scott-martin

. . . We get figures like Argoom the Shadow Rider or Vettebbe allowing for less pleasant (former) celestial beings. Or possibly underworld stars fallen from a tilted sky dome. This level of lore is why I come here.

As Joerganos points out, most of the original language now exists only in translation or in isolated proper nouns (names of places, persons and peoples). One of the few exceptions is ironically "engrion," formerly translated colloquially as "knight" and now as the more technical "person of all." This then retroactively suggests that "engr" (an epithet of MLKYNr) is really their word for the collective, the all, the holistic . . . "society" or wyter. The word "wyter" itself may originate in their language despite what would to us look like an old germanic cluster of semivowels and consonants. They seemed to have zero discomfort about cramming too many hard sounds together to create blends difficult for modern English speakers to master. In this scenario, the word might have once been pronounced something like "HOO-eyeter" but this would have been before they had writing . . . almost impossibly archaic.

I don't recall this coming up in the email newsletter era so will simply have to treat it as the top revelation of the season. For the Dawn Age Pelorians, the initial lightbringer contacts probably looked a lot like starlight tribes returned from ancient times to brighten a dark world. Only later do they learn a separate word for "storm." In this model, the north never really bothered to assign native bronze a mythic role in its metallurgy but instead relies on Lodril's ability to alloy copper with tin (and maybe some additional metals that look like silver) into what Pelorian "brass." This alchemical wedding of earth with heaven is a cult secret and probably at least mildly taboo in formal yelmic doctrine. Later the bright points in the sky were sorted into pro- and anti-yelmic families, with some getting classified as "storm stars," others as "sky stars" and one or two big enough to be planets or moons. Uleria is a planet. Sedenya is a moon. Entekos is a planet and a storm goddess or "air" with lunar associations. But Orlanth's association with silver remains embedded in the metallurgy of the southern coast, land of the "grey ones," the silver people, the silver age, the silver empire. Note that water forces also conquer heaven but do not get true silver secrets. What they have instead is the mystery of "quick" silver, heavy water that sinks or (when purified with the Lodril secrets that they did actually take), rises to the surface. This is the alchemical mystery. And IMG now crazy old Gringle needed a Third Eye Blue and an Uleria on site and on payroll because he was engaged in the great work of breeding bullion itself.

Thinking harder about where metallic dwarf castes come from and what gods leave behind when they die, I also had reason recently to look back at the old Elder Secrets list of which cults can harden which metals to become suitable houses for death. Babeester and Maran Gor have iron. So does Gorgorma. Ur-metal is somehow compatible with the malign earth. Babeester retains the broad earth ability to work with copper as the de facto warrior cult of that pantheon. Lhankor Mhy also has iron but has never bothered to collect the lore to work with the other metals. Maybe this is a legacy of his ancestral link to Urtiam. Tsankth and Wachaza have iron, again as de facto warrior cults, but Magasta does not despite his intimate relationship with death. Lodril does not have lo-metal, quicksilver or lead. That's okay because in the Holy Country they have other routes to those metals. Iron is native to Orlanth and Storm Bull as two of the primary warrior cults of their pantheon. But Orlanth also gets native silver, which has perplexed some people. Historically the Lunar Way got access to silver "from associate cults" but now I think this has vanished . . . neither Yelorna nor Uleria are associated and they really don't share this magic freely. I don't think the real magic properties of enchanted silver and tin or the mysteries of sa/lo have really been explored in non-military context but Bertalor is the nominal authority on the subject.

Love it. Don't want to talk too much here but I could be convinced that the current sun was (and is) considered a failure in strict celestial terms, the runt of the pantheon much like Tecciztecatl revealed himself as a vainglorious coward who couldn't even dodge a thrown rabbit and so becomes a lesser light. In this scenario the yelm had no place in the cosmic order before the introduction of death created an opportunity for weakness to step forward, accept his own sacrifice and negotiate with the night to be reborn as something more impressive.

