scott-martin

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.

I like a lot of this "modern Malkioni" push back against the bland narcissism of the white wizard doctrine . . . to me they are better and smarter people if they are at least open to these nuances. But I like this part in particular. One idea I toy with is that a native Genertelan wareran population might have initially developed a Western Lands cosmology as a prescriptive spiritual practice, a sort of projected visionary world where the soul could have its adventures and accumulate the experiences required to achieve its goals. Meanwhile the empirical history of these people continued on through the known ancestors and culture heroes similar to the ones everyone else has: son of Aerlit and Warera, son and husband of Phlia, father of the nations, etc. But at some stage the levels were confused so what was initially recognized as the future of the soul replaced the mythic origin and then the people became mental hostages to an artificial past. Obviously some entities benefit from this while the people no longer develop, effectively becoming stereotyped and "immortal." And something like a "sorcery plane" emerges, stark and rigorous. People like the waertagi (YarGan "made the masters of boats, called blue men") spin out or are kicked out along the way. An original native Genertelan "wareran" population may originate in a colder sea and Old Trade was always a myth . . . a little fancy footwork would be required but it answers the underlying question of what Brithos has been doing Since Time. There was one more point on the Plunder of Aron, also. Cults of Terror contains the evocative note that until the Lightbringers came West to meet Arkat, the notion of a Manirian route from Seshnela to Dorastor was apparently unknown. Unless this has been revised away, nobody had even theorized that this approach was possible, leaving the space in between to the beast peoples. I like this because it reflects the way central Genertela was a void in the archaic western fiction. The Seshnegi were apparently familiar with all the coasts but anything northeast of Slontos was alien territory until the map finally filled in and the "krjalki" resolved.

To be fair diehard Powers & Perils fans are still digesting the massive Western Lands supplement Richard Snider handed the mailing list back in 2006 and it was awesome enough to sustain us all this time . . . oh, you mean pen and paper. Well, yeah, in that case, better start the moan. It'll be ready when it's ready. If people want it to happen faster, convince the examiners.

