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scott-martin

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Posts posted by scott-martin

  1. 5 hours ago, Mirza said:

    Then the Horse Hykimi meet these people from the west who teach them to be different than just Hykimi,

    Great phrase. Looking at it makes me think back to a puzzling assertion the princess of the Altinelans makes to Snodal:

    At that time the oceans rose to the land, and the sun died to make the night.  The winter started when Flamal, the vegetation god died, and also was made the race of the Brithini, the second race of men.  The first having been these descended from Hykim, the animal-god, for many other gods had been born at by that time. 

    It's easy to accept the droning of maseren and paseren and who came first when we don't have anything else to contextualize or contradict it. But while a demigoddess might lie about these things for her own undoubtedly sinister and interesting purposes, the notion of the Hykimites coming first and Brithini following actually confirms obscure details buried in the White Wizard creed. The "human ancestors" in question do not really come from a separate stock but are crafted elsewhere by others. Only later, amid the chaos upheavals, does a Malkion "bear logic to humankind." For most, the teaching fails to take hold and they remain what they were.

    Some, on the other hand, are converted and become Malkioni humans. A second race. The people of the "colonies." The colonists themselves may not come here in the flesh in boats but as a kind of armada of invasive ideas, a new teaching. They adopt the hykimites who are receptive and leave pure beast rune and forest in their wake: "Green Woods, inhabited by Beast Men, where no foes can walk.”

    Now in this scenario all the kachasti and other western precursor peoples may be pure spirit tribes or have bodies that work differently from ours. Some stay home. Others interact with other creations and become entangled there. Think of watchers, egregores, nephilim. They experiment with various relationships between bodies and spirits. One or two might come early to the islands off the west coast and transform the consciousness of native humans there, creating new covenants and new hybrid lineages out of hapless "warerans" and the people Vadela mated with. The really ancient people of the uttermost west may not even notice.

    Dissent in "heaven." One ideology argues for progressive alienation and separation. It dominates. The other "was determined to teach the truth once again, and bring together his peoples." It exiles itself and once again goes east like bodhidharma. Foreign spirits return to the mainland, this time to both teach and stay. Soon they're wrapped in bodies taken from whatever stock was available. A second race crystallizes within the hykimite world, sets up a new kind of religion on the mainland, builds a new kind of city. "Colonists." They segment according to their spirits, find themselves clerics and fighters and sorcerers and peons within the convert communities. They remember the horse gods and other gods of their ancestors but it doesn't matter so much any more. It's technical interest only, pushed down into a psychic underworld. We live different now.

    The hardcore zzaburites, as though tipped off to something, stay home. The western continent sinks, leaving its remnants interwoven into the north like roots from another tree. Separatists keep sinking land that looks too close for comfort. This much, at least, is true.

    EPILOGUE: In 1499 ST, the prince of Loskalm is troubled, remembering maps from the future and Fronela no longer exists. Somebody showed him those maps. It worked. Finally some time alone.

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  2. 1 hour ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

    I guess it's possible that the Ralian names have been used for the translation of Zzabur's potentially more archaic or esoteric names. Ralian culture might be a substrata that profoundly influenced early Seshnegi culture, a bit like Anglo-Saxon and Norman French. The commoners' language prevailed and even made it into scholarly usage as the centuries progressed.  

    Zz-b-r Says is theoretically a direct communication with only passing concessions to define terms unfamiliar to the malestini audience . . . some of the entities mentioned alongside Ehilm are known in other contexts or are completely obscure today. For what it's worth, while the Serpent Kings culture is an interaction of colonist and continental patterns, my suspicion is that whatever the White Wizards were pushing was direct from the island so would only use continental vocabulary to demonize or otherwise belittle. Sometimes the words stuck and sometimes they didn't.

    I don't know the name the original solar people of Ralios called the sun but if it was Ehilm (and not for example something horsier) there's probably a good story behind it. Ehilm worship (so called) is extremely well entrenched in this part of the world, which is interesting. 

