scott-martin

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.

Know the enemy!

The terrifying aspect of this is that he understands that being born mortal implies that he's only "immortal" up until this moment. The future is still dangerous. Any sufficiently random factor can take all that away and leave him with nothing, no consolation. Everyone who emulates him accepts a similar situation. Being born mortal undoubtedly embarrasses him as a screen for something more existentially uncomfortable. I think this embarrassment feeds the way his people are encouraged to treat his mother. It didn't have to be this way. Old fragments about the ritual function of the zzabur suggest that he once had the potential to be a brisk and leaping person, a collective effervescence if you like. But he took all that good stuff and ran.

Love that term. Life is messy and the closer the work of imagination gets to real time spontaneity, the more valuable these throwaway tricks of the hand are. They keep the line moving and maintain the spell over the audience that suspends disbelief. And with the right audience and enough practice in crafting your throwaway beats, you can nudge the audience to help you out and fill in the next few beats on their own. Then you can coast for a few measures, recharge, take a deep breath ahead of the next verse. Historically game writers have been harried people, always one beat ahead of the deadline, so this temporary relief is invaluable. The advantage private dreams have over this kind of narrative creation is that the sleeper has endless subjective time to ponder all the angles and experiment with the details. Most of the results aren't worth taking with you when you open your eyes, but it's okay. The bits that stick are probably weird and meaningful enough to feed into your waking story without embarrassing yourself too much . . . maybe you'll hook their dream on your line and they'll push your now shared work forward. Of course where it gets interesting is that the world is built up out of these dream particles and our own effort. For most people the world is some fraction of dust just out of reach like the blue wizards you mention, practically a meaningless editorial glitch between the load-bearing blocks we can see behind everyday life at a distance. The dust is the seed of the next block. The blocks wear down to dust and recede to the dream again to refresh the next cycle [age], and so it goes. The mind goes where it goes. Call the dust atoms or runes, we shall not cease from exploration.

Gotta catch 'em all! Although I think this one's craotic

As you know, Mother Market retired the "Communication Rune" a few years ago in order to avoid a toxic contango scenario and hedge against anticipated volatility. The improved version we'll be rolling out for the fourth age will be pluralistic and recombinant . . . more of a platform play. A few prototypes here.

It's a loan word from the Tradetalk γράμμα, literally "bill of sale." I'm told the practice originated as a way to teach junior merchants to make sure to check off every single line on the manifest or else you discover you've accepted the nasty road trip into inventory. But as the world got more complicated it became a tool of intermarket politics and the occasional prank. You don't dare touch it yourself because you're busy so you work through intermediaries to deliver the package . . . I could go into detail on the machinations but the Desert Trackers would not appreciate the attention. Let's just say that if you have a board meeting coming up and really need to force an absence, it's a pretty good system. And if it helps build a new Genert, hard to be too critical.

That transforms her story for me. I initially wondered about using the spell to summon intermediate "ancestors on the maternal line" (larva hosts) but the motives there quickly became gruesome. In general it strikes me as an avenue to wreak revenge on the forebears for ever having been born in the first place . . . not the most expansive or comfortable symbolic economy but one Daka Fal can tolerate. Away from my books right now so I don't know if Daka Fal is open to a similar association with Bloody Tusk.

This is great. My initial response to Jeff's speculation was that the caravan lords who run Mother Market would probably have started diversifying their interests around the northern route at an even earlier phase (1600-1605) and then this would accelerate as Heortland spiraled out of control. After 1619 I suspect the only people running through any of the northern corridors had some ideological interest in keeping it open . . . play nice with extremely interesting customers in the provinces and beyond, run woad to the rebels under mercantile cover, whatever tickled their fancy. This probably reflects the internal debate going on inside Mother Market, with some people arguing that it was unwise to annoy the rising lunar power while others wanted to impose sanctions on what was after all an unpredictable and disruptive rival to Nochet, where the fat cats live and which they consider the center of the habitable universe. Meanwhile, of course, the opening provides alternatives to the inland routes, diverting capital that would have otherwise been reinvested in the Sartar project and its satellites. Maybe people like Gringle regret decisions made in that era. Either way, enough big money rotates to shipping that the imperial road is largely left to, let's just say, people who are cool with imperial entanglements. True believers and trouble makers crowd into the desert trackers and the trader prince organization or set up crazy new routes on their own. Trouble makers who stay on the route to the provinces eventually run into the trouble they made, one way or another. People who grew up in Sartar before the fall look around and see fewer Issaries hats on market day. They assume that the empire has driven the "good" caravans off or that the area has gotten too dangerous for the traders. 1621-2 is a shock to everyone's complacency, the "black swan event" (technical term in Mother Market divination derived from imarja esoteric cult dogma) the fat cats deploy cash to prevent total system collapse. Some were ready for life after Orlanth . . . we had done it before and will undoubtedly need to do it again some day. Others did the channel checks, ran a few numbers (or in fantasy bronze age terms got high on donkey fumes or whatever) and decided that Orlanth remains the best of all cosmological constants, maximum gini. The "gini jar," if you will. These are the guys who opened the warehouses and started funding the rebels in earnest. You started to see very different people on market day. And then after the liberation these are the people who come in to take over guilds and so on. Consensus in Mother Market remains fractious but enough hyenagrams have been delivered that the mood in Nochet shifts.

