Alex

And you thought that the US midterms was a short and tough electoral cycle. "Hammy the Weather Hamster says three more weeks of Sea Season. Rurik the Restless, you're fired!" Can't find such a list, but my search is by no means definitive. KoS's and the GtG's agree exactly to the naked eye, as you say. Nor of course, still less even, can I rifle through your brain as to why you might be thinking this, but Heler is very frequently referred to as "Orlanth's loyal thane" (as staunch as Heler, etc, etc), possibly appears on some take on "Orlanth's four (weapon)thanes", and so you may have been eliding that with the "thanes" thing on that list? At any rate, it seems like a very logical and so likely as to be almost inevitable to happen someplace (whether rationalised as a TB, a thane, or as Flesh Man), especially as Heler is a noted variant member on the Traditional Clan Ring. So below, so above!

Not entirely sure I'm following your thread here. You're saying that if a child is born outside of marriage, or inside the wrong type of marriage, they won't be able to do any of those things?

True I suppose, there's bound to be some sporadic worship in neighbouring cultures (like Sartar), and in mythically connected one (like Dara Happa). Oh indeed, I wasn't thinking of gameworld taunts! I don't see Prax as a great place for lighthearted ribbing at the best of time, and I were to start, it wouldn't be with a bunch of stabby hard-bitten gender-separatists. I was thinking rather more of the at-the-table ones. And I speak here as the traumatised former player of a noble celestial qilin sage in another game...

Good and tricky questions! The concept's very hard, because I think it's pretty sure time (any sense) doesn't work at all like the mundane variety anywhere in the otherworld -- sky realm included, as a rule -- and even less so in the underworld. But it's also pretty important, as if you're ritually much less physically in the underworld, you're in some stronger or weaker sense magically dead. You want to fix that soonish, or it'll become a permanent condition. I think a key part is that you have to bring your own map -- the myths you're seeking to interact with. They provide a number of dangers and challenges, but they're better than the alternative, which is a featureless void of constant and continual unknown danger. You wont necessarily see Yelm or the Boat Planet show up like clockwork in the way they do in the mundane sky, but if your myth foresees an interaction with one of those, that'll happen if your quest is being done correctly. (Slightly outcome-biased way of looking it, of course!) No heroquest ever goes entirely predictably, of course, so just because you didn't plan on meeting a particular entity doesn't necessarily mean you won't! If the questers are Boat Planet passengers, then they'd tend to experience a structure similar to the BP's "own" myth. Though as with all HQs, with the bringing their own baggage to proceedings...

Another possibility is some sort of "asymmetric devolution" -- more correctly asymmetric federation -- arrangement, where you have a tribe where a full-fledged triaty as a member of the tribe collectively. Feasible if the triaty is relatively small, so in effect more of a "sub-clans" situation, however they choose to regard it themselves. As @Leingodsays, if you just have a "subsets" arrangement, that's pretty much necessarily unstable. "In times of crisis, follow chosen leaders." Well, which one? You have the small-tribe king and the big-tribe king to contend with, in addition to any of the usual command-and-control conflicts. There has to be some sort of defined relationship between the roles for it to be in any way workable.

My take would be that's essentially each tribe's own beeswax. Not whimsically, of course, but following their own tradition, or whatever elegant compromise was hammered out when that Tribal Ring was originally formed, or re-formed in some political or ritual crisis. Naturally there will be regional (and temporal) patterns, but there's no guarantee of compete uniformity in a given confederation, kingdom, etc.

Which one? Ask six Orlanthi, get seven opinions! I think this is certainly true if you ask at 'HQ' -- if you ask the Prince or the Boldhome High Storm Voice, no question -- the Far Point tribes are an important (and semi-detachable) part of the Kingdom, there's whatever-the-exact-current-relationship with Sun Dome to maintain, and so on. Why re-pick an old quarrel with them that was painfully settled before? (OK, because they're Orlanthi, that's why, but good counsel will intermittently prevail not to.) OTOH in the backwoods, things will be more variable. The last game I ran that was pretty much clear from Session Zero. Clangen instantly went down the 'I told them it was the thin end of the wedge when they built roads!' The Elmal thing didn't really come up at all in that game that I recall, but if it had I strongly suspect the PCs would have had the stagnant, backwards looking, and hidebound take on it.

Yeah, the average HQ is a 'spot fix'. (Well, the average one is probably a spot failure or a spot disaster -- the average successful one!) You enact and adapt the myth just enough to take care of the local circumstance. If you're a big-cheese HQer, that turns into a hero cult, and maybe even one that survives your mortal existence. If it catches on beyond all reasonable expectation, it might make it to local subcult. If the actions embodied are seriously jarring with the standard cult of the deity, then it's presumably even less likely to become a thing, and if it does, it has 'schism' and 'religious war' written all over it.

