scott-martin

I like how at Nochet Knowledge Temple elf and dragonewt studies share a "department" in the form of the Green Sages. It would be wonderful if they look back to Castelain's work . . . or vice versa. Either way, their loyalties may well lie in the near west.

Striking how clearly it resembles the human head from this angle. I haven't seen it anywhere else.

The extinct "dragonewt" nation of the Elder Wilds were technically more-or-less flightless birds in communion with Rinliddi and proto-Kralorela. When Nysalor cursed the reptile nations the dragon who ate it lived in the east and that's how they get their scales there.

People interested in this can build out Divine Intervention a little as a hinge between ad hoc ("animist") petitions and routinized worship. Perhaps providing conditions sweeten the deal for a spirit and enhance success percentages. Then once you know what the entity likes, you simply offer it again.

Yes, I am still waiting for the dumb part.

Love it. Truly badass. Let's get a little crazy when we should be populating our powerpoint. All of this is just IMG of course. I suspect that the 10% annualized ROC is just what we can reasonably charge for minimum risk activities: peddling penny candy to children, bankrolling other traders and providing liquidity to the Credit Network when we can't think of anything more interesting to do. The starting initiate has a little more than 600L in cash and carry so can reasonably generate Free standard of living indefinitely. Of course the magic happens when carry converts to cash and cash converts to carry. You are going to want to keep the capital rolling, finding cheap stuff to buy when you're flush and finding motivated shoppers when you want to cash out. I think a rule of 10 is easy accounting in a fantasy bronze age environment, so if I can easily source a thing for 9 clacks I'm going to charge the public 10, restock and keep the extra copper. Keep the money moving. Turn it more than once a year, it will compound. That's how you get big and start running into big problems like paying people. You can get too big for the local market. In that scenario, you need to fall back on the 10% yield on passive cash or take on something riskier and more ambitious like what Mr and Mrs Mith have built in Votankiland. They are easily richer than any two of the citadel kings put together (Treasure Factor 300) and they do it all on just four mules in every year and four mules out. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if most of the incoming cargo is stuff to furnish the trade mission and keep Skilfil and his women happy. Maybe they bring 30 Things of bronze military hardware, some medical supplies for the hospital, religious artifacts for the temple, but the rest is geegaws that only the citadel courts can really afford and even their demand is limited. As long as Skilfil is happy you can take your pick of another 40-50 Things of dwarf munitions back to Mother Sartar padded out with luxury furs, exotic artifacts for specialists and a few precious envelopes of the wildest elf shit they will share. He's earned his payout for the year and probably helped advance some personal philanthropic objectives besides. Once in a blue moon he goes up to confer with the giant. He loves it out here. In theory he can even run the bar at a loss as long as he keeps this route open, or simply retire by 40. Cool story. But we aren't all Joh Mith with what amounts to a monopoly of two thirds of the howling wilderness. Time is money so while he's waiting for that big once-a-year turn, he and his people are happy to keep shorter-term cash working in lower-return commodities. This is more where middle-level merchants can operate. Djimm has the Trilus trading post mostly covered: incentivize the local population to hand you stuff that's worth money, then offer them things they want so they give you the money back too. Junior merchants on any given caravan will trade their own shingles along the way while finding ways to earn their spot at the chuckwagon. Fancy ones will simply rent a piece of the overhead, which Mith appreciates. And unfortunately the route really only scales to four mules because otherwise he'd be running more in and out. Most of his money at this point is sunk into inventory at the bar. He wants to keep it working so he goes on the road a couple weeks a year. Within Balazar his markup is as simple as it gets: if I'm the only guy around who can reliably get it for you, I'm going to charge you roughly double it would cost back home. The only competition is capricious and a little arbitrary because they're government funded, but even with then, double wholesale is the base. (They'll go up to 5X list price in the right greedy mood. Seller's market.) This is the kind of return junior merchants on the caravan get . . . but it's a risky and annoying venture. You only get one turn a year and if your mule gets eaten or whatever, you've blown out your shot to make money that year. On the other hand, come into a string of luck and you end up running your own route. I think the breakpoints are interesting. Standard beginner merchant has to keep moving just to keep eating and it's risky business out there. Take that starting stake on a seasonal trading adventure and you can double it. Then pay your bills and try it again. When you've got 1200 L in play, you can hire a friend full time. Maybe this person runs the store back home or comes with you so you can do more dangerous runs. 1200 can turn into 1800, then 2400. And you can always just hire freelancers for seasonal work along the way. The funny thing is that someone who compulsively Bargains every transaction will end up losing money until skill level hits 80%. That's okay. God likes it when you simply charge list with standard markup. Don't get cute. This is where we explain the slight wobble between 1:9 and 10% profit, by the way. The merchant inevitably tries to get cute or has a twinge and ends up overpaying / undercharging. It's okay. I think this means a Free artisan can pay the bills producing about 540 L worth of wholesale product a year but that piece bears further reflection.

