scott-martin

The Vadeli appear to have already won long ago.

Woke up more convinced than ever that Brithos has never been a place you can physically travel to or from. "Emigrants" are pure intellectual entities devolving into matter like angels falling in Milton and facilitated by waertagi psychopomps whose boats are often purely allegorical. Humans make receptive hosts, especially when properly groomed. An effective "emigration" or conversion experience replaces the host consciousness with something ageless and immortal, creating opportunities for the rest of us to interact with personas who were always already present in prehistory and can occupy new hosts under precisely defined parameters when the old ones break down. The island itself is somewhere like the sky and physically recedes further every year. Dawn Age reports of direct interactions with the island reflect early hrestolite heroquest mysteries now mostly lost. This makes Belintar even more interesting.

Always room for one more. I think their lives would be that heroquest and their children (biological or spiritual) will be able to discover new gods for the new world that follows. From a certain point of view, the children might actually be the new gods. Empires can rise and fall in the background. It's a great storyline. Run it and see what happens! Like Romeo and Juliet, you don't really need to explain their relationship in cosmic terms or explore centuries of philosophical development. Other characters (and people here!) will do that for you. All you need to do is give them a place to express their love. They are demanding that the world recognize that love. This is heroquesting. To make your life a little easier I might make her a refugee or pilgrim from all the way up in the Arrolian Territories on the western frontier or (maybe a better option) Oraya in the east. She isn't quite like most of the lunar people we see in Dragon Pass. Her view of the world is a little different. She was taught different things from what people raised at the heart of the empire learn. Then when the wars accelerate they can run back to her people and see the world along the way. He can start out relatively basic because we already know a lot about Dragon Pass Orlanth. But along the way he learns a lot about the limitations and deep potential of his god too.

Quackjohn and Gringle are clearly life partners so Issaries has been running the empire all along.

I spotted an undercurrent of "Argrath equals Jar-Eel" the other day so we are clearly closing in on something important here. Of course all the RQ3 Ladyhawke stuff in the West also really happened during the Castle Coast heritage cosplay craze of 1613-19.

Oh my.

Yeah, much of this is not so dumb. Someone in any sufficiently complex Glorantha believes these things. And sometimes they come true. Sometimes I look at Genertela and see the Mediterranean Sea reversed. Maybe we can all do dumber.

Hungry Jack!

Yeah, now I can't help wondering if the lost remnants of the Vrimak Dynasty claimed they were from some prehistoric Ganderland and were punished for their ostentatious refusal to participate in the Dawn Wars. In that scenario others fled to the islands.

Many of these are ominously plausible and even enticing! Thank you all. It is good to see them.

I know I've come up with some whoppers over the years but tonight I can no longer shake the suspicion that the whole Third Age cult around "heroes" is actually rooted in a faulty transmission of the archaic "horal" ethos. What convictions do YOU have that you recognize are ridiculous but love them anyway?

Whenever I see curses and chaos together lately I think of the Bright Empire . . . curse of kin, the Telmori curse, the mysterious "failed" dragonewt curse, Dorastor seeded with curses. Nations and tribes reshaped forever in the Dawn Age wars. So I think, when people talk about the ducks being cursed, when and how does that happen? I would not be surprised if there was a noble bird nation once, not sufficiently hostile to Nysalor and brought low. They could fly. The curse took that away and the records of their glory were lost. Maybe they were allied with the heron worshippers of the swamp belt, maybe they were a "ratite" culture. Maybe the harpies fell more or less simultaneously. And if we learn how it happened, we're a step closer to repairing it. But if anyone can disprove this hypothesis, it's you. Of course it could be just be the lurgy season. I hear a lot of gardens have gone to pollen this year.

Mighty Quackatoa, do you have record of duck people in Central Genertela before the Bright Empire and its demise? There are curses and then there are curses.

The juice must flow! Otherwise all we end up with is these raisins.

This is why I don't mind "king" in theory for the queen's primary husband-protector. In this part of the world "king" is at best a few generations away from being synonymous with "sacrifice" and in the wreckage of the Winter several probably met the sharp end of a knife or axe as various queens got desperate for ways to get the seeds germinating. Some grandmothers undoubtedly argue for reinstating hard term limits now. We probably see this most clearly in areas where Flamal worship survives . . . probably not Crel's Sylthi but I bet as you move toward Belernos king longevity declines. Of course grandmothers facing Heortland are probably relatively skittish about any whiff of independent male authority (the Leingod model) so that's another great source of conflict. Around here "prince" might reflect alliance with Issaries for that matter. These might be matches for love or money but obscure cult dogma suggests that you'll want a husband-protector as well. (You can get around this by getting an AA sub license.) Love the original post. Hot stuff!! I adore the Fat Women. Worship well and often, ladies! EDIT every temple worth having is a market and vice versa

