scott-martin

"A lot of ruin in an empire." Parallels and contrasts between KOW and the red empire seem useful to draw out, with the lunar way's increasingly magically expensive rush to the sea often considered a symptom of its unsustainable madness. When the moon falls, what's left behind? I guess we find out.

Yeah, these are etic models not necessarily reflecting any Gloranthan's in-group perspective. Ask ten trolls to distinguish between Nakala and Dame Dark and you're unlikely to get a lot of useful information. Ask ten dark-oriented humans and you might not get a lot of people who know (or, given secrecy standards, will admit to) "Nakala" as any name worth conjuring with. The insiders might recognize the broad symbolic economies though when you say it back to them. On the other hand, smart informants will insert the occasional blind lie into the narrative to lead you away from what they don't want you to know. And even the helpful ones don't necessarily parse your terminology the same way you do, so glitches multiply. The ideal type of a complete celestial court, for example, remains just out of reach. Assignments like trickster also bend when you get into a multi-cultural environment, with one culture's clever and innovative mastery or magic creating disorder for its unlucky neighbors. I don't see a lot of room for Larnste within the Plentonian Glorantay unless the concept of Change/Movement is latent in something like "Entertainment" or "Growth" as opposed to "Love." Interestingly they insert primal Sky/Fire in the tenth slot, presumably to replace but also embody what we have as Disorder. Some people distinguish between Change (good) and Disorder (less fun) and others don't. Elsewhere in Glorantha both might be missing and they'll talk about concepts like Luck. -------------- Nandans definitely get babies. But I confess that out here I have a hard time distinguishing between a Nandan adept and an Ernaldan. Some babies have or get dads, some don't. Some are discovered like changelings in tree clefts, delivered in rites, sewn together as poppets (the gingerbread boy who terrorizes Dragon Pass may have gotten his start in this way), remain spirits because that's all they need, are implanted when a blonde and a brunette love each other very much, etc. I like the notion of Baby Carriers a lot. All of this teaches us new things about how Menena happens in the West and where she returns whenever the Brithini start needing babies. Of course I am not there so all of this may be a pleasant lie, Entertainment.

There's roughly a metric entekosiad to unpack here. I might start, perversely, by reopening the case of Kylera and her relation to a cyclical trickster. As Taylor Swift teaches, she knew he was trouble but his world moved so fast and so bright. The waters and the east, the trickster and the tricked.

I wouldn't be surprised if the "heart" here is one of the unspeakable euphemisms for something else on the plate that a real flesh emperor requires and the dragon needed to fake its way through. The genteel compiler would have known the truth but refused to commit to posterity. More broadly there is probably a rich tradition of canopic magic submerged in "portions of yelm" talk in the north and then developed in literally nightmarish profusion by the Wizards of Gore to the east, with or without troll mumia behind it. They cut the body into parts, the way that trolls do.

Risk-reward is indeed interesting here. On the one tentacle, you can market to the loyal existing Glorantha audience so the sales floor is a little higher than zero. On the other, limiting yourself to that audience without actively trying to grow it sets your sales ceiling at maybe 3,000 copies right now. Does someone who can write see that as an opportunity or a constraint? But people can do it for love as well and sidestep the development costs. I believe the Johnstown Library would take unauthorized fiction. If you have the love, see how it does.

Sure. At that level, art is (doing math on a nearby cocktail napkin) 85-99% of the content spend. That's part of the joy of the mainstream fiction market . . . format expectations are much more relaxed and every page can stretch farther for you once you're in that market. That's the goal. Here in game land, though, page of fluff, page of crunch. Laid out the same, same art direction, similar freelance. When crunch is budgeted as "design" it can be more expensive . . . but those pages tend to be more utilitarian as well so art demands can be lighter.