I love all of this. Building up steam for the next wave . . . the notes on beast/man material culture are really useful. Five things I want to linger on for now. Not an exhaustive list, just the ones that come to mind. Four revolve around the Enchanter: 1. His influence can project east from "Aron." At first I thought this was because he was aligned with the mountain giants of the pass, but I wouldn't rule out a relationship with the "hostile breezes" that have yet to be consolidated into an Orlanth Tribe at this time. He might preserve traces of a pre-missionary Ralian storm complex with dramatically different views on the man/beast relationship as well as paternity, etc. This might ultimately feed into Loko with his Ram totem, the Caroni people of the Mislari or ultimately the storm revelations happening in modern Ralios right now. 2. The question is what he did after losing the Vingkotling livestock. This feels less like a simple prank than the expression of a foreign religious system. (Do farmers near Beast Valley have to worry about their stock being freed and fused, or only romanced and left with strange pregnancies? Is there a Beast Folk PETA?) Also the Sivin Feat sounds apocalyptic enough to have scorched a big hole in the Greatwood. Maybe it grows back before the Storm Age ends but maybe it becomes the "hole" in the vast western forest that those Serpent Beasts inhabit at the Dawn. In this scenario we can speculate about changing relationships with the elves, perhaps a rejection of the aldrya mothers for a different earth orientation. Some theoretically inclusive Mother of Mammals who transcends totemic identity. 3. The Enchanter's rivalry with the dinosaur goddess seems personal, especially if we start hunting "reptile hsunchen" into Peloria where the Fire Tribe has already wiped out a few gazzam ecologies and the elves and their allies continued the work of extermination. Seravus may be etymologically closer to sereving than we think. On the other side of the feud, she kills his son (the Herdsman?) so the scales balance somewhat. Either way, she represents a different beast lineage and seems more active in proto-Peloria than proto-Esrolia. (See also the snake mothers / snake daughters I recall Steve Perrin putting in that part of the world back in WF.) I wonder if the Fel-di-chi were reptiles. 4. "Aron" may be the forest that becomes "Eron" but also a fix for the cryptic "Erona" who shows up separate from Frona in the sourcebook. We don't know a lot about the Erontree except that they had already divided from the Greatwood at the dawn and that they're friends with Oranor, which traces its descent from Oran instead of Drona. Oran, Eron, Aron. The people remember a boar father much like the Jonatings remember a bear. Maybe the original north-south split in the hsunchen unity was whether the local tree was green or brown. EDIT one or more "Arroin" may also be involved. Non-spell botanical technology. A dead god. And the larger theoretical point at this stage revolves around the importance of lineage in general in Greg's West. Looking for all these quotes I was reminded of the Q&A in TOTRM 13 where Greg characterizes the West as "the root cellar of our modern way of thinking. It is where the mythological flaws and strengths of our Western way of being can be played with." At the time, this was considered "medieval," but as we all know the truth of this term both in Glorantha and our world is a lot more complicated than simple knights and crusades. We let go that word. Do we keep the Gloranthan West as the root cellar of what becomes a cosmopolitan and largely secularized modernity? These encounters with alternatives reveal something about what that might entail. I would go back to the Cults of Prax reference to a dynastic development of Daka Fal and euhemeristic explanations of other people's gods. I'd also go back to the statement that appears a number of times in the canon, which is that the most important myth for most peoples is their tale of origin. Who are the first ancestors? Where do we come from? Ironically, the imperial Western monomyth crowds out most of these stories, leaving us only with some maps and archetypal placeholders that support a model of history where civilization starts in the Far West and is exported to the northern (and southern) continent, ultimately outcompeting the barbaric failures that were here before. In this model, primitive tribes might evolve into "barbarian belt" consciousness or convert directly to the sorcerous view. I think for many of us this is a pessimistic way to look at Glorantha because it makes the secularists villains who succeed in wrecking what's otherwise an enchanted and splendid world. While I am working up ways to redeem parts of the West, it's also worth deflating their propaganda wherever we can. We know the God Learners lost catastrophically. They got the world wrong. This forces us to question their other assumptions about where the long arc of the world is going. Maybe that includes the hsunchen hypothesis. I think Greg would like that. If nothing else, in a world where tribal resistance to the "western" commercial monoculture and myth seems increasingly futile, it's nice to have a hobby where we can contemplate other outcomes. Anyway, the important thing for me is establishing that monomyth genealogies aren't innately privileged over local or isolated origins. Other people have their own history. Whether it's recorded in a way that interests the sorcerers is secondary. Besides, there's a weird bit in TOTRM 13 where Greg Himself tells the story of YarGan. Remember? The Kingdom of Logic was YarGan's realm of refugees attracted from all over. They were amoral, wise and venal. They probably flattered themselves to think of their adopted land as some abstract utopia, a realm absolutely alienated from the natural processes that lesser people had to obey . . . on the continent but not of the continent. Is YarGan's realm the only historical "Danmalastan" we will discover? I don't know, but it's worth looking. Such melodrama!

I'm not convinced the Tests have been administered since Artifex called the recalcitrant temple's bluff. If it were me, I'd deprecate the rite right there to ensure that Raibanth knows its place. A proxy can do it if necessary . . . and as you say, why should even a god need to keep proving himself except under extraordinary circumstances? The important thing is simply demonstrating that you maintain continuity with a previous successful claimant. This presents the ambitious and alert with many opportunities.

Great question. The back of my google envelope tells me that a Greek in 400 BC might pay 20-50 cows for a new house (typically 3000 square feet so you can play with graph paper) and the land will be extra. Buying an existing building in a really prime location might be 2.5X as expensive. A hut in the boondocks could go down to 2-3 cows. And of course fantasy bronze age may differ. It would be fun to build an Apple Lane. Any money left over could ransom people the player likes . . . become a kind of "gini banker" or bail bond office. Distraught families come in and make their plea, the players decide whether it's worth taking the case and buying this person back for the right terms. While waiting for the locals to get into trouble, buy your Harst license and park the cash in commodities you bargained down on the right day and are saving for the right minute to sell. Suddenly you're a shrine. Hire a few derelicts to whittle the sticks into furniture or whatever. The adventure begins. EDIT and the most important thing for campaign planning purposes: where did this dragon hoard come from and who else wants a piece?

