scott-martin

1 minute ago, Joerg said:

changed the name to Argrath for that game

(all out of reactions for the day)

Greg associates the origin of "Argat" [sic] and the apocalyptic Gbaji struggle with an early health crisis well before WBRM. Several of my key sources on the internal chronology are in transition right now but if my recall is accurate this is maybe early 1968 -- after Snodal, Jonat, Froalar and Hrestol but before the move to California. Ralios, Seshnela, Brithos and to some extent Fronela already exist in more or less recognizable form, back when the world was Acos. "Argrath" of course comes with the game counter and then when the West is reattached a separate "Arkat" finally emerges.

What's striking in this context is how little time actually separates the earliest material from the fanzines and then WBRM. The 1966-74 period must've seemed like an eternity of slow development for him then but in retrospect it's "only" eight years of fairly compressed development. He was moving fast!

3 hours ago, MHanretty said:

just as fascinated with the development of the mythology as I am with the mythology itself

Love it. The short answer is "not yet" but maybe if you have some free time we can start putting something together. While Greg Himself didn't keep a lot of precise diachronic notes there's no reason not to compile what we do have. It's a worthy tribute to his achievement, provided of course that's something he'd want.

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Pamalt of the Jungle - what would be his characteristics?

Growing suspicion here is that the secret of the south is that he is a green god and they call him "Flamalt," lord of the kresh.

Just now, jeffjerwin said:

Eurmal stole/traded for his gigantic ass from Issaries, I think.

Finally we all know where that donkey came from!!!

The dumbest question:

If the religion was the "Light" bringers because they were encouraged to go out and light up the rest of the world, and if we call them the "Theyalans" because they bring the Dawn and if Heort had the heart of a "star" and if he died by lightning fighting the storm, what's the functional difference between them and some archaic expression of what becomes the Elmal complex? What faith did they actually spread . . . and what origin might Starbrow's sages have thought they were tapping into?

 

17 minutes ago, jeffjerwin said:

Except, of course, it defines the single point where Eurmal was 'stopped'. Of course, Eurmal is always impossible.

 

I always thought it was a conditional holy site . . . wherever authority gets a trickster to sit down and shut up is by definition within Sit Here . . . and that the two armies are hyperbole to demonstrate the scale of god's gigantic ass. There may or may not be useful history hidden in that punchline.

1 hour ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

is it even possible to talk about an "Earth people" in the first place, and not just various groups who were focused on chthonic powers unrelated to each other?

This is evolving fast as people explore that part of the mythic landscape. The simplest answer right now is to "try it" and see what happens. If an immigrant initiated in one place can participate in a foreign earth rite (whether as a female initiate or being accepted as a husband or other male role) and receive access to its fertility, you can say those goddesses are closely enough related that they recognize each other's rites. In the RQ3 era we would have said those land and grain goddess cults allowed the initiation to "transfer." Of course if you can't feed yourself or have children, something is not working. 

In the West particularly there's a tendency to equate being "Earth people" with being "women," so we can approach it sideways by exploring who if anyone Earth "men" are and see if that helps us compare and contrast across regions. After all, if all the women more or less worship the same goddess, then chasing goddesses is ultimately just going to bring us (or God Learner monks) back up against the Robert Graves generational cycle that fascinated Greg. You're always going to fixate on finding an old lady, a girl and a woman in the middle. When they found a society where that goddess complex was relatively central and the men were relatively peripheral (compared to Western expectations), that was an "Earth people."

That usually meant Esrolia and to a more limited extent the Pelandan highlands (relatively shielded from mythological manipulation, I think Valare Addi or one of her editors says in the Entekosiad) and the Pamaltelan veldt. In modern Esrolia, of course, you actually have a more intricate hierogamous system where a storm father shares more or less in the mothers' ritual authority, while in Pelanda the low hot god of the mountain spear plays a vaguely similar role. Pamalt is also a spear god and so it goes. 

