Nevermet

Trying to map up the army of goddesses in the early myths in the Entekosiad is an exercise in madness, and I sympathize with your efforts.

Just to let you know, trying to map out and compare families trees to make a unified genealogy does not save one from madness.

1 minute ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

We don't have to go that far - Christian trinitarianism is a headscratcher in itself.

"No, it's simple!  You ju-"

*Is punched by Santa Claus*

1 minute ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

what's worse, that or the fact that a text that is explicitly about how Entekos is Dendara constantly divides them into separate divinities appearing at the same time as distinct beings

also, who is Natha in the Monomyth, I haven't dragged myself far enough out of the East to figure that out.

I honestly have no idea what the Monomyth thinks about Natha.

But yeah, the Entekosiad is a real mess in part because of how gods are  blurred.  Turos is ViSaruDuran, the son of ViSaruDaran, and an internal aspect of ViSaruDaran.  ...you can find this sort of embraced complication in real world polytheistic religions (Meso American cultures like the Aztec come to mind), but my God... it makes me want to drink.

Cool.

I mean, it fits.  The Spolites are rather obsessed with the underworld, and there are a lot of hints that they have experience with the undead, so I won't be terribly surprised if there are vampires running around.  EDIT: the only question is whether the Legion is in Zern, Dezarpovo, or near Natha's Well.

2 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Bisos is a bad fit for Urox, but is an equally bad fit for Waha the Tracker. He doesn't have any history with hsunchen, although there's no specific reason he wouldn't work well with them given the tribal situation of Prax, but he also has no known-to-us footprint outside of Prax with some bleed into Kerofinela. I guess the Bison Riders could have brought his worship? His hatred of the Zora Fel and its worshippers seems on point.

Learning that the Entekosiad was originally written using the Monomyth names which were then retroconned into local words just makes this work more frustrating lmao. I'm still swinging and missing on most of this stuff.

Oh, it's an extremely aggravating text.  Everyone has 2-4 names, the narrators are ALL unreliable, and its really unfinished ("you must tell me about Gartemirus & Natha!  NOW!!!")

And I agree that Urox is a bad ft for Bisos.  One of my (gentle) criticisms of the Guide is that it sometimes feels like they wanted to simplify the mythology by removing unique, local gods.

(or perhaps thats my twisted love of Maniria talking there)

34 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

One of my new best friends!

This version looks complex and exciting for your game. I really like the aldryami sacrificial origin, which will tell us a lot more than we currently know about early interactions with the forest that I think ends up as Rist. 

My "hungry ones" are a now-extinct digijelm occupation so I wonder if there's room for earlier trollish influences on their Darkness reactivated in the early Second Age. Maybe it was mediated through the elves so you'd get a Light / Grower / Summer complex and a Dark / Eater / Winter side. In your game of course the elves would be the ones who defined the relationship and warned the people against Daak and company. But when the elves started failing, Spol embraced the dark.

I'm sorry - I never actually responded to your thought:

The Uz of the Yolp Mountains would definitely have a lot of interaction with Spol.  This is where The Ebon City would come from, and Mount Gestinus would likely be a shared holy site.

Oh, and another Bad God: Oh, also?  Daak is Daxdarius.

One is a thief in the night who ruined the House of Virtue and raped the virtuous queen.  The other is a warlord who insists that the world is defined by war now, and the fall of the sky & sun proved his point and allowed him to become a High God (for a while)

Saying that is a great way to get killed by a phalanx in Pelanda & Oronin

Oh, also?  Daak is Daxdarius.

EDIT: SOrry, wrong thread.

16 minutes ago, M Helsdon said:

There are rumors that the Vampire Legion is based in or near Spol.

Oh, that sounds fun!

Do you have a cite for that?

16 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

One of my new best friends!

This version looks complex and exciting for your game. I really like the aldryami sacrificial origin, which will tell us a lot more than we currently know about early interactions with the forest that I think ends up as Rist. 

My "hungry ones" are a now-extinct digijelm occupation so I wonder if there's room for earlier trollish influences on their Darkness reactivated in the early Second Age. Maybe it was mediated through the elves so you'd get a Light / Grower / Summer complex and a Dark / Eater / Winter side. In your game of course the elves would be the ones who defined the relationship and warned the people against Daak and company. But when the elves started failing, Spol embraced the dark.

Greetings, new friend!