Catching up but this always struck me as a remnant of a tantric formula that survives in the southern systems but is not often described in the north . . . Kendamalar taught to the wise among the seers how to bring together Cronisper in the lap of Yanmorla again properly, so that they could be with Langamul when he made the world. or in the other system, Aleshmara and Cronisper tried, but they failed. Each of them only managed to get parts of Langamul back. Noruma shows them how to work together. They do what Noruma says, and they burst into flame, but are not burnt. M+F in the right way = composite entity, creator reborn as great horned serpent Hykim = mikyH Noruma = amuroN

I hear that. Keep the icebreakers ready as this thing starts pulling water out of circulation and new shorelines emerge. With that in mind, I'll try to stay as focused as I can. Let's start this round in a place where I think we can all agree: This is why I'm reluctant to embrace the RM narrative where everything good comes from some hypothetical "absolute elsewhere" beyond the sea that only the wareran colonists remember . . . especially in the absence of independent corroborating evidence. As you point out, a doctrinaire Western observer would either not recognize urban complexes of coastal Genertela and Ralios as "cities" when they don't conform to their chauvinistic expectations or else posit some ancient precursor whose achievements were taken over by savages who don't understand them. The second approach is not perfect but it's an improvement, more faithful to the documents and MGF in which the wolves and lions built cities, drowned civilizations are scattered around the Manirian coast, things were happening in archaic Fronela and so on. Naturally I like to push as far as I can until the evidence pushes back, so maybe there are even more dynamic models in which some proto-hsunchen achieved a relatively high level of material culture on their own before backsliding or one or more hitherto unexamined ur-sources (material or otherwise) seeded the Western and other cultural revolutions independently from one another. In other words, maybe good things don't need to come from either western colonists or Council missionaries. Sometimes people in between developed and survived on their own before their stories were ultimately consolidated into one of the dominant narratives (god learner maps) and the undigested bits discarded. And of course in the cyclical fullness of history there might have been multiple expressions of all of this. Some western influences would become submerged in the continental landscape, "going native" or simply failing to persevere in the face of internal and external threats like "chaos," floods, dwarves growing a mountain range on you. The blue man would say that the world degenerates. All of this has happened before and will happen again. And then the stories are wedged back together in ways that preserve some truths and obscure others. This isn't only about west and north, either. A vision of a world segmented into four alienated quadrants is just another of the blue man's schemes to keep us all weak, small and lonely. In the real world before he broke it all the influences circulated everywhere . . . the world was made of everything, as it were. But all that is too serious, which is why it is far more labored than my usual style. Time to stir some lore: That might be a bottomless question. Let's start with the Face Guardians, who are a kind of recombinant "hsunchen" echo, only inverted as they start out as "domesticated" animals who receive human heads like manticores or the sedrali women of Ballid. Either way, they subvert the standard modern distinction between beast and man. They have breath weapons like dragons. And in the logic of myth, when we hear that they were animals "like" the stolen livestock, we need to be open to readings that they are the same creatures enhanced by the magic of Seravus, whom we never see but are told knows about the shifting of shapes. (It's significant that the liquidation of the Guardians and the liberation of the livestock take place roughly simultaneously, as though these are two versions of the same event.) The enchanter himself is a known rival of the Vingkot way of life even though his motivations here are not recorded and the Herdsman gets all the screen time. What we know about him is that he reflects a world where the paternal role in conception is a little vague by modern scientific standards. He comes from one of those archaic moments where your mom can get pregnant from a magic rock or a toilet seat or whatever. This is a story that tribal people in the know like to tell about people they like to consider primitive or inferior. (Since it's Glorantha and Before Time, of course the magic rock might actually be as literally true as it gets. However, every mythological utterance begs to be interpreted in its own terms like a persistent dream.) We also know that the enchanter is at least sometimes in league with elves (aldrya) against the tectonic reptile earth powers (likita or here the shaker goddess). Note that the shaker is intimately associated with Kero Fin and so she is on the Vingkotling side of history. She hates the enchanter. He is a very big piece of why she turned mean in the first place. Two of the most totemic of the Storm Tribe play a role, with Yinki[n] doubling for Vin[g]ko at one weird point where they tell the same story twice. Odalya the bear reports to Vingkot the man. Yinkin the cat seems out of place, emerging from a secondary narrative now lost or garbled. As we know he is Orlanth's brother and patron of Desemborth. The Bull is missing, either not yet adopted into the tribe or absent when the mundane cattle vanished. At the end of the story Odalya stops coming around as often as he did: another of the primeval beast bonds estranged. We're increasingly just people and pets. So what do we have so far? Vestiges of a rival cultural complex, a different system for interacting with the animal world. A rivalry with the tectonic goddess system. A friendship with elves. Shapeshifting. Weird beast forms. Where does he live? I think everyone agrees that this is going on in Ralios, where the Serpent Beasts were already in place at the Dawn. The real question for me is by which route the Thunder Brothers travel to get there. We know they don't face elf resistance until after they cross the mountains, which to me indicates that they went all the way through Kartolin and then had to burn their way through forest to reach their final destination. If so, they went through Dorastor and apparently already found it empty of interest. The alternative route is through a suddenly quiet southern Greatwood / proto-Arstola followed by yet another of those passages through the impassable Mislari, at which point the natives get restless. They don't kill the enchanter. This was a first contact situation but not the last. While we aren't any closer to the identity of the Fel-di-chi here, the Wolfbear strikes me as the sort of entity the enchanter would appreciate. The Wolf is of course the king of the carnivores in Telmorite territory, a band that ultimately encompasses modern Dorastor, much of Ralios and in some texts straddles the Nida gap to spread into Fronela as well after the Serpent Beasts are wiped out. They were an urban people once. The Bear is of course the king of the northern system that succeeded the "Hykimi Alliance" and sometimes becomes Jonatela. Multiple beast expressions already. Wolf + Bear = Dorastor. A sign of a fusion or alliance among powers broken only a generation or two before the God Project. Reptiles and carnivores. The Eneralites who become the Dari Alliance don't seem to participate. The horse people develop their own urban culture. The Pendalites might have had access to Serpent Beast magic across the southern forest, but those records do not appear to survive. Drona came from the south and a pig introduced him to his wife. The northern bull people are next.

