scott-martin

17 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

The goddess of capitalism and class exploitation!

The historically successful ones always seem to end up there, one way or another, yeah.

Just now, Sir_Godspeed said:

So did Etyries apotheosize because she invented the Limited Company and shares?

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?

25 minutes ago, Joerg said:

the various exile groups from Brithos

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.

2 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

On the other hand, seeing the wheat-barley dichotomy switched up. Apparently the Orlanthi are big on wheat, now, while the (upland) Pelorians are more into barley.

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!

5 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

Images usually depict him as a handsome, blueskinned man, or dual-gendered god with the right half male and the left half female.

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.

1 hour ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

rye

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.

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

There is this guy

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.

14 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Uh so the problem I'm seeing here is that existing markets in Lunar Sartar are going to be sacralised to Etyries.

 

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.

1 minute ago, Bill the barbarian said:

yet still I must sincerely apologies for having a chuckle

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.

44 minutes ago, JonL said:

Little-John-ing in various former rivals like Heler, Engizi, Elmal, and Yavor,

Not to mention Magic Weapon Subcults for the win!

3 minutes ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Ice cream! Getcher tootsie frootsie ice cream!

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.

20 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

can

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.

On 11/21/2019 at 1:27 PM, Elcid321 said:

I must thank you all for this information, it has been very helpful, but now i must ask, if "we are all us" than why is the lunar pantheon so opposed to Orlanth, and how to i make sure that my character is not killed on sight in Sartar (i'm plannin on disguising myself, but i know that at some point i'm going to have to reveal myself to the people and my companions)

Ingratiate yourself. Enrich their lives. Keep in mind that they are all you in some respect so their success is ultimately yours. We are all in this together. Lunar magic can provide good healing and lunar connections can provide good trade goods to share. 

Avoid arguing politics and religion until forced. By that point, you want to have accumulated enough goodwill that they will actually pause to ponder whether you might be one of the "good" ones. 

11 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

I like your solution.  However, maybe we are misreading the material, but we are having problems enough finding accessible temples and shrines for approved cults like Storm Bull and Issaries.

Issaries is easy. Anyone with a few beads to line up on a shingle can create a Market. Where do you need one?

18 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Of course, this might change with the return of the Dragonboat(s)... Gonna be some "revitalised" sog cities. Esrolia better build some shore defenses.

Heh. They're gonna need a higher shore anyway as those longer boats come. 

Definitely a lot of archaic survivals rolled into all extant elemental complexes, especially Storm, which on the right day I'm still convinced is only the succession process of a malfunctioning Sky, essentially the Earth's divorce papers served. Any "Storm Tribe" that we observe today is an accident of history and artifact of continental politics. 

This would of course reduce the "central Genertelan" or "northern corner" mythos into a three-element system and relegate Dark and Sea to the transitions so who wants that. But someone historically associated a Lorion figure with the Helerites and that's interesting. What's that cycle all about and to whom does it matter.

I still want to know who observed the rising cycle in the first place and then correlated it to the tidal cycle and the Streak. Who is watching the outside of the Sky and is then situated close enough to the Homeward Ocean to see the Streak and observe the tidal effects? And how did these weirdos communicate their findings to the rest of us?

Supposedly there are "mysterious worshippers of the Blue Streak" who have figured out the deep math, but who are they and how does this work? 

1 hour ago, None said:

What I meant was a similar summarization of the way Darkness and Water civilizations are most of the time. Like the ones I gave for Earth, Storm and Sky/Fire (with corrections welcome if any of them are too far of the mark ).

One complication here is that Sky is really where human religious innovation starts and then develops in the Storm interaction. Before that you mostly have tutelary relationships with "elder race" complexes transmitting their elemental orientations. 

Again a mouthful so what does it really mean? We can talk convincingly about Sky and Storm civilizations because we have terminal third age examples to look at and they generally behave a lot more like classical religions familiar from earth. The gods look both like us and like the reconstructed pantheons of modern pop mythology. They should. That's where they come from: human sources, human intermediaries filtered through human concerns. What you do not hear a lot about in Sky and Storm is talk about tutelary spirits far outside the anthropocentric norm. I know they're in the books but you rarely if ever meet them as part of your core experience. They look and talk mostly like people.

