scott-martin

Last bit from me tonight because I am literally all out of reacts, but postulations like these are liable to get us both roasted sooner or later. I love it. Bracketing potential typographical errors in Revealed Mythologies, the Waertagites are perplexing for many reasons, of which their relationships to other triolini nations and the wareran race are not the smallest. "Each of the Major Tribes has their own Origin of Malkion the Founder story, of which the Aerlit/Warera myth is one. This one even sounds like it could be the Waertagi story." Page 25 is a swipe from the Book of Foreigners so is very old.

This is cool. The cryptic line in the Malkioni Glossary is that Hrestol originally worshipped Malkion(2) in the form of Malkion "the Founder." Of course this is also the text that notes that it was Waertag who Aerlit and Warera produced, contradicting other versions in which the Waertagites are either children of Malkion by yet another mother or an entirely separate tribe. So its accuracy is slippery. The most extensive list of Wives of Malkion that I have seen has Phlia Tilnta, Elela Triolina and Yena Wambla, mother of Menena. At least one version shows Phila as mother of the Horalites where Elela may be mother of Waertag, the original warrior brother Gwymir and the three other caste fathers we know about. So no ENGR there . . . but what had been preying on me is that some people in the genealogies are denoted "Engrion," which is the experimental caste-sharing council an early king of Brithela set up after seeing the derring-do the Seshnelans could get up to. (The next page, tantalizingly labeled "The Rebellion of Kaldes," is blank.) However, going back a bit reveals that "It happened that in Seshnela after the Dawning, Duke Froalar married the Goddess of that land and became king. Through new laws from Malkion, who they called Engr, they had destroyed the castes and formed a single one called Engroni (knights)." So there we have that. Before Malkion in Seshnela they called him ENGR, which may well be the name they knew in the north. Maybe they were all ENGRovalini in those days, except the ones who weren't.

Thanks. I think the hurdle I had with your initial "The Loskalmi love Malkion" outside a historical perspective is the statement that "To the worshippers of Irensavel, Malkion was the evil and corrupt demiurge whose purpose was to keep people in the gross and bloated clutches of the material world." The cryptic 2007 observation that "Loskalmi are not Malkioni" is also in the background. We out here would call the NHI a "Malkionist" philosophy because that's what the burden of the publishing tells us. I simply wonder whether the people of modern NHI Loskalm would call themselves "Malkioni" and identify with a name they associate with their particular devil. My suspicion is that the name came with the Return to Rightness, but in that scenario Nenanduft and Isefwal would have known him by another name. Or if they knew him as Malkion, they would have needed to discover his demiurgic identity within a particular historical context. Maybe they were the people who knew him as ENGR, although my current thought is that this is a private name used among the Waertagites and only occasionally shared with their land children or cousins. Or maybe they're the ones who use the Kiona / Ordelvis terminology, although I doubt that too. That feels more like an island taxonomy. Maybe Hrestol brought Irensaval and/or Malkion to the north under those names. That's interesting too. Would love to know more.

Thanks! So as far as the original question goes, Malkion(eran) was loved in Loskalm by that name as of year ____ ST?

Ridgely uses EMI (Orchestral) as the devil card in her sonic tarot for a reason! This is a great point. Sometimes Charlie was running the west so this may be his fault, the diabolical triton(e).

(with apologies to St Johnny of Lydon . . . or is that Sâr or Sri Johnny since he ain't dead yet?) Trying to pin down exactly when "Malkion" becomes the name of the Invisible God in various regions of the western diaspora I come up against the mysterious ENGR again as an archaic local cognonym, epithet or failed anagram. Who recognized him as ancestor by that name? What does that tell us about the true + secret history of the west? I have my thoughts but talk too much and they lead to places that get me roasted for blasphemy.

It's a good question. I suspect this will ultimately make Library Use a really cool and closely guarded skill.

