scott-martin

This is some epic stuff. While I've been aware of a significant Quinpolic exile community, their ultimate trajectory in the absence of Argrath-facing documents was never clear. Maybe let's segment the population a little more and see how that flavors where they end up. I still lean toward an earlier Quinpolic end date (early 1624) to get it over with and accelerate the moment when players can make a difference but can be argued down if that's where MGF goes. Either way, the sack of Noloswal (late 1623) is at least the beginning of the end . . . even if the League holds another year or two, smart, connected, pragmatic people will start buying one-way tickets out as an insurance policy. These people probably have the best shot at ending up where they want, which is somewhere relatively sophisticated and comfortable: Nochet. Unfortunately for them, timing could get tight. Miss the window and you either need to hang out in Handra through Storm Season or try an overland passage instead. The truly daring might try the Hero's Run into the far east, which opens up additional MGF opportunities for seeding hardcore Navigationalists in unlikely places, but that isn't the kind of thing that creates a robust or rooted expat community. It might be far easier to simply raise the wolf flag while the boys are in the area and head out under pirate management. Once the land war is over, the Waertag agenda at least initially pivots and any survivors who want to escape on Dormal boats need to reckon with that. Depending on your dramatic instinct, the people who make it out by sea might be only a pathetic fraction of those who made the attempt. If not, somebody with muscle got in the dragon ships' way . . . if that's the Wolf Pirates, I suspect most of these people (even civilians) would end up absorbed into that freebooting proposition one way or another. The poorer and less connected may actually be luckier if they take to the Manirian Road, where the Princes are at least theoretically sympathetic and Greymane is no longer a problem. Rhigos probably covets agricultural talent and everyone wants muscle to replace people lost in the recent war. The especially ambitious, useless or visionary may continue on toward Aeolia. I am really loving that future plotline, of course. I don't know a lot about the plan for Dosakayo but maybe herself would rather push a few hundred or even a few thousand foreigners all the way out there for her own purposes. If the Malkonwal movement starts to look like it will become a problem, I can see her kicking the troublemakers down the coast . . . where of course they will MGF discover world-shaking things. Depending on timing, Vadelites and Fonritians may be happy to book "passengers" for the southern Risk Run or in general. We probably won't meet a lot of these people again. But we don't need a huge survivor population anyway . . . New Pavis is about 5,000 people soaking wet and it's a pretty good staging area for a Sartar liberation movement. A lot of plotlines weave in and out of this, including the Wolf Pirate intervention (this might be where they hook up with Mularik, either again after the Cradle escapade or for the first time) and Hunralki's weird "claim" in Pithdaros. I don't think Hunralki hangs around to annoy the regime. I love the notion that they get there just a little too late to fulfill his vision or whatever. Classic. Maybe Hunralki gets a boat back south and follows his own heroquest path down there, with or without a cadre of Pithdarans with nothing to lose but a ticket back to the motherland. Greg and Charles Saunders were friends. I want to believe. I also want to believe Mulliam was a smart guy as well as being incredibly rich, so while hubris kills (the Elon Musk of Glorantha) I can see him having plenty of contingencies in place . . . his dad was a master chess player of course and either the apple fell close to the tree or it didn't. If the good guys aren't at least a little smart then the Rokarists win. And I really don't want them to win. So let the Hadestolids get at least some measure of smirking revenge. So an entry-level book on the West as a kind of distributed "homeland," all these droplets of mercury rolling apart before they roll back together. To be published in heaven of course.

Those were primitive days. Gay gamers, Seahawks fans and others have taken us so far over the decades and there's still so far to go. Now even my sister is a Seahawks fan . . . I wouldn't be surprised to see ospreys as totemic hunting companions when we find the Helerite nation, it's a Navy thing.

