scott-martin

Too far inside baseball here but this does indeed seem to be Why The Council Broke. Their partner in Raibanth "suggested" that the new god be raised with at least a Light orientation, the Dorastans went with it and here we are now. But the character sheet was different then. Fun to contemplate Dawn Age RuneQuest now with the tools we have . . .

I love that stuff too. The funny thing here is that Tamali were originally the darkness people before Sandy's beloved trolls emerged. The archaic fire people were the Promalti. This is probably too far inside baseball for the RuneQuest forum to care about but if I were doing GWD I'd make them another Decapolis diaspora culture like the horse people, star clans and so on. Were they human then? Maybe sometimes, like kitori. Would they be human now? Hard to say.

The esteemed Jajagappa is familiar with Gold Wheel Dancer psychology so may weigh in. Etymologically I suspect they'd have Fire and Harmony, possibly as the origin of Harana Ilor's musical iconography. Speaking Wheel at least was strong enough in Harmony to fill that seat in the Council. It's interesting to think about these vanished races having rune oppositions that don't really apply in modern Glorantha.

Let's open up the tale of Greya. Moon Rites is scarce but if there's demand maybe these fragments can get published in something like a Wyrm's Footnotes compilation some day. Greya is from Esvuthil. She thinks she was born in around 1456 (4/47), when the once and future Lunar Empire is completely melting down as Sheng's "merry" hunt for the red man escalates. The liberation comes in 1469-70. There are glitches in the narrative that may either be Greg's improvisational editing or vestiges of how their form of sevening changes people's sense of self. It may also be lingering nightmare, a women's secret or both. The occupation may simply be the dark side of their moon. The people eat leaves and savor cockroaches. They live in rubble heaps. The cities are ruined. "Demons" rove them and children are hidden in holes to keep them from rape and murder. Farming has been forgotten. It reminds me of how life must have been under the "digijelm," when darkness hunted the people for sport. Life gets better when the liberation comes. Maybe a useful preliminary question is to ask what the Kralorelan equivalent of the greater darkness is and then apply the answer to Sheng's eastern agenda . . . or at least the exoteric stigmata thereof. One thing I know about him is that he appreciates suffering for what it teaches the soul as you say. In the east, where they make a big deal of how chaos lost, suffering is transitory and sacrificing all attachments ("ascetic mysticism") is progress. This may be why he tried to invade the Dawn Country by force, mixing the planes as it were by bringing a Praxian army to the gates of heaven. Of course he failed there. What was Kralorela before it was Kralorela? The solar realm? Another dragon realm? Did Sheng even understand these distinctions? Does this connect with the apparent Kralorelan dichotomy between "Splendor" where they are now and "Ignorance" that comes before experience or at least rejects insight? We know Sheng's empire encompassed both realms. Did teachings move from the north as well as between east and west? In general I may be wrong but I don't consider him to be an intellectual magician but more of an instinctive force driven by urge and destiny. His apparatus, even more so. This makes it a little easier because we don't have to track so many footnotes. ALSO, speaking of Sheng, footnotes and obscure publications, does anyone recall which Lore Auction rehearsed his background for the first time? I think it's in one of the Conpendia but mine are scattered around the house. Figure someone has it at hand. This is important as we figure out where he emerges as a fan favorite post-KOS.

If anything brings Steve Marsh back it would be this. Mythic insight is always a moving target . . . this tome should provide a starting point for the Hero Wars. Who knows where things end up?

To be fair to our cousins in the Chain Gang while we are the current lease holders there are supposedly basements beneath Mother Market where he is represented with tusks, segmented eyes and a braided thread instead of the usual weighing scale. Of course if even if I had the grade to witness such a thing it would be above my grade to discuss in profane circumstances.

