Alex
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Posts posted by Alex
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1 hour ago, Sir_Godspeed said:
I really wish they'd just make fungus "Darkness plants" and end it there. Not Aldryami, but certainly Flamali. No need to bring bloody cellular biology into this.
Occupational hazard of letting someone with a biology degree loose on a fantasy bestiary. 🙂
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3 minutes ago, jajagappa said:
This group [Olontongi] doesn't extend into Volsaxiland [...]
Ah. I'd been guessing they'd have claimed some of the former "Sylangi proper" territory.
11 minutes ago, jajagappa said:They are waiting to see if there is a True Heir to Broyan... and on that note, someone might just happen to remember that Queen Samastina of Nochet gave birth to twins in 1624... 😉
Seems a long time in to wait in Hendriki attention-span terms! But yes, that sounds like a very plausible arc to me. Quite what the threshold between "let's wait until" and "we need another fix in the meantime", and that and "we waited too long, that precedent no longer holds" is doubtless itself... Changeable!
3 minutes ago, jajagappa said:And not only will you have God-king loyalists, ornery Hendriki, and Aeolians to draw upon, but also: Storm Bull warbands, Wolf Pirates, scattered Westerners (both Rikard's former followers as well as new arrivals fleeing the fall of Nolos), and... abandoned Lunars! (There were some scattered Lunar garrisons now abandoned by the Empire - if someone pays them well, they are likely to be as loyal as any.)
Thanks, I'd hate to have missed out any complications, much less all of those! Those are less likely as sources of rulership models, or models even to bodge a compromise between, but they're certainly all additional factors to cause them all to struggle and fail... An essential part of any "listen people, I have a great new plan for Orlanthi government!" plot arc.
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Just now, Baron Wulfraed said:
Where do slime molds fall? (I seem to recall reading that some slime molds may cover acres, if not multiple sq. miles.)
They're a Mee Vorala thing, surely. No doubt to the dismay of biologists everywhere. ("Definitely. Not. Fungi. Argh!")
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20 hours ago, jajagappa said:
It's a precedent. But you need the right regalia. And with Wolf Pirates busily raiding - you may have to get creative to find/retrieve (maybe time to open up those old barrows???).
Yup, if you can't find the right regalia for the precedent you had, find the right precedent for the regalia you have -- or can get your grubbies on...
20 hours ago, jajagappa said:Belintar's gone, the Lunar army is gone. There is no one to appoint such, and nothing to enforce such. But, there may well be ambitious leaders who can seize power and claim to be "governor" of say Durengard, or another city.
No Rex rites in Heortland.
Well like I say, now you have Olontongi who, ever if they don't have Rex rites yet, will certainly have obstreperous people pointing out how much better it'd be if they did... (Now you may object that they're barely even in Volsaxiland, and Volsaxiland is barely in Heortland, and on that I'd have to cop a plea.)
Now possibly this is getting out mere inches ahead of the Canon steamroller, and just begging to be contradicted when the book comes out. ("Nope, still no Reges!") More importantly very possibly not what the OP is looking for, if that's essentially just as straightforward a map as possible -- this is more of a way to do the exact opposite, but for me there's potentially good story value out of it. (I say, having mined similar ideas in my Kultain game, so likely biased!)
If one does want a nice simple map, I'd probably go with the concept of the former provinces as kinda-sorta tribal confederations (again, very ricketty ones, or else utterly non-functional as such), and with "tribes" around the features identified on the Dragon Pass gazetteer map.
20 hours ago, jajagappa said:Durengard was the center of the God-king's cult though and was where the Governor's Palace was located and the magic bridge from the City of Wonders. If you look at the map of the magic roads, if you just keep extending from Durengard, you can see the true destination of the magic road: Stormwalk Mountain.
Interesting. Presumably you need a Magic Silver Key to get the escalator to continue to the top-storey stop...
