scott-martin

The consolidation of "New" Seshnela and reconstitution of the caste system was probably a glorious time for mercenaries but I don't see him evacuating the region without a firm push. The timeline there is also tight: if we take the Companion fragment as a fair transcription then he knows about the Arrolian Properties under that name (post 1389) and believes they are still a viable destination (pre 1450 circa). He might of course be wrong and Arrolia had already fallen long ago, but since his internal misgivings about his hero status in the text don't sound like someone who has already harrowed hell, I am reluctant to insert an extra-temporal episode before he emerges from the Convergence zone, however we would approach that now. According to the information he had when he went in, Arrolia endures. Whether it had fallen when he came out is another question, but in that case the emperor is going to be busy until at least the early 1460s. In this reconstruction I can see him helping to rebuild the empire in some capacity but the Nights of Terror put a hard stop on his participation before he needs to head down and build Muse Roost so he can start brooding. (Part of the impetus here is to start building a HQ/RQG transitional timeline so we can move beyond 1618 with some degree of confidence.) The fact that he doesn't show up in FS may either reflect lunar chroniclers' chauvinism or Greg's exhaustion with a juvenile creation past his prime. Ironically I suspect the former scenario here. Greg remained engaged with our favorite asshole until close to the end. So what are we seeing, now that Yomili and Halwal have both weighed in? He's on the run in the late 15th century and moving north (Companion). He ends up cutting a deal with an emperor, probably Magnificus. Magnificus or his immediate successor sends him south when the empire is restored. It's incidentally funny to see Hon-eel messing with the telmorites too. Evidently they were a problem or an opportunity for a lot of people once upon a time. Maybe the horses turn black after Horror, maybe not. TBD. Looking at the Companion again I suspect Keener Than is a useful algebra, a jungian cutout. Clever fellow, our Ethilrist, to deploy such an obvious achilles' heel, I mean hell, I mean "best friend." But this shows that I'm not a fan of easy "atroxian" placeholders after all.

Daddy! I suspect the now-vestigial Soul Arranger mythos hints at many esoteric mysteries preserved in the Guide of the Dead. Telling also that some people say Larnste engineered the birth of Umath while an issaries (I imagine a preposterously cute cherub, probably disguised as Groucho Marx) was born explicitly to grease the cosmic gears and make it happen. One force, two factors. Of course today we have the modern Issaries so who could ask for anything more? But we digress! I am eager to discover trader princesses to the immediate west who can shed light on these things and if anyone is still following the original post the book The Distaff Gospels came up over cocktails the other night. Highest recommendation.

Sacking Dunstop "a few years before Starbrow's Rebellion" might push the start of the 30-year commission back as far as circa 1580, which fits your timeline but is challenging to reconcile with settlement at Muse Roost "more than a century ago" (SKOH 257 . . . the currently deprecated "Atrox" is my placeholder for his real faith to be discovered). But I'm eager to hear solutions. We have debated the Mislari crossing in the past . . . if the fragment preserved in the Companion is the primary textual evidence then we're back in Volume III, once again "over a century ago" and a long way from hell. It's possible the grant and all or part of the 30-year commission happen as late as Volume V, in which case there's time later to hobnob with future kings, queens and emperors after the horse changes colors.

With a band of companions he traveled to the edge of the sea, and there he contacted a great spirit which could guide and protect many tribes — which could protect a kingdom. After that Westfaring success Sartar was recognized by the many peoples as their ruler. His original title was First (Prince) of the Quivini. Who controls the route west of Dragon Pass?

There's a feeling I get [as] I look to the West (beware) that I don't know enough about Ethilrist's heroquest orientation, so it starts with trying to get a grip on the slippery external facts behind his braggadocio. Separate sources say that the Mislari crossing (Guide) and the establishment of the Atroxist colony (SKOH) happened roughly contemporaneously, "over a century ago." This suggests that he came south somewhere between circa 1468 and 1517, i.e. the Fifth Wane, and the emperor who authorized the grant was almost certainly the Magnificus complex, which makes sense in terms of the larger Kingdom of Conflict southern strategy. However, we are also told (Guide) that he spent his 30-year commission harrying "Sartarite rebels," so the window narrows to 1491-1517 in order to fit all the facts. Lunar missionaries only show up after the apotheosis of Prince Sartar (SKOH), which means Ethilrist was an enemy of Boldhome for all or part of Saronil's reign but probably just misses his chance to be among the "strangers" who kill him. I'm sure people have explored this history in exquisite detail, possibly weaving conspiracy plots around the Telmorite migration, etc. What do you know? And if people want him present at the Nights of Horror, this complicates the timing and the motivations a little more.

