Eff

What this implies is that Arachne Solara's will determines the gender balance of "nature spirits". It all makes perfect sense when you put it like that...

Elves and Beast Men are also "nature spirits" in the sense that they are in the same roles as other nature spirits from the real world- a nature spirit doesn't have to be ethereal. And they certainly tend more masculine in their description and definition. River gods tend to be described as masculine also, though really we should expect they're fluid of gender and presentation. But those are some immediate examples that aren't obscure, but are obscured by how the tendency is to assume nature spirits can't be touched. (An obvious aspect of all of these things is that the gender balance of nature spirits in Glorantha and Glorantha's primary real-world inspirations is driven by the assumption that it's men who are coming into contact with them, and thus the interaction can play upon a variety of fears, anxieties, fantasies, and social obligations related to interactions between men and women. But of course, this is Glorantha and it would be more in the spirit of things to also have homoerotic encounters and encounters where adventuring women encounter passive male figures of nature Or to put it another way, perhaps some of these oreads and water nymphs are actually just femboys?)

It's worth pointing out that in Pendragon Passions are very specifically emotions the PK has, and, for example, Love (family) is very much not reciprocal- eldest sons and daughters start with 15, but for younger sons they get a randomized value: between 7 and 17 (average 12) for the second son, 6 and 16 (average 11) for the third, and so on. Even though your siblings have a 75% chance of feeling inspired by their love for you, as a third son, likely to be sent for Holy Orders if you're lucky, you might only have a 45% chance of feeling inspired by your love for them Loyalty (Lord) is 15 for a landed knight, 2d6+6 for a household knight, 2d6 for a landless knight bachelor, 3d6 for a new lord acquired through play... but Loyalty (vassals) starts at 2d6+6. Not only is it non-reciprocal, it's quite possible for a PK who knights a serjeant for valor to end up feeling more loyal to them than they to the PK. Pendragon, of course, is Arthurian and derived most principally from Thomas Malory, and Malory himself was a knight in the Wars of the Roses and the questions of mixed and mercurial loyalties lurk under the surface of the Morte. This is a very appropriate system for inspiring dramatic tensions between PKs, as a consequence! Of course, Runequest's own initial inspirations were sword-and-sorcery fiction most strongly, and while these characters tend to be very loyal to their friends and companions (I'm sure Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser have a suitably platonic Love for one another in a Pendragon-like system of Passions, as would Elric and Moonglum. Or perhaps less platonic.) they tend to be fairly mercenary towards superiors, in part because they are generally paid mercenaries. In that sense, perhaps what makes more sense would be for the default Passions to be primarily horizontal ones, bonds between "equals", (even if not actually equals) and the game were aware of the player character group being some kind of, well, nascent Hero Band. Or perhaps RQG was reframed to put the player characters in the position of companions and servants to a heroic leader type, but even then, making that loyalty reciprocal by default is, well, an interesting choice.

I think that the reasoning is that Pendragon starts PKs with the Passions of Loyalty (lord), Love (family), Hospitality, and Honor, as befits a knight in Late Antiquity in Britain, and then when this was imported into RQG, the lack of a feudal context meant an awkward bit of fumbling with Loyalty to the various political entities that ought to be relevant to player characters. The end result was a potential proliferation of Passions and thus the apparent lack of loyalty to clan in Prax, the apparent lack of any intermediate entity between clan and "city" in Esrolia, etc. Perhaps what should have been done is to set up a set of default Passions that tug PCs in opposing directions in common situations, like Hospitality and Honor or Loyalty and Love do for Pendragon. But this road was not taken.

I feel like, if Loyalty (Tribe) is supposed to replace Loyalty (Clan) for Praxians, then this really should be -20% to that Passion. But perhaps it's meant to be the case that Praxians have no culturally instilled loyalties to clans, only to the ethnic group of the tribe and their immediate families, in which case this entry makes no sense, they're stealing from fellow clan members already. And perhaps it's just the case that because Praxians have Hate(Chaos) as a default cultural Passion, they got Loyalty (Clan) cut from their defaults because that way every homeland gets three. That last can't be the case, of course, because I have been assured that Runequest is deliberately not balanced and so there must be some other reason why Praxians don't have any clan loyalty. By default. If only we knew the reasoning involved, though.

