scott-martin

For me at least Hill of Gold is more broadly applicable to a wide range of life circumstances. Guards the Stead is great but it revolves around accepting a subordinate role. His greatest pains come from following orders despite all temptations to the contrary. Failure means you're not Elmal any more. Full success means realizing that submission to your duty transcends personal loyalty and is a higher reward. It's a magnificent story with something to teach us all, especially the winners who need to learn how to step back. But Hill of Gold forces failure by setting you up to lose. You're probably not going to keep your fire. You're vanishingly unlikely to win anything back. But you go anyway. You get your butt kicked and the parts of you that survive will always mourn the sacrifice. We've all been there. Shitty things happen to the best and brightest. And that's how the work of the world gets done. It's a magnificent story with something to teach us all, especially the losers who need a reason to go on. It supports a more nuanced and flexible moral consciousness, which is good unless you see nuance and flexibility as part of the problem. Are everyday initiates engaged with the full revelation of either story? No way. Most of them are only a little less petty than the rest of us. They want to win. Sacrifice is not something to embrace. But maybe in some sun domes they remember different pieces of it. There's still a lot we don't know about those other domes. Put them all together, maybe you get an even better god. Some will set their jaw and renounce what they see as tellers of lies, false prophets. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the Pavis Dome favors Elmal forms. I don't hear a lot about those guys even paying lip service to the idea of pilgrimage to Hill of Gold, assuming they even remember where it is. They play it down. More important here on the edge of the wasteland to maintain discipline, obey the chain of command, do what the other guy tells you even though it goes against your self image and instinct for self preservation. You take it for the team so the community can survive. You Guard The Stead. Whether that means Yelmalio-in-Pavis gets fire magic, the hero wars will say.

Even children know the big guy is responsible for life as we know it. We greet the sun when it returns every morning when he's young and generous. But one of the central characteristics of Storm Rune is that we can separate our enjoyment of his largesse from any sort of respect or worship. We can take the guy's money but nobody can tell us to like him. Some of us do like him . . . maybe we hope he'll do it differently today, learn from his mistakes and do better this time. He never does. The fixed path is his nature. It's up to us to learn from our mistakes, make the tough calls and do better. If he won't save us, we have to save him. That's no incentive for worship. If anything, we pity the sun more than we propitiate. That asshole tries to buy a world of friends and that's how the world works. What does another husband-protector offer Esrolia to justify his seat at the uh table? That's up to her to say and her answers change with the circumstances. But usually what I see is that she simply loves having options. More options give her more routes to ultimately getting what she wants. Fire, wind, rain, dark, another dark, another fire, another wind, whatever. Keep the suitors guessing. Maybe there's a true love coming back by sea, maybe not. I don't know if Belintar played that role, by the way.

Hot stuff! Gloranthans also have the upper hand here because the lucky ones can communicate directly with their collective effervescence (wyter) and know what unites them. We poor sophisticates have trouble with that sometimes.

Love it. This is a great journey for the brave! The stories contain their own discontinuities. The vocabulary of stories each of us knows varies from person to person. Initiates draw from a common pool of essential lore, but beyond that we still diverge from one another . . . and the Godtime-us we theoretically share becomes specialized. People fall apart and come together, world without end. "Culture" lives nowhere and everywhere, like a language.

Love it. The natives at least get instant feedback (good or bad) when they test a hypothesis. I don't want to give the impression that I'm rejecting the heterogenous godtime out of hand. I like the ramifications of building a cosmos out of chaos in order to achieve an integrated consciousness. It's just that the whole sense of a universal "godtime" in the first place can be too easy a construct when it's the only explanatory model. Most of us start with an origin once we become conscious. Our experience of it is unified. That's our godtime, call it Godtime-me. As we encounter the limits of that experience, our Godtime expands to comprehend new experiences. When those experiences push back, we encounter the other. Sometimes the other talks and we now have Godtime-me and Godtime-thou to negotiate, one way or another. We develop a sense of a larger hypothetical Godtime-Glorantha that incorporates everyone's explanations. It's probably going to contain contradictions until and unless we "know everything." This is probably illuminate / lunar theology in itself and they debate what this means. Even illuminates don't see I to I.