    Reading more deeply into the names the Altinelans called the ancient gods reminds me of the cosmic grudge between the people of the northern and western corners. They fight like seelie and unseelie. Esoteric musing about Rausa's allegiance aside I wonder where we can find traces of a primeval "pole shift" far back in the never never. We know the fall of Umath tilted the Dome. Maybe the Blasts or some other cataclysm also bent the surface as much as 90 degrees off true north. 

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  3. 34 minutes ago, Joerg said:

    For some reason, many of the Ralian deity names coincide with many of the Malkioni names for the runic powers. But that may be later feedback collected by the God Learners, and a set of names different from those known in Brithos.

    It is truly funny that the soi-disant Sorcerer Supreme only knows these entities by their Ralian local names . . . almost as though he was ignorant of them before the first mainland contacts. Someone more sympathetic might say that these were degenerating erasanchula who eventually introduced themselves to the proto-Ralians and were worshipped as gods. 

    In parallel it is interesting though that the princess of the Altinelans also refers to Ehilm in the famous fragment. Her close family relationship with the gods probably gives her account authority and subtly contradicts the blue man. (Surprise.) Looking back at it, I've overlooked a lot of the details myself, like the way Ehilm is created to challenge the western air god and is Eurmal's true father, or how Snodal acknowledges Lim as the sun, Umt as the wind and so on. Fronelan names that reveal what the princess explains as linguistic drift from her own fundamental source.

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  4. 55 minutes ago, Joerg said:

    Pamalt is notoriously dishonest. He tricked the sun god (Kendamalar?) to cooperating with Nyanka in order to create the Agimori by dishonest means. Or rather, in disorder.

    Nice. Day to day the bolongo (as opposed to the historical Bolongo who went north across the mountains and sent the results down to bother people) is also just a mask anyone theoretically has access to. Want something and don't have any legitimate routes? The bolongo will get it for you and then the bolongo will get blamed. Punish the bolongo and enjoy your thing.

    Consequently, he fulfilled his role as empty Bolongo

    1 hour ago, Joerg said:

    Temporary reality may feel like a trick, and can be used as such, but there is nothing negative to it except that it may fade away. Illusion is a necessary part of the cosmos.

    Just to be especially obnoxious in the trickster thread I might say that illusion is a necessary part of consciousness and the fact that we will disagree (Our Gloranthas Will Vary) about how that relates to the cosmos is why disorder is immortal.

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  5. 4 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

    Neither am I. I always liked the heretical idea that he became one of the Egi. 😉

    Your heresies are our best case scenarios. Lolon will rise again!

    As for the City, I don't think they'd let me in to ask around at this point and besides, once you check in you can never leave. Maybe we send some grogs.

  6. 1 hour ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

    can a sun god be a zzaburi or a malkioni? seems uh

    Can we find traces of a pre-Ehilmic solar order in the far west when we squint? Yeah!

    (This too is a test or challenge for the supplicant: that far out, Vith and Luath wrap back around and Greg himself sometimes gets confused. And what is the archaic MALKYONR but the absence of both?)

    EDIT: another enigma revolves around the way archaic sources place the Gates of Dusk on something like the Southpath, "west of Pamaltela." This aligns with the way Therophis in his Monomyth asserts that the "land of the Brithini" is in the "north" (relative to Jrustela of course) while the far west is somewhere else. But for Rausa to be west of Pamaltela bends the equator. Was the sun forced northward? Should the real westfaring really be the southwestfaring, toward the end of the "original" sunpath?

  7. 2 minutes ago, Ian Absentia said:

    "Everything was fine with our system until the power grid was shut off by dickless here."

    Yeah, it's a sign all right! Going out of business!

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  8.  

    33 minutes ago, Eff said:

    It's also odd that it seems to have been utterly ineffectual at actually defeating Sheng . . .  ascends as a star the very next year . . . perhaps Yara Aranis exists solely to provide the very specific Lunar Hell Sheng is chained up in?

    There's probably a reading popular among apologists and quislings where he engineered the entire program in order to (a) finally get what he's always wanted, some time alone in a discipline he can't easily escape and (b) get us all addicted to Permanent Full in the meantime. I suspect the deep dualities are a tad more complicated but the IO is probably significant enough to chase. Along with that, it's interesting that this feels like the foundation of anti-seleran resistance for Vonlath and Naveria, i.e., this is how the Way survives in Silver Shadow whereas Dara Happa seems relatively happy to keep entertaining puppets and pretenders. The version of the Way that radiates back out from Glamour is set on Permanent Full.