Starting with your experience as a female gamer can unlock wonders. If the stories and structures available don't express your view of the world, nobody is better equipped to discover new ones that can do better. It probably won't happen all at once. Perversely Greg's essay in a book called "Choirs of the God: Revisioning Masculinity" might be really useful to anyone looking to decode a bit of the gender journey that gave us the stories and structures available. Once we know better where we've been, it can get easier to figure out where to go next.

Harst has a surprisingly broad reach but I digress into spoilers and minutia. The exciting thing about cult ecology is the way different theologies emphasize different levels of the Tindalos Religious Pyramid. Some are narrow because their epiphanies are abstract or they are actively fastidious, refusing casual affiliation so "lay members" are limited to people preparing for initiation. Others enjoy a broader footprint so most of their people are Tindalos 2 types. Orlanth in Orlanth territory is interesting because levels 2 and 3 are usually conflated and there's a lot of overlap toward 4. It's an egalitarian society with few intermediaries to act as spiritual chokepoints. Most people can talk to god and actively participate in the work of the world. Few may have the kind of deeper understanding (kate bush reference) that turns into spells, but who really knows if that's what matters. Anywhere you get a lumpen underclass will have more lowlies farmed for magic points serving as the audience in the rites important people perform. In some places this may actually look something like "Barntar," with a lot of lay congregants and few initiates or bigger magic people. In others, Harst or one of the lodrils. But this also verges on puppeteer mystery.

Welcome to the Hero Wars! The menenstral cycle for those carrying that onus will begin in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . .

I think this is ultimately where she needs to step up. While I like B personally, he did the work of getting them through 1622 and is now a little extraneous. That's okay, he was always meant for bigger horizons. This is her patch of ground to claim. Meanwhile I guess the nymph is happy, which tends to be all I care about.

Top thread of the season!! Thinking about the "ruins" of Stone Nest I realize I don't actually know much about the durulz archaeological record before Delecti made the Marsh. The Mongoose book makes some interesting leaps in terms of a broader pre-Dragonkill duck diaspora that then gathered into Dragon Pass as a kind of central homeland. Sadly that's about as far as its imagination goes, but I wonder if that global duck community needed more extensive housing than the current population can or wants to maintain. Maybe they truly have come down in the world from much more lofty circumstances. (Born in an egg like the EWF, after all.) Their boats (perfect for messing around in) would have been different when the current was stronger. And now that the topic is out in the open I don't have a lot of compelling evidence for the Wild Temple and Beast Valley before the Kill opened up the Zoo either.

Haha! YES. You want to make the river happy, this is how it works.

Then every day's your birthday! Happy birthday, Miss Chaostic, Alternative Miss World for 1626. Out of reacts, will come back around to this and the alchemy later.

Our best economists say there will be seven runic genders, the seas will fill with a nutritious and refreshing beverage like lemonade, every tribe will contain exactly 1600 souls (all personality types perfectly balanced) leaping out of bed three hours before dawn to pick perfect cherries, the Valind Glacier will melt, etc. I believe part of it but a lot of wild stuff comes out of Zoria these days.

Given the persistent rumor of testicles in RL elixir formulations (Fulcanelli opens the door in a dress) I would suspect blood is only the tip of the taboo factor. OTOH someone needs to step up to supply the known potion market and until Minlinster starts loading real spell points into craft beer or the beards come up with something useful I guess people will have to keep on making difficult choices.

Just to piggyback on everything else. When life gets complicated, adventurers and other complicated people have to make complicated choices. Maybe one community needs you more, so if your home clan told you to help out these other people, it's OK to stay with them and help them recreate the world. Unless you have a strong suspicion that the wyter wants you to come home, that's your community this year. Go ahead and do their rites. There's often a job for someone like you. In Orlanth land, getting lines on Day 5 and Day 6 is a great honor but they might find something else for you to do depending on your skill set and their needs. After this, you'll have a special relationship with these people. They might not be your clan but there's still a bond. When the wyter and your soul want you to come home, they'll let you know. Maybe you'll have adventures along the way and barely make it back when your presence becomes essential. Or maybe you were needed more elsewhere all along, so that's OK too. And in a world of orphans and disrupted lives, sometimes new wyters are born.

