scott-martin

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.

Organized data dump coming, I promise. But luckily it's a sideshow to your current primary interests!

Brastalos is an extremely important goddess . . . somewhere. We just need to find that place. [lots of great but extremely complicated stuff saved for now, except to say that in the triolini-facing archaic west another brother seems to have become Storm King through a different channel while little brother was relegated to more of a trickster role]

I don't think the months come from any of the major cultures that survived the Bright Empire, which kind of amounts to the same thing. It incorporates aspects of the major predecessor calendars into a hybrid model.

Great question. In Esrolia it's a matter of basic geography. When societies around the Choralinthor focus too hard on interior disputes it creates an opening for opportunists on the fringes to intrude. The Manirian tribes are currently the fringe culture on Caladra's frontier so when the fire people get distracted with Esrolian politics it leaves the western border open. The fact that the invaders are nominally a "storm" culture is a little coincidental. However, more broadly, whenever people in Glorantha get really involved with abstractions and other things remote from concrete everyday survival, disruption always follows. One of the biggest abstractions we know is independent "sun" worship because the sun will shine whether you sacrifice to it or not. It doesn't have a choice and we don't either. The only freedom we have in the relationship is to decide whether to identify with the sun or get out of its way. As the heat pushes mobile factors away, what's left behind becomes increasingly stale and oppressive. If left alone long enough, these systems trigger a spontaneous correction that violently moves the air around, temporarily darkens the sky and liberates latent forces. We call it the storm. It's unpredictable in its details but inevitable in its pattern. Every Gloranthan society has a storm age in its past, present or future. Strip away the meteorological metaphors and every community needs to grapple with change. Those that embrace change tend to be storm people and they tend to be on the losing side of history until they win big and the cycle refreshes. In Maniria, this means destitute tribes breed tough in the forest and when the volcano people on the border look away there's no stopping the horde. (As an aside the volcano people will generate their own internal rivals over time as the "little vents" come of age and erupt. The border zone probably sees transient elemental alliances of convenience, storm and water and low fire interacting to achieve a common goal.) Her fiercest fans can jump in but in my Glorantha the task of giving her a name is complicated hero stuff that nobody has really managed to do yet. Right now she fronts for her goddess and plays her sexual politics like someone in a decadent opera.

Now that you mention it, the persistence of apparently sprawling "traditionalist reservations" within the larger uh fabric of the Middle Sea Empire is something Samastina enthusiasts might beneficially face head on, at least amongst themselves before presenting a version of what "Ernalda" did in the second age that's fit for public consumption. Heritage breeds. Of course all our cults based in Nochet have an understanding not to really talk about it.

Love it. I was indeed thinking about them with the whole business of luring the volcano into town. The Adjustment may not have been so much an invasion as "bait" like in a Mad Max movie but that's really up to the Samastina enthusiasts to proclaim or not. Thinking again of the "nonbinary" refusal of Water to play these role games in the modern monomyth. In theory members of an isolated Helerite community would simply love one another and the cycle of love would ensure generational continuity. Heler is Helera. Sshorg is Sshorga. Merlin is indeed mother and father of the baby now and coincidentally the line of Flamal is rarely discussed. (Faralinthor.) It's only with the promulgation of the Gospel Of Earth Fertility "Woman" into the Manirian west that the indigenous water people find themselves increasingly forced to choose. The origin of love. But before that they built their own cities, mostly gone below the waves now but maybe not exactly extinguished. If the hero wars do not bring out what is within every people then the hero wars will destroy them. Now the trolls code matriarchal also and TKT is a dark goddess (eater) but that's not what brings us here today. And maybe not all the Elmalites came down from Saird. (Y)Ehilm(al)AEO, the strange persistence of "Elmal" among Asrelia's warmers and maybe an insight into what becomes the Hill of Gold. How the mothers learned to make fire for themselves. "Troll" mysteries, failed efforts to breed around the trollkin problem.

