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scott-martin

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Everything posted by scott-martin

  1. I suspect not a lot of wampum changes hands . . . IMG the currency they prefer is very precious for most orthodox wahaites to pay if they value their covenant more than winning.
  2. Love it. The short response to this one is that the Wall is considered infallible divine revelation but individual interpreters' understanding of it is not. Not even the authority of Plentonius survived unchallenged for a century before people found his identifications insufficient. This is the mechanism through which their civilization maintains fidelity to unchanging ancient forms while the inner sense of what those forms mean and how we interact with them evolves to fit current concerns. The slightly longer response to your current concern in particular revolves around the sheer number of entities depicted being too large for most people to hold easily in their head at once. Figures get ignored. After periods of development (investigation, experimentation, conflict, "change") some figures that were once popular objects of veneration become exhausted or more actively suppressed. They're still self evident on the Wall but nobody talks about them any more. Their cults recede and the tour guides come up with pat segues to get themselves through figures they prefer not to talk about or no longer really understand. The Moon among others is built out of these "dormant" figures and a new interpretation emerges. It's how new light gets in, with some figures getting pushed to the margins, others pushed together and some rising to the center of life. However, because continuity of knowledge is limited where these particular figures are concerned, many of the details come as a shock or would require special pleading if not backed up by a competing and immanent revelation. But the Wall lecture used in the Guide and other places is still largely the literary text that prevailed in the early third century, nearly a millennium before the lunar revolution. And there's only so much you can do with footnotes when Plentonius himself didn't really know or preferred not to say. He might not have wanted to think about a girl in pants or a boy in a skirt, maybe he didn't even have access to our word for "daughter" and so had to engage in severe gymnastics to get through the tour. The shortest answer is that if you really want to know, you can always ask the goddess and she'll tell you. This is how she differs from the sun that will not talk to us.
  3. () = malkion, the patriarch, "name of the father of the law." note that the second is the neliom /n/ form, sometimes called "mem final" in orthodox proceedings. the has been stolen = talar, lawspeaker, justice balanced between death / necessity and magic / inspiration = horal, "the brother from another mother," stormy but not necessarily fatal = dromal, the younger brother, practical person = menena, ancestral principle, the witch (compare to ) = zzabur, the man in the high castle, antichrist = dronar, replacement worker, no access to "mem initial" /m/ = lhankormy, the new life = neliom, "reverse malkion," father of the other brother
  4. God no. That would be crazy because as we all know this is not the game where the analytic philosophers ended up and which effectively ceases to engage with structural approaches in the late '60s. I would not be surprised to see a wholly triangular script deployed in sorcery to record and communicate the evolutions of LAW as you have hinted at here. Such a system might work a little like Japanese heraldry with its radial symmetries (and so a little like the devices of the Noldor in said Silmarillion) and a little like Hegel or at least the more materialistic interpretations. The implied "trinary logic" is designed to give avowed dwarves pause but otherwise this is the route humans take when they want to learn dwarftongue. Anyway the important thing is that the erasanchula who became ehilm () got greedy for like all incomplete creatures and took it for his own in the lands that become Dara Happa . . . in his arrogance it acquires the dot of ego ("the solar eye") and the pronunciation /y/ for ehilm. Likewise laderal claims the and it becomes the pelorian /l/. Other gods of and carry on with their common runes. Ultimately (after Khordavu's era) the (y)ehilm rune is hammered free from its triangular / sorcerous / legalistic entanglements and a slightly more "humble" but also smooth rises, spherical this time but still imperial. And the secret is that the empty triangle inverted and filled is the dragon.