That thread got a little complicated, doesn't it? Listen hard enough you can hear at least one heart crack. Innerworlder2000, if you see this, I want to hear about that game of yours! I wrote a long dull thing on how the north can be a stronghold of Hrestolism while rejecting Malkion even though Hrestol is a historical response to pre-Dawn "Malkionist" thought . . . but suspect everyone here can figure it out. The history of the west is one of perpetually failed reform, efforts to get back to an origin that may never even have existed at this point. Then I wrote a shorter weird thing on how the north was more receptive to Gbaji philosophy and the purges were less strict, with traces ultimately incubating there before finding their way back to Spol as part of Irensaval, the resistance ideology turned invasive creed. But it was too weird. It's interesting how Syranthir wasn't the only heretic fleeing the Kionavaran conversions . . . "many virtuous Loskalmi went into exile." Where did they go? Probably a lot went south and married into Safelstran families, bringing their philosophical traditions with them. More probably went up river and started cities. I currently slur the old "Sir" as "Sri" because "Sifu" didn't really cut it. People hear what they need and we all get on with it. The horses in their "chivalry" probably derive from later Eneralite conversions and this is probably one of Sri Ethilrist's most arcane secrets. But I do think the Bailifids are caste transgressors. They're really a horalite warlord family who stepped into a vacuum and coveted a crown they can only fathom as another kind of projectile weapon. This throws off their entire structure and their magicians will always lose. Then I think about the Saints of the Great Trek and think I know where the last real talars left alive in the imperial heartland went. So that's nice.

At least three would look mighty smart together. Suddenly the ghost of Eliade's 16-book Encyclopedia of Religion skittered across one of the back shelves and the shelf fell down. 100 is a good number!

For fun I'd run scroll creation as a portable training relationship so the real benefit of the "magic" here is that the instructor is always more highly skilled than you are, the skill increases can be accelerated far beyond 1D6-1 per season and presumably they overcome the 75% training limit. At a minimum someone would need to succeed in Read/Write and the skill(s) transmitted in order to "load" the document. If you're feeling generous, the writer can pass on one season of training (1D6-1) in one skill per season of whatever sages do when they say they're working. If you're feeling mean, it's a special success or even resisted. Uncle Ken would be happy if the process is extended so you roll every season to add skill gain. If you want to transmit +20% it can take at least a year. Failure probably doesn't ruin previous work but maybe a fumble introduces errors that reduce the net benefit of the finished work. (Many documents in Jonstown etc. are worse than useless, having been penned by idiots. Reading them will confuse you and take skill points away.) For real magic I'd say you need at least one special or critical success to "set" the skill points and make them transferrable. If you're feeling mean, there are also HeroQuest implications. Literacy endangers the integrity of Glorantha because in theory an adventuring party or even an entire community could all chip in on a book and pass it around until everyone gets the benefit. When you imbue a document (or mural or symphony or whatever) you are basically creating a conduit through which the community can bask in your awesomeness and everyone can get a few points better. However intellectual HeroQuests ("text adventures") are often boring so I'd only dwell on that part if the players show a strong interest. One thing that you can probably do is go around and interview people who are actually good at what they do, preserving their expertise in a form that other people can use. Even the biggest LM nebbish can do this, although it's dangerous out there where the people are and they might catch a bad case of neck beard (technical knowledge temple term, I swear) or even a suntan. The outside expert doesn't even need to know how to read. Just hang out with the person, ask the right questions, get it all down. Roll high on the Write roll and you captured it. I think the real costs are social (writing it down risks Knowledge Theft) and economic. Open a dojo and you can capture 10L per newbie per season. Write it down and you disrupt that sweet gig . . . IMG even "magic" books can be reproduced on the right Write roll. Some may be encoded or otherwise witchy to defeat easy attempts (resisted roll) but break the encryption and you can flood the world with pamphlets. The encryption and surrounding enchantments on really heavy grimoires are probably where most of the magic burn happens. In a way this functions as the beards' limited and incompetent version of Spell Trading. Oh, one more thing: bards, scalds and weirdos can load Passions in their stuff, whether they call it poetry, drama, "fiction" or whatever. Beware!