Love it! When do they want it? How soon is "now?" I've been waiting for Samastina enthusiasts to start weaving these exciting theological threads into something useful like a hat, a brooch, a fabric pterodactyl. If anyone knows anyone like that please point me their way. Until they step up with their revelations, here's my hot take on warm earth. Start by standing in the place where you live: Rhigos is important as the real center of Esrolian "earth power" (insanely rich soil, land routes) and so is probably a better example of the Ernalda complex in isolation than cosmopolitan Nochet. The gender mysteries or Old Ways run closer to the surface here. There aren't so many alternatives or distractions. When push comes to shove, this is the natural pivot point of mainland Esrolia against Nochet, as we see in the civil agrarian wars of the 1070s. Ezel cloistered in the hills of Delain works through Rhigos where Delain is the local goddess, linked by common archaic Delainaeo heritage (survival or reconstruction). I would not be surprised to see more substantive digging reveal that the Delainaeo were "the original Asrolians" supplanted at some stage by younger goddess people from elsewhere, but this is complicated, obscure and controversial. The Esrolian people were relatively untouched by the teachings of the Theyalan Lifebringers. Rhigos gets the full benefit of enriched volcanic soil coming down the rivers and spread by the prevailing Heler winds. People looking for "Egypt" can find it here. You could practically drop a baby tooth in this dirt and in a year dig up a fully formed baby. This naturally makes the place a bigger prize for hungry outsiders so the girls have gotten crafty at managing the boys. Think of the techniques the Earth Pantheon uses in Gods War. Think of the Husband Protector system. Think of Harmast Barefoot. Think Flamal Rites, Entekosiad. Think of oxen and swine, bachelor herds and their opposite. Mighty Rhigos, mother of nations. Caladra is where the gods who "warm" the goddesses come from. This is the warmth the Warm Earth is looking for. Veskarthan at home is not necessarily Lodril because at home the male corner is the devourer, hated and feared by elves and other crops. You have to lure Veskarthan into town in order to lodrilize him and make him useful but not dangerous. She chanted the words, breathed upon the remains of the ashes, and a tiny flame burst out. More recently, Rhigos probably suffered significant indignities in the Adjustment before finally subverting the Hendrikite overseers and regaining their freedom in time to greet the Trader Princes. A golden age begins. Good things come down the river like volcanic soil. The rivers are Heler's daughters. Heler versus Veskarthan, in her cycle the goddess marries blue and then she marries gold. (And maybe red also.) Once again storm becomes a fourth wheel as Hendrikite influences get absorbed into the native mythic ecology and vanish. She has different names in different seasons. Delain remains abstractly above it all, eternally herself but ringed in with taboo, euphemism, rainbows and other veils. She dances. There's a natural etymological impulse to make the Demivierge a kind of hungry virago figure threatening to upland masculine sympathies. But I don't know. "Old" storm-facing earth was never going to fly down here until the Samastina fans cook up something really astounding. The only real question here in flyover country is whether you prefer the breadbasket of the world be warm or red, low fire or lunatic sky. And in that moment I know who really had Kallyr's ear to the sorrow of just about everyone.

That's why it blows its stacks! Literally. But there's still a lot we don't know about Caladra inner doctrine, how they relate to the Plateau in particular, etc. For that matter I'm reminded that I now need to make an open call for Heler enthusiasts to get a better sense of how the hero wars play out in western Maniria. Still a lot we don't know or have forgotten about those tribes too.

If I were pursuing it today I'd have some guys in there working with a pro-Solar imperial faction, the Assiday I guess, to restore Sky to what they think is its rightful role at the center of the universe, refine away this weird and annoying lunar crud, get the many little suns lined up. For fun let's say a bunch of recalcitrant (Y)ehilmaloids get the news this is their new promised land and head down to work out their oedipal issues over there. Unfortunately for them IMG this would be part of a larger rotation among the fires and so between a revitalized and truly vibrant Lodril Unchained (plateau blows its top, spike rises) and Jar-Eel and her gang putting the red kibosh in Esrolia proper the normal solar influence melts down pretty fast. Also star magic, unicorn women, Teshnites. Ultimately they all screw it up when the western (storm) tribes intervene like they do.