Here in time, it isn't. Myth out here remains a disease of culture. But the experience of myth doesn't start with awareness of discontinuities. It starts with a single story we are told or develop if for some reason nobody ever tells us how the world works. For Gloranthans who remain within that emic framework, that's where all explanations come from. They live and die within the envelope of local knowledge. To the extent to which it stretches to make our experience meaningful, it's as coherent as it gets. Otherwise it breaks down. We sophisticates switch among multiple frameworks to negotiate the breaks. We're aware of the discontinuities so we're the ones looking for heroquest solutions. Nothing wrong with that, of course. It's where innovative magic happens.

Here is my thought. Every community starts with a coherent perspective on Godtime. No inherent contradictions, just a seamless experience. When communities interact and share their perspectives, apparent contradictions emerge. Sometimes these interactions are spawned as internal divisions of identity / interpretation. Sometimes it happens when we meet the tribe in the next valley. Either way, that coherent experience fragments. Whenever we try to negotiate those contradictions to create a synthetic truth, we are heroquesting on at least a humble local scale. Sometimes we succeed and the contradiction is transcended, becoming a new narrative large enough to unify our communities as far as it goes. Usually the results aren't perfect and the contradiction persists. We remain two communities and the larger perspective we jointly support remains inconsistent. The failures of Gloranthan history revolve around these limits of "we" and "us" and "them."

Definitely. I suspect that friction is why (among other things) the Compromise incorporates both harmony and disorder simultaneously . . . and why the logicians have yet to (dis)solve the world. The inner world itself may be only the parts of experience most resistant to a mythic overlay. We are the paradoxes. It takes a spell or more serious heroic measures to transcend them and realign experience with Godtime. Whenever we interact with the gone world we are the anachronisms. The sky historically provides an external chronology but I wonder if we might reverse your sentence: Sequential analysis of what is going on in the sky produces the cultural / magical / ritual framework we call "Dara Happa." These were the people who numbered the days and noted the cycles. When they encountered other people with a different orientation to the past, resolving the conflicts became more urgent on all sides. (We are working toward extending the bull belt model east to buserian.) The Stafford Library has a few voids around the sky. I recall Enjata Mo being equated with Black Dendara in my print RM (too busy typing to walk across the house and see) but the pdf has Black "Entekos," potentially a third entity of mask of the planet entirely. I need to know more about how KataMoripi resembles or differs from the Pamaltelan figure. For that matter I need to know a lot more about Pamaltelan astronomy.

IMG this is connected to the mysteries of time itself. Without bogging down in too much metaphysics, an observer in the broken Genertelan north facing the sun will see time pass from left (maximum potential, origins, "early") to right (maximum depletion, endings, "late"). As entities lose their hold on the present and start to recede into the past we call the direction they are moving "westward." Because death is how we know time is passing ("death needs time for what it kills to grow") this means the western gate is the way into the land of the dead. The eastern gate is the way out, or at least the way into the world of the present. When Gramps felt the premonition of time, the direction he moved was toward Rausa. Rausa is red because from our point of view everything in her world is receding or has already receded beyond the usual wavelength. The frequencies of Vithela are too energetic to look at but probably tend toward the blue end. This is part of the dharma of the Children of Malkion. Sometimes entities move from west to east. I am not explaining this well yet.

Recent review of the work of William S Burroughs (especially "Ah Pook") leads me to suspect that the anachronisms are the shadows of heroquest vehicles projected on what would otherwise be a coherent mythic situation . . . something like changing lines in an I Ching hexagram. When we go back there we bring our present, the mythic "future," with us and sometimes we leave bits behind, unintentionally or otherwise. And when we bring an encounter with them back from the Godtime it is like the fragmented experience we bring back when woken up out of a dream. The pieces just don't fit back together in any kind of logical order. But we can come close enough given effort and a little luck, even though those within the dream itself will perceive the effort as interference and if disturbed enough will respond, distorting the cosmic fabric even more. It's interesting that your examples are mostly planetary. I don't know enough about Enjata Mo and her family, especially in Dara Happa.

This is great. The controversy over throwing crowns appears in the Guide (407). The "mace" might be an older D&D joke. I'll look deeper.

IMG the deep tantra of it is that you don't have any children right now. TKT is past all of this. She's never coming back to Fertility and is focused on the world beyond. BBG refuses motherhood for compelling biographical reasons. And MG in the middle started out like Ernalda, suffered losses and became angry. Initiates can cross back and forth depending on circumstances and their own needs.

