scott-martin

You know what? Flip Genertela or flip North America and I just realized what that skinny coastal strip on the far side of the Sierra Nevada really is. Top post of the month!

One approach might be to treat some of the words we have now as lousy transliterations from Vithelan to Western script, where the pronunciations got garbled and the names became what some would consider goofy. Other "errors" might have been deliberately introduced to consolidate the NDR within the yanoorite language while making it difficult for rival imperial predators to gain access. Then when the belt buckle man overthrows them he institutes his own linguistic reforms to make sure they don't come back, further confusing the historical record. So call things there what you want . . . what is sticky will stick. The rest is like a dream experience, here and then gone.

The trolls are here to seal the room with lead. I see that actinium glows blue and nasty in the dark like some apparently mutagenic forms of moon rock, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Proto-Carmania, Pelanda. The 3EB emissary in BCG seems to have shown up fairly recently as of 355: "a newcomer to Dorastor, the first of the Third Eye Blue peoples [sic] to come to the Council." Apparently world famous in central and western Peloria, almost a Gonn Orta type or incarnation of some metal-working figure from the Entekosiad. Might also be where the old human metallurgist culture went when Halikiv was revised to become a troll region. Where does 3EB appear in the Genertela box, if anywhere? Would be good to compare. Then the very expensive divination starts to unfold: I'm not thinking any Blue Moon (or Red Planet) reflected in Boltror's line is a native Seshnelan influence so much as a foreign import brought carried from his mysterious wife and then transmitted to the kids, ultimately producing An[n]il[l]a and the final incestuous end of the Serpent King system. From there, the winners would have twisted or suppressed accounts of the House of Aignor (not sure what color Vadeli he was, either . . . "trader" but also "judge," although there are no yellows), possibly feeding into the febrile fragments of Thorloss the Scribe. In this view the rule of the Aignorids would have been Too Awful To Think About. Which maybe it was.

The Council of Friends evidently first encountered 3EB somewhere around "central and western Peloria," so that points to a Carmanian connection for at least one branch. (There may be several.) Apple Lane is either a silly place or practically a short world in its own right, which adds up to the same thing in the end. Cracked Blue Moon Divination of the Day (a whopping 11 rune points sacrificed and spent): Thinking the eastern lore crawling around the house of Aignor includes worship of the planet twins (possibly including dynastic incest) so that's how that piece "lands" in the far west. Anilla [Annila in variant texts] didn't get that name for no reason. Much of the familiar account in Troll Gods may actually be a misrepresentation / screen memory of her cult teaching, later mostly buried as "atrocity." What this means for the Tarshite twins cult I don't know.

This probably gets too complicated for the RuneQuest forum but I suspect that the suppression of the menenas as co-equal caste prompted the dudes to allocate the female role across all the caste daughters, with talars as "princesses" or objects of dynastic desire while peasants and others default to "earth witch" within the Serpent King system. Of course a princess could become a witch too, although I'm not convinced they had (or cared about) sorcery . . . warrior women and sorcerer women never seem to get a lot of traction, forcing their dudes to marry outside. There is evidence that at least sometimes a woman with no living male relatives could take over a talar title but this might be an aberration of the wild and crazy Damolstens and she was a badass besides, probably a man-of-all as it were. (Hrestol's gospel to the menenas is unrecorded.) Betria / Bertia is intriguing in her absence . . . the page that would ordinarily describe her rule is tantalizingly blank as though the details have been expunged. Even more tantalizing, Greg seems to waver on whether this figure was a woman or a man, reigning as queen or king. S/he might have been magically unusual or simply adopted masculine regalia to mollify reactionaries. Then you get Anilla (Betria's daughter in variant sources and not her sister as is now commonly believed) as full-blown Serpent Queen and after her, the reactionaries would rather end a dynasty than let a woman rule. If I were doing Betria's story she'd be the Akhenaten of Seshnela, transcendentally transgressive and loaded to the gills with prophecy. The quest of putting menena back together probably works something like remembering the moon goddess to herself, reuniting all the lost portions. Somewhere in the Hero Wars there are probably witches and allies working on this even as we speak.

