jeffjerwin

Now for a completely - well, maybe not completely - different version of the Flower War.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_war

Somehow that seems so much more civilized than (RW) Westerners with their gauche grenades and war crimes...

I threw rather too much money at this. But then, my players are mostly female, the clan we use is Gavrening, and this year many of the women dyed their hair.

24 minutes ago, davecake said:

 

Of course, modern Aldryami think all this is a terribly bad idea and that they should stick together against the other races. Its also notable that the biggest Aldryami Empire in history was largely peaceful, and conquered (at least other Aldryami) by magical/political means. But elves still remember that axes are death, and are designed to be used against their own kind. 

Is the Aldryami death rune/symbol sometime like a squared-off "P" then? I suppose swords a pretty normal thing in many human cultures, even though they embody death as well (and aren't all that good for anything but killing).

If Greg hasn't been influenced by Le Guin, I'll eat my shoe.

It may be coincidence, however, in this case... hazia = hazy?

The creatures from "From Beyond" seem to match perfectly.

"And the gods looked around and saw a small, new rune wandering around." "Whose rune is that?" "No one could recall the rune as being one of the main runes, but because Yinkin was already asleep in Ernalda's earth-box rune, they shrugged." "We have an alynx rune now, it looks like." "Why is it that he gets a rune - along with that snorting bull-man, when I have to share one?", said Vrimak. "Because there is something about the universe that loves cats," said Uleria, "and no one will tell the bull to leave."

And Yinkin!

Perhaps 7 is simply the magic number of the Middle Air?

Each other part of the universe has a magic number (I think/intuit), after all; Earth is probably 4.

Speaking of which there is a whole different Blue Moon mythology down there.

How do they connect Vendara (the Blue Moon, mother of the Artmali) with the now visible Red Moon? I've seen some stuff on the digest, but I'm not sure how canonical it is.

12 hours ago, Jeff said:

But by itself it is a very poor model for understanding the Lunar Empire - it is just too different. I tend to draw more from Achaemenid Persia, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Bene Gesserit, the Mughals, etc.for understanding the Lunars than I do on the Roman Empire. 

+1 for Bene Gesserit. Dune would, I think, be an excellent fit for HeroQuest. Alas I am none too fond of the posthumous books and the license seems to be even more cursed than Middle-earth...

My daughter and I have been building a diorama of the clan hearth (this is the Gavrening hearth in Hendrikiland/Volsaxar, if anyone's wondering about the alynx imagery; there's a mural of Orlanth, Ernalda and Yinkin and his family and a tapestry visible with Gavren as a grown alynx on the other wall). It's a little crude, but it's a project involving an eight-year old (hence some of the more idiosyncratic decorating/figurine choices). Here you can see the main hall (a work in progress).

In the first picture she models a curious giant. (Just added missing pic, sorry)

"Turkey" was originally a European name for the guinea fowl, which was called the 'Turkey Coq" because they were imported via the Ottoman Empire. Fortunately there are no Turkey Hsunchen... or are there?

Genertela is clearly a mis-mash of Old World and New World fauna and flora. Raccoons are North American, for example. I believe there are potatoes in Genertela (much like Middle-earth as it happens...).

10 minutes ago, Yelm's Light said:

I'm going to guess that that's not a very large cult.

It seems very Tarsh Exile-y to me. It's clearly modelled on the galloi. Below is a drawing of sacred castration clamps utilised for the initiation of galloi, eunuchs dedicated to Cybele/Magna Mater:

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

Ralzakark has an army of Broo Castrati.

Forgot about them... I believe there are also Broo castrati in Lunar society? That may be something deuterocanonical from Tradetalk or TotRM, however.

Just now, Ali the Helering said:

These do, indeed, appear to be of the 'blood for the gods/demons' approach.

Blood for the Blood God! (sorry, not sorry)

Alkoth?

4 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Iranian Mithras was present in Verulamium (St Albans) in the later second century, Syrian Cybele and Ba'al at Corvoran around 165, and an amulet to YHWH indicates possible presence from as early as 43.

Cybele (as imported into Gaul by the Romans) is an interesting one. She has been argued - by Pamela Berger in The Goddess Obscured - to have been a major figure in the development of the Virgin cult in Christian Gaul. Her one of her largest sanctuaries in the West was in Lyons.

Thank you all for this discussion.

Errr... what about the gap in initiation rates? It seems as if the Sartari at least initiated virtually everyone, where (to my, perhaps out of date) knowledge the average Imperial citizen was not privy to the inner secrets of their cults. Has that shifted?

Would a(n average) Dara Happan think of the events outside Tarsh as "the ongoing disorders/rebellion in the south" or actually know more? (I.e., how does Imperial propaganda operate?)

My gut feeling up to this point is that the ongoing tendency for stasis among the DH gives me the sense that a non-officer-level, non-academic member of the Heartland cities is going to spend very little time thinking about what happens down there; in a sense, it is almost the function of the Orlanthi to rebel.

From this I'm also getting the sense that the Windstop (note, I think the similarity to Sunstop in nomenclature, though it's far smaller) is what happens when Dara Happan magicians get put in charge of pacification programs in the Empire - they restore things to Divine Order, damn the consequences. At some point the notion of substituting Tarumath or Douburdan (this is hypothetical on my part) must have either been abandoned or failed, leaving only Molanni, the still spot in the heart of Orlanth...