Maybe you've discovered an eastern cognate of the "-sket" we see in Dawn Age likitite communities, where the "-chet" is a collective form and "no-" is a special (defective?) case of what would ordinarily be a legendary founder name in the "-sket" zone. In that scenario experts need to determine who or what was a Fili . . . possibly a local likita or other lost earth figure. Since we sometimes say "goose egg" to refer to zero the "No-" may even connote something like what it does in the original English "not yet" story. This is the interstitial city that exists as a negotiation among the symbols of the preexisting great families of the region, not partaking in any mythic founder in itself beyond the sacred goose girl and her egg. A placeholder, a riddle. It's interesting that Lhankor was already there before the Dawn, presumably along with the waertagi familiar with other likita communities. But this is a tangent at best around the great stuff happening around Saird. I wonder if Mirin's "cross" wasn't left there by western colonists, pilgrims or crusaders whose ways persisted.

Pedants can consult Guide 651, hipsters will always have Elder Secrets 1.45 although the Kalikan Lights are new to the Guide.

I like this people already because they remind me of the people Gerda meets on the way to how you say, Snödrottningen. It's one of his sadder stories but has a happy ending once all the tantric sacrifices are added up. This has got me thinking of a myth for them that might incorporate and subvert a few of your edits here. I had forgotten who Kalikos was before he was drafted into the Lunar economy. The fragment in the Entekosiad is very evocative in terms of how the decision to push back Valind is coincidentally the moment the old king "decides it is time to retire." Unfortunately Kalikos has no loved ones left to inherit so the rule in the mundane year passes down to more mundane guys. This is probably their Sacred Time ceremony, or one of them: when the cold becomes intolerable, you do something about it so a new generation can thrive. Ironically this shows us how to best hack the modern icebreaker complex but that's a side story. The important thing here is the characters you have: at least one snow queen (possibly in distinct facets or phases), a cold miser, at least one youth (who might be cold miser at the office or vice versa). Your musk ox people may not have what we consider a "normal" earth mother role for girls to evolve into and through . . . the choice may be more Elsa / Anna, queen or Gerda and how hard you need hearts around you to be. This is a very Altinelan concern. I forgot to say that classic Greg and Sandy would probably have at least teased an aurora orientis and an aurora occidentalis to light the world's other corners but nobody who sees the former comes back to talk about it and I suspect very few have endured the latter. Other jumpers. But yeah, the south is probably painful . . . although down there you either drink fire for breakfast anyway or you're chaotic.

From the perspective of theistic cult authorities, I actually think it's the attitude. It probably isn't posted official policy anywhere . . . there's unlikely to be a little placard in the vestibule of every shrine, "No Shamans, No Sorcerers" . . . but heterodox consciousness leaves marks that a halfway alert god talker can recognize. In other words, POW speaks to POW and a fully hatched shaman will present so weirdly to the examiners that s/he will almost always fail to convince. The theistic community doesn't really need to know or care about what a fetch is, what color yours is, how you were trained or any of that Great Expectations crap. You're a weirdo and the cult rejects you. This rejection is part of the shamanic awakening process for many people born in the wrong place and time. It's okay. Robust societies develop ways to redirect your abilities in a context that works out for everyone. In Dragon Pass, for example, you could have ended up with the weirdos at Old Wind or found a niche in the magical ecology of a local community. Now, of course, some talent scout in the Sartar Magical Union will probably grab you and the problem is solved. If you aren't in a robust enough society, you wander until you stop. Functionally the nature of the initiation into the fetch ("how heroes work") is definitely a factor into why you freak the mundanes but very few Gloranthans are in a position to even theorize about this. And if you try to support yourself doing shamanic work in the community, the authorities are definitely going to resent a competitor, especially if you're better at what you do than they are.

Not a lot of work has been done on the Kalikan Lights or the Lonely Cry so all these ideas can find a home somewhere. Far northern sky/white goddesses are interesting. The sky is a little ragged on the southern edge so they should be familiar with rips and tears in the night that let the light shine through, especially as you get close to the Nargan and other skyfall zones.

Best historical explanation of How They Fell I've heard. Everything was going great until they got distracted and their souls swerved into a cycle of overcorrections and perpetual dinosaurism. Wonder if that darned Soul Arranger played a role.