At any rate, regardless of the exact respective loyalist concentrations in either, any self-respecting wannabe Archon of Durengard or Chief of Hurlantar (titles made up while you wait!) is going to want to claim, in pretence or otherwise, nearby areas if they're at all of a compatible constituency. In this sub-region you'll have some moderate-ish levels of loyalists, and be at some middling point in the gradient of Aeolians, as well as having lots of ornery Hendriki (or Orlanthi, misc, at least). So this is very much the sort of place I'd expect to see some sort of compromise polity start to re-emerge. Albeit on the "raging success" scale maybe someplace between "work in progress" and "dumpster fire".
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6 minutes ago, jajagappa said:
1571 more or less marks the end of Kitori influence in Volsaxiland with Tarkalor's victories. Tarkalor proceeds to extend the Royal Road south and effectively gains control of the trade from Karse to Whitewall to Boldhome.
So am I even approximately right in thinking that the "missing" map (1570-1617) looks a little like:-
- Crossline to Marzeel: Volsaxiland;
- Marzeel to Bullflood (or else to the Syphon, depending who you ask when): Vandarland;
- Above to Minthos: Gardufar;
- Minthos to Bandori: Esvular (and/or "Bandori tribe").
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2 minutes ago, scott-martin said:
Could be the horrific real reason the Empire had Six Legs! We have krarsht now, of course.
Twelve castes... six legs... Ma heid's fair nippin'!
You can see why they only had room for one caste for the ladies, with all that going on. Maybe overdid it, at that! </Fosters beer ad>
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Just now, scott-martin said:
Really old Brithos texts describe a society of three castes while others a little more recent classify people into as many as six, including the "sailor" (waertag) and "man-of-all" (engrion).
Say for the sake of fantasy I'm bidding on a scrap of inscribed leather that memorializes the exact moment when the fifth and sixth castes were forcibly combined and the island entered into its penultimate civil war. Don't jinx me, it might come true if we wish hard enough. The sailors will have their revenge.
Jeepers. Now I'm imagining -- I think this is very much thread-qualified! -- that there were originally eight-to-twelve castes, and the whole Vadeli... unpleasantness is just the world's worst trade-union demarcation dispute...
"You asked who to do what job?! Right lads, everybody out!!"
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17 minutes ago, Jeff said:
It is only complicated when you try to reconcile years of fan publications and discussions. Start with the Guide and go forward.
I promise I got confused without reference in years -- possible closing in on decades! -- to TT#12, so I may need to ignore or forget still more stuff. Or drink a great deal more tea.
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1 hour ago, Richard S. said:
Jeff's FB notes suggest it's closer to 1500 or slightly less people with sorcery training, though of course not all of those may be considered proper wizards.
Well, if you ask the Brithini, then exactly none of them are "proper wizards". 🙂 But in Aeolian caste terms, surely the vast majority of these are of the priest/wizard/zzaburi caste?
2 hours ago, scott-martin said:IMG this remains an unsettled question of history. For purposes of both art and expediency, I want to believe that this may be the most ancient surviving mortal caste expression left on the lozenge . . . maybe even the original Malkonwal settled after the Expulsion if you believe the local street prophets.
Personally, and I appreciate this annoys the heck out of some people who want everything like this to be definitively settled, I kinda like it this way. The actual history is presumably pretty murky. Just ask two RW historians about things that happened 100 years ago, much less 1600, and yet three opinions (and watch the fur fly in many cases). You have of course prove which version is magically correct... but often multiple different cultures can prove contradictory results. Unless it all ends in heroquesting tears when one utterly crushes the other. But ignoring the admittedly related question of when the henotheism begins -- or resumes! -- and how that relates to the Orlanthi substrate, the hereditary three-caste model makes as much sense as any of the other Malkioni ones... and more than some! (Those Rokari. I mean, really!) So they may plausibly maintain on the one hand that it's the original, or acknowledge that it's changed from a hereditary four-caste one, but argue that's still the more faithful take than any of the other weird heretics.
