scott-martin

We'll go back to Wenelia now that I'm back with the books. I wonder if this is more properly expanded "Aram Yu-Ud-Ar(i)am" or Aram Yu [translated "soul of" in the Bestiary] Ud [unknown particle] Aram [repeated] . . . depending on the Ud this might be a "Son of Mother" construction or something more like Popeye's (or YHWH's) tautological "I yam / what I yam."

Thank you. It is funny that all this time we didn't ask. Taking that linking particle first, I'm intrigued with theories that the "ya U-" is cognate for a "Yu-" which would have marked him as one of those sky survivors at the beginning when he tamed the pig. Otherwise it's too easy to read and dismiss as a Welsh "yr," which is fun when you're engaged with the Mabinogion trying to figure out how pigs were tamed in Britain but it gets distracting here in our hobby now that we've grown beyond all that. Whoever Udram or Dram was, we'll find out eventually. Maybe it's related to the rehabilitation of the Plinth people and other piggies elsewhere. In Wales they might have said "Mabon ap Modron," which is as simple as "the son of the mother," relevant to talk about how archaic male consciousness emerges as something expendable and then gets a chance to live out the harvest.

Son, we need to get you to an elf glade or you have an Orlanth-all chance of either dying in a bungled lunar kidnapping once they find out about you or worse, actually getting shipped north.

"Clem, by now you probably figured you ain't really mine and Ma's boy. We ain't got no seven-foot nine-year-olds in either line. How I put this? You're Bessie's. But we done raised you as our own. Maybe we done wrong not giving you to your own folk but we loved you so."

Resistance is now Greco-Bactrian or Indo-Hellenic, citizen. Kindly report to Slon for reprocessing. I always thought Minotaur (WF 12) preserved the traces of a formerly viable cult that degenerated into a monster type. He looks a lot like the Bison Founder counter so this might have once been a ritual status that people across the bull belt could incarnate under the right conditions . . . maybe by mastering the Battle Rage / Eternal Battle, weeping and sleeping it off to digest the insight. (In this scenario we would expect to find at least the potential for Beast Folk mirroring the other extant Founders.) Founders mate with Protectresses so I would expect to see baby minotaurs emerge from a cow, sort of a gentle country veterinarian scenario but the calf you reach in there to turn punches you in the hand. The cow's owner then has some complicated choices to make but in minotaur regions there's probably a traditional understanding where you leave babies on a rock or something and the tribe comes to claim them. Maybe the baby remembers you fondly and you can be friends years from now. Like you say it's also a compliment to your cow. I don't see minotaurs pursuing human women but it's a big world.

This is HOT stuff since Odysseus' mysterious "thigh" scar (i.e., near miss) was on the boar hunt and IIRC the pig goddess was the Lady of the Wild. I had forgotten that. The lady was eternal and the boys were completely ephemeral and expendable . . . the earth king was supposed to run his term and retire into the temple, so coming back from the wars to challenge the suitors preserves the ghost of a profound revolution in consciousness. In our hobby we might postulate a boar father emerging at a certain historical / mythic moment and building nations, only to fade from view. Slontos is a strange place. Also can anyone remind me who the Udram the Aramites ultimately descend from was? For Aram to have a distinct identity as the "son" (child?) of anyone is noteworthy. For them to be "Aramites" and not "Udramites" (Yudramites?) says even more. Maybe the first King of Dragon Pass was also the last king to die by sacrifice. Where does it get us? Back to the furries.

Good question. On one hand, people emulate the good goddess because she gets the good outcomes . . . her children are all wanted and they all live. When you need to mourn or rage or make tough decisions the sisters and the crone are there to take your hand. But this also means that everything bad that happens around Ernalda is passively suffered (there's that gender dichotomy again) and turns into a happy ending with the right attitude. I don't think this captures the real complexity of a fully lived life, Luck and Fate. Bad things happen to good women and bad women happen to good things. Someone right now might be heroquesting a way to integrate the light and shadow earths. On the other hand this may simply look like the Moon, cycling from princess to bitch and back again. No wonder the Shakers are so upset with the Hon-Eel reforms . . . they invested a lot of identity into Terrible Mother and if that simply becomes another phase of Every Woman they've wasted their lives.

Cry havoc and release the puma people.

We hear a lot about pig mother but . . .

This is outstanding. Say more about pig father please.