Dark and Sea are at the other end of the spectrum. The overwhelming majority of the population here are not simply tutored by elder race patrons but the elder races themselves. You rarely meet a coherent Water civilization these days because the ethos isn't really compatible in the long term with sustaining long-term human life beyond a certain small scale. As a result the triolini are the primary reservoir of Sea in itself and if you want to learn about that you really need to find a way to get them talking. Likewise, while there are plenty of trolls and troll-tinged human successor cultures, most of that stuff survives on the fringes and deep strata of the human world. You really need to be eager or desperate to discover a lot about the Dark. Then, after that, you really need to be special in order to communicate those findings with us back in town. What happens in Dagori Inkarth largely stays in Dagori Inkarth.

History also makes it complicated. In ancient days the world was much more makeshift and most of us were a lot closer to the troll world. Arguably one of the functions of time or at least civilization as a verb is to widen the separation between humans today and the trolls of the past, but once upon a time trolls ran the world and our ancestors were a subtype with then-unexplored potential to thrive under different conditions. Some of these undifferentiated "Dark civilizations" did survive into historical times though so for models we look at places like the Kingdom of Night and its cousin, the Kingdom of Ignorance, along with the reconstructed mythic record of the Spolites, the theoretically extinct Tamalites of old Seshnela, Alkoth, whatever got built in Stygia, etc.

Local variations abound as these people differentiated from their Dark patrons but in most cases I think you'd see strongly survival-oriented patterns. They are what we'd consider extremely pragmatic, without a lot of fixed ideology to hold their urges back. What rules they do respect tend to look irrational and more than a little spooky to us: taboos and elaborate superstitions. They eat, they reproduce, they die. Their theology and other aspects of their inner lives are built out of similarly cyclopean blocks that some people would consider primitive. Records are often irrelevant, which complicates reconstruction of the ones that are gone now. But you can go back there and see for yourself. The hard part is to avoid simply becoming a troll. Trolls did OK. The toughest ones of all became the trolls that are still here with us. Around a typical hard troll center you get a softer periphery of hybrids, crazy or desperate human "degenerates," fancy trollkin, whatever. Sometimes the troll center goes away and leaves a periphery behind. That's a classic Dark Culture. There were more once than there are now. I do not think the world is still creating new ones but could be wrong.

Sea also has a margin and coastal humans all over the lozenge were open to archaic triolini contacts. We know a lot less about the patterns here because of the accident of documentation: the part of Glorantha where all the publishing happens is between troll peripheries so many of the deep roots in the Storm we know are really Dark. On the other hand, the closest Sea cultures are quiet, vestigial and largely submerged into more recent collectives, so you won't actually get the taste of their water until you actually go there and talk to the people. Thanks to the Closing, this is mostly true across the third age: Water comes and goes but unless you go swimming it's hard to really get your hands on it. 

This was not always true. Triolini were on the whole more numerous, more diverse and nicer in the dawn days and there were tutelary contacts. The most important ones I know about were in the West, where separate contacts become various strains of the Malkion-Waertag complex, but there were undoubtedly others. There were also the famous but vanished Helerites, classical Artmalites and so on who learn Water from more direct sources (more like the more successful Sky/Storm humans) but they don't really survive, largely because the dominant triolini culture achieves coastal hegemony by suppressing nearly all known competitors. Taken as a whole, the West remains the dominant Water Culture we can look at, although the influences now are dilute after centuries of contact and innovation. But that's what Water does. It flows, it mixes, it absorbs, it spreads. 

What is "watery" in the ideology of the West? This is already too long so I'd just ponder Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea (quick, short read) for now. Pragmatic like Dark but with a more developed sense of process. Water has no internal boundaries but it has memory, which serves a similar purpose. It makes friends, borrows and lends, holds grudges. It is interested in origins and speculates about endings: genealogy, taxonomy. For all this, its thought tends to be abstract and, as we say in Glorantha without real explanation, "iconoclastic" or non-representational. They don't usually make idols that create an archaeological record and reveal their ritual world when they wash up. They carry their idols in them. The bodies of their gods don't survive on the surface. They explode. Ask the ouori if you can still find one. Give the ludoch something worth their time. Or talk to the other ones in a language they can understand.

Now I've left Earth out of this because Earth is at the center of this elemental process. Like the older elements, nearly everything we have here derives from elder race tutelage. Those races are still extant and will make new pacts. But like the newer elements, the primary engine of innovation here now is human initiates in relation to mostly anthropomorphic gods. Religion follows human history. 

