scott-martin

1 minute ago, jeffjerwin said:

There's an interesting correlation between the domination of the Earth Rune post 1460, the defeat of Sheng, the appearance of the Feathered Horse Queen (1455) and the crowning of Queen Bruvala in Nochet, too.

If you can shoehorn this into a sense of a "Later Classical Demi-Birth Period" I for one will be so happy. 

42 minutes ago, Grimmshade said:

I'm writing to Chaosium for a refund. That seems totally fair to me, as long as it works out. I don't want to troll the forums just because I don't feel satisfied with the current state of the rules. It doesn't change my opinion of the current rules, but now nobody has to hear me constantly complain about them. 

Sorry they lost you. Rather than force you to go through any kind of refund process, I'll buy it off you eBay style, shipping included. What's a good price?

22 minutes ago, boztakang said:

In part, though SIZ 12 can look pretty small when crouched and groveling as the enlo are prone to do. 

Thanks! Looking at the stats from the other side, full uzko status starts at SIZ 9 for the boys so there's overlap in the 9-12 zone . . . for all I know a large and extremely Valuable multiple birth can rise socially and become a small troll. They probably don't get picked much as mates so whether or not they breed true is irrelevant, but in the meantime, when you're an uz you're a troll all the way.

 

15 minutes ago, boztakang said:

Modern twin uzko are considered trollkin, despite being otherwise entirely normal uzko.

Mighty boz who keeps all the balls in the air, can this help explain why up to 16% of "enlo" are SIZ 12 thugs when so many of the illustrations are of the teeny SIZ 7-8 dollkin? Starve and neglect a twin and you might end up with something like a big human.

4 minutes ago, Joerg said:

the Pelorian peasant hero is a tragic hero

All out of reactions for the time being but thanks. Not quite convinced with a few of these . . . the "fire pantheon" outside Dara Happa is very strange and feels more likely to have been forced together to fit theoretical (GL) or political (Sheng) needs . . . but in these eight words I see the young sun god who goes up a hill of gold and comes down an ass-kicked subordinate. 

2 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Being a peasant in Peloria has always been an underprivileged existence since civilization had been introduced. And it is not about second amendment barbarian farmer warriors. There are no peasant heroes in civilized Peloria, only nobles hiding as peasants, or their low-born wives who heroically take them in and cover for them. Danfive Xaron might be the closest to a peasant hero the Pelorians have.

You make me suspect that the Pelorian peasants who "win" become something like lowland storm tribes or give birth to lowland storm gods. Some say Lodril some say Larnste some say Humath. The first rebel who spawns the terminus.

Also I missed it in the flow but am I alone in thinking Magnificus is an abstraction like Argrath, there were many magnifici on their separate quests only converging into the great work of the man who finally restored the empire? Too many records lost or buried.

6 minutes ago, jeffjerwin said:

Re. the Hill of Gold - I've come to the conclusion that Sheng adopted the persona of the Cruel God (Kazkurtum-Zorak Zoran) to steal authority and the 'soul' from the Antirius part of the Emperor. He proved to the Dara Happans that the Black Sun is a equal or greater manifestation of Yelm than the Red Moon. The fact that this entity shared attributes with the troll god of pain and terror is probably not made obvious except to initiates of his cult/association.

You are almost literally on fire. Are there periods within time when we can say the spear god won Hill of Gold free, proud and unhumiliated? What does that look like? Who helped the moon burn Rist?

Also how old is collective Lowfire worship?

To me a lot of this raises more questions around historical and mythic "solar" aspects of Kralorela. What does Kargzant look like when (if?) horse tribes make any headway across the Shan Shan, maybe coming up through Teshnos and seeding those sun gods in their wake. Were the archaic dragon emperors also suns or something more exotic buried in the official histories.

From the POV of the mystic ravenkaaz board of consciousness I am on the bright side of illumination (lunar) because it's generative. It takes time to new places that myth on its own never unlocked and tradition refuses to contemplate. Sheng's world-destroying approach gets in the way of that by resetting the board to zero. But we got that with Arkat too, he is a black god against bright empire.

6 minutes ago, jeffjerwin said:

There is a core part - albeit a contradictory part - but such is her perogative - of the Lunar Way that is rooted in compassion. Ask Gerra about it. It may be more exemplified by Great Sister than Moonson, but she has a definite moral role. There is no such balance in the empire of the Pain Star, whose bureaucracy only exists to feed his host and support their ruler's ambition.