  5. There are other confusions as well. For example, in at least one archaic Pelorian script, something that strongly resembles a slightly more naturalistic was used to write /e/ and so we could explore cases where "scribal error" ended up transliterating /e/ for /f/ or vice versa much as we would run into trouble if an E lost its lower bar or an F nearby acquired it. Possibly this is why E is for "elf" but the dominant sound in that word is arguably the F for flamal, why some lists of grain goddesses include both the familiar frona as well as erona, why the erontree is in Fronela (perhaps they pronounce it more like farontree, forontree) and so on. Interestingly but trivially, this would make EWF something like a palindrome with a form of on either end and in the middle. Maybe that's how they started that particular adventure and why people have a hard time translating the glyph today. We know they had strange botany. And we can guess that the initial /e/ in that archaic Pelorian plant rune was probably short for the strange botanical phenomenon now remembered as the "yarm" or "earm" tree, the recombinant chimera generating all forests and fields. Yarm probably did not take the we would assign it today and definitely would not take the for stormy /hyu/ . . . E was for elamal. Hey wait a minute
  6. Definitely. So until recently I never really examined the runes as transliterating to the Roman letters since they usually function more as ideograms (hieroglyphics, 康熙部首, glyphs, तत्त्व) than a more combinatorial alphabet. While advanced sorcery may deploy long programmatic strings of runes like mantras and the dwarves can have whatever they have, this rarely emerges in the everyday linguistic experience of the theist belt, where people speak whatever mortal or spirit language gets them results while leaving the runes to be the runes that directly power spell effects. This makes sense. Building out a universal Gloranthan kabbalah would be a fairly stupid kind of mischief, right? However, we have the Dara Happan rune set, which is explicitly alphabetic (known English transliteration) and overlaps with the post-God-Learner standard grouping in a few key respects. Most notably, the sound /t/ is written as something like for terminatus, an entity who does not appear elsewhere in FS but is clearly humakt (GROY 16). And while since at least the court of Khordavu they have pronounced as /z/ to make sure that modern yelm gives his initial Y to the "triangle sun" character, this political expedient does not seem to have been followed universally. When Elmal accepts the truth rune and becomes Yelmal(io) we do not pronounce the new name "Zelmal." Furthermore, the extremely archaic cult of Dayzatar and others tend to cluster /y/ and /z/ (and Y and Z) together as though trying to keep both old-school traditionalists and modern pragmatists happy. (Despite the cosmological prestige awarded his otherwise insignificant cult after historical reforms, he does not appear under that name in the sacred carver list.) All in all, I still think was originally /y/ and the Khordavic attribution is artificial. But even if you have two glyphs that resemble Roman letters and are pronounced roughly the same way, it's barely a curiosity worth mentioning in polite company. Where it gets interesting is when we see yumat, who would be written YMT in a consonantal system like what we know prevailed in parts of the archaic west where they spelled death's name as HUMCT and I have tended to go with a slightly more familiar HMKT for convenience. These are already transliterations so the letters are pronounced as they are in the glossaries, pivoting in use along roughly the same axes as pronunciations do in our modern earthly languages. For example, "yumat" with a slightly different aspiration on the front becomes "humat" and both are only a hasty breath or a few centuries of isolated development away from "umath." All are something like storm gods. All have a relationship with death across the theist belt. And all start out with more or less the /hyu/ complex that we might spell in English with an initial "Y" . . . which is in turn looks a lot like the other rune of modern humakt, the otherwise largely solar "truth" rune or that "y"elmalio also has but "e"lmal really doesn't unless you're looking very closely. OK. So the family resemblance among these entities (and keep in mind what "family resemblance" entails among the gods) resolves to an initial and a "final" (death is always final but nothing ever really ends) with a persistent /m/ and some vowels along the way. I initially skipped the vowels as overly complicating what in my MGF is a primarily consonantal western magical lexicography but let's reserve them for later. Two runes that resemble Roman letters and are "pronounced" much as the letters in the sacred names of entities that prominently hold those runes. Why not more? In particular, what standard rune looks enough like our M that we can prolong this high-tension wire act until something snaps? How about ? I am doing a lot of work with archaic water societies right now as well as digging canals in the backyard. Let's say as a dumb theory that M is for something like magasta. Obviously this association does not appear in the Dara Happan sacred alphabet because for them the water rune is pronounced /o/ for oslira. They are not a sea people. Neither were the pony people of Ralios who built the Hrelar Amali pantheon and were only introduced to sramak and other