This is a great point. He looks a lot like a Young God (Lightfore rises in Youth at the new year) and could theoretically grow into a sun under the right conditions, but as long as he remains Yelmalio he is never going to become the retrospective origin of Yelm. He's shifted 180 degrees away. Even if there's a magic trick or euphemistic explanation where the sun never enters hell but jumps across from dusk to dawn, simultaneously evolving from little sun to big sun and then at night from big sun to little sun again, they will never meet unless the sky is completely unsettled. And Lightfore is chained to the same route as Yelm. Yelmalio reaches the zenith every night, but at that point the world is too dark to support an imperial claim. There is no father in the darkness because the father is dead, leaving the son to limp on through the night, spilling crystals without much of the pomp that the day sun commands. But hey, Lightfore "always" occludes Pole Star at the moment when the father is at the deepest nadir of hell. I wouldn't be surprised if Polaris started out as a little sun (Dayzatar's child, the "son" of the previous generation) and now replaces conventional Yelmalio in polite Dara Happan society at every moment but midnight. Interestingly, Polaris is associated with Kargzant but not the upland suns. I like Lightfore as the memory or ghost of the mature Young God, the abortive regenerative cycle. Heir without portfolio. I wonder how that played out in Saird.

Love all of this. IMG the Khordavu era consolidated what were once regional expressions of the sky god into a unified modern Yelm, who is a jealous god who protects his prerogatives, including the right to be the only sun (solitary / solar) with full use of the "Fire" solar rune (the central dot is his ego or central viewpoint). This means that with very limited exceptions everyone around him is forced into the role of either subordinate or rival . . . and rivalry is rebellion. We all know that. As far as they're concerned in Dara Happa, every other sun or potential sun is either a little sun or a wandering sun. In the process, the story of the primal family of Aether was preserved in vestigial form like an afterburn: all of this had happened before, once upon a timeless time even the serene, perfect, unchanging and immortal emperor was just one little sun among many. And he had a father, someone whose very regime forced him into the choice of whether to obey or rebel. He had brothers who give us a vocabulary for weighing all the options. I believe that a version of the young sun rebelled and murdered his father in order to take his place at the center of the sky. Because gods are immortal Aether did not die but was forced to abdicate "up" and out where he is now acknowledged as the Dayzatar solution, the sun-that-was pushed out of the center by the sun-we-have-now. The mythology attributed to "Yelm the youth" are memories of these exploits. Other rebel sons and even daughters preserve other perspectives. Those with enough lore can read this composite story as a conspiracy of forces incompatible with universal order, but I find it more generally useful to think about each one in his or her trajectory. And within Time death is available as a lever of generational regime change. Every day we can watch this succession (or precession if you prefer) roll across the sky as we start with a young god, brisk and leaping and full of possibilities rising from the gates of dawn. By noon he is at the center and rules the world for a moment before the weight of age starts pulling him down in the west to make way for the young god to follow. Is tomorrow the same day, the same sun? Different Pelorian philosophical movements will answer the question differently. When the perspective remains within the dead sun of yesterday, we have the experience of being the black sun in hell. Sometimes the order of things fractures and what any given observe might consider the "wrong" sun triumphs. This is a rebel imperium, one of the blasphemous rites acknowledged by Yelmgatha but dreaded and shunned by most right-thinking people. There are many ways to go wrong. The Kralorelan solar hierarchy found an ingenious solution to the problem of how these rites can coexist with the true imperium, maintaining the potential for many suns when only one rides through a healthy sky at any given moment. I believe that the lost Genert civilization recognized the cyclicality of the masculine or paternalistic lifecycle, much as the Esrolians honor [A]srolia as the mother who was but spend most of their time focused on Ernalda as the mother who is, the current generation of today. This might be where Tada comes in as "young Genert" or the rebel earth son destined to replace the aging father when the cycle comes round. But as we know the great god Genert did not come back when he died the last time. There was no successor. The elves of other forests figured this out.

I'm saying the process of religious consolidation itself is the battle. When an expanding storm cult comes into an area and absorbs the local storm entities, the "living" parts of the local storm system ultimately become part of Orlanth. The "dead" parts that do not continue drop out of the system and we dig them up later as inert hu-metal and unpowered crystals. When scattered horse tribes fight over which sun will rule the sky, you get a battle of suns within the religious community. The winners continue to receive worship. The part of the losers that is compatible with subordinate status continue as "planets" or "stars." The part that is incompatible drops out of the system and gold becomes available. This is of course one of the secrets of the Lokarnos system. And sometimes an entire cult is incompatible so we say that god who was acknowledged within mythic memory is dead. Missionary earth movements leave copper behind. Missionary shadow movements leave lead. And so on.

