scott-martin

God I love that little town. The Colymar can have whatever they want.

Since my Sartar is largely Colorado, a few magically interesting things happen as you go farther up. First, local terrain variations break up the territory into more distinct micro climates that then fluctuate across a more extreme range . . . it's moodier weather, with a larger number of smaller fronts packed into a lot of three-dimensional space but a relatively small amount of space on the map. In other words this is a wind nursery and when you have a lot of baby winds in a small space they fight each other, cancelling out their aggregate force. That weather just doesn't go anywhere. Compare this to the Great Plains of Peloria where by the time you get a wind front moving it's pretty big and coherent. Generally it's also very cold, which is why you get your gigantic blizzards across vast flat territories. In Colorado, the world can end on one pass and the sun keeps shining on the next one 300 feet down slope. Then the next day they switch. The winds in their home country are fickle. Average moods are provided but bet on them being extremely volatile. (A more boring temperature table would probably include standard variations to gauge local wind moodiness . . . nobody wants that, just talk to the wind and get to know how it swings.) Also while I leave the angles to the trigonometry specialists, the war between light and dark gets more stark as you rise. Most of the country gets very bright in the days if not hot (don't worry, temperatures are coming) . . . but there are crannies where the upland sun never shines and they get literally cold as hell. Glacier ice in August. Five foot snow pack in June in the shade, surrounded by vast columbine fields. Storm and Dark have a sympathetic and complex relationship. Up there, they're each other's Best Friends. It's also one of the esoteric secrets of the upland sun and Inora as reflector but we aren't here for that. So what this adds up to is that when there's grumbling in Peloria, everyone complains about the same thing. In Sartar, just put on your shoes and walk 30 feet and maybe the microclimate there fits your needs a little better. There's always another valley and by the time you get there the wind will change. TLDR Clearwine works for Ouray in terms of average winter temperatures but catch the winds in a bad swing and it gets down to -22F/-30C. Go up another 500 feet to Silverton (one five-mile hex SOUTH) and the weather gets worse, average winter temperature drops to 1F/-20C with a historical minimum around -39/-39. Go like a mile west from there and 5,000 vertical feet farther up and Owl Creek Pass averages -2/-21 in January. Probably gets a whole lot colder at its coldest but nothing human is paying attention at that point. Only the hairy ones if anyone will dance there then. Granted, Peloria gets colder but that's because you have the howling Valind waste within frostbite range. Wind is not inherently cold in itself but a heat distribution engine, so Orlanth in his country blows both cold and hot. Take Orlanth out of the equation and his colder cousins leap in to fill the gap. In apocalyptic polar vortex conditions it got down to -61/-51 in Sartar a few years ago. Good thing the world didn't actually end.

It might be as simple as Sartar being the northeastern limit of the Trader "Princes," the moment they link back up with the Desert Tracker network. Still a lot we don't know about him.

There's also all kinds of proto-Indo-European reconstructions to seed a "core Gloranthan vocabulary." Say these artificial words look uncannily like Trade, recognized by sophisticated people across the lozenge, and the translations into the blandish are such and so. The bland terms are probably still required to protect the learning curve though. (I hear the strategy around distance from the Teutonic terms. Das tut, meine Freunde.)

Oh definitely. Nochet has grown into an empire in itself but it's only a literal needle in the great haystack of the latifunda where most of the slaves of all types toil off the adventuring path. I wonder how a LARP gathering of the grandmothers out there would play out. Meet the ladies from the provinces, record the machinations, see what if anything they decide. I suppose the challenge is luring adventurers out there in the first place to drum up the MGF. Either way the rate of social change lurching into the Hero Wars period mandates YGWV simply because the stickiness of "canon" itself is starting to slide. Assumptions we had 40 years ago about how characters live in this world have been tested again and again. Some of it persisted. Other parts have evolved and will continue to evolve. And when characters go off the published map, the map has had to catch up with them. Ten years from now the survivors will be in a very different world. That's okay. A Hero War gives every traveler a chance to influence the outcome, the ideal Glorantha to come. The world is heavy but find the right point and it will budge. Your game, whoever you are reading this, might be that budging point. Of course that's the kind of thing those apocalyptic lunatics who went into Malkonwal said and they were at best "kind of out there" philosophically.