deep salt forces later . . . but certain tribes were tutored by "triolini" of the lakes and rivers. And as we all know, the ancestral patriarch of the western caste peoples was half fish on his mother's side. Modern or even classical malkion does not take the sea rune. Mostal definitely does not. But for now, let's leave the door in the back of history open to the possibility that archaic malkion participated in symbolic processes that we now wrap up in aquatic experience like old fish in yesterday's newspaper. His teaching derives in large part from the tutelage of the western triolini, the people of nralar and so forth. In that origin, it resembles their way of life and their unique perspective. Like the fish whisperers in an old von Daniken paperback, the ontogeny of the west recapitulates its phylogeny. And gods who are especially central to his teaching can demonstrate this by taking the and pronouncing it /m/ . . . flamal, ehilm, hykiMikyh, mata, umath, yumat, humakt. Lhankormhy. Yes, mostal. Not a sea god but a "god" by virtue of his connection to a sea god. "M" not as elemental rune here (that would come later) but as something like one of the Dara Happan honorific characters that identifies someone cosmologically important. Even dromal alone of the classical castes but not dronar. Now obviously we might say there was no historical malkion depicted as a patriarch with a fish hat and net in periods when they tolerated representational art and smashed into an abstraction when they didn't. Maybe all this is the historical Dangkal instead or some rival culture hero with humble mortal roots or the result of a long process of early syncretism. Go for it. For me the important thing is that if we have our /m/ we can start running additional combinatorial substitutions like Sherlock Holmes trying to crack the dancing men cipher. After all, the /hyu/ complex also features behind the names of many of the theyalan gods who ultimately find their way into Hrelar Amali under various guises, recognitions and translations: hyurlanth, hyurmal and yes, hyurnalda. Suddenly other phonemes are in play: /r/ was always in plain sight () but what about /l/ and /n/ and /d/? And is it important that hyumath in ancient times did not incorporate a /k/ or hard /c/ but hyumakt does? So we go hunting. /L/ may be the easiest because hyurmal in particular is a god of sexual license and hyurlanth/hyurnalda also share in this libidinal mystery within occasionally more circumscribed limits depending on how Greg was feeling in a given year. I think at their origins hyurlanth and hyurnalda are young gods with more in common with the mature trickster than they have today . . . and we are talking origins so this is part of their shared inheritance, what they have in common. In Dara Happa, the libidinal mystery that can be named is of course lodril. There are many Pelandan equivalents but their writing is complicated enough to escape scrutiny here. Unfortunately in the Khordavic alphabet /l/ is written as the "square sun" and so looks nothing like our L. But immediately nearby (mysteriously wedged between Appendix B and Appendix C) we see that in at least one archaic Dara Happan system they pronounced as /g/. OK, G for genert. And modern RuneQuest players know that after the death of genert in the north the only true source of is pamalt. We can productively ponder the root similarities between pamalt and lodril and fill in the historical record of how perhaps the secret of died out in Dara Happa and lodril rushed in to fill that hole left in their world. Their /g/ now belongs to gerendetho. Their /p/, in the absence of proximity to living pamalt, gets taken over by pela and is written as what we would recognize as the shaman rune , which is of course fascinating in any study of how their sense of gender evolves despite all protestations. P is for pela where you have pela and P is for pamalt where you have pamalt. And where you have pela, perversely, G is for "pamalt" and he is a dying god. Death in the earth complex takes the hard /g/ for gor because terminatus is a foreign concept. The /b/ in babeester is her hungry axe. Only in the more genteel times we live in, alienated from direct experience of the grower ecology and its cycles (see the upcoming board game Shadows Dance), do people who don't know what to do with this rune any more classify it as revolving around the undead. We already have an undead rune and it is , "dwarf," which might be /d/ when stood up. is the dying god in bloom. As in hebrew, /f/ = /p/ after another order. Flamal contains a repeated /l/ and an /f/. Pamalt contains an /l/ and a /p/. Both also incorporate that /m/ but in the "p"amalt phase you also see in the post-God-Learner spelling. I would not be surprised to hear that this terminal death rune is swallowed or secret in general usage in the south. They don't really need it. It's already there whenever you cut a hornbeam and sharpen a spear. It goes away again when you're done with the spear, plant it and it roots in that great dirt they have down there. Anyway, somewhere within all of this you will find the secret of the /l/ in hyurlanth, hyurnalda and the third mind between them, the hyurmal. Use any of these runes that work for you but maybe is the best. /K/ or hard /c/ has been discussed. There may have been a deeper trick involved here where rotated left became the K and rotated right became C but as with the Khordavic alphabet I don't think there was much practical difference