I haven't collected a lot of Talor apocrypha because even the surviving "Argat" material (a lot has evidently truly been lost or at least misfiled) tends to turn right beyond Kartolin and so Akem stays on the periphery until much later. This means much of their Old Religion is sadly unknown to me at least, especially because Talor's marital dealings with the earth priestesses and "Oracle of Ehilm" seem to be focused down in Ralios. However what we see is that the Gbajites take over Nenanduft and a city called Alorket and introduce "new gods." The only one I can recall seeing is "Volkas," lord of a special hell for warriors. Good people in this time and place stick with the ancestral deities Tawar and Enjorel. These people ride bulls and call themselves the Losk-Alim. They plunder everything, including Ise[l]fwal. It's a confusing time. Mostalites (a/k/a "Grey Ones") are shooting at everybody, some rogue Telmorites switch sides and fight the krjalki from Srvuela. "Kolati" get involved. (Worshipped as "Coalot" in the south.) For fans of island lore Talor is interesting because some people insist that he's literally Argat's son and Gerlant's little brother, come over with dad to raise ruckus on the mainland. Their mother is an elf. Grandpa is still some shadowy god of war. Talor does laugh all the time.

I hear you. I'd excerpt more but the book curses on these are severe. I hope one day it can all be available in handsome and annotated Unfinished Tales trade dress. What I can do here is synopsize the Talor side as well since he gets a few pages in the Book of Gbaji. The moons up in the far northwest probably factor into Arrolian occultism and maybe even spawned pilgrimages from the Heartland back in the day. Still a lot we don't know about their way. Might be part of why they were so eager to get the Janube open. Always happy to meet another Tolat.

The man gets his own Saga that runs about 110-120 pages in some versions. I think the salient points are that he works with our friend Halwal to drive out the last vestiges of "Seshnegite" occupation (whatever that means in the terminal second age) and that he achieves a kind of totemic epiphany among what is by that point a relatively settled Rathorite nation. (Apparently a different branch from Harrek's people, although given the Ban it's hard to say which bears end up where.) Keeping in mind that all of this is paracanonical at best, the Rathorites at the time (actual 1967, Greg is 18-19 years old) are depicted as worshipping what we today would consider an interesting transitional Dangan (Hrelar Amali) / Hsunchen elemental pantheon. Hykim is Lord of the Hunt and ancestor through Rathor but they also have Gada, Nakala, Humakt as storm, Genert as ceremonial chieftain, etc. Weirdly or funnily, "Tol" the red moon shows up in a variant list as war god so he'd theoretically be available for KOW and/or choosers. (Suddenly I love the idea of Tolat Amazons up here brandishing spear and magic helmet, who wants to live forever.) "Resant" shows up as variant storm god, bumping Humakt. "Ava" appears as white moon death goddess so she would be available too. There are also unusual "Seshnegite" war / death gods in the mix in this decadent era, including "Erta," their lunar death goddess only red (!), "Setum," a sky / death god, and "Humak" moved over to their side. My suspicion is that these aren't really the "Seshnegi" we know now but some backwater client state or buffer seizing their chance to expand while the real imperial powers recede. I would love it if Gunda's line was conversant with many of these now-faded entities, because what else is a hero war for? Probably a lot of them flap like "Vadrudi" now.