These theories need to get dumber. To celebrate my thousand-and-first post this one, for example, really just reverses the murder and disintegration of Yelm, which is a type of magic on my mind lately. Cut it into pieces, redeploy the pieces. Or find the pieces, put them back together . . . maybe in a new and personally more appealing form. It's a somewhat gruesome calculus in its nether reaches (think of entities like hydra with negative magic factors) but can be as simple and universal as the food song. Ralzakark is clearly having trouble rolling all his parts together, which is a good way to know the world hasn't ended yet. Maybe when he goes to the east and meets the black sun. This theory will also have to do better in order to earn "dumb" status.

Oh, you know. Some people have polished tiles to sit on and are willing to wait decades. Others are either less patient or for whatever reason exist in a transmission where shocks are the only levers of consciousness available. And then there are those who have access to the meditative systems but decide that what a particular student really needs is a sudden jolt or other random encounter (警策). "Better" is a work in progress. If nothing else it shuts the barbarians up for a little bit (couple centuries), letting you get back to what you really enjoy.

Previewing work before it's ready for prime time is a dumb move so why not here? The deep forest story of Peloria is a little more complicated than the time-lapse maps suggest. At the Dawn, Rist is unusually isolated, without a clear bond to any of the forest neighbors or regional survival compacts. The Riyestans are friends but don't really last long. The foundation of Berthestead points to elf vestiges down the Erenflarth but the forest has receded and the arrow bushes are growing wild for the harvest. A case can also be made for the practically provisional Arrowstone Vale culture as another ally or satellite of a once larger elf complex, maybe a joint project with a local dwarf nation. While everybody suffered in the Dark, the overall impression here is that Rist suffered a little more than others and the process of deforestation continues into Time. This probably cast a shadow on their particular psychology that shows up again in the God Project and afterward. I suspect that the specific tribulations remembered in "The Second Plantings" belong to this forest and its early struggles with the Fire Tribes. This becomes a personal challenge for Saratin Seomale, who brings the good news and loves the light above all else. Saratin Seomale is not a lifebringer from the council. Saratin Seomale is an awakener from the Greenwood to the West, which has a different survival compact and little history of hostile sky gods. The Greenwood has to be taught to fear fire and Saratin Seomale learns that lesson only at the end if ever. By the time the lifebringers come up, Rist is already there waiting for them and ultimately joins the World Council on its own terms. In 193, Rist blooms, wiping out what appears to be horse nomad territory up to what is now Doblia. Something unrecorded happens and the Greenwood and Elder Wilds forests expand shortly thereafter, producing FS Map 5. This gives the Khordavites a little breathing room and probably makes Dorastor feel even more enchanted as a beacon of coexistence in an otherwise hostile wood green empire. The council moves. Khordavu is crowned. We win Argentium Thri'ile. Starting around 325, the new growth collapses. Something is wrong. Maybe, as in Pamaltela, there's a rot somewhere in the fiber. Maybe they just overreached. And maybe people like Erraibdavu help. Pelandan records from this era have not been recovered so we don't know what they were like so far from the Entekosiad. My guess is that they were Saratin Seomale's friends. Either way, New Forest persists around Jernalf and the Brass Mountains through the Gbaji Wars. The Poisonthorn broods. The fact that the Army of Righteousness does not cleanse these forests suggests that either he couldn't do it or he saw no taint. We know Arkat had no friends in the Greenwood because he was denied northern passage, but he evidently saw no enemies either. He always gives elves a choice and evidently some chose right. And Rist endures for the time being. Around 500, the forest around the Brass Mountains tries again and spreads across modern Carmania, once again disrupting the historical record there and clearing the stage for the Spolite Empire to follow. Maybe someone there recognized that Arkat was no longer paying attention and decided to make their move. It doesn't take. Something terrible called THE ROT appears on the 550 map, which is helpfully subtitled "nonhuman wars." The Carmanian forest evaporates. There's also a battle in the Brass Mountains, "dwarves out." Spol rolls in. A conspiracy theorist might ponder whether this is some awful, awful rite engineered to birth some kind of karmic successor or ghost project. We know almost nothing about this forest, what it wanted or where it went. They might have originally been the vaguely sinister Old Ones beckoning from Map 6. They're almost certainly the forest that erupts in the reign of Elmharsnik. Note the simultaneous digijelm incursion. Rot Wood itself pops up in 700 north of the Brass Mountains. Again, it doesn't last. Something within the Spolite complex might maintain a sacred forest of shadows but it loses its separate elf identity in the birth of Carmania. This leaves Rist and peripherally Erigia in the region and they do not try to reforest again despite the post-Kill upheavals and opportunities. I don't think they can do it. They feel the season aging. Rist ultimately dies in one last efflorescence on behalf of ancient allies in the Erinfarth watershed. Rootless survivors take quickly to the hidden way of krjalk. Maybe they preserved it all along and nobody noticed. They are, of course, pretty pissed off.