When a local cult is consolidated into a larger organization, many of the stories are incorporated but the aspects of the god or spirit that were incompatible or just didn't make it into the successor entity are left behind as alienated material: rune metal, crystals, less durable magic item components. This is the Gods War expressed in mythogeological terms: as above, so below. The fact that so much native bronze, copper and gold is available for mining reveals the relative success of the storm (lightbringer), earth (lifebringer) and solar (starlight ancestors) missionary diasporas, which radiated out across the world and left a handful of world religions and a lot of local ore deposits behind. In some cases the diasporic era replaced entire archaic pantheons, leaving metals without much organized mythology behind. Restoring these materials to their original divine narrative is an alchemical mystery of the hero wars. The immediate mystery is that despite this, rituals for enchanting bronze are rare despite the ubiquity of the lightbringer complex. Not even Orlanth cares enough about hu-metal to teach its intricacies . . . but the ur-metal spell is surprisingly widespread. As below, so above.

Now that you mention it, maybe Waertag's Pier was structured like a language as well, being so close to the original Kachasti territories. A different language. Great interview with Jeff by the way. Nice lore.

"Old" Trade is not an island and is only incidentally a state of mind. What it is: a language. EDIT: Or rather, "structured like" a language.

If lineal descent is important to your relationship with Sartar than I suspect it would be difficult to approach Sartar in any other way. Another thing is that people in the terminal third age IMG are discovering that these "genealogical" links are less a matter of proving your bloodline than demonstrating to the wyter that you're aligned with the founder's vision . . . a spiritual heir. One bit of MGF this opens up is that the wyter can be free to refuse someone with otherwise impeccable ancestral documentation if someone else makes a better competing argument. Families of choice are a real thing in magic, why not open that choice to the spirits themselves?

A close reading of his nativity narrative and the fact that his signature spell is Suppress "Aether" tell me a lot about his unacknowledged paternity. I have THOUGHTS on him and Xentha and the primeval earth cults of the Shadow Plateau (and the female nature of the bat) but am distracted elsewhere.

I always laugh at that part of the Brook/Carriere when they elide the entire thing with a wink and the line "he spoke for a long time, a very long time" and then get back to the action at hand fortified with whatever it was. The religion is there for those who chase the religion. The play resumes after barely a pause. And it strikes me that a lot of these arguments are for Yudhishthira types worried about the fine points of dharma (can good dogs go to heaven) and not necessarily the Arjunas crowding the game table. So with Arkat, who was ultimately just an eccentrically trained horal and not designed to worry too much about sacrifice and prayer.

Each of the major Troll Gods in that book represents a fundamental approach to Darkness that has as yet resisted consolidation into modern standard Kyger Litor. Shargash appears there but not by that name.

The Tap is not the only technique known by reputation by the pious liturgists of this fallen era. They who traffick with demons outside the Man Rune pentagram of zzabur the wise gain horrible knowledge & conversation but at what price?

Especially funny given the "grey" faction in the MOLAD being an unruly array of independents: trader princes, hermits, tricksters, sorcerers, Power Rune cults, dwarves . . . and Stone Men. Might as well be silver given the printing technologies available at the time.

If only I had a copy with the "foreign" lineages left in! Maybe if I put together enough of these ancestral accounts it will serve well enough. Speaking of imagined ancestors I still think Daka Fal as "separator" (arranger) of the souls of the living from the souls of the dead is a mask or transformation of the Soul Arranger who we now call Larnste and that the mountains are a way to describe the territory of the dead ("god learner mythic maps"). The part that is new is that I am thinking we can identify these "stone grey deities" or "Law" givers with a rarely attested archaic malkion . . . the transregional yet local king of three corners plus the center. But this is unlikely to make me many new friends.

We will find it we will bind it we will stick it with glue glue glue. IMG "Daka Fal" is really more an umbrella category for how we structure our true & faithful relations with some spirits of the dead . . . and since practically all the gods have died, with spirits of that scope as well. The procedure often involves letting the spirit sample your blood to confirm a lineage but clever people can make other kinds of compelling claims. (Sometimes just knowing the name and having a relic of the person is enough.) Either way, the goal is to get the spirit to recollect enough of itself and then recognize you as part of its posterity in the world worth intervening over. Blood is easy for a lot of spirits to recognize. But blood also makes them thirsty. And blood can be changed through adoption or other magically sufficient procedures. What I find useful is simply getting the spirit to feel sufficiently sentimental toward me and my predicament. You want to move them, remind them how precious life is and get them to help you out. On Earth we might call this something like the orpheus technique. If you can arouse enough passion, you get results even from people who weren't historically related to you. Again in theory you can concoct a relationship, a spirit identity or both but in Glorantha this is usually facilitated through dreams and other spirit contacts ("seek your real grandfather") so in practice this looks a lot like simply asking Uncle Eddie for advice. The random ancestor roll reveals how much of the shade you recover and how well you overcome their innate thirst for embodiment. The archaic talars, for example, used this to explore their inheritance from the burtae. A more experimental approach then created the genealogies of the gods and even allowed for contacts with "hypothetical" entities like Tanian. I also suspect that the God Learners are the reason ancestral myths are described as being so fundamental to Gloranthan reality and yet so sketchily documented in the primary sources. Being able to infiltrate bloodlines played a huge part in their magical success. They probably wrote all this stuff down but it is one of the pieces that was successfully suppressed in the fall of the imperial age, erasing their records of comparative mortal origin while leaving the pantheon genealogies behind as an isolated relic of the system.