in which direction the sacrificial man was facing. I like HMKT and karmania. You might prefer humct and carmania. Either way, it is ty Kora teK, two Ks for the queen of the book of the dying way, psychopomp of the earth complex. /N/ and /z/ or /s/ are a little more challenging given the rune set we have to work with. Dara Happa is little help on /n/ but the occasional confusion between /m/ and /n/ in the archaic documents (much like modern Japanese) makes me think the /n/ that distinguishes hyurlanth and hyurnalda indicates their foreigner status. They come from a slightly different system. Until a better rune shows up, I tentatively think we would have originally written them with the as well and pronounced their names something like /hyurlamt, hyurmalda/, which is obviously unwieldy on the tongue and would have invited something easier. None of this rules out the hypothetical vestigial presence of two separate "water" influences here to reflect competing malkion and nralar currents, which, come to think of it, is why the modern rune is doubled to reflect its broader scope. But /z/ (and especially /zz/) may or may not suggest turned on its side to defy its natural flow. Khordavu mysteriously pronounced as /v/, which is interesting. And there are other letters. All of this is provisional and can be changed when evidence is put forward. For example, I keep glossing over the vowels because I was never too happy with the convenient way the Khordavic alphabet is a straight substitution cipher for middle english more or less. Did they really need a /q/ and a /k/ and a /kh/ and a /ch/ and exactly our vowels? Hard to say. Mysterious. However, the first thing I would look into would be differentiating /y/ from an aspirated /h/ or the /u/ that is written . . . maybe the /y/ in yomat and the /h/ in humct are actually signs of initial disorder and not what we would now call truth and the "truth rune" exemplified in the modern sword cult is originally scribal error.
  7. It's obviously a work in progress but I currently think "Z" and maybe "SS" are rotated special instances of the generic (mem) that emphasize a particular orientation within the broader fluid complex to produce, for example, the blue man of the west (mem final?) or the talking god of everyplace. One of the interesting things revolves around the relationship between L for Lodril, which in the sacred Dara Happan is of course the "awakened earth" rune or "the eye in the box," and G is for Genert, which is clearly the Pamalt upright. This conceals one of the more profound mysteries. And as in the earthly Hebrew, we can read F for P throughout.
  8. As luck would have it the "K" rune revealed itself to me last night . . . or "man rune supine" but it introduced itself to me as the sacrifice. Malkion the sacrifice, the ultimate rite of the old Fronelan religion. Eurmal and Orlanth do not have knowledge of this principle, which might operate something like Crowley's version of the hanged man: a drastic resolution for when the resolutions get drastic, a way to end an old world that has gotten unbearable and clear space for the new. When god makes a deal with god, whether that involves hanging on a spear (family show) or raising the line of Abraham for slaughter. Humakt, on the other hand, is well aware. And it's interesting that the beard cult knows all of these things even though the tendency is to portray them as light comedy nebbishes. People keep trying to misspell Lhankor Mhy by eliding a consonant or moving the aspiration but he is possibly the only god to maintain access to while reaching for and whatever (probably thunder or an archaic form of "mastery") emerges to claim "N." He negotiates between the world's trivial juvenilia and its most profound mature realizations. In theory, his people can know everything and this is probably the key to the Philosopher King movement that we know becomes a subversive element in the terminal third age. Think of all those nerds emerging from their cubbies to claim a poorly educated world. In the triumph of knowledge you have nothing to lose but your brains! But as usual this is a digression. I think Kaldar is an interesting figure here because he gets the "K" and so is integrated into the death story on the sharp and painful end. Kaldar is what happens as you note when the Eurmals of the world need to sacrifice something to make change happen. He's the egg that needs to be broken. And the dragonewts are all over this thread, speaking of species that theoretically interpret all forms of as food or slave. I don't know how the dragons tell the death story. Maybe this is how it goes.
  9. Looking at that post again I should've shown the work a little more clearly: -> (L)(N) / (L) -> (K) Now (L)(K)(N) actually combines all of these factorials and we know him in modern times as (L)(N)(K) , the grandfather or "sage" god of the storm pantheon, but that takes us a little farther afield. (The blue man stole his . Note that the two gods in the middle share an L, which might be an archaic form of "disorder," strength or pleasure principle . . . that the southern god retains and the grim death god transmutes into something else. L is for Lodril.) I think substitutes for at least /a, ae/ among the vowels by the way. However becomes a problem for people who insist that the aerlits are their own thing and not just another dispossessed sky line. Some of the young gods will take and others will take but the consonantal runic identities are what matters.
