scott-martin

Love it. For MGF I'd consider staging them at least a few days travel apart on average to make each one feel more like a passage into a separate ecosystem even for elves in their own forests. This gives each of the girls space and encourages the clumping patterns you point out. Let's run some tests. Say an elf on the go needs to run a wild and happy day from grove to grove when it's Awakening season. If we treat native forest as trade road for their purposes, those dryads might be 30 km apart for an average territory of 700 km2 . . . more like 500 groves in Vralos and each would function as a living great temple to Aldrya with maybe 1,500 full elves (again on average) under her shade. Naturally they aren't all frolicking right there 24/7 so it doesn't get crowded. They have things to do. But when there's trouble and/or a festival things get ugly for intruders fast. Maybe you want smaller clumps more closely spaced. That's great too. At 50 km2 the girls are maybe 4-5 km apart, call it one in every AAA hex on average. We can do that. It's up to you. If you want a little drama between them, slow the runners down. This won't keep lucas virae from using spells to know what's going on in neighboring groves, but maybe you like that spooky hivemind vibe. YGWV. Some people like dryads to be awesome campaign-culminating events, "hero-level heavies." In that scenario, I would just park one on each of the Plant Runes in AAA and the Guide, so that's 11 mature groves in Vralos. Is that too thin a distribution? On the one hand, you get maximum drama when you meet one. (I have not personally encountered many.) On the other, if you need to run a week to kiss the dryad and pass the Awakening baton, it's going to slow the spring down a lot before everybody gets the good news. Maybe they have special magic to motivate you in that season.

I do love a turtle. Now that we're here I wouldn't be surprised if our original source for a lot of this comes from Sofali informants and what I now want to believe is that they have a weird unique spiral astronomy and that their word for sky is bronze. Dragons, waters, trees, snakes, fruit. EDIT "Apples." I was going to mention the Holiness of the "tide-wracked" Holy Country, half solid and half fluid, but forgot to go there. Golden apples, silver apples. Apple Lanes. A lot of this was probably developed into whatever form Ernalda Dragon (Ernalda Likita?) was allowed to take inside EWF and then spectacularly suppressed . . . I think this is probably the best answer to the original question. They knew more about these connections and worked them more explicitly than they do today. Anyway people don't like to talk about it until the terminal third age reopens all the locked mythic boxes and those ghosts of previous epochs come briefly home.

I think, my friend, that beyond a certain scale of antiquity it is literally turtles all the way down. But this might be one of the primal struggles of that age. Are mommy and daddy "fighting" or is it another form of hugging? Some say one and become one kind of creature. Others say and become another.

That's a very deep question. Some people preserve vestigial memories of an era when the dominant elemental hierogamy was Earth and Water. Something happens to Water and the struggle to establish a successor sets up the "primal" (actually relatively recent on this time scale) rivalry between Storm and Sky. This is probably related to the flood but what's clear is that it's much older than a lot of the status quo we usually talk about. In the time when Earth and Water were united, they generated their own joint ecosystem. Snake forms were popular and beloved by both. The rivers were a sign of their union. Fish and snakes have scales. When a snake or river leaps it can become a rainbow or something like a "dragon," a winged (but probably not feathered yet) snake. The likitas (earth snake women, nagas) represent both tectonic "currents" and the literal flow of fluid energy through the landscape . . . dowsing, what we would call ley lines, the serpent force. It starts to look like a primeval dragon complex. Relative to other primeval complexes they read earthy and watery . . . but in the fullness of time the dragon world within itself has diversified to emulate other modern elemental vocabularies, one sheds his skin and becomes "brown," for example, another mirrors the sun, the red dragon from the board game remains a little mysterious. Cragspider's friend may be even more ancient than generally surmised or simply a recidivist looking farther back for a pleasing expression. The primeval dragon complex runs in parallel with the primal vegetative complex, children of Earth and Water we can understand a little better because they work a little harder to be understood. Different logic, different mythic economy but still contemporaries, fossil cousins cut from roughly the same stratum. There's a memory that dragons fought with giants that might conceal the fall of Water and the rise of Storm/Sky. If so, the giants are the shadows of one or more new divine dynasties, massive in "scale" but maybe more human in shape. Man Rune. The dragons are aligned with the older world. Giants and dwarves have an obscure relationship. Dwarves receive or acquire Earth affiliation at some point. Law, Stasis, Stone. As moisture recedes the ground hardens. Generations of elves and dwarves come and go. The world changes. East is where the old world never rolled back. West is where it recedes. People in the West who remembered the dragon world recede as the giant world and its monomyth comes into historical focus. But with strange aeons . . . .