This "clash of psychic civilizations" model is super interesting. While we might want to bracket caste relief (already available to most of the post-Hrestol west, even unto the island), there might have been other aspects of the teaching that prompted a deep rejection / immune response . . . what Greg sez is that we think Nysalor taught the Ralians (westerners) that "thought is not the only reality, that their Laws were not eternal truths and that instinct was neither good nor evil." This is a direct insult to the blue way in particular so would have confounded their diagnostics and might have even presented perfectly asymptomatically as we would understand it . . . the bodies seem healthy, maybe healthier than ever, but there is something different about the mind that we aren't prepared to treat. A plague of bad thought that then threatens the perceived foundations of their way of life. And of course people with a lot invested in caste compliance in particular would suffer more extreme effects. While I mentioned not wanting to talk much about Arkat here in order to make space for the empire itself, it's interesting that he personally struggled with caste boundaries more than most and so would have been unusually sensitive to the missionaries' offer of radical caste relief. I imagine him as a gifted half-outcaste child in the boondocks training to live up to models of horalite performance that were really unrealistic and unattainable. Then when the plague comes in, the only response he sees is to tear everything down in order to protect the caste walls . . . even as the crusade tears them all down, one by one.

They talk a pretty good game (and modern wannabes on the mainland are eager to believe it) but there are dawn age texts that show a lot of innovation and even struggle on the island in this era. This isn't part of the Bright Empire Interlude because it's peripheral to the question of what the imperial civilization was actually all about, but in some stories the Gbaji teaching enters Glorantha on the island, loses a religious civil war and flees like all western heresies to cause trouble for the Genertelan colonies before the sun stops. This might make Arkat's island illumination either an independent phenomenon of his experience, a trace of the alien religion interacting with the local elf population or some venn diagram option. Right now I still lean toward the dumb theory that being an almost literal outcaste predisposed him personally to see the relationships between competing religious systems . . . I suspect aldrya initiates were mighty rare in the Talar's Army . . . but there might well have been something specific in the elf way that feeds both his consciousness and maybe that of other brithinite initiates. EDIT of course this is all old lore subject to revision and refinement now. YGWV. But Greg was working with these ideas at a crucial stage and it feeds his sense of what Arkat is all about when it's time to put Cults of Terror together a decade or so later.

Love it! Be vewwy vewwy quiet. There is probably enough underpublished material to fill a Stafford Library Gbaji Wars installment but I don't think it's a high priority right now. Maybe in a few years. But back to the lexical gaps for a moment, it strikes me that AT(Y)AR = AR(Y)AT, where the central character is something like the ayin in Hebrew or KH in the plentonian alphabet, unrecognized and elided in some parts of the lozenge. Shadows and shadows.

