Shimozakura

In my games I've treated Gagarth as a subcult of Orlanth, so that Gagarth is just another name for Orlanth the Outlaw. It's clear from the lore that initiates have the movement rune so it stands to reason that they would have the standard Orlanth power suite, perhaps complemented that with some limited disorder magic from the Gagarth subcult. If Gagarth is a different cult altogether, is there also an outlaw subcult of Orlanth? If so, then based on what Jeff said above it would seem that most of the outlaws roaming the hills are decent Orlanth laymen or even initiates who cling to their previous notions of honor and clan kinship. And then there are the "bad boys" of the deep hills, who'll rob their own grandmother if the opportunity arises.

I'm sorry to break this string of pondeous musings in the deep, murky waters with a quick question from the kiddies pool (no sarcasm intended). Lunars are aware of the illusionary nature of the world and use strictures to ground them so that they don't lose their sanity. On the other hand, lunar illumination is all about embracing that nature and transcending artificial restrictions. Do I therefore assume correctly that illuminated lunars no longer need to adhere to their strictures? Would there still be some reason for them to do so? The reason I'm asking is that I'm running a homebrew HQ2 where PCs have commitments (dos and don'ts) that yield hero points when fulfilled. The idea is that if my orlanthi PC Disrupts the Order of Things during the session, he gets a HP when he does it (the dos); and if my Inrippi Ontor initiate has not broken his vow to Not Refuse To Teach someone during the previous session, he starts the current session with a HP (the don'ts). Things such as geases and lunar strictures lend themselves well to this kind of system, but I'm wondering what will happen to my lunar PC upon Sevening. Would he lose his stricture altogether and have to find some other source of HPs? Would he be able to keep the stricture (thereby continuing to gain power, or in game terms HP, from it) but become able to break it without repercussions (i.e. not have to overcome a minor story obstacle to restore his vow)?

Wow, this has been long in coming. Thank you and Jeff for this. Just in time for my campaign too.

It's actually the same campaign as the one in the link below (thanks for the help to all of you who helped me back then and now), but in a subsequent arc. In the first arc my original Rathori PC:s managed to intervene in the murder of God of the Silver Feet on a heroquest (in my game the perpetrators do this by transform his Communication rune into its opposite, turning him into a god of Death). The PCs could not stop the murder, but they managed to contain the emerging entity into a mortal shell (the NPC heroquesting as GoSF and a lover of one of the PCs), so that the resulting creature ceases to be a god and becomes "only" the demigod Lord Death on a Horse. In this arc of the campaign, the PC in from the previous arc who was the lover of the questing NPC has become LD on a H's number one warlord, and has been tasked with taking the Dona river valley while the Lord herself heads west to Loskalm. However, the Dona river valley Sun Dome - through its access to unlikely magic - has used an ancient artifact rumoured to contain some of the powers of Arachne Solara to magically bind together four unlikely heroes for purposes unknown. Structure-wise the trick is that I'm running a sandbox where all the factions are run by players. We still have a regular group of PCs (primary characters) with regular adventuring, but this is interspaced with dreaming episodes where one of the PCs connects - throught the magic of Arachne Solara - with one of the faction leaders (secondary characters) while the remaining two of my four players take the role of the faction leader's advisers or lieutenants (tertiary characters). During these episodes the secondary and tertiary characters (each of whom have their own goals and personalities, ultimate say in the control of one or several community resources, and a reward system that rewards you for yielding today for greater decision power in the future) decide what their faction will do, while the primary character throws curveballs into their decision making. My job is mostly to sit back and enjoy the show. The system is not without its kinks, but we're having a lot of fun with it (plus it saves me a ton of GM management) and I'm finding that HQ2 yields itself magnificently to this style of play. You unadvertedly stepped on a big plot point in my campaign so let me hang on to this. I was under the impression that the sun in the Rathori creation myth is a plain old Yelm-equivalent and therefore warm. However, my rathori faction is re-enacting a series of deep heroquests of their creation myth in order to jointly raise the two oldest cubs of the White Bear to their father's status, and it just so happened that my Yelmalian PC managed to enter the first heroquest through her mythic connection with the quester, and sort of ended up taking the role of the Sun in the myth where the Earthmaker makes the Earth. I had totally not expected that to happen, but I figured that since it did they're now stuck with her for the rest of their endeavors, and since the Cold Sun is the best she can be, the bears are going to have to find some new source of fire for the fire-related parts of their subsequent heroquests (in my game there are quite a few). I'm thinking maybe Lodril or some equivalent spirit. But are you saying that the Rathori Sun is actually Yelmalio? Or did you just mean that Yelm is weak in Fronela? Having it be Yelmalio would explain much of the Rathori's connection with elves, but wouldn't that also mean that they are quite new as a people since their creation myth would then be taking place in the Greater or Lesser Darkness? I wholeheartedly agree, the becomers are way more interesting. I think Yelmalio is especially so, as his becoming is about becoming weaker but gaining different kind of strength in the process. Btw, I don't think your assessment about ZZ is quite right. I think we both agree that Humakt is a pretty straightforward embodment of death, and all his virtues are aligned or at least do not conflict with the Death rune. however, the way I see it, ZZ is a much more complex entity who uses death to vent his rage and create disorder. Not all his virtues are death-aligned; while death is cold and calculating he rages, for instance; and he even creates zombies which should be anathema to the Death rune. Actually this distinction is also a theme in my game, as one of my PCs is an orphan Hsunchen child of the Owl people, who in my game are a bunch of disturbed psychopatic assassins who are having difficulty procreating due to extensive affiliation with the Death rune. The question of whether their Beast rune is actually just a close derivative of the Death rune will hopefully have some impact on the game, and I'm thinking of throwing my player some curveballs regarding the difference between gods who own the Death rune versus gods who use it.

