scott-martin

Accidental mutation damaged the egg. The nature of the damage may be a combination of ambition and impatience, depending on neck to tail ratio. I consider this not quite on thread because it is veering esoteric into other technologies of consciousness, but what the hell, we can get it back . . . . . . penitent parasaurolophus ultimately grow wings and become something like birds, in which form they are considered aspirational in some forms of Pelorian mysticism (but never Kralorela). When the Bright Empire with its fixation on "highness" came in, they took to the sky and were never seen again, except in memories, dreams, reflections. Maybe some day they will return.

Say more. I'm trying to collate that stuff with the Burning Man dinosaur camp materials.

Handra's wide open and would be in my top priority handful for JC treatment as it "drains" an eclectic but under explored slice of ecosystem. Fay Jee is of course another but they're older and weirder. Maybe the way in is to do a survey of major river deity quests. As we know the watersheds in this part of the world have seen their share of engineering and shocks. Figuring them out is going to be somebody's mission.

Oh yeah. And it's 30,000 years old (cool!) with an uninterrupted written record of occupation to prove it. Local government runs similar to Chicago only with a centaur (cool!) for a mayor [sic]. Everyone on this thread knows Glorantha can be a challenge because it supports deep data-driven modeling as well as these flights of dream logic. Sometimes the dream confounds the data and forces us to do a little creative adjustment, but it's complicated. The best way to experience the place with authority is to go there in some sense, and then the dream logic tends to take over. I love the way RQ keeps the dream tethered within shouting distance of the data. Sartar is an explicitly weird place even by Gloranthan standards.

Top thread! Who knows where the day takes us but just want to star one of the lines: IMG this is worth reinforcing. "Sartar" is not a conventional country so much as a novel exploit of location and global relationships. It's a lens for higher-order economic math built out of local accidents of language and social structure. This naturally allows for statistical extremes that may not apply anywhere else in our fantasy bronze age: more coinage, bigger towns, more spells, more scrolls. More important people (runes), greater monster density. Maximum fantasy. Among other things, Boldhome is Nochet without so much commodity baggage. It's the Miracle Mile, a kind of holy country. The question of how sustainable the project was and under what conditions it persists is for the Hero Wars to decide. And how it scales. It will be interesting to see if other regions can find their inner Sartar and give us a similar high-density encounter table. In my heart I would like that but I know that the tragedy of Time is that most of the best resource sites were discovered, developed and abandoned early on. Maybe in the Dawn Age. Maybe along the great watersheds that tie regions together and keep "obvious" short portage opportunities on the margins.

I always liked the "throwaway" reference on the Trollpak skull spread where a diversity of exotic darkness creatures including nightstalkers (hoons, nightriders, frights) emerge after the midget slasher lost its man rune back in the terminal green age. Looking at it again, the specific absence of "bearded" troll skulls in the temples of the "beard" god is ominous, especially because their closest surviving relatives are the chaos-tinged cave trolls. We don't know a lot about the romal races but then again, we don't know a lot about the secret history of the Lhan/Than (Atyar) complex either. Maybe there was a "bearded" skull that went missing somewhere on the fringe of antigod country. Who collects skulls anyhow? A grand and terrible adventure of the mind awaits for sages willing to go all the way. Being a huge Bruce Chatwin fan I wonder if the midget slasher wasn't also a type of prehistoric superpredator ranging across both the Pamaltelan and Pelorian veldts: terrifying in its voracity and sadism, picking the weakest members out of the clan and harrying them for days until our ancestors' cousins died of blood loss, exhaustion, fear. The slashers gave up their man rune and became something like sakkars in Peloria. In Pamaltela they changed in different ways. On earth we would say dinofelis, the devil in the dark. Speaking of which, I also want to know who the dirt devils are! Something ancestrally like a rock eater, maybe.

Anything you'd like to recognize. New mapping, new lego dioramas, new art. Could even be podcasts!

In the eye of the beholder. Eccentric and obscure OK . . . not necessarily always a popularity contest.

It strikes me that this is a great place to nominate your favorite achievements in Lozenge Studies in this difficult year. Let us know and we'll move the prize money around!