We don’t know exactly what Nysalor did. None of the changes were concrete: no great art, architecture, cities, or families were initiated. Everything disappeared, as prophesied, when the god was killed, leaving only vague nostalgia and deep-rooted resentment against the killer. Much talk of Arkat sends me back to the fragments to understand how these interpretations evolve and get ahead of where it will go. To celebrate this venture, Storm Bulls get free ransom over on any of the other threads. Just contact me to receive you drink tickets and have fun, boys and girls. You've earned it. Now that we can talk here, what do you know of the Bright Empire beyond what we're all told? What do the specific patterns of erasure tell us about "the pinnacle of First Age history" that held three generations before they finally woke up? What components of the dawn world went in for a blessing and came out bearing a curse, leaving modern chaos garbage behind? I am only peripherally interested here about Arkat, Nysalor, the fine print of illumination and the gbaji phenomenon. Some of you have participated in Broken Council reenactments and can share your experiences. And they say all illuminates were there when the cosmic egg cracked and the light invaded the world. We know they had cities. That elf nations now lost were avid participants, as the Talking Grove prevented miscommunication as long as it lived. Issaries is already present. Lines of fracture persist within the Dara Happa / Dorastor condominium where highness and brightness dominate and in the west, where shadow teachings proliferate to spawn their own enemies. They had magic that could both engineer a kind of sickness and bring the cure. To me this is always psychoanalysis; the early accounts of illumination with its dark side are always mysticism transmitted through Jung. But your Glorantha may vary. Missionary priests in the west are called alternatively riddlers and healers. Perhaps these are separate orders or currents within the imperial system. Only Mallia in modern Glorantha has this ability and she is ambivalently cursed and allowed, sometimes chaotic but open to debate. Chalana Arroy, on the other hand, holds her own secrets because nobody cares enough. Rashorana lives in the Hospital. They were open to the east as well but these interactions have been more perfectly erased, leaving only confused accounts of gbaji veneration in Kralorela, whatever is going on with Atyar (the empire supported "the Thanatar complex in Ralios") and a strange but detailed history of [a] gbaji exterminating the people of genert. A dragon emperor dies in the sunstop and some say he comes back afterward, but who knows? There are bright gods and elves in the far southeast, blue magic too. Arkat and sons never made it out that far and it's beyond troll reach as well. The western chroniclers "from every age" do refer to trolls and dragonewts as krjalki but aldryami and mostali remain a separate and less pejorative class in all but the most conservative eras. Contemporaneous arkatsagas use "krjalk" to describe the true monsters the empire spawns in its decadence. I think this is actually a reference to the chaos feature but that's a separate argument. What is clear is that the bright empire in its desperation resorted to chaos feature and other dark side temptations, becoming the abominations gloomy Arkat saw everywhere. Whatever this magical technology originally did or how it changed is irrelevant. Tentacle outbreaks now can be tracked back to this era. Other aspects of their medical magic may well persist in the undead rites. Look closely at the dark side note in Cults of Terror. When you cut yourself off from the natural cycle you doom yourself to unnatural prolongations. Separately I note that while Arkat himself was indeed secretly illuminated (by elves!) the surviving RQ2 manuscript version does not extend this to his secular third age cult. But this is an entirely different ball game, the true tale of the "Dark" Empire behind what we think we know today.

Some nations we now classify as "human" were liberated alongside more distinctive Jolanti forms and live mostly among us today, enriching our bloodlines and technological capabilities.

Hi Sten -- welcome to the ranks of the green sages and please keep us updated on your adventure. The illustrious Jajagappa has covered all the essentials. I would add this essay of Greg's as a slightly different take on the core mythology. Reading between the lines might get you going down rarely traveled paths. The Mongoose supplement points in a good direction but I think was overly burdened by game design values at the time. More tightly focused material from that author shows up in Tradetalk 7-11 if you're willing to dig a little. It's really as close to modern canon as we have.

They do seem to be extremely popular.

Every forest secret worth knowing either remains unrevealed or is now the common property of every peasant shoveling dirt. On the whole a marginal win so far. The dwarves screwed up by trying to keep everything and so spawned whole nations full of motivated snoops. And someone down there always wants to brag so the snoops keep coming. In terms of tricksters, this is probably a role for aldryami who understand fire, "the rose that takes." As noted above, runners and pixies handle most of the day-to-day shenanigans / shanannigans so the forests can echo with laughter. Does anybody, ah, remember laughter? Some are susceptible to a kind of fermentation that converts the sugars into alcohol . . . growth bubbles over when the fire within gets too hot. Trickster understands that process and can share with a few friendly cults. Only YOU can prevent forest fires.