    But wait, I thought this was a trickster thread. OK.

    4 hours ago, jajagappa said:

    The Moon Rune represents magical power,

    Parallel with that impulse to consolidate independent lunar influences, it strikes me that the early empire would have been extremely diligent in making independent magicians throughout the Pelorian bowl an offer they couldn't refuse. Some would convert willingly. Others, ultimately culminating in the Jannisorian revolt, were harder to convince. Either way, by hook or by crook the once diverse lore of the forerunner traditions got welded into what modern hipsters scoff at as the institutional College of Magic . . . or if they wouldn't play nice, the smart ones fled (go west it's nice) and the dumb ones departed from history.

    The upside is that the converts' techniques and tutelary entities remain intact within what I until today considered the monolithic body of lunar magic. (You already knew that. I am slow.) And in theory we can unravel the body of lunar magic into its component strands to better understand its weaknesses as well as its strengths. 

    Of course Argrath is doing something similar now, but four hundred years ago they knew the power of diverse and exotic weirdos. They had the example of the mothers describing their particular elephant (or "bat") if you will. But until you understand who the weirdos are and where they fit into the big scheme of things, it's just another rune you don't know, weird one-off tricks, wild talents, tricksters.

     

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  9. 19 minutes ago, Joerg said:

    a failure to crucial tenets of the Lunar Way

    I wonder when and how Yara Aranis metastasizes into the science of Glow manipulation and the doctrine of Permanent Full. If only someone were brave enough to turn it off . . . but arguably the empire we have now would not survive the disruption, too much is built on Permanent Full.

    EDIT: The Glowline was developed by Yara Aranis during and after the long war against Sheng to mark and hold the borders. The effect of the Glowline was to maintain the Lunar Constancy within its effect as if the Glowline was a container. It also increased the magnitude of this constancy to the level known today. (Some Lunars find this constancy within the empire to be a betrayal of the Goddess’ own nature. Secret organizations such as the Cyclical Conservators plot to end the betrayal. Thus far, however, they have had no success.)

    • Like 4
  10. 1 hour ago, jajagappa said:

    It's the Red Moon that has the chaos taint. 

    This finally motivates me to start looking for the ways lunar influences were consolidated not only through the Seven Mothers project but as the expanding empire recognized its reflection elsewhere. A lot of this would have happened in that heady early wane era when the shape of the world was changing and heroes were busy building what until recently was the third age status quo.

    Work today is being done in a few directions with the sables, the Twins and other phenomena of "Lunar" Prax . . . it strikes me that it will be even more fruitful to look in Maniria, Fronela and other areas where the imperial tide has yet to flow. The native lunar influences in these places have probably languished forgotten or misunderstood until the magnetic tug of the Hero Wars focuses their force.

    In the center is the Mountain of the Moon, a mysterious and shrouded land that took over the region where the Cosmic Mountain once stood.

    If nothing else, there's that cryptic MOLAD chart where the eight one-point "moon demons" [sic] are "planets." Whoever understands that the yelmic sky is broken will probably work with that knowledge in what we consider a "lunar" way. 

    And the moon in that chart is the daughter of dark and water so the invasion of the sky by blue and underworld entities would be part of that story. Two enemies for the old sun, one direct and one more subtle. 

    Ironically enough looking back at "Red Moon in Prax" I suspect one of the things Jannisor Did that is now suppressed or ignored was to help codify the limits of Moon from outside, the points from which someone would consider the red light in the sky and say "that thing is not me, check your children for these signs." Maybe in Imther they have people really looking at the traces his martyrdom left behind. 

    But then despite the Guide I'm not convinced Jannisor died in Glamour. "Red Moon in Prax" leaves it open. 

     

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  11. Sorrowful Rausa. IMG the references naturally get paradoxical that far from the inner world anyway and depending on timing even the sunset colors we usually associate with them might have drained back to her eyes.

    The monochrome is iconographically very interesting depending on whose depiction this is or which account they were drawing from . . . absence of modern caste coloration is metaphysically significant + appropriate, but would be lost on a theyalan observer.