Please keep us posted + consider publishing your results.

Love it all. As usual many of these are not trying hard enough to be dumb and actually deserve their own development threads when time permits. For example . . . "Executive" is its own category. From now on in a Glorantha very near mine the wizard schools are known as "legendary houses."

Lokarnos was a sun once in his native land reasonably well equipped to contend for the crown of heaven. He was a chariot god before they broke him. There were others.

If it helps, retranslate the "rightness" of these answers as "historically successful, conventional," much as anyone with the right paperbacks can respond to the question of a dog's buddha nature with "mu" without triggering the illumination mechanics or attracting the riddler's attention. We know that in such and such a time, so and so said a thing and was illuminated. People tell the story and feel spooky. Maybe with the right meditation and lucky rolls even the story can provoke a transformation in consciousness. More likely, nothing changes. Esoterically there is only one "right" answer in every riddle interaction because only one response will unlock that transformation for any given person at any particular moment. You can say a lot of things and act up in endless ways but unless it clicks, it's not the right answer. The answer that clicked once for someone may not work for anyone ever again. But once it clicks, that's my answer and I carry it with me unless for some reason my understanding evolves toward MGF. Nobody else's answer should matter unless for some reason I've engaged in a personal relationship with that person. Worrying about what works for anyone else is at best a greased rail to occluded vision. The story of Glorantha and the third age in particular is a story of occluded vision.

IMG it serves MGF. Any reasonably alert riddler should realize that a response has "provoked the great doubt" or relief from certainty that triggers the illumination mechanics. The linguistic content (if any) of the response is secondary to the riddler. You're just looking for the existential release. However, in the absence of broader experience, the respondent will often fixate on his or her personal "answer" as the key to the epiphany and so can miss the signs when they present in someone else. As noted across this thread, narcissism or at least solipsism is a common byproduct of the illumination crisis, leading many riddlers to become occluded to responses that diverge from their own. It all starts to revolve around the answer, which has been published and so you can cheat your way in. This cheat in itself serves the Nysalor cult as it enters the terminal seventh wane. They reward a kind of false consciousness that a good zen stick would cure in more innocent times. And this comment in itself represents the riddle associated with the Sense Ambush skill. There are other schools and infinite right answers.

"It's always the '90s somewhere in Glorantha fandom. It's just unevenly distributed." Your original question was very helpful to me personally in terms of figuring out how Orlanth works in the southern corner, so far from Dara Happan chauvinism and the suns northerners know. When they think of an Evil Emperor, they think of someone different. Thanks.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have cracked the puzzle of Why Desert Trackers Persist.

This is great and probably worth a FAQ. It's not them. It's you. The best initiators can cheerfully give it their best shot but the rite just won't take.

A lot of wonderful things here but this is the distinction I like best. As scrutiny of the lozenge expands, we'll discover a lot of "water" populations with original triolini descent (usually maternal, a nymph replacing an earth ancestress) but boating is not necessarily part of that birthright. If anything, as the first person in historical times to circumnavigate Iceland by kayak told me once, the whole point of boats is to avoid contact with water. If sailors loved swimming they wouldn't be sailors, and if the air wanted to cross water he would fly. [digression on "wareran" peoples and archaic Shargash the Sailor murals taken back to the lab for further development]

He lies all the time.

Ashara is one of my favorite of the silly things in this world, so thanks for that. Tilt the Talking God and suddenly a lot of hidden etymological insight shakes loose. I'm told there are still around 3,000 "Āsōrī" in Armenia today.

