Akhôrahil

1 minute ago, Joerg said:

Trick question - could an Orlanthi be attracted to the Red Moon, or would he be repelled?

The Red Moon makes for an interesting case, in that it is spherical and that its inhabitants walk around on the lower part without falling off (or so I assume?). So at the very least, it has it's own system of 'gravity' or 'down', separate from the rest of Glorantha.

I'm sure some people would cry "Chaos!" at this upending of the natural order.

38 minutes ago, Zit said:

I don't think so. There must only be a myth justifying this (rather than explaining), which is a major difference with our real Earth (to come back to the OP).

"Up" and "down" got separated in the Green Age? 

39 minutes ago, boztakang said:

Ernalda is Love, and wants to keep things close.

In that case, gravity would be going in the reverse direction in the Underworld, and you wouldn't be able to fall into the Underworld, the way you definitely can (attested in more than one place). Aristotelian "gravity" would be nice, but doesn't really work.

It can't just pull towards the center of the Earth cube - there must be some fundamental "down" to Glorantha.

47 minutes ago, Joerg said:

I think that Harmast's first Full LBQ was almost accidentally correct as he assembled lots of fragmentary reports on the quest into his template, which was spiked with his earlier heroquest interactions with Jajamokki.

Another way to say the same thing is that he created the 'correct' quest. It's probably far too simple to say that there's a correct path for the heroquest and your job is to discover it – instead, in the mess Lokomayadon had made of Orlanth-worship, Harmast created (or at the very least put together from disparate parts) a myth-cycle to quest within. To us, it looks just like what we think we know about Orlanth's own LBQ – but then, it would, wouldn't it, when everyone is working from how Harmast did it? We have no idea how pre-Harmast notions about the LBQ looked like or how they differed from the pattern he created.  

I really like how the LBQ always brings back someone problematic and iffy, who might get the job done but where you may well regret it later. Yelm, Arkat, Sheng Seleris...  

5 minutes ago, Steve said:

Surely not the first human heroquest, just the first human Lightbringers' heroquest?

Possibly the first "modern" heroquest, as well. Harmast is the first one to substitute one station for another, correct (as the Baths of Nelat aren't really survivable)?

"Arkat was the discoverer of modern Heroquesting. Heroquesting itself is ancient – since time immemorial intelligent Gloranthan beings had used rituals and ceremonies to contact deities and spirits. [...] This method of spiritual conquest and growth was known previously, but none had the knowledge and power to explore or exploit it"

Who is/was the God of the Silver Feet? Local version of Issaries?

11 minutes ago, metcalph said:

The Gift Carriers were another name for the Knowledge Assassins (mentioned in the Umathela writeup).  They really only targeted the God Learners there and God Learners elsewhere had their own dooms.

You sure? That's not at all what the Guide states:

"Another terrible secret was avenged by doom guardians calling themselves the Gift Carriers of the Sending Gods. Everyone who was privy to the Forbidden Secret, or who was kin to them, or who might have witnessed or heard about the secret, was hunted down and destroyed. So successful was their effort that no modern Gloranthan even knows what secret they extinguished"

(This quote really reminds me of Keyser Söze: "He kills their kids, he kills their wives, he kills their parents and their parents’ friends. He burns down the houses they live in and the stores they work in, he kills people that owe them money. And like that he was gone. Underground. He becomes a myth, a spook story that criminals tell their kids at night.")

I mean, it must be tens of thousands of people we're talking about here, if we include everyone who's kin, everyone who even heard of the Secret, and so on? A massacre throughout the Empire?

I think it's striking how anti-cosmopolitan Glorantha seems at time. The First and Second councils seem doomed from the start. The Ban was just great for everyone not reliant on trade (you can build a utopia as long as you don't have foreigners around to muck things up), and the Closing seems to be mostly a Good Thing. Bad things come from attempts at multi-culturalism. All multi-national empires are corrupt. And let's not even get started on magical innovation inspired by contacts with other cultures, and magical systematizations derived from that!

Seems the Doraddi have it right – don't try anything new or foreign!

11 hours ago, jrutila said:

I got that there wasn't any great heroes (comparing to the First Age) during this time. All the big things happening were more of crowdsourced stupidity.

We don't have an Arkat, but we sure have an Alakoring Dragonbreaker and all kinds of heroes on both sides.

Early EWF and God-Leaners both are really cool. If they hadn't overreached so ridiculously, it wouldn't all have had to end in tears.

I've never liked the Gift Carriers. Where are they supposed to have come from? How can we have super-important, super-powerful entities that aren't part of any previous mythology? This really looks like a direct, personal intervention by the gods to put things right, in just the way they aren't supposed to. Deus ex Machina (no, not Zistor!) solution to the whole God-Learner mess?

