scott-martin

They don't have grain goddesses down there so archaic lineage-defining interactions with the local "likita" might have been extremely different, now that you mention it. Faranar is not Nyanka, etc. EDIT FOR PRAX If the Genert and Pamalt systems were once congruent on this point I would not be surprised if the "Genertelan Nyanka" wasn't one of the parts that died on the northern side of the land bridge, forcing them to adopt new reproductive family structures or die out.

This is a great thread and this is the exposed gold. Whoever tells this story as being about "Lodrilites" might tell other stories about "Lodrili." Maybe they tried the plow already too and were drawn into the wars of the northern continent through contacts with neighboring civilizations. They may have diminished in the south and all the names have changed, but that's where it was before the last of their ways was absorbed into the Dara Happan underclass. As for water and phallic deities (Pamalt the spear), this is probably another of those tantric references that haunt the lozenge. Before the lodril initiation their braves just know how to make it hot, or something.

My two clacks on the expansive art captions is that they're a good working compromise between (a) usability for vision-impaired fans who want an alternative text description of that big blank space in the layout and (b) a reasonable amount of extra detail and background "footnoting" the images for those who see the pictures. If both channels transmitted exactly the same information the picture would be redundant. I wonder how many people would buy an annotated behind-the-scenes "Art of Glorantha" showing the process (assignment notes / "script," sketch, revision, production), talent interviews, rare unused / variant art pulled from various products that not every fan is going to own: the Guide, 13G, the Sourcebook, Prince of Sartar, etc. Maybe a glossy con fundraiser or something

High praise indeed given the source. Maybe let's give the bloody rites of Arroin and other veggie tales their own thread when/if I ever get out of the office. She might well have stolen that Man Rune altogether, in which case Pavis Himself would be only a famous recent case. (Why are Green females designed to be so attractive to human males?) I hear you also on Sunripen . . . my fantasies of them casting it prophylactically on fields of ripening sprats like we immunize children may be a little broad, and either way it protects their bodies and not the more psychic forms of Gloranthan disease. Did forget one possible "consolation of Chalana" for them, though. Aldrya has no remedy against death. This is probably not a problem for most, but we probably see the occasional militant Evergreen get so spooked at the prospect of not coming back next spring that s/he takes the white robe to get close to resurrection. Maybe a few Browns as well. Either way, they're going to be, uh, on the nutty side.

You got my attention. First thought there was "I know they have that weird 'special relationship' with Arroin, but what do they get out of the full Chalana that they can't get at home?" Aldrya can Find Healing Plants through her independent Arroin connection -- dryads adore the wounded healer, which is probably a long Frazerian screed on the horizon in itself -- and is the source of Heal Body, which competes with CA (and Lunar) medicine in some ways. The tree goddess apparently also has independent access to Preserve Herbs, although the text is a little vague on this point. Sunripen prevents mold, rust and other "plant disease spirits" while discouraging vermin. (Naturally I imagine Miracle-Gro sells the secret now in extract form.) So what does a well-rooted plant person _need_ from the white goddess? Plant disease spirits are a little controversial so maybe Sunripen only works in some circumstances, forcing an infected elf to seek alternative medicine. Maybe this is a kind of "war cult" for hygiene-driven types who hate vermin so much that they delve deep into the mysteries of cleansing . . . these would be militant "sweepers," driving all the bugs they don't like to the nearest troll territory in order to promote a healthier garden. Maybe new plant disease spirits are emerging that the old system can't deal with As The Hero Wars Begin. And just maybe these people come into our hospitals offering friendship and weird plants as part of a long and sinister agenda to destabilize human healing institutions. (Yes, I did read a little Castaneda as a child and have relatives in Colorado to this day.) Trivia: Heal Body is shared pretty widely among ("grain") goddesses but doesn't reach Eiritha until Pavis Himself spills the magic beans. This is of course a big deal in the pacts allowing the City to persist within Prax. P.S. Arroin are happy to work with Humakt, especially when it comes to poison therapy. Even if that's just the Swords making sure the hospital stays open, there seems to be room there on the healers' side for pragmatic compromise.