They also posited an extinct "Earth people" in what's now the wastes where the husband didn't come from outside but was an actual Earth Man, the fourth corner of the lozenge. (For the monks this would be Genner in the "north.") This is of course Genert who is dead now. In their time the Genertites might have been the purest expression of Earth across both genders. There might be echoes of this in the oldest Pelandan materials where the native god followed a different trajectory and sometimes becomes part of what we now call Lodril in the cities. 

Now there was another "Earth people" that also worshipped a dying green god and that is of course Flamal, who seems to have been centered in the relative southwest, closer to Esrolia. As we know Flamal is an acceptable husband-protector there when the usual suspects are unavailable. Like Genert, he really isn't from any other elemental pantheon come looking for wives. He's as Earth as it gets. But unlike Genert, they found a way to put Flamal back together again. Maybe it took elf help and elf insight. Maybe his "ur-Earth" people simply became elves or if they were already the elves stayed that way while the rest of us exited that green world.

In Pamaltela green politics obviously evolved very differently and you don't have friendly grain goddesses. This bewildered the monks. Are they an "Earth people?" Sometimes, if you're looking for exogamous elemental fathers and can't find any of the usual suspects. Do they have a living "Earth King?" It works at least superficially. Does that mean the southern directional lord is also an Earth King? Hard to say. Is Vith an Earth King? We don't know. Is the blue man in his western tower an Earth King? I would say no, he is the willful and doomed opposite of that.

Might there have been another primeval King in the West before the blue man? Now that's something to conjure with.

18 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Sorry to disagree, but Goldedge was founded as a Sun Dome Temple, and the Dinacoli and Princeros probably already were Yelmalians when entering Dragon Pass from the north.

 

I hear you! Spear people keep coming and going. My comment only applies to the 1550 "syncretic revelation" version . . . those dislocations are practically within living memory for some people.

On the other hand half the time I suspect "Harano" is the Esrolian sun god (himself an import from the mysterious west) and Barntar's real dad is another blue god so we know how trustworthy I am.

This is a great thread. In general if you know in your soul that something belongs to someone else and you are not making Equal Exchange to acquire it, you are setting yourself up for trouble. Otherwise god provides wiggle room. ("Everything else is negotiable.")

The adoption of money itself went a long way toward simplifying compliance. While chattel property generally has traceable provenance (someone produced it, owned it and has heirs) coins are designed to have no memory unless you mark them in some way. Every clack is the same clack. People from all kinds of cults may have held that clack but in the exchange the coin usually remains abstract and innocent of its own past. Maybe yesterday it was worth a fried ham hock. Maybe today it's a haircut. Tomorrow it's one more clink in my hoard or even just another tally mark on my sheet down in Nochet, where the actual copper has already gone out to work for other people.

The moral: if you're ever concerned that wealth in your possession is in some way dubious, cash out as soon as you can. The coins you receive are as clean as it gets. This is part of their association with the world of the dead within the Issaries Mysteries (issteries). Cash has no living family, no heirs or parents. Find a penny on the road, god sent it your way.

2 hours ago, Grievous said:

There's a few topics in Glorantha which have some frustrating details, but the Yelmalio-Elmal thing is thoroughly confusing on a meta-play level. I have no idea how to properly use Yelmalio (or to a lesser extent post-Monrogh Elmal) in my campaigns. 

Yelmalio in Kerofinela is so new that I suspect people in a lot of campaigns are still arguing the details at least as passionately as we do. It's the Hero Wars.

I will say that either every trans-regional deity needs to aspire to this level of complication or else we're in a situation where a minor upland cult appears to be an order of magnitude deeper and "more realistic" than the imperial Lunar Revelation itself. Either everybody is as weird as this or nobody needs to be. There's no intrinsic reason this particular religion needs to monopolize all the complexities you want in your game.

This disparity happens sometimes in real world religious studies but it's often an accident of how the sources are preserved. Maybe there's an archive of Yelmalite texts safe in some Sun Dome that comes down to us from the Hero Wars period whereas survival of key Lunar (for example) material is mostly limited to the unfinished books we have. Meanwhile other extremely complex cults like the Lodrilites and Shargashites are awaiting better archaeology and/or translation.

