jeffjerwin

If I recall correctly you had Rikard (and Mularik) working for the Governor-King down south in the 16-teens. Were they hired before Jar-Eel said hello to Belintar, or in the chaos that followed? I'd love to have Mularik Iron-eye in my game. He seems quite memorable. At some point he must have joined Harrek, I guess roughly when Harrek invades the Manirian coasts (c.1616), most likely when the money dried up - after Belintar's enforced retirement - while the more idealistic Rikard stayed behind to try to protect the Esvulari...

A little backstory... When I was a teenager my father ran RQ for my twin brother and my little sister. After he died a few years ago I inherited much of the collection. I've been running HeroQuest for my daughter and have been planning a campaign for my gaming friends as well, using some of the old characters as NPCs. In the original plot line after the Fall of Sartar the characters went to the Holy Country (we used "Carse" and what other fragments existed, and ended up forming a clan on the borderlands, full of refugees, misfits, ducks, and a few other random things. As canon marched on I discovered that some of the old stuff wasn't exactly "official" but I've adapted what I can. The campaign (for both age groups) involves the Cave Inn outside Whitewall, a hive of rebel scum: an odd sunglass wearing troll or two, a Centaur initiate of Issaries, a bunch of intelligent alynxes (the Gavren stone is on the tula), some magic otters, some Lunar spies, and an old woman who lives in wagon that seems to know some uncanny magic. Thus far, Kora, my daughter's character. has snuck out into the woods near Finovan's grove and encountered a strange dark girl who says she lives with her grandmother near Zatarn Lake and has a pet moth. They have decided to be friends. Kora is also helping with the Holy Time festival by representing Voria in the Goose Dance.

I don't have the map that came with the Heortland issue of Tradetalk. I'm not sure how to source a copy but it would be treasured (and consulted) if it can be provided. I have WIP historical maps of the EWF, Dawn, and c.1317-1470 period; I'll fix them up and post them soonish.

I've got a detailed map of Volsaxiland I use for my campaign I thought I'd share... Locations are chiefly from the Dragon Pass gazetteer, the Guide and Atlas. It's a little messy since I work by hand. The base map is the old Holy Country map from the RQ Companion - it was just sparsely detailed enough to be able to fit all my scribbles.

From the BoHM, p. 91: "She [Serias] was the most beautiful woman of the Vingkotlings, seven generations descended from the Archer, but her clan had been scattered, and she had been left behind when they fled from the snow wolves. Garan dashed below, streaking to her side and destroying the entire pack." Is this what you mean? In this case the rescue of the Garanvuli happens twice or from two perspectives: once when the Low Star arrived and once when Heort was threatened with being eaten (he was presumably caught in the form of a deer). That would make the last Kodigvari identical to the snow wolves, who preyed on their human cousins. Interesting. Of all things my 7 year old daughter was helping me name the hills around Volsaxiland for my campaign (I strongly endorse listening to children for the real raw stuff of storytelling) and she pointed to the ridge opposite Whitewall, near the barrows of the kings, and said: "That's Wolf Ridge".

When did Mularik arrive in Heortland? If it wasn't until Harrek's invasion, this leaves a gap where the semi-canonical materials specified a "Baron" being overlord of the Volsaxi and guardian of the road from Whitewall to Karse. I'm tentatively thinking Gold-gotti would take his place (and I'm definitely rejecting the "call out" in naming Gold-gotti "Auric" in the Dragon Pass gazetteer...). Or should the man in charge of patrols and tolls be a Pelorian? This has significant impact on my campaign, but I'm not at a point yet where it's come up directly.

Speaking of things that might be right under our beaks... I had a gut feeling that Vingkot's stead was not actually restricted to Grizzly Peak - after all, he "inherited" Orlanth's hall. And the various crude maps we have of the Storm Age show Vingkot's run below Kero Fin, not above it. So I considered the mountains, the aunts and mother of Orlanth: now the map we have of the God Time stead shows the mountains in a different order, and as space and time flow differently in that way of looking, and the map I came up with is no great leap. In the deuterocanonical TotRM 19 we are given two older names for Delecti's Ruin: Orin Jistil in the EWF and Wingkoland also. Wingkoland, the seat of the necromancer himself, is the Summer nest of Vingkot and of his divine father! When we were Wing-goes we could fly. But now all the Wing-goes are gone. But it gets worse, of course, as it always does. In WF #15, p.17, we see Ernalda's Undead Grotto. This, I believe, was the Loom House (or, as we call it, the Loon House). The hill people may not understand this, but the Durulz do. In Time, Nontraya has won. The seat of the Vingkotlings is profaned, the dead queen dwells with the dead Burnt Man (or "Cooked Goose"), and we have all lost our power of flight. Even the other egg of Imarja.... I mean Grandmother Loon... has gone wrong, spicy and red: it is indeed the Devil's Egg, which when things are scrambled, will birth the End. Delecti feeds off the divine tula to strengthen his unholy life; makes the fertile earth into drowning quicksand, fills the sweet breeze with foetid decay. He is the rot at the very heart of the Earth. Quack for Hueymakt!