Thank you! Agreed rounding those hexes is tricky . . . Spol may feel downright haunted compared to the Blue Moon Plateau, depending on whether we draw the line around the top elevation proper (which Guide 308 implies, 114 hexes) or assume that the troll territory includes the upland forest as well. (Sort of a dodgy proposition based on what we know about their appetites, but they probably don't have a lot of competition.) In the former scenario, the Plateau is almost as densely packed with uz (3300 per hex, averaging 1.5X the threshold for "urban center" on the maps) as modern Ireland or New Hampshire is with people, which is a nasty prospect. Sure, a lot of them are going to be trollkin and mutants but even a wretched enlo is hungry and takes up D6+6 SIZ. What awful things are they all eating? Latter scenario gets them down to about 1260 trolls per de facto hex of territory, so either way they're a whole lot more successful up there than the gloomy Spolites. (The disappearance of Jarasan as anything but a word on the map is ominous. I hope it's an omission because I like bird people, but maybe those trolls got hungry.)

Vingkot's ring assigned the tattoo needle to the god-talker but an archaic form of the practice (branding, no ink involved to reveal the patterns) is specifically attributed elsewhere to Issaries, who uses then "the tattooing of power" to set his people apart. My current thinking is that the "marking bone" evolved into both the stylus and the needle and that the first writing in skin used charcoal. What becomes of the competing burnt-mark system remains to be seen. I'm fond of the idea it becomes written Trade, speaking of Elasa, cat and dog scratch, etc.

It's almost as though the blue man were blind to what we post-Arkat people would consider "chaos" despite all his fine talk of Law, even through his ambitions (malkion the sacrifice) greased the road through which it entered creation! But back to Chalana, I'm fuzzy on the mythological nature of poison, which might be a useful tangent to explore here. Poison feels completely mundane in the RQ materials, generally best treated (and brewed) with secular skills instead of spells. On the other hand, poison will affect a lycanthrope while broo are specifically immune to poison along with disease. And of course iron "poisons" some people and not others. Is there a chaos god of poison? Does its use damage the world? Or is this a secret of Gloranthan "alchemy?"

With six Dark Runes west of the Jankley Bore the troll population there may be drastically undercounted unless they were brought to the edge of extinction in one of those elder race wars, maybe payback over Lentasia . . . and as for eastern outer world folk, Dozaki-Koromondol inverts the human demographics with 4 out of 10 known uz on the lozenge packed into that strange corner of the world. Even the mountains feel crowded with hsun chen. Substantial herds of lo fak retreating to the Panj Mao in winter, flocks of wind children (a lot we have yet to discover about storm worship here), white tiger people, etc.

We'll put those scaling theories to the test as we survey the edges. The territories at the limits of the inner world are an obvious place to look for wilderness since they tend to be (a) remote from conventional man rune fertility systems and (b) "open to expansion" along at least one border. For example, the mapped portion of North Pent (roughly defined as east of the Troll Marshes, west of Jankley Bore and north of the edge of the central Pentite plateau) might be about 3/4 of an AAA map or 130,000 square miles, so if we extend up another half-map (200 miles, 3-4 days' ride) north you get an overall density equivalent to the modern Yukon. Granted, most of the population will cluster as far south as they can (especially with the Hot Lake so close) and things are going to get very strange up there, but that's how adventuring sages earn their beards. Even if human habitation in North Pent stops short at the AAA edge (unlikely given label placement), the place is more desolate than modern Alaska or Khabarovsk Krai in the Russian Far East where the movie Dersu Uzala was set. That makes sense. It's harsh up there and normal man rune fertility magic hasn't gotten much of a toehold there . . . probably for various reasons. Likewise, while most of the population of Eol probably stay as close to the Thunder Delta as they can, including a lot of the territory on AAA Map 8 ("Northern Erigia") gives them a whole lot of almost empty space to roam. As long as we can find them about 1/3 of a map (54,000 square miles) they're as lightly settled as modern Lapland. Admittedly there are still a lot more of them crammed into a smaller zone than we see across the White Sea, so clearly those people are "blessed" by their pacts with the Empire -- starting to suspect this is true in a lot of areas, with advances in trade and other magical technologies feeding population pressures that would be unsustainable in previous ages of the world or if those advances hit a hard wall called "hero wars."

Thanks! It's a complex challenge because many of the "blankest lands" are between maps and claimed territories . . . and so we'll only get a sense of how empty they are once all their neighbors are resolved. As for explanations, I have to admit wondering whether hexes actually get larger around the limits of the inner world, giving humans who wander to the edge more relativistic space. This may have something to do with why the most ancient Brithini are so small, but that's a crazy though so I prefer your view. The "inner world" may simply be where the Compromise has been knit most strongly by the weight of mortal lives.