This is fantastic! Which game system are you using? I am loving the recombinant creativity in play throughout this thread . . . unless we find a way to compensate for Central Genertela's 40-year developmental head start, the rest of the lozenge is doomed to remain sideshow territory. That may ultimately be the outcome after all (a deep mystery of the hero wars) but right now I still think it's possible for other regions to catch up and even match the deep refinement process that created modern terminal third age Dragon Pass. And if the West can't step up to that standard, what hope does everyone else really have? We're fortunate to have something like a few Deep Sources here at least. It would be great to see more probabilistic board game results and Questworlds / Pendragon Pass style exploration of the historical landscape (at least 1621-5 to set the RQG stage) . . . every game log is extremely valuable because statistical "machine learning" can only take us so far before the results start feeling stale. We might not need 40 years of active play at all this time around. Then we can apply what we've learned to regions that don't even have Deep Sources yet. [seshna dragon plot] . . . this is astounding! This is my favorite idea of the season because this exile community then opens up a corner of the East to similar development down the road. We learn about the West and set the stage for its hero wars by seeing westerners isolated from their homeland, and in the process learn with those refugees about the lands and peoples that shape their lives now. It's a lot like the way most of us only discovered Sartar reflected in foreign outposts like Pavis and up to Balazar, only coming back across the frontier for an immersion in the intricacies of clan life when the learning curve could support it. And then through Sartar we could see the Empire face to face. Maniria. Nochet and Aeolia. Carmania. Teshnos. Baby steps. I think we have a year or two to sow some dragon teeth and narrow the gap a little, if we're smart.

I think Greg would have really loved this. Well played! As for Eastern Sorcery, it would be good to explore all this in parallel to a Western exploration. Some recent thoughts on the form runes that might not be so dumb after all. For all I know Form is one of their core modes over there, taking over for the elements . . . but specialists will say yes or no.

That's an essential point. Players have a certain comfort level with the Heortling part of the world now but avenues for extending that knowledge into the West are limited. You can be a sailor, go overland through Maniria, travel up through the Empire and out via the Janube or over Kartolin (yikes) . . . or you can meet the people who come to you. For most of the last 600 years at least, the Manirian and far Charg routes were the only real game in town and Charg shut down in 1499. Exiles and archives are the only ways most people were ever exposed to non-Aeolian expressions of this way of life. I wonder how the Aeolians are responding to the influx of strangers, especially with the Malkonwal adventure still fresh in many minds. Either way, Samastina has her own foreign sorcerers to drive any magical experimentation her enthusiasts care to attribute to her. Who needs Argrath anyway! I love this, the broader Ghibli ecological concern (another green world) and the alignment with @jajagappa's circle back to Hrelar Amali. I skipped over a lot of Old Ways Revivals in this part of the world because IMG these returns to origins are more liberating when we see how restrictive the failing new ways have become. But I hope everyone across the West gets a chance to look back and draw power from it. For most people that means paganism, hsunchen heritage, the forest. For others that means an authentic + redemptive relationship to colonial origins. We step back in order to take a huge leap forward. Definitely pigs and maybe giant nuclear battle robots or the equivalent. (Old moons.) While the world is doomed some of us still have 20-30 years easy to turn up the heat. Caladra sure is getting interesting!