That's what I'm saying, man! People showed up dressed for an argument and got rebuke instead. To be fair I bet the programming was pretty sophisticated but who even thinks about deploying that kind of thing? Lucky Theo blew it by gambling on the big man. Bad genealogy, especially if good things come out of Dan like we hope. Sad. 1627 or bust!

Beautiful invitation, all gold and that phosphorescent calligraphy we had in the good old days. I guess he still had some or figured out how to make it again? "You are cordially invited to the Seventh Ecclesiastical Conference of Malkion to participate in the clarification of the True Faith and birth the Egregore of the Occident. Honorarium will be provided." I was tempted for three whole minutes and flattered for maybe one, then mysteriously the prentices forgot to book the flight and by the time we figured it out the weather had turned. Anyhow he's figured out range-boosted brain busting at high enough intensity that it's practically indistinguishable from God's Will if you catch my meaning. Got to go!

All out of "haha" reacts! I hear you man, but those guys' heads exploded. Clearly he speaks for God and the West Is One. I for one like my brain inside the skull. Crusade mode engaged. But there's a trick to it or else the spells don't work.

Out of reacts. Yeah, the assault on crazy town is going to unleash all kinds of crazy up there for those players. Good times! Love this. No one move a muscle as the dead come home.

That is the thousand-mage question that rolls up all these other ones. (I think the broad answer to all the others is "yeah" or at least "sort of.") Technically the One King Of The West gets access to imperial authority as long as the ritual architecture was tight enough. Which I doubt is the case because I'm alive here in barbarian country and I know there are others who conveniently "missed their flight," got snowed in or sent an actor to the seventh ecclesiastical party and went underground. It's been a crazy couple years for those of us who aren't actively dead so I haven't really gotten a chance to think about it until now. The ritual architecture has at least three gaping holes in it big enough to drive an actual dragonship through, maybe as many as five. Depends on the island Aamor happens to recover. But I am but a simple genealogist and don't want to say too much on an open crystal ball. What is everyone else up to as we look toward 1626: the year we make it through if it kills us? How are you planning on kicking things up to slow the big man's roll? That's all you need to do. Slow him down a little so we can keep this part of the world playable and let the ritual architecture implode on its own. Your friend, Geleron Green deep in the sticks halwal: not a town, not a castle, not even a dude . . . a state of mind (Basm. Niiiiice.)

Love all this. I just want to get back to Coney Island so Scar and the Riffs will leave us alone. In cold light of morning I realize that Guilmarn has trouble enforcing his will on the Road for a funny reason but it's probably a SPOILER and close to maximum MGHV. Basically every time he tells the Traders to submit they say "pass" and he says "okay." It's the weirdest thing. Funny things show up in the terminal Hero Wars era, maybe for the last time. Likewise I wonder what Arstola really wants, where the seeds travel. They can hold a grudge a long time and their biggest one is Rist. At minimum there's probably also a Brown / Green philosophical schism going on from tree to tree: do we come out the other side? how do we come out the other side? how do we define that? Suddenly Maniria becomes very important to people looking for what "conventional" elf tutelage looks like. Dragonewt is to Kethaela as Elf is to Maniria. Either way, I would love to know what Redwood wants. A real Reforestation Project will need to reach out to all the known stumps and invite them to contribute their precious quarter cup of pixie dust. It's good manners. The worst they can say is no. I'm still at the stage where the chronicles of the archaic Entruli cross my eyes . . . I think the important early thing is that these are apparently LB "missionaries" who might have had a distinct objective in resettling what some people called "Ernaldaland" after magical disaster wiped out the relatively advanced original nation. So they would have started out a little funky and then developed along their own lines. Later this is the prime Arkat route so he's going to leave a mark on religious consciousness that future generations wouldn't even know they needed to try to scrub away. I've always liked the 'Mane as a juicy Shakespearean role, "Lion in Winter" jokes notwithstanding. Oliver Reed. Somebody in this period should put the puzzle of what happened to the last Pendalite nation that went into exile in the east . . . there's probably a geezer or defrocked sage or somebody nearby to provide exposition on these things. It doesn't really matter to the epic saga but it ties off a few loose ends in a dramatically satisfying way. As for my friends in Pasos, what I want for Christmas is a compelling Episode Two: The League Bites Back scenario. The southwest gets boring if the bad guys win before the curtain even goes up. We need to collect pockets of resistance and revolt now. Slow that guy down. Hurry up please, it's Time.