Test case: Silver Shadow is an easy enough benchmark since it's a perfect ring around the Crater extending as far as north Raibanth roughly 3.5 hexes (17.5 miles) away. We know the Crater radius is 12.5 miles so the total this-world land area is roughly 2335 square miles. Between the cities, the rural population is about twice as dense as the modern Peloponnese -- not exactly a lonely land, but we should expect nothing less within walking distance of such a vast concentration of wealth. Not Lonely. The Hungry Plateau, on the other hand, gives 36,000 sable riders 86-7 hexes (about 1,900 square miles) to rove so this is a much wilder territory than the imperial heartland without being truly desolate. Presumably the graze is harsh but uniquely suited to the sable way of life, supporting 4X as many per square mile as modern Mongolia supports Mongolians. No wonder they're pleased with themselves! Not Lonely.

For modern demographers, areas with population density below 6 per square mile are considered "frontiers," approximating wilderness. This is not a rare phenomenon on 21st Century Earth: Navajo territory and parts of Maine USA only push the upper limit, and we find even fewer humans stretched across relatively inhospitable or remote areas from Namibia to Greenland. In your travels, as you identify territories in 17th Century Genertela in particular where the math works out especially lonely, please let me know here. As a rough rule of thumb, 6 residents per square mile translates into a per-hex population of 130, so a 100-hex "frontier" could support maybe 13,000 people and feel as empty as Namibia, Navajo country or the forest of inland Maine. Again, I am not nitpicking or challenging the numbers. I am simply looking for the wildest corners the inner world has to offer. After all, depending on how the population is distributed, even high gross densities can feel extremely remote -- the modern Black Forest here on Earth manages to support nearly 1 million people across the equivalent of 73 Gloranthan hexes (570 per square mile, equivalent to modern Maryland) and you could trek a long time there without meeting anyone but ancestors and other spirit neighbors.

It's an interesting point. My initial suspicion was that those fields are clustered around the towns, leaving vast sweeps of more-or-less howling wilderness across most of the lozenge. But even by modern definitions, a "frontier" community means a population density under 6 per square mile (~130 per Guide hex) so a backwater like Skanthiland (rural population 25,000) would need to sprawl across 200-210 hexes to be as desolate as, for example, Piscataquis County here in 21st Century Maine. Likewise for a place like Eol (with a relatively primitive nomadic population of 250,000) to achieve the same population density as my mom's home county (where they have gas stations, antibiotics and satellite TV), we'd need to find those people 2/3 of an AAA page (5,300 hexes!) to wander. This is not a nitpick because while these population numbers are clearly canonical, beautiful and complete from the original transparencies, I don't know if anyone ever said they had to count living embodied humans exclusively. In my Glorantha these territories get crowded with spirits loosely affiliated with the "community" or genius loci. A secular census may only manage to count 7,000-8,000 living Eolites and the place would still feel as empty as modern Lapland. But the bush sings with ghosts for those with ears to hear.

It might be worth refreshing what we know about these wars and these competitors to see how their mercantile monopoly evolved as well as how it was "maintained" (enforced) in the centuries before Tanian. Various far-flung cultures have "pirate" gods, for example. Others cultivated independent relationships with the oceanic powers.

A bit of an edge case (is it published? is it fan speculation?) but Sandy spilled a few beans at the front of the '97 Lore Auction (Conpendium).

This is an extraordinary line revealing deep logic around the Tap. Thank you.

He'll do! The question was about survival, but it looks like the legacy of the Bull Shahs goes on strong in pockets like Tawenos and Hurvisos.

On the bull front, you might be onto deep insight with that primal scene. A brother may readily ally with foreigners, possibly sharing the secret in exchange for protection or revenge. What this entails for modern "storm" bull barbarians' relationship to their ox-making cousins is wide open but somehow I don't see the concept flying high on the chaparral. Maybe Dromal, Dronar or some now-nameless caste-father of farmers contributed the secret in the north and the circumstances around this can easily fuel old grudges like the Tarjinian Bull. At last they had a beast who could really pull a furrow. The technology spreads. This may be the true weapon Syranthir wielded among the old bull people of proto-Carmania, so taboo that the locals would rather focus on the plow it makes possible. Either way, timing here is probably important if we need to restrict this agricultural capacity from warlords of Talor's era. (As far as I am currently aware no bull god survives into Idovanic Carmania or the lunar era but I would be happy to be proven wrong. While applying "the rites of the bull" to younger brothers would be a good atrocity for the Carmangs to inflict on subject Pelorian nations and beyond, Third Age contexts have probably changed.) Barntar could sometimes be a fosterling in the household of Orlanth, a more tractable bull-son from vanished Envorela who was separated from his own family and took the bull/ox decision with him -- as you say, kinsman of the ox. But on the plow front, people have occasionally pondered that troublesome lod-plow from the Lodrilites whom the early children of Malkion subjugated and turned into "laddies." This is its own tricky field.