Always further until after we hit Furthest! Yeah, this is open to a much wider primeval bull zone that sooner or later connects up with the Waha covenant and the East. The persistence of Tawar/Tavar at these two points is striking . . . especially because the Entekosiad is one of the few sources that provide clear geographic markers for something like the origin if we accept that KefTavar really returned "to his people" after the abduction. Of course KefTavar is not necessarily the First Bull but in the absence of a common ancestor with an established geographic reference I'd lean toward his people being the origin in the northwest and the Tawarites bearing that particular expression of the cult all the way to the far side of the Ozur. (The Anaxial's Roster reference feels like an Ocron-era simplification.) Maybe they followed their herds all the way across the continent and the rites mingled with yak people and others. And naturally the Council either knew what it was doing or got extremely lucky sending Praxians up as "missionaries." We've all heard the hints that Lightbringer conversions up here had a strong urox component and then the version of "Orlanth" that initially flourished in the north might well have ended up looking more like Tarumath anyway. Jonatsaga only notes that "Humakt (Resant) is the storm god, having little else to make him stand out." In a revisionist "hsunchen" material culture model it's revealing that the Tawarites are singled out in the Guide for their architectural record, the "enclosures of earth and wood" that I don't think they have in Prax or the Shan Shan but are probably the sacred corral/villages emblematic of the Bisos rites. Not exactly living in caves. On the other hand, the presence of something like Peaceful Cut spirituality is not only obvious here (a parallel Covenant with its own culture hero) but seems to capture one of the enduring mysteries of the Fronelan literature, the "ultimate rite" of the religion of the Loskamite kings teased in the Genertela box. The King Must Die. Long Live The King. Bisos knows mysteries of life, death, sacrifice and resurrection that don't seem to survive in the Praxian expression . . . but probably persisted into what the Losk-Alim retained and built on. There's been talk about Waha being the god of butchers up here. Maybe his role is even more complex. We'll find out. Looking back at the Bisos material I'm starting to think that SerArba's bull "dance" is probably the way they express the hsunchen lycanthropic theme: not as a transformation but as a temporary transference resulting in hybrid forms. The bull rises and prophesies. The man receives horns like Morak in Cults of Prax. This might be the root of what "beast folk" like minotaurs are all about. (Like the minotaurs and more familiar storm bulls, the Enjoreli are noted in archaic texts as berserkers. So, interestingly enough, are the various lion peoples.) Multiple beast relationships that once might have been distinct but got monomythed. Given the profound symbolism here for Carmanian traditionalists I wonder if this the real reason some lunar faction or another collects throwbacks.