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Just now, Erol of Backford said:
Wait, am I totally wrong in thinking the Esvulari are all Aeolians?! Again the stuff in Tradetalk 12 by Mark and Greg may have been changed but they are calleded the children of St. Aeol!?
Oh what a tangled terminology web we weave, whenever we stick a toe into Glorantha. 🙂
I think the two terms are more or less synonymous in practice, the derivation of one being a toponym, and the other a religious handle. But, to confuse matters...
- The "common" caste are often pretty much standard Orlanthi, or at least might as well be if you were a myopic person in a rush;
- There's two different sub-regions, one centred on the Bandori River, one centred on the Vulari peninsula. So some references to "Esvulari" or "Esvularings" seem to be to the latter specifically, rather than everyone Aeolian-leaning. From the maps it's unclear if there's two different dynasties in charge at different times, two subtly different subcultures, if the two are synonymous, or two distinct subregions, essentially boiling down to "Pewthy, who's talar?" I think @jajagappa who is wise in such matters was suggesting something closer to the last of those, but it might be any combination of them, for all I know.
- Given that the borders change over time, but there was an enforced peace and top-down administration under the the Pha--t-headed demigod guy, I'd bet money there were at least some "orthodox" Orlanthi, without allegiance to any talar, geographically intermingled with the Aeolians proper.
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23 minutes ago, Richard S. said:
Checking RQG, it does describe them as just having wizards, nobles, and commoners, the latter two of which don't practice sorcery. I doubt there's much Hrestoli influence in them, considering they seem to have been in Heortland since the dawn.
That doesn't mean they're unchanged in their religious practice since the Dawn, though! They've explicitly switched from being atheists to henotheists, and given the successive bouts of Malkioni influence, they may have wiggled a fair bit either side of that, too.
Apparently though, all non-Brithini are "Hrestoli". But your amount of "Idealism" may vary...
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5 minutes ago, scott-martin said:
Yeah. My rubric right now is about as simple as it gets. If a plant acknowledges "Aldrya" or works for a plant who does, it's aldryami because the distinction is more about religious communion than botanical taxonomy. Any fungus, kelp, orchid or fern can join at any time, but right now the compensations around their current situation are compelling enough that they resist conversion.
Fungi are probably more clear-cut distinct, partly due to their "troll" associations, as well as any consideration of RQ's longstanding use and abuse of "phyla". Though I'm uncertain about this, having read about obvious Vivamort cultist Tom Brady avoiding eating mushrooms and "other" members of the deadly nightshade family. Maybe because I lost several points of IQ (maybe an entire point of INT) just seeing that...
But that'd make sense, their initiation may be not so much "automatic" as "collective"... so collectives (however defined) can also opt out...
5 minutes ago, scott-martin said:Likewise now that you bring it up there are going to be recalcitrant trees and even whole grains who reject the aldrya . . . either maintaining older ways or developing radical alternatives of their own. We know about krjalk. Others will emerge.
Yeah, makes sense, we have the sweeping categories of "rootless" and "renegade" at present, but there could be emergent categories of religion and culture within those. At any rate, it's a less mind-bending exercise than trying to work out how "barbarian" dragonewts work. (Much less any other sort!)
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1 hour ago, scott-martin said:
In the beginning there were no uz, no aldryami, no mostalites. Those broader categories came later, after missionaries spread the gospels of kyger litor, aldrya and the machine to what were once isolated and divergent enclaves of eaters, growers and makers.
Still arriving, really. Ask Jeff at a Lore Auction if ferns and mosses are associated with Yellow Elves or Red ones, and consequently are they "true" aldryami or not, and he might well throw your euro/dollar/pound back at you. The management accepts no responsibility for any injury sustained doing such a thing. 🙂
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On 11/19/2021 at 11:10 PM, Godweyn said:
The Predarks, antagonists of the primeval gods, were actually true dragons.
I think that works pretty well. The Orlanthi have been described as thinking of anything off-piste on their mythmaps to be "Chaos", or at least, presumed to be Chaos unless you can prove otherwise... and it could be Illuminated, so you never can be sure.