The prodigal returns! IMG Arstola is special because it participated directly in IFWW and so has a history of cooperation with all the standard races and cultures of the Dragon Pass region. It looks to the east and understands Unity. They're the pure Weberian type, as it were, the stereotype against which Central Genertelans measure all other forests. From what I can figure out, Tarin's survival covenant seems to have been a bit less generous and more introverted. Their achievement was getting different elf communities to work together with a few liminal outsiders but that's really as far as it went. As a result, while they learned how to interact with various forms of meat within Time (there have been experiments with trade / diplomacy), it isn't their preferred mode of operating so true Tarin Friends are both scarce and weird. This doesn't make Tarin evil or even "xenophobic," which can be an easy way to create a Blank Land where nobody talks and nothing is known. They were active in the Bright Empire because it suited their internal religious goals and might preserve deep mysteries of Nysalor to this day in the forest deeps off the conquest routes. But that was a long time ago. I suspect they are vicious to the pig people, ambivalent around the serpent shamans of the "western jungle" and aloof around other elder races. My dumb theory is that their particular "eaters" weren't what we call trolls at all and have mostly died out.

One pragmatic methodology would be to work in the "short realm" the acceleration to 1625 has given us and concoct snapshots of the region in 1616-24. This would allow space for exploration without forcing any assumptions about the state of play in the publishing present, effectively feeding Jonstown Compendium effort that might or might not persist into the Hero Wars. This is important because (a) the aeolians provide a wonderful transition experience from pure storm polytheism into the westernized complex as our view of the lozenge expands (b) I suspect the rise and fall of Malkonwal was the kind of highly overdetermined situation that looks from the outside like a classic tabletop campaign. A lot of crazy fun stuff probably went down there and a lot of crazy fun stuff was left behind . . . or scattered to nearby regions where it will be in play in 1625+. Few things can disrupt the tabletop status quo like a cabal or two of desperate sorcerers hundreds of miles from home with no easy return ticket. Even if most were safely neutralized in the 1620-24 disasters, they leave tempting magical wreckage behind. And if a significant population of those sorcerers were infected with any kind of apocalyptic fever to begin with, the impacts stretch to truly MGF proportions. The Malkonwal moment probably doesn't accurately reflect what we'll eventually find out about the authentic Hero Wars West or even conventional Aeolian spirituality in 1625. But it gets us closer. And one day when we all stand in the New New Malkonwal and all voices are raised in the Correction Song of Sri Bertilak, Sri Rimans and Little Shri Agga, marveling as the Spike rises in an explosion of glitter and pearls.

This cultural rhyme deserves continued investigation.

For all I know they started it and the big E is the convert. </dumbtheory>

I like the pagan direction kings receiving the male -ela, in which case there's a lot more to Enjor than meets the eye. Maybe this is a vestige of the world the Pendalites [retaining my eccentric demonyms here for emphasis] knew before the colonists came and insisted that the land was female. Either way, Jonatela preserves it in the north/west.

Got to shout this out as one of your crowning career achievements. And there’s a reasonable number circulating.

Thanks for documenting these and so much more ... your pages on Before The Moon and Our Great Empire were in the background as I was thinking about this. The evolution of the 2007 “rainbow” edition can be better told by others but I can say it is rarer and more extensive than the one commissioned in 2015. Even so, I hope people grab when either inevitably comes up. That’s the spirit! The briefest of notes here since all are worth a lot more meditation because they matter to you: * Bertalor does marry and have a kid so there are either multiple people of that name or “metals of Acos” is juvenile production. I prefer the latter scenario but we will see when we get moving here. Maybe a Kings List readalong would be useful! Anyhow he ends up abdicating. * The pralorites are definitely extant early on and seem completely separate from the lion realm. There are sketch maps but I don’t recall any river names. Will check again when not buried in PowerPoint. * Yingar is of the line of Horal and has his wings. However the lineages are contradictory, reflecting either revision or controversy now largely lost. As with all of these, this is only a placeholder. I know he is mentioned in Hrestol Saga so people with that might jump in first. * Damol is my favorite! The “aerlit” identity is part of his controversial role in the history of the children of “malkion” since there are those who want to deprecate all local storm entities to nuisance status. The whole family is very strange. Sorry to tease but more ahead ... typing this on the phone before getting back to work.

That is the goal. While I'm assured my beard will turn green if I share en bloc (and odds are good one or more fellow collectors will just have me killed, I am pretty easy to find and they are resourceful people), there's no reason this side of the lozenge's evolution should remain locked up among a handful of people when other researchers could benefit us all.