I think you just wrote the pitch for the Eighth Wane Handbook here.

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

Yelm worshippers are a callous lot, and so are horse nomads.

Now that you mention it, does Dara Happa "on Horse" imply that the solar temples incorporated aspects of "nomad Yelm" (Youth through Sage) at this time? We know that the lunar establishment rebuilt but the sources are silent on how (or whether) a solar reformer emerged to once again purify the imperial cult from new influences.

6 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Controlled of course by the cult of Asrelia,

One more handful! Bring on the trollkin gold, repay the good grandmother for her "loans" and she'll rebuild her stores when the market permits. Classic qualitative easing with sterilization.

5 minutes ago, Joerg said:

There are two main (pony-sized) horse types around, galana hill ponies and sered horses. It isn't exactly clear whether the galana are united in a single origin or whether they are something similar to the Wareran shape of Genertelan humans, dominant wherever there were hill barbarians (including the lowland Enerali). The sered horse isn't much taller than the galana, and seems to hail from the eastern Pelorian grasslands.

The persistence of Unicorn and his shield maidens might be relevant here. Yelorna worship was "exterminated everywhere west of the Rockwoods," which probably had a permanent impact on horse culture in galana country. 

5 hours ago, jongjom said:

You could have died from the Winter, Dragon, war and may still die from the Lunar retribution.

This raises a solid point: the winter itself already deranged pricing by hyperinflating commodities (food) and destroying production capacity (farmers). At this stage a lot of acreage is fallow but there isn't even a lot of seed to plant. Meanwhile there'd be a huge currency drain to regions equipped to export grain to what used to be the global breadbasket and I'm not sure who that is. Trolls bearing gold really only add that wonderful touch of Chaosium absurdity to the situation.

Not sure yet how the big players in Nochet Mother Market dealt with it. I know rice futures  get very interesting.

1 hour ago, jeffjerwin said:

Mahaquata, the Dara Happan goddess of bats and Death, was born from the Hall of Verithurus[a]. She is of course the child of Lesilla/the Blue Moon, the adult Verithurusa. Mahaquata/Death distracted Yelm when Orlanth came to kill him, armed with Humakt. Is Homura the Gem in fact the child Humakt-Mahaquata? *QTA = death, cutting, severing?

Homura-QTA + Huma-kt.

That's dense. I'm still a few posts back trying to figure out if putting a beard on Zaytenara (shades of a Streisand movie) and then making "him" the knowledge keeper tells us anything about how MHY acquired Truth Rune from the incumbent who they say got too abstract like some kind of streak crawling up the outside of the sky. We know another lightbringer comes from the far north and she is a white goddess. Maybe the "sisters" carry a buried family relationship with the "sages." (Never, ever, spell the beard god's name with the "-khor" rune no matter how tempting, logical or natural it is. MHY has zero relation to the house of Khor. Clearly.) 

We know they had goats. I wonder who Arroin's real father was. Odds are the Wild Healer has insight there, having looked at life from both sides now and found some harmony in it somewhere.

But anyhow, sometimes the undifferentiated archaic storm god stresses the "HU" before we discover his parts. Humath + QTA = HUMQTA.

12 minutes ago, jeffjerwin said:

6. Zorak Zoran stole the fiery heat of Yelm in the Underworld.

Nice. When they erupted near what is now the Kingdom of Ignorance they saw a black sun there waiting for them.

Since my favorite bogey is the Bijiif I suspect there are as many shadows as suns, getting conflated over time with their suns and occasionally sharing secrets. Thankfully Spol is over.


 

4 hours ago, Pentallion said:

Well, if the "Sending Gods" are themselves God Learners then the secret they are trying to hide is that they've supplanted the gods and shaped the pantheons and myths to thier own liking.  

A lot of great things going on in this thread but I'll throw my two clacks at this one. This may be both the secret "of" the God Learners and the secret "held from" the God Learners until the very end. After all, any sufficiently advanced work built on Arkat's journey will include that moment where you meet yourself on the road, at a mirror stage as it were. "We have met the old gods, the ancestors and the enemy and they were us." - old jrusteli graffito

29 minutes ago, Quackatoa said:

Who do I sacrifice to my cabbages Whom do I sacrifice to for the sake of my cabbages?