Love it. This chapter probably had the most jeffing to do in order to clear away developmental dead ends. I was fond of it at the time and it holds up well. All the text bears the stigmata of endless scrubbing and failed renovation like any proper old house. If it were happening today I would argue a little harder to push the ideal Brithini forms back and lead instead with the Rokari forms in order to immerse new readers in that, then peel back to show all the survivals, innovations and alternatives rumbling under that big but pervasive lie. Adventure! Hero Wars! Also it distills what's otherwise some of the most complex and arcane lore back down into What The Priest Told Me, which is good for play right out of the box. Kudos to the person who found the error in the Genertela Box population total. Beast Societies here play a useful role in bringing horalite history forward a little and are fun in their own right as reminiscent of Hawkmoon. Only 4% of the population in the Genertela Box were military (fewer than "clerical" roles) so these are actually something of an aristocratic elite in their own right with room for a highly developed warrior ethic, divisional rivalries, etc. Running all the math across this implies maybe 110,000 horalites or spread across a hypothetical eleven beasts, about 10,000 per lineage. The horalites also probably father most of the important children. So happy with the art on 409. Miyazaki and C.S. Lewis would both applaud. 411 is also a stunner although subtler. Part of the almost impossible challenge here was negotiating the elaborations of the Mongoose map with the right kind of complexity needed to drive a Third Age decline and fall. To build the right kind of ruins you need to imagine how the cathedrals worked and which way they collapsed. But for a ruin to be interesting it needs to differ from the cathedral, usually through subtractions. And vice versa. Big stuff now going down in Dangk, and how often do I get to use that sentence. Also Nolos (New Neleswal) and Pasos become interesting as ancestral centers of one heresy or another; in early texts Xem was from Pasos and it was a "Tamalite" (~trollish) town. At first I was sad that Seshnela and Teshnos got pushed back here to the Missing Lands volume but now I kind of like it. Both regions are relatively isolated from mainstream Gloranthan play and require a little more learning curve than even the sprawling Lunar Empire. Heavy with history and groaning under their doom. Good tea craves a higher altitude no matter what the latitude so I might look for plantations on the otherwise mysterious Antilian plateau run out of Pithdaros and Hathwal and fueling the Nolosite burgers' late nights. Or it could theoretically do OK on the upper Tanier but there is a very real possibility that most Western tea is shit and all the posturing only tries to hide that fact.

Hope you keep us posted. To mostly back up the serene Jajagappa the strongest vibe I get off them these days is Ancient Near East and more specifically and ironically the "city of Tyre during the time of the Seleucid dynasty" where the early Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories happen. For me that's a call back to Mormon devotional art and also Herodotus . . . perfumed cities of brick, gardens and inland seas, parable-spouting visionaries, hedonistic despots, a mosaic of heterodoxies lit up in a vast frontier that supports more spirits than people. Those tile colours are AMAZING. Arkat the Red, Arkat the Yellow, Arkat the Black in his Palace, Arkat the White dreaded and seldom seen.

Not taking sides on this but my dumbest comment for the week is to wonder if the north-south axis flips when you enter or leave the hell perspective. In this view, dead "southpath" entities limp mutilated and sad across what to us would be local north of the dead sun path, then their orientation reverses when they clear the Dawn Gate. As a native hell god erupting outside the Gates, Shargash could have experienced that reversal in an abnormal way, showing up in celestial north (still hell south) and then only grudgingly converging with the celestial south path as life in the sky tames his original barbarisms. For it is written: them what's above / is backward below.