The West is the . . . best.

Hmmmmmmmm.

The RQG Bestiary (my new source of choice for all things Ethilrist) says there's a hard limit of 2600 and a waiting list, which breaks down to about 500 steeds per cavalry counter and the remaining two infantry counters might be aspirants. Pork is often an option in this part of the world! I wonder if they will eat Golden Horse if given the chance. I could whine and say this is their travel dress because he isn't on the Hound . . . but who packs two sets of armour? I'm not married to him having a lot of iron after all his travails but now the Troop's unusually high (defensive) Magic Factor is nagging at me. It says something about their support that the board game's mostly theistic magicians have a harder time affecting them. So how does that work? These are great. No talars or "telleran!" Again, I don't yet know the specific nature of his heresy, but suspect his arrogation of the archaic Sidi or Sâr is revelatory in itself.

Mormon boys too, although it gets complicated. I still think that in Orlanth country most of the transmission of divine power happens at the hearth level. Dad IMG is the highest ranking Orlanth initiate [sic] in the household and celebrates the Orlanth rites. Mom is the highest ranking Ernalda. In many ways Orlanth is simply The Dad God and Ernalda is simply the Mom. Everything else is local color. Children, livestock, servants and weirdos circulate around the edges. If there's a problem they can't handle the smart thing to do is ask an elder or a specialist. In the Ernalda system this means going up the generational chain to the grandmother goddesses. Since Orlanth has no father who can be contacted, you have to find somebody wiser in Orlanth than you. (Still mulling the great stuff on local distribution of beneficial and malign big magic people.)

I hear that! They are a gateway to the West . . . admittedly a profoundly heretical version but still this is how sorcery gets in front of the players. I do think they have iron though. Will go back to the old Arkat rules next week and see how that stuff worked in RQ2 unless someone pipes up faster.

Not at all! Baby moomin is stabby but non chaotic. But I saw you sniping a comment in while I was typing so figured I better hit "Submit Reply" and go see the real deal in action.

Yeah! I was thinking that was how you get ogres . . . no real desire to see if there's a Sex Pit behind the Red Cow but I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me. There was a Pit there once even if people try to close all the heroquest doors. Sometimes people find their way there. I don't know anybody who defeated it. Although maybe it's a place the girls are taught about and get the tools for handling it. Oh hi, Qizilbashwoman.

The backstory around the Pit is interesting. "These were all uncles of the children gods, so although they hated them they could not kill them. Instead, they decided to destroy them without having to take responsibility for the deed. They lied to the children, and said that they had prepared tests for each of them, and that afterwards they would be gods. In truth, they took the children to various wicked places which they could not understand, and they put a child in each. They hoped that one would destroy the other, and thereby lessen the number of foes." These were preexisting sites that frightened even the uncles. But that last line has always relied on broken grammar for its ambivalence. Were they hoping that the site would destroy the child or that one of the children would destroy the others? All you need is one success to poison the band of brothers or at least lessen their number. The people who play the uncles now in initiations probably don't set up for the Sex Pit. It just worked too well and instead of revealing the initiate's hidden strength only succeeded in its wickedness. Mourn the other brother but pray he doesn't come back.

One reason I've started looking at them is to resolve contradictory cavalry caste restrictions in the terminal third age, so this fits right in. For apocalyptic drama I wonder if the BHT wyter is actually the Hound, which would convert its reservoir of stored POW into devastation if ever released. Not a whole lot of time today but using WBRM counters as a rough gauge the elite mounted troops should be about as tough as the Full Moon Corps or a unit of minotaurs, beaked "soldier" dragonewts or Tusk Riders. Their real advantage is one of the best movement factors on the board. The infantry might be the cadet branch waiting to inherit somebody's steed or simply how these guys fight on their feet. In the boardgame they're about as tough as a lot of units like centaurs, Pony Breeders, Tarsh Exiles. Tough guys but not hugely noteworthy. Of course the game can be wrong. They would ordinarily be a great experiment for someone looking to model relatively population-bounded battlefield sorcery. (We know there are 2600 steeds or about 500 per cavalry counter, which scales back to about 1000 of the infantry / cadets and 3500-3600 troops in total, enough to support a few full-time sorcerers.) But I don't know if Ethilrist supports any real magical firepower except what it takes to maintain his situation . . .the Hound can take a bite out of Harrek but nobody else on that team seems to be able to achieve a Wound. (The Ethilrist counter is ambiguous.) I think his real Arkatic heresy melts caste restrictions and allows pacts with strange gods so they might not have specialist sorcerers beyond the Temple at all. EDIT as for "countering a significant theistic attack," I like the stats here but in the boardgame they do have a slight edge on most tough secular units in terms of magical defense. I suspect this is relatively heavy iron.

