scott-martin

Love it. My sense of the barefoot womanizer is that he -- deliberately or otherwise -- practically (re)invented what we now call Orlanth worship from the scraps Loko hadn't managed to eradicate. This process undoubtedly took time and a lot of work we would call "heroquesting" before he had enough of the LBQ to try it. When Varmast initiated Barefoot he initiated a genius. Thank God.

!! They have a weird call-and-response to that one they love shouting at me: what is cloth but time you can see? Without the knots we'd all go naked. I have no idea what they get up to after I go to bed. More swan knighting later when I digest.

Wow, those ladies can drink. The really wild performances seem to happen around the big fleece fairs later in the season when the girls are tired and looking for one last hurrah. Not as familiar with the linen parties but they seem a little more settled.

No expert but my emergent take on the Goose Girl / Swan Woman complex is that she reflects the female equivalent of King of Dragon Pass aggregate mastery of the realm down there, possibly as an undocumented survival of something like the archaic "stork mother" they have in the northern lowlands or some local beast/hsunchen culture now lost. We know the durulz venerate a transcendental goddess of "nature" at the Wild Temple. Maybe Imarja initiates recognize that goddess as their goddess too. In this scenario, I always assumed an orgiastic edge to stork mother (why SurEnslib gets such bad press at home) so this may look like chaos to establishment-minded people. Of course cults change so we would need to look at when people pivot into Imarja when the conventional Ernalda complex doesn't give them what they need and when they pivot away. Maybe chaos gets in there at various points but I think her nature has defeated that so far. Also while I like the idea of the Goose Girl (Die Gänsemagd) being autochthonous she might have come from afar . . . perhaps from the east riding an oracular horse named something like Falada. If and when the Feathered Horse Queen ever saw the mysteries in that temple I suspect she'd understand. The problem of chaotic earth is interesting. If I were them down there I'd look toward the Print and then back to the greatest city in the world and start pondering who krarsht really was once.

Great catch. I wonder if the quest forks early enough that someone could succeed with either a beard or a talker, but not necessarily both.

All these are good options for debate. Technically the extinct hreekeen (whale people) occupy an ambivalent position in post-HW canon much like the puma people. The waertagi may well have taken a leading role in their slaughter and then taken the conveniently open place.

I like the Masks of Gbaji Hypothesis but formally Ghani has been with us since Wyrms Footprints 4 . . . when Kana Poor was still known as "Kara-polor," before his name was amended for the Redline History.

(Out of likes.) For me this is always the horror and the comfort of their civilization. At the end of the day, a whole bunch of dwarves -- maybe a majority, maybe leadership in one or more colonies, maybe everyone -- may turn out to be harboring some secret heresy in their fluid exchange units, hidden from the others. Would love to run a dwarf game some day on a Paranoia model. Everyone starts with a hobby, a heresy and for all I know a mutant power that they can never reveal for fear of extreme correction.

How extraordinary it would be if this were an original document of the archaic celestial Yuthuban pantheon revealing divergences from the Raiba-centric system of the Wall. This may be the moment when relatively isolated "planets" were forced together above while down below their shadows ("cities") did likewise. (All out of likes for the day.)

All out of likes for the day again but yeah, the Man teaches that if you push the moment of incarnation -- this particular die roll, the rose of mysterious union, luck or death -- with enough conviction anyone can win all the money and give it back simultaneously. The awed silence in Casino Town. Real talars get it.

Love it. A lot we don't know about those people or why the Machine had to be built there on that wildly indefensible edge of empire. May be a little far afield but as long as I insist that the Man Who Came In From The Sea used a different exploit (maybe something more like Run Lola Run instead of the brute force algo that mass-produces bladesharp matrices) I don't age as fast or trigger the storm bulls.

I think I see a star going out, as it were. Sorry, buserians. Love it . . . no intent to jump on the physical chemistry model at all but most of my gods are clearly talking gods. I wouldn't be surprised if one of Zistor's rightfully unsung "achievements" was breaking the bank at Casino Town (runic monte carlo simulation / betting algorithms) . . . play the moment when all the rune wheels come up lucky, infinite payout. A different cheat from what Belintar would later pull off.