  10. 3A. The Praxian religious system "currently" (ST 1616-25+) considers the recruitment of broo a source of impurity but this will change in the Hero Wars period. Ancient prohibitions bend in the reconstruction of the Jaldon Games. Because it is off screen from the action in King of Sartar, we just don't know about it yet . . . but what we actually know about the terminal third age can fit into a leaky bucket when the house is on fire.
  11. Two things here, the last one first: I'm increasingly seduced by the idea that the previous sun crossed the sky in the opposite direction, emerging from the horizon in what we now call the ancient "west" and rejoining the underworld out past modern Vithela. Call it a "solar reversal" if you enjoy speculative paleoastronomy but it opens up a space for Greg's occasional early compass point confusion and frequent RW map flips to reveal something essential. Also explains why dragonewts as faithful children of another sun are left handed. Second (first), any time a character vanishes and another appears in close proximity the mythic economy gives us an opportunity to cast the same actor in different costumes. Thus when she incorporates Eurmal and "regurgitates" Yumat we can read for underlying continuity behind the superficially separate names and aspects. A tricky guy goes in and a deathy guy comes out: coup de theatre, everybody gasps. The plot develops in linear fashion across the discovery of death. Sinjota is the situation where the trickster aspect gets transmuted into the death aspect. She's where he finds death and in the process his previous clown role takes on more overtly serious implications that are different enough that he gets a new name. Is he the same god transformed or are there two gods here? Depends on what you want . . but if we consider her as an aspect of "Subere" cloaking infinite secrets maybe we get somewhere interesting with his psychological arc and hers as well of course. For example because kundalini is commonly compared to a snake the image of Loki and Prometheus bound in snake coils is interesting cover for a family show that wants to explore prestige television themes. Early trickster has zero discipline and zero reality principle. He cannot keep it in his pants because he will not wear pants. It takes an encounter with something larger to domesticate him. Early trickster experiences this encounter as death. He is reborn as someone who understands how death works. Early orlanth has zero discipline and zero reality principle beyond what we learn as a very little god with no tangible birthright in a world of very large gods with prerogatives. He gets beat up a lot. When the trickster and orlanth myths start interacting in the morning of the world, trickster brings death and orlanth brings "honor," something like responsibility. They shuffle aspects and keep moving. Someone called HMKT is generated around the edges, becoming a reservoir for death and honor and liberating his two dads to focus on other things. Add them all up and you have YMT, the theoretical giant who broke the original order of things. So that's the story of the and the , leaving the "m" that unites them on the top level to be discovered. Of course there's an "m" (and a "k") in Malkion (and so by gematria, the modern bearded god of the hill tribes) and as luck would have it I am currently waist deep in the most likely candidate: . But that's a more complicated process and quite the tangent.
  12. As I ramp back up to speed, it strikes me that one of the best bits of unclaimed treasure from the HeroQuest era was the randomized log line on the old site, "the hero wars are between [X] and [Y]," where the specific poles around the conflict would shuffle every time you loaded. So the key Gloranthan conflict is between all of the binaries we see and can negotiate a compromise around on the one hand and all the others on the other. The hero wars never really end. For me right now looking backward like some kind of angel of history the real war is between Klee and Millet, a kind of immediate broadway boogie-woogie relationship with these once-fake gods versus the sentimental nostalgia that sees only a disenchanted world in sore need of restoration, "if only" things worked that way. Or character and player, Glorantha and published product, Being There Now and Being Here Then. And this is not so much a war so much as cosmic forces caught in the act of "wrestling." So the Gloranthans are as anxious and grounded in profane experience as we find it useful to bring into their world . . . their nights are full of meaningless dreams from beyond the gate of horn full of the soul singing to itself and not the brush of the divine, their days are spent in the daydream of skill checks, they have personalities and concerns that deviate from the eternal cycle of ritual time. Even the priests get shit wrong all the time. They aren't constantly running divination. It's something they have to turn on and when it's used up, they're alone. That's when they fight each other and you get the good messy MGF drama. And maybe the people here on earth aren't so alienated as some like to think. It isn't the 1950s any more, Campbell left Sarah Lawrence behind, Eliade's office caught fire. Jung defined god as whatever got in his way, "violently and recklessly" fucking him up like the passenger in the Gospel of Thomas you need to express before it kills you. The real war in these terms is always going on: the sun going down bloody in the west and coming up bright on the other side, strangled in the crewcut corridors of Beloit College and reborn in California. There are always exactly enough players to fight that war. But I haven't really been paying attention to the thread. I'm mostly pleased to have an occasion to use one of the memes that only comes out every couple years
  13. A little sick and a little distracted lately (too many pots boiling) but finding this productive for its glimpses behind the evolving architecture of our thing. One quick point of information: Maybe you people would say "Jane Harrison" instead. Similar impact even if the underpinnings are very different.