Bull people for bull markets . . . much of the development around the bull people of the northwest has happened on these forums so textual evidence is surprisingly scarce. (If any western scholar of Greg's acquaintance in the 1960s made more than a casual study of these people, it sadly hasn't reached me.) I'm sure specialists will correct my lapses fast and furiously. Let's see how we dance around the horns: KefTavar may have "wandered" from the distant West in order to attend the Lord of Beasts conference at Mount Dabur, leaving bull people behind to develop independently as the Tawarites. But we know that he brings Esus back to "his people" and his heirs end up in Worian/Vanstal, so I think it's more likely that the far western bull tribes are the product of a more extensive Elesdandrian diaspora than previously surmised. Either way, you end up with a theoretical "bull belt" at the Dawn stretching from the Ozur to Pelanda and supporting cultural exchange, revival and "recognition." Looking objectively, I have rarely sounded more like a crazy person than in this paragraph. Maybe we up the ante. The fate of the eastern bull peoples is already known. In the west, the Tawarites seem to have earned their special place by preserving a more direct continuity with some archaic (Kef)Tavar complex . . . but the real heart of the confederation seems to be on the other side of the Ozur where you get the Jorri / Jora / Jarins nomenclature as well as Basol. My guess is that EnJORA becomes a condominium between the tribes early on if it doesn't start that way. Maybe the Tawarites don't really dominate until the Akemites force their way into the region and pull the Janube down from the Sweet Sea where their bad blue cousins happen to give the eastern bull people so much trouble. Two blue peoples. Two bull peoples. A story that may rhyme or even overlap. (Judging from survivals in Thantom (the heart of Jora country) boar survivals weave in early and then feed into the Drona ancestral complex.) Now the Enjorelites remain a problem for the children of Malkion well into the terminal First Age, raiding down into Arolanit at least as late as the reign of Palangtar (286-291). In the archaic texts a bull-riding force persists long enough to factor into Talor's northern war on Gbaji. They call themselves the Losk-Alim and that's where we get the name of the modern kingdom. Other bull people evidently settle down and recognize the compensations of storm worship or "civilized" sorcery. Logic Beats Spirit. Valsburg becomes a prison for bull gods. While formally a "hsunchen" beast nation at the Dawn they never seem to bother with the familiar lycanthropic/ecstatic rites. Their "alliance" with the hykimites ("snake masters") to the east often seems more a matter of strategic convenience than shared religious conviction. On a day-to-day level, the Dawn Age beast peoples of the interior found the bull people terrifying and would only challenge the Enjoreli out of desperation. We know this from the memoir of a member of the "Redeli" (a semi-orlanthized bear nation) recorded in the reign of Sonmalos. One thing that's interesting about the fragmentary sources we have for Eleven Beasts survival cultures (Jonatsaga, for example) is the persistence of Hykim or Hikim this far to the west. As with the Pendalite origin myth, the beast is father and a local earth is mother. Snaky mother, tree mother. At the Dawn these are tree mother people, not yet differentiated from the forest. A distinct feminine "Mikyh" is absent except in the Korgatsu of the far east and the inner hermaphroditic mysteries of the Orggee Snake Caves. I don't know if any indigenous dragon presence persisted here into the Dawn or afterward. My gut tells me that snake mastery was never more than a foreign overlay north of Nida, possibly coming up from Vustria through the wolf belt or from "the moon's meeting" described in Entekosiad 37. MGF leads me in the second direction by giving us a more complex historical expression of beast consciousness. Besides, the Entekosiad reference is supremely weird as well as cool because it also creates a pathway for lunar precursors west into the Janube valley. We know Jonat's people acknowledged scattered moon goddesses. This is how a moon gets in underneath what becomes Carmania to wreck that empire. Seven days in the telmorite cycle. So maybe the hykimite snake masters also preserved the otherwise lost mysteries of "crab, mantis and cicada" as well as the Pelandan "dragonewts" who only appear at this point in the Entekosiad and then never again, except maybe as part of that "whole tribe of humans" who fill in for the dragon people after Nysalor breaks the Council. I knew they went west and ultimately link up with the Vustrians. But to get there, maybe some lingered in the bull belt and taught things now lost everywhere else. All of this lore undoubtedly fascinated Black Hralf the Weasel. But it's essential to modern understandings of Carmania as well. This was not some empty void waiting for Syranthir to cross in desperation because suddenly there was enough food for a migrating army. Arkat himself did not consider this route. This was a cultural corridor filled with ghosts and echoes that anyone with Losk-Alimite blood in his veins would have heard if not recognized. This is where bull shahs come from. This is how you find the weapons and/or magical instruments you need to defeat a blue man under the sea. This is why Syranthir goes to the east, to answer the riddle of Sog. And this is ultimately why the Arrolites retrace his steps walking backward like all angels of history. And what happens to the eastern bull people is that they get rolled up into the proto-Spolite Land of Shadows cast out of the emerging Bright Empire. "After they left there was a whole tribe of humans who worshiped the Darkness, and who ate raw meat and did other disgusting and inhuman things to prove they were troll-worthy." There are no dragonewts or hsunchen in modern Peloria and few true troll enclaves. So it goes. But once upon a time the bull riders were friends of the Andam Horde along with lion brothers (extinct in modern Peloria) and skin walkers. And once upon another time in Worian KefTavar was crowned king over the lion, the bear and the deer, not to mention signifying monkey, the fool of the forest.

Noted warrior deity. I see that he and Xemela are "Saints" as well. My intuition is that they originally dug themselves a bit of a design hole with the West and now the theistic parallels are starting to stretch. Personally I don't mind. Let a thousand wests bloom and we'll see which is strongest. I wouldn't mind playing with multiple Invisible God sets for that matter to reflect the mythic reality of intradoctrinal disputes. The Annilla sculpt in particular looks really nice.

