scott-martin

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.

That's part of it. You've met derrideans. A new scribe comes in with a system that promises to be more expansive, incorporating truth with illusion, reconciling fundamental oppositions. Love the rhetoric or hate the rhetoric: the motorcycle needs enough zen to get across the country somehow. The empire is the IO motorcycle. Across the water, Ompalam, for all its grossness, was the way they found to get through their particular problem. We naturally want to fight against it. It's the hero wars. I hope we win. I don't think I've ever seen the paperwork excommunicating the Brown Man. Wonder what his final flounce was.

"It's an allegory! All allegory! Where it veers from what you think is the Truth read other wise for inner clarity, what I call my _no prize_!" - Geleron Green For example one of the things that's interesting is the way cognate cults compete and consolidate within a society like species in an ecological niche or corporations today. Once upon a time a buserian sect emerged to amass Star Knowledge, at first with special tents and then towers. A sorcery man found his way to what was probably Vingkot country and set up shop. The Carmanians eventually evolve their own viziers from archaic Fronelan forms. When any of these vocations are working properly to process and apply information within the society, they tend to develop into parallel bureaucratic structures. The smartest ones naturally work hard to study each other, seeing a rich local source of lore to tap. The defensive ones tried to shut themselves off while proclaiming that their lore was the only good lore, foreign lore is inferior and a waste of time. But in other places the lore and the bureaucracies converge. Then in situations where none of the known lore is working for you, you go outside the box. The Brown Man drifted across as many schools as he could. None of them helped. He kept digging. A few centuries later, people who followed in his footsteps have largely replaced the buserians in imperial society (compete and consolidate) except in specialized and explicitly traditional contexts. Buserian had to retreat to make room for the new way that clearly did it better and which by the way the goddess adores. They have a different mix of knowledge tools up there, more star lore and a lot of that wild old henotheism that Syranthir brought in. The fractional truth calculus is brilliant in some applications and useless in others. But as they institutionalize, they ultimately just move into the old library spaces knowledge competitors leave behind. The bureaucracy recapitulates itself. Meet the new beard, functionally identical to the old beard even though it may be styled differently to fit the "head" or society it's attached to. Luckily they all hate outright Knowledge Theft, whatever that means for you.

The power of Up and Down (or rising water and falling water) seems to recur endlessly with them, from esoteric Heler (who also has Movement but probably plays only a limited role in triolini religion under that name) to the surface tension mysteries of Wachaza. Two forms of sa-metal. Maybe it's as "simple" as Lodril and Lorion doubling in an early cosmic cycle, not a conflict of Sky and Storm then but only falling and rising forces. In this model of course the third blue eye that negotiates between them signifies the alchemist.

Another fine avenue for translators to explore! But a little more seriously, orthodox triolini look first to Magasta for the metaphysical "soul arranger" or psychopomp function. Maybe one of his many epithets is the Flow, the cosmic force that pulls us all back to the hole in the heart of the world for purification and recirculation. Some might say gravity, धर्म or άνάγκη. (Maybe "love" also comes close.) Weirder triolini undoubtedly have weirder ideas involving the role of Daliath on the far end of the cycle. Magasta churns and flows but Daliath learns and flows, so to speak, giving water people a system to make sense of the otherwise murky patterns of Change. Of course there are textual cues that the entire Daliath complex is an alchemical allegory, deploying Change for higher goals. Exploring these waters might tickle your fancy.