With that attitude I don't know if the flamal mysteries will help. Good luck though . . . are they too wet, too hot?

12 minutes ago, Joerg said:

It is a question of runic association - lizards are of earth, feathered beings are of the sky.

And come to think of it, "pteranodons" are weird dating all the way back.

3 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

short people that were allegedly tapped short

This may be the simplest explanation, assuming for the moment that we even follow the Hobbit Brithini Hypothesis. At one point Tapping was legal and the people were smaller than they are today. Now most people are taller and the zzabur like to point out they're the tallest of all. Coincidentally they ran the Tap on people or things we can't remember now. (Maybe ducks started big.) 

If nothing else gives me an opening to roll my eyes at their recruitment criteria as at least partially favoring SIZ over more effective sorcerous criteria, which in turn makes them incrementally less effective magicians as a group. Tall, blue and stupid.

26 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Is that a thing in Glorantha?

It is IM mainly because the lizard guys ride a curious raptor that's only "demi" avian. More obscurely, there were apparently Pelorian dragonewts before the council broke, maybe they lived up north of the Hungry Plateau. And in terms of mythological inheritance, we all know birds as sky animals recall the speech of reptiles as surely as Aether evolved from Gata.  

14 minutes ago, Joerg said:

That map only shows the range where the cult is worshipped now.

That's a great point. I initially read the absence of the Crater on the generic photocopy as historic but the Wendarian distribution in particular looks like a population that's already in deep decline . . . so this is not how the bird cult looked at the origin or in its prime. Could be now, could be some snapshot of a moment we could probably date.

Either way it's a wider belt than some might suspect. I forget who her husband is, supposedly.

15 minutes ago, Joerg said:

The modern version of the goddess (used to be Great Spirit) is much diminished, but her myths are more primal than anything the Yelmies have to offer, and rival the oldest women's myths in Entekosiad. Possibly predate them.

I do think Imarja is special in the role she plays in modern Esrolian religious consciousness but while archaeological evidence elsewhere is scattered it's still suggestive. I think you've seen this.

cal
 

Looking back at it now I suspect Rinliddi predates the division between reptiles and birds.

3 minutes ago, metcalph said:

"or been conquered by an eskimo"

There's probably a Manfred Mann reference in there somewhere! It would explain the diet.
(all out of reactions for the day, I'll be back with the like)

Still looking for the primal reference to the notion that Brithini are little. Here's a bit from the Mortal Lords manuscript that went out to some RuneQuest Classic backers:
 

SIZ for the nobles at least is 2D6+3 so they're not teeny on average -- bigger than a dwarf or brown elf, as big as a larger typical trollkin -- but there's a distinct scrawniness here. In an earlier version of the text Greg blames this not on anything metaphysical (much as I'd like to) as on a poorer diet with more fish than bread or beef. Naturally none of this is modern canon, use at your own risk, past results future performance blah blah blah.

However, the horalites are, as one might expect, quite weird. At certain stages in the text there are horalite knights. And "Brithini armies of the First Ages have not yet developed cavalry warfare for the homeland of Brithos knew no animals of a size suitable for riding and the major barbarian races (the Vadeli whom the Brithini all but exterminated and the horse-shy Pendali lion-worshippers) also did not know riding." For what that's worth!

Easiest thing is to just translate the Entertainer professional skills and passions to the cult. If you're good at your job, you're good enough for Donandar. RQ3 included a funny restriction where you had to be distinctive looking in some way (low or high appearance) but I think now the way CHA plays into performance skills already handles that. He was open to all spirit magic and sorcery but taught none himself. Rune magic was various illusions and the old spell Harmonize, which worked like Jack O Bear power. 

For a full modern write up I'd let his powers interact directly with the passion system as a fun minigame that weaponizes that side of the character sheet. But that might be a whole other project.

On 9/21/2018 at 5:43 AM, Tindalos said:

 It never directly says that it's forbidden, just that Horali never ride them, so I figure Arolanit's Horali are all infantry.

This gets even more muddled when in the Genertela Box era Arolanit horals got Ride x3. The talars did not. Granted this was in the days when you couldn't trust the art but the demographic tables were extremely useful.

Probably another of the mysteries of the place. Hunting the horal hobbit now. I know I've seen that reference too, although centuries of breeding with the Tanisorites and others probably give the Bailifes a larger frame to support their bulk.