Not to cloud the dance floor (a cloud like a star) any further but I suspect the Sartar Rising poets are a lot deeper in sky magic than I am with their juggling stars and planets and such. We can all fight over whether this means they were close to the Kallyr court or simply rocking adjacent mysteries . . . this is a good fight to have. Being a simple and uncomplicated person, I really do see the Dragonrise as a straightforward application of sympathy and contagion. The visiting team had set up their set of identifications so they could force the local sky to hold a certain configuration (perpetual full). Home team finds a weak entry point and within the ritual vocabulary becomes identified with the ring. The sky can't reject the ring once it's there. Everyone knows the ring contains a green star so the perfection of the ritual stage requires a green star to emerge from somewhere. As above, so necessarily below. The dragon emerges. Little orange stars exit as the ring does. The sky gets on with its work. The simplicity may be a tell that Kallyr and her tricky sky people truly weren't in the loop or at least involved with the ritual planning. All we really know is that they had orders not to molest Pole Star if they could help it, which seems to be a concession to her known all(eg)iances. It raises a great question whether Burbustus magic is intrinsic to the Reaching Moon network or just a local flourish designed to set the temple into the local ecology. If Burbustus runs the Yara temples in the east, that's awfully interesting. If he doesn't, that's interesting too because then the question is how those temples work, why they changed (feedback from local sacred mountains?) and whether Storm Pent has anything to say about Reaching Storm when that happens!

The CHDP chronicler doesn't appear to have had access to the Sartar Rising books and the architecture of their ritual sabotage is a little clearer in some respects there. The real goal was apparently always creating a sympathetic opening for the green star to make an appearance above and be answered by some dragon power closing the circuit below. The timing indicates that they wanted to be as far from the site as possible before that proton torpedo went off. At best, it covered their retreat. At worst, it looks like a suicide mission. CHDP is very careful about assigning plausible deniability. Even Orlaront says he didn't know the magnitude of the dragon power they were calling up. He gets banished anyway as Starbrow is "seeking to contain what had been awakened." Maybe someone somewhere is trying to cover up an inconvenient truth. I have always been in love with the CHDP account so really can't say. I think that simply calling the Ring to its rightful place in an otherwise sanitized ritual sky wouldn't have bought them anything beyond a short-term stalemate motivating the empire to torch the jungle, as it were. They needed to flip the board and put the empire on the defensive. That requires opening yourself up to something bigger than what you started out with. All the orange stars were in play but on a perfect mirror something green was required . . . and then the ground rose up to meet it. Because I like human drama I side with CHDP and think they were making a huge leap of desperation and faith that they'd draw a better card from the deck. Other people have more worldly perspectives.

Love it. IMG RGQ reflects the same world as HQG only showing the strains of a difficult decade. Old models no longer work as well. Sometimes the people in power make choices that alter the magical systems that run the world. Some of these choices are born of desperation and we know a little about how they happened. Others have yet to be revealed. I'm personally convinced that the sacrifice of Issaries rune to itself is one of these hidden choices that rocked the world off its underpinnings but we don't know a lot yet about how it happened. Maybe we all went to bed one night and when we woke up in the morning it was accepted across all the markets that the rune was gone. Maybe it was always a figment of the bookkeeping and we finally decided to give it up. It was too expensive, no longer useful, the opportunity costs stacked elsewhere. Maybe a cabal of esoteric merchants ("syndics") haggled it out . . . something like the Ban and the area of effect is now expanding out of that Zero Point to convert all Trade Runes stored into something else. Rune as crypto contract, but I digress. A notional sink of magical capital denominated in arbitrary numbers we invented and are now calling back. It's the hero wars.

Love this! In some sources there was an aberrant Dawn Age dragonewt community in the Elder Wilds. I think you've found them. After all, they apparently held the Water Seat on the Council so Hurrah, I awake from yesterdayAlive, but the war is here to staySo my love, [untranslatable?\ and me,Decide to take our last walk through the noise to the seaNot to die but to reborn,

All these replies are sizzlers but today I just want to tease out one juxtaposition: "Mysticism" just got interesting as something more than a renunciation of spiritual materialism. And if we glance in the right direction we might understand a bit more of what the East did in the shadow of the Dawn Wars. That direction might be forward in time.

Best Post Of The Year. Followed closely by I want everything available on this Southfaring, not coincidentally because we're temporarily down here in Florida and the only question is which of us is which. "We never saw them again."