    This may also be a test or challenge for the supplicant. Always know who you are really talking to out there. They don't lie exactly but can "misunderstand the question."

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  12. 8 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

    You can probably say the same thing about the Third Reich and the Soviet Union - once checked, the internal contradictions meant collapse was just a matter of time. They couldn't exist without constant expansion.

    "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.

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  13. 8 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

    It's possible that what we are dealing with something similar to what the Sourcebook does with the Darkness genealogy chart. In there, they make a separation between Nakala (the primal Dark) and Dame Darkness, who is said to be Nakala when she is attending the Cosmic Court at the Spike. This strikes me as a fairly meaningless distinction except maybe to show that Dame Darkness has somewhat more of anthropomorphization* than Nakala. Similarly, it's possible that Ga represents the purely elemental, raw fullness of Earth, whereas Gata takes on some level of anthropomorphization* that allows it, amongst other things, to be a her, to devolve into differentiated forms (such as the Earth Kings, etc.).

    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.

    29 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

    It's possible that what we are dealing with something similar to what the Sourcebook does with the Darkness genealogy chart. In there, they make a separation between Nakala (the primal Dark) and Dame Darkness, who is said to be Nakala when she is attending the Cosmic Court at the Spike. This strikes me as a fairly meaningless distinction except maybe to show that Dame Darkness has somewhat more of anthropomorphization* than Nakala. Similarly, it's possible that Ga represents the purely elemental, raw fullness of Earth, whereas Gata takes on some level of anthropomorphization* that allows it, amongst other things, to be a her, to devolve into differentiated forms (such as the Earth Kings, etc.).

    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.

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  14. 46 minutes ago, Joerg said:

    Drona the Earth King of western Fronela might have a similarly tolerant position towards Eurmal Friend of Men. The occasional goddess was "blessed" to give birth to a re-incarnation of Eurmal and priestesses of these goddesses may possibly allow some maternal feelings for that offspring.

    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.

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  15. 15 minutes ago, Joerg said:

    a heartless emperor of Dara Happa wouldn't miss anything

    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.

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  16. 41 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

    and 3) the tenacity and patience to get the details right so that the forumites do not behead you at first chance.

    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.

  17. 1 minute ago, Steve said:

    Won't fiction cost a lot less per page than a rulebook due to the lack of art (other than the cover) and the simple B&W layout and printing?

    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.

  18. 15 minutes ago, MHanretty said:

    More broadly, could fiction ever be considered a part of the overall strategy for bringing new people into the game line (as is the case with Games Workshop and WotC)? Was the expanded and revised King of Sartar considered a commercial success? In the current environment, is supporting a fiction line for a single setting even viable? I'm extremely curious but plainly ignorant to the business side of the hobby, so any answers on this subject would be revelatory.  

    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.

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  19. 13 hours ago, Charles said:
    14 hours ago, Charles said:

    With the Guide to Glorantha, I understand that the 3 worlds are considered as different perspectives of the same thing. See page 162 of Volume 1 for the way that the 3 different major types of magicians might view the magical landscape of Kerofin and surrounds - I drew the layout that became this pic.

     

    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.

     

    • Like 2
  20. 7 hours ago, Jeff said:

    Now that the White Moon Movement is in full rebellion, these old heretics are no doubt being revived, and their errors must be confronted by the Goddess's Incarnation, Jar-eel. So many things for the Fourth Inspiration to do - defeat Pentans, hold the Empire together, and teach the misguided and mislead the errors of their ways. But then again, she is Her Incarnation!

    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

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  21. 24 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

    Is it simply a case of - at least in the case of the trolls - them emerging from the Underworld with a (to borrow a linguistic term) "pantheon isolate"? They didn't have access to these other archetypes, so they had to develop their own?

    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.

    44 minutes ago, Richard S. said:

    How does ZZ work as a trickster? Violent, raging hellbeast doesn't seem to quite fit that role, at least on a surface level.

    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. 

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  22. 13 minutes ago, Gallowglass said:

    But what about this obscenely huge army?

    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.

  23. 11 minutes ago, Eff said:

    Vibe Check

    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.

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