What is interesting about Earth in the terminal third age (and indeed throughout most of time) is that this is where we see the world changing. Where the trolls have already receded to the hardest frontiers (and are now being squeezed out there), the elves and dwarves who taught Earth Mysteries are now in the process of disappearing from human religious experience. Not counting the occasional short-lived successful reforestation, Aldrya is going away, leaving settled grain goddesses and the occasional isolated survival in her wake. The dwarves are also largely done with us. They have some spectacular revenge plots left to play out but then their armories and treasuries are empty. Both ideologies spent valuable resources trying to exterminate each other over which would dominate the Earth complex. There were other Earth tutors like the Likitae and Tilntae early on but they are even farther along on the road to becoming pure spirit (i.e. extinction). 

On the whole I'd say Elf Earth won as far as "Earth" cultures go, but it gets complicated. Grower is settled and passive (the active part literally follows the Sun and seeds that world) so survives literally underfoot everywhere you have peasants. Push them in the right way and maybe they can reconnect with the elf world that was, Green consciousness. It's worth a hero war to find out. Maker, on the other hand, sees Green as at best an inefficient production system to be replaced when you find something better. There aren't a lot of successful Maker client cultures because that's not how Mostal ever functioned . . . we usually call Mostal Earth client cultures "slaves" or at best "dwarves," but again, there are examples all over the lozenge. Either way, they were here, they taught us the Earth as they knew it, now we carry on.

The expert will note that the classic five-element taxonomy bends around Maker/Grower and also its expansion into Maker/Grower/Taker when trolls are reintroduced to the surface world. Likewise, sovereign Sky hates the water that makes its gold eyes blue but is especially concerned about the binary Light/Dark . . . "everything not Fire is Fuel, and what sensible Yelmite wastes effort puzzling out fractions of impurity? It's all impure." And so on.

4 minutes ago, Eff said:

The Wicked Hydrophobe Of The West 

Keep 'em coming people. Guy googles himself constantly, like the Am-nda P-lm-r of ancient times. A more porous ego is good for the soul.

ALL OF WHICH IS A WAY TO SAY, ON TOPIC that the best way to divorce lunar insight from imperial solar-phallic trash is to rediscover the Arrolian diaspora while you still can. Go west! The weather is great and the bookstores are great places to meet people. You'll thank yourself later.

7 minutes ago, None said:

I wish I understood, I assume I misspelled his name?

Yeah, I have a healthy hatred and fear for the character . . . and since typography has power in his magic there's no point in giving him the dignity of the name he so painstakingly constructed for himself. But we still need to refer to him sometimes so until today I used euphemisms ("the blue man," blue meany) or the "printer's resentment" that lowercased Ceaușescu in the newspapers when the Romanians took their lives back ("zzabur"). But now he can be Szazubur, which is delightfully absurd. It will get on his delicate nerves. I cannot wait to talk more about him, my good friend Szazubur, so full of piszazz and the old rasz-a-ma-taszabur.

[Just the highest notes.]

4 minutes ago, None said:

Its because I've always been under the impression that the Earth want to add the Water runes life/food capacity toitself while the Ocean is upset that the earth cube pushed it away. Hence why Earth and Ernalda like rain so much.

I would say that the Earth process revolves around concentration and encapsulation of food whereas in Water food simply circulated free and the journey from eater to eaten is the direction in which the world flows. Which sounds a little more obscure than it needs to be so break it down into smaller bites. As others have mentioned, Earth accretes as a local irritation in the infinite Ocean. It's a dense spot, not necessarily heavy (it floats) so much as concentrated. Experiences that are otherwise extremely diffuse in the water world precipitate out of solution. Different taxonomies of life ("new foods") become possible. 

But Earth carries its secret water within it. The concentration process preserves a kind of ghost of the original universal solvent, which is the encapsulation. This inner water remains thirsty. It obeys the great tide and ultimately seeks reunion with the universal. Sometimes this manifests as a desire to reincorporate fractions of the original solvent lost to us, especially when the world gets too dry and our inner water runs low. We pray for rain. Water is happy to oblige.

Flamal and all his children share in this. But sometimes it gets too wet and you risk root rot. It's important to know and obey the cycle of these things. Storm is a useful partner because it keeps the humidity and the heat moving. Some people might even say it's the flow of the dry world, the heart beating. Otherwise the dry stays dry and the wet stays wet, the body gets brittle like a mummy and the secret water left behind gets brackish. Disease conditions. 

21 minutes ago, None said:

Szazubur

This is really the part I wanted to comment on. I love this and am adopting it as head canon, a useful way to refer to him while also insulting him.