God, what if they tried something similar vis-a-vis each other once upon a time? Rock loving plants and plant loving rocks, each with an ulterior agenda.

I hear you. For what it's worth, the king and warlord of Loskalm are officially "complicated" now so it gets better as we learn more about who these people really are behind their stat blocks. And YGMV: I've been known to argue that Hrestol and his good chum Faralz blurred the platonic line while for most real-world purposes IMG Gringle and Quackjohn of Apple Lane are functionally married, which might break representational ground in multiple directions at once. There are endless others. When our friend Gunda broke the queen's back I always assumed it was in bed. As for eunuch-only priesthoods, Maran Gor has that and who knows what the zzaburists get up to?

Sounds a little like Cantonese. I forget where they talk like that. I don't think it's Hamburg but . . .

It's an interesting question. One of the things the recent tour through archaic sources taught me is how little we really know about the north . . . the Guide says Orlanthi settled the upper Janube but systematic Lightbringer Missions in the region seem to have stopped at Talsard. After that point, the council program changed and they would have spread Loko Moko instead. Maybe Harmast set them straight when he was in the area but missed a few tribes.

I would say something maybe a little more perverse than normal linguistics is required. Every Gloranthan homeland needs a set of fantasy-fake linguistic conventions that some fans can aspire to master (like your Klingon example or the quenya I know for a fact Greg's contemporaries used as a flirting language in their day) . . . but distinct enough from what's evolved for Western Genertela so (a) we can learn to recognize where a word, person or concept may "come from" in our hobby landscape (b) real-world game translators can communicate this outside assumed patterns of English usage. This is of course harder and more fun than it looks. I was, for example, delighted as a child to see the Creekstream River because it breaks formal English usage. It's a joke less sophisticated than Not-Yet, practically cradle language. Among other things, it's a call to relax, play, set adult naming conventions aside. To a casual observer, it looks either cloying or like ludicrous word salad. But Dragon Pass and Prax are special in a lot of ways because they developed differently across Greg's career from the Far West that came before them (fake Greek and Vedic to my ear, largely untranslated because those were simply the names of the people and places) and the wide world that followed. Dragon Pass started as a landscape in translation, with English components bolted together and manipulated to express the relatively simple archetypal natures he wanted to express at the time. The people tend to have the "fantasy" names and that's another digression in itself. As a result, places in Prax are still called things like "Copper Sands" and named after his friends and not "T’iis Názbąs" or whatever. Then the world grows. It's still growing, we feed it and it grows. Everyone reading this. Some places got a lot of love and others for whatever reason got left out. We don't have to accept that. Chaosium is super busy and it's convention season but make them a smart, sassy, dazzling and commercial pitch. Maybe they've been waiting for you. What's striking in the earliest Eastern material (as fragmentary as it is, maybe 50 pages that I've seen) is how "square" or philological it still is. As we know Greg could get up to a lot of trouble as a youth but he came from a military background in Connecticut and went to a conventional liberal arts college to raid the library for scribbling material. The primary sources are tomes by people like Max Müller and then Heinrich Zimmer, with Joseph Campbell already hot stuff. It is, as you point out, mostly India. That's great, Seshnela can work like Mohenjo Daro. Ancient China gets relatively short shrift in this literature but you can find a lot in places like Campbell's now-unfortunately-named Oriental Mythology, which had just come out a few years before Greg started getting busy. It's okay. I think Campbell reads less Chinese than I do. He makes immediate effort to ground it in contemporary currents in Taiwanese archaeology but it all still feels pretty Max Müller. To the extent to which Greg would have had a "Cathay" at this time let alone a 中国 this would be it. Start there if you want to start there and work your way back to here. But here's the thing: I don't see any sign that archaic Kralor is anything like a "Cathay" yet. Teshnon might not even be a "Vietnam" yet. That seems to come later, well after the era when he's gotten himself in-laws from Hong Kong and they're teaching him that soy is not actually a miracle condiment, not to mention the secret origins of all the stuff he sees in the comic books. Some of that, garbled and always in translation, feeds the world of the Genertela Box and enters the canon like knights in heavy plate crossing themselves with the Death Rune before riding to battle. It's a start. We work with it. I've been to enough dinners where a young lady's father will express his fascination with the 心經 heart sutra or whatever and I, the quintessential WASP roommate, am all "that's super interesting Mr Lin." I suppose we all have, one way or another. One thing I would love is that exasperated but patient father-in-law's vision of a Gloranthan East, how it would play out and interact with everyone else, where the pulp childhood thrills of hazily recalled newspaper action serials go. Maybe someone here will do that. I'll buy one. After a night's sleep I suspect that you're right and it's the Taktarists who died out / got assimilated. They might've had all the hu-metal as well, which would let early Kralor leapfrog into some iron applications (or just take over the Forts, etc.) before getting stuck. When the Seshnegites showed up their eyes bugged out with avarice to see all the metal on display but sadly there weren't any extant mines left. I also suspect Diamond Mountain has gotten (or stayed) far weirder and more glorious than even the occasional fan has theorized over the years. The Hero Wars will provide.