Thus the popular quip attributed to Hon-Eel (in her Instruction), "devant moi, le déluge" or loosely translated, "rainy season is over, now I am on fire." It's interesting to go back to the masks as moments when a particular current in elite lunar thought reached its apotheosis and then was discarded. Some of them may only be dormant waiting for the hero wars to be revived in a new and more vibrant expression. Others become monsters. Some go both ways. (Will get back to other threads soon.)

That thing is pretty rare. Sorry to hear Big Purple is still wielding the ban, or maybe comforted that they remain ever vigilant. I would hate to get banned from here but at that point Greg was spitballing a little. The key was an extremely expensive knowledge skill (not quite as expensive as General Knowledge but far beyond the basics on the character sheet) called General Sorcery that opened up each tier of rune magic (1-point, 2-point, etc.) with every 25% increment of skill. You would then need to find a sorcerous source for the spell. Most people could cast whatever they had access to once per day. There was also a somewhat more affordable Ceremonial Magic skill that let you stack up to 5% onto your casting roll for every hour you spent getting into what we might call the mental Bonewits Zone. Every point was precious so you wanted to take your time. Because there wasn't any kind of POW economy attached to this short sketch (maybe a typed page within the larger article) Greg was gravitating toward the knowledge economy as the fun part. Books were going to be important (this mechanic might have turned into the Call of Cthulhu grimoire system) and they were working on a hierarchy of tutelary spirits you could call up and force to teach sorcerous spells. Because this direct route was called Demonology there's a slight faustian whiff around it . . . but no explicit notes about any authority warning people away from it. It would be interesting to reconstruct a Call of Cthulhu that worked this way! So not lunar magic or RQ3 at all because the manipulations aren't there. There were other efforts moving into the '80s.