I like the logic emerging here. Two observations: that 12-point holy woman is also going to be drawn into more rarefied spiritual adventures whether she wants them or not, and for every 12-point holy woman in one place there's a witch a few valleys away to depress local outcomes and normalize life across the lozenge. I suspect the gods will bring these factors into opposition and burn the points. On the other hand, the abundance or famine are themselves the opposition showing where the points get spent: plump babies glorify one goddess and insult another; sick ones tip the score the opposite way. As for Pelorian wyter-based systems, I don't know enough about their fertility complex in general. Let's find out!

This opens a seductive heroquest door. IF the wyter and the wyter priest are receptive, what's stopping fairly sedentary people from transferring worship obligations from the god to the community itself? The priest needs to maintain the spells the wyter casts on behalf of its members but as long as Reprisal is avoided all points should be "reusable" up to the spirit's POW reservoir. Don't like your priest? Stay home and pray with family. In time religious affiliations may drift.

This sounds like a dare. I love it. In terms of the binary Powers being "reversible" I think that the arrow of Time in Glorantha implies that dispelling (banishing) one Power does not necessarily equate to summoning (evoking) its opposite. The immediate effects will often be similar as the Powers resolve but as with acid/alkali reactions you will also generate possibly unwanted "salt" and "water" neutral products that build up and get you into trouble down the road. Best to learn the technique or call a friendly specialist . . . if you have that luxury of course.

First thing I thought back to was every story that starts "A widow had two daughters" or occasionally a variant on that opening. One of the girls does everything right and ultimately life works out great for her. The other one tries to get everything her own way and is punished. In many cases probably beloved to Dara Happans it's a powerful independent woman who stands in the way of happiness.

A great discussion continues! Maybe it'll go on around me. Everything comes and goes. The original writeup was as gender neutral as it got in game land back in 1978-80 and you get at least one explicitly female Orlanth initiate in Borderlands, the lovely and lethal rhino rider Kranaka Windfriend, mounted on Hurricane and glorying in combat. She found Eiritha too restrictive. Not to call down the red tide but Kallyr was comfortable in Thunderous back in the freeform in WF 7. Leika also gets her divination from Orlanth in WF 14. How Vinga erupts beyond that stage and where her adventurous takes her is a matter for specialists. Some of them red dyes will really fry the hair though.

I come from appaloosa country so they all look fancy to me. Kind of fond of the idea that the White Horse knew how to dance like the Lipizzaners . . . the depth to which they fell becomes more poignant in the light of how sublime they once were. Speaking of origins . . . Now that you mention it, the Ban may actually be newer than Ethilrist. Oldest reference I can find is WF 5 when Greg identifies Arrolia with Fronela. Before that, if there's a reference to Snodal closing off the region in the archaic texts, I haven't seen it . . . if anything, Siglat demonstrates remarkable freedom of action when he appears. On the other hand, Ethilrist seems to appear fully formed in WBRM, when all we knew about the lands west of the Lunar Empire was that the Jungle was south of the Rockwoods and the Properties were north, arcing around to meet the Thunder Delta. WF 4 is the hinge where the world around the WBRM map fills out to make space for the old Western sagas. Before that, Ethilrist may just as logically have come from another world, a parallel Glor[a]ntha. Hell may well be an infinity of untaken paths, people we could have been but never became. It's worth refreshing our sense of who Greg thought the Arrolians were then and how the Ban worked. In WBRM through WF 4 the northwest is wide open and the Arrolians send seasonal gifts across the river (a proto-Janube?) to the Crater. Ethilrist requires no temporizing footnote in WF 1 / RQC. But by WF 5 Greg wanted to create some distance between the Snodal material (then not even a decade old, look how young he is) and these new lands of Peloria and Prax: there had been an interruption that lasted almost a century. The curtain has already come down of course. It's always already down, receding into the narrative past. Arrolian magicians have cyclical range but steady state MgF, which suggests a creative alternative to the Permanent Full of the Glow.