Not to get overly uh literal but in this uh context I tend to think of the runes as the equivalent of a cosmic alphabet, semiotic characters that a clever person can interpret, arrange and rearrange to read and write reality. We all have a combination of runes in our personal "signature," as it were, a kind of true name. Runes in common open up cabbalistic correspondences for magicians to exploit. The great gods are themselves the stories around the letters. But then again, I spent a lot of time in the postmodern '80s.

I've always loved the notion that there's a vast unpublished epic around mer interactions with the West in particular, maybe tutelary relationships broadly similar to what other nascent human cultures achieved early on with the children of wood, stone and dark. Cosmology notwithstanding, that might be why they get "elder" status here. (And why Malkion is sometimes a wet god.) In that light, one thing that's interesting is that each of the major surviving kindreds has a specific set of coastal cultures it could have tutored in its specific spin on the Way of the Sea. The ouori, for example, range from the Brown Sea up the Banthe and then northwest into the Neliomi, so these are the people the ancient Brithini would have met on their shores -- the ludoch prefer warmer waters and at least in modern times the malasp are limited to the region south of the Banthe. Ludoch contacts would have influenced cultures across southern Genertela (including Teshnos), the islands (including Vith and Teleos) and around as far as the lands around the Loral Sea. Only the zabdamar thrive in the Kahar so that's the way the archaic Kralorelans negotiated their initial sea influences . . . and even the God Learners conceded that the zabdamar are weird. In general the multiplication of aquatic races in RPG of this vintage seems due to the popularity of the Aquaman comic around that time, where every trench seemed to have its own mutant Atlantean successor civilization -- domed, open, helmeted, water-breathing, advanced, primitive to meet the needs of the unfolding story. By the time it gets to Steve Marsh who invented the locathah and the malasp-esque sahuagin in D&D to vary the standard merman/maid, for example, it's already assumed that you're going to need to fill a monster manual with aquatic versions of goblins, trolls, elves, everything. What's kind of surprising there is that Steve says he didn't invent the murthoi, who are otherwise really just a void in Gloranthan lore except for that bit in RM. Blue elves and sea trolls may be a Sandy thing, I've never asked.

Love those tough little . . . are those mutant enlo? Caption claims the jungle trolls escaped that nuisance so they must be midges, which is amazing and probably some kind of taboo to mention. I confess to being perplexed over the years at how small trollkin are portrayed in absolute terms since their average SIZ in RQ was always 9-10, comparable to a full-grown human before modern diet. The weight lines up (GTG 93) but even at 3'6" they'd be eye-to-eye with a human 4-year-old and extremely heavy. On one hand, I love teeny enlo in the art so much that I mentally scale them down to SIZ 4-6 in order to support the pictures. But I also tend to brush off the description of how "puny" they are as a sidelong joke: a pathetic trollkin is really only as "tiny" as a typical adult human (also average SIZ 10) to a mighty dark troll. Again, taboos are probably in play around this. Maybe the little enlo we see strutting around in their cute little mini outfits are mostly juveniles coddled like pets in troll families that haven't managed to have real children. I don't know where the adult ones go, but survivability is probably low. Trivia: the midget slasher runs the exact same SIZ range (d6+6) but is generally a lot dumber than even a non-superior enlo.

Love it. Dangerous! Any time someone pauses and realizes, this is like that one time god did something similar, the walls around the worlds open out.

Who were Vrimak and Hippoi really? One general personal note on this chapter that your comments touch on: in general I'm actually a little let down by the scarcity of third age dragon influence outside the unique environment of the Pass itself. Granted part of this is the ruthless success of the dragonslayer cults of Peloria and Saird, but I'd love to hear more about survivals in the far west (possibly behind Serpent Beast or vanilla hykimite cultures) and of course the east as well as what we see in Pamaltela and Slon. In theory a dream dragon can manifest anywhere, which helps. More is welcome.

Used up all my likes again for the day but I'll be back. Like the aldryami color wars and other arcane lore, discerning and ambitious people could dig under the variant evolutionary choices the estranged dragonewt communities represent and come up with some vibrant insights. MGF implies that newts in those regions don't universally consider themselves inferior in their "barbarian" existence -- even if they're slowly dying out, their persistence demonstrates that the experience is valuable and the utuma is not yet ready. For example, we may find that the Kralorelan community comes and goes. There may be an entire draconic alchemy -- or multiple alchemies -- built around dragonbone instead of the metals.