The reference to "debt" initially roused my ruckus but from what I can intuit about the Esrolian system the Grandmothers have a real MGF decision point on their hands here. On the one hand, the disasters of 1621-3 killed a lot of debtor households outright, but an unusually large number of the survivors are still facing repeat crop failure and default, losing their freedom. However, a lot of the overseers are dead too so incorporating all of these formerly semi-free people into the system at once creates significant strain and raises the odds of at least sporadic revolt. MGF. Of course the Grandmothers as a group don't need to foreclose all these families. Ty Kora Tek probably manages the bankruptcies so argues for compliance while Asrelia at least superficially counsels forbearance but not everyone acts with their ultimate best interests in mind. Some people need to keep wealth flowing to support foreign obligations, status or simply to maintain urban food security . . . after the disasters people will be either supernaturally serene or completely risk averse. (These are of course the two faces of the Grandmother Goddess.) I suspect the importation of captives is an artifact of centuries of prosperity in Esrolia proper while the western hinterland deteriorates. (As far as I can tell it derives from the original colonization of Caladra and the Veskarthanites.) Obviously this is in the interest of the Trader Prince network when times are good enough in Esrolia that the Grandmothers don't have a ready excuse to foreclose local labor. However now the labor dynamics have changed and with refugees from elsewhere in the Winter zone streaming into town desperate for a meal there's less incentive to pay for barbarian slaves. Life is cheap and labor is only a little more expensive. This is an opportunity for anyone with a little cash and vision to buy and liberate a lot of human potential at a deep discount. I wouldn't be surprised if this is where new armies of the Hero Wars are created. The Grandmothers can go right on doing what they do until emergent realities force them to stop, but at least the foreign trade can be diverted to something more positive. After all, the world is ending and their business is crashing harder than a lot of things. Etyries may well have brought new and seductive accounting systems during the Red Earth era that are crashing the Grandmother credit models too, but that's another story. I hear that! Grower, Maker, Eater, Taker . . . maybe the ethic is in keeping them spinning.

Kerofinela as anagram for Kalifornee still tickles. Also . . .

Not sure this is the case even in short world models. There's a back passage in every dreaming head where it opens up again to the sea and responds to those tides. Gloranthan theoreticians forget this to their sorrow. "Or so it is said." (East Islands fragmentation as metaphor for the archipelago of consciousness . . . or vice versa.) The sectarian distinctions can draw on "sober" versus "intoxicated" forms of earthly mysticism, although transformed of course for our hobby. Some are engaged in waking up. Others are engaged in finding the waking insight within the illusions night as well as day. "A particular dealing of [god] with my soul." MGF. Meantime of course we interact with them as dreams within a dream since the setting itself is one elaborate artifice and our point of view is limited, which makes the thing complicated when we look at it too close. Too many complications generate stress points, and then we wake up.

Reminds me of how in the RQ3 days the question of whether an entity was "complete" was resolved with characteristics like STR, POW and so on. It would be extremely interesting to approach it again now with paired power runes. Does a vampire, for example, cross off Fertility and only run on Death? You're not alive then but you're something more transgressive than simply dead. I imagine powerful and desperate magicians committing to embody all the powers by rejecting their opposites and reaping strange rewards. We probably only hear about most of them in stories designed to frighten children. Or in places like Spol. Your players have to go there and report back!!