  14. Having now seen it for myself I can confirm that this is the career achievement we were promised. It will take time to absorb the content (the thing is massive) and write a coherent review for the boards, but a casual flip reveals exquisite attention to the intimate details of the landscape and local population. This looks like a visual novel in the form of a deluxe sourcebook, actual literature, something like a folio Shakespeare written for dice around your table instead of the elizabethan stage. While layout and art are great stuff, my only regret is that this isn't (yet) a full-nostalgia boxed scenario pack to shelf beside Pavis and Borderlands in particular, against which it stands as a worthy and logical successor, extending our horizons beyond the fields we know . . . but as with all great succession plans, the new hotness manages to learn from past experiments and do it better. Imther will never be a blank land again. Edge of Empire, maybe, but core Glorantha now and forever.
  15. This gives me flashbacks to the days of trying to figure out the propagation of "Ehilm" in the prehistoric west and in particular the route the Eneralites (presumably another vector of the diaspora from Nivorah) took on the way to lower Ralios and the Tanier valley in time to give Hrestol a horse. And it makes me realize that people looking for a strict binary resolution to the little sun problem are cheating themselves out of a real opportunity to find whatever they want in modern Delela, where the communities are organized along familiar tribal lines but the people are of Galanini descent. MGF suggests a thriving variant cult around its own dome that probably has the exact mix of spells, skills and attitude desired. Possibly they have the rare combination Fire without Sky, for example. Or if they remember Zrethus, he is aloof and rarely important to the character sheet concerns of everyday life. And they might be the ones who cultivated the relationship with brown forests. They're clearly pony people, with a pony for a wife and so on. Sad that Monrogh never went there. We can go. But by definition things over there are not necessarily like what we have over here around Dragon Pass . . . otherwise, nobody would ever need to travel or learn anything new if they did. Who would like to go for me and report back?
  16. Seeds for this and that. The memory and cyclical promise of summer when you're hungry or cold. A fresh start. It's awful tempting to just never come back from the garden. That's okay, maybe it's even your goal. But in that scenario nothing is retrieved. And the coming back is what hurts. This is important.
  17. This is fine. All can agree there's an "I" in "I Fought." IMG the part where we start "Winning" still requires a "we," even if that's only a duplication, fragmentation or projection of self. The more I hear about how this second phase of Hill of Gold opens up to this kind of "we," the better I like it! Let's take those crystals home.
  18. Even though I don't have much of a dog in the human cold sun fight, this is something I'm pondering right now. Sacred Time IMG is a collective rite where everyone within a community comes together to recreate their sense of how they're all united and how they all fit together to make a larger world. For Lightbringer people, this starts with the LBQ and ends with the reweaving of the web of time in the compromise. OK. Hill of Gold is a solitary ordeal, like initiation. You make a pilgrimage to the hill and you learn from your suffering. You might go and come back in a group but there's a sense that you experience it alone. "I fight," definitely. Fans of the cold sun like to fight like hell. But how does that "I fight" cross the gap to "we win" in Hill of Gold? Or does it? Does it need to? Maybe this is not the way cold sun people recreate the world and reweave the compromise. Guards the Stead might be an option because you're acting within a communal framework on behalf of other people. You're doing all that stuff they attribute to Yelmalio in the darkness: making friends, building relationships. But most of that stuff seems to happen after the stead falls (I Fought / We Lost) and we're exiled to assemble a new survival covenant on our own. Simply guarding somebody else's stead while they're off having the important adventures doesn't really cut it. We can say we're playing an important part and we ARE, but the real adventure is literally elsewhere. So there's an eternal tension built into the highland sun experience, at least around Dragon Pass. As long as you're in the community other people's adventures built, you can participate in their world but never really build the world your way. In fact, your primary role in their sacred time is to be the person who patrols the walls while they have their dream. Your role is to be an "I" on the outside isolated from their "we" on the adventure. This is OK. Some people like being that person. Others yearn for a little more. But Elmal can't run the stead until Orlanth is gone. And Elmal can't go out and have adventures until the stead falls. And the stead doesn't fall until Elmal fails. This is a hard lesson to absorb all the way through but it's the route to social, personal and cosmic renewal if that's what the world needs. If it were me, I'd reconstruct the entire spiritual arc of it to recover elements that have been lost or forgotten within