scott-martin

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.

I will always defer questions of prehistoric Saird to Jajagappa. And in that context it's worth lingering a bit on where we are in the fall of the northern forests. Rist is still a viable society but is already shrunken in the face of rising human power on the 1220 map. Looks like the inheritors of Eston in the Eston Wilds are technically calling the shots here . . . not sure how effective they are in this era. "Dense groves of trees cover hills and valleys haunted by elves, trolls, Tusk Riders, and bad memories."

They would have been such fancy prancing beasts.One emergent heroquest aspect of all this is of course the way the Black Horses have evolved from speedy but otherwise un-noteworthy mounts in WBRM into what we could consider the bijiif horses of the RQG Bestiary, restorations of the mutilated perfect pony from parts available in the underworld. This is almost a parody of the Golden Horse or Feathered Horse program, an inversion of horse eschatology . . . Grazers by Night. They can outrun the FHQ counter and keep up with Ironhoof. Since he comes from the approximate region of the western horse tribes this is interesting, undoubtedly a quirk of his heroic psychology for allies and enemies to absorb, accommodate or counter. I keep forgetting to check the sourcebook now that it exists! Nice to pin down the grant to 1545+ in current materials, even though it means some fancy footwork if people want to keep "over a century" or the Resettlement Sagas / KODP presence in the region. Like all good monster manuals, the Bestiary is full of the good stuff. Ethilrist becomes relevant after the Carmanian collapse and the hell ride is him ducking under the Ban, which dates that portion of the story (Volume VI) to 1499+. I'm happy with that. This gives the Mislari crossing, Companion fragment, etc. room to happen "over a century" from a 1618 start date. He might have made Nights of Horror, he might not. I'm not married to that piece of his mythos but know some people are. It's possible that Muse Roost was in place decades before Ethilrist took possession of the place, but I'm not eager to ascribe either serial incarnation ("Sir Ethilrist" as an inherited job title like "Dread Pirate Roberts") or straightforward time travel here. The "convergences" he chases in the fragment are bizarre and possibly take him outside the circles of time, but from the outside this probably looks more like big gaps in his narrative than opportunities to insert him where he doesn't belong. He's more likely to be absent from an era when a sequential life would mandate him being active than he is to emerge somewhere he shouldn't be. After all, he wasn't a Hero yet in the Companion fragment so wouldn't have access to attributes like heroic movement, escape, etc. The fragment is an interesting look at his ambition as well as his trajectory. He looks a lot like Greg in one of the portraits. My notes on his interaction with the Empire also say "ego = egi" but who has time to figure that out. Another shadow of the man in the red shirt, those early Carmanian syncretisms.

These might be the earlier horse people who find a loophole through association with Ironhoof, then are later assimilated into the "vendref" who preserve eyewitness accounts. The un-stitched bipedal line of Harfraftos. Modern people would just see "grazers."

Unless we posit a western extension of the Dragonewt Road Network that no longer exists in that form, these people would have needed passage through the Shadowlands, right? That tells me OOO was in the loop or not in a position to do anything about it, or the story itself is disinformation for humans to spread. If I had to render a hypothesis now I'd say a lieutenant had gone rogue with scavenged EWF secrets or worse and once he became a real diplomatic problem he had to be eliminated with clean hands. The UL informant tells a carefully sanitized version (Trollpak as a whole may be Shadowlands PR for a northern audience) designed to hide the embarrassing details while subtly cautioning ambitious trolls that there are worse things than death. The CHDP version contains even more careful silences. Putting them together as you do helps us approach what really happened and then a trip to the Ruins proper will confirm or deny. People who like extra bizarre dragonewts can posit that the draconic forces latent in the Ruin required a certain type of sacrifice or even just a commemoration of magical processes, something between a slow-cook barbeque and a long-burning signal flare. The elves are mysteriously quiet in the EWF era except for the isolated Pavis influences (man and city). I'm starting to think that they were especially vulnerable to the Kill so their participation was more thoroughly eradicated, and then the Newbloom was ultimately collateral damage in what board games fans know as the Shadows Dance scenario. Are there any references to elves and newts being particularly friendly or unfriendly to each other? EDIT who is the mother Tree here anyway? RIST, right?