While I hate to introduce a third dimension of complexity, over the years I've come to embrace "emic historiography" as a way to negotiate the apparent contradictions. Current publishing reveals the most accurate information we have in the Gloranthan present about the Gloranthan past. The smartest people in 1625 accept these things as true. But Time changes the world and in the past, they told other stories that were a mix of supposition, useful lies, garbled insight and so on. This is especially true in the West where we've seen multiple grand visions rise and fall and leave a lot of once-settled facts up for reexamination . In this approach, some of those stories were the ones Greg fiddled around with when it was called "Glorinthael." My conceit is that somebody in Glorantha somewhere believed that this was how the world worked, just like at one point at least a few fans built their games around settled facts that the publishing has moved away from. Those games happened. The characters and adventures were as real as any other exploration of the setting. We know differently now . . . but what these stories reveal is what somebody believed before the rest of us figured out it was wrong. That tells us a lot about the culture. And I like the idea of somebody in the West concocting these elaborate fantasies about various clerical models or mounted heavy cavalry or "chivalry" and "crusades" and Malkion alone knows what else. The archaeological record doesn't support much of it any more than it supports a bright and gleaming Camelot whipped up to inspire people in mud huts, but when the story inspires people it influences their magical landscape. I've always seen the West as a profoundly alienated mentality because that's the academic theology Greg ran into at the university: cut off from the moment, denied sacred time, prisoners of the self in a world that murdered God. When these alienated people try to figure out how they fit into the world, they tell these stories of fallen empires, world-shaking magic, dramatic upheavals, hubris, decline and regret. Greg did a lot of that too. So the upshot is that for those of us who bought into these stories, the seeds of redemptive reading are in there. This is where it started. This is not who they were but what they thought was important, and because that's how Gloranthan magic works, this is how their magic could work otherwise. This is how you kill or forgive zzabur, overturn LePlain and just maybe heal the world, resurrect God. This is how their hero wars feel from the inside. Now I am no expert on the back half of Revealed Mythology but sometime in maybe 600-650 ST the Western sages truly believed that Kralorela, "Teshnon" and a third Hykimite Empire were the successor states Genert established in the east. Whoever they meant by these terms is vague but broadly it means Hykimite dragon people in the river valleys, Vrimakite bird people in the northern highlands ("Kralor") and a mixed race of Neralite sheep people and (N)Agi migrants in Teshnon. The intricacies of Abzared were lost on them as well as me but I think the Eagle Phoenix Emperor concept (killed by greedy sea gods, a/k/a Western adventurers) is extremely compelling here as a way to recover the lost bird empire before the Kralorela we know. Their wing could have stretched across Pent into Peloria, bringing a form of solar / sky civilization with it that only exists now in the hauntology. I don't know if they had horses but maybe they were the ancestors of at least one horse people. Another branch might have deteriorated as the Qa-Ying or some of the avian forms of Eastern Chaos I vaguely remember. Vengeful forms may even be behind Senbar, Orathorn, wherever. Greg had yet to expand the chronology so the Seshnegites come at them fast in this version, using dragon magic to conquer the Vrimakites / "Kralorelans" before ST 80 (remember "year 1 = solar time") and held on until shortly after the Closing in 224 [!] Clearly these dates conceal a lot of history that nobody wants to talk about or were once considered boring "dark ages." We know a lot more now. However, it's useful to get a sense of how official historiography in Kralorela has changed . . . these are not static Asian stereotypes without history but their own sense of their past is as dynamic as everyone else's. After all, when you work for a Dragon Emperor, it's politically advantageous to say you've always been a Dragon civilization, forever and ever amen. (不要) There is clear crossover between the animal civilizations, or at least the Pendalites, who were are told are of the line of Fralar and Hykim. These are more fully developed in the eastern "Hsunchara" empires, which creates an obvious question. Is this the origin story the Pendalites told about themselves or the one the Seshnegites invented for them and substituted? The former version implies that the lion people have cousins in the Shan Shan. The latter requires the Seshnegites to encounter the East first and then retroactively apply it on their rivals back home. They might all have been solar people as well or had solar apparatus that would later show up in Peloria. Sometimes the East shows up as "Yelm" territory after all. Maybe this is also the lost bird influence, phoenixes and eagles in particular being his people.

Love it. Sometimes all we can do is set our jaw and hang on for where the ride takes us. People have floated various extremely arcane theories about the (re)occurrence of Beast People in areas where more conventional human life vanishes or reverts to a kind of ambivalent "hsunchen" state. Since I'm in an ecological frame of mind today I like the one where these entities are a kind of therapeutic symbol the land spontaneously generates to keep humans out while it recovers, a sort of forced return to Green Age systems. For me that's a sign magic is moving in the right direction. However the fact that centaurs have not erupted in the wreckage of Jrustela makes it more likely that even if this model is valid the right totemic substrate is required. Seshna and Kerofin both remembered horse people and bull people and goat people so those forms were available there. The island at best had its bug people who may serve the same broad purpose. To test the hypothesis I would look for grand, terrible and beautiful hybrid forms emerging in the Hero Wars as civilized people with beast tribe backgrounds are pushed back to the origin to survive. Charg may well be full of minotaurs and worse. I have not made it out to Guebelle yet but suspect the King there will insist that they've always been there and that all the intervening history is the myth. If so, I can't say I blame him. While some might also have escaped from some imperial reservation or living museum similar to how the stitched people were built by the EWF for zoos, I appreciate the romance of the stitched mutants making it into the forest and meeting their perfect and beautiful cousins waiting for them for the first time. (Guebelle probably contains a nest of the "puma people" to take the place of the extinct lions, but we won't talk about that.) Another complicating factor is that there aren't a lot of true Beast People in these texts. We meet pony tribes and vrimakites but I haven't run across an actual centaur or "winged folk" yet. Likewise, bull people but no minotaurs, none of the weird hybrid forms you can summon in Nomad Gods. Greg wasn't really interested. That doesn't mean they weren't there.