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

It might just counter enemy mystical powers, be they Red Moon or Zolathy-powered. The enemy at the time was Sheng, and summoning Yara Aranis to fight Sheng sounds like what Argrath would do after he had already summoned Sheng to fight the Red Emperor (Phargentes II).

You raise a great point by grounding the original Reaching function in the nomad-destroying Aranis cult. Applications better suited to the southern frontier (like keeping cyclical magic on Permanent Full) are interesting but secondary. All we really know about Reaching Storm is that it protects against ravaging nomads. I originally assumed that it's a network effect but by that point in the 1630s time is starting to fray around the edges anyway so details get scarce.

The identity of the "six-armed goddess of Saird" in this context remains interesting of course. However she interacts with Storm ideology I suspect she eats horse.

That's more or less what I always suspected, which is why hypotheses that depend on Dara Happa developing an independent five/six-element system, Dark at the beginning, Earth near the center and Storm/Moon at the end are worth reinterrogation. Dara Happa definitely recognizes that there's a body of fluid running through the landscape, dirt with plants in it, stuff we breath that isn't Sky and that it's hard to see at night. Maybe the centuries have brought them the idea that most of these phases of matter have powerful intelligences to be acknowledged via Young Elemental cults or other channels, sure. Their magicians have inherited parts of the Carmanian system that work. Are they motivated to squeeze all the ritual roles of those other elements (like a four-cornered Earth with Queen) into their pantheon? Maybe not so much. They don't have a Sea King because they are far from being a Sea People. The Wall has plenty of demons but is there room for a Hell Dark behind them? And while modern theologians can point somewhere and say that figure is the Rebel "Storm" the jerks down south follow, he sure isn't on the side of history as far as the urban elites are concerned. He might not even really be "Umatum" in all historically promulgated readings.

Anyway,

5 hours ago, Joerg said:

D rune?

Yeah. So I'm looking back at GRoY to refresh the sense of where the "Dendara" III.2 fits relative to other people who might be a suppressed or forgotten Pelandan "Earth Queen" type, and this time my eye lingers on the sarcastic "her smile shows her happiness" bit that reveals Plentonius' chauvinism with Greg's feminism shining through it. Okay. But why is she really "smiling?" Is that even a "smile" or the trace of some mystery buried in the Dendara wife complex? III.4 retains this iconographic cue also, and as we all know, Greg drew every truly important detail and every squiggle is of utmost importance to the reader trying to determine where Plentonius gets it wrong. 

as always there is a Kate Bush lyric here

Now separately I'm going back to the Dara Happan Sacred Alphabet to see which gods were important enough to the Esventhists to be considered "carver" (owner) of their initial letter. Not surprisingly, Dendara is not there because a dude whose name starts with "D" exists to horn in there. But there is a funny thing in the "Early Runes" table, which perversely Greg the trickster put first:

Hello "happy face!" Dendara evidently got the "D" after all (Lacan would be so happy, also fans of a phallic Entekos), only in a provisional system that didn't get the right bureaucratic traction. There is, after all, a tradition of interchanging runes with heads on the Wall or incorporating a distinctive face into a rune (or vice versa) to make a symbolic point. The Planetary Sons have rune heads. Lodril's people have his earthy block as well. (See below.) The Star Group (I.23-5) and so on.

Might a less chauvinist observer believe III.2 is carrying not a "smile" but D-2 for a more self-assured Dendara? I want to believe. The smile is an ambivalent thing with Greg, if you don't know why Mona Lisa is grinning odds are good the ultimate joke is on you.

Now who else carries D-2 on the Wall? III.4, who is an interesting transitional figure more naturally associated with III.5 as "Naverians." This is a mythological rhyme because III.2 has her own daughter, III.3. Two mothers, two daughters. Two families. Although III.5 has two daughters of her own, one of whom is allowed to get dirty. All of the classical Dendara's children are perfect and everyone loves them by divine imperial decree.

Perhaps III.4 is both the daughter of III.5 and the person who grows into III.2. They have the same "smile." This would conceal mysteries of goddess succession and the domestication [sic] of the "Naverian" Oria complex that are not my primary concern. I just want to figure out why Mona Lisa "smiles."

And as god said when he stabled the horse with the donkey, maybe something valuable will drop out of this. The biggest "letter head" group supporting this hypothesis are also "D" people . . . the blockheaded Children of Lodril whose head is D-3. This form of the letter is interesting because Greg explicitly lists it as a weird "early rune" and yet there it is in the Esventhite / Khordavu alphabet as the way you'd better cut a "D" or the khor is going to get you.