This might get a little fragmented. Thinking ahead to the awards for 2020 as a whole, but I was still a little groggy. "Of the decade." Let's bracket a notion that one of the first things we learned about "Seshneg in the Dawn Ages" all that time ago was that they were masters of evolutionary taxonomy: lineage or genealogy. If they could deduce the antecedents of a thing, they could figure out how to manipulate it. As such, much of what we have from this era is page after page of dynastic charts and yet it strikes me I know next to nothing about Greg's mother, for example. The Seshnegi Book of Enemies occasionally confuses the wives of Pendal and Basmal[t] but the bulk of the textual evidence reinforces the aldryan priority hypothesis: Pendal married Ifttala Likita while Basmalt [sic] raped Aeelra Aldryama first, back in the days when "the lions would not harm the deer and the rabbits scampered with the wolves." Maybe there's a version of this story where that act breaks the green age bliss and forces the lion people into a broken world of predator and prey. Presumably he has other litters elsewhere because that's what lions do. I don't know who the ancestral Lioness mates with but he would've needed to be fairly formidable to survive the experience long enough to be remembered. However, Pendal's boys were all over the map in terms of mating preferences, so it's possible that the reference to Pendal being the one who married Aeelra preserves some otherwise suppressed incestuous union or Seshnelan propaganda. People hate the "mofo" reference in Lords of Terror but this is one place it could be folded back into a modern Glorantha. However, we digress . . . Orphal was the oldest and most lionlike, "he did not marry, although several nymphs and one of his sisters were mothers of his children." Rolfas simply married a sister. Avalal, Joril and Kaanil had sons but their mothers aren't named. Ernnal is taken by the sea and probably sires a lion nation elsewhere, the triolinas of this era being as thirsty as they were. Basmalt is still circulating and available for incarnation into the second quarter of the first century . . . no firm dates but this is the generation of Laxus the Peaceful so the Lion would have mated with his own great-great-granddaughter to produce the magically gifted Children of Basmalt. Again, gods are different but this would have scandalized a few innocent proto-Westerners. It's possible that these are the people who in their desperation figure out how to wear a lion's skin. Otherwise the last of the lion kingdoms breaks down in 138 so they would have missed out on any missionary revival of "hykimite consciousness" spread by the Serpents. I think we've talked a lot about the horse people and their separate origin coming down into Ralios so will leave that part alone for now. One interesting note, however, is that one of the last kings of the Jorils (d. 109) "was a member of the cult of Yelm [sic!] and was skilled in the arts of bow and chariot." This is part of a wild story that amounts to a "Pendalite civil war" but the important thing here is the presence of the Ralian Sun God famous for his oracle. At this point some lion tribes may have intermarried with horse tribes. Some people believe these are the ancestors of Tanisor. I agree that Ifftala as primary visible likita bears a strong resemblance to Sorana Tor as ultimate source of mystic kingship. There's a weird subtext I haven't fully plumbed where her death culminates one war (circa 2 ST) and triggers another (circa 4 ST, sack of Frowal and the annihilation of Avalalsket). Something going on among the likiti, a realignment. Ironically I think this story is told in greater detail in Hrestol Saga? Show me a kachisti with its own legs instead of using legs as a vehicle! I am not denying their ability or intent to incarnate but simply want to keep other avenues of propagation and exploration available to them, especially since the archaeological record is so fragmentary. It is possible that jealous white wizards would have expunged the sites as blasphemous (politically awkward) however. Let's find the sites. But beasts definitely have languages worth collecting because the Xeotam entity spends a lot of time talking about Beast Speech and hsunchen languages in the Sourcebook fragment. (Amusingly the entity's knowledge of "Jonatings" both confirms the fragment's recent composition and indicates that the lion savages of the Mislari are not yet extinct. Let the hero wars begin!) Which earthmaker are talking about, Langamul or Korgatsu? I've misplaced my Korgatsu materials but either way the Spike is tricky. Langamul is of course Noruma spelled backward, the southern "dragon."