That's intense. I can never remember where the extinct colonies are . . . is this the only one? I'd never put it together before how there are Stone Beings under Taktari living in Walalash as well as Metal Beings under Babadi. Strikes me that one caste complex or the other was wiped out / assimilated and the other became Diamond Mountain. (Heen is almost certainly a totally different problem.)

Hmmm!

Handing out trophies on all sides because this thread is basically heroquesting and the process might take us somewhere great depending on how people identify with the material (are "we all" this "us?" can we be? should we be?) and the humility, respect & compassion it entails. The place I personally would start is a throwaway line in the Guide: At one time there were more than fifteen different languages spoken in Kralorela, but Emperor Vayobi standardized a new speech What were these languages and who spoke them at the Eastern Dawn, which almost sounds redundant somewhere?

Now that you mention it, the earliest Kralor material I've encountered predates Greg's immersion in immigrant communities and doesn't incorporate any of the "Chinese" placeholder material of the Genertela Box at all. It's definitely a self-consciously colonial situation (a version of Eest is there from the beginning) but there's no obvious earthly referent: just local people interrupted by Seshnegi ambition, maybe the tiniest opiated blur more directly reminiscent of a Dunsany (himself apparently emulating Japan) or maybe Saki if you blink. Definitely an opportunity to explore that early realm of totemic empires before advancing the timeline back up through the Genertela Box and beyond. P.S. I forgot David has Eagle Lords of Yu Ah in there. I love that!

The last day of the Garhound contest is always Ladies Choice for a good reason!

Coincidentally she gets the weather she thinks she wants at the time!

This is already one of my favorite games of the year. Please keep us posted! Genertela Box rules would have been 1/10 crossover (Manirian Theyalan to Pelorian Theyalan), which feels a little crippling unless people revert to Trade. Your number feels more playable for exiles . . . you can argue extenuating circumstances from the migration of the Second Council bringing their vocabulary, writing systems and so on. Maybe Heortling became something like medieval Latin or Old Church Slavonic up there, once used by the foreign elites who colonized nearby Dorastor and surviving in ceremonial contexts while the vulgate does the job for everyday locals. I think Talastar has IFWW now. Whatever their original survival story looked like is probably something your game will discover. Probably something to do with spiders.

Love it. Yelm is a healing god so a few short poems Greg commissioned once just emerged and might be a decent fit for you and a great private in-joke or reference: How we choose to move away from the heavy core to the light is all in Thanks and What is spun between us and sun is named light and felt as what living is: built all in bright and let on to our position is constant beauty.