or horse for that matter, if we're talking Prax

Imarja is clearly from before when the Gods were cursed and lost their beaks and feathers. Her illumination protected her luxuriant quills and her gleaming bill. I find it interesting that Orlanthi Wind Lords were asked to eat eggs, as a metaphor for the sun, that the sun is a goose egg in the Ezel cult, and that Durev and Orane's twin too-smart and too-stupid children lost - along with the dish and spoon - the golden goose - to a handsome stranger from far away. I think Imarja is from the Dureving/Orenaeo strata of the people's mythology, long, long ago. Perhaps Durev was carved from wood, but maybe Orane was born in a nest... After all, won't it be a little fitting if the Durulz were telling the truth?

1. I may have been thinking too much like a God Learner - obviously the warlord and the queen's theft/borrowing/receiving the sword and helm is the mythically ideal spot to end up with them in a HQ. (And for a moment I said - ah ha - an obscure character is much easier to adapt to one's needs... but Broyan would want the "best" role - not the Trickster role, and not the supporting character role... I supposed also that if he were not Rastagar it would be a tiny bit easier to sell his actions to Samastina, who isn't a fool). 2. I've noticed that you've argued that Imarja is Chaotic, or that she represents Illumination. But is that true? Isn't she a Mystic entity, and that doesn't mean Chaos or Not-Chaos... Not disagreeing but trying to figure out the reason you came to that conclusion. I probably missed it.

There's at least one example of a ziggurat being associated with a peripheral culture of the EWF - the New Pavis temple, which is clearly conservative in design. Though the Bright Empire's residual influence might have brought ziggurats to them. The old illustrations in the war game and in WF of dragonewt structures, however, seem to suggest, fluid, surreal, and labyrinthine structures for the actual Draconic edifices. Did the Bright Empire reach that far east in Prax?

Certainly Ernalda "divorced" Orlanth when Orlanth was outlawed. She then took year husbands until the outlawry was lifted.But outlawry - which seems to impose divorce (as part of its severance aspect) - seems a bit severe as a means to "take a break". I could see it though, as it seems very practical and the Storm/Earth approach to marriage is, if nothing else, very practical. As Heort says, "sex is easy, but marriage is hard".

Does that mean the WBaRM and Dragon Pass (the war game) are non-canon now? Because that's where "Baron Sanuel" comes from. I suppose we out to have a Kethaelan vocabulary for titles, much as we do for Western peoples. Or did Belintar simply adapt Jrusteli titles... if so it might be a clue where he originates.

It appears that it is non-canonical, after looking through everything Hero Wars and later on hand. They are said merely to worship "foreign" gods in Sartar:KoH, which, if true prior to the Resettlement, might mean they were a Foreign tribe/clan under the laws of Aventus. Gustbran is not a foreign god; he married into the Earth tribe, after all.

Exactly what happened to me. Still, I worked around it.

Interesting. Of course if Mularik is a Westerner he might actually possess a surname, and be Mularik Sanuel, called "Ironeye". This of course would have explained how Mularik is missing from the war-game. In Blood and Gold, "Sanuel" is the forename of Caselain, whose Saint was Ashara (that is, Sorcerous Issaries), which - if still canon - suggests a link to Maniria. But as I understand it B&G is apocryphal now.

Sorry about the above post - for some reason I couldn't add any text - only snip... weird. Ok, the Locaem are said to be Lodril worshippers, which I took to mean Veskarthen/Gustbran worshippers and hence likely from either Smithstone or from southern Esrolia. Trying to track down a citation for this at the moment.