Try calling them earthshakers or gazzam and see if that snaps better into place. As long as they're massive slow survivals from a primeval age, they can have any kind of blood, hips and plumage your imagination can concoct. I like having them lumbering around the fringes because they prepare the player for how fragile the marvels of Glorantha really are. On our world there are no reptile giants. They died out long before we were born and all we get are the bones. But here on the lozenge we can still hope to see one, even on the fringes of the setting, in special contexts and sometimes with the sense that they're not going to survive the Hero Wars. It's bittersweet to get to see a member of a failing species cross the road. On the one hand, you got the experience. On the other, the sadness. Also the notion of the way the dragonewts deal with their overgrown, spiritually perverse and otherwise "damaged" cousins can be hilarious or heartbreaking depending on your dramatic needs. See how it feels if there are simply big dumb irritable reptile mutants hanging around the fringes of a dragonewt community. Nobody ever needs to use the word "triceratops." EDIT plus this is a people cursed by Nysalor also, even though the tailed priests roll their eyes and click at the story

It's working. Resist their lures and snares. Stay focused. But this is an aspect of the archaic religion Glorantha participates in. I've started grinding my way back through the unabridged Golden Bough for another project and before the first introductory chapter winds down we get lines like (paraphrasing a little at the end) "the custom of physically marrying men and women to trees is still practiced in India and other parts of the East. Why should it not have obtained in ancient Kanthor?" Why not indeed? I just keep in mind the notion that maybe 1/100000 of the vegetable intelligences -- the interface elves -- will ever encounter meat people under normal conditions. These are generally the ones who through some combination of training, aptitude, dysfunction and assigned burden have some sense of how we think and how to motivate us. As meat people myself I like these because they're easier for me personally to deal with. The vast majority of vegetable intelligences rarely interact with us except at moments of ecological disaster. Most encounters are accidental -- vine-seeking shamans, lost children, estranged lovers, senile kings and other freaks of the human condition -- and rarely go well. These encounters can be as alien as people enjoy. Everybody gets what they want. [lost forests will come back as we get into the history maps, "scrub" or dwarf elves will also come up later, reproduction is an enigma that may have changed Since Time via contact with various human cultures as you note regarding the Pendalites and centuries of sorcerous investigation] Probably. It may not have been his creation but he ran with it.

A lot of Shannon Appelcline's work on the never-completed Elfpak made it -- at least in spirit -- into the Mongoose Second Age "Elfs" supplement, as related in Hearts in Glorantha 2. I suspect a treatment as groundbreaking as the original Trollpak could eventually bloom on those roots if someone is willing to develop the ideas to a similar level. The boobs are undoubtedly a facet of certain precious but secret phases of the forest seed dispersal cycle, "white bulges" and all. You want the reproductive bodies to be attractive and given time will cultivate a reasonable approximation of what the meat wants.

"Happy" Jack of Who fame always winds through my mind so there might be some clues to his origins in that song as well . . . the broken body lost in the lapping waters, leaving only the horrible gourd head to dream, grin and propagate. The "furry donkey" implies that his enemies were children of an ancestral Issaries figure. Cast Townsend and Moon (or Daltrey) as the bickering Ethilrist and Than and the adventure writes itself. I also like the notion of the severed head being part of a larger chaos entity looking for some evil genius to stitch it back together like Atyar and Than. Maybe the bears are its seeds or runners. I wonder what happened to their heads when the pumpkin came in.