The Aldryami come in because of two things: First, the city of Karresh (1) has had an Elven Garden since before the Dawn, (2) It has a pyramid to Derdromus the Pelandan Monster Man, and (3) it is the hometown of a Spolite Emperor who also ruled Dara Happa.  Additionally, we know that ELves were VERY active in Pelanda early on: The maps in The Fortunate Succession  show Pelanda as heavily reforested, and the Entekosiad documents Elves destroying at least one Pelandan city (Othens) during the Dawn Age.  Meanwhile, the Uz were nowhere near Spol until Arkat helped them settle in the Yolps.  The Spolites started going bad when they tried to graft Uz mythology in, and got a bit... ambitious.

IMG, During the Bleak Times, human sacrifice created a sort of symbiosis between human & Aldryami communities: humans died in ways that kept plants alive without a sun, and the humans could then eat some of the harvest, using moon-sickles.

On 8/29/2019 at 8:19 AM, Sir_Godspeed said:

Good catch.


I was thinking that GanEstoro might be associated with the Greater Darkness of the Gods War (either as Chaos or Darkness) - but I'm not sure how these things line up chronologically (as mentioned above, I sadly don't have the text on me - but all of this appears to be before the Daxdarian age, so I guess it's during the Storm Age sometime).

I guess the association with "Lies" fits fairly well with how a lot of theistic societies view sorcery/materialism. Sorcerers lie about how the universe works and perverse the faithful with their atheist/dystheist ideas, after all.
 

I have a lot odd thoughts about the Bad Gods of the Entekosiad.

GanEstoro / Estoro / Ganesaturus

• IMG, GanEstoro is a version of Turos.  He is "Gan Turos," associated with the Gan Hills.  Both Turos and GanEstoro talk to worshippers through cracks in caves, and GanEstoro is called the God Who Gives and Takes, which suggests a capriciousness that would fit with how Yelmites talk about dirty dirty Lodril (who is Turos).
• GanEstoro is a version of Turos that supports human sacrfice.  We know that some of the High Gods secretly kept getting human sacrifices after Idovanus / Idoman / Gartemirus banned the practice.
• The idea that a version of Turos that is associated with human sacrifice and the Gan Hills would explain the Spolites, a Northern Pelandan culture who are defined by their "enthusiasm" over human sacrifice.
• Ganestoro is known in Fronela as Ganestos, "an underground god... who stole the secrets of the dwarves" (P. 225)
  • Based on this, I would argue that there is some sort of a relationship between Ganestos & the Third Eye Blue tribe of the Brass Mountains

Yargan 

• While I can understand a reading that sees King Blue and Yargan as different people, I equate them, along with Guide to Glorantha (P. 317)
• EVERYONE hates Yargan: 
  • Jernotius defeated him, Daxdarius overthrew him, Urvairinus the Conquerer dismembered him, and Bisos killed him and then resurrected him as the God of bountiful harvests.  
  • Given that Yargan has strong underworld & death associations in some stories, I'm not terribly surprised that death is a temporary inconvenience to him, and then he's redeemed as a god of harvests (which is kind of has an association to life & death)
• Yargan has a blue spear from the corner of sky.
  • Between this, and Ganestos stealing the secret of iron from the Mostali, I would suggest that The Later Blue Peoples were Kachisti who worshipped Ladral / Lodril / Ganestos.  The Kachisti were also allied with the Weartagi for a long time before the Dawn.  Yargan's invasion was therefore a western invasion to "liberate" a version of Turos from the "tyranny" of earlier blue peoples who followed Listor, the Poralistors, and King Oronin.  I realize this is a radically different understanding of them compared to what some people here have said.  However, I think this fits the Entekosiad and the Guide to Glorantha, and it explains the Third Eye Blue Tribe.

On 8/29/2019 at 9:37 AM, Tindalos said:

Bisos is the son of the bull god KevTavar, and of the cow mother Esus. So if anything he's more like Waha. (For sufficiently wide standards of "like")

The Guide to Glorantha explicitly equates Bisos and Urox in at least 1 place (p. 327), though they are distinguished elsewhere (p. 325).  So, I suspect either interpretation is viable (though I personally prefer Bisos to be different from Urox, since Urox doesn't seem to have Bisos' leadership skills).

Hi!

So, I'm about to play in an online game of RQH, where the pitch quickly states is a bunch of Adventurers from Carmania coming down to Dragon Pass.

I decided to play a Spolite... and then realized I didn't know that much about Spolites other than "Scary Darkness People."  So, primarily using the Entekosiad and Guide to Glorantha, I tried to get a handle on what the Spolite Religion entailed.

