identities among the most minor cults, squeezing (for example) Delaina and Deleanora together and liberating the redundant slot when the doctrinal distinction that initially mandated two entities is no longer relevant. As long as they can keep doing that, there's little real threat of Goddess Ten Thousand And One showing up some day and ending the cycles of time. Although maybe in a Hera War it will happen. For now, they're pretty clever in Nochet about this kind of divine taxonomy, possibly a residual defense (or offense) mechanism left over from Goddess Switch Times. But the thrust isn't immediately useful in the struggle of empires and so tends to get overlooked.

Why stop at two [Jar] Eels? Surely she encompasses multitudes! --[ * ] -- God Learner claims that the Elder Races had gone extinct (or more precisely were converted) within their territory are actually grounded in empirical exploratory data. However they failed to anticipate the recidivism rates when the empire shifted into reverse; terminal second age as shadowrun scenario.

I forget when Gonn Orta harrows Nida and delivers the jolanti to the elves' tender gifts . . . this would be the perfect moment for shocking revelations. Great stuff. Gathering notes.

Love all of this. While I'd be happy to receive a dump of newly excavated pages from the 1960s not a lot of fragmentary documentation has made its way into circulation yet . . . there's a strong sense that as with other Soul Arrangers some nymph or other autochthonous force distracted Greg from this corner of the world and left it to develop out of sight. As a result, we have to either acknowledge that History is thinner here (after the Gbaji interruption, the God Learners, the Ban) or that the sources simply haven't been found. One thing that makes My Glorantha a little heretical is that I attribute the collapse of the Greenwood to the horrific struggle between Brown and Green that consumed so many forests in the post-Nysalor reconciliation. If any faction of western men did that deed they would have left records bragging about it. Instead, their silence tells me it was something not even the elves are fond of discussing. But this is unlikely to show up in the publishing. I'll check the maps on Talastar to see the ebb and flow of forest there, or at least on the eastern frontier.

Mostal had a wife and she was the mother of earthquakes, not a rock lord but an inhuman queen. Not even the shakers remember now, of course. But oh how they dance.

Suddenly flashing back to alt.magick.dojo!

I've been hunting the "Dragon Ernalda" who apparently vanished or was transformed when the EWF system evaporated and think we've found her. One of the reasons this thread exists!

I really like slowing the year to make room for Moon Season. Reminds me of other efforts to reform the calendar, which reminds me that while the colored moons have a foot in Robert Graves they're also the virtues of the republic. Of course the blue moon is free but sad, the white moon is "comedy" (cruelty) and the lonely sexy one is dominant.

Big win!! Are modern high llamas that tall? Either way, new context for why horses are not native to the Garden since they only really emerge in the Miocene . . .

I would hate to waste your bandwidth so am extremely happy you found it useful. Yeah, this is the event when Steve Perrin got his well-earned knighthood. Refreshing my memory more closely, our little friend might formally be an "aardvark" drawn by someone without a lot of zoological training and so has tapir characteristics as well as that bushy skunk tail. Maybe it's really "the Set animal," which I'd associate with morokanth anyway.

I wasn't there when Nomad Gods was coming together but can easily imagine the conversation revolving around something like a boar as a useful metaphor for food chain inversion . . . and then somebody (probably William Church, maybe or maybe not with Greg's urging) tweaked the silhouette toward the tapir for aesthetic purposes, leaving us with something less immediately symbolic than a regular "short pig" but ultimately more complex. Either way, by the time it got to Gene Day they were tapirs. There seems to have been an undercurrent of tapir art in Bay Area fandom by the time Greg got to town, as revealed in the early SCA flyer for the 1968 Spring Tournament. Of course it could have gone in an aardvark (earth "pig") direction instead, in which case Joerg has beaten me to the punch and Gene Day's Canadian connections suddenly become extremely interesting around 1977-8. (sorry formatting is off around post pictures . . . most elegant placement I can get today) I think the inversion was baked into Nomad Gods from the earliest tests but would welcome correction. If I were betting I'd say the inversion came first and then they looked for an animal to represent it . . . I doubt Church would simply draw a four-legged tribe on his own initiative.

Orlanth is considered just another lowfire in the Lodril Belt.

Yeah. Even if the cult itself has no institutional Reprisal, leaving the cult can still make enemies . . . who are now free to seek their nastiest (one-use) forms of revenge. Nice way to bond with the new party.