Love it. This touches on the whole complex of castrating a sacred bull to create an ox but until I get a chance to really review "all the questions about Prax" that piece of it remains nebulous and probably taboo in berserker circles. We know Dronar and/or Dromal comes to the table at the very start of the caste system with "the holy plow" already in hand but nothing about who or what originally drew it. Maybe it dug a shallower furrow in the yielding body of Britha and couldn't be easily transplanted until being modified Since Time -- explaining how Syranthir managed to cross Charg on his belly when Talor couldn't. It kind of starts me wondering in earnest whether Malkion didn't start out with (or acquire) multiple peasant sons bearing multiple plow designs, with their stories conflated except for trace variations in the nomenclature. But that's a slippery slope. Either way, to me the success of the Western-style peasant in Carmania over Pelandan survivals probably hinges on the importation of higher-yield farming magic crowding out the old goddess religion. I don't even know where the Barntar plow comes from. He's definitely a friend of the ox. Maybe the animals drawing the shaker priestess were his originally.

What prevented Akemite forces from simply following the Janube up to proto-Worian and then striking at Dorastor from the north? The Talsardians may have blocked an initial thrust in that direction but by 450 they were allies. Also it goes without saying that there is no Ban in force at this time. Nonetheless first Arkat and then Talor takes the long way around, finally forcing Kartolin despite all precedent. Did Talor's dealings with the Bull and/or blue people mandate what looks like an extensive detour? Was Rist simply a hairier prospect than the unvanquishable fort? I have theories but crowd wisdom is surer. Bonus: does this shed additional light on Syranthir's unprecedented genius in daring to take his nation on a route his sainted predecessors refused to even consider?

On the third hand, without the White Goddess and her sister books we would be unlikely to have the Red Moon Empire or be here to talk about it, so I'm inclined to be a little kinder to his enthusiastic overreach. Likewise, on the viability of God Learner sources, in many if not most cases they are all we have, so even if that bathwater is filthy it's our best shot at recovering the baby.

The "firenewts" White Dwarf editor Albie Fiore inserted into the AD&D Fiend Folio always struck me as familiar for the way they ride around on large flightless birds like heavy ostriches. Looking back it's funny how their society also happens to be organized with elite warriors, priests and overlords. Surely a coincidence!

1. IMG it's a lot like the "Dragonkill" in that "Luck and Death" aren't forces you wield within the MOLAD environment but external challenges you subordinate through your relationship to the archetypal structures that drive and unify the Sixths: the "mini-monomyth" that makes the Holy Country "Holy." The Master is beyond luck and beyond death, thus eligible for embodying the cult founder who himself embodies all Six. 2. Study of the Book may grant insight into how to combine multiple elemental affiliations within your person as well as open heroquest paths that would otherwise be closed. There are indications that he left the Book deliberately as a trap door if the MOLAD was interfered with, but the way is likely to be extremely hard,"hailing the harshax" notwithstanding. Prince of Sartar doesn't exactly leave him sitting in a position of confidence. 3. Unless you live in the City of Wonders I think most people in the Holy Country participated through their particular Sixth and only in rare and inscrutable circumstances via MOLAD. Finding your way to the City of Wonders and a place within it may be congruent with "worshipping Belintar directly," although those people seem to be big weirdos so who knows. I imagine most of them have disappeared and the rest are somewhere between sad and lazy.

I love it! While it's a shame history hasn't given us examples of the bride winning the contest yet, I wonder if Inkarne or some other future figure will qualify. For us, the question might be which FHQs push back on that very specific restriction on their status in KOS -- "she must speak only on matters of magical interest" -- and how they do it to reach for broader Mastery. There are undoubtedly Esrolian models.