Developing relevant JC materials for the terminal Third Age West presents its share of challenges. On one hand, the Guide presents a richer 1621 status quo than we've ever had to work with, confirming the most robust historical insight while pruning back a few of the more wayward branching paths. However, advancing the timeline to 1625 without benefit of a regional King of Sartar or decades of systematic Sartar Rising style exploration means sacrificing a lot of that hard-won clarity on the altar of current events. Time is moving fast now. If you want to get ahead of it, you need to move faster. Maybe you help us get it moving here. Let's start by refreshing the scene: It's 1625. All the cool people in Seshnela are dead or desperate. Theoblanc assassinated all the freethinkers he can catch and if his buddy Guilmarn hasn't crushed the Quinpolic League yet we know how it plays out. Unless you want to start your epic saga in the last days of a doomed struggle, MGF argues for ending the Crusade soon after the somewhat apocalyptic Harrek sighting in late 1623. This was never an especially friendly time and place for player characters anyway, so there isn't a lot of drama to gain from setting up a relatively sympathetic counterweight early in the game and watching them lose. That's prequel material. It was a dark time for the rebellion in 1621 and it's slightly darker time now. That's how the light gets in, with pissed off exploding apprentices, quixotic horseback heroquests, peasant uprisings, forest witches, cat people outbreaks, all that good stuff. Also some bona fide bad stuff, people turning to diabolism and chaos. We also need to give Father Laurel and King Hardy a little time to establish their oppressive supremacy because the Waertagites need their own window to sweep the sea clean after the League falls but before Boat Planet rises in 1624 or otherwise any effort to undo the Opening looks a little silly. There's no sign in RQG of Dormal being under serious pressure. I think the green men are getting their green butts kicked for reasons that are MGF exciting to discover in play. The sailors are dealing internally with the new maritime dynamics but on the surface it's more or less business as usual. Refugee Navigationalist insights might help this happen. Either way, keep the seas unsettled and Open. If you're brave, you can evade the dragon ships. There are, however, a bunch of new True Brithini on the mainland who are familiar with conditions and developments on the island, so we want to keep them around to provide intelligence as well as thematic resolution. The Hero Wars are all about our last chance to tie off all the loose ends of the world, after all. I have my dumb theories that need to be workshopped before being served to guests. I will say that MGF requires twists and revelations. Keep them gasping. Keep them engaged. Moving north, the Arkat Returns! prompt is so iconic that your players deserve to participate in it for themselves and a whole new generation has stories to tell. Textual cues tell me King Hardy starts stinking the place up as fast as he possibly can after crushing the League in order to exploit lingering disruption from the Swarm . . . the farther out we get from 1622, the more time the locals have to clean up the mess. Maybe he pushes the button 1-3 seasons before active play starts so the war is still out over the horizon while the players get set up. Maybe Arkat Returns 2-3 seasons into the campaign so the players can make a meaningful difference and have a good seat. Either way, Laurel & Hardy quickly discover it is possible to bite off more than you can chew. Imagine me crying here. A similar situation applies in Fronela, where generations of players have wanted to Wage War On War and it would be cruel to open that action when it's too late to participate. (Remember, unlike the Quinpolic Crusade where the initial outcome is fixed and only makes the region more of a downer, the big Ralios and Fronela struggles remain question marks. MGF always.) Things are getting real. Ratchet up the tension and the philosophical ambivalence. Xemstown and the last Jonat tribes are fresh from the ban now so that will give people plenty to do. Maybe drop the War bomb in 1626 or even later. We know something like good guys win this one because there's still something like a civilization left for Phargentes TakenEgi to conquer circa 1642. That much is easy now. All we need to do is keep the story interesting between here and there and then beyond. Likewise, we know there's still an Arkat presence in Ralios as late as the 1640s (mid decade looks reasonable) so evidently shock and awe got a little bogged down. Keep that storyline rotating. We don't really know anything about how that one ultimately plays out in the final weird phases of the hero wars. Nobody has come back to tell us. I don't think Guilmarn is the Talar Of The West because Cragspider-XIII has the serpent crown in dispute, which will not happen while Hardy is alive, but then again, I don't think Guilmarn's talar powers of command were authentic anyway so IMG he can't really command the Brithini sorcerers. Your Hero Wars Will Vary. This is part of the story. Instead I think my boy Aamor the Wanderer becomes the last of the sacred serpent kings under the full panoply of the old rite with a few new twists along the way. But at this point things are going to look a little strange to people schooled in the 1621 world. By 1630 the glacier is moving and the old world is effectively doomed to ecological disaster anyway and that's how the last serpent king eventually dies. Charg opens in 1628 and complicates Carmanian independence. I would count this plot into the Western Hero Wars (and also the Lunar Civil Wars) because by definition all worlds come together at the end and we are made of everything. This is a good place to note that if spillover from the West does not cast a shadow on the Dragon Pass plot it's not because nothing is going on here . . . the magic simply points in a different direction and the shadow falls across other regions. Arguably much of the Western plot projects south. Maybe it even projects east. And it definitely affects Lunar policy throughout this era, with the Arrolian Territories and Carmania in the middle. Working back around to Maniria, I have a hidden joke about why Guilmarn seems content to crush the League and then turn north, leaving the apparently fragile Trader Prince network to become an underground refugee railroad and otherwise remain a thorn in his gigantic ass. They have their role to play and this far from the Dragon Pass plot this is where they play it, looking west and not east. Otherwise, we know Greymane has thrown his last party as of 1624 so the western tribes are probably riled up but in flux . . . like everyone in the greater Orlanth belt after the Windstop. Apocalyptic movements, new and old rites, warrior opportunities across Ralios, Jonatela and beyond. To the east, Malkonwal is fallen and its people are circulating across the mix of refugees from everywhere else. We know the elves are busy in Arstola and elsewhere but timing there is a challenge. Unlike the more aggressively genocidal troll / dwarf plots I see the New Forest as something transient and survivable . . . after all, human civilization has weathered plenty of New Forests in historical times and come back stronger than ever. This is a B plot for the Western Hero Wars and the Hero Wars writ large, something more like the faerie interactions we see in the Great Pendragon Campaign. They have a different plan for us and it has different ramifications. Maybe it starts small around 1625 and proceeds in parallel with the human magical agendas. Players can chase its mysteries or just cope with it as another complication they need to worry about. Cragspider thinks Brithos is ultimately eaten by ice trolls and I want to believe. Your turn.