So the main plot twist here is that this simple-minded, naive, most "Rioting Conservative Tribesmen" of regional event table notoriety take... is actually correct!
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35 minutes ago, littlewitchmaus said:
{and let's not forget that the plural would be 'walktopodes' and not 'walktopi,' anyway} and folks in my campaign tend to refer to minotaurs as 'aurochs.'])
The Bradford Observer line that "a man would as soon think of swallowing one of the animals thus described as pronounce such a word at a respectable tea-table" seems especially plangent in this context. 🙂
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33 minutes ago, Richard S. said:
Actually, don't Aeolians combine Horali and Talar into the same caste basically? I feel like I remember them only having three castes: wizards, nobles/thanes, and commoners. Don't recall the source.
I'm not sure, but I'd be any money that's not how they view -- or rationalise -- it. Depending on how Heavy on the Hrestol they are, perhaps they see themselves as closer to a Men-of-All caste on the one hand, and a Common one on the other.
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3 hours ago, Joerg said:
According to the History of Heortling Peoples p.88, Andrin the Mover, a Larnsting king who reigned 923-950, instituted the Dragonbreaker Cult. It would be weird if he had not adopted the Rex kingship at the same time.
That sort of weird I can definitely rationalise and live with. In fact, it might even act to reinforce the resistance to the Rex subcult, if Andrin "proved" that his Alakor was a Dragonbreaker, and very definitely not a Super King with Evil Emperor Tyrannical Mind Control Powers(TM).
3 hours ago, Joerg said:Then there are the City Reges. Heortland has plenty of cities which will have a plenipotentiary mayor or city king or sheriff who acts as the local big man.
But surely the point is they're pretty much anything but Rex-types. They might be "Super Chiefs", usin Dar rites or some variation on those -- I think the BoHM mentions another entity or aspect of Orlanth significant to tribe-foundation, but I'm not clear if they're essentially the same rites. They might be talars. They might be sub-sub-(sub...)-governors.
41 minutes ago, jajagappa said:I suspect "fighting" of any sort will violate the caste restrictions of the Aeolian nobles. More likely they will ride in chariots to clearly mark them as nobles, and will command their cavalry to take appropriate actions. The warriors, chariot drivers, etc. will all be of the common caste.
That's only going to be the case if they follow the Brithini model -- or Rokari, those infamous wannabe Brithini! -- of caste, and do so pretty strictly in that regard at that. As opposed to the manymanymany things they very much don't do the Rokari way! I'd have thought that especially given the baseline Orlanthi cultural substrate, there'd be huge pushback to this from the governed. Though I suppose you could flip that and say it's their distinctive point of difference from the Orlanthi leadership model.
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4 hours ago, Joerg said:
At those values, I wouldn't bother to introduce something as strong as hate. "Annoyed by" or "loathe" would be my in-betweens.
The Yelm of GRoY sounds like he has "Peeved by Chaos, 15%" or so. But then he's peeved about a lot of things, so I guess that diffuses his efforts!
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39 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:
Am I a bad person to wish for new material before the rework of the old stuff? I'd rather see material on Esrolian, Grazelands, the Dragon's Eye but mostly Heortland or say a Sartar homeland book released before a New Elder Races or a GM's book? Sun County in Sartar would be really nice... but I'd be less thrilled to see another cults book?
"Rework" might be a little unkind for those. Clearly there's going to be a ton of new stuff in CoG. The elder races pub presumably will be considerably too, given that ER was a pretty slim book, and apparently a chunk of it has already re-reappeared in the Bestiary.
39 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:Over the years I have been exasperated waiting for the end of the Wheel of Time to come along or say the Doors of Stone but I will keep asking when, its in my blood!
Well, by the Law in the Letter, you can still ask Rick if any of the things higher up your want-list are out of "still being written" or onto art or indeed layout, or where or in which part of the pipeline they might be... And he might actually tell you those things! Think less of these events as occurring in future Time, and more in terms of Hero Plane maps...