Thanks! So I take it that the tribulations on the Hill of Gold are a central part of the mythos of both cults. Or is it only Yelmalio who is robbed of his fire powers?

Interesting. I wonder about the relationship between the Sun Domes and the cult of Antirius; or Yelm for that matter. I know this subject has been discussed in other threads, but my question is a local one. My game is in the Dona river valley, where the local Sun Dome and the Yelmic city of Eastbank are practically neigbors with a river in between. Not only that, but they've only made contact fairly recently after a hundred years of splendid isolation by the Syndics Ban. In my game the Yelmic Eastbank is isolationist and ties to build a magical wall in order to re-separate itself from the surrounding world (having the Kingdom of War pay for the wall would be ideal, of course). Because of Eastbank's reluctance to extend its influence, the two solar powers are having a tacit understanding where the Sun Dome shows filial deference toward Eastbank, provided that it doesn't try to make any actual demands. So, how would this be if the ruler of Eastbank were to actually press some matters? Would Sun Dome have to submit to the local representative of their patron god Yelm, and if not, how would they protect their autonomy? And how would the cult of Antirius treat my Yelmalian PCs when they finally get around visiting Southbank?

I'm running a Fronelan campaign heavily featuring the plight of the Rathori after the death of their great spirit at the hands of Harrek the Berserk. My PCs and several other factions (also run by my players, it's complicated) are planning to resurrect God of the Silver Feet (the major Fronelan god of communication whose death triggered the Syndics ban). Against that backdrop, one of my PCs just got tasked with finding out how Yelmalio rose from the slain body of Yelm. Any ideas how that happened, other than "he just did", which is best what I've got at the moment. Are there any sources you could recommend?

I'm preparing to run a campaign for a party of low-life criminals and/or dark cult worshippers and I have decided to set it in Notchet because of the metropolitan feel, the Necropolis and the inter-grandmotherly scheming inherent in the setting. I'm tapping heavily to the Guide for setting-related information, but there doesn't seem to be much there to get along on. Could anybody suggest me any good sources on Notchet? City maps would be especially helpful.

I found him in one game and went for it for it. The act completely ruined my clan magic seemingly forever and Uldak's bounty of a 100 weird, gutturally mooing cows drops to 99 when you go back for more, and decreases by one ever after. So, I'm crossing out human sacrifice from my list of good ideas (duh), although I regret never staying around to see the end of that rabbit hole. In reference to a previous topic, is it just me or do the raven worshippers seem somewhat decent compared to eurmali in KoDP? Maybe I'm just playing the game differently, but it seems you can actually send a raven worshipper on a mission and expect a proper result instead of a trickster catastrophe (not so with the eurmali I think). I have not yet tried having a raven chief, although that is on my to-do list. Btw, what's the rune stone on the top right corner of the map? I've never managed to find it myself.

Sorry for bumping. Ropecon event took place this weekend and I had the talk there. Everything went nicely, and I very much wanted to thank all the participants of this thread for helping me with the Gloranthan side. Unfortunately I didn't see anybody in the audience with a worker pass and a camera, so I'm sorry to say there won't be a video of the talk coming up after all. Nevertheless, I'm very grateful to all of you.

That's what I thought too, and the multi-point commando raid sounds like the right thing, although I'm not sure if the timing of the teams is so crucial as time is not a factor on the Gods plane. I was just wondering that if you depart from the actual events of a myth during heroquest and end up with wacky results, the same or almost the same story will still be there the next time you try, right? You'll need some specialized magic to drastically change things in one fell swoop, and I wondered what that might be. I guess wielding Death might do the trick, and I remember reading somewhere about techniques that enable you to quarter a Deity and spread the bits around the Gods plane. Any ideas?