Love it. I am not on the business side here but these are great questions. The short answer here is usually "dazzle them with a pitch if you want something to happen and maybe there's a way to align resources to opportunities." From the cheap seats, I think the revelation today is the way the economics work in game publishing. It costs roughly the same amount to produce a page of fluff or a page of crunch. Only the gamers want the crunch and they are at least an order of magnitude smaller as an audience than the mass fantasy market that just wants new fluff. With that in mind, every page of fluff you create is ultimately better deployed in that mass market. Page for page, "fiction" can reach more people and ultimately make you more money. This was a factor in the old Dungeons & Dragons fiction effort as well as what companies like FASA and White Wolf did. It's probably also going on with the Black Library. Luring anyone who picks up one of these books back to the crunch is secondary . . . don't get me wrong, it's great when it happens because the crunch books are priced for a niche market, but historically the real payoff was simply getting the fluff in front of the much larger passive fantasy audience. Chaosium was a bit of an outlier here with the Mythos Library. On one tentacle, these books really did function as a gateway for the game because the core sources were largely available only to hardcore collectors. Having them available in something like a mass market format helped ensure that people who heard about this "Cthulhu" thing could get up to speed and buy into the game experience as well. That's your marketing engine. But it worked because much of this material was deep reprint, cheaper per page to produce than original game fluff. Throw a new Bob Price introduction on it, give it an attractive cover and it was something close to free money. That's the second tentacle that Glorantha doesn't quite have right now. While there is some existing fluff, it "costs" roughly as much to render compliant with current crunch as it would to simply commission new fluff. (This is not a slam on Penelope, Oliver, the divine Phyllis or anyone else, much less Greg's original work. It's simply a statement of economic realities.) As far as I can tell, simply feeding the game publishing is an all hands on deck effort right now. When that effort hits a nice groove, there will be internal resources for more outside fluff and theoretically the expansion potential that conventional fiction has historically offered. Growing the game audience accelerates that timeline a little but at the end of the day companies at this stage are all about project triage. You have to pick one toy today. Maybe you can get another one the next time you come in. Today it's the supporting the game we have. So how do we grow that audience and get more pages? At this scale fan outreach still works great. I don't know about the fan policy because I am not a static blogger. All I do is talk about Runequest all the time. Sometimes it sells an extra copy or two. A couple times it spawned an actual fan who the company can count on to buy new product when it comes out. That fan is now in the audience. Audience +1. A couple of years from now, if all goes well, we all get more toys. The scale right now is that constrained . . . every single convert moves the needle. In the meantime, the audience is the audience so a page of fluff in some Gloranthan novel has to wrestle the same opportunity costs as a page of setting for the game market. We don't know yet how deep the Gloranthan game market is right now in terms of spending power. Reading between the lines, the Stafford Library experience has ultimately been the opposite of the Mythos Library. Instead of expanding the audience, Greg's Deep Fluff only attracted a subset of the game community so the economies of scale get worse. Maybe three dozen people know any of the sagas. In a real way, RuneQuest exists to drive that fanatical niche population to the sagas, and not the other way around. Can that change? Sure. Would it be easier for some hotshot writer to revise the sagas for a mass fantasy audience than it would be to do it in house OR commission something completely new? Maybe. I'm thinking it's a resource intensive project either way even if the pitch is dazzling. Even the assignment documents are a lot of work. Is it economically viable? Depends on the pitch. I seem to recall the mass fiction efforts kept both TSR and White Wolf liquid until they didn't. When they faltered, the dream rapidly became a nightmare, but the drivers were very different in both cases. Fluff delivery systems have changed so much in the intervening decades that the winners of tomorrow may look very different from what worked historically. Do we want new chapters of Prince of Sartar, new Glorantha fiction, inexpensive starter paperbacks of the pulp / myth sources, luxe collections of the annotated sagas? Oh yeah. Baby steps.

I love this. In schematic form it looks like the evolution of the White Bear Red Moon counter set from first edition to Dragon Pass, a revelation in itself.

I should be crying, but I just can't let it show I should be hoping, but I can't stop thinking Of all the things we should've said That were never said All the things we should've done That we never did -- afterword, Aelwrin's Complaint

That's a career-launching question. If this were an easier question to unpack we'd have "-paks" for several elder viewpoints now. Arguably J.G. Frazer spent a quarter century on the definitive Elfpak and it's still a mess even for its fans. Since we don't have a quarter century right now I'd suggest that while nobody IMG with Person Rune is a true isolate, each of the elder viewpoints has evolved as an alternative to the way we construct "normal" identity and the social persona. They're variants. Just like the subcultural / professional narratives that inform most of the Power cults you mention, many of which might actually originate in archaic elder contact situations. In these scenarios, the cults themselves are masks for pre-human spirituality . . . Arroin as vegetable deity and so on. Any elf, troll, dwarf, beast, mer or miscellaneous IMG can always come in from the wilderness and try to get a job in town when times are tough at home. Some don't find a compatible fit. The ones that "succeed" end up assimilated within a couple generations and the kids have the same opportunity as everyone else to be healers or traders or tricksters or whatever. And we can always go out and spend a lot of time with the ones who stay home in an effort to figure out how they individuate in isolation. People have discovered that trolls have their own job gods, their own professional roles, their own specialized performance of the universal troll experience. We're lucky to have those records. Elves seem to have these roles too, but the ecosystem is different. Dwarves are arguably nothing but role. You either perform your caste expectations or you're broken. The totemic beast psychic economy has been better explored. The mer are still waiting, and so on. They probably have their own healers and traders and tricksters but they haven't surfaced yet and nobody who's gone down there has reported back yet in the documents we have. TLDR parallels to "race as class" versions of D&D are superficial. They also really love the Three Stooges. XU as troll trickster is extremely interesting. AA, XU, ZZ . . . three choices to disrupt and survive in negotiation with the hateful pain world.