One of the best posts of the season. Please keep us posted on what else your players get up to. IMG the Lhankor intellectual economy runs on a mindset of artificially enforced scarcity. Many of the big beards consciously or unconsciously consider lore to be a kind of monopoly and literacy as a kind of cult secret. They will grudgingly copy a text for money (or better from their perspective, charge you a consulting fee) and then trade the money for more paper and the other things they need to live, but when they're feeling rich the tendency is to simply close the library early so they have more time to think their deep thoughts. The problem for them, of course, is that information isn't like a cow or other tangible assets. If I have a secret I have monopoly power over pricing and dissemination. If I tell you that secret then two people have the information and the power. If we trade secrets, both of us now have twice the information. If we all share what we know, we are all equally well educated and there's no reason for anyone to buy a library card. The beards go hungry. Maybe a few need to put those big brains to work and get a job. I am all for this because a smarter community is a stronger community with fewer expertise choke points and more resources overall. But many of the big beards are not thinking about the community (compare our lifebringer stories, where ours is all about everybody and theirs is all about them) so will try to squeeze every lore point as hard as they can. The good news for your player is that if he can keep it relatively quiet at first the beards will be too busy bickering to even notice until it's too late. Once the beards figure it out, they will complain about your player, spread rumors to tribal authorities that this person is messing with dark forces and in general try to make life miserable. They smell a competitor to their comfy routine. We would not object to a wider market for pigskin, etc., especially as the Hero Wars require unusual herd culls. As to God Learnering, Arkatism, etc., I suggest that as long as someone keeps an external goal in sight (people outside yourself) it gets easier to avoid truly awful outcomes.

This is another opportunity. We know a fair amount about how the Lunar Way adjusted after the shock of Sheng. (Some might even say this is when the empire lost its sanity.) However, sources are currently silent on the other side of the steppe. How is the Godunya system different today from where it was before nomad pressure drew resources and attention away from other agendas? Were any long-term projects aborted or changed? Is he not going to make certain cosmic deadlines as easily? Or maybe they say all of this wasn't even a distraction but part of the imperial process, whatever they have instead of Wanes. Maybe that's true and maybe it isn't, but even that would tell us a lot about how they construct the imperial cycle . . . who is essential (a lot of important people were either slaughtered or converted and would need to be replaced or rehabilitated), how their jobs are reallocated or discarded, what changes. How the spiritual journey of the emperor twists or remains on track despite obstacles. We didn't even know that Sheng had eastern ambitions until relatively recently (post-KOS, the '90s) so I suspect this was a hugely traumatic event for them. One of the things that's interesting is that in the Guide where Sheng comes up as an interruption (p. 54) it's practically an aside compared to the NDR centuries previous. They might even consider it a new GL phenomenon to the extent to which they like to think about it at all . . . a different regime would focus on the more recent threat as scapegoat and consider all foreigners dangerous failed mystics, for example. Some regimes will talk about anything except what actually scares them. Also unlike Peloria and Saird, there are zero pockets of Godunyan resistance on the 1450 map to rebuild from after the occupation ends. Nomad orange goes all the way up through Eristiland, across the dragonewt islands and down to the jungle's edge. Maybe that's because their reconstruction was more a "state of mind" but maybe it's because submission was total. Whoever is Godunya there now may not have a lot of continuity with the old one. "Godunya" may be more a term of dynastic art over there, the person who emerges from nowhere and leads them through the fire. Either way, they're still bothered by God Learnerism over there even though they never got the catharsis of outwitting Sheng on their own. Barbarians did it for us, nothing to see or notice here. Nothing really happened. Let's go back to old Warren Zevon songs and what could be construed as our spiritual theme park, carnival of the soul, our splendid isolation. Our "bardo." You fight. We don't win or lose.

While I'm deliberately resisting my Unified Conspiracy Field Theory of western historiography here (for one thing, no time to set it out in an invulnerable or even comprehensible argument) or commenting in depth, three early details here about the blue man. First, a cryptic but insistent statement that every time the Vadelites were defeated, their bodies were transported back to him in the tower for "storage." Make of that what you will, book-binding enthusiasts. This is probably from late 1966 or early 1967. Second, a note that in around 1981 he is equated with the theistic Ginna Jar for what that's worth. His role in their ideology evolves in the texts, sometimes blurring Malkion and other figures. This may not be an accident. Finally, when hunting the damn Adventurism quote, this turned up in the old Jonstown Compendium back in the Companion (1983): I met a man named Xeotam and he appeared to be quite insane. He babbled stories of great imagination. He claimed to have been held captive for 424 days in a crystal tower while all about him flashed the secrets of the world within great slabs of diamond. A voice within his head rambled at great length about al subjects, from the why and wherefore of dragons to the reason of the sky bowl. The voice called itself Azabur [. . .] a Wyrms Friends document that also mentioned an Azabur. Supposedly he was a wizard from the west of great power who . . . Compare to the White Wizard missionary who recites "Zzabur Says" in RM as though he was actually the sorcerer supreme himself. Maybe he is, from a certain point of view, and azabur is a sort of telepathic virus or initiatic entity, a kind of ginna jar.