To piggyback the Asrelia and Lodril references, there's also a sense of geological superposition going on in a lot of this stuff. The "darkest" layers are the deepest and the oldest, and as time proceeds what was once "bright" in a given generation gets pushed down away from the surface. Asrelia and Lodril started out as bright young things. She was fertile and he was fire. Now they're grandma and grandpa within shouting range of the grave. All the world's potential focuses on the grandkids and the dawn. Us adults in between look one direction or the other, but for the typical person the trailing horizon (the past) is where the sun goes down and shadows get deep. It's the archaic world of ghosts, vestiges, relicts, fossils, ancestors, extinct species. When you carry a light down into that world, it's not so scary, but you have to have the courage and a reason to go there in the first place. Grandma and grandpa have a lot of things to teach us that the adults misplaced or lost. All good things ultimately grow in the dark. People who forget this and focus entirely on the light (of the sun, of tomorrow) are doomed. There's a sense in which the trolls (and other "primal" peoples) are either dying out or merging with humanity. They ruled the world once, almost within living memory, and they have big songs left to sing before the curtain falls. We were closest to them in the dark and now when we see them they remind us of that primordial experience. They symbolize the dark we left behind. They're a matriarchal people so people who read earth as woman often see them as verging on the dark earth. That's okay. In my first grandmother's day, the line between human and troll was just a blur and people came and went. My other grandmother is already in the tomb back where the trolls come from and where they're going. Hard contrasts soften in the dark. But to the extent to which a troll can be male, people often imagine a kind of dark storm. Wild hungry winds, cold blasts, Gouger rites. In my experience people who identify too strongly with the bright side can associate the entire storm complex with a masculine dark. There's no storm rune for these people. It's just another subrune of dark . . . call it cold maybe. Of course here we know storm is its own thing. Some people don't recognize a female brightness except as a kind of shadow solar consciousness, a reflected light . . . call it moon maybe. Right now the dominant moon is neither dark nor light but cycles red. (Would love an explication of Red Earth theology in the new decade. Even though they lost before the curtain rises, the psychic trash they left behind plays a role in the Hero Wars.) Storm is the classical element that can learn from its mistakes and vow to do better. By the bright standards of today, storm is primitive, archaic, unlettered and crude. It's "darker." But the sun won't budge from its throne to save the world. The storm has to liberate the sun when it falls, negotiating with the sunset powers and exchanging one hostage for the other in order to bang open the sunrise gate and start the clocks of time again. Day destroys the night (ouranekki) but night can only divide the day. It takes storm to revive the sky. That means setting it in motion, but life is change. We'll sleep when the world stops. This is the sea.

First part: I know how that goes! Take what you want, I trust you to build the house you want out of the impenetrable sentences. And yes! But not necessarily a single continent-spanning civilization . . . more of a "beast belt" full of local variations, innovations, reforms, empire building and disintegration across Time. So like the Orlanthites or Malkionites, with their own history. Only as the losers, that history has not been studied but instead suppressed as with other variant expressions of Gloranthan consciousness. (Women, blue people, moon rune, etc.) We have the opportunity to reconstruct.