The carver of D-3 is of course Deshlotralas, whom Plentonius places down at IV.8, the third hell. It's a fraught move because, among other things, Esventheus gives this entity the terrestrial deity honorific and not the mark of a "demon." What classical theological dispute is preserved here? Furthermore, we know ownership of "D" is especially dubious in this era because (a) Greg lists what we now call the "Dayzatar" rune first in the Early list and the "Deshlotralas" letter third, behind "Dendara" (b) Dayzatar did not carve the letter that makes it to the official court alphabet, even leaving my historical obsession with "Z=Y" or "truth" out of it. Shargash gets a letter. Lodril gets a letter. Of course Yelm gets a letter. Dayzatar, despite receiving every formal honorific, gets passed over for a literal blockhead. 

As do all of the prominent star people. They are not too aloof for writing. They have runes but not letters. This preserves the ghost of at least one Tale that thankfully does not concern us here. 

It is also interesting that "Entekos," despite receiving pride of place at II.1, also has her own Early Rune yet does not make it into the Khordavu alphabet, instead being deliberately passed over for the otherwise enigmatic "Everinus" who may be either a forced misprint for III.17 (Enverinus) or an oddly regendered III.7 (Everin"a") or a separate entity now obscured. Like the Dayzatar figure on the wall, II.1 has no feet to better avoid the ground. Weirdly Ourania (I.24, see also Early Rune O-1) does. It's the howling Gamara (IV.18) who does not. Who are the fathers and daughters here?

Many gods were plowed under in the construction of the Dara Happan canon. Others were forced together from what we would consider historically remote antecedents. This much is clear. It's the details . . . the ghost grudges and mistakes, opportunities and missed connections . . . that feed a Hero War. Multiple vestigial alphabets on the Wall. And I know we were promised a Kate Bush lyric.

Love it. Insight coming out of Ralios is coming one way or another. Can't say I've ever seen the mechanics of Reaching Storm ever really worked out. I suspect the revelation of multiple Holy Mountains is part of it (at least, that's where I'd start) . . . when it's just another magical commodity they can be built like franchise stores.

For that matter can't say I'm clear on what Reaching Storm actually does for allied magic. That sounds like High Storm has a role there.

17 minutes ago, JonL said:

The Dara Happans don't place high value in Earth, they consider it beneath them. It's for Lodril & his people to be soiled with its dirty work and fecund drives, so to speak. From the DH perspective, that the Southern barbarians crow about their Rebel God's union with the Earth is just another sign of their uncouth nature. 

I'm not even convinced they historically acknowledge Earth or any elemental power beyond the children of Aether.  No sovereign Earth, no Earth Queen position.

I do wonder when they forgot or suppressed that Dendara's forced "happy face" is actually an alternative D rune. The smile is later desperate apologetics.

8 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Lodril is one of the part time husbands of the rivers.

This is one of the great points of this thread. Storm guys marry the land to bring rain to crops. There's a tradition of fire guys marrying the river . . . even Zola Fel has this.

There are also the persistent rumors of Ernalda's original husband the water god who may or may not be Flamal to the West of modern Esrola. However by that point the elemental genders are so primitive that easy classifications break down, ironically opening up "sub rune" special cases. "Storm" may really only be an especially successful sub rune of Sky or even a subtle reinvention of Water . . . Umath as Blue Sky, as it were.

Every "Kolate" in the archaic sources is male. While Greg plays around with (and often bends) the latinate suffixes, only the early Likitae and generic Tilntae reliably take the final "-a." This is important to people who want to create space between Earth (Likita), Fertility (Tilnta) and the female condition. There were at least two types of mothers at the beginning and if not all of them were earths, maybe not all earths are necessarily born to be wives. Uleria herself is a blue goddess, right? Mother or bride of Umath? Both?

Remember when "Lodril" was one of the great gods of Pamaltela? The Men And A Half apparently remember something like that but who knows how their religion has developed in the north.

49 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

this differentiation is largely academic and hypothetical

I'd flip this a tiny bit: only differentiations that matter to devotees are anything but academic and hypothetical. When it becomes important to say which strands of solar culture Yelm "is not," then people do the analytic work and isolate as many unessential accretions to the Yelm complex that need their own names and functions so we can focus on the one god at the center of the sky. Otherwise, we don't sweat it so much and the same force animates falcons and horses, healers and archers alike. It's true of all the gods. Every Gloranthan god either has devotees here or not. The Celestial Court is always subject to negotiation. The live ones are receptive to a kind of conversation . . . they talk back.