I spent a little time overnight rehearsing the evolution of the Vadel blood libel and was pleased to see you guys bending Sandy's ear a full quarter century ago. Good times. They're unequivocally Big Bad now in the early Hero Wars era, "insidious and perverse." This is a rare thing in Glorantha but Greg didn't always resist the absolute moral judgement of history. Sometimes peoples make bad choices. Sometimes the choice gets made for them. That's how their wyrd works. Rewind to the mid-to-late-'60s and the "Land of Brithela" fragment that makes it into RM (25) is probably one of the earliest extant references. At this point in Greg's development the Vadelites are no worse than any other pagans in a world where (ironically given real-world parallels) one tribe has divine dispensation on its side. They're jealous of Malkion and make his life unpleasant, all of which he bears with serene aplomb until leading a slave revolt and killing the only Vadelite "king" I can find. After this, the culture disintegrates into the three nations we know, each with their color and elemental origin. These nations are then progressively decimated as the example of Zabur is invoked again and again to first sink Vadeli terrritories and then preserve the Brithinite realm when Gata Herself turns hostile and orders Britha to roll. We now know, of course, that the people or at least an ethos named for them regenerates within Time. By the late '60s, Greg has made it to the reign of Bertalor and there's an extended eyewitness account of a visit to both Brithos and an island we might call Vadelos. The Brithinites of this era "treat all foreigners like slaves or enemies . . . straw-headed weaklings, a fearful people." On the other island, "foreigners were treated with friendship and kindness as long as they honored the customs." The story they tell is that the Brithinites "broke them and slew them like cattle," but we can all carry a grudge. I see scattered references through the Chaosium era into the Genertela Box but nothing substantial or particularly damning. In the roughly contemporaneous Missing Lands material, they're largely history's victims (although someone can still read whatever they want into the text). "The Vadeli Smile" is an account of weird magic, more eldritch than blasphemous. They actually hug in that. Genertela Box is '88. By '94, Sandy is vacillating on the Digest on how bad they are or whether they're just misunderstood "Samaritans" in opposition to the main line of tribal transmission. It catches the fandom's attention. Before you know it, people are mapping the castes onto various perversions of bodily fluids. The resurgence of the Blue is Too Awful. As we ramp up to the compilation of Revealed Mythology (1999-2000), Greg is far more nuanced in his myth making and we get the Tribes of Danmalastan, Vadel as fallen founder and so forth. I think this is completely new information to all but the perfecti. I know it was to me at the time. People can trust the narrative voice all they like (YGWV) but I am convinced that most of it is a lie in the way the Fortunate Succession or any of the other early Unfinished Works is a lie: in its deliberate lapses and contradictions it tells us another kind of truth. It generates adventure ideas. But what does it tell us about the modern Vadelist ethos in their own words or even how they might have changed through history? Nada. It comes from outside. Someone benefits from presenting the material in this way. Someone else might lose. One thing we know about various phases of Western magic is that they are world-class demonizers. They have a knack for making anyone they don't like into monsters. So maybe it worked, who knows. Then in the deep background material written for Mongoose (2005-6) and incorporated into MSE, I think we see "Vadel" in full Faust mode for the first time. This is an explicitly Gloranthan document compiled from sources like "Old Freedom: A History of Jrustela's Golden Age" in the early 10th century. We could dwell on the nuances but I would hate to complicate things. Before you know it, we're here again and it's the Hero Wars. Can the West Be One? All of this is incredibly complicated and arcane. New readers have historically had a hard time even grasping the ideal types of caste practice (EVERYONE KNOWS THESE LIES) across various modern sects without getting slapped for their effort. They're just here for some adventures. Most will never realize that it's also a moving historical target under the weight of everyone's agendas, aspirations and magical catastrophe. That's okay. I personally do not want any synods or councils to haggle out a creed. I just want to ride a horse made of thought across a landscape of time. And also to keep the blue man from sinking any more coast but that's another story. The story I always heard is that when you ask an aghora if he does all the skull stuff and so forth he always laughs and says "oh no, you want the guy who lives on the next ash pit, I'm normal!" So you go to that guy and he says the same thing. Whereby may hang some sort of parable.