I've been rolling all this around in my head looking for the right thread to twist all the way through the maze. This is good enough. Start with origins and the stubborn persistence of the Spike as cosmic fulcrum rivaling the Tower of Reason. The received zzabur narrative preserves nothing but disdain for the mountain (or mountains) and its cosmic inhabitants, whom other people remember as elder powers. While the water powers recognize the Whirlpool as the holiest mystery and the center of the middle world, the sorcerous center starts from close to the far edge (probably the Enrovalini zone), slides south toward as the Kadeniti become more prominent and ultimately takes refuge in Brithos all the way up on what must have once been the frontier separating the Kachasti homeland from Ladaralela. Watch the various towers, palaces, citadels and castles move around the map. See the progression as various "zzaburs" and "malkions" establish successive residences. But there is a layer of western-facing mythic history that takes a more sympathetic view. Once upon a time, at the beginning of things, there were two brothers. One stayed home and one went out. The brother who stayed home was the origin of the world, ACOS, the first mountain born and the first mountain that died. He was not Mostal. His name is associated with living stone, the law, making. In the northwest the oldest word for world (predating "Glorantha" by about a decade) is Akem, realm of Acos. We know him as the Spike. Before the world broke, the Spike was the Mountain and the now-blunt and inert Stability rune had the thrusting angle of Law. By definition, he inhabited the center of the world and never left. He was invulnerable until they killed him. The space he left behind is still the center of the world but now it is empty. According to the Prosopaedia, the cult of Acos persists within the Yelm and Eastern pantheons, where his brother aspect LARNSTE is also recognized in some form. When consciousness ranges outside the law, change emerges. Those left inside say he was expelled. He says it’s his nature, “free will.” By definition when the One becomes Two you have begun the long process of duplication of entities and the mountain begins to multiply. The people who stayed home belong to Acos. The people who went out from the Spike are Larnste's people. And when they stop and build a new local law for themselves, a new mountain rises. This cycle might remind us of the pattern of zzaburs cloistered in their towers and malkions going out to bring their teaching to new peoples in new lands. To the extent to which zzabur persists, his "spike" remains unbroken. Going out as a malkion exposes him to fear, suffering, sacrifice and ultimately death. It is illogical. And yet it happens. The zzabur left at home becomes jealous, seeing rival mountains everywhere and working toward their destruction. Despite Tojarinor's gloss in "The Metals of Acos," URTIAM is not quite modern Mostal and his recent (re)insertion into the sacred genealogy of Lhankor reflects this more nuanced view. We know this figure in the Snodal fragments as the creator, the law and as secret god of Nida. The name also belongs to a Grandfather Mortal and sorcerously warped appears in the Guide as Lord of the Spike. Special care was taken to erase this cult in all but the most obscure aspects. He is neither an orthodox malkion nor zzabur, but more of an acos. Technically, I believe he was a "ladaral" buried when Nida overwhelmed the mainland Kachastites and created a mountain wall between "northern Lodril" (Turos) and "southern Lodril" (Veskarthan) . . . loser of a war between mountain gods, enslaved like his father to fuel sorcerous engines, prisoner of Mostal. The sharp point of the spear of the law is hammered down to flat, rounded stability. The miracle is that he endures at all in the secret heart of the northern decamony. It is "ur-" metal to this day, a stolen secret. But these are not the children of Warera. These are the children of Kachasti, another tribe like the children of Vadel, son of Vi(y)morn, who went "west" (southwest?) to Mostal Mountain and came home again to become master of a defeated Zerendel. You can go too far out larnsting. This is what happens. This is the fall of all the old law people except those who had already found refuge elsewhere. Sometimes the blue strain of Warera is attributed to "Vadeli" blood. I don't know. The important thing here is that the island enters history with the blue caste rising. The talar are distracted. The horals, the red people, are open to heretical innovation. The green cousins have their own religion and their own agenda. A man named Drona goes to the northern frontier to become father of human nations in the shadow of "Akem." We could talk more about the blue man, his persistence and the history of the island, wherever it is or was, elsewhere, but this is already too long. Who knows these things? Probably nobody living in Glorantha today. Maybe tomorrow. It's the Western Hero Wars.