Too bad about the people of the Gates of Dusk. One day I hope to learn what the Altinelans want but the encounter we have is a little preliminary. I need to find Siglat so I can ask. Here in the northern quarter there's a cryptic note that the Hykimites evacuated to the far north, "the lands of the gods . . . where they continue in their Golden splendor." This feels like an echo of the ultimate settlement of Ignorance but takes place in Genertan times. The east: I mis-typed Vrimak early on but this is the familiar Bird King we've known about since the old days, only here enthroned at the dawn as dynastic god of Kralor and enemy of the Hykimites. Some wild bird people separate from the regime are evidently extant by the 70s ST (tiny marginal note, year 1 = solar time) and they can fly. If I were agitating for anything I'd make this the glorious lost homeland of the keets and their bedraggled western cousins. I'd also have this culture extend across to archaic Rinliddi (they can fly!) and seed various Pelorian quail / heron / stork cults . . . one striking thing about this material is that there are few civilizational walls, peoples are constantly encountering each other. For example, the original people of Trowjang were apparently "Nagi," which was perhaps considered too reminiscent of the possibly Dravidian Naga people of Sri Lanka or just too snakey. He dropped the "N" and we're better for it. But a conflict of totemic systems in the east: which will be dominant, snake or bird? For all I know the mystic creature who would have bridged them might've looked something like Horse with wings, claws, etc. (A few Eneralite heroes had a flying horse.) I have yet to see anything between Avlor's origins and when the Vetagi find him in the Mislari foothills and marvel at how anyone coming from that direction can have such good manners. (He wanders off again, presumably into the north where these documents don't really reach. There's a funny epilogue though where 250 years later Good Siglat Himself comes down to help them wipe out a krjalk incursion.) There may be a lost pass at the turn of the Mislari and the Rockwoods to let any Lightbringer-connected Halikites in, Ethilrist out, etc. A surprising number of people get through there. Or Avlor may have befriended some "Tamalites" in Ezkoro Roko (Nakala + Tilnta appears to equal Troll, or at least whoever Xem's people were in Pasos) and gone under. ---------------- Horses: I'm abdicating all points on which I might be tempted to especially empty-headed speculation. But what I am starting to suspect is that the dawn age Eneralite culture (male Galanin, definitely patriarchal inheritance) is different from people who go back to Galana and are probably based in Galin. This may be an evolution of [Yelorna], Stygian project or god knows what else. Maybe later. The south and the sea: Yes, there's 45 pages of pre-WBRM "Ernaldela" (roughly contemporaneous with the sagas) but it only goes to the eastern edge of modern Maniria. The archaic Hykimites might have come to Kaxtor or visited the Entruli, Ramalians or other peoples. I am not optimistic about this material solving the Were Pig Question but we'll see. From my early skim pre-WBRM here means no Lightbringers, no Orlanth, no OOO but I may have missed something. Generally "Triolina" is the classification for nymph at this point although the father of the Blue Vadeli takes "Wavmor" and I'm sure there are other variations. It seems broader than the modern ceto / pisco taxonomy. For one thing, Avmor marries a triolina back in Teshnos who is a daughter of Sramak Himself, which strikes me as pretty regal for an air-breathing ludoch, even a princess. Some of these entities may even be fresh murthdryans, which sounds bizarre but would help finally establish why the bestiary knows so much about these people even though they never appear in the sagas. Wambla is the classification for Menena's mother in this particular variant, which is interesting because it speaks to the Malkionites as patrilocal exogamists where the bride's function is not only to produce children but, more exciting, to signify. Since I think a "Wambla" is a type of air spirit this might be an early introduction of storm blood into the family of Malkion. On the other hand it could just as easily be a non-likitite earth inheritance or even some people that has since died out elsewhere. Which brings us to . . . My current long-term work posits an entire "aldryami" substrate that could easily support a surprising material culture without ever really leaving the forest. Before even the Beast Peoples emerge, they were already there. But I rarely get time to really pursue it so there isn't a whole lot to show beyond that basic point. They had aldryami on Brithos but I don't see much sign of totemic organization there. One theory might be that the castes had already absorbed a lot of the totemic force by the time we meet them, so there isn't a lot of need for animal identifications in order to differentiate society. However, as caste populations fail to thrive, replacements are "adopted" in from subjugated animal peoples, bearing the marks of their heritage to rediscover given motive + opportunity. I used to think the Children of Waertag were adopted in this way but now I lean toward them as the original people of Malkion and the classic caste peoples emerge through further cross breeding to create the modern "wareran" or West Genertelan race. But then half the time I think there was never such a thing as Brithos and everyone who talks about it is either describing an Other World experience or lying for profit. We're all malestini here except for a few extremely rarefied enclaves of weirdos. Time to get on with the hard work of living, dying and JOY. But anyway even if there was a Brithos and people could still go there in the Dawn Times, the same questions apply to DANMALASTAN. Maybe there was a blessed triangle on the edge of the world and those people were our endlessly rarefied ancestors. I don't see any reference to them in these documents, which take great pains to differentiate three core religions: Seshna, Brithos, Malkion. Only much, much later does Malkion become the state religion of Seshnela and then after that the battered Tanisorians in their desperation try to emulate some austere dream of Brithos. And there was a blue nation in the south that fell.

