scott-martin

As long as we're running with a "Night Ancestors Hypothesis," then yes, I think this Pentan digijelm culture would have been the inverse of the Pure Horse, drawing on darkness shamanism instead of the solar religion that dominates the steppe today . . . insect tamers, insect herders and insect riders with their own version of Griffon. These "dark horses" might have been part of the Jenarong system, the sinister Flesheaters who were dominant early on. A few might survive inside Alkoth but I would hate to speculate about that. Either way, this would have been reminiscent of a conventional modern nomad symbolic economy filled out with participants drawn from what we now consider "troll" pastoralism: Kargzant for a kind of mounted independent Karrg Son priest warrior who rode within the tribes to enforce their version of the tithe and the cut. If this culture ever existed at all, it would have been wiped out in the Dawn Age (possibly as the local equivalent of the "light" bringing or literal "dawn" over "dark") leaving only fragmentary traces: * Karrg Son adopted into the Kyger Litor establishment (lacks riding, bugs, all overt hell sun symbolism) * modern "lycanthropic" Gorakiki (acolytes split between breed and ride but all other levels favor breed) * Aranea (technically lycanthropic but in the service of Cliffhome) * Black Sun (retains hell sun "digi yelm" outlook, possibly the purest surviving form but lacks riding, bugs) * Morocanth (secret origins) * Rinliddi (hypothetical at this stage: "night bird" or "bat" cults) * Alkoth * Kitori (for those into that) * Ouranekki (once called "Gora Neki") * Black "Horse" * Three Curious Spirits (needs more work but see below) * Vale of Flowers and other vestigial "giant" ecologies (big bugs, big blooms) * TROLLBALL. The more I think about this, the more likely it is that the main adoption gift Karg Zondt brought to modern troll civilization was the game of the Running Field of Forbidden Sport, which requires giant participation to use the entire rule set. This would have originally been a mounted game like polo for the Dark Riders who had easy access to giant bugs. At some stage it might have developed fixed ritual "night" and "light" teams that survive elsewhere as the seasonal kingship contest, with the victorious team winning the prize of living until another season. As the digijelm are pushed out of Pent this gradually becomes a struggle between rival solar factions, two sons of "Yelm." In the OOO system a version persists in the seasonal bride contest (initially shadow and fire, soon expanding to support other elemental claimants but no longer actively "trollish" at that stage). And in Ignorance you have the blood games. If I were gambling I would say this is the mythic underpinning of the Shadows Dance game as well.

It is true, I've occasionally wondered where and when the Gorakiki Complex gets folded in with the rest of the "troll gods" under the nose of the modern ancestral cult of the Mistresses. Why not the great steppe, somewhere between Koromandol and the Glacier on one side and prehistoric Dara Happa on the other? Then after the collapse of the political entity we could call the "Karrg Zondt" the insect totems only persist in isolated family cults who play specialized economic roles . . . and in fragmentary practices embedded elsewhere. I think these Night Riders would have had a more complicated relationship with the bugs than the modern lycanthropic "hsunchen" cult, something more like a survival covenant assigning clear roles for eaters and eaten, riders and ridden. Modern bugs derive from those who were primarily eaten and ridden. Modern trolls were the eaters and the riders . . . the "takers," if you like. Those looking for horrific insight only need to observe the essential role of pollinator figures in "grower" societies to understand the lost magical ecosystem of what becomes the Elder Wilds. Not all of the ridden need to have been bugs and not all of the eaters need to have been bipedal. The morocanth came from somewhere. Modern Karrg Son does not preserve the secrets of riding or insecticulture, having given all that up in its assimilation into the way of the mistresses. Likewise, I think this mostly died out in Pent where different aspects of "Dark" or "Little" Son survived in troll as well as human religion . . . leaving Yolp as the most likely place in Genertela where Big Bug Rider survives. As for Ethilrist, King Griffin in his original state must have been pretty weird looking with that beak and those claws and the buzzing prismatic wings . . . maybe the original Proto Palbarite wasn't "eagle" lion so much as "ant" lion. All the oldest temple carvings I've seen from out there are severely mutilated and/or unconvincingly reconstructed. Of course different "birds" would have made it to Rinliddi and that iconography has its own historical tale to tell.

