EricW

I think the solution would be to hero quest to see a Malkion saint, and ask them for a copy. Or reconstruct the original event, or do what Argrath did - have a chat to the ghosts of the original God Learners. Obviously there would be terrifying dangers, you might encounter horrifying guardians placed by people who never want God Learnerism to threaten the world again.

I think of experimental hero questing like gain of function virus research. You might discover important clues about imminent problems, or you might accidentally release a terrible problem on the world. My interpretation of the hero wars is they forced the Orlanthi to reconsider religious conservatism. When the Wind Stop occurred, imagine the shock to Orlanthi and associated cults. Here they were complacently believing Orlanth was the king of the gods, maybe even that Orlanth would take care of the goddess if they were devout enough, then suddenly their security was taken away. Even worse, when they started exploring the hero plane before the Wind Stop, they found the Lunars had been there first, tampering with the myths, closing their access to power to fight the overwhelming magical prowess of the chaos moon. This is why IMO Argrath's draconic mysticism and temples of the reaching storm and other odd powers were accepted. When Orlanth vigorously rekindled the flame of Sartar after Argrath entreated him, they knew whatever odd things Argrath did were OK with their god, so they wholeheartedly followed all his breaches of tradition to free their lands from chaos.

For some reason I just got a vision of Storm Bullies ripping a "chaos vegetable" field apart, building a big bonfire, then changing their minds after the potatoes started cooking... 🙂

Surely that child would be a hot chilli pepper?

One of the few mitigating factors of Snakepipe Hollow is the cliffs help contain the monsters. If you knocked some of the cliffs down with a hero scale earthquake, not only would you mortally offend Maran Gor, who went to all the trouble to create the cliffs in the first place, you might find the chaos monsters now find it easier to climb the resulting piles of rubble and escape. There's a real chance the infection would spread.

Was there a time when Argrath was vulnerable, when a different decision by Lunars could have ended his rebellion or permanently destroyed him? What would have happened if they had?

The Great web has power over fire. The spider ended the sun stop by dragging the sun back on course. Arkat's darkness defeated Gbaji. Zorak Zoran stole fire. So it makes sense that an extremely powerful darkness entity has power over light and fire.

Summoning a dragon and destroying an entire city + lunar magicians + major command post is pretty convincing 😉

Argrath is a terrifying warrior mage who took down the Lunars. Even before the dragon rise people would have been in awe. I think people would no more defy him than they would defy the Crimson Bat or Harek.

Friends or kin can cooperate across cult hostilities, otherwise how do you explain the Seven Mothers? What a motley crew they were! Probably some friendly sparing, and the occasional heated argument. Having said that the unnatural cooperation and lack of observance of cult hostilities by the Seven Mothers led to very bad things happening. So if they say all tried to go on a hero quest together, some odd things could happen - they might find themselves facing each other on the hero plane as adversaries, or worse, they might cooperate in ways which violate the myths and invite unwelcome consequences. Maybe they encounter an empty shadow which invites them to discover new ways to resolve cult hostilities, if they overcome it - just like the goddess did.

I wondered how Wind Children were treated by the EWF? If they stuck to old ways they might have been seen by EWF leaders as rebel sympathisers. If they embraced Draconic Orlanth they might have had contact with Fire / Sky powers - Draconic Orlanth comes close in a sense to being a reconciliation between air and sky, which might have been very appealing to winged Orlanthi. I doubt even the EWF would have hunted Wind Children down, but the relationship may have been uneasy in some respects.

If they mostly hang out on Orlanthi sacred mountains maybe fire gods are difficult to contact. Seeking help from air spirits was maybe how their ancestors survived the Greater Darkness. Having said that it’s a bit boring none of them have tried anything new.

If the crimson bat is the beast lord of all bats, does this mean all bats were corrupted when their lord fell to the devil, or was the bat just an animal before the devil captured it?

I've always thought of the relationship between being a cultist and sex as being like the relationship between a meth head or heroin addict and sex. Initially the magic and frenzy might drive heightened sexuality, but after a while the madness displaces all remotely normal urges. To put it another way, to a cultist, a sexually attractive person is not for seduction, they're a useful ingredient for powerful necromancy, or a fitting vessel for birthing the mythos hybrid who will bring down the world of mankind. A cultist might use seduction to lure their victim to the temple, but the end goal is not sex, in any normal sense. There are exceptions, like deep ones want to have lots of sex with humans, and insane cultist humans at least tolerate this attention, if not relish it - the selling point is the gold, the magic, and that the children will never die from old age. But this seems more transactional than based on genuine sexual urges, at least from the POV of the humans, though who knows where the insanity leads in this case.