It would be if that were my argument! I'm saying the blue gentleman who lives in the Tower is a follower of Vadel who has taken his place and wears him like a mask. I see him lying all the time. Our Gloranthas Will Vary however.

Great to see you so active lately! For me he's complicated by the "bad things come to Pamaltela from the north" theory where he goes away and sends spirits and monsters back. That sounds like a cult that either collaborates with foreign forces or gets coopted. Of course there can be many Bolongo . . . there's also "his best known tale" of taking over the Artmali Empire through parody where foreigners are intimately involved. (Whirlwind people? Keraun's people or someone else?) Sociologically of course the mask is a very useful technology for expressing impulses that otherwise don't fit into the structure and one's everyday role. This is how you break taboo and skirt the consequences. In the Arbennan system, that's explicitly the flayed Bolongo face that presumably anyone can put on at any time and become someone new. More generally all the esiti must have their sacred costumes that differentiate the dancer into the god . . . figuring out the principle through which that operates is heavy magic as the Garangordites discovered. To pick a mask from the ancient gallery, as it were, allows the magician to transgress with something like impunity. After all, you can theoretically always take the mask off and then it gets blamed. Flaying also happens to be a key zzaburist trope as a colleague would say. He is mask maker extraordinaire, only he binds faces together and calls them his books. I find this most useful when inverted: is it possible someone we know has been wearing "zzabur" like a mask for a long time now? And in that case, can we trust anything he tells us about how awful this other people he calls the "vadeli" really are or were? Somebody invaded the south and ran amok in Brithos. IMG the rest may not be straightforward. In terms of the canon I'm not sure when or even if the original Vadelites received the Law. In the paracanonical Dawn Age, Hrestol comes to teach the matriarchal people of the islands it's possible to transgress and survive but somewhere between then and now they seem to have evolved. For one thing, there's no room for a "Vadel" in these stories unless Vadela has gone through changes of her own. She had many husbands but none named like her. So who, I wonder, is the "Vadel" who shows up in RM?

Oh yeah. Just quoting my Totem & Taboo.

More THOUGHTS later but negotiating these symbolically necessary but unspeakable relationships may be how the imperial mask system evolved in the first place. The people come and go and the relationships get complicated. The eternal drama persists. Something similar in Pamaltela for Bolongo, whether he was introduced or promulgated there as a useful technology for exploitation.

Suddenly 沙悟浄 makes a lot more sense. We are probably all profoundly flawed companions of 唐三藏, piggy people born in a bad place. Could be worse though, could be Damon Albarn's version although that one is catchy. With two of the Four Great Masterpieces on the board now, what kinds of texts would a modern Kralor canon need to include? Has this changed Since Time? Is there, for example, a Scroll of Vith or however they represent the age before the flood?

Are some "solar" though? Or are some things we call "solar" now part of them? Starting with their persistence seems a natural way to go. Separately I forgot about this.

I still think the "born in an egg" thing with them is libel, a downright canard. But while the women may pack their bras to conform to a human standard of va-va-voom, I don't know what they look like with their clothes off and don't push. They think they look great and seem to have no trouble attracting the ganders.

Great point. I keep forgetting how seminal Uz Lore is but it also contains the dual devils and various exotic Moorcock-sounding entities like Arrquong so we're back to a pre-Warhammer origin or at least parallel development. Is that the same slime event as Boztakang's Victory west of the Blue Moon Plateau? Looking at that map, the secondary invasion moving up from the vicinity of the Vadeli Kingdoms in the south seems to be Kajabor. In that model, Jraktal meets Pocharngo in the wreckage of the Great Victory when those two chaos gods fight each other. Also when ZZ pulverizes "Krjalk" here into millions of pieces, is this the troll story of the origin of gorp? Porchango becomes identified with the Gorpgod of Halikiv, one of the closest troll strongholds in the area.