The "short world" hypothesis is pretty good as far as it goes (haha) but it begs the question of what makes some worlds shorter than others. How do you even measure that meaningfully? In my Glorantha (which is to say, the version of the setting that resides in my head and scattered notes) it revolves around a micro/macrocosm distinction. Some dreams contain true information. Others are bewildering psychic trash left over from spirits, madness, the wrong light of the moon, illusion, disorder, unfulfilled desire, etc. etc. etc. Random encounters of the night. And some will be of one kind disguised as the other. The same is true of people and phenomena you meet in the day. When your eyes are closed, the encounter originates within your soul (or "sorb" as the hippies say) where distinctions between self and others blur. When your eyes are open, it's the macrocosm communicating with you. Because the individual soul is commonly perceived as smaller than the world, we say the world within is "shorter." It fits inside the larger world you inhabit with your eyes open. Because divination is available, you can put your dreams to the question and interpret them just like they were external phenomena. Some dreams are actually someone important tapping on the inner door of perception but the Compromise ensures that very few of these communications make it back out here to the waking world without serious distortion. But if you have the divination points, even a garbled dream provides a hint of what to ask about. Then when you ask the question in the proper ritual context, you get the right answer. Some people who are trained or talented in the workings of the micro/macrocosm can concoct dreams for other people. When the eyes are open we call them illusions. At night when sensible people are in bed it becomes glamour. Naturally it's in these people's interest to blur the distinction between the world within and the world without. If they tell you the right things, they control your experience. If they tell the world the right things, they change the world. Many mystics at least dabble with this stuff. The macrocosm persists so far between eye blinks. Call that persistence "truth."

Valare definitely had a very specific spiritual agenda and we're lucky she collected so much additional data along the way. Heroquesters can apply that stuff to non-Lunar objectives. For me these books are extremely valuable because they were never directly fed into the Jrusteli monomyth. Carmania was a closed door to the God Learners and the inner workings of Dara Happa seem to have been accessible only second hand, via whatever they were able to scrounge from post-Arkat sources. EWF got into the cities but that's a different thing . . . and even then, the western reaches remained aloof. What they feed is neither GL nor EWF but the Goddess. Sure, Greg's compositional method was largely to use the familiar monomyth constructs and then fill in the brackets when something more local came to mind. But within the setting, it takes someone like a Valare to incorporate these local rites into a more cosmopolitan context. Otherwise they might have remained [Ernalda] and [Uleria] forever and we would never have been the wiser.

Girding my uh "lions" for a full-force engagement with the text but in the meantime I wonder if it helps to follow the Plentonic conclusion that some of these entities map onto two or more foreign gods in different phases or interpretations. We know, for example, that someone who initiates to either DH Entekos or Dendara can "participate fully" in the Pelandan rite but Pelandan priestesses moving into the binary upstairs girl / downstairs girl DH system have to choose which goddess to keep and which to leave behind. A paradox only if we assume that all deities are the same size. In previous readings I decided Entekos, Dendara and the mysterious Endeddi were all phases of the same goddess as planet, fertility and weather . . . the parts that are basically a female Orlanth remain with Entekos (folding in Endeddi) while the parts we would associate with an "Ernalda" or other lifegiver spin out as a separate Dendara at some point. These might also have been three separate cults in the never-never who got conflated but the text is mostly silent here. (That said I like the theory that Dendara came from / rose in the east along with her immediate family.) I am not sure Entekos maps onto the Addi, which I always read as one of the accoutrements of shamanic or at least magical consciousness, the magic wand or signifying stick who takes pride of place among her sisters. Maybe all woke women are daughters of the Addi but not all daughters of the Addi participate fully in the Entekos. But we go with the travel we get. I think Valere is reaching a little in attributing the mysterious Vorgetela to IV.19*, which throws off the perfect sky count if we assign it a number and a name. I'm cool with breaking the sky count but the Plentonists would have kittens. Karanda's children are stripy but I don't know if all Finger Goddess are stripy, all horizontally divided entities on the Wall are Karanda's children, all of Karanda's children make it onto the Wall or even if Karanda's children are really identical to the Finger Goddesses (I must be missing a cite), which reduces the urgency of assigning a Wall spot to someone invisible and ineffable. Of course this begs the question of what IV.19* is instead and also fails to address what sublime state the Vorgetala represents. She might simply fill out the octave in a numerically pleasing way. On the other hand, if there is an esoteric link between the Finger Signs and the Enari then yeah, they would need the numbers to match. But Vorgetala may not be her real name.

One of my new best friends! This version looks complex and exciting for your game. I really like the aldryami sacrificial origin, which will tell us a lot more than we currently know about early interactions with the forest that I think ends up as Rist. My "hungry ones" are a now-extinct digijelm occupation so I wonder if there's room for earlier trollish influences on their Darkness reactivated in the early Second Age. Maybe it was mediated through the elves so you'd get a Light / Grower / Summer complex and a Dark / Eater / Winter side. In your game of course the elves would be the ones who defined the relationship and warned the people against Daak and company. But when the elves started failing, Spol embraced the dark.