The notion that a lot of these P[l]ent diaspora cultures have already hit a hard historical wall and reinvented themselves (charismatic revelation) is very liberating. The system FHQ transformed probably didn't work a lot like what they have on the steppe now . . . a family resemblance, yeah, but the devil is in the differences. It might not even have looked much like the late classical demibirth Kargzant most steppe people followed back in the 1240s. We need to send more desert trackers all the way up. Tarsh had pretty deep reservoirs of earth magic. I guess when the Pauper came south he already had an ancestral sense of the goddess as "Ernalda" (or "OrNalda") which is interesting for people who track that kind of thing. Maybe this lore starts interacting with what the vendref brought up and uh seeds the cultural landscape for recombinant insights ahead. It's interesting that "hyalor" is an optional eater technology in the larger Holy Country earth rites . . . lesser and greater meats.

This is great! I hope you'll keep us in the loop on what you find out in play about your god. IMG they were once closer to the "true" merchant cults than they are today but as others have mentioned their real cosmic role was elsewhere and has now been forgotten or deliberately obfuscated. A character exploring the mysteries around Sun County might be able to participate in the uh reinvention of the wheel. Who is he really? I think the wagon man has always been envious of the riders even when he rose to a celestial estate in some vanished imperial system or another . . . while the riders might have had a word for him that sounded a little like "vendref," crippled (walking) thing. There may be vestiges of shamanic ordeals. (Mules are sterile.) And while he was never quite a charioteer there are family relationships there to explore as well. Who were his bad dogs? Who slipped the pin off his axle as the old empires imploded? Where is it now?

A lot going on and I am tired but I keep coming back to this bit. My intuition is that the murder of Malkion is the crucial event of their Great Darkness, the irruption of chaos into an already unsettled world. This event is portrayed differently in various modern and historical western accounts, each with its theological bias and agenda. For some, the breaking of the world became inevitable when the expulsion happened. Others will say that the exile itself was the original "sin" or mistake that broke the world and everything after that is just consequences. And apologists throughout will defend decisions that others mourn as cosmic errors. Few can agree on anything. Most try to distract themselves and each other with other topics. But there might have been a few people, maybe in the dawn times, who put together something like the LBQ as told from Flesh Man's point of view. In this account, the role of the wind god shifts from the accidental bringer of death to the friend of man who repents his complicity in the fall of the world and is now doing his best to set things right. There's no royal Orlanth here yet. There's just a trickster in multiple masks. And there's no solar emperor here to offend and betray. There's just the Grandfather, the first ancestor. This reverse perspective on the LBQ was not well known to the Dawn Council and I suspect was something Harmast had to discover on his initial West Faring when he encountered the mythic landscape of that quadrant and incorporated into his rite the friendly or useful pieces he met along the way. I think his second LBQ was very different from the first in terms of the amount of Flesh Man material available at the time and opened up different territory in return . . . but Harmast was never a Flesh Man devotee and so the archaic Malkion rite never really made it into his reconstruction of the Orlanth story. And so it goes. So imagine an early incomplete version of the story we all think we know by heart today. No solar emperor. No revenge for a dead dad. No Yelm and no Orlanth. Just a trickster who may also be death doing his best to repair the world and repair a simpler primal crime. Not so much a "Light" bringer or even a "Life" bringer but a rectification and renovation of the Law brought back for a new age of time. A different story of how the world broke and was partially repaired. Now what gets interesting is that some people in modern Glorantha remember bits of this archaic narrative. The characters may have shifted official roles since then (the "zzabur" most notably) but what is remembered can be reborn as the Hero Wars heat reaches reaction temperatures. In terms of Gerlant, IMG caste is more often defined by the work you do than the parents you had. The strict inheritance we see today is a historical aberration. Gerlant, for example, was able to rule despite not necessarily being born into any talar family or even marrying into one. But as long as you can exercise the perquisites of leadership, you can be consecrated to a formal leadership position. (The very identification of talar with "aristocracy" is controversial historically, but let's leave that for now.) And as long as you have the power, you can take a formal leadership position. The line between horal and talar is always permeable within time and probably beforehand as well. Some people would like the lines around zzabur performance to be equally pragmatic. We don't see many examples of rising dronars but that doesn't mean they aren't there. (Another story for another day.)This reality behind the rhetoric seems to be at the center of the riddle that "illuminated" Arkat back on the island, opening his mind, wrecking his Dawn Age caste training and ruining him as a good soldier forever. Which brings us something like full circle. Do I think Gerlant was a literal son of Arkat's line? I think a symbolic son or daughter of Arkat's line would say it doesn't matter. Talor would laugh. Are all secret keepers brahmins? Depends on whether you let them marry at all. Compared to modern Glorantha, I think this question attracted different controversies in the ferment around the Abiding Book compilation, but this is already too long.