You certainly may! Only risk is that we might answer you. 😄 Any theistic interaction with a deity will do this, to a degree. (A degree you could maybe try to quantify, if that's your vibe, but I mean in a fairly general, hand-wavy way.) If you sack a point of POW -- sorry, wrong sub-forum! -- to initiate to Ernalda, you're a little bit identified with her. If you manifest her virtues, and sack for her rune magic, more and more so. But you're still a free-willed being, of course, not simply an Ernalda-avatar at lozenge-level. This is hard and dangerous to do, it goes without saying. Most likely results are you get the screen of 'lost in the heroplane', or you get dumped out of the ritual on yer arse, or worse. But it can be done! And in a way it's essential to all heroquesting. After all, you're seeking to at least slightly expand the nature of the deity as it was magically known to her cult -- presumably the typical good-faith HQer sees this not as contradicting the fundamental nature of the goddess, but of discovering it and adapting it to the thing-wrong-in-the-world you're HQing to fix.

Fake it until you make it!

Thereafter, prequels all the way down! When we get to 0ST, the debate begins whether with you can even have Prequels and Sequels without Time!

And attitude, I think. IMG (where I go with the odd-numbered Gregging, rather than the even-numbered ones, and the Elmal sitch in Sartar is much more historically recent), by far the majority of solar-cultists worship "Yelmalio", but most non-solars ordinarily think of and refer to the sun as "Elmal". But almost everyone has the understanding they're essentially the same god -- insofar as magic and mythology allows any precision and certainty about matters of identity. So if someone is talking to a Yelmalio worshipper, which name is used may come down less to deep theology and more to a wish to extent some basic courtesy vs gratuitous obnoxiousness. Of course, Orlanthi being Orlanthi, gratuitous obnoxiousness to solars is often the mythically correct thing to do! Though also often not...

I'm not sure what 'legitimacy' means for the Orlanthi, much less 'mythically' so. What's the practical or magical downside of not doing so? Limited, I'd think, if anything. The main benefit of marriages is social. Both the upside of cementing alliances, and the offset of the downside of quarreling with your neighbours in an unregulated manner if an inter-clan informal relationship goes a bit Pete Tong, when it comes to property, living circumstances, raising the kids, etc.

Very much looking for the Red Star (hammer and sickle optional) reaction for this comment!

For instance, and this is of course a notoriously non-canon, deprecated source (and for the wrong game system, and now unavailable and de-published forever). But in this respect it's just going with precisely what KoS said. A "crapload" is indeed the ISO unit of cattle, as anyone who's ever taken a walk in the countryside will confirm. But bear in mind that a KoS/TR stead is clearly far larger than the nuclear-family steads of RQG -- something like 60+ people as against 5 -- so that's not entirely unexpected. I'm going to give myself a pass on not getting the initial reference, then, as I'm staring at that sentence in that insert box on that page in my physical copy right now, and still not getting it. But very similar to the 1/3/3 thing, so my confusion on this point is fairly moot. For bride price it's somewhat traditional that the bride be unmarried at the time, oddly enough! I was going by for example this old-forum thread: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/wp-content/uploads/www.glorantha.com-forums/www.glorantha.com/forums/topic/carls-and-thanes/index.html But clearly RQG isn't counting a whole lot of live-at-home adult children in its numbers anyway. (Or if they live in the same physical large/longhouse, they're still being treated as economically and legally separate.) The analogue-improvement continues! I suspect I may already be long past intended scope of the thread and anything likely to be useful to the OP, so I'll endeavour to largely button it after this. But in the interests of some degree of source reconciliation, I guess there's some terminology going on here that RQG is considering those without arable land to be 'not really free', and anyone that does to be. Whereas TR is setting "full carl" as the gold standard of economic independence (has land, has oxen, has the herd to maintain those oxen), and alludes to "half-carls", "poor carls", and other variations on the theme with some client relationship as being steps down from there.

So in which spirit... here's potentially my second-dumbest one. I'm still rather fond of an old theory that the Kralori have eight elements. Reasoning: Look at that Dragon rune! Geomancy. Looting from RW Chinese and Japanese takes on the elements, but not getting rid of the "standard" Gloranthan ones, so we need to knock through to make more room. Much easier to Balance! Might have looked feasible back in the day, when washing care-labels doubled as minor variant runes, but looks pretty dumb in the light of current canon.

This thread's totally like being asked "your biggest weakness" in a job interview, or "your most humiliating moment" on a national TV show. Sacrifice the point of Honesty, and under no circumstances answer with your actual dumbest theory.