I have given up all my likes so remind me to come back. Your first question about the centralization of magic revolves around the "disenchantment of the world" model of religious history that was popular in Greg's formative years. In this model, as societies become larger and more complex, what we would consider significant magic becomes another specialty for a narrow proportion of the population to pursue. These specialists tend to be close to the state for various reasons: they're valuable and need to be protected or controlled, their activities bring them personal power in themselves, their function is part of the state-making apparatus so there is no difference. For just about everyone else, encounters with magic become rare and extraordinary to the extent to which the specialists become integrated into the state. When the interests of the magicians and the state diverge, you're in for exciting times. Now as for the link between chaos and decadence, Greg's innate suspicion of empire is probably the biggest factor. Throughout his career he's been on the side of disruption. Storm gods are his favorites and Sartar wins the war because in his heart complex systems tend to be inauthentic and unsustainable. At times like the hero wars era the seeds of the failure take many forms: bureaucratic stagnation, failure to initiate, decadence, strange and exotic pastimes. Participating in these systems carries significant rewards for some -- often the entrenched specialists near the core -- but in Glorantha this is rarely a long-term good deal for anyone. Sooner or later the machine stops. Most simply get ground in the gears. Others drop out to seek authenticity in the form of a personal relationship with "magic" outside the usual channels. Some find chaos and become part of the problem.

Thanks. Even my hatred for them observes a certain delicacy around their obvious intellectual failures. But it's interesting that if the ancestral "zzaburites" have such a Napoleon complex need to be taller for the magic to work, that sounds like a different original gene pool from the baseline Brithini type. Whether that's simply a separate bride of Malkion bringing height (and probably blueness) into the system or something more sinister in its complications, I don't want to read ahead. (I've never seen a reference to the old Vadeli being low in SIZ and I seem to recall the Veldang are relatively tall, for what that's worth. Height might also come to signify facility with magic at a certain historical moment, possibly with tall wizards staging some sort of coup within the blue caste. Also we are dealing with a civilization singled out in the texts for turning "ancestor worship" or genealogy into a military science, so these questions are important.) The notion of them swiping perfectly good children from the other castes because there's a chance they'll turn out taller is a good one. I think we tend to imagine them only picking the smartest kids but I see little evidence of that in their society. In some eras we know that zzabur have taken women, presumably selecting for actual magical talent there. Thanks also for bringing up the kshatriya -- as you are aware, some theories have posited that the vedic castes evolved separately and came together in a pattern of conquests, alliances and other amalgamations, so at various points in history the proto-kshatriya tribes in particular might formally outrank the proto-brahmin, for example. In this model, while each caste now plays a stereotyped professional role (priest, warrior, bourgeois, peasant), each had or could evolve an independent cultural apparatus that substitutes or compensates for the other castes if cooperation breaks down. I'm most familiar with the concept in modern arguments that the brahmin are effete parasites and the kshatriya with their muscular, chivalric ethos really know what's going on. I'd forgotten this earlier so maybe that makes the deep analogy to archaic Brithos a little more direct. Cutting a lot to avoid turning this into a drastic resolution (too late) but it's probably pretty easy to evaluate a population's physical drift from the classic Brithini type by prevalence of various skin tones as well as SIZ. I'd probably start in Sog. We know the percentage dice for that, at least. And as for your henotheists, definitely my idealists in the far north. One thing we can always agree on is that Tanisor is a serious pain.

I read all this stuff as how an observant outsider in 1625 Seshnela (Tanisor) would describe local cultural norms -- the facts on the ground -- while including local explanations and accounts of alternative Western practices where they support or at least fill voids in that narrative. Obviously the chapter reflects the "all you malestini must listen" Brithinocentric puritanical party line coming down from Leplain because that's what the wizards say, but the narrator is good to let facts that don't fit the dogma remain unchallenged. Modern Seshegi talars engage in war all the time. At best, the historical "use of weapons" in the shape of regalia defies strict caste boundaries, and then you've got the cavalry (to satisfy some ghost of the old "knights on horseback" image?). These facts are gold because they trace some of the ways their society has deviated from the Brithini ideal Since Time and may yet do so again. Maybe at some point the Tanisorians ran out of "legitimate" talars and these are really the heirs of the old horal caste (*) doing the best they can. They aren't censured for fighting because the wizards know the truth, but as the local gentry they're also happy to make someone else do the fighting first, which is where the people with hykimite lineage get pressed into service. Or something like that. Anyhow, the point is that the rokarites are doing it wrong and I'm happy the text supports this reading. (*) not "horalites" in this context -- these people were remarkably good with horses before they were absorbed into Western society and retain elements of that heritage, not that of the original Children of Horal from the sagas -- but I'm probably already in trouble for reading sideways.