So Orlanth and [the Orlanthi sun god] competed over a girl and it got violent. Orlanth felt bad about it and after grievous ordeals made it right. The [Orlanth] sun rose again but the girl stayed with Orlanth. What that I'm hearing is a clearer version of Hill of Gold after all this time. I love it. There were once two brothers. The way the bright brother tells it is that there was a girl who was not receptive, there was a cruel rival, heartache and survival. A fourth figure, identified as modern "Orlanth," sometimes lurks around the edges, not a great fit for the core drama. This Hill of Gold is how the Orlanthi sun god really remembers the core moment of the gods war. Everything else is latter-day syncretism and other compensatory quest work. When they came down from the south telling us this "Orlanth" took credit for bringing the bright brother back, all we could see is the cruel rival in his face. And the bright brother they brought us was always a loser. Over time, some people resisted that arrangement and others found ways to live with its terms.

I need to know more!

Images that depict "the historical Malkion" as a black stone (salvaged from the sea, now worn smooth) provide a valuable hint to the inner alchemy of the West but the real body of the prophet is more of a soft and spongy mass . . . edible like a tuber or a kind of leaven loaf. While this "biggle" stone is now forgotten it's always been there underfoot.

Long way come, long way to go before our technology eliminates space once and for all. "Remember here when you are there."

The Book of Dale is intimately connected to "Moonbroth" and details may appear when that prophetic site is explored. There are those who say the historical Dale was son of a famous duck but that might just be lexical confusion and not some unique EWF species-crossing experiment. Pushing the range factor is attractive of course to magicians averse to getting their hands dirty and their skin bruised. The author was obsessed with the notion of systems of communication at a distance: if you can exchange information remotely, you can modify the carrier network to transmit heavier magical effects. The problem is you need to prepare the way by having an address on the ground. You can't simply beam a sunspear across the chaparral, for example. Greg didn't talk much about the narrative content, which tends to focus on the monster experience and is good for at least a few scattered lore points. Either way I do need to get my copy to a Knowledge temple one of these days because I believe it's one of the few remaining in private hands.

"Tentacle" as forbidden Hit Location Magic, a frequently encountered chaos feature trope of course. Weep (acid blood) for the Bat! But then shudder as the dreadful and arcane "tentacle metaplot" flexes across Glorantha. You'll believe even dragons can acquire a chaotic taint . . . or if their Hit Location Table changes, maybe all their limbs turn into extra heads or something.

Now I wonder who the Gloranthan scholars were who followed the Hit Location Table approach to Beast Rune taxonomy. Are . . . we . . . those scholars? My Elder Secrets is somewhere in the basement so I can't look up the Bat or extrapolate what its anatomy was like before Chaos added a few stray tentacles . . . although I'm another fan of the great hummingbird secret soul hypothesis. But six limbs make me think of centaurs as a third way between lycanthropic beast people and riders. There are no known "were horses" (although this may be hidden in more prosaic stories) but there are whole civilizations where a biped and a quadruped enter a symbiotic relationship where the biped temporarily surrenders the use of its legs and the quadruped temporarily gains access to arms. With the right magic, this relationship becomes literal and a hexapod emerges. Or a dragon. Maybe without the right "lizard brother" or lizard sister partner someone who gets deep into the dragon way will lose legs or arms in order to acquire wings and you get a wyrm or wyvern, much as divergent beast fusions will produce a bipedal goat man or fox woman. You can fall partially off the dragon way and end up with a bizarre hit location table. Maybe if you fall partially off the centaur way you end up walking mostly like a human (except the outrageous dog people of Ralios and others) driven by unbalanced urges like a dinosaur. And I'm reminded of the weird redemptive role of the pterodactyl in dinosaur failure. If bat has the same hit locations as a pterodactyl then maybe we can extrapolate some things about wings in Peloria. I don't recall which of the various orders of Dara Happan "angels" have wings but suspect they're feathered and in addition to arms, creating a kind of aerial centaur. Maybe there are intermediate and neotenic forms of bird people as well . . . still a lot we don't know about how and why "wind children" emerge historically much less bee tribe and so on. My suspicion is always that wind children were Made and not so much the product of natural magical evolution. The hsunchen X is fascinating and I will ponder it. I wonder if "dragon" had a similar distribution at the dawn, but I really do think that dragon forces concentrated in modern Dragon Pass are known elsewhere by other names . . . radically divergent routes to enlightenment, horned serpents of Pamaltela and so on. Six Legs in an empire . . . . . . and Pamaltela has bats!