I think we're all in roughly the same boat so let's goof around a little while we're waiting. The function of the Road now is probably to keep ur-metal from going directly into Harrek's war machine. Everything else is a sideshow to fill in the caravan slots and give partners on both ends a low-cost / slow-speed option. There's probably a lot of what we would call smuggling. The question is what if any contraband the Safestrans wouldn't want to go east. Maybe the better question is what would be too dangerous to run through Pasos so close to LePlain's watchful and punishing eye: religious artifacts, "heretical" texts, the body of western magic going to join the cousins in the Holy Country. Ethilrist has buyers in the cities. So do God Forgot and those lunatics in Malkonwal, or they did back when they could afford it. Maybe there are things the Dwarf needs too and he hasn't figured out that the ships are back. We also need to figure out where the slaves come into the western end on their way to the labor-starved Esrolian farms and dwarf mines, or just to Saltcastle. Ramalia really isn't on the way . . . more to the point, if Ramalia were the entrepot the Road would have been built to swing south of the hills. It's tempting to speculate about a breakdown somewhere farther west we don't know about yet that forced people into long-distance servitude. Captured Ralian barbarians? Impoverished urban dwellers enslaved and deported? When did it start? Why does it continue once population pressures eased and labor demand stabilized? It might have started as a refugee program in the wake of the luathan disasters that got institutionalized. Mother Esrola Needs Hands. Either way, it's a triggery topic so it's probably controversial among the Traders so we can have sympathetic and unsympathetic factions. When shipping broke the business model it would have seeded a religious crisis (business = religion within "Ashara") that working for Greymane only distracted them from for a little while. Now that he's gone, they're busting out trying to figure out who they want to be and where they want to go. The Pralorelans might covet a piece of the action beyond Highwater but I don't see them having a good shot at even taking Yolanda without serious help. Some of the Traders (especially around there) work for the forest. Castelain married an elf. It's how their trail stays cut through the Arstola . . . so far. The forest might ultimately prefer the elk people but I'm not so sure. Maybe they're conflicted too. Guilmarn covets it all because he's a jerk. He's in full One True King Of The West mode right now. Good luck out there. Gini is everything. It's all about human resources in motion, people on the move. SOME NOTES ON THE ROAD. Drom to Nochet is (very) roughly 700 miles if you go Highwater / Yolanda / Jaraz / Ferry / Yellowstone / Swartz / Saltcastle / Staton. At about 30 km a day (mule train) you can do it in about five weeks. There will be set Markets on the way where you can lay out your beads and shingle and get your points back. There's probably a bifurcation between "Trader" Trader Princes who stay on the Road from end to end and Trader Prince "Princes" who maintain a particular town. I forget if Blood over Gold talks about this . . . the alternative of local Traders taking over the caravan across a particular segment and then handing it off at their limit is not nearly as fun. You want the romance of the long haul trucker here, brothers and sisters of the Road. "Geasa" similar to the ugly hyena business might also apply out here to force comfy people to light out for the territory when they roll bad. God is good. Because the Road runs roughly parallel to the coast shipping has a huge edge in terms of speed. Under RQ3 rules you could move the same cargo from Alatan to Nochet in roughly a third of the time. (Looking at the coast raises the question of what exactly the League was exporting. I guess they'd get tea from the interior but the population centers of Tanisor that survive really aren't coastal.) I like Ashara quite a bit but I am a perverse individual given to fancies of esoteric issarism. I'm torn. On the one hand, it's tempting to assume it's a post-Closing (post-apocalyptic) phenomenon when the sea routes stopped working and we needed to roll out a Road instead. But it's also interesting to treat it as a stubborn atavism within the Empire, a specialized network of relative traditionalists who preserved a strain of pre-imperial cultus that would otherwise have died out. It's really only a question for hobbyists. Now there are 3 new replies so signing out.

Who doesn't love grenadine?

Around here we call that "midori" but the ladies' visceral reaction to it is usually more of a shudder than a roar.

Maybe over the holidays we start putting some gini together on some of these homelands! When this came up last year consensus was that the old man and the boys are all dead but I think something needs to survive from the Lion's organization into the RQG era simply to conserve that background for actual play. It would be a shame otherwise. Maybe there's a previously unrecorded heir / pretender / regent situation to feed the inevitable power vacuum. Maybe the Wolf Pirates make people an offer they can't refuse and so their story feeds into that whirlwind of adventure. Depending on how the gini plays out there might be an incentive to use the remnant tribes to open or close the western routes. It's what I'd do if I had a motive.