Sandy spent a fair amount of time up there and was impressed with the notion that KOW is a kind of "controlled" wildfire where the entire community resource is on the expanding periphery as the army. Everything else is burned out to sustain that growth. The interior is apparently a weird but evocative Waste Land environment. Of course SGHV, usual disclaimers apply.

Yeah, that's the stuff fullness of goodness. It's going to be an interesting couple years for the Way and the Empire. Great to see you hitting the ground running.

The historically successful ones always seem to end up there, one way or another, yeah. If you are referring to the development of the Seven-Sided Soul I leave that to specialists to explicate. Not having a free subscription to the IO TGS or unlimited time to ponder its intricacies, I cannot prove which of the statements attributed to the historical Rufelza are actually the Voice of Rufelza, i.e., the Seventh Apostle.

She's a beloved revolutionary sweetheart, a windfall profit, a bustle in the hedge fund, a pearl of great price. She makes life interesting. We delight vicariously in her achievements, most of which have been misconstrued in the popular press. And that's okay. We see a new world in her and the old truths in that new world. More than either of the boys, she gets it. Etyries became the favored goddess of a budding accountant and his circle of friends who held the London School of Economics in a healthy superstitious awe. Her fundamental innovation, her heresy and closely guarded cult secret, is often said to be double entry bookkeeping, which changed the world and made the empire possible. A generation later, I want to give her all the more elaborate monetary weapons we've developed in the armories since those relatively innocent times. She knows how to calculate and price futures contracts, evaluating not just what a dream can be worth tomorrow but what to pay today. She can separate a commodity into its derivative rights, sell or buy the notional pieces, put it back together in a previously unimagined configuration, make money. She can run time backward, buying a thing back later to ensure it can be sold in the past. Through a perpetual license of the IO Truth Grading System🈸️and her own genius, she processes the statistical field to concentrate on only the best risk-adjusted outcomes. She sets exchange and arbitrage rates, transubstantiating the vagaries of coinage into the imperial and theoretically Standard Lunar (L), which exists almost entirely in the spirit world and only occasionally gets called down to inhabit coinage. Working closely with Elder Sister she assesses the cosmological inflationary constant (>1/wane) that keeps the world alive and adjusts interest rates accordingly. She is the gini and the gong and all that's to come that runs in with the thrust on the strand. Of course most of this is only useful or even comprehensible in the most spell-dense treasure houses of mind-melting Glamour, where I kind of hope I never have to go again. Out here in the fantasy bronze age world, Etyries is the force that binds a polyglot empire together. The Mothers don't do that. The Mothers are for putting on coloring books you hand out to the inbred illiterates in flyover country, I get it. Sentimental trash pumped out of the Jillaro paper factories. The last time Etyries played a direct role converting anyone actually important was Carmania, and that went pretty well. They recognized the inner core of her teaching and as far as they were concerned, no other earthly red goddess was necessary. They still love her up and down the modern West Reaches, which is appropriate when you think about it. A nice tribute. The West Reaches defied the Sheng era largely under her aegis. The Lunar Way that survived up there was her Way, the direct and unmediated (always mediated) system of Self Voyages, Wisdom Trading, Words of Wisdom. New Gods. They don't have a lot of that in Jillaro's shadow but I assure you it's huge in Arrolia. Our great sorrow is that she won't succeed. The deck is stacked against her and the temptations she faces are too intense. All of her achievements are paper money, moon money, glamour and dreams. It won't last. "That's all right, dad," she says. "Nothing does." Meanwhile she's a welcome kick in the pants. You know her too. What's she like when you see her?

I'm not sure I've ever seen a satisfactory answer to the question of what we farmed when we all lived on the island and my own memory is hazy. Mongoose was the only setting that needed to know and they gave her "wheat" to share with Jrusta (undoubtedly an import) and the more challenging Pelora [sic]. As noted up thread, Greg didn't really care so I think the Archaic Sources at best have "[green acres here]" in the spaces the Seattle Farmers Collective have since opened up. Either way, whatever it started out as it's probably ghastly factory gluten there now, those poor people doomed to live forever on that tapped-out crop. The only really robust seeds to survive are here on the mainland of history. Speaking of Jrusta and the ghost of "wild grain goddesses" from the digest days it's interesting to play with the notion that some crops are in search of domestication and some goddesses may be in search of better crops. Keep it dancing.