I wrote up my version of Spolitism here, and I would love feedback or discussion.  I may not be right, but I can explain my reasoning and how it relates to published materials in most cases.  I tried to generally stay "inside" published setting information and not violate it too much.  The biggest "bending" of canon I've done is equate Ganestoro with Lodril.

I've also in general fallen in love with Pelanda and Carmania, so I suspect I will be interested in that corner of Glorantha more moving forward.  Thanks!

Another idea: just as Gerra's Pyramid descends, so does the Black Mountain of GanEstaro and Vogestes.  The Black Mountain, therefore, is not a mountain at all.  It is, in fact, Natha's Well, the great bog of sacrifice.

33 minutes ago, albinoboo said:

My memory maybe faulty, but isn't Natha, the name for the current incarnation of  Sedenya?

Yup.  She's the current incarnation of the Lunar Goddess.  She was also a pre-existing goddess in both Pelanda & Dara Happa as an underworld goddess of balance and murder.  Here's the entry from the God's Wall in GtG:

Quote

Goddess of the Second Underworld, Keeper of the Second Hell. She holds a bell, and her priestess’ costume has many others. She is also called Avenger, Mistress of the Balance, Mother of Murder, and Assassin.

Natha is the Lunar goddess of Balance, the Avenging Destroyer, and one of the seven ancient Moon goddesses. She is the Goddess of the Empty Half. Natha has used her powers to bring life or death, light or darkness, good or evil, into the world as necessary to bring balance to the world.
 

8 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

The Spearman might not be associated with lies and deception, but he is involved in an "error", which might be thematically related, with just a different in the perspective on intent. Just a thought.

And it's also good to remember "Error" in whose eyes.  The Entekosiad is blurry about it, but there are a lot of traditions layered on top of one another, and I suspect that some of them view Vogestes as more in error (Carmanian religion focused on dualism, the Jernotian Way and its rejection of human sacrifice), than others (Pelanda before the High Gods were established by Jernotia, the revival by Natha the Sacrificer during the Bleak Times, which I'm assuming is strongly related to Spolitism).

I like the idea of setting sun and black mountains... hmmm...    

2 minutes ago, JonL said:

I would figure Disorder and Darkness, but not Chaos per se. 

Yeah, reading the Entekosiad, I'm not 100% sure of any of the named characters being truly chaos beings, until you get down to the stories about Bisos.  Mind you, there are definitely characters and events that make things worse, but they really don't seem to have as elaborated a notion of reality-destroying chaos as, say, the Orlanthi or the Praxians.

That and death seemingly always existing whether or not people realized it, but that's a different thread.

41 minutes ago, Joerg said:

"Chaotic" doesn't have the same absolute condemnation in Peloria as it has in the Theyalan cultures.

Non-conformist (outside of well-defined roles) is a much harsher verdict in Peloria than just Chaotic. Thus Shargash, a truly bad entity and as borderline chaotic as Zorak Zoran (which may or may not be a different entity) but who has an assigned role as such is an acceptable entity, while Orlanth is not.

The Dara Happans and Pelorians either don't mind or don't like the observation that their ruling deity promoted Chaos by excluding all those who defy that absolute authority.

I used to regard Ganesatarus as the acknowledged worshiped version of Vogmaradan, with Idovanus or Yelm as unacknowledged version of Vogmaradan.

 

That would explain the similarity between the name Estaro and and Turo - The God who Gives and Takes, vs the God of Power.

Ooooh, another alternative:

Vogestes is not GanEstoro, but the Red King.  In "Naveria and the Red King," the Balancer ritually kills the Red King in a giant clay pot shaped like a bull (E p. 76), and in "The Path of Addi," Natha sacrifices Vogestes "at Naveria's Court." (E. 83).

This has a lot of interesting consequences, but (1) I get nervous that Natha is an imposition by the Lunars, and (2) there's still a concern over both GanEstoro and Vogestes having black mountains, and (3) The Red King seems ignorant that anyone lives west of his city, and all of Pelanda is west of his city.

grr...

This is my second, and arguably more esoteric, question about GanEstoro.