Love it!! Do you remember anything he told you back then? I have a feeling that stuff lines up with "Life of Harmast" . . . first person fiction, dialogue, day-to-day memoir that ultimately evolved into the 10 Women Well Loved @David Scottmentioned. "Harmast Saga" is where the more technical ritual material happens.

Always a joy. This doesn't seem to have motivated you to grab any of them, though, and while there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, I have to ask anyone reading this: at what price point would this kind of document become attractive to YOU?

Love it! I wouldn't mind a census of this type of thing just to map the revisions across copies, get a more refined sense of how the ideas are emerging year by year. I've always loved esoteric glorantha collectors because from the outside it looks just like the cutthroat economy of occult curiosa and maybe even the medieval relic trade. A whole separate underworld of ambition, thieves, grifters, disaster, greed, madness and all that other good stuff. Magic and Loss, Luck and Death. The booklets, like comets in the far sky or grimoires in somebody's vision of the sorcerous west, keep circulating. It's their nature. Maybe some day a minigame around those grimoires. But it's fascinating that by definition all of this material is not essential to a rich Gloranthan experience and probably even gets in the way. As the public-facing Seshnela Kings List notes, "this list of facts is virtually unknown in Glorantha." These largely fictitious societies don't even remember all the people who ruled them going back to the dawn. It's arcane trivia for heroquesters only. And as we know, heroquesting is just the continuation of life by more desperate means, what you do when you can't get what you need any other way.

Great point. The kickstarter was the widest release some of this material ever got, so not being in the kickstarter means they're rarer. Further complicating the situation is that I've spoken with the seller and this is not 10 Women Well Loved (which I need to revisit) but "Attempt 1" from 1991, the one with the proto-KOS LBQ materials along with material like "Here Is What I Did."

I think you've just found the Heron Hegemony.

@Hijabgthis could also be the Sorcery Plane but they playin it's the hero wars ok i owe Joerg a long serious thing

Everyone you meet

Hi Mal -- The Encyclopedia is also known as the Seshneg Book of Kings and was incorporated into the Guide kickstarter package, which is why the seller (not me!) is letting this previously published piece go. It's a pretty cool artifact IF you are obsessed with the Dawn Age West and wanted a little more than what the publicly available Seshnela Kings Lists provide. The Froalar book is also known as Hrestol Saga so is arguably the most famous, least rare and most important of the manuscripts he's selling. The Yrleam book was only reproduced a handful of times to my knowledge beyond the kickstarter. On the other hand, it's pretty short and only good value for absolute completists, which is I think why the seller stopped collecting the "rainbow books" on their own. Both made it into the kickstarter. The Arkat and Harmast takes (two separate books) were not in the kickstarter but are roughly as scarce, maybe one or two more copies of each in circulation.

One of the only things I really know about the Altinelans is that they hate the Luathans from forever back. Still have only a vague sense of what that entails but since the Luathans seem to be guardians of the Western Corner (reflected in the black camp?) it's worth flagging here. I'd start by roving as far north as I can. A Northfaring. But this is dangerous, desperate stuff and northern new england is wild enough for my delicate metabolism, right? Love this. I don't know if the entity we call the Blue Meany could ever really tell the difference.

Great questions. I am setting up the artillery so will require covering fire in the likely scenario a full-fledged "ecclesiastical council" erupts here . . . but will just say two things up front. First, so much has been painstakingly reconstructed about the God Learner methodology that we need to find some truly world-shaking achievement lost in their downfall. Otherwise the secret carriers etc. look completely ineffectual when MGF wants them to have been impressive. Maybe the Danmalastan routes, true history of Brithos and so forth give us that lost achievement. In this scenario, the God Learners were perfectly fluent with this material but now there's just a mysterious and ominous void in the mythic landscape. Harrek and Argrath don't figure it out. Only your players can do this. [A more recent similar collapse of "the sorcery plane" is probably a ripple here, it's the hero wars.] Second, they might have spent a lot more collective effort suppressing this material on their own and mostly succeeded. Your take on this one depends largely on the role you see the island playing within the larger fabric of empire: adversarial, allied, absent . . . personally you know my take on the value of an earful of zzabur says. Now in modern times people are going to want to explore their heritage and put the pieces back together. This has not been the mission of Hrestol in the past but that's where I'd start this adventure. The Arkat people are too busy with Arkat, the Rokarites are jerks, Siglat PBUH has his own weird gospel not found in Revealed Mythologies yet, Rikard and the Aeolians were looking in a completely different part of the world, the Princes have their more immediate agenda, etc. But some plucky Hrestolite might start rolling the bones back together, God save us all. EDIT @NevermetI found the mountain stories. Now playing: GO WEST