Love it! And I take your point in terms of "apparent" spiraling. The Gate is fixed. The sky turns. Sky Lore is not my expertise so I am going to have to ponder many of the fine points. I'd forgotten about that bit. Couple things here before we find our way back to AA. First, the Cloak of Night feels like the Desert to me, which would help us figure out which star is Eurmal Firebringer (interesting elemental attribution there) and then step back to Malkion. In that scenario, we're still in the western sky and so "Eurmal" can be one of the Ring. If not, what is its number? Likewise, Malkion's star might be Thasus 32, which opens up all kinds of convergences. It's also interesting that the Guide mentions the descending Block wiping out at least one star in the return path. Does this indicate that a primary Spike was directly under the Desert, perhaps around what we now call Jrustela? More broadly, a Dawn Age celestial role for "Malkion" suggests some avenues for Bright Empire integration into Western theology. Just as we know about a High Sun and a High Storm (one more successfully suppressed than the other) there might have been a High Law now lost. Or for that matter, High Law might have simply been the Bright Empire recension of one or more archaic Malkions, reinterpreting the rustic patriarchal figures as a cosmic principle. Naturally nobody will like this but me but my war on the blue man continues. To step back for a moment, a Xentha archetype seems to have been a major player in Spol so if they probed the night that's probably where we'd find a big body of lore. On the other hand they might have focused on analyzing the shadows between the lights. Xentha is also friendly with the dull and faintly glowing phenomena like the Streak and the equivalent of Artmal's vesper (possibly the lonely cry or "eastern lights") so her cult is probably a primary source of what we know about them. I suspect Argan Argar In Peloria got wrapped up in this cult and then suppressed when it fell. Maybe the Spindle Hags preserve parts of it. Night worship is also cited in Guhan within the old "Dark" empire that followed the "Bright." Arkat is known to have pursued star magic to the extent that Plentonius' understanding of Quail and Dove no longer applies. Of course a lot of Arkat's sky work was eradicated in order to prevent reprisals. It would be amusing to think of the trolls as passing this on as purely theoretical hearsay . . . they themselves can't see the little lights twinkling but they can pass the lore on to those of us who can. EDIT so I blew a precious traded point of Blue Divination and here's what I got: NOT THE FIRST (OR LAST) POLE STAR. Maybe you know what that means.

The seeds of much good blasphemy here as we pick through the wreckage of Kallyr's disasters. EDIT: In fact, I initially cut the list in the belief that this reply would be an extremely short placeholder while your points digest. Turns out I was wrong! In particular the coincidence between the seven-day Theyalan week, the Ring's transit and the modern Lunar period is striking, as is the possibility that like the Streak (Orlanth is also a "blue" god) the Ring spends time spinning up the outside of the sky. The Streak's broken period. Find enough of those gates and something like Reaching Storm / Permanent Ring might become possible. Of course for that to even be an issue would require the theoreticians to tap "cyclical storm" forces in the first place, which is pretty advanced by our primitive terminal third age standards. Separately and slow as always, I'm starting to wonder how much of an archaic Sky/Star ("High") pantheon flourished under the Bright Empire and where the scattered remnants survived. This might have been a central theme in the Fronelan occupation about which nearly nothing is known, for example. Whether a Bear participated in that or not, MGF. Umath is interesting because so much of his story revolves around getting it wrong the first time. Otherwise there would be no "second time" requiring so much superficial repetition. One way to read it is that someone tried to combine a mythic complex where the rebel failed with another where the rebel won. Obviously the failure is no longer relevant so he must be the precursor of the success we recognize today. High Storm people might have really explored this . . . after all, their god's name was tarUmath and not tarLanth. And of course the "brother" who drops out of this process is our friend Umat whom Arkat but not Harmast loved. The geographical dispute over the true center of the world is probably baked into this "syncretic" interpretation. Take a myth where the sacred mountain was north and try to combine it with one where the "spike" was east and you are going to run into trouble unless the center is with you and moving, maybe in a kind of spiral when viewed from a certain arbitrary vantage. Just as star mysticism is odd among nominally storm people (star tribe descendants excepted of course), the sacred mountain is a strange and pregnant intrusion in the deep Orlanth mysteries. We all know that Larnste Mover, Soul Arranger Issariesfather, is the real mountain god. But some say Lodril. Likewise the eyes of the Pole strike me as a theme dualistic illuminoids would have embroidered in documents waiting to be unearthed. Someone must have invested a lot of effort exploring the Dayzatar system and Pole is Dayzatar's emanation along with Ourania with her two weeping eyes. Dualism for me is an artifact of "Bright" illumination and its reactions and inversions (Spol) so whether you are on the left or the right eye path is probably very important to some people . . . battles of night and day. Ideally post-1625 lunar magic will reach for tools like these. If you reading this have ever thought the words "mary sue" in proximity to the Argrath you know where to reach me.