As I read through the Entekosiad this weekend, it occurred to me that while there was no stated link, GanEstoro and Vogestes were 2 entities with a shocking amount of overlap:

1. Idovanus.  Ganesaturus, often accepted as another name for GanEstoro, is the brother to Idovanus in Carmanian legend (GTG, p. 725).  Vogestes is the brother of VioVanus, (p. 19) or Idoman in Pelandan legend.  These two names are associated with Idovanus.
2. Black Mountain.  In the Legend of Idojartos (E p. 56), GanEstoro has a throne on a black mountain.  In the legend of the Third Error, Vogestes builds a temple at a black mountain (E p. 32)
3. Death. GanEstoro is associated with death & destruction, and Vogestes is instrumental in the error of believing that death is good and more is better (E p. 32)
4. Spears.  GanEstoro tries to kill Kenstrata with a "death dart" (E P. 62), and his primary worshipper Yargan wields the Blue Spear 45.  Vogestes, meanwhile, is the Spearman, and he teaches men to paint their despair into their javelins (E p. 20)
5. Sacrifices.  GanEstoro demanded sacrifices (E p. 45), and Vogestes taught men to sacrifice (E p.20).

At the same time, this is not a slam dunk association:

1. Against Text.  Valare, the author of the Entekosiad, loves telling us which names from ancient Pelandan myth equate to which gods in contemporary Carmania & Dara Happa.  Not mentioning such an equation seems deeply odd.
2. Yargan.  The associations with Yargan are extremely tenuous.  Yargan is from the West (or at least beyond the Sweet Sea), and is associated with Water.  Vogestes has no associations with water, and he's indigenous to Pelanda.  Also, claiming GanEstoro is Yargan's father because Yargan worships GanEstoro is a weak argument.
3. Deception.  Vogestes has no association with lies.
4. Elemental Associations.  Vogestes is the "Fire Magician" (E 41), while GanEstoro is the "cold master" (E 56)
5. EDIT: Different Sacrifices.  Forgot this one.  GanEstoro demands sacrifices for himself, and Vogestes claims sacrifices make the world.

So... what do people think?

Basically, what the subject says: Is GanEstoro, the Enemy God that appears in the Entekosiad, also known as Ganesatarus in Carmanian mythology, chaotic?

I've read the Entekosiad and the Guide to Glorantha, and I'm not completely sure.  I can imagine 2 answers:

1. GanEstoro / Ganesatarus is chaotic.  He embodies the Lie and evil, not just darkness.  He is the opposite and sworn enemy of his brother, Idovanus.  Given that Carmanian religion isn't about balancing the light and dark as much as the light defeating the dark, it makes sense that Ganesatarus is a truly hostile force to reality, and is therefore chaotic.
    
2. GanEstoro / Ganesatarus is not chaotic.  He is not referred to as chaotic in either GTG or Entekosiad, "merely" that he is associated with evil, darkness,  deception, and matter.  His opposition to Idovanus may have brought chaos into the world, but that's not the same thing as being chaotic.  Also, the fact that Idovanus the Light and the Law is able to pardon and redeem Ganesatarus (GTG p. 725) suggests he is not chaotic.

I'm fully aware that YGMV, but I wanted to see if either of these held more water, or was more the accepted viewpoint at the moment.  Thanks!

On 9/1/2018 at 6:30 AM, Ian Cooper said:

Work is continuing on Ron Edward's Cosmic Zap. He has playtest videos and notes over at his Actual Play site. You can check it out there. We have learned a lot from that and we are ready to start turning those ideas into something more concrete.

We are negotiating about a couple more genre packs, and also starting to think about a new core book with some sample genre packs in it. Obviously we need to get the presentation of the rules cleared up first.

I'm extremely interested in both of these.

I hope to hear more.

7 minutes ago, David Scott said:

All of that is correct IIRC. Not sure what you mean for the last line about western culture. 

All I meant was lets assume the wizard is from a wizard culture, as that is a simpler case for most of HQ chargen

Hi.

I hope I'm posting in the right forum.

I just wanted to double check my understanding of chargen in HQ2 as it exists after Pavis: Gateway to Adventure.

As I understand things...

• All PCs start with runes, regardless of their culture or magic.
• PCs who practice rune magic may become an initiate of a deity, assuming their rating in the relevant rune is high enough.
• PCs who want to start using spirit magic don't need the Spirit Rune, though it'd probably a good idea.  Instead, they are able to join a spirit society if their Tradition rating is 1w or higher, and they get that through their cultural keyword
• PCs who want to start using wizard magic don't need the Law Rune, though that's a path to spells if they're also an initiate of Lankhor Mhy.  Instead, adepts start with a grimoire equal to their cultural keyword, and 4 spells.
  • Assume for this one the PC is from a western culture.

...Is that accurate?

Thanks!