Indeed, though cattle are money for the Hendriki. This legend would probably heighten this sense. If there's a Kitor present, he/she is probably going to say "that tribute better be paid, whoever has the bull owes us". Of course, in the Tain the bull ends up getting into a fight with another sacred bull, they both die, and it's a complete waste of lives. Though a good story. I think it's specifically contradicted in the book, but it would have been amusing if the bull was carried off by the Kitor as "tax" under some pretext after the war ends. Another possibility is the Argan Argari/Kitori trading various suspect magic objects to the two/three parties involved to sway events that go completely wrong... followed by them winning the bull as tribute. If we go with Orlanthland as the setting, and I'm partly there, now, then some survivor of all this masculine stupidity will probably go looking for "another way" and run into a dragonewt... At the very end.

Yeah, my way of writing games is to take on the story from an unexpected place if at all possible, and use dreaming and meditation to do so. Thinking about Glorantha intensifies this.

Joerg, your comments are very helpful. I'm starting with a fairly outré position because I don't want to assume that anything before Heort is necessarily recognisable - that the Heortlings impose their values backwards onto their non-Heortling ancestors. You wrote: "IMO the concept of Vingkotling kingship is contrary to the sacrificial kingship. Compare the upset Yarandros of Tarsh caused when he claimed Vingkotling kingship rather than the Sacred Marriage sovereignty." This may be very significant. Though I'd argue that Vingkot's necessary immolation may be a post-facto, Heortling-derived, interpretation of the facts. After all, the RW analogue, the cremation of Herakles, as we can see in Euripedes, is not just to release him from pain, but a crucial part of his apotheosis. The Romans, of course made their emperors into gods in the same way, though they waited until they were physically (if not spiritually) dead. Ultimately if Broyan is a devotee of Vingkot the same fate ought to be a part of his adherence to the cult. But then, falling on the Rastagar as villain possibility, I like the idea that the "warlord" is burned alive as a act of mockery by Rastagar, perhaps in his stead - viz. the "stead burning" part of bloodfeud. I may dial back the cosmic meaning of things a bit when things see play. Well, I do think Broyan took on the "warlord" role in gaining the Vingkotling weapons - rather than the status of heir of Rastagar. I supposed one wants the pieces to fit together, but it's a little like a extremely scattered jigsaw, and 80% is lost. Stepping back a bit: 1. Rastagar screwed up and Orlanthi storytellers will make this both inevitable and hubristic, altering details to make it fit. The implication on the one hand is that he summoned the fyrd to fight Chaos, but the betrayal of so many of his thanes would have to have some sort of justification. 2. The Queen is Orana/Orendela, or her manifestation. I am still inclined to see the sacrificial aspect of Ana Gor as somehow connected to her. Of course - if death was no great barrier to access to the World, human sacrifice, particularly willing sacrifice, might be seen as a transformation rite rather than a grave and disturbing tradition. 3. The warlord is not Irillo. I'm going with him being the figure adapted by Broyan. Broyan finesses the "lover" aspect to help him win Samastina's aid, though this is seen through by most of the Grandmothers. However, the warlord probably dies somehow in the story and Broyan can't fully sidestep this. 3. The Irillo role is someone else. He would naturally appear as a proxy for the Esrolians, drawn in accidentally or deliberately. Perhaps it's our hapless Governor, Orngerin?

I would think that the following eras show space for Karsten and the Bull War... The era of Orlanthland (before the EWF) - this is what Joerg suggests... This period would also be the period of the Tax Slaughter and a neo-Traditionalist period, but with social domination by priests rather than kings. The quarrel, however, is between two kings and a queen. On the other hand, if one uses the Tain as a model, the vast influence of Cathbad in that myth-cycle is closer to an Orlanthland theocrat (or a Vedic sage). I'd point out that the story of the Tain isn't all that out of place if it's set in "Vedic" India, as another Indo-European epic period. After the Dragonkill but before Belintar (c.1020-1316) - my initial preference. In terms of the actual Bull War in Orlanthi perspective, there are obvious "problems" that result in the ritual strife hinted at in the book. There's a proud king who ignores or offends his wife (comparable to Rastagar, and I'd expect in a reconstruction of the epic that he would be compared to Rastagar), a magic bull (clearly a sacred animal of Urox) - if one uses a Vedic parallel, it's like those wandering stallions invested with royal virility - and a devastating price exacted for the cuckolding - the stripping of the Bacofi of their core territory of North Vale - which eventually leads many years later to the rise of Hroar, who betrays the Volsaxar to recover at least part of the old lands. But if the epic exists, it probably has a didactic aspect. So some sort of disaster is also the consequence of this adultery, pride, and greed. In the first era, the disaster is the EWF and the ruination of Whitewall; in the second possible setting, it's either the Red Moon or Belintar. I'm working from very little here, but any other period would probably have Kitori attempting to enforce order, which apparently isn't a part of the mix.