As this applies to all three ages:

I find it weird how the Pentans are shown on the maps as living only in a slender band in Pent, following the caravan route. Surely there aren't vast stretches of uninhabited grasslands to the north and south, only a lower population density? I refuse to believe that the grasslands of southern Pent are less populated than the Wastelands, which are described as Praxian!

I had no idea that Prax was part of the Seleric Empire (or Balazar, for that matter). That must have gone over well with the Praxian nomads, being ruled by filthy horse-riders!

Also, it's super impressive how the Lunars just smashed Sheng Seleris and his empire, given the relative sizes – not like in our world where some battles only put a break on things and then dynastic concerns screwed up further Mongol expansion.

Can we unpack what happens at the Sunstop?

"first nothing happened, but then dark strands grew bolder in the sky, like huge loops of rope from the western edge of the world, and hooked over it tautly. Soon a great dark net was visible, straining to pull the Sun back to its path. Strands snapped and unearthly shadows were cast upon the world."

This is the dwarves catching it and pulling it on its correct path again, correct? Although the net or web also brings Arachne Solara to mind.

"Then a great dark spot rose into the sky upon the net. This huge bloated shadow flickered with a smoky glow. The shadow crept across the face of the Sun, blotting it out and making all the world cold for a moment."

No idea. Is this Chaos? Osentalka getting his light by taking it from the sun? 

According to the Wiki, this is Artia. How do we know, and what does that signify? What's going _on_ here?

"A snapping moment of terror pierced the world, then the dark sky-web vanished, and the edge of the Sun crept past the shadow. The shadow disappeared"

I don't get this. It sounds as though the net snapped, but the sun still moved? Is this a partial success, then? Or did something happen? What happened with the shadow?

"and the Sun brightened, but everyone thought it looked paler than it had before.

Paler is more white white-ish, or as in less bright? 

"Some said it moved differently, too."

This seems like something that could be easily checked against astronomical records in Dara Happa.

Page 94: "The Swarm". What else do we know about this, and why is it a big deal on a more than local scale? Compared to elven global (well... not "global" exactly, I guess...) reforestation and dwarven continent-pulling, it looks less dramatic at first glance.

On 2017-07-30 at 4:38 PM, Dogboy said:

I'd question if anyone is atheist in Glorantha. Everyone knows there are spirits, great and small, even if they think worship of them is misguided.

I'd probably use the term rationalist over atheist.

“Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.”
—Terry Pratchett

Does wood burn because it contains elemental Fire that's released as part of the burning (like phlogiston, or caloric), or because Fire brought to it starts to eat it to grow?

2 hours ago, davecake said:

My university gaming club once had entire theory of Gloranthan physics. Earth runes stack nicely and densely, you see, being square. But light and darkness runes, being perfect spheres, bounce off one another, and so never form anything solid. Air runes are almost spheres, but not quite - that little hook catches sometimes so you can feel a little resistance.... 

This sounds a lot like Democritus's atomic theory, which had the atoms as the smallest pieces of the elements, defined by their geometric shape. Fire atoms are D4:s, for instance.

The question about whether matter is infinitely divisible or whether there are smallest units of elemental matter should arise in Glorantha as well, among people who have nothing more important to do.  

3 hours ago, MOB said:

Neal Stephenson uses the Mesopotamian 'perfect language' as a major plotline in his book Snow Crash (and of course, the Christofundie billionaire who owns Hobby Lobby and who got fined millions for illegally smuggling Sumerian tablets out of Iraq seems to be acting out that plotline in real life)

The Ars Magica supplement Ancient Magics had one section on Adamic as the perfect language, working in a similar way, with bonuses if you you used it for spellcasting due to it perfectly referencing its objects. 

The great part was that no-one in the wizard community knows it, and three ways were suggested for the wizard who wanted to learn it: Linguistic reconstruction (more difficult than it might seem, as it would involve trips to a Mongol-ravaged Mesopotamia); learning it form (a reluctant and unpleasant) Cain, who obviously knows it and is still alive; and "heroquesting" the Garden of Eden (more technically, going to Sumeria and entering the Eden Regio, but it's essentially the same thing).    

The Pavis dwarves are so ridiculously heretical that even other heretical dwarves would think it's excessive. I imagine the Pavis dwarves keep very silent about themselves to the others.

1 hour ago, MOB said:

As I have mentioned elsewhere, my belief is that if the Zistorites ever invented the Gloranthan equivalent of an electron microscope, they'd see that all matter (in fact, all reality) is made up of tweensy-weency runes.