But until it happens Yelmal is going to be as complicated as someone's game wants it to be. If someone cares about these things, the intricacies can eat up a lot of play time. If they don't, these are those guys with the spears who have their own religion and their own complicated internal debates . . . which we never have to worry about because the players never spend a lot of time in their temples. 

Maybe "Orlanth" is the really weird one and parties who travel the world following the weather will discover a confusion of storms. But right now in Sartar this is practically unspeakable. They need the Orlanth who came back from the Windstop to be consistent right now. They don't have much else left to lose.

32 minutes ago, jeffjerwin said:

Lightfore/Elmal/Yelmalio is preferable to the Aldryami to the 'scorching sun' capability

We might've been able to learn more from the Pelorian forests.

Before they burned.

13 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Balumbasta literally used to be called Lodril

My current thought is that many of the deportees came from the area prehistorically known as "Lodrilela," making room for the cultures we know now with only occasional survivals (or revivals) like the Caladraland tribes. Maybe they carried "Umath" with them and saw his signs everywhere above the horizon.

On 6/12/2018 at 4:58 AM, Joerg said:

the final episode of Biturian's travel, but those are highly unusual since the wedding takes place away from his folk

Love this reference. Also since he's an Issarite there may not even be a set marriage ceremony within his people . . . some traders marry traders, some marry strangers, some pair up like the Orlanthites. It doesn't seem to matter.

4 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Very few, and probably only found in the list of Original Rune Owner vs. Current Rune Owner, and in the cult writeups on deities of power (e.g. LM son of Acos, or Donandar son of god of music and goddess of dance, etc.).

Acos himself is a name to conjure with!

My tentative working model is that we tend to see Power emerge in two spots: when a cult evolves away from one of the larger elemental theogonies we have, or when something like an elemental theogony has otherwise died out, leaving only an isolated mythic survivor like LM or Issaries or Chalana behind. So Malia, for example, was a dark goddess who acquired death without any relation to KarGan Tor and has since dropped out of most (all?) dehori- or ancestor-driven darkness religion. Chalana may have been a "light" goddess from a pantheon that no longer really exists in recognizable elemental form, so we know her only through harmony. Issaries is the unique possessor of his rune in some phases of his cult's history and now is content with his Powers. And so on with Stability, Movement, what have you.

Each has an associated ecosystem. Death is interesting because it's contagious. You can catch it.

This is a great myth. If for some personal reason you feel the need to keep refining it I think the best Gloranthan mythology makes a kind of argument about the way the people who tell the story choose to live. 

Within Chalana, the lesson many need to accept is that the world will always be sicker than you have healing spell slots. You can work with dozens in one day, even heal 100 and they'll keep fighting. You will never win.

The only way out of the cycle is to heal the "cycle of violence" itself through some transcendental gesture. At a certain point -- 98 healed, 99 healed, 101 healed -- even the most idealistic initiate has to absorb that there has got to be a higher and yet more pragmatic way. Red needs to become Green and Green needs to become Red. Then they're all friends and while We Fought, the new larger I Wins.  You heal the problem of there being too many (engendering disputes and violence) by overcoming difference and making them closer to one people . . . the harmony rune in action.

 If you can do this, you probably get more than the +3 that happened at this site. You get a new spell like Harmonize. Maybe it spreads.

5 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Mallia was a Death Goddess

A follow-up question here: are there Power Rune theogonies anywhere on Glorantha? 

Malia is interesting as a dark healer in archaic sources (sort of a "Black Lady" if you will, even a XU analogue) before taking up Death. Given the role of disease models in the spread of the Bright Empire and the trolls' rejection of that empire, it's a hint to conjure with. 

2 hours ago, M Helsdon said:

In other regions beyond Saird and Monrogh's influence, there hasn't been a schism and the Elmal cult retains its original position, and no conversion.

Now I need to find out whether, for example, Fronelan storm cultures like Jonatela even have an Elmal and what he's like. Maybe he has a sister or cousin who's familiar with unicorns.

4 hours ago, Joerg said:

There is likely to have been a Teshnan influence, from the 1250 settlements in the Corflu/Grantlands area

I always liked the suggestion that they brought hazia with them along with a foundation of miscellaneous Somash syncretisms that no longer really fit into the Monrogh timeline we have now. When do the towers start being repurposed for "retirement?" 