Time. Monrogh had a lot of the missing pieces but not the entire picture. He points to a better way to come. That story might start with two brothers in a troubled world. One goes out for solutions and one stays home to preserve what works. Sometimes the brother who goes out goes willingly. Sometimes he's pushed. Staying home never works forever. Sooner or later, no matter how tough you are or how hard you resist, you or your posterity will be forced out one way or another. That's just how the world works. A brother on the outside can attract allies or not. The better you are at this, the more likely you are to achieve a "we win" result when you fight. You're building a new covenant. You're making compromises. And of course you can reject all this and go your own way because you're tough. Maybe you're the one [sic] who can win your particular Hill of Gold. But in practice, Hill of Gold is what teaches that whenever I fight without a "we" to win, I lose. You get your butt kicked by the cast of Frozen. Let it go. Any brother who can assemble a better "we" than what was left behind in the stead can come home and recreate the world. Or stay out there and build a new stead there. It's the same difference. You're home either way at that stage. Within history, the outside brother gets identified with the young storm. Orlanth is the one who needs to quest for lightbringers. The inside brother gets identified with the young sun. He guards the stead. The secret of how the inside brother becomes the outside brother gets lost. IMG it probably happens around the time that Hill of Gold stops being a purely spiritual ordeal (heroquest experience) and becomes a physical pilgrimage site. Then when the kill interrupts access to that site, that stage of the inside brother's way disappears. Inside brother stops failing and being forced to wander in exile as outside brother. Inside brother stays inside. The stead is kept. More recently inside brother had to step up because outside brother started to fail, even if that failure was being outshone by the philosophical splendor of big sun cults. The tension became unbearable. Some families were on the verge of forcing outside brother out. Geniuses found a solution where inside brother could have his own community and live out his own story without having to deal with outside brother. In those steads, the survival covenant changed. It's based on the old Heortling IFWW but with some cosmetic adjustments to better align with what Monrogh figured out. However, I don't think they observe the LBQ story at sacred time. After all, as far as they're concerned, the stead doesn't need to be fixed because the stead is not broken. The world you need to recreate looks exactly like the world you had last year: the unconquered sun bursts out of darkness just like always and you're caught up in the awesome triumph of it all. You tickle the local runners awake, kiss a dryad or three if you're feeling naughty. The stead is yours. For a couple of generations, everything was great. So how this works is they have an initiation into inside brother. It's probably based on conventional theyalan puberty rites up through around Mirror Self. After that, you take the other self's trail and learn how to Guard the Stead. I am alone, I fight alone. Devouring Monster is deferred. You reject that part. That's not you. You're going to try to keep the old world going instead as long as you can. A lot of people get through life without ever having to think about a new world. If you get into trouble, geasa raise the walls and make you stronger. Great! Every year when the Orlanth people reenact outside brother's journey (Second Son) you stay home and celebrate the walls of the world (Second Sun). The underpinnings of that world are still theyalan in origin . . . you're still an IFWW community with roughly the same calendar and the same fundamental sense of the compromise, but you're engaging with it from a Mirror Self place. You're the other guy. Maybe you spend most of the two weeks locked in the Dome mourning the murder of god, then you come out at the end to greet the outside brother people in the spirit of dawn age amity. You're the sun they brought back. They went out to fix YOU. Here you are, fixed up and shiny. Renew the pact. Join the world party. And when your sense of everything being great breaks down, you feel drawn to do your Hill of Gold. Maybe you find a rock (d20), maybe you learn something, maybe you come back with it. I would not be surprised to hear that the Vanch temple complex is under lunar sway, which interferes with free access to all who want to make the pilgrimage. Or maybe it's just crowded so tour groups need to observe the schedule, YGWV. Either way, this is the exciting part because that religious impulse will seek other outlets when frustrated. And the stead is unsettled because it's the hero wars. Some of the inside brothers are exposed to the outside having adventures. Wanderers, mercenaries, outlaws, exiles, Rurik types. The world is cracked, the stead is failing and this is literally how the new light comes in. By going out in the first place. If you're feeling really ambitious, do something mean to the Sartar dome community. Force them to have an ordeal, give them an adventure. Scatter them to the mercy of the wind and see what great things the survivors come back with. Don't be the other brother for once. Be the hero.
