scott-martin

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 However this is a dumb theory at this stage and poses obvious challenges when it comes to defusing outdated cultural prejudices and assumptions.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.

. . . We get figures like Argoom the Shadow Rider or Vettebbe allowing for less pleasant (former) celestial beings. Or possibly underworld stars fallen from a tilted sky dome. This level of lore is why I come here.

As Joerganos points out, most of the original language now exists only in translation or in isolated proper nouns (names of places, persons and peoples). One of the few exceptions is ironically "engrion," formerly translated colloquially as "knight" and now as the more technical "person of all." This then retroactively suggests that "engr" (an epithet of MLKYNr) is really their word for the collective, the all, the holistic . . . "society" or wyter. The word "wyter" itself may originate in their language despite what would to us look like an old germanic cluster of semivowels and consonants. They seemed to have zero discomfort about cramming too many hard sounds together to create blends difficult for modern English speakers to master. In this scenario, the word might have once been pronounced something like "HOO-eyeter" but this would have been before they had writing . . . almost impossibly archaic.

I don't recall this coming up in the email newsletter era so will simply have to treat it as the top revelation of the season. For the Dawn Age Pelorians, the initial lightbringer contacts probably looked a lot like starlight tribes returned from ancient times to brighten a dark world. Only later do they learn a separate word for "storm." In this model, the north never really bothered to assign native bronze a mythic role in its metallurgy but instead relies on Lodril's ability to alloy copper with tin (and maybe some additional metals that look like silver) into what Pelorian "brass." This alchemical wedding of earth with heaven is a cult secret and probably at least mildly taboo in formal yelmic doctrine. Later the bright points in the sky were sorted into pro- and anti-yelmic families, with some getting classified as "storm stars," others as "sky stars" and one or two big enough to be planets or moons. Uleria is a planet. Sedenya is a moon. Entekos is a planet and a storm goddess or "air" with lunar associations. But Orlanth's association with silver remains embedded in the metallurgy of the southern coast, land of the "grey ones," the silver people, the silver age, the silver empire. Note that water forces also conquer heaven but do not get true silver secrets. What they have instead is the mystery of "quick" silver, heavy water that sinks or (when purified with the Lodril secrets that they did actually take), rises to the surface. This is the alchemical mystery. And IMG now crazy old Gringle needed a Third Eye Blue and an Uleria on site and on payroll because he was engaged in the great work of breeding bullion itself.

Thinking harder about where metallic dwarf castes come from and what gods leave behind when they die, I also had reason recently to look back at the old Elder Secrets list of which cults can harden which metals to become suitable houses for death. Babeester and Maran Gor have iron. So does Gorgorma. Ur-metal is somehow compatible with the malign earth. Babeester retains the broad earth ability to work with copper as the de facto warrior cult of that pantheon. Lhankor Mhy also has iron but has never bothered to collect the lore to work with the other metals. Maybe this is a legacy of his ancestral link to Urtiam. Tsankth and Wachaza have iron, again as de facto warrior cults, but Magasta does not despite his intimate relationship with death. Lodril does not have lo-metal, quicksilver or lead. That's okay because in the Holy Country they have other routes to those metals. Iron is native to Orlanth and Storm Bull as two of the primary warrior cults of their pantheon. But Orlanth also gets native silver, which has perplexed some people. Historically the Lunar Way got access to silver "from associate cults" but now I think this has vanished . . . neither Yelorna nor Uleria are associated and they really don't share this magic freely. I don't think the real magic properties of enchanted silver and tin or the mysteries of sa/lo have really been explored in non-military context but Bertalor is the nominal authority on the subject.

Love it. Don't want to talk too much here but I could be convinced that the current sun was (and is) considered a failure in strict celestial terms, the runt of the pantheon much like Tecciztecatl revealed himself as a vainglorious coward who couldn't even dodge a thrown rabbit and so becomes a lesser light. In this scenario the yelm had no place in the cosmic order before the introduction of death created an opportunity for weakness to step forward, accept his own sacrifice and negotiate with the night to be reborn as something more impressive.

This is a great point. He looks a lot like a Young God (Lightfore rises in Youth at the new year) and could theoretically grow into a sun under the right conditions, but as long as he remains Yelmalio he is never going to become the retrospective origin of Yelm. He's shifted 180 degrees away. Even if there's a magic trick or euphemistic explanation where the sun never enters hell but jumps across from dusk to dawn, simultaneously evolving from little sun to big sun and then at night from big sun to little sun again, they will never meet unless the sky is completely unsettled. And Lightfore is chained to the same route as Yelm. Yelmalio reaches the zenith every night, but at that point the world is too dark to support an imperial claim. There is no father in the darkness because the father is dead, leaving the son to limp on through the night, spilling crystals without much of the pomp that the day sun commands. But hey, Lightfore "always" occludes Pole Star at the moment when the father is at the deepest nadir of hell. I wouldn't be surprised if Polaris started out as a little sun (Dayzatar's child, the "son" of the previous generation) and now replaces conventional Yelmalio in polite Dara Happan society at every moment but midnight. Interestingly, Polaris is associated with Kargzant but not the upland suns. I like Lightfore as the memory or ghost of the mature Young God, the abortive regenerative cycle. Heir without portfolio. I wonder how that played out in Saird.