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Actually on reflection, the more useful and user-friendly "backup nav" tactic is to use the "chapter" pages. They're not linked to directly from the drop-down menu, but they're accessible from any of the comics in each (which you can get to from said menu). Specifically they're:-
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http://www.princeofsartar.com/chapter/chapter-3-the-white-bear/
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http://www.princeofsartar.com/chapter/chapter-6-battle-for-the-cradle/
In another little oddity, these don't work if you just use "/chapter-3", etc, in the resource URL, which makes them a little less handy.
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On 11/19/2021 at 4:27 PM, 7Tigers said:
Hum, it seems Harmast healed himself, according to Starter Set cover and his glowing hand:
Hrm, this thread's gone a little bit CSI: Sartar. 🙂 The glowing hand looks like it's healing a shoulder injury, rather than one straight through the heart. Much less out the back -- if that's a scar on his back, it could also/instead be (yet) another injury.
Moral, really needs to train up that Shield Parry of his. And especially that one-ply CON of his. Hull breach!
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23 minutes ago, g33k said:
Because "10-" (one zero hyphen) sorts earlier, in the ASCII code, than "100" (one zero zero)... hyphen has a lower-numbered code, and thus comes earlier, than zero.
</geekmode>No, it doesn't work because no "10-" page exists, as the one after "9-" has the URL http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/end-of-chapter-1/, so there's no lexicographical tiebreak between "10-" and "100-" happening here. Where there apparently is, for example between "1-" and "100-" for "/1", "2-" and "20-" for "/2", the URLs starting "end", "introduction", etc, it's resolved as the ordinally lower, rather than the higher as you appear to suggest.
At any rate, the point of my comment was to try to help with the navigation problems you were reporting, rather than to speculate about the precise functioning of the WordPress resource-handler.
Bonus error: http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/46-thief/ , the last in chapter 3, loops back around to... the start of chapter 2.
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58 minutes ago, DrDave said:
So that leaves just one question. How do augment a resistance with a skill, if it takes at least one round to do so? Do you need to be able to guess that a spell is going to be able to be cast on you at least one round in advance?
Well, as I said (in comment #3), it'd work if the incoming magic is even slower (and you had no other or better counter to it). For example, sorcery starts slow, and gets slower.
Or also if you're a very good guesser, or have precognitive powers, I suppose...
Neither case seems likely to be super-common.
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11 hours ago, g33k said:
<sigh> But only for a few panels... at the 3rd: http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/3-the-underworld/
the "Next" button from this panel takes me back to the first one, "Flame of Sartar" (and thus a 3-panel loop)I noticed the same thing, after jumping into chapter 3 (which seemed to work just fine), and then getting to notion to reread from the the start, and had the same problems you describe. However, it's fairly easy to get to the next by typing the episode number into the URL -- you don't need the full address complete with the strip's exact tagline, it'll get autocompleted (or prefixed-matched, or whatever precisely's happening with the back end).
- http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/1
- http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/2
- http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/3
- http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/4
- http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/5
- http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/6
- http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/7
- http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/8
- http://www.princeofsartar.com/comic/9
... however, "10" doesn't work (instead it redirects to /100, just to confuse matters), so you need to switch back to using arrows for a few until it goes back to ep-number prefixes at /12. But as /3 and 4/ are the only ones I've found that have broken links, hopefully that's fairly moot.
Backford Aeolian Campaign
in Glorantha
Posted
I'm not suggesting they're Clans of Unusual Size as such. For one thing that'd get more and more unworkable if they're supposed to be exogamous in even the most notional way. But rather that if you have a tribal "king" with only the sort of rulership authority and magic a clan chief has, and without the decision-making structures a clan has, you have an even bigger governmental shambles than Orlanthi usual.
I'm not sure if this correlates at all with the confusion of tribes and tribal confederations, and clans and tribes, in for example the Tales presentation of some of this, though it's an available rationale if anyone cares about that.