Harrek is always a significant exception! But like the wolves is an immigrant. My current working model of Beast in Peloria is that any indigenous shapeshifters died out or otherwise left too early to show up in the records we have. I think they were part of korgatsu so we would look for their surviving cousins in the Shan Shan. What remains are descendants of rider peoples and so we might find bird riders and bat riders or their traces. Any lycanthropic urges they had was probably largely exhausted in the Sun [Dragon] complex where among other things horse and bird were consolidated into a once-useful and now-extinct chimerical cult. (And then the rider heritage was consolidated into the Seleran Empire and is no longer with us either.) Maybe "bat" is only Old Pelorian for what we call "dragon." A kind of lycanthropic shamanic path with wings. Hon-Eel depicted as married to a green "bat." The crimson "dragon," funny but also endlessly sad in its current perpetual mutant agony. A black "bat" that betrayed the sun . . . buried Pelorian wyrm traditions banished by Nysalor and now awkwardly stitched together into the modern lunar way. But nothing really dies even in a hero war. And as the Kralorelans will once again learn, nothing lives forever.

Great thread. I know this isn't your authorial intent here but in the context of persistent questions about the Lunar motivation the turn of phrase got terrible wheels grinding in my head. From earliest days I've always gotten a whiff of palpable desperation from the way the Lunar thrust into Prax has been portrayed. It's a "mad rush" to the sea or whatever their primary target was, leaving the rest of us to make excuses for the fundamental strategic errors they apparently committed along the way. Something must be broken within the Lunar High Command, we hear, for them to commit to this irrational frontier before they really have the resources to do it right. The best military minds in the empire must not be thinking clearly. Or the target might have felt like an extreme priority and there might have been enough urgency around the timeline that the military geniuses decided they had to roll the dice before all the pieces lined up in their favor. A lot of these "irrational" strategies in Glorantha revolve around magical thinking: prophecies need to be fulfilled or overcome, the stars are as right as they get or can be nudged, the goddess told us to do it. Moonbroth and the Book of Dale are extremely important tactical objectives but not to the point of opening up yet another economically unviable front without some hope for gaining some near-term transformational advantage. If somebody in the high command believed Lunar Prax could tip the map against Belintar, then maybe it made sense to commit to a generational presence here. I think this is true, personally. Belintar was up to something within the Moon Rune itself that they hoped to not only counter by absorbing lunar vestiges in his big desert backyard but also maybe exploit them for themselves. BUT that doesn't really explain the urgency. They'd already committed to a long magicopolitical struggle with the Holy Country and were actually grinding the frontier south decade to decade. They had the long win on their side. No need to throw that away on a premature victory lap. We know how that works out for them. And if they simply needed a frontier to bleed off malcontents and bring home propaganda victories, Eastpoint is wide open and begging for support. Go West, especially if you want a route to the sea. Or if West is not a politically attractive target, let's explore why not. Suddenly I wonder if there's another prophetic timeline in play important enough to force the illuminated geniuses to gamble their edge against the Holy Country away . They had been alerted to something catastrophic on the horizon. I think in order to forestall it they went "after Dwarf technology" where they could find it, pushing into the Copper Caves on the way toward Diamond Mountain. This was important enough for them to open up another front. I don't think they were successful enough to continue . . . or else they learned things that demoralized them. They had a shot at derailing the dwarf plan for the cosmos and failed. There was a deadline and it expires. Arguably it was already too late in 1607 but they had to try. After that, the strategy gets a little more febrile. It drives the empire a little crazier. Why not? No matter what happens with the Holy Country you've already lost in conventional terms. Only thing left is to seek increasingly unconventional definitions of victory (killing gods) because the Dwarf Prophecy is online and the crimson wonder will roll. Sometime after 1607 the world ended. Most people just don't know that yet.

Yeah, I should've put that in distancing quotation marks. "Pamalt" is no friend of the jungle. But that's probably a fine point of distinction that revolves around whether someone identifies as Arbennan, Doraddi, Agimori or something else like "Kresh." I love this. Whenever we see a character without a name or face we can project all the possibilities across it and see if we can generate a productive match. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if there are "Malkions" who can serve as both evil uncles and fallen sons in this story . . . as long as we remember him as a child of the air. Maybe the storm god of the west betrayed or was betrayed and changed his name.