I think it's certainly political. Everything's political, and all politics is local! And what could be more local-politics than "whose field is that?" (See John B. Keane plays for the colourful details.) But I think it's ritual too: the land-sovereignty thing is soooo important that any steadholder has to be able to be seen as some sort of husband-protector figure, however that's locally construed. They also have to be seen as qualified and competent for the role, which will be presumed for an Orlanth or a Barntar initiate, and much more "oh yeah prove it" for others. And each of those feeds into the other. Yelmalio (or dare I say Elmal) is a great cult for a stead-holder! ... in a Yelmalion clan. In a normcore Orlanth-cult-led one, it'd be a little unusual. Or maybe not, depending on local precedent. If there's a local bloodline or "sub-clan" with that tradition, you're golden! Or even the remembrance of such a practice in clan lore. If you're the First In Clan Memory, and it's a conservative-minded clan, then good luck with that. 7M even moreso. Of course, this was likely a common practice in many clans and tribes during the occupation, so there's precedent, but in the immediate aftermath of the liberation, what'd be almost universally seen as a very bad one. Humakt is a different case. Pretty much every clan will have Humakti, or recent precedent of having them, but are they good models for steadholders? They'll less often be married, less often have children, so they're worse off for the Cheap Child Labour side of the house before we get into the magical and ritual associations. But they're the perfect steadholder's hardcase sibling! Certainly I think it's possible, especially in clans that have a big tradition of this, or where an important bloodline is currently headed by a Humakti. I think most Humakti (hus)carls or (weapon)thanes have essentially followed a different 'career structure' than the landholder one. But heavily caveat this in the light of the above about just how common the status is. If 4/7 or 60% of the adults of a clan are carls or thanes, then that pretty much implies "little or no cultic restriction". But as regards being the big cheese of a stronger-sense larger-scale stead, at the top of the client-patron food chain rather than the bottom, that's how I'd see it.

I think these days we're "lumping" half-carls rather "splitting" them, but I thought the threshold was originally given as eight oxen. Maybe that's been lowered to take in a broader category of "carls further down the clientalist pecking order, but still with actual farmland, so none of yer cottar riff-raff!" I'd have thought of that as merely a House-Formerly-Known-As-Long, and a stead as pretty much necessarily larger, but I guess as Jörg says there's two sense of the word "stead". Can you remind me -- lest I be behind in my reading, or have forgotten it long since, could be either! -- which clan and RQG book is being referred to here? But granted this does broadly consistent with other sources (like one part thane, three parts carl, and three parts carl). Horrible terminology, though. Are we purging references to Early Middle Ages England as being crude anachronisms... only to move to High Middle Ages England instead? If just the couple actually "holding" the land are being so counted, then that implies very salami-sliced notionally separate steads indeed, and really not very "extended" families living at each at all. After all, "cottar" covers not just poorer arable farmers, but the whole the "sheep men" and "hunter" sub-economies, the layabout adult children of carls who've not been separately granted that status yet, craftspeople, and so on. So evidently I'd have to walk back my statement about carls on the basis of at-all-recent material, but seems rather different from how I ran it or pictured it in any of my various Gloranthas.

But the Malkioni and the Dara Happans both prominently have calendars going back earlier than 0ST. So what was happening between the various "year zeroes"? Not "Time" but merely "time"? (Whether their calendars are actually total nonsense or not is another matter, what I'm curious about is what they think -- or claim they think -- about them.)

That'd very much be my take, and I'd go so far as to say the Orthodox one. But then again I'm a stereotypical eurocommiegreenliberal, and Sandy appears in the Gloranthan Yearbook as "most likely to be Yelm"!

Yelorna... also somehow. Which I'm mostly happy with, except for the parts involving living in Prax, and the "My Little Pony" jibes.

If it's any comfort, Sandy Petersen is in the "trolls are the bad guys" camp. Or certainly at least very willing to visit it for the purposes of an argument to that effect!

I might be speaking mainly from my own conception of what the typical stead-size is here, somewhat circularly. Yes, if they own the warrior-gear and the ox-team then that'd qualify them. But is that a normal situation for a one-hide-holder? That's rather a lot of beef, and more if you're looking to keep a self-sustaining stock of cattle to maintain them from, rather than "buying them in", or again being in some sort of clientalist relationship to obtain them from a neighbour with a large herd. Of course, if we're talking about some sort of exceptional situation, like a PC adventurer with their wealth or own income stream turned "gentleman farmer"...

I might be speaking mainly from my own conception of what the typical stead-size is here, somewhat circularly. Yes, if they own the warrior-gear and the ox-team then that'd qualify them. But is that a normal situation for a one-hide-holder? That's rather a lot of beef, and more if you're looking to keep a self-sustaining stock of cattle to maintain them from, rather than "buying them in", or again being in some sort of clientalist relationship to obtain them from a neighbour with a large herd. Of course, if we're talking about some sort of exceptional situation, like a PC adventurer with their wealth or own income stream turned "gentleman farmer"...