A few hints and rumors in old post-Belintar campaign logs that they're actively working with Warm Earth to destabilize Esrolia, either as a counterpoint to the Lunar effort or just a parallel power grab. They seem to be aggressive enough to drive the rump unity faction into cooperation with Red Earth, but that might just be a phase in the struggle. Either way, they're definitely a player in the Earth Sixth and so their politics at home haven't really been explored yet. My guess is they came out of the MOLAD disaster in a relatively united and uh inflamed position, eager to project influence on more passive and incredibly wealthy former allies. In a way it isn't hard to imagine the Sixths spiraling into a reprise of the elemental Gods War dynamics (Fire oppresses Earth and is checked by Storm, etc.) after the artificial MOLAD system evaporates and all that magical energy needs to go somewhere. There are also hints of a naval alliance with a pirate town called "little Mandros" west along the coast. This might be an early draft of Handra or one of the other Manirian free ports. The goal is clearly to project friendly naval power into the Choralinthor over the anticipated protest of the locals. Again, elemental dynamics in play. In this model they also hate the Shadow Plateau and I wouldn't be surprised if some clever person isn't trying to raise Free Lodril via the usual tactics . . . overheating the volcano, calling local monster man, getting ornery. Not sure what Warm Earth is getting out of it beyond a soil infusion that doesn't depend on the rivers and the rain, but arguably in light of recent agricultural disruption that might be enough.

Shadowlands might well have operated that way in various phases of the Tribute. Old-school Battlestar Galactica fans will recall the cannibal casino planet of the Ovions, a kind of lotus eater island where the "flowers" have sharp appetites. I don't know how to boot a theory back out of the dumb zone but it's starting to sound like this one is reaching for breakout fan canon status. Well played, @Eff! Evidently Kerofinela = Kalifornee after all. Let the MOLAD games begin and reenact the myths!

That's super hot stuff. Going to look for a lost figure behind Spol now, YarGan YarGar, once the wellspring of "a large pocket of worship in Peloria" and ultimately Fronela. First he lost his Truth and then he lost his realm (a kind of northern holy country), becoming one of those lost gods who vanished at Castle Blue. The Xentha / Xemela linguistic link is close to a simple coincidence.

Carmanian Sorcery has got to look extremely strange from a modern Rokar-centered perspective. Awful unreconstructed influences. Strange gods. The works. This then of course becomes one of the matrices of Lunar Sorcery, whereupon hangs at least one joke.

It's a good question. A local sect or secret society called the Dragon Emissaries claimed to have been around in the region since the late 600s, when the Spolite philosophy was dominant and orthodox yelmists don't like to talk about it. These people or entities then get mixed up in the emerging Golden Dragon movement by 800, but historical records of this era are fragmentary and often seem to have been successively purged by careful editors. After Dara Happa Rises there was a radically anti-EWF dragonslayer movement incorporating Carmanian / Western insights. The important people in this movement eventually break with the Carmanians and are ultimately wiped out in the Kill, taking their insights to the fire with them. Historical records around this era are equally fragmentary, with a lot undoubtedly lost or "misplaced" in the Carmanian occupations and other Kill upheavals. The lunar relationship (if any) to dragon forces remains tantalizingly unclear. If I were doing it today, I'd insert strong Kralorelan elements to better tie the lozenge together in complex diversity, possibly making the Golden Dragon a kind of "joint project" between them and EWF and setting up larger conflicts between the eastern God Learner complex and their estranged but magically capable Carmanian cousins with EWF and Dara Happa stuck in the middle. But that's not today.

I don't know about these ladies but driving any fertile woman, especially an active and ornery priestess, into the crone zone is a good way to invite serious curse reprisals from all parties. It infuriates the mother and distracts the crones, which amounts to the same thing in the end. Of course it happens even in Glorantha because ambitious people rarely think through all the implications of what they're doing. In my general experience everything looks like Ernalda when you're in the prime of life. Aging is how you are initiated into the knowledge that the mother is only the queen of the world to her children . . . the really deep earth allows her that much prestige but no further. These are some of the secrets Belintar somehow managed to glean despite being formed as a boy, by the way. Somehow he was already there in the rite. And he knew how to come back from it.