A tangent but a lot of the dawn age texts are full of pernicious "triolini" in the rivers and lakes eager to steal our princes if not engage in outright warfare. This culminates in versions of the tale of our friend Damol where Neleswal becomes a real problem for the likiti-oriented Serpent Kings . . . quite a few vadeli witches married into that family. And yeah, I see Aerlit show up around Damol in some sources. One of the dukes of Neleswal got deep into storm magic so the inheritance gets complicated . . . but even this might be simply a screen narrative for early encounters with "storm barbarians" in the forest. More to come, just grabbing the blue thread. (blasphemy: the first zzabur wasn't blue)

Ouch. That does not sound fun. That is my Too Awful To Imagine theory there . . . the further north Snodal was driven, the closer to the original God Time the information he received becomes. The things they told him no longer existed in our Glorantha. Strange weather up there at the edge of the world. But for our purposes it means that Snodal and Jonat were in place by 1967 and then he turned to work almost exclusively on the south until the mid-1970s. If not for the repetition of god names and concepts I wouldn't even be convinced they take place in the same world. I think so. In all these lands horses (or at least equestrian culture) come from somewhere. They aren't native. This probably ties into some Six Ages lore but I haven't had time to ponder that one yet. Horse isn't invited to Waha's covenant and the first time I see the Eneralites they're on the move south to get away from the triolini of Lake Nralar [misspelled "Nradar" in original]. But this is all pre-Darkness. This doesn't rule out Galin being the foundation of Western horse worship. It's a very old city and I recall references to wild herds of Galanini ponies there in the dawn days. Eneral may not have fully appreciated who his father was until his children made it down to the Felster. Even at this time the Telmorites guard the Pass so it's possible that the Eneralites brought riding from the east, but Greg doesn't seem to have been thinking of this. All their migration routes spread out from Otkorion. Besides, Eneral's mother is a daughter of Ralia (no coincidence! for all I can see, "Ralios" is actually a cognate for "horse land," wide plain) so wherever Galanin comes from the Eneralites are definitely a local horde. Divisive inheritance definitely seems to be a thing they share with the Pendalites. The sister might have been a Western Yelorna! But the difference between these two nations seems to be that the lion people work a little better across archaic kingdom lines whereas Greg lingers on how Eneralites were reduced to "a miserable condition of petty chieftaincies." Dari's father is not listed, possibly as befits the matriarchal nature of "Halikiv" in this layer of the texts. I have fought the ligature too and wouldn't be surprised if the weird rhyme between "Dari" and "Dan(g)" originated from a similar confusion . . . but Dari and Dang are already both here, separated by several centuries. Could be continued iterations of a tribal prophecy. This is where the Book of Foreigners gets weird. For one thing, I haven't seen Mikyh yet. As far as the Pendalite sources go, Hykim doesn't have a wife. However, the archaic Seshnegites had a lot of information about "Hykimi dragon people and rightful rulers of all Hsunchara [sic] in Hykimela," a Vithelan land that may no longer exist. These people were great sailors and made it as far west as Slontos, where contact could have been made. This is back in Genert times. The Hykimites are the imperial totem in what we