Love this. Those who want it both ways can simply say the plant doesn't thrive in the Middle World without a dose of precious moon rock. This makes it scarce enough to reserve for priestesses to share with temple beggars in a ritual meal . . . where there are no nearby moon rock deposits or expensive trade route, you will find no proliferation of aloo tikka stands. Presumably someone privileged enough to make it a regular staple would get mighty weird from long-term glow exposure and (a lunar philosophical delicacy) too many wholesome meal options skipped for "food" that doesn't really even exist according to word of god. This makes the specific theological underpinnings of the Beat Pot Revolt really tasty. Concocting a tuber is a work of great personal spiritual ambition. Demanding that enough of it be grown to satisfy the masses is going to cause trouble . . . and as noted in thread, people who care about maize (I doubt Jar-Eel does) will begrudge the copycat.

Karrg Son is clearly a corruption of Kargzant from when the digijelm (itself a linguistic clue) who formerly rode alongside the more classically solar nomads lost their war and were forced underground when their ritual meal fell from favor. The system of those forced underground is now called "trolls."

We could probably find traces of an entheogenic "god carrot" in the dawn ages, possibly in the Henjarl or some other wetland. On one hand, distinguishing it from lethal water hemlock is an obvious challenge but those who guess right are rewarded with visions and liberated from normative diets. On the other, only the desperately hungry have a strong motive to even try. Read potato throughout. Yes, the consultant told us to encourage the Queen Anne's Lace in the meadow but who is eager to grate it into the burdock?

Maximum fun if the cults of Hon-eel's kids argue among themselves while Palbar burns. Lunar Complexity!

All time great work of Gloranthan art worth enshrining IMG alongside such paracanonical flourishes as the gini economy. At a glance I would add a third "Child of" box for supplemental genders and discount ransom flows to reflect Trade Temple policy subsidizing that method of non-violent dispute monetization . . . but you can punt that by pushing people to the itemized form.

IMG the answer comes from the other direction: the cults have historically developed an unusually close relationship with illumination and so their elites tend to be more flexible than others when they encounter chaos. Any ambivalence you notice may be less about the gods than the priests who emulate and embody them and mediate our sense of what the gods want. And the priesthoods of Humakt and Yelm have been intimately associated with Arkat and Nysalor since the formation of the Dark and Bright Empires. We have some records of how the Yelm establishment worked over the intervening centuries to purge riddler influences but IMG this isn't really something you can do even if you take the long way around through hell. History leaves traces, especially in modern times when the cult is closed to the masses and wide open to the lunar way. Removing all the illuminates from the palace is like unbanging a golden gong. Sword priests, on the other hand, are still free to hate. They just don't operate from a position of existential terror, which by Gloranthan standards is a shocking and weird attitude to have. Uleria is of course the third cult usually discussed in these terms and her history is less well documented. They're so rare that every initiate has a direct and almost gnostic relationship with the goddess . . . it would be easy to build out the cult as a route to enlightenment in itself, a piggyback insight like conventional Nysalor illumination complete with its own "riddles." ("Say the word / and be like me. Say the word / I'm thinking of. The word is love.") You could do that with Ourania as well, the twinkle in the eye at the heart of the cloister. Maybe those insights converge at certain points within religious history and maybe they get separated again. Get a high enough proportion of illuminates inside any cult (even Mostal) and things will probably get weird. Also all free jolanti have something close enough to a soul that it's good enough for me. The hard part is getting liberated in the first place.

Ty Kora Tek Karg = TKT(K) In English publishing, this is a proofreader's mark to indicate that Text will "K"ome later because it is Not (ready) Yet. Thus the goddess of the three known corners holds space for the fourth that will emerge, the earth king who is transient in the northern systems and whose ritual necessity the would-be grandmothers have built a civilization to manage. The perpetuation of their economy revolves around the deferral of its ultimate collapse. One day at a time, ladies. "Lord make me chaste but not yet." See also: Corflu, cultists of