I love it. A contender for top post of the year! The only door I'd like to keep open at this stage is the possibility that these might be primeval migrations of consciousness (or spirit patronage) and not necessarily nations. When Lion came to the northern forest he might have found a people there already receptive to adoption. If nothing else he found a "wife." And so on for all the first peoples. Before the world fractured, there were systems that looked like bodies and systems that looked like minds. The bodies would have needed to move in linear paths to get to where they met the Dawn. The ideas (dare I say kachasti here?) would have spread differently. The ideas shape the peoples. The way they're shuffled at the start influence where they go within history. Tribal identities erupt everywhere in the turmoil leading up to the birth of the world. At that point, some carry Fralar and came "here" from Fralar's land. Some carry Froalar and consider themselves exiles from Froalar's land. All equally "immigrants." Now once we all get here, there are two early consolidation movements in the West and at least three others elsewhere across the lozenge. This is not hidden backer-only lore. It's just a slightly different perspective. It may not ultimately be historically "true" but it can still generate compelling explanations. We're familiar with the process of reunifying the scattered "western" experience after an initial period of isolated local development: Hrestol brings good news to all the surviving cities, white wizards argue for reformation, etc. In the past, I at least have tended to consider this "history." It's familiar colonial textbook material. Civilizations are built on the bones of savages. But for a moment we imagine a Glorantha where the other people (who embodied the other half of the green world) start innovating and consolidating too when they wake up. They aren't locked into any colonial fantasy of the wilderness passively waiting to be cultivated. They have their own ideas, build collectives that Greg sometimes calls cities and sometimes takes it back, embarrassed by his own audacity and accepting his own white wizard rhetoric. There were "hsunchen" civilizations. They just didn't look like what the chauvinists who wrote Greg's early history books would consider civilization at all, and so their religious movements get buried. They become people with no official history because official history is written by the winners and any records the losers left behind are destroyed. Like the proto-malkionite West at the Dawn, it was initially a mess. Some had riding, some had herding, some had neither, all had an ancestor. Scattered contacts happen. Some expressions of the proto-totemic consciousness die out early. Others become part of larger systems, "beast collectives" and "lion empires" and so on. They interact. They exchange ideas. They have their religious and political geniuses. Consolidation. The second consolidation, a beast consolidation. I like your three cultivating influences predictor and will raise you something like a dragon as a correlating factor . . . something like an EWF. This might not be the original beast consciousness at all. It might be their greatest achievement but they lost the war of time. They aligned with Dorastor and all the works of Dorastor are fragmentary now, so tattered the survivals look impossibly archaic to modern observers. It's "natural" to assume that the wretched and bereft we see today conform with how we imagine the original human condition in some hypothetical "green age." The books say they never learned. This is nothing new to you but might be productive for others. The Telmorites fell. Beast peoples who remember the lycanthropic rites are scattered to the barren wilds. Those who converted forgot and their children survived. And so it goes. The familiar history resumes, with the children of malkion ultimately writing the books and the children of pendal replacing our old horalite class. Desperation produces monsters and demonization is one hell of a sorcerous technique. But almost nothing in Glorantha remains buried forever. We'll find out. Maybe we'll find out in our lifetime, in a western hero wars. Or an eastern one, for that matter. A southern one. Now to keep this overtly on topic it's fascinating that while the sons of malkion and the sons of the beast are fighting the daughters are playing out their own continental drama. Ancestresses. At some point there's a divergence or evolution within what we would call the "earth" group and you see some people trace their lineage from an "aldryama" while others come from a "likita." These are all mammals so the choice (moiety) of tree or snake seems more symbolic than anything else. Some nations come from tree mothers (the Entruli, for example) and some come from snake mothers (the Pendali). And of course other nations have other mothers. Interactions among tree mothers and snake mothers generate a weird and ungainly duplication of entities but at the dawn it's almost as though it's a binary choice: inherit the ideas from Aldrya or from Seshna, for example. Tree worship survives among mammals in the grain goddess complex. The snake mother system seems to evolve into the modern land goddess list, but occasionally you see a vestige of something older, a shaker cult or chthonic / tectonic goddess. Along the tectonically active southwestern coast we don't see the humans interact with a lot of tree mothers. Even at the dawn the forest already belongs to Seshna's first children and actual elves are rare in the sagas. Tree mother consciousness is already done here and is already hard to find in Ralios as well as the Flamal cult rustles. Here in Seshnela, the mother war is now about which vision of snake inheritance will be master, and as we know Hrestol triumphs. This has ramifications for all mothers to come in the West, the carriers of menena. The likita consciousness gets coopted into the serpent king system everywhere except places like the Vadeli isles where everything is always inverted. Traces of the aldrya consciousness turn into Earth Witch, giving the ladies who live on the fringe of the forest access to options: technologies of consciousness (intoxicating drinks), alternative sexualities (furries) and of course spells the patriarchy can't figure out. This is a good thing. Now that I'm actually reading the Sourcebook I see that Earth Witch is prominent among the mralot people, who are a tree mother people in Maniria . . . successively orlanthized, gbajized, arkatized, malkionized and syncretized but maintaining ancient alliances with the Arstola. That's a good thing for them because Slonta is a tectonic goddess (likita) who ultimately rolled. I would not be surprised if part of the truth behind the "goddess switch" was an effort to interchange a likita with an aldrya, but everybody has a favorite pet theory there. But there's a third female expression in the archaic genealogies: the tilnta, pure fertility in itself. This person is not defined by her lovers. She defines them. I am hunting the birth of "Ernalda" in the fusion of snake and tree and maybe pig in this part of the world right now. A new kind of consciousness who unlike the destructive masculine rivalry of the farther west integrates and bridges previously parallel systems. She has both sisters' magic, land and grain. Of course now that she's proved her superiority, people call tree and snake her daughters. It's easier to get your head around that way, even if Since Time the evolution has gone in the exact opposite direction. Generational cycles, scratch an old lady and you'll find a little girl and a woman in between. I think the Ernalda cult was complicit in the age of the empires, acknowledged in Jrustela (where people did come in boats) and interacting with the latter-day EWF. That's okay. We all have adventures. What's interesting now is whether something like Ernalda consciousness, the self-aware tilnta, spreads in the apocalyptic West. Time for Menena to take her crown. I am sure I am missing some crucial details in this rant. I swear it looks organized in my head.

