scott-martin

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

I have the suspicion that their Basmoli ancestry is rather of recent Godtime arrival in Seshnela, predating that of Froalar and Neleos by few generations.

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.

On 12/29/2019 at 7:37 PM, Sir_Godspeed said:

The Orlanthi of Maniria (sometimes called Entruli) are likely at least in part converted pig/boar Hsunchen, and appear to preserve some cultural substrata. Entru is perhaps more a Dawn Age culture hero than a god (but differentiating those can be difficult without firsthand sources) who was married to Ketha (which might be the local Dawn Age name for who we would consider Ernalda or Esrola nowadays, or specifically the local land goddess, it's hard to say).

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. 

7 hours ago, Minion1stClass said:

And Kygor Litor and Xiola Umbar haven't found a fix so I am not sure Earth is the route to it. And my Xiola Umbar Runelord has LOTS of heretical ideas about the trollkin curse, but I only shared them out of character with the DM because I want her alive.  

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.

9 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Yu-Adariam

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."

17 minutes ago, Corvantir said:

I have not found anything about Udram her/himself.

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.

11 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

"Well, they dun said that I was born from a union 'tween a minotaur 'n' Bessie our milk cow, but all I ken tell ya is that the man who dun taught me to mend fences and chop wood and be honest and guard the tula is a Colymar, and as far as I reckon' he's my Pa, and the woman who done cleaned my britches as a young'un, and who packed me this here lunch and taught me to share it with travelin' fellers is my Ma, as Orlaynth 'n' Ernalder is my witnesses."

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.

3 minutes ago, HeartQuintessence said:

Unless the cow's owner keep him and uses him as a excellent field hand? ( I assume Glornatha Minortaurs are intelligent)

"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."

3 minutes ago, g33k said:

In the West, Joerg -- also now deprecated, but the echoes live on -- we'd say that resistance is feudal.

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.

10 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

On a somewhat related note: sows are infamous for eating their young if they are stressed or feel unsafe. While the motif of female filicide might be considered misogynistic, it is undeniably a common theme in lots of mythologies around the world, and they do starkly highlight the power of women in a deeply disturbing way (the male equivalent, in terms of taboo, seems to be father-murder, which isn't a direct mirror image, but appear to have shocked the ancient Greeks and Roman at least, just as much). 

Anyway, in the Green Age such devourings might've had a completely different context. A mother gives birth to her son, who is also her brother, her guardian, and her husband. Then, when he becomes old and weakened, she devours/sacrifices him, and rebirths him strong again. (mirrors the themes of Seshna Likita "swallowing" the early Seshnegi kings (ie. as they went down into the earth), and then as their sons miracuously emerge to rule anew.)

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. 

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

But then, is there a place for a myth of Ernalda suffering a miscarriage? Or an abortion?

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.

3 hours ago, AndreJarosch said:

Why oh why do i have Taylor Swift in her CATS image in mind?

Cry havoc and release the puma people.

Just now, Akhôrahil said:

I'm sure Mralot is worshipped by the pig hsunchen?

We hear a lot about pig mother but . . .
 

3 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

There may be some of the Pig/Boar god-complex in Maniria that's still active and explicitly related to Earth. I'm not sure if there is an organized Mralot/Entru cult (as opposed to just listing Mralota/Entrula as the metonymous mother of pigs/boars,) and whether Mralot has the Earth Rune, but that's my best guess in addition to the above.

This is outstanding. Say more about pig father please.

34 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

So obviously a correct one!

Not as bad as allying Delecti or the scorpionmen though.

The West is the . . . best.

52 minutes ago, Joerg said:

I wonder whether the Daka Fal Cult has genuine initiates.

 

It appears that wyters don't usually have initiates or similar.

Hmmmmmmmm.

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

there are slightly less than 1000 demon horses

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.

1 hour ago, Tindalos said:

There's a picture in the guide of the Black Horse Troop with armour of hardened leather or bronze scales, with Ethilrist being described as garbed similarly to the others (excepting the lack of helmet)

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? 

1 hour ago, Tindalos said:

• Herrelan: Only Ethilrist.

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. 

1 minute ago, Akhôrahil said:

And in Lutheranism, everyone's a priest. 🙂

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.)

32 minutes ago, Dissolv said:

which may be one of the reasons I want it to be so, as opposed to established lore

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.

Just now, Qizilbashwoman said:

i'm... i'm not an ogre

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.

2 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

I could imagine things sometimes going awry, though, just as with how Red Cow initiations can take a swerve into Ogre initiation. If you find yourself in the Sex Pit during initiation, you’re in massive trouble.

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.

13 hours ago, g33k said:

Although I've got to admit, I find Ragnalar's actions there to BE essentially Chaotic, even though he wasn't "yet" infected.  I think on the whole, he was infected even "before" then.  Maybe it happened in some Chaotic non-Time-bound effect whereby Ragnalar ALWAYS had some echo or resonance of chaos-to-come within him.  Maybe it was from his failure in the Pit.

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.

4 hours ago, Tindalos said:

revering an equine beast

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.

16 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

My point is that even if it's just 1% of the population that has this, it's enough to thoroughly Bless everyone's fields (let's say it's cast as +60% for 10 hides, cast five times yearly, and each hide supports ten people, then a single Ernaldan with 12 Rune points could bless the crops for 500 people). And character creation rules suggest 6-12 Rune points is as common as dirt.  

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!

8 minutes ago, Joerg said:

I agree. But then, we have never had wyters that would take POW sacrifice/gifts from their congregations. Such donations will affect the reputation of the donor.

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.