What we have here is an early rumble of the Heroine Wars. Mass crop collapse, mass seed stock depletion, mass migration, desperation is the mother of agricultural innovation. New foods. Foreign foods. The goddesses rotate. Everyone wants the best partner before the dance stops. Some say all of this has happened before. Talk to every goddess. See what she wants NOW. It might be very different from what she said in 1616 or even 1620. Opportunity awaits!

Such great things throughout the thread. Super busy at the office but looking forward to seeing it all developed. One thing here though! I'd forgotten about that! Wonder what they'd say if you showed them this image from the distant East. If they recognize it, I wonder if that tells us anything about Heler. Coincidence? Parallel development? Either way, my water tribe adores the person we call Heler but they don't make pictures and in general it gets hugely complicated fast.

I liked Joerg's insight back in the Loren Miller days (!) that rye might be a Dark grain and so might have been prevalent across the Stygian Empire before all their works were literally plowed under. In that model it might not dominate anywhere today (obsolete) but you would find a few stands of it in miserable plots everywhere people are poor, much as you have families who drop below the mainstream subsistence diet. The logical thing would be to hunt "black bread" survivals, entheogenic or otherwise. Probably the simplest way to do this is a Black Elf census. I wonder whether Genert favored rye or maize or both in their season, a mystery behind II.23 / III.21. For that matter, what's people's take on III.21? Fronela after the Thaw might be a recombinant laboratory of reintroduced ancestral crops and even new ones. If I ever get the chance I want to talk to Frona about it, speaking of sorting (winnowing) out the sisters and Zoria prophecies.

This is probably the most "rational" (and safe) explanation we are ever going to get. I like it enormously. Some nebulous figure once put all the pieces together or was told how the tides work, and then the information spread organically across the maritime community. It's just something the sailors say and it largely works. Anyone who asks too many of the right questions has an accident. We know the Ingareens can navigate the tides that wrack their country. I just never thought of them as either a source or a conduit of astronomical observation before . . . they would understand what the falling Streak means but might not have the magic to see it on the far side of the Sky. Maybe they just "know" through some invisible channel. And mentioning them, I wonder if a few of them were part of the colony planted on Jrustela. Makes sense in hindsight.

It's covered. Who owns the Create Market spell? Who can turn it off for Etyries if there was actually a problem? Does it go the other way? Business is business.

Push back makes us all stronger! It's how dumb ideas become actual tactics and change our hobby world. I always love your commentary and that of everyone here. We're all in this together. As for Issaries I waste a lot of attention and money supporting puppet shows because I keep the story of how the merchant got so caught up in his routine that he froze up. Eurmal pushed him over and before you knew it they were all laughing again.

Not to mention Magic Weapon Subcults for the win!

God smiles, points are exchanged, everybody happy. My initial "beads on the shingle" was of course too vague and people have every right to push back on it. Now, however, an opportunity has opened up for emergency deployment of Market Makers to operate as a kind of portable lightbringer "glowspot network" or "glowline." Send them out to population centers so they're in place on Fireday and can set up, protect the sites until the doors open and suddenly all the friendlies have a place to worship. Mother Market recoups dues from all friendlies not currently paid up and splits the door with the priests. All we need is a month lead time to get everyone Harst membership so they're good to go. Go go go. It's the Hero Wars. If we're lucky this will get built into Reaching Storm.

It's just the cost of doing business. The Harstings stay put and the Market comes to them, so you don't need a lot of priests on the circuit. All traveling sales jokes aside, the real constraint on the pop-up shrine store is worshipper population. You still need the ice cream truck to gather a total of 75 kids who know the score for the point replenish on wild day. The Harstings can come running as long as they know you're open. Good for everyone going into the territory to know the routes and keep the customers incentivized. Safety in routine.

Operative word there. It's a fine theological point: the cult considers every place where they make a Market Circle to be a seat of worship, full stop. Drive the pegs, say the words, burn the points and that's holy ground where anybody can worship and replenish until you pull the pegs and move on. The question is whether people can keep the points in reserve in case they need a Market on the go. If not, yeah, you're going to have to get back to town or cross paths with the next Free Trader on the road who has the pegs, free set-up time and the points to spend. If he or she spends the points, lay out the beads the next morning and you're worshipping. You both get a shot at getting your points back. Your friend is out nothing but time. Of course if you're within a day of the next standing store, it's faster to start walking.