  19. If the ancestors of many people now living were once elves from the days when we still all lived in the forest the ancestors of all dwarves were once people who sometimes sleep fitfully, heads crowded with sky. Man Rune is a work in progress. (Now do the triolini: it's too bad that our friends can't be with us today / the machine that we built would never save us.)
  20. This is the thing! Much effort has been made over the years to plumb the works of LBQ and so I find myself wondering which other survival covenants (which other forms of IFWW) survive in the early hero wars landscape. In Prax they might take two weeks to hear the storm story; Prax has acquired deep storm sensibilities over the years. When they greet the spring (the new sun) in the Fronelan Dome, what friends are invited to their feast? I don't know if they let the storm people take over the temple in that season. And in other domes, the political dimensions might make things even more complicated, diverse and fun. Of course this is not to imply that Chalana is not a green goddess also and so they could have met that way.
  21. Yeah, I bent that a bit to protect the brown mysteries. In the nuclear winter of Yelm's absence what they really craved was the light and what terrified the usual factions was the flame. How convenient it would be to engineer and promote a new sun with access to the heat stripped out. How lucky to participate in a grand project to swap out an old sun for a new one. How sad for hapless trolls! But I do think now that some frozen forests turned to man's red flower in their desperation and in the absence of any other sources of the germinating heat and the feeding light. Call it an oakfed (so an oak can be fed while other "oaks" or lesser plants feed the flame), a survival covenant. Another high[land] sun now plowed under after centuries of religious debate. A way to burn elf bodies like the human nations do it today, to liberate trapped emotional / chemical energy and give back to a fresh generation. Like a lot of their true things, it was controversial. They get shy talking to outsiders about it. Obviously they would have wanted to train the raw material along friendly lines, taking a hot little sun that won the mountaintop fight and pruning the dangerous heat from it across a few generations. When it could no longer reliably produce anything but light they were satisfied. A few who were there are still present in the deep groves of Peloria and beyond. I don't recall Monrogh consulting them. Instead, he had access to hotter little suns that grew up around the Yellow Way of Teshnos so his project would have had more of that going on. Once the "regular" elves resolved their differences with and without Arkat's help, the forest sun cult was itself pruned almost to irrelevance and so we now have vague cosmological vestiges of a Yelamal or Falamalio or whoever depending on where you go, dream whispering in the gloom. "Why not a Palamalio," the embyli insist. "It's working ever so well for us." IMG it's the serious kind of joke. But my elves are mostly a separate kind of human(oid) consciousness, a different way to figure out Man Rune mysteries through a variant relationship to death and the eater principle. As people, they need to eat something. Efforts to sit in the sun and grow their own internal sugar have been iffy at best. As "plants," the northern forests want to stay as insulated from the meat economy as possible: no herds, no dairy, not a lot of animal hunts for the table. So they developed a different kind of arrangement where some plants would be eaters (elves) and some would be eaten (crops) much like you have in the Prax covenant. This archaic religion, older than farming and developing along parallel lines to how Foundchild grows up into Waha (he said, reviewing the "odd" obsession in Campbell with food systems, good to eat not necessarily as good for thinking until something gets left out to ferment), survives in the Grain Goddess complex. By the way, thanks for that thing. Reciprocating when I get a chance.
  22. Opening up the notion of a Sun Dome LBQ with this association makes me wonder what independent non-Orlanth Sun Domes do at Sacred Time. I don't know if it's possible for them to reinvigorate the world in quite the Orlanth way . . . their version might preserve or recover ritual elements that otherwise didn't really survive the Bright Empire. This is probably not quite an annual Hill of Gold, which IMG remains a more personal spiritual adventure. Do they integrate into the Orlanth LBQ with some form of Protects the Stead?
  23. IMG this is exactly how you get Kallyr Starbrow. But to rescue this from being just another cryptic one-liner, forging a link between the highland "sun" (a beacon lit on the cold mountaintop) and the lowfires is very interesting because for a pyre is required dead plant matter . . . and at least one of the little suns was a friend to the elves in the dark. Did they warm their hands at his heat, even though the fuel was unspeakable?
  24. Arguably the deepest cut in this thread.
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