This is all @Joerg, the original Halwal. When he pivots, all the rest of us can do is drop a little chaff or get out of the way. My mountain material comes from a draft mythological compendium attributed in-setting to Belintar that never got published. In theory the curatorial impulse reflects his interests and just maybe gives us the keys to repeat his work, but outside that specialized focus it's really just an effort to combine the various mountain rising memories.

The western hero wars deserve to be as awesome as what the Sartarites are building. Everybody's does. There are theories about vadelist chromatology but if I recall the goddess Vadela (they reckoned descent that way) had three lovers and never made it around to having a yellow baby before the Malkionite captivity. This is probably a deep secret of the archaic talars in itself but other people chase different angles.

Maybe "south"west or another of those rotations may be in play. The bizarre persistence of twin Decamonies (both with iron) makes me think Slon and the larger Piparovor complex are more important cosmologically than most Dragon Pass facing documents suggest. It's not hard to believe that these were the original Mostalites and the people who now run Nida are a kind of variant or successor race, possibly perpetuated from captive or converted stock. Belintar seems to have believed that one of the functions of the Rockwoods was to divide various factions of the Davimostingsi (makers / miners / minions) from each other, fostering a diversity of purpose (many "mountains") as well as geography. But this is obscure and the dwarves are eager to collect and hide most accounts of their origins and history. > iron > miners > the origin of trolls > elves I am now more than half convinced that timinits take double damage from iron weapons too.