2 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Lærd

Love it. It's like a hinge (or henge) swinging between lords and lore.

Not a "locateur natif" by any stretch but for GL en français I would ground what they did in savoir -- le gai savoir, with all its troubadour riddles and mysteries -- and so they might've been "Les Savants."

On 8/9/2018 at 7:45 AM, Joerg said:

Annilla (or possibly Mastakos)

I can't shake the feeling that this is extremely important. Mastakos was important enough at one point to rate ownership of a Core Rune despite his now abstract worship and while a Blue God never struck me as all that watery.

29 minutes ago, David Scott said:

I think it should be treated as a proper noun

Yeah. In terms of the scale of their ambition and their amount of ruin in their empire I call them the "theosophists," which is equally alien to all modern languages, lozenge or globe.

1 hour ago, jeffjerwin said:

I've argued this before (relative to Zolan Zubar), but Shargash ~ *Zar-k-az = definitely a Hell divinity, who is associated with fire and necromancy.

Love it. Now you've got me going back to discover whose kazkurtum Shargash might be or become. Oh yeah, Orlanth.

Does this make the OOO's use of Kitori troops against the Shadzorings the equivalent of a digijelm civil war? OOO as "ultimate authority" over IFWW trolls enforcing the universal missionary agenda against the tribes who considered Peloria "especially good troll hunting" at the Dawn?

These tribes seem cognate with the shadzorings but the demons of Alkoth are denied Uz status in some versions of the story when they kill the missionaries. Maybe if OOO can blur species boundaries in his own person his magic can also remove an ancestral birthright . . . although compare to the ultimate eradication of "trolls and dragonewts" in Peloria as "dark men and snake men" take their place in the world, this may simply be a Dawn Power. Either way, OOO and the incarnate power of ZZ break the shadzorings ("human beings came forth to negotiate and they are afterward called the Alkothings, not shadzorings") and Shargash goes dormant for some time.

9 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Fire and leave him holding only Light

Who is the earliest culture on record making a hard distinction between "Fire" (lo-) and "Light" (zre-) with "Sun" (el-) as their union? Ralios comes to mind. I wonder if they brought another little sun with them when they came from the West, or took the little suns they found in the highlands and interpreted them on their terms. One sun, one dirty younger brother, one rarefied older brother who is also in secret ways the dispossessed orphan: a gift to the perfect Khordavu.

22 minutes ago, Joerg said:

his reunion with the rest of Yelm. 

No Hill of Gold for Kargzant. 

Eager to be corrected by the buserians but these two phrases in tight juxtaposition initially got me wondering if the "Hill of Gold" revelation reflects an archaic theological crisis similar to what Monrogh learned. At one time the Antirius complex was a separate cult isolated from the pantheon the Wall Builder Empire worshipped. Integrating with what they had in Dara Happa required both sacrifice and consolation. Some parts of the community accepted the new myth and ultimately become part of the Yelmalio complex. Others retain what they had and remain more-or-less pure horse people (maybe with some factions joining Yelmalio later). 

On the other hand the Hill of Gold we have is primarily a struggle of a dispossessed heir against various local usurpers and not a Multiple Suns scenario. There's no rival and superior sun god here to challenge proto-Yelmalio's ownership of his own Fire and leave him holding only Light in a subordinate position. Maybe there was one and that part of the myth was lost or suppressed. Maybe that's why Yelmalio questers have never managed to win enough to earn their Fire back . . . by the time they start the Hill of Gold we know now, Fire has already been abdicated and the god who took it died.

Yelm may also appear at Hill of Gold wearing a mask of darkness left over from the digi[j]elm (the "j" here is sometimes pronounced like Welsh "ll" in the archaic "Llankhor" or honorific truth-rune "y" in "Dayzatar") and take Fire in that form. If so, then that mask was banished when the Empire became Bright and wandered the wastes until reentering the story with Arkat. But that's all deep experimental heroquesting and not even my cult unless for some reason we needed to anoint a legitimate High King of Saird one of these days, give our other brothers their homeland back.