The Syndics Ban was caused by the death of the God of the Silver Feet at the hands of a conspiracy led by prince Snodal. It says on the Guide that "a coterie of sorcerers and priests prepared an intricate and elaborate plan and slew him", but does anybody know how this was actually done, or more like what did it take to kill a God who has a lichpin-like significance over an entire region? I'm toying with the idea that the conspiracy used Arkati heroquesters to infiltrate one of the God's myths, kill him and disperse his essence elsewhere in the God plane.

I absolutely agree with you on a general sense. The real world is not Glorantha, and Glorantha is not just some cheap jumbled imitation of real world phenomena but a truly independent, vibrant universe that makes use of these phenomena but only on its own terms. This is also something that I am going to respect in the actual talk that will be partly based on this thread (see the first post). However, for the interests of gathering material gathering phase for the talk, I'm after the kind of input that allows me to see some of the similarities and differences between Glorantha and the real world, and that's why I'm provoking the good people of the forum with real world examples even though it doesn't quite fit. Like you, I was concerned that it would narrow down the view too much, but I'm happy to see that people seem to be having no trouble "running off into the Gloranthan high fantasy wilderness" like you put it, despite my occasional attempts to ground the conversation with Eartly topics. This supports my understanding of buddhist illumination (at least the kind that happens when you're still alive): you can be illuminated but you still have to do your taxes, clip your toenails and be an individual human being like everybody else. You don't lose the ability to be an individual, you can just choose not to be one. As for contacting illuminati after death; maybe we can raise a parallel from the draconic side. Does anyone know if it is possible to contact an illuminated draconic entity who has performed utuma?

Sorry for the long silence. The discussion of whether or not God Learnerism can lead to illumination has some counterparts in real life. For one thing there exists the Kyoto School of Philosophy, whose thinkers attempted to reconcile the spiritual traditions of East Asia with Western thought. If we think of God Learnerism as the Gloranthan manifestation of real-world Western naturalism and the scientific method, then the attempt would come close to attempting to define the Invisible God in draconic or lunar terms (something like this is definately taking place at the Lunar College of Magic). I think with God Learnerism and illumination, the matter ultimately comes down to whether the founding myths of Glorantha, with the Ultimate and such, are real to everybody or not. If there is an objective monomyth at the bottom of it, then I guess digging deep enough using the tools of rationalism should reveal something fundamental. Then again, Glorantha is all about relativity, so maybe there exists no single truth to attain. In that case I would rule enlightenment out of the scope of Western rationalism. By the way, one thing that came to mind is whether the division of theravada and mahayana exists in Glorantha. The basic difference is that in theravada-buddhism, only the true practitioners who withdraw from worldly life can hope to achieve enlightenment, whereas in mahayana even a lay member can achieve enlightenment or other form of salvation. One example of this is the Pure Land Buddhism, where it is believed (on a general level) that a normal person who chants a prayer repeatedly or engages in other form of meditation can be reborn by the mercy of a boddhisattwa in a buddhist paradise where attainment of enlightenment is easier. The religious practices include things such as repeating a prayer for every prayer bead in your rosary or for every bean in a whole vat of them. Of course, the enlightenment in Pure Land Buddhism is mostly attained after death, if ever. As far as I know, most paths to illumination in Glorantha rely on closed monastic orders (I count the draconewts as such) or heroic events. But is there a popular cult that sets illumination of the layperson as its goal? The most likely place to look for would probably be the Lunar empire, since most of the leading figures of the Empire are supposed to be illuminated (also there was the excellent entry above about Moonson's parties). Still, I feel that even these people have to be novices first and nobles second if they're going to unveil the secrets of the black moon. The street demagogues are another questionmark for me, but I'm under the impression that bread, circus and politics are more of their thing.

Ah yes, the paradox where the will to achieve enlightenment becomes in itself a barrier to enlightenment. My heel of Achilles is that I've learned about many Buddhist concepts superfically but I'm not familiar with the Buddhist discourse so I'm lousy at recognizing the allusions. Here I thought you were referring to a Gloranthan concept and scoured the Guide for it. Yeah, that's something I'll definately take up. ありがとうございます。 By the way, to re-iterate something that I said before, where do you think the enlightened go after death? Since they no longer perceive souls and god plane entities as meaningful, I doubt they'd be happy with an ordinary afterlife. Or maybe a better way to frame it would be to ask whether the soul of an illuminated person who is not powerful enough to escape the Underworld after death will be reborn or not? (I'm also assuming that even the enlightened have to adhere to the Great Compromise.) The connection for real world Buddhist practitioners is of course that those of them who endorse the idea of rebirth rely on enlightenment to end it.