So it's been a few years since the Guide kickstarter and we've all seen a lot of the Blank Lands around the lozenge pushed back. Maybe we could benefit from a little more information about what's in some of the rarer publications and, more importantly, what isn't in there. Sometimes the anxiety of influence is crippling. While it can be frustrating to know material is unavailable, it can be worse not to know whether it's available or not. With that in mind, I hope it's useful or diverting to describe the contents of the Roots of Glorantha series. I have to emphasize that everything said about these books is true. They are rougher than any volume in the Stafford Library and can vary widely from the 17th Century Glorantha we know today. Even when they are accurate, their insight pertains to the world as it was over a millennium past. The world has moved on. Some of this material was not even available for reference when it came time to fill in the Genertela box and what followed. Other texts were only grafted on later through the long process of reconsideration and revision. The core of what we have here is a more developed version of the so-called "Serpent Kings chronology" or the "Seshnegite Book of Kings" that incorporates Hrestol Saga with similar material filling out the royal history to shortly after Gerlant, along with bits that we would recognize from the early Imperial Age. It's a little Thomas Malory and a little Herodotus, concerned with the epic sweep of a civilization that starts small and fragile and ultimately assimilates or annihilates its neighbors. Mostly it's about the tragic fall of the Pendalites and the seeds of empire. Because the Seshnegites were remorselessly chauvinistic, the world beyond Tanisor is relegated to two loose collections of material, the "Book of Enemies" that discusses the Pendalites and Ralians and the "Book of Foreigners" providing very early notes on Slontos, Pamaltela, Brithos/Vadelos and the East. The overall effect is a high-level history and geography of the world the Seshnegites might have known before the Riddlers came, with a few additions to take us through the Gbaji period. There's also some short swords & sorcery fiction as a sample of what Greg was pursuing before the WBRM breakthrough as well as two versions of the tale of Damol, the later of which is quite extraordinary and I wish I'd had a chance to digest it earlier and tell him. It's like a fifth branch of the Mabinogion and could easily be published separately with relatively minor critical amendment. But if not, it's a side track from Thamor's reign so unless you're obsessed with religious politics in the first century you aren't missing out on anything. In general you aren't missing out on anything here unless you really need to know about the Dawn Age West before the early disasters set them on their current course. The world was different then. And while it's nice to see the seeds of many other parts of the lozenge, it's worth noting that this is before the WBRM map crowded in between the western jungle and the far east. There's nothing here about Central Genertela, no red goddess or storm god. All that came later and has evolved before your eyes. Genert lived there somewhere in the middle and he's always already gone, leaving a howling wilderness of nonhumans in his wreckage. There's also nearly nothing here about Fronela. We've talked about most of it here and there. While the Snodal / Jonat material does graft onto the end of the Seshnegite narrative, none of it is in the commercial edition, so you aren't missing anything in that direction either. You'll have to go elsewhere to check all the sources there. So rejoice. If you're obsessed with Seshnela in the dawn centuries, just ask. Otherwise, you're free of the need to covet these particular volumes, although they are pretty (Rick did astounding archival work) and if you see one come up on the secondary market it's worth at least making a play for it. And of course, endless other unpublished pages remain in the Chaosium archive and more are being recovered all the time, so we're never entirely free of the past. Now I cheerfully await correction from others who have encountered these books and have different opinions. THE ROOTS OF GLORANTHA (second state) Book I: The Encyclopedia of Glorantha (aka Seshnegi Book of Kings) Book II: The Reign of King Froalar (aka Hrestol Saga) Book III: The Reign of King Ylream Book IV: The Reign of King Thamor Book V: The Book of Jychan Book VI: The Reign of King Bertalor Book VII: The Vadeli Traider Book VIII: The Reigns of Kings Sonmalos, Mimtak, Bertia and Queen Annila Book IX: The reigns of Kings Gothimus and Torphing Book X: Genealogies of Seshnela Book XI: The Book of Enemies Book XII: The Book of Foreigners Book XIII: The Book of Gbaji Book XIV: Hero Tales Book XV: Aamor The Wanderer of Ralios Book XVI: Damiliol

What I would want at such a moment is a way to contact some ancestors so I can negotiate a new survival covenant. Luckily those tools are available locally but it means settlers can't really go home again. Which is a good epic to have. And if corn grows down there, what a miracle.