Not Dumb Enough! I am not convinced there was ever a "historical Donandar" who originally crossed the world teaching performance and deep in my heart I suspect there was never a "historical Issaries" either. I go back and forth on a "historical Chalana Arroy." These are composite figures cobbled together from diverse parts and cultural matrices now mostly lost. They belong to the world now. The Lanbril network at least seems to have fixed geographical scope and boundaries so we can seek the origins more easily. Maybe there was no founder as you say. Just isolated crimes resolving into patterns, and then those patterns of crime became conscious, acquired a name and accepted sacrifice. This is an amazing line. Where do Gloranthan guilds come from? Where are they going?

The smoking man might have one or two surprises left for you if you veer a little past Civilization / Discontents in either direction. I am out of "thanks" reacts for the day but would like to highlight this extended insight: "Game creation and shamanism were intrinsically linked for Greg. Both gave him constructive means of sorting out his life. If you believe you're a bad or fallen person, what's your storyline? Can you change it and yourself through mythology, like lucid dreaming instead of just being swept along by whatever comes? The redemptive story arcs in Arthurian mythology gave him the understanding, and Glorantha (and specifically Argrath) was its personal expression. And once he had his mythology he could make it real. All versions of myth are true, and if Percival could achieve the Grail, and Argrath conquer his demons and become a god, well now Greg's got a roadmap. I think he very much ended his quest in an Arthurian way. Shamanically speaking." So back to the original post, Glorantha is overfull of assholes. Our work here on the therapeutic battlefield is to teach them not only to talk but to sing.

TOP thread!

Love it. My other Dumb Theory on Lanbril is that these "skill based" or "professional" cults are the first expressions of cosmopolitan Glorantha's pivot out of "spell based" and largely initiatory consciousness. We were once defined as who we are. Now, in the cities, we come to be defined as what we do for a living. That's the future: autobiography emerges as myth recedes. The role of the Issaries, strangely subdued in the Lanbril context (what's their Compatibility Number?), is a factor here . . . and it's probably time to rejigger the narrative as personal passions and their magic emerge. Vadel always a possibility, My Dumb Theory there completely unspeakable. I really like the Artmal Hypothesis because it then gives us materials we can retrofit into the archaic South, complicate them up. On the other hand we might be bringing them the plague.

Where do Gloranthan prophecies come from? We are told the gods, like the human unconscious, do not recognize the distinction between past, present and "future." But not all divinations are literally true. They require expert interpretation. Perhaps these divinations function as "prophecy" until someone emerges to decode them correctly. Or perhaps all the "prophecies" we have are not magically supported at all but are instead consciously constructed as wish fulfillment, propaganda or to serve some other goal. This would make me a little sad. While I'm sure plenty of mystagogues actively promote fake visions of the future, it seems like a waste to attribute the entire Hero Wars complex to this kind of activity. Moreover, in a world where the gods are real etc., it strikes me as extremely dangerous to lie like this . . . sooner or later, the right people will find out and you will get in big trouble. Either way, where does all the foreshadowing come from? Who sells it? How is it made? Where are the margins?

My Dumbest Theory around them is that they're the draconic power of the true (magnetic!) West. In the tragicomic fullness of time they tried many things, made and broke many alliances (including a super weird "marriage" with the jelmre) and the Western Wars will determine the ultimate blah blah.

I like the intuition you display in picking at that particular line with its unusual syntax. He is "of" the Heortlings and his cult inhabits the outlaw umbra of Heortling society but he is not "the" Heortling Thief God. This is where he comes from . . . but he is not Our Guy. IMG Thief and Trickster emerged historically as overlapping monomyth constructs. Some God Learner schools were invested in aggregating the Trickster cults into something that survives within modern Eurmal. Most died in the devastation of Slontos, hoist on their own gigantic final petard. (To risk an especially eccentric personal joke, other sources say "canard.") Others focused on expressions of the Thief. While we know a whole lot less about their role in the Empire, it's not hard to imagine them as magical saboteurs and subversives who infiltrated the criminal undergrounds of rival cultures in order to disrupt the "normal" local magical economy, steal secrets, support friendly resistance movements and probably smuggle contraband drugs, skills and spells for profit. You come into a village, find the local outlaws, "convince" them that you're a co-cultist and ultimately if all goes well they work for you. Then you go on to the next village. You do it again and again, collecting local magic along the way. Once you achieve a critical mass of expertise, you can go into a culture and set up your own Thief network that can operate within the local mythic landscape without too much resistance. You can use this quasi-artificial cult for various purposes, as above or so below. Some are hero cults built around a mortal exemplar. Others are constructed from useful fragments. Whether this is where a "historical Lanbril" emerges from the Heortling mythic underground is not a question I am willing to entertain in uncertain company. I will say that his origin myth is very strange. Some western adept seeking immortality may have come to Pavis to start a mystery sect in the shadow of local eurmal. Imagine a century or two of shadow war between the cults leaving Lanbril in control of the Thief aspect and local eurmal "deciding' to get out of the way. Imagine loose threads tying back into niche cults like Black Fang, which preserve lore that no longer exists anywhere else and so are important enough to rate their own writeup despite completely negligible influence and initiatic population. Imagine someone like Arlaten in Strangers In Prax coming to run a similar scam. Maybe in the fourth age there's a Cult of Arlaten and the boundaries of Lanbril have changed. Imagine "Knowledge" Thieves with a more explicit parasitic role to play in the world's information economy. As the Empire broke up various expressions of Pirate might have emerged as well.