Collecting recombinant insight like this is one of the main reasons this thread exists. Thank you for bringing it here . . . and to all for all the rest of it! Opening up the "not yet" or "premature" aspect of the vampire complex gets me thinking about its probational characteristics, the way the background was rushed to fit into Cults of Terror and then remained a kind of unfinished placeholder throughout the publishing history. It's never going to be ready to go. It's always "coming soon." Not yet. Hanging over us like the apocalypse or death on our shoulder. And we know it's never finished because the name is still such an obvious Latin motto that a child would find defiant and clever but lacks the deep embedded development that people associate with post-unfinished Glorantha. Nobody ever formally went looking for the secret name of Vivamort or what he was called before adopting that goofy alias for himself. He's like King Griffon or Undine or Empress Earth or one of those other archaic placeholders, a revenant or trace of the trajectory of Gloranthan discovery. Not quite a survival, not quite a ghost. Identifying the original Vivamort with the historical Nontraya is great. I love the way it opens up a theoretical role for him as the boy who would have symbolically carried death in the Ancient Earth sacrificial system and, more importantly, refused the role he was assigned by the goddess we now call TKT. He was born to embody the fourth corner, the corner that comes and goes in its season, and decided that meeting the fate of Genert or some other earth king sacrifice (the words are gendered in Nekropolitean) wasn't going to be fun, so he rebelled and was cursed. Whew. That's a lot of chatter. But the specifics are interesting. I love the implication you have here that one of the best ways they invented to kill sacrificial earth kings (i.e., excess boys who had become boring for some reason) was to manipulate them into fighting each other. The "tor" human sacrifice complex and the "tor" power rune combat complex were one and the same. We can imagine a kind of arena where the grandmothers watched stony, ornamented and cruel as various earth king candidates fought to the death. Losers were expendable. The winner might be married and deified, by which we can read killed more happily. This was the origin of the modern "marriage contest" reflected in the husband-protector rivalries and the Garhound rites. We might also see survivals if we squint in places like the Basko gladiator games (and the Kargg "warrior son" cult) and the historical Ten Women Well Loved story but this gets a little more complicated. They all did it because they didn't know any better. It was just part of their neolithic sense of death, life and gender. At least one of them found out about death and opted out: "non trayo, I will not surrender it." Their entire emotional economy couldn't handle that so they expelled him. I think the (K)arg is the spear here, which has uh pregnant implications for the emotional emancipation of trollkin as well as the binding of local Lodril. In their particular form of the rite the original husband contenders were probably as simple as it gets: winter and summer, night and day, dark and light. The boys fight, either individually or in communal contexts as part of teams. Sometimes one wins and sometimes the other wins. The goddess is eternal. At one point in prehistory the night side fixed it so they wouldn't lose again for a very long time. As you went north and west (and east toward the Tada / Genert civilization) the symbolic ecology changes to mirror local conditions. The important thing is probably that modern humanist Ernalda only remembers the story as a sort of fairy tale that teaches young women to beware men too narcissistic to embrace the immanence of death. We can imagine an Esrolian Angela Carter writing in Nochet, the city built on the deferral of human sacrifice: we will all die some day but not yet. Nochet Vivamort, maybe his original name was pronounced something more like No(n)chet Rya.

I call that the OX but who needs these complications, as it were

IMG there weren't any tangible elemental manifestations left for Storm so they are all copied or stolen from the ancestral pantheons. This is the esoteric secret of Four Magic Weapons and in the background of the Hero Wars antagonism with Moon. Air's power is to whisper the rain and trick the lightning, steal death and seduce earth.

The essential process of Vithela is disintegration: starting with an undifferentiated experience, the magician of the dawn corner proceeds to identify and expel everything that differs in pursuit of the perfect unity at the core. Thus Kralorela, for example, is shrinking as impurities are externalized, often at least initially as flawed or incomplete reflections of the current imperial system: Dara Happa, for example. The aim is to become both infinitesimal and ineffable.

Canonically there's a giant lizard and a giant chimpanzee on Loral, which might give you what you need along with a giant butterfly, "king" hydra, a flying turtle and an otherwise undocumented giant radioactive pteranodon.

Still a lot we don't know about the 1616-5 window. A lot of hidden machinations taking us from there to here.

Top insight of the season. Between this and jajagappa's long prayer to the golden trumpet and friends, an interesting obstacle elsewhere is overcome. Has anyone ever explored Pinchining's journey from Urggh's critical success to the Cradle? Probably an interesting lost chapter there for those who obsess over these things. At some point the dancer hooks up with Gonn Orta.

Somebody spoke and I went into a dream . . . these can be Gloranthan miniatures too

I've flirted with the conceit that the east-west axis is actually Time expressed spatially and so any westfaring is a disintegrating journey into the future through disenchantment to death, which is why all iron ultimately comes from there and the luathan giants were just us all along, viewed from up the doppler well. Vithela, on the other hand, is the breakfast counter at the start of the universe, constantly receding from us in its transcendental perfection as long as the sun has torque. However this is a dumb theory at this stage and poses obvious challenges when it comes to defusing outdated cultural prejudices and assumptions. But fairly recently I'm losing immediate interest in that while the Campbell quadrivium beckons. There's an "eastern" monomyth alongside the "western" one we know, with the Pelorian bowl ironically aligned with the metaphysical east in this case while conventional coastal storm cultures look to the more humanistic western model. And there's a northern continent of the soul grounded in the way of the animal powers surprisingly absent from our modern view of the south, which must be more intimately organized around vegetable orders. This creates its share of opportunities to go with the obvious challenges, especially for a better understanding of the Season Wars and other elf intricacies. The year is a wheel. Death is its axle. The heart of the world is the homeward hole.