I really like this. Maybe related: I have never really fathomed the role of the "star" heart in orthodox Orlanth initiation. You definitely want to kindle something perpetual within your self that can ground more dangerous magical work. But why do storm people use stellar terminology to describe the experience? And for that matter, why is it necessary to give the Lightbringers a presence not just in the "middle air" but the sky itself? This is not just archaeological trivia because it opens the door to alternative LBQ and Return Path approaches. Modern accepted Harmast uses the sunpath gates and requires the Westfaring. In theory, the exit takes you back around to the east gate and you ride the dawn. The Ring, on the other hand, starts in the West and spirals up and out. This tempts Orlanth questers with a broader pool of options and creates spiritual tension, i.e., MGF. It also exposes complexity behind my friend Harmast and his great work. I wonder now what High Storm taught. Also it's past time we named and numbered the orange stars in the Ring.

I thought that was disorder! I think I know where the puppeteers come from now. Thanks for that.

All these stories are equally true. The puppeteer counter is portrayed juggling what appears to be a six-ball shower, which is extremely difficult. We usually start with three.

Much like Joerg I wonder if these are not really trolls in the sky but allied celestial darkness entities. What we have here might be the origin of entities like the Tamali who might have been mostly assimilated into the troll way so early on that we only have fragmentary records. The Tamali are notorious for being a "shadow" people. So, arguably, are the uz-adjacent tribes of Pamaltela. Of course I am no authority in modern troll politics so I would take these notes with even more caution than usual. However, it strikes me that people who remember the White Elves occasionally hint at a kind of substitution where the sky forest disintegrates and a new wave of Takers emerges in its place. This might be simply the elf memory of the sky changing color but even in that scenario, your "sky trolls" are probably involved. They might be related to the children of Lorion . . . more work is always required.

IMG this varies across the Aeolian diaspora but generally the "orlanth" or kshatriya principle really does call the shots and the "issaries" is content in a mediating role. Barntar (probably with a lot of folk "flesh man" practice) works the land and a form of Humakt provides the muscle when needed. This reveals something of the way the "gunas revolve" dynamic informs Western social history. The "farmer" or shepherd (dronar) rises through upheaval (horal) to become the new aristocracy ("talar") while old aristocrats fall or simply recede (zzabur). Losers are pushed to the bottom and history cycles. Intellectuals and intermediaries are not always content to merely guide the process but in most places efforts to rule in their own name are not sustainable. I don't think the brahmins lead collateral worship in normal circumstances but probably jealously protect a ritual specialist role. Real talar magic (as opposed to the social status) depends on a sacrificial economy that few bookworms can negotiate . . . MOA experience unlocks it fairly reliably.

It's how Glorantha happens. At least one of the Princes believes this. Others reject or amplify parts. We find out who is on which side.

I think you two just also solved the Lunar obsession with finding a warm water port and, failing that, keeping the strategic Dorastor route open despite immeasurable losses.

What little we know about Belintar's relationship with the Silver Age Founders can charitably be described as "occult" in the wake of the MOLAD disaster but I agree with Jajagappa, the Loyal Household seems to function differently. If I were gambling (luck and death!) I would chase the theme back to the original institution of Unity . . . this is the related to the ecumenical collective effervescence OOO in his genius was able to bolt together and save the world. It's his thing. We can love him for that if nothing else. Within Time, some pieces of that collective fell away and became "disloyal." We don't talk about them now. These are the ones that remain. Here in the 1600s it's probably a shrunken household. Hardcore AAs have spent a few centuries in the literal wilderness out of power. Their "loyalty" preserves the memory of Mastery. The profound thing is the way this also resembles the Husband Protector court, which sometimes seems curated to achieve elemental universality with a female figure at the hub. Maybe Argan Argar has many wives as a parallel to the Esrolian menu and as a subversion of normative troll family. It's good to be the shadow king. Maybe this points to a primeval interface between an "Ernalda" and one or more Kyger Litor. Now that you mention it, I've heard more than once in the necropolis that "Ernalda is a black goddess" but you hear similar whispers about everyone in the old parts of town. Maybe AA is sometimes a woman like Belintar is sometimes a woman and has husbands or "best friends." The easy way out is to give him something like Four Weapons Subcults and leave it open whether Orlanth worship adopted the form from the troll overlords back when we all lived nearer the dark. Of course Pavis remembers something like this too.