----

The impression I get of Celtic Britain from studying it extensively is that it did have an interconnected priesthood, which while not providing political cohesion, encouraged mythic and artistic patterns. I also get the sense that the same facts prevailed in pre-Roman Greece, but as in Britain, localization of divinities and stubbornly maintained contradictions all played a role in the spiritual autonomy of the poleis. I see the tribes of Sartar and the Hendriki in the same way. However the Roman way was the intepretatio Graeca, that is, the enclosing of religious difference into the roman pantheon - it was the Jewish resistance to this simple fact of Imperial life that led to so much trouble. The Britons show no sign of caring, of course, though Celtic gods have a very wide range of identifications, so that in a sense the Roman god has been subsumed into the Celtic rather than the other way around; Sulis Minerva is far more Sulis than Minerva...

That said, Caesar and other authors make clear that they are offended and opposed to the forms of human sacrifice and cultic organization that the Britons had. The official policy of extirpating the Druids and their sanctuaries (as a source of competing authority) does resemble the whole policy of cutting off Orlanth's priesthood from the people. I suppose that to the Lunar Heartlanders this is also a moral issue, since Orlanth is Rebellus Terminus... was it not the Nysalorean Bright Empire that first made this connection? The prototypes in Orlanthi culture differentiated between Elmal and the Bad Emperor (who appears to be Light/Fire in general?) so far as I can tell, though the moral and remarkable corrective power of the Lightbringers/Lifebringers Quest is deeply strengthened by making it a "sun-returning" myth.

There is probably some balance, as well, in the corrective of the "smallness" of the (Lunar) Empire, though its still immense in Bronze Age terms. The Babylonian empire is a close parallel..., as might be  "A Sense of Scale" notes that it's about 430 miles from Glamour to Furthest; however... it's a further 180 miles from Furthest to Whitewall. Rounding to 1000 km/650 miles we find the distance is akin to that between Babylon and Jerusalem, or between Rome and Byzantium, Rome and Jutland (a similar geography), or between Byzantium and Persia; my best analogy, however, would be Qin China. In the Chinese Empire, the barbarian frontier is of course not a major matter to non-governing people living their lives in Shandong.There are differences and ignorances as vast as between the Qin and the Xiongnu as between Rome and Britain, and between Glamour and Whitewall.

Though we discuss the Lunar elite as indeed theistic and dominated by pre-Lunar religion, the tendency of Dara Happa and the Empire to exemplify Law and Enlightenment speaks to a similar type of superiority as between Romanitas and the barbarians.

3 hours ago, Mike M said:

You get both of those as poster sized maps in the Keeper Screen Pack.

By gum, you're right!

1 minute ago, Rick Meints said:

Dragonewts are unpredictable. That is their primary purpose. They are not meant to be understood, but to wonder, delight, and to mystify. If you try to codify them you are missing the point. Glorantha is full of mysteries we are not supposed to understand. This is a feature, not a bug. Dragonewts were intentionally kept vague to keep us guessing.

I promise, we'll keep guessing, however... This keeps any of our outlandish ideas from being "corrected" too, which is a net bonus.

17 minutes ago, Mark Mohrfield said:

But the term is no longer regularly used to mean that.

True. It's just fairly accurate for the Britons to be called pagani by Romans, of any age. The use of "pagan" to mean generic polytheists is of course a specifically Christian tendency, but reflects the Romano-centric notion that weirdos in the sticks are the kind of people who worship that way. As a polytheist myself I tend to be frustrated with how people use "pagan" as a synonym for "New Ager" or reconstructionist...

(I forgot the sarcasm tag for my other comment and apologize. We are all odd barbarians today.)

Anyway...

I do think the prevailing theme of a civilized power against a conservative, magic-obsessed people from a obscure part of the Empire does sound like Dragon Pass in a nutshell. The impression I get is that a fair bit of the early Hero Wars goes practically unnoticed in the Heartlands.

5 hours ago, Mark Mohrfield said:

But the Romans ARE pagans!

Technically, "pagan" means rustics. It was applied to the holdouts against Christianity by the victorious Church... from a viewpoint of urban supremacy. The Romans were never pagans in the sense of "hicks with a backwards religion".

We should be referring to the Britons (as we do now): as "barbarian savages", of course.

2 hours ago, Bohemond said:

Why the hell does that second trailer feature a rendition of Silent Night? What can an 19th century German Christmas carol possibly have to do with the series? 

And the first one has a Donovan song. I think it's supposed to be meta and humorous.

8 hours ago, Joerg said:

Babeester Gor is widely known for arranging severed sexual appendages, and since that is what flowers are to a plant, I would say she fits the bill.

On a more serious note, do Aldryami have the problems with sexual/patriarchal violence that define her mission among humans? It seems like she would operate entirely differently. Moral "Wrongness" from an Earth perspective within the forest ecosystem would - I think - be more likely to be disease, chaos, invasive species (including humans and trolls), or other disruptions. Hunting down dryad molesters alone seems awfully limited.

1 hour ago, davecake said:

An elf with the Harmony rune may care as much, or more, about harmony with other plants than other 'people'. 

Is there an Elven god of flower arranging?

You can also borrow them from here: http://skoll.xyz/mythras_eg/

I usually start with a picture (the internet is your friend and backstory - sometimes on the fly) and fit the stats to match.