The Hervey Bay Dome is a mysterious weather pattern which seems to protect the Australian town of Hervey Bay from bad weather, almost like the town is shielded by a forcefield or a dome like the Stephen King story. I'm a believer - I've seen a hole in the clouds both from the air and the ground. I'd love to know what causes it. No doubt meteorologists would give a boring mundane explanation, rain shadows and currents and wind patterns and whatnot. But the island next to Hervey Bay, Fraser Island / K'gari, is a sacred site for Aboriginals, a seat of ancient culture and magical dreamtime experience. Hervey Bay is also known as "God's Waiting Room", a lot of old folk choose to settle in the town. The mild climate must be good for them, they tend to live a very long time, and hardly ever leave once they settle.

Ah but are living things alive and intact? Or have their experiences changed them?

In the manifestation Hisfault, Eurmal is theologically to blame for everything wrong with Glorantha, so there is no real defence against this accusation 😉

The book says swallow just kills people. But things swallowed by Trickster in god time are just gone. So the question is, do victims really die, or do they end up more or less intact but horribly trapped in Trickster’s stomach? If they don’t die, how could resurrection bring them back? How could non trickster divine intervention reach into the stomach of trickster?

Maybe the Broo found a way to consume the bodies and absorb / acquire the chaos features of other Broo. That would explain the reduced number of extremely powerful Broo. What a terrifying magical feat this would be - instead of chaos monsters taking their chances with a dip in the ooze, Broo hunt each other, with individuals with uniquely powerful features at the top of the kill list. The survivors would be fewer in number, but extremely dangerous.

Well Eurmal was the first god to “moon” the sun 🙂

I would argue the only reason Trickster doesn’t have a chaos rune is he agreed to help fix the mess he created when the joke goes too far. Would the EWF Great Dragon project have broken the compromise? Likely. Trickster didn’t necessarily suggest the Great Dragon project but he gave mankind the tools to stuff up the world, by teaching them how to learn Auld Wormish. Is Trickster chaos? Absolutely not. Do Trickster’s pranks sometimes lead to the compromise being threatened? Absolutely.

Given Trickster’s role in EWF and likely other violations or near violations of the compromise I suspect any serious concentration of Trickster power is way too unstable and close to chaos to rule anything. Look at what happened to the God Learners in Slontos, who built a great temple to Trickster. There is no rule against Tricksters attacking each other, so tricksters with access to an infinite range of divine spells would have wielded unimaginable destruction on each other, until the land itself gave way. At least that is my theory 😉

Disorder can mean strife but it also represents breaking away from the old order. Disorder could represent a youth movement, like hippies rejecting the societal rules of their parents, or people refusing to participate in the deadly clan feuds of their elders. Like a group of youths who refuse to initiate as warriors. How would they survive? Would they be easy prey to the first group of enemies? Or would the primal disorder they embrace somehow protect them, cause plans to attack them to go astray, magically divert bullies and enemies? How would the Lunars react to a movement which was sapping their enemies of potential warriors? Or would the Lunars have their own problems with youths refusing to take up the holy Lunar mission to heal the universe? One thing for sure, the parents would not be happy with this rising movement of lazy deserters, they would accuse them of everything from being secret chaos worshipers to clan traitors.

They wouldn't even need a machine shop. An old guy I used to hang out with sometimes once whittled a pistol out of steel - worked out the mechanism on a piece of paper, cut rough pieces out of a piece of steel plate, then whittled the parts to shape while watching TV, using a small but very sharp cold chisel, one almost invisible metal shaving at a time. Watching him really looked like someone whittling a piece of wood, except what he was whittling was the action for a gun, into a perfectly shaped component. The pistol wasn't for me - I have no idea what happened to it. Point is if someone is an expert fitter and turner or machinist, I wouldn't require them to have anything but the most basic tools to make something like a set of lock picks, people that skilled could probably fabricate a set of lock pick out of a few pieces of hard steel and an abrasive rock.

Eurmal Swallow spell. The book says death, but perhaps with Trickster it is not exactly death, so I would argue the Dragonewt may not reincarnate. Whatever happens to them I suggest their chances of returning to the mundane world are pretty slim. Unless Trickster decides it would be incredibly funny to unleash a broken, half insane dragonewt wearing a permanent clown face in pursuit of justice against one of his followers.