There's a document that might date from around 1969, the Seshnegi Book of Foreigners, that lays out a variant narrative for the land it calls "Ernaldela." A storm god Foi loved the Sow Goddess Mralota and their son Entru married Ketha (an Aldrya) and had five sons. This is before the dawn in Genert's country to the east. Entru and four of the boys (Ramal, "Heeril," Wenel and Manir) migrate to the lands we now call Slontos. The fifth, Vathmai, stays home until 115 ST. Vathmai is as much a pigman as his brothers but by the time his people go west under Lalmor they're firmly assimilated into the Unity Council and their storm father is Orlanth. Two tusker nations there, the Harandings northwest of primeval Nochet and the Aramites of the Plinth on the other side of the Pass. I suspect the Aramites have a separate origin but only their mounts really know for sure at this point. The Harandings probably become the Vathmai "missionaries" bringing the gospel to previously estranged pig cousins to the west . . . since this is their holy land, population pressure from burgeoning Esrolia might have been a factor in addition to religious zeal. The Ditalings seem to get absorbed early on. Meanwhile the main body of Mralota's brood build an urban civilization along the coast, but tribal unity breaks down in the shocks around their capital sinking in 97 and the Pralorites move in from farther west. The Vathmai are greeted as liberators and ultimately absorb the other Entrulian nations into a polity that lasts roughly a century. By this point we're a long way from the pig days so the rise and fall no longer really matter to us here. Whether they were ever lycanthropic tusk "brothers" instead of simply tusk "riders" is mysterious. No outsider knows where shapeshifting tusk "brothers" come from and they are too angry all the time to say. What we know for a fact is that tusk "riders" don't demonstrate any trace of hsunchen religion. They probably never had the right spells. The Harandings are also already human by the Dawn. Their cousins to the west may be more controversial. However, I'm starting to think "hsunchen" shapeshifting is actually an innovation of the Serpent Beasts and not a primordial state of man/beast innocence. Even if we were all animal people back in the forest, it's clear that some nations had access to those spells in the dawn age and others did not. What we know is that the Serpent Beasts came into conflict with Council proxies just as much as they did with the expanding Malkionite communities of the far west. The Remakers may have been trying to reverse engineer lost beast nations for reasons of their own. And of course all of this is paracanonical at best.

So this may or may not be funny . . . when Chaosium was developing what would become the RQ3 West trainee-level horalites were taught two special skills: Sense Magic and Dispel Magic (as the spell, no cost but anything over 1 point of spell gets exponentially hard). Then the adult warriors got what I have been calling "iron" with their choice of Countermagic, Protection or Spirit Shield inherent in the armor. More rarefied ranks could train better Dispel and ultimately sacrifice for permanent Dispel (range 15 m.) YGWV. The horalites got other exotic abilities in some drafts like enhanced weapons skills with high DEX and CON if that makes the BHT cooler for you. I think that's already reflected in Tindalos' build though.

Hey there, did she ever wonder if some/all humans are just really fancy trollkin that breed true and forgot their proud roots? Just wondering.