IMG

I am letting go of pre-troll Halikiv . . . whatever role they played before the Genertela Box might be inherited elsewhere. Talsard makes a fine place for the expanding Council to encounter independent 3EB metallurgy. I can see that as a trigger for global dwarf leadership's complete meltdown around this period. I say so! His volume of the epic of the West is called "The Vadeli Trader" and everything. Until recently I've never had more than a minute to confirm the contents but it is rocking my socks right now with ach, drastic resolutions between all the peoples of the northern ocean. ("It was then that I learned the children of the sea are the cousins of the Brithini, just as I am of the bears.") Aignor is definitely of the people of Vadela because they're a matrilineal [sic, come at me] culture and while the Judges apparently recognize descent on the male line, he comes to Seshnela steeped in their ways. He seems like a good guy, which makes me think somewhere since then the weight of zzaburist propaganda turned.

Too Awful To Even Think About so yeah, I think it must be true.

Too late for that! Like many, I always assumed the ideas flowed from RuneQuest to Warhammer with things like goatmen but now that you've got me looking at it, I wonder if parts of Pocharngo came the other way. The earliest I can find him in print is the Gods box (1985) while when I consult the grogs I learn that Nurgle is extant by early 1983. The stray "old world" detail with Porcharngo is just idiosyncratic enough that it might be a comment on what Chaosium's former partners were doing with their more explicitly horror-comic-and-Moorcock material. Someone with the drive to ponder a stack of White Dwarf could probably pinpoint the moment Pocharngo emerges. As for us, it's interesting how the Malkionite West as crapsack "medieval" game environment with "chaos" seeping through the cracks seems to emerge in response to that other one. I wonder if in some undocumented but tense Avalon Hill meeting someone demanded to "do it that way." We should ask Sandy. It would definitely clarify the arcane "two devils, one moral and one more cosmological" formula that emerges around this time. When Glorantha with its moral devil encountered Khorne and company, two visions of chaos contended. Of course for us it's less interesting than where cosmic orphans like Pocharngo and Kajabor go once they arrive. Nowadays Kajabor sounds more like a dwarf concept (thermodynamic failure or for them, the ultimate evil) possibly attached to a word that looks like it could derive from Vithelan origin. Pocharngo, on the other hand, sometimes followed Jraktal The Tap onto the Pamaltelan mythological landscape. They make a good team, the ultimate failure of matter to remain organized and the force that drains energy from the cosmic system for personal gain. Makes me wonder if what we now call Porcharngo was originally a Vadelist invention for the exploitation of the south . . . they might have concocted an entire array of 4-5 "chaos gods" for that purpose, Seseine being an obvious idea. A Pamaltela occasionally troubled by slime, awful growths, mutation, charnjibbers and worse. The Chaos Feature Table is different, intellectual property of Chaosium. This is something more crude.

I remember that too but no luck yet. Starting to think it was a lore auction. It's funny, Adventurism shows up with no context in the Malkioni Glossary and then they almost run with it as a formal GL ethos in the Second Age books but it just doesn't get any traction. I think it's amazing personally and would like to see more of it as the Hero Wars spawn Adventurers. Arkatism?

Also the Central Valley would naturally flood and we have the Suam Chow today, it being the '70s and all.

The alternative is Too Awful To Contemplate, isn't it? What the thunder initially told me was that CRALO was simply horizontally flipped and then wedged on the far end of the Wastes when he wanted a place to put that idyllic narrow strip of mountain-bounded coastline. That's where he met the in-laws and encountered their food. But you're right, once it was there the rest of the coast would have traced in around it. I keep getting a weird parallax . . . most of the time SEATAC maps onto Fethlon and Inherent Vice is up north, but some of the details do their own vertical flip in order to hide the serial numbers. (Sadly I have not seen a pre-1978 map positioning Kralorela and don't know if one exists.) I guess it depends on how Aztec you want the Black Sun to be and whether that's problematic. It's funny because pondering this also cements the old wisdom that the People's Republic of Loskalm maps onto the Bay Area so there's a right-side-up California on the left coast as well. In this model SEATAC is clearly SOG and L.A. met its Edgar Cayce fate. Then there's the third California hidden right there in plain sight, "CARO FINELA" or "KALIFORNEE." Center of the world, sacred mountain, where all the action is.