The Free Men of the Sea could have done it on their own if first contact happened in the half century between Taniens Victory and the New Dragon Ring conquest (718-768). I don't mind camellia sinensis jrustelii originally being imported to Kralorela by foreign pantomime "mandarins" as almost a subversion of the imperialist trope . . . maybe David will weigh in on his next orbit. On the other hand, the East could have sourced it themselves well before that, although in that scenario it's curious why we find no reference in the East Isles as yet. Maybe a tea dryad from the Errinoru World Tour entourage got left with the Fethlon for some reason and it spread from there. I'm not 100% convinced camellia sinensis jrustelii and camellia sinensis kralor are even the same plant or have the same effects. Kralorelan "tea" may be a broad category of boiled plant matter extracts, some of which make you sleepy, produce visions, soothe the stomach, support the libido and so on. The Guide is ambiguous. Caffeinated gardeners in Old Seshnela a must. My belief on runners is that they do not personally reproduce sexually or otherwise but are a perpetually juvenile and self-replenishing resource the forest uses in its own reproductive process . . . sort of a signifier of plant love at work. When you see runners gathering the forest is expressing itself. Elves reproduce. Runners "are" the reproductive organ or at least a metaphor the forest supports. This is why they get so angry when you harvest their runners for the exotic pet trade and why, he drawled as though knowledgeably, Voria and Voriof figure in more civilized agrarian cults, no longer children of the forest but children of the field. They aren't participants in the actual rites but their presence points to older green worlds.

"Inorganic dirt is expelled," according to Thorloss the Scribbler's contribution to TROLLPAK. This seems to still have enough nutritional value to keep a trollkin alive but unhappy, but after that point it's probably leeched completely free of organic compounds. IMG it smells like pool purification tablets and makes aldryami high from the nitrogen rush.

I smell a trade route!!

Got to have a place to put all these reminiscences of murdering god.

even the blue man has something like nightmares

PART TWO I got to pull that one down again this evening and it's interesting how little overlap there is with the Roots of Glorantha series. The Enerali descriptions, for example, start out recapitulating the old material but the technological / religious revolution that created the Galaninites is new. Seshnela in that period was busy consolidating Tanisor so if Greg knew or cared what was going on farther north, the narrative doesn't give him an opportunity to say. The early Seshnegites never pushed inland beyond Vustria and seem ignorant of anything beyond Wenelia along the southern coast so most of the Lands of the Council never enter into this layer of the text. There are scattered references to Srvuela on the other side of Kartolin where Gbaji has his power base but the point of view doesn't really encourage detailed description -- ironic, given your observation earlier that later development would focus almost exclusively on regions that contributed to the God Project. Much of it builds more directly on the Genertela box. Halikiv will never be a nation of human metal workers again . . . we have trolls now, they can be trolls. I don't recall an earlier reference to Hrelar Amali so the whole thrust of the Dangim and the Dari changes. The entirety of the Nysalor story now derives from the Cults of Terror version . . . the extant texts focus on Argat and if Greg gave much thought to Gbaji's origins beyond "bad god causes trouble" those pages are regrettably lost. I don't even recall seeing the name of any of the countries Argat devastates along the way. They are full of Kolati and Sunchen though. And endless waves of Krjalki. The most interesting new material in the BCG seems to be the development of Ormsland into the "Serpent Beasts" zone showing up on the Guide maps at the Dawn. The notion of this being a "reptile hsunchen" ecosystem that later gets organized under Gita Flatsnout is pretty amazing. I also suspect the motives of everyone who signed off on planting a dragonewt colony there. While the Genertela Box showed us the dragonewts, the dynamics around hsunchen/newt interactions probably prefigure EWF in a lot of ways. I'm not sure Arkat killed all the hsunchen. Maybe some laid eggs or took flight. Later on the Serpent Beasts had always been there. And so it goes!