Foundation post of our era. A little graffiti scrawled here and there: * I love the mountains as metaphysical representations of various Laws. Brilliant. No matter how much some people want to unify the grand systems, most models recognize that beyond a certain stage (duplication) that multiple conclusions can derive from original principles. The Law that ejected the Block and finally killed the desert devil may not have been from the theist mountain Srvuela. In fact, given what we now know about inertial paths, a more distant origin point is much more likely. * Belintar was very interested in the multiplication of mountains, maybe because he had access to people who remembered / respected Lodril's mountain or something they called a "Spike." Volcano magic is a phase of this: deep magic of Caladra waiting to be investigated. * Jrustela also had its primeval magic mountain. Like Srvuela in some regional accounts, it rose to the south of continental Genertela and was an advanced civilization that died. In other accounts, vestiges linger in the north, in the Pelandan zone. Jrustela had its elves and its dwarves and its unique insect nation, a kind of dark folk, but we digress. * Every nation considers itself the center of the world until artificial constructs shift the origin point. The Magastan pool is the geographical center of Glorantha. We know about it from discourse with triolini. Whether they say it was the Spike once or we get that story from some other source is unclear. Perhaps two or more stories were spliced together. If so, the person who did this was probably not a Bright Empire scholar because they didn't have deep knowledge of the sea. If it was, our history of the Bright Empire and its reach needs to be revised. * The "Xamalk account" of the chaos war (collected as Guide 702) is interesting because it is organized around a sense of a place to the south of Genertela, north of Pamaltela and east of a lost continent as the central origin. Unless this document comes from the destroyed Spike culture itself, Jrustela is the only major land mass that fits the bill. The pagans of Jrustela would have had access to a form of Lodril and a form of Lhankor as rival theoreticians. Maybe these were taken from the same or different tribes. More work is required. * ("Lodril" as magician, possibly even "Lodril" as sorcerer. This becomes crucial to Carmanian sorcery as well as what they get up to in the Vent and the powers OOO stole, which is to say Spolite sorcery and the modern Dark Phase.) * In the Xamalk account, Brithos is famously situated in the relative north. Some also say Brithos was originally connected to Seshnela via a land bridge, whether this is only a transient Expulsion Walk path or something more substantial before the atheists found out how to physically separate themselves from the mainland. Again, this hints at a Jrustelan origin for this story. * Others say Malkonwal was built somewhere near the Choralinthor basin and the true descendants are the Aeolites, but they are not orthodox. The directional cues still work, however. In this interpretation, you either need to move "Brithos" or posit a longer/more convoluted migration path across the Manirian coast . . . something like the Trader Prince pilgrimage route, how odd. * If you move "Brithos" then the official account is a lie. I suspect triangulating the diaspora points to a central origin somewhere near Old Trade and/or the Vadeli Isles, but there may well have been multiple home islands / Danmalastan "survivals" at various times. Jrustela seems to be connected to this sinking land belt or even on the same "plate," although I confess the deep zzaburist tectonics may point closer to Old Trade after all. * I am away from the deep sources right now but seem to recall a confused migration narrative for the "Brithini" and/or Children of Malkion that has them born somewhere and coming to what we now consider the island. There were probably people who argued that Jrustela was the original homeland even though the Jrustelites themselves were immigrants and more or less converted pagan stock. * For every reference to original "Brithini" and Children of Malkion I suspect we can always at least provisionally read "Children of Vadela" until the evidence points otherwise. While modern self-identified Vadelists are gruesome people I see more to distrust the early accounts. * Many mountains. For Belintar, Larnste is one of the entities who grew a mountain. They're very interested in Larn ste in his part of the world; this is a deep spring of deep magic. Larnste is the Rockwoods, separate from Mostal and working ceaselessly to separate elf and dwarf nations. A dragon who may evolve into something like Cragspider had a mountain but this might just be another form of Turos. Chalana had her inverted "mountain." Gonn Orta is one of these mountains. * Belintar is very interested in how to become a mountain, to grow as a personal mountain or in your approach self-sufficient cosmic system. There are probably Gloranthan hero practices that teach people to identify with "giants," become something like a giant. * The giants and the dragons are at war but at least one dragon has a mountain. Cragspider has a relationship with Larnste. Perhaps it is unique. * Unless we can attribute the maps to some subjective in-setting perspective, I have to trust that Brithos and other features were always where they say it was. The notion of setting developmental error cannot be a factor. Unfortunately accounts of the island and its politics are ominously rudimentary . . . where were they in the era of Jrustelan supremacy, unless (a) already gone or (b) right there operating under a different name? * Fronela is probably where the God Learner regime bent the maps most, either in an effort to control the territory or simply to enforce outside order on the locals. (Same thing. Pamaltela is of course another place where this happens.) The "objective" historical maps we have today do not reflect more heterodox accounts but given the way institutional heroquesting works "were always true" once they became true in the first place. The Ban and Thaw alter geography again, whether as a "reset" or a separate evolution is unclear and probably moot for most purposes. * Archaic Fronelan history is uniquely effaced in the documents we have. They either suffered more severely in the God Learner regime, took their records with them into Carmania where they remain to be investigated, or both. Much of the fragments that remain focus on a relationship with Brithos that simply does not match the official zzabur-centric accounts. Which means that even if their version is not truthful, it can be extremely useful. The war goes on.

Technically this is what we call a "dumb" or "crazy genius" theory but I like the insight into his methodology and where it goes when he takes his eye off it. One day it will be useful to explore this secret connection. This is important in the larger discussion of the origin + evolution of gender. I tend to give them the Uleria rune that has been mostly annexed into modern earth but might be profitably examined in different elemental combinations. But who has time these days!

I have been told that Kralorelan sorcery is "unusual" in that it builds on the negative spaces around the runes or, in variant schools, the transitional processes that transform one rune into another. In this model, both "Glorantha" and consciousness conjugate like verbs and compound multi-rune forms are possible, but only lunar technicians really care. (They hate it.) For most monomyth types the main point of intersection the character sheet on is the binary powers (either/or) with the elemental cycle being seen as more environmental, transitory and in general secondary. The parallels to what we think we understand about dragonewt magic are obvious.

My friend Uzmund Freud is one of the few trolls who will still talk to me and says this holy but somewhat controversial sextet is also sometimes the Seven Sacred Ancestors (minus one who always "talks in a local twang"), which points in turn to an archaic troll LBQ only without so much light of course. A BQ, as it were. More when things calm down! And this is not actually thread drift.

"We fought. My sun." Great insights on how Dara Happa perverts what we would consider the essential sacrificial dynamics of the rite. We see hints of something similar in the west and maybe other civilizations' survival stories: some people learn how to give and forgive, others only learn how to win.