Hi Phil -- they are still working on it but you're right, they decided that projects like Cults (5+ years in development), the Sartar Book / Box and the refreshed Guide To Dragon Pass needed to come first as a foundation. Then they can build up from there. If they get clear roads and nimble art direction it could come pretty fast on the heels of those products. I also can't wait.

Her most of all!

Since you lay the pieces out so clearly here it gets me wondering whether he was hoping to shore up his IMG shaky claim to the forms and regalia of talar rightness with a healthy slice of Rex. In theory the systems of authority are compatible if someone puts them together in the right way . . . he couldn't pull it off but MGF suggests someone with more extensive local resources will try.

This deep cut on the morocanth way is indeed relevant to my interests. I see that they are 2% ZZ, 6% 7M, 19% Daka and 11% other . . . significantly better integrated into the waha way than the Pol-Joni but when you really crunch the numbers the bar is pretty low.

Suddenly I need to know how prevalent horns are among the great herds. On earth, here's how it plays out: BISON, SABLE - both genders have horns IMPALA - male only LLAMA (LOW) - no horns MAN (HERD) - no horns I would not mind if IMG female impala had horns and all high llamas had something, even if it's only something like the earthly giraffe or male okapi . . . only again extended to the mothers. But I could be wrong. I would not be surprised if the morocanth groom their herd to create hornlike crests from wild head hair. (Think of the wilder om hairstyles in "Fantastic Planet" and not anything earthly. We are not going there.) They then parade their property in front of the other tribes as proof that these are the two-legged people who drew the food card. Even though modern morocanth do not present any kind of horn or tusk they are culturally sensitive and tend to wear hats anyway among strangers.

Funny story. People don't talk about it much now but the major conflict of the Broken Council LARP (memorialized in the modern ouranekki board layout) revolved around whether the New God would get its initial education from Day (light gods, emergent Dara Happa, elves) or Dark (the rump IFWW alliance of OOO, storm and trolls). In canonical history the Day faction got the votes and this is how you get Nysalor, the exit from Fire to what chaos-rejecting cultures reject. So the apocalypse already happened, it was literally how the light got in. ZZ was of course ultimately arrayed on the other side: burned by the light like a shadow burned into the walls of Watchmen. But I think the light by definition can't see in the dark the way ZZ grudgingly makes out shapes and movement. The sun in the sky might cast a shadow but has only abstract experience of the night. Some people think Shargash was a sun once and Alkoth is hell. In that scenario, Shargash and ZZ may sometimes provide reciprocal initiation . . . other times they fight like Ernalda and Dendara, jealous of their fine distinctions. I think pumping corpses full of the spiciest "zombie sauce" (probably with beetle gland extracts) to jolt them to an unholy parody of life is brilliant and should be canonical. It's literally the fire within, the one thing a troll can't quite digest and so it keeps the body warm and twitching, constantly rejecting the intrusion like an autoimmune disorder, the bite of forbidden fruit you can't swallow or spit out. God only knows what it does to the living, probably instant illumination. Where it gets dumb is that IMG this is also Tanian, the impossible element that the Jrustelans brought down from their beetle-infested mountain and sprayed on their mucoid seafaring rivals. That one is theoretically spicy "water" but the standard elemental progressions are breaking down for me these days, the part of the world where they came of age didn't have much room for darkness as an element and the primary antagonism for fire was water. In this model, fire is the alien from the absolute elsewhere . . . the sky is dominated by a "nuclear chaos," if you will. Water steps up to shield the world from it in much the same way darkness operates in the old Council system. Note that this means the waertagi overwhelmed by tanian sauce work their way back up from hell through sheer persistence (they are unkillable twitch machines now, alive with flavor) and a wink around the whirlpool. By the way everything here has been great. I have been distracted but am flying to California incredibly early tomorrow and hope the office will calm down after that as the Issaries community continues to evolve.