Who would we be if we didn't ponder the most intricate minutia of the setting? IMG Nochet stores rolls horn out (the horn caps are labeled or inscribed) so the key metric is volume and not linear miles. If a typical Greek roll was about 1 inch diameter, you can cram a theoretical maximum of 2750 documents per linear foot, assuming 15-foot ceilings and ladders. Jonstown was designed for SAN so figure those 15-16 intervening tiers might displace 250 rolls from each foot. In this model, they might end up with a million documents every 400 feet. Granted a lot of this text is probably bureaucratic records . . . tax rolls, schedules, construction plans, contracts, inventories, catalogs, catalogs of catalogs, want lists, correspondence about want lists . . . but a truly inspired magician with something to hide will encode sorcerous skill rolls in the most unexpected places. Depends on why the sorcerer chooses to write instead of instructing apprentices personally. Obviously mortality and the local talent pool are factors but something like whimsy can play a role, thinking of how texts like Impossible Places and the Book of Dale communicate the deepest arcana in superficially bizarre formats. Write for the reader you want. In terms of other questions, when a dryad and a human love each other very much you can get half an elf. There are probably grimoires on the subject, false and true ones. Ditto all manner of chimerical hybrids, I'm sure it was a whole genre and even today occasional Stitcher Manuals or ZOO books show up in private collections, let alone what the Seshnelan monster manual community had. There are multiple competing grand grimoires but for your purposes check out the Book of Drastic Resolutions and the Book of Secrets, which might share a common source or sources. Along with this, while no great libraries have burned lately, the devastation of Slontos and the southern universities undoubtedly took a lot of titles off the table so to speak, and the purge of heterodox sorcery in the West is probably feeding a few bonfires abroad while closer to home texts like the official MOLAD rulebook just vanished in the death of the City of Wonders. Other evil books have been reported and even destroyed. You don't need to feed them to a trickster and sacrificing them to a chaos void is probably a bad idea. In theory all you need to get rid of one is throw it in the cabin fireplace until it stops screaming.

Flip a coin. If you aren't happy with the answer, flip it again. The Arkat question isn't so much an external fact to be divined as a diagnostic. Your answer is your answer. It tells us who you are.

Oh, you know, Bill Burroughs was obsessed with That Hideous Strength and I agree with him. Plus Williams can stay. But you all put something important together for me in relation to the original question. Glorantha has shrunk almost 100% since the golden age and then started reinflating at the dawn. We know this because almost everyone agrees that the world was once united and then disintegrated to the point where every "community" was reduced to an isolated individual fighting alone in the dark. That's maximum alienation. If you were lucky, the world extended a little past your fingertips. Then two of these atomic consciousnesses came into contact and decided to dream a world big enough for the two of them. Each was an "I" at first. They could have fought each other. Instead they decided to fight alongside each other as a "we." The world doubled. And even in the face of imperial disaster it's largely been expanding ever since. Maybe this means the dwarves are right in their way. After all, they are clearly left over from the shrunken times.

This is why my sense is that the Middle World is actually expanding at the expense of the mythic periphery. We can see this when we encounter "dwarves," natives of Brithos and other people who were born in the god time and retained their original bodies. They're notably smaller than people born today to reflect the reduced scale of the world back then. In this scenario even alien entities like the Luathans started out bigger than they are now and are shrinking relative to the rest of us under the pressure of Time. Maybe the Middle World ultimately achieves 1:1 scale parity with planet earth. Hard to say, much less square the circle.

Summon the syndics; we must protect our land.

You sure have pinpointed the important questions! I will second Jaja's motion that the Stafford Library should keep you busy for a while and reveal something essential: the outer limits of the data we have right now. Every answer not in those books is either secret, emergent or both.

That said, ZZabur is one of the greatest of all Gloranthan liars, possibly surpassed only by Greg himself. And all great lies coexist comfortably with the truth. It makes them more convincing.