At my table I would run this as a kind of Spirit Combat where Ugly and the priest both make their case. This might be a ritual ordeal, a theological debate in front of the community, silent prayer or something else. Either way, God decides whether Ugly has wandered too far from orthodoxy. God's will is revealed through dice rolls. Assign each disputant a "convince the examiners combat score" that might be (POW + CHA) x 5. Cult Lore, Cult Skills and Favored Passions, and Runes can be used to augment but I would limit the disputants to one augment per round. The loser of an opposed roll takes spirit combat damage. God rules against the first person reduced to POW 0. Someone was right and someone was wrong. At the end of the dispute, one person's faith is confirmed and the other one needs to accept the error. The community doesn't have to know what happened. If Ugly wins, he is free from Reprisal for this particular offense. The priest still hates him. If Ugly loses, he doesn't need to give up the weird new magic . . . but the priest will probably make sure to spread the news that Ugly is unwelcome. If your players are really excited about this kind of thing you can build various quests and minigames around things like theological research and sacrificial augments to prove your dedication, but this is probably verging on outright heroquest territory. Note that this is only for deciding worshipper versus religious hierarchy disputes when you don't really care either way. If in your opinion God is unhappy, all you need to do is unleash Reprisal.

From internal geographic cues I'd say the core text comes out of Tanisor in the last few decades before the Ban (1480-99). I love it too. As you point out, it's not entirely compatible with "Zz-b-r Says" . . . the ideas have apparently evolved enough to justify a different technical vocabulary. It's almost as if the blue man didn't actually Know Everything all those centuries ago like his people proclaimed. EDIT @Mirza I hear you. Odds are very good Xeotam is from Ralios so that's where his magical understanding was probably shaped . . . my only qualm is that by the time he gets to work with Aamor, Ralios has become "that land," somewhere non local. Of course the paranoid could say that Xeotam is only allowed to remain in print as a kind of disinformation spread among "educated Malkioni" to waste their time and conceal the inner workings of sorcery. However, in that case its inclusion as an exhibit in the Sourcebook is only going to mislead new fans as well, which nobody wants. An enigmatic document. An early Jonstown contributor concluded that the historical Xeotam was completely insane. I want to talk about horses along with bulls and bears (too slow) but want to linger for a minute on the "srv" root word that denotes the elemental intelligences we call "gods" in the barbarian belt. Srvuali, Srvuela ("the Spike"), Soruvela land of Soruve (the zzaburite devil). This is the land also identified in historical times with the continental interior, sometimes Kethaela (a volcanic land "teeming with krjalki") and sometimes what looks more like Dorastor on the far side of Nida. We also see it of course among the serevings and our new friend Seravus the Enchanter. There are no linguistic coincidences in a civilization where words are power. To get to "Srvuela" from the archaic west you need to go past, through or near Seravus. So I nosed around a little more in a few of the other archaic texts for primal beast references. "Orlanth's Battles Against the Sea" is an unusually structured document knotted together with blue dragons. It's relevant to us now because "The First Beast War was waged at this time. Orlanth and his brothers exterminated many creatures that came from the minds of sorcerers, [i.e. chimerical or "hybrid" forms?] and kept their own favorites." Then there are these fragmentary details: "Lord of Beasts: Orlanth's opponent in the Beast Gamble. Orlanth won every time but once, and so took many useful animals for his descendants, including bulls, boars, cocks, and rams." "During the Gods War Yinkin had to make a hard choice between his various kin. When the Beast Wars began the Serpentbeast Brotherhood seized Yinkin and demanded that he join them or else they would kill him. Orlanth swept through Orandaro until he found Yinkin, and crashed through the barrier and saved him. Orlanth made no demands and asked only for fraternal duty. Later on the Brotherhood seized Yinkin again and demanded that he follow only his father, the great beast spirit Fralar, but Yinkin was loyal to Orlanth and called for the Thunderer, who appeared and freed Yinkin again. That was when Yinkin decided to be a god and not a spirit and incurred the wrath of all the spirit creatures. The Brotherhood mustered all the hsunchen and invaded again, trying to seize all of the game animals to take away. Yinkin fought tooth to tooth and claw to claw with Telmor, and he kept many creatures alive in Dragon Pass because he and his followers defeated the Brotherhood." "Andal. A land to the southwest. It is inhabited by terrible beasts and hsunchen, as well as hostile Helerings." Also there were "deep snakes," powerful monsters of the Serpent Beast Brotherhood purged by Babeester . . . the only good snakes are mom's snakes, apparently. Who is the Brown Dragon? Which "snake" calls the tune of the snakepipe?

The prophecy! Many opportunities for ambitious heroquesters to put a thumb on the scales of empire!

If I can put all the issaries back together maybe these hyenas will leave me alone! Side bonus.