Embroidered little devotional books with pictures are a great idea for pilgrims and others. Take a little linen, screen (or even weave in) a pattern and the Dendara / Ourania / Erissa sisters can do it for themselves without getting the priests bothered. (The Erissas can even write in flesh but that's another story.) It remains to be told how exactly literacy was transmitted to women and other formerly deprecated people but Valere acquired an interest in archaic writing systems somewhere . . . probably from her sequestration. Then as the Way unfolds we get that great little throwaway about the Second Wane emergence of a literate middle class and a market for casual literature. A feminist scribal tradition working in textile would have been very interesting. Luckily enough, that stuff burns as easily as paper so we don't have to worry about too much of it surviving Sheng outside the great lunar archives.

Keep changing it up! You are rocking. Until your players see it for themselves past publishing is a closed book nobody cares about outside the knowledge temple.

Eyes on the prize! But where else do the Aisors . . . I mean "Issaries" . . . come from?

Oh yeah . . . Fellini Satyricon (also on YouTube) is prime Lunar Empire. I just don't spend a lot of hobby time there these days. "If the work of Petronius is the realistic, bloody and amusing description of the customs, characters and general feel of those times, the film we want to freely adapt from it could be a fresco in a fantasy key, a powerful and evocative allegory: a satire of the world we live in today. . . science fiction of the past."

If you hate 'em you get your money back.

Right now my core cinematic Glorantha is about half Sergei Paradjanov and half Peter Brook, which means they intersect a little awkwardly with Meetings With Remarkable Men. It's not so much any ethnographic detail as the effort to capture mythic consciousness. Brook's crowning career achievement is of course the Mahabharata (all of these are available in their entirety on YouTube), which is deceptively simple, a five-hour epic built out of a list of five primal terms: LIFE BLOOD HEART FIRE END. It was meant to be performed live. Look at the staging, the casting and the way he directs performances. The appearance of Krishna is a true coup. His other movies are less interesting than the plays but easier to find. Paradjanov is trickier to assign to a specific Gloranthan locale but the journey is more rewarding. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is prime barbarian belt, probably Rathorela in some historically layered period that could be now, six hundred years ago or on the edges of Time. The assignment of Color of Pomegranates, Ashik Kerib and Suram Fortress is in the eye of the beholder. The Transcaucasian setting that bridges these last three increasingly says Ralios to me. I'm also super fond of the alpine landscapes, hypnotized performances and apocalyptic doom of Werner Herzog's "Heart of Glass" as a tale of Old Sartar but I appreciate that it's a deeply anti-canonical posture. His Fata Morgana and other movies are also deeply Gloranthan but I don't know where exactly they live.

Thanks all the same! Not important until it's necessary and then there's usually someone on site who has the cues on which direction is which. Now I'm wanting a chivalric LBRP with all those whirling swords.

At the risk of looking retro this almost looks like a "sorcery plane."

I was unaware of this one! Who did he have in the north?

IMG now there still are stands of clove trees in a few of the river valleys and the sheer anesthetic blast when they all ripen at once can give an entire moiety instant visions. So let it be written, so let it be done. Probably yet another Kresh plot.

Hey, that's something!! (Forgive fudged composite quote . . . not letting me bring in text across pages.) Starting to build a dangerous picture of prehistoric Frontem that might finally reveal where the Tadeniti went. It became an obsession today so I checked. The Guide has cattle in Jolar as well as Umathela. Conspiracy theories of garbled Pamaltelan records notwithstanding, it looks like some Doraddi managed to capture a few herds and the secret of sustaining them. Not sure how far they promulgated. This is good grist for differentiating what would otherwise be endless ahistorical savannah.

"Hang around the beard shop long enough and somebody's going to start braiding." Western Buserian is awesome. I think it lines up with the fragments I'm starting to see in Talsardia. Somebody also brings cattle to Pamaltela of course but now that you mention it I don't know for sure if herding survives down there the way it might in Masai country, for example.