Seeing the runes in things (if not perhaps at the micro level) is what the God-Learners' RuneQuest Sight does, correct?

37 minutes ago, Oracle said:

So a Mostali could be the employer for a player group (possible never visible, but staying in the dark) for retrieving this kind of dangerous weapons. Will the player characters understand these weapons? Will they hand over these weapons after retrieved from wherever they were?

Strictly speaking, this is in itself heretical, the notion that non-dwarves are good for anything and can be bargained with.

39 minutes ago, Oracle said:

Another way to get dwarf in a regular play are the Dwarf Heresies of Individualism and/or Openhandism. If you want to have a dwarf in your player’s group, then this most probably will be a apostate/”broken” dwarf, mortal and otherwise very different from normal dwarves.

Yes, playing a "proper" dwarf should be almost as impossible as playing a "proper" dragonewt.

40 minutes ago, Oracle said:

Isidilian the Wise is a Quicksilver dwarf? That was new for me.

Well, Quicksilver True Mostali. Technically, The Dwarf is in fact not a dwarf...

I always thought the alchemy bit was a dead giveaway. :-)

2 hours ago, metcalph said:

AFAIK the Dwarf Earthsense is actually a sensation of motion (as they are tied to the stasis rune).  Likewise the Uz IMO do not actually use sound for their darksense but use the darkness (the means their darksense is stuffed in extremely bright light).

I like this a lot better than what the Guide gives us.

Random comments:

I love dwarves – they're just so appallingly awful. Lovecraft liked describing some of his alien beings as having a fascistic socialist political system, and that sums up dwarves just perfectly. I imagine dwarves get good press in a lot of older Gloranthan publications, as both the dwarves of Dwarf Mine and (especially) the dwarves of Pavis are completely unrepresentative in their (comparative) niceness. The god-awful dwarves of Slon are far more representative.

I absolutely love the Hero Wars sidebars, and the dwarf one (just like the Aldryami before it) doesn't fail to impress. Pulling subcontinents together using cables (and dinosaurs) is wonderfully bonkers!

Dwarves approve of the Red Moon. Glad to see some non-Lunars do. Really makes you question the line of argument we see in most Sartar publications, as well as this week's Prince of Sartar. Dwarves – among those who would be most troubled about compromise breakage and chaotic intrusion – seem very calm about the whole thing.

The images making clear that these aren't Tolkien dwarves is great. Many of them are so weird. Massively approve.

Glorantha sense of wonder moment: Not only did the dwarves invent (not discover, not refine, not be the first to craft - invent) Iron, they could also have invented it to be poisonous to humans as well, had they known at the time what a mess we will make.

Wait, why are cannon much more rare than muskets? It's the same technology, only much easier! In our world, cannon predated handguns significantly. Should we imagine that it's not just about the physical properties – which really are the same only simpler for cannon – but about more difficult magic to keep them working.

I'll also repost what I wrote in the Bronze Age thread:

I don't particularly like the description of Dwarven earthsense: 'Dwarves have a sense, unique to them, called “earthsense”. It is like long-distance touch, and permits them to sense heat, air pressure, and air currents with remarkable accuracy', or the way Troll Darksense is described as sonar. I would much rather see that Dwarves have an Earthsense because they're connected to the Earth rather than because of quirk of their biology, and that trolls can see in the dark because of course they can - it's seeing in the light that's tricky for them! We don't need any God-Learner explanations for how it works! (I'm reminded of the awesome suggestion that Troll Vampires can't stand the darkness, and have to dwell forever in the light.)

1 hour ago, Jeff said:

Who knows? I'm not sure Glorantha even has protons, neutrons, and electrons. 

I would go so far as to say that I'm certain that it doesn't. The fundamental building blocks of Gloranthan reality are runes, not tiny tiny particles. Fundamentally, matter consists of the elements, organised by the other runes.

I don't particularly like the description of Dwarven earthsense: 'Dwarves have a sense, unique to them, called “earthsense”. It is like long-distance touch, and permits them to sense heat, air pressure, and air currents with remarkable accuracy', or the way Troll Darksense is described as sonar. I would much rather see that Dwarves have an Earthsense because they're connected to the Earth rather than because of quirk of their biology, and that trolls can see in the dark because of course they can - it's seeing in the light that's tricky for them! We don't need any God-Learner explanations for how it works! (I'm reminded of the awesome suggestion that Troll Vampires can't stand the darkness, and have to dwell forever in the light.)

Just wanted to say that this is a fantastic sentence: "Ouroboros includes all of the universe, and everything else, too."