Love all of this. IMG the Khordavu era consolidated what were once regional expressions of the sky god into a unified modern Yelm, who is a jealous god who protects his prerogatives, including the right to be the only sun (solitary / solar) with full use of the "Fire" solar rune (the central dot is his ego or central viewpoint). This means that with very limited exceptions everyone around him is forced into the role of either subordinate or rival . . . and rivalry is rebellion. We all know that. As far as they're concerned in Dara Happa, every other sun or potential sun is either a little sun or a wandering sun. In the process, the story of the primal family of Aether was preserved in vestigial form like an afterburn: all of this had happened before, once upon a timeless time even the serene, perfect, unchanging and immortal emperor was just one little sun among many. And he had a father, someone whose very regime forced him into the choice of whether to obey or rebel. He had brothers who give us a vocabulary for weighing all the options. I believe that a version of the young sun rebelled and murdered his father in order to take his place at the center of the sky. Because gods are immortal Aether did not die but was forced to abdicate "up" and out where he is now acknowledged as the Dayzatar solution, the sun-that-was pushed out of the center by the sun-we-have-now. The mythology attributed to "Yelm the youth" are memories of these exploits. Other rebel sons and even daughters preserve other perspectives. Those with enough lore can read this composite story as a conspiracy of forces incompatible with universal order, but I find it more generally useful to think about each one in his or her trajectory. And within Time death is available as a lever of generational regime change. Every day we can watch this succession (or precession if you prefer) roll across the sky as we start with a young god, brisk and leaping and full of possibilities rising from the gates of dawn. By noon he is at the center and rules the world for a moment before the weight of age starts pulling him down in the west to make way for the young god to follow. Is tomorrow the same day, the same sun? Different Pelorian philosophical movements will answer the question differently. When the perspective remains within the dead sun of yesterday, we have the experience of being the black sun in hell. Sometimes the order of things fractures and what any given observe might consider the "wrong" sun triumphs. This is a rebel imperium, one of the blasphemous rites acknowledged by Yelmgatha but dreaded and shunned by most right-thinking people. There are many ways to go wrong. The Kralorelan solar hierarchy found an ingenious solution to the problem of how these rites can coexist with the true imperium, maintaining the potential for many suns when only one rides through a healthy sky at any given moment. I believe that the lost Genert civilization recognized the cyclicality of the masculine or paternalistic lifecycle, much as the Esrolians honor [A]srolia as the mother who was but spend most of their time focused on Ernalda as the mother who is, the current generation of today. This might be where Tada comes in as "young Genert" or the rebel earth son destined to replace the aging father when the cycle comes round. But as we know the great god Genert did not come back when he died the last time. There was no successor. The elves of other forests figured this out.

I'm saying the process of religious consolidation itself is the battle. When an expanding storm cult comes into an area and absorbs the local storm entities, the "living" parts of the local storm system ultimately become part of Orlanth. The "dead" parts that do not continue drop out of the system and we dig them up later as inert hu-metal and unpowered crystals. When scattered horse tribes fight over which sun will rule the sky, you get a battle of suns within the religious community. The winners continue to receive worship. The part of the losers that is compatible with subordinate status continue as "planets" or "stars." The part that is incompatible drops out of the system and gold becomes available. This is of course one of the secrets of the Lokarnos system. And sometimes an entire cult is incompatible so we say that god who was acknowledged within mythic memory is dead. Missionary earth movements leave copper behind. Missionary shadow movements leave lead. And so on.

When a local cult is consolidated into a larger organization, many of the stories are incorporated but the aspects of the god or spirit that were incompatible or just didn't make it into the successor entity are left behind as alienated material: rune metal, crystals, less durable magic item components. This is the Gods War expressed in mythogeological terms: as above, so below. The fact that so much native bronze, copper and gold is available for mining reveals the relative success of the storm (lightbringer), earth (lifebringer) and solar (starlight ancestors) missionary diasporas, which radiated out across the world and left a handful of world religions and a lot of local ore deposits behind. In some cases the diasporic era replaced entire archaic pantheons, leaving metals without much organized mythology behind. Restoring these materials to their original divine narrative is an alchemical mystery of the hero wars. The immediate mystery is that despite this, rituals for enchanting bronze are rare despite the ubiquity of the lightbringer complex. Not even Orlanth cares enough about hu-metal to teach its intricacies . . . but the ur-metal spell is surprisingly widespread. As below, so above.

Now that you mention it, maybe Waertag's Pier was structured like a language as well, being so close to the original Kachasti territories. A different language. Great interview with Jeff by the way. Nice lore.

"Old" Trade is not an island and is only incidentally a state of mind. What it is: a language. EDIT: Or rather, "structured like" a language.