This needs its own thread and ultimately extended development. In My Glorantha there was always a strand of primeval mostal influence within human Jrustelan history. It has simply been hidden in the fragmentary records that survive. (Urtiam, etc.) Theories relating Blue Zz-b-r Magic (historically adroit at shattering or sinking lands) to the Purple Luatha Project especially welcome. Who is the natural enemy in this? The dwarf. And also the altinelan.

It's surprisingly complicated. Greg had already written at least a little about just about every place except for what we now call Central Genertela (Sartar, Prax, Shadows Dance, Holy Country and Empire) but that material wasn't grafted onto the board games until the RuneQuest era, when the composite world became "Glorantha" and you could walk from Seshnela to the Vulture Country and back. If you want what we know and love about the West, East or South, it grows out of the freeform material, parts of which are vestigial and parts of which are intricately detailed. Otherwise, as far as I know, the board games are the earliest extant source for what becomes King of Sartar, Prince of Sartar and deep background for what we can call the Third Age Argrath Heroica. As for Argrath, I believe he's both a wave and a particle. Greg's informants indicate that Sartar ultimately wins and someone -- call them "the historical argrath" -- is the catalyst of that. A terminal hero wars environment undoubtedly generates endless potential argraths, most of whom are transient and pose only an incidental challenge to empire before being neutralized or coopted. In that respect, every player character with a healthy grudge is participating in the argrath legend and their scattered acts of sabotage ultimately pull down the moon. Think of it as a version of Monster Man building up power until finally it erupts. The scrawny kid from Pavis just happens to be the one whose chit of resentment happened to sway the roll and trigger the eruption. And so that's the story that's the most interesting, because it ends differently from all the others. To flip the lesson of the oracular film The Three Amigos, everyone is theoretically the imperial "El Guapo" (pain in the ass or "argrath") at any given moment. We all contribute in our small ways to history. Some of us get punished for it, others do okay. The scrawny kid manages to make it more than a metaphor and become the actual argrath, which is why we tell his story. And as such, he might be an asshole and he might get in our light sometimes but he's on the right side of history and so he becomes our asshole, a force of nature. You don't fight that. You just ride with it until your journeys diverge. If you don't like where he's going, get off the bus. Glorantha is big. A lot of opportunistic crap gets pulled into the terminal vortex that is Dragon Pass but a lot of crap gets spun out as well to land in other regions and seed the hero wars energy. Maybe you're in the outgoing crap. Me, I am eager to see the moon liberated from empire so she can get on with her work and we can see what Greg's informants missed. I'm eager for a lot of things. The kid has taken it farther than anybody else so far. Keep rolling the dice. A wounded world cries out for healing one way or another. It looks like disruption when it comes. SOURCES: Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie Lorne Michaels, !Three Amigos!

It is a delicacy but mostly for export markets. When you're rolling at that level hypoallergenic alynx wool for luxury spin is probably a better use of your labor. With all seriousness this is great. I like the constant references back to the silver standard and the evolving sense of the traditional hide as a productivity metric that salt of the earth types often conflate with land footprint. Multiple interlocking economies . . . I suspect the right square foot of Gringle's storage unit is valued the equivalent of several "hides" among the cognoscenti while the great spell traders are worth more than the entire kingdom (and covertly support a hell of a lot of otherwise marginal agrarian posture).