Thanks for your insights... Regarding the above, I wonder if part of the problem is that Volsaxar/the Volsaxi Confederation is sometimes confusingly conflated with the Volsaxi proper, a constituent tribe. On onomastic grounds, I have a theory that Hardard the Green is actually related to the kings of the Bacofi - viz. their names: Hagard and Hroar. This would mean that the Bacofi claim to be the chief tribe of Volsaxar in the 1620s has some merit. It also might explain why they press their claim to North Vale - that being the location of Whitewall itself. Again, here I am using the model of kingship among mediaeval Celts where it alternates between two or more distinct male lineages with a (possibly mythical or concocted) common male ancestor. Remotely, of course, Volsax, would be a common ancestor of everyone in the Confederation, though from the evidence of Sartari tribes, this may be in the sense of "everyone gives sacrifices to him" rather than "we know the names of every man in the descent between us and him"; there is obviously a tendency to adopt heroes who are associated with clan and tribal territories. Whoever Volsax was he must have done a great number of interesting things. The Bacofi are also - in DP I believe - to be descended from Silver or Dawn Age clan called the Orvantes, though more recent works make clear the whole area was properly under the rule of the Garanvulings, who were hardly numerous enough to have sub-clans at the Dawn. Perhaps "Orvantes" is a by-name of the Garanvuli... certainly they had a king "Orvis" who could have fathered a bloodline by that name. This would make the Bacofi, at least, lineal descendants of the Garanvuli. Which would also imply Volsax was one as well. But not necessarily... Hendrik himself was a Gavrening, that is, a lineal descendant of Yinkin, though that may have come through his mother. I have the feeling that the later Hendriki kings were related via either daughters or sisters of his, which is one reason they clearly have elective kings. In fact, Hendrik might not have been a king at all...? Now the Hendriki Old Laws seem to hold up the tradition of there being no thralls in their steads. This tends to limit the Volsaxar tribes in the same way if they are in fact Old Hendriki, though in the DP gazetteer, the Bacofi have clearly abandoned this Law. The Kurtali also seem to have thralls in some sources.

"Politics" seems to me be pragmatic behaviour based on power or wealth (not that they are far different). Gods and their aspects in the World (devotees) are interested in behaviour that supports their god's interests/God-time actions. Sometimes that plays out like politics and sometimes not. But I think there might be room for different aspects seeing things differently. Eiritha has very basic pragmatic interests, though they are pragmatic primarily in terms of her needs in the Greater Darkness. Mating with Storm Bull is one these "political" decisions. Maybe if we think like a dominant female in a herd (like an elephant matriarch) we can approach how she would other gods and their refractions in Time.

This post is a lot less weird than my last one, I promise... The old Dragon Pass gazetteer suggests that Baron Sanuel was a Trader Prince or a Trader Prince mercenary. Is this still true? I think the Locaem must have originated from around Smithstone, a sacred space for Gustbran (whose father's former mountain is very close by). Does that work? Speaking of Gustbran, when died he learn smithing from the Mostali? Is there anything specific regarding this? If the Volsaxi came from its vicinity are they (the original core clan) Fire/Earth Orlanthi or Storm Orlanthi? The same hoary gazetteer suggests that Volsax was a rival of Dreven, who I think is probably a Dureving given his name. I also place Geo's original home at the Cave Inn, which I think is southwest of Whitewall, and speculate that he was recruited by Sartar there as Sartar contemplated crossing the Crossline. (This is my game canon, as the Cave Inn is where there PCs come from..). But is there anything out there that makes this a shaky/wrong assumption? The other thing I had to nail down was the date of Karsten's war with the Bacofi over the magic bull, which, based on the Tain Bo Cualaigne I put in the generation before the Red Moon's rise (in the Tain the events prefigure the Crucifixion). I don't think this is contradicted anywhere but if I'm mistaken, let me know. Thematically, this should involve chariots, lost magic, and trolls, all of which are on the wane by the 16th-17th centuries.