would call a Beast Confederacy but they might've called something like Hsun Chen: Vrimakite bird people [!], Damalites, Fralarites, Neralite sheep people, Sofalites. Various civil wars including an engagement with "krjalki, minions of Gbaji himself." The initial "kings of the Kralori," on the other hand, are Vrimakites. They don't seem to have likiti there for what that's worth. Anyway, Hykim may only be the signifier of a certain form of totemic / lycanthropic society that made it down to Tanisor as well as possibly other places. In this model the Praxian Basmoli may not be the end of the eastward migration from ruined Pendalela so much as other children of Basmol by local mothers. I wonder which epithet Genert would have taken but I haven't had a chance to dig into the Ernaldite texts yet, maybe it's in there. There's another elemental nation "Wambla" in the feminine that might be an early storm tribe. The Malkion animal stories are a personal obsession. Now that we can read them as the story of assimilating the Beast Confederacy it gets easier to discover the details. Too Awful To Think!

Love it. This early on, the Seshnegites were doing pretty good to figure out Tanisor, much less make contact beyond Kartolin. I wouldn't rule out the Akemites figuring it out faster, but these are not their chronicles and the two main colonial centers don't seem to have been in close contact in this era. I think we know from the Entekosiad that if Akemites made it this far past Oronin their exploits aren't recorded? (This might win for most vacillating sentence ever from me.) In terms of "real world evolution" Greg occasionally said the world of WBRM was created from mostly whole cloth and then the early material was folded around it. This seems to match the texts, which have room for the West through Slontos, Kralorela, Teshnos, Pamaltela (!), Artmalites and a Genertan waste but I have yet to find solar cities, a moon goddess, the animal riders. This gives us a challenge to solve. Another angle might be that the digijelm / horse lords of dawn age Peloria effectively resisted all intrusion until they stopped.

Yeah, all talk of sorcerer celibacy looks like a historical reform, possibly supported by the way the wives of the line of zzabur were never recorded or have since been deliberately expunged. Early on an estranged son of Hoalar has one of Kaldes' "sons" in court and assigns another to a special project, so it's possible for them to replicate their knowledge more than once per generation. (A "third action," as it were.) I forget about Damolsten because my eyes are watching Damol / Damiliol. Whatever they got up to in Damolsten was probably nothing that dutiful lover of sheep would recognize or endorse. From Horal to Holar with maybe Hoalar somewhere in between. My "real world development" guess is that Holar and Heler got in each other's way (not to mention Hoolar) and so the consonants flipped. Something similar happens when Dormal emerges and someone starts typing "Dromal" wrong, forcing Dronar to take its place. IMG of course all of these are traces of how the caste system evolved differently in various dawn colonies.

Did you ever see the genealogy where Menena is resolved by marrying her off to someone named Horal whereas the line of the third son of Malkion (somebody named Gwymir) appears to die out unless you know where Grodram and Nrodram end up? The problem of zzabur replication is solved for me by the way they have "schools" and sorcerous lineages instead. Other people make the bodies. Zzabur breeds in the mind like other parasites. I don't know how he got Kaldes though.

The hero wars are made of everything. Great points.