The known limits of their bromance make this a really useful opening to distinguish "Arkat" as a magical technology from "Arkat" as personal allegiance. Anyone with motive and opportunity can become an arkat technician by incorporating that methodology into the personal practice. Some people will also nourish a personal relationship with the historical figure and his messianic agenda. Some push it as far as they can in both directions. Others stay mostly on one side of the venn diagram or the other. IMG most people pursuing "arkat" experience pursue it as a vanilla hero cult. This is your guy. You're a fan. You study his adventures and try to apply the lessons to get ahead in life. There are compensations. Your cult has friends and enemies. When you see an opportunity to advance the cult's this-world goals, you contribute your resources and participate. There are many cults. The technicians have what we might call a more explicitly sorcerous approach to the material. The Stygians went places and encoded their conclusions in ways we can exploit now to get what we want. The persistence of a historical Arkat is irrelevant. This ultimately points toward a state of consciousness that interacts with the better documented "illumination" you talk about here. Mularik can be a technician who shuffles the letters to see that Argrath maps onto the historical Arkat and doesn't care. A hero cultist would have a conversion experience (model with passions) or some other spiritual moment: this is the guy we were promised. A technician might see a competitor, potential ally, catspaw, whatever depending on the circumstances. In my experience many technicians would view a reincarnated Arkat Actual as a rival and a threat. They're territorial people. So Mularik one day concludes that the guy he's been hanging out with is the guy thousands of people back home have been praying a thousand years to see. He doesn't fall down on his knees and cry. He waves for the check. They're no longer pals. It's on. Struggle of the Magicians. Five Arkats, you say? There Can Be Only One in the end. Now it gets complicated because at the highest levels the ambitions of the cult and the most impeccable technicians converge again. The cult is an easy thing for the technicians to control. And as the formative experience for many technicians, the cult will shape their attitudes and agendas. Then these "true arkati" can coopt, divert or otherwise interfere with the rest. I think this is where a lot of the reportage around shadowy figures guarding key HQ nodes comes from. The problem is when they get what they want in a form they weren't expecting. There's a lot of history outsiders don't see about how the Stygians responded to the Seshnegite threat and ultimately the God Learner Empire gave them what they wanted all along. Some people say that because that history is invisible, it must be sad propaganda losers come up with to feel better: the God Learners ruled the world for centuries, Paslac is a footnote and that's that. I welcome compelling evidence either way but can't help but notice that whenever I encounter resistance on a key HQ node the challenger usually looks, acts or smells more than a little like me in pancake makeup. It's the only place I really see the back of my own head. But I'm just a technician, no dog in the fight.

Love this. It makes the existence of Catseye really interesting as part of the spiritual preparation required to really have the Hill Experience and "see the sparks." I wonder if people with Permanent Catseye are in some way always susceptible to being pulled into Hill interactions, etc. no matter where they are physically. Lantern, maybe not so much. Might be obscure cult dogma here. Hottest lore of the quarter.

Any sufficiently charismatic claim to authority is indistinguishable from birthright when the examiners read the wind right. Some people lean into this mechanism and scatter the seeds around just in case. I love what you've done here: "Enough" is always enough. You get what fate needs. Separately I was just dreaming about how dangerous an unreconstructed Yelmgatha teaching would be in an empire already spinning too fast. Every man a Yelm. Maybe a non-trivial number of women too.

Coincidentally I was just looking at the ancient Cults of Terror story of Rashoran that distills that teaching as "you do not have to be afraid of what you do not know." That's all it is. No ethical gymnastics, pretzel logic or attraction to paradox for its own sake. Just an openness to the alien and the faith that it cannot really hurt you in any way that matters. Since then the teaching has been routed into the service of the self and its passions: "hatred, selfishness, greed and jealousy." By the time it gets to Nysalor, the riddles and other compensating mechanisms are in place to prevent something like the Trio from happening ever again. Maybe it's worth looking at the Argrath in these terms. Still a lot we don't know about the nature of his spiritual liberation + I "coincidentally" always seem to have better things to do than psychoanalyze him. He is what he is, like the weather. Wear a hat if you don't want to get wet.

Now that you two mention it, I wonder if the Flamal Quest ("greater bonus") wasn't really the core of an archaic LifeBQ pushed to the margins of history as the Yelm narrative took over from the Dawn Age. In that scenario, some people might still perform it every year with only the usual hoopla . . .it just hasn't been weaponized in the same way. Of course in the Hero Wars people spinning out of the Argrath mystique might reach back to these primal mysteries. I know I would.

Photographic record checks out.

I like the oncological vocabulary you are using and hope that all is well. To extend the metaphor, there is no ultimate or permanent cure for chaos in Glorantha. All we can do is extend our ability to mitigate its virulence, buying time for something else to kill us instead. The LBQ does a "good enough" job and so is still prescribed today in cases that do not respond to more orthodox forms of treatment. Specialists keep working on refinements that help the therapy work even better . . . we've come a long way since Harmast and outcomes that would have been miraculous a century ago are now routine.