Akhôrahil

At full cult basis. There is no cost apart from social considerations to joining multiple subcults, so PCs can be expected to want as many as possible.

That seems like a very good reason for propitiation. 🙂

"Seep", "crawl", and "slither" are useful words here.

If I hadn’t moved to digital for most things almost a decade back, I would have had to find a larger place to live. 🙂

Or as was often the case historically, it was personally dishonorable for the executioner as well, but why would the leader be concerned about that - that's what the executioner is there for! In Europe, the executioner could often be someone pardoned from execution himself in order to take on the job, or something like that.

I think it's both. On the one hand, it really is just excessive battle fury and violent black moods. On the other, since it might mean you may have to put down a kinsman like a rabid dog, it causes Chaos. It becomes Chaotic when it goes overboard this way. Urain might not be a "proper" god, just a name for the phenomenon.

What I really wonder is what they do at Sacred Time.

Fun thing is, the second (or is it third? I think it's third) time Oddi kills Ralzakark in maybe 1630, the text says "Final Death". Which means that either final death isn't really final, or there's something odd about the Unicorn Emperor of the Monster Empire and he's not - or at least not exactly - Ralzakark.

Telmori for Risklands then, perhaps? Or is that in some other product?

I know it’s stated in LoT that Hahlgrim makes peace with Chief Renekot (who is Hakon’s son) and pays wergeld at some point, and that Renekot participates in the war and wins glory. I’m picturing that the PCs in my 1617 campaign will be local small-h heroes and top-notch local experts and guides/advisors when the war arrives, and a valuable resources to Hahlgrim’s side.

I was thinking the winter makes travel difficult and curtails Lunar activities (although they won’t be starving), and that the Lunars assume they’ve just won and don’t need to do anything except watch the population starve and freeze to death. On the other hand, it is reasonable to imagine that it could happen along better lines of communication, and the ”push” factor is immense. Extra-crappy conditions for anyone travelling, I’m sure.

Standalone minor cult or subcult to Maran Gor makes every sense. I expect this situation may well occur in my campaign once we resume it, and I would likely allow an Earth cultist to get to be God-Talker with waived or reduced entrance requirements if she’s the one who sets the whole thing up.

Come to the Monster Empire (we have cookies!)

Oh, I thought it was a whole thing with chaos tendrils emerging from the inner earth to cause chaos eruptions in various places, a whole Karia vs. Dorastor chaos-on-chaos war, and so on. But since I only ever heard snippets, it might just have been what I tried to patch together from them.

I'm interested in the Hezel Darong thing and chaos in Karia, which I hear is going to be a huge deal? Apart from secret lore transmitted only to The Elect, do we we know anything about it apart from the textbox in Guide p. 395?

The Unbreakable Sword breaking seems like a nice way to show what a state the cosmos was in? (Or quoting Iain Banks: "What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? ... The unstoppable force stops. The immovable object moves.")

Oh yes, and in 1625, after the war, there is colonization along the Sludgestream. The Oxhead temple is sending priests there to support settlement.

One very Gloranthan thing that I like about Oddi is that he's completely unenthusiastic about his Orlanth cult duties, and most certainly doesn't have any Devotion passion, but since he goes through the motions out of a sense of duty and demonstrates all the right virtues, this is perfectly fine as far as Orlanth is concerned. Only people like Ketil register concern.

I checked up on this recently and did the timeline, and the main events are Hahlgrim’s War ongoing 1623-1625, the deaths of Bolthor and Hahlgrim in early 1625 and the subsequent crowning of Oddi, and victory and the slaying of Ralzakark in summer/autumn (most likely) of 1625. The Tower of Lead likely falls in 1624, which is a big deal for anything Spider Woods related. Presumably the Sartarite transportation stops with the Windstop in 1621 and is never taken up again. I personally think The Windstop has serious but non-catastrophic effects on the weather in Talastar as Orlanth is weakened but not bound.

Why doesn't this interface have a ❤️-button?! Also, what year are you going with? The 1617 of Dorastor or the 1625 of "modern" time?

You can also avoid the problem of having to pay 140% of your income by making sure you don't have any, The Producers-style. Time is more of an issue.

Ooh, this will be an instant buy for me. My PCs already had a brief sojourn there that went surprisingly well (they did it in winter).

This is certainly possible, but at the moment, it's anybody's guess if the liberation will last, and it will doubtlessly be war-torn for a while either way. And if you just want to fight Lunars, there are ample opportunities closer at hand. Traditionalists might even find Talastar a more appealing place - no toying with draconic magics here, and the new king is cleaning house of the appeasers without being some kind of Illum— oh damnit!

There’s that, but there’s not just that. The Silmarillion was edited to be coherent and non-contradictory, but in the process became oddly incomplete in places (the story of Eärendil is supposed to be one of the ”big three”, but was never written) as well as fairly narratively unsound. In later writings, Tolkien wanted to push that Middle-Earth was the pre-history of our world, and attempted to get rid of the flat world and the myths of the Sun and Moon. What’s the nature of orcs? We’re never given a proper explanation, because Tolkien couldn’t work it out for himself. The Athrabeth makes us question the story of elves and men we got elsewhere. Just how high-tech were the Númenoreans - did they really have flying ships and rocketry? And so on.

Interestingly, Tolkien looks less unitary the more of his work-in-progress stuff you read. What comes down to us is a bunch of often contradictory material, a corpus that shifts over time and where attempting to reconstruct the "real" Middle-Earth becomes a lot like reconstructing "real" ancient history out of conflicting, fragmentary sources. I don't know the state of Arkat's Saga, but is it significantly more unfinished and fragmentary than the Tolkien texts and fragments you get in History of Middle-Earth?