So I have a board game, if we're talking about WW2, which is called Empire of the Sun. Now, it purports to represent the Pacific in the Second World War, all theaters. But curiously, it has nothing in its guide to play about how to handle Guadalcanal. There's absolutely nothing to help me with ensuring that, playing as Japan, I can get 17th Army onto Guadalcanal, or playing as the Americans, I get 1st Marine Division onto the island before 2nd Marine Division. The Americal Division might never even land on the island at all! Of course, this is a very silly complaint I'm making, because the game places the characters in operational command of the whole theater for either the Japanese or the Western Allies and the only guaranteed adherence to history is the 1st turn, where the Japanese player always has the means to execute Pearl Harbor and the sinking of Force Z. The 1st turn is also optional and omitted from tournament play. There are cards that reference historical events and can be used for relevant effects- for example, Hideki Tojo resigning as prime minister affects the victory conditions for both sides- but the players chose when to deploy them and how. It is quite entirely likely that the Japanese and Allies will slug it out in the Solomon Islands during the course of the game, but where the flashpoint is and how it will go will also likely differ quite a bit- I've played a game where, starting in the January 1943 scenario, I was knocking on the gates of Rabaul by April. "Multiple Argraths" put the player characters in the prospective position of, to continue this metaphor, Alanbrooke or Pound or Cunningham or Mountbatten or Wavell or Montgomery or Dowding or Leigh-Mallory or Portal or Eden or Churchill himself, with Argrath perhaps as George VI. Would it be hard to have a scenario involving a commando raid on a fictional Greek island if Churchill has been replaced by someone less concerned with the "soft underbelly of Europe"? Sure, but Jason Morningstar's Grey Ranks doesn't focus on Tadeusz Komorowski, commander-in-chief of the Polish Armia Krajowa, either, for a similar reason- the game's ambit is about something other than the decision to launch the uprising in Warsaw in 1944. The specifics of this method and its overall effects are of course debatable, but its aims were simply very different from putting the player characters in the role of a ragtag band of Allied commandos in the Dodecanese in 1943, or their equivalent for Sartar in Glorantha in the Hero Wars, and they should be evaluated in terms of those aims rather than how well they did something completely different. Lightning edit: And of course, if the PCs are on anything but an inflexible railroad, it helps to know the personality, goals, and beliefs of their superiors so that when the unexpected happens, the referee or GM can play out their superiors' reaction and things can continue from there.

I'm guessing that the reason why he perceives it as a waste of time is because the answers to the questions being raised would appear to already be answered. Between bold heroism and intellectual pragmatism, intellectual pragmatism's victory is already set in stone. (And then Leika's death is also set in stone, but a bit more remotely.) So choosing Kallyr or trying to find a middle ground- those are the wrong answers. Or perhaps there's no meaning to the events and the time was wasted because there were themes at play and symbolic language in action when those were irrelevant all along. And what's more, of course, is that Kallyr has been deemed to have been explicitly wrong, to have been bad at her job, to not be all that good of an Orlanthi. So even if you want to carry the flag of Kallyrist politics forward, this has already been defined as a mistake, a bad trajectory, by statements that are certainly presented as the truth about what Glorantha not only is but in many cases was apparently always meant to be. It's sort of like the difficulties in trying to play from the Lunar perspective while still keeping to the metaplot and statements about the metaplot- whatever the Red Moon develops into thematically throughout the course of your game, as something the characters value (or else they wouldn't be Lunars!) it is something that must inevitably be destroyed, and it's something which must be irretrievably tainted with corrosive unreality. So in this fashion, I would say that it is also a waste of time to keep to the metaplot while playing Lunars unless it's primarily to revel in how disgusted you are by the Lunars and their lunatic ways. Now, you can and in my opinion absolutely should ditch the metaplot when playing, and then you can ask questions that don't have predefined answers and work out what answers your characters or your group comes to. But then at that point it's a question of whether your Glorantha is varying or being run directly counter to what has been presented as the consistent, unchanging intent of Glorantha from the 1970s or 1980s, and I can't blame people for feeling like there's no point to a game which would appear to be anti-Gloranthan even, or perhaps especially if it's being conducted without any negative intent towards Glorantha.

Yes, it's true that you're not forced into interacting with particular characters, because a book is incapable of forcing people to do things independently. The more relevant aspect, though, is that if you pick up the Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha core book and run the game from the core book, what you will do when creating characters is to start with their homelands and then move to their family history, and in that family history, there are some figures (Fazzur, the Red Emperor, Pharandros, Argrath, the Feathered Horse Queen, Samastina, and Harrek) who you can, and quite frankly are likely to gain Loyalty Passions for. So when the GM goes to consider plot points to introduce, these are names which have been marked as clearly relevant for player characters as people they did or may have interacted with in the past. If the group decides to use the shorter family history options, they have to invent three Passions for their characters or else they roll in the entries for 1622-1625, which is likely to highlight these characters as well because they're marked as important figures. These figures are marked as relevant and important right off the bat. To contrast, Runequest 2 generates ties for new player characters to institutions- guilds and cults paying for training and the consequent debt load. It does not generate these ties to specific setting figures, although, for example, it's fairly likely you'll end up interacting with Argrath if you're using the Pavis box because Garrath Sharpsword is a guild instructor. But using that core book alone... it's quite likely you're not playing in Glorantha, but for the sake of argument, the things which are flagged as relevant to the characters are the guilds and cults and developing plot points (along with the firmer character motivations of RQ2- getting a Rune) is more likely to be built off of those guilds and cults because they're already there. And in RQG, the metaplot figures are also already there.

Honestly, Your Glorantha Will Vary has always been an incomplete or inadequate expression, because Glorantha has always been incomplete, for a long time deliberately so. It's not only going to vary, whenever you play with Glorantha, you, the players, must fill in gaps and complete the areas of personal interest. This is unlikely to actually be adopted, because there's a strong desire to know more of the lore baked into the fanbase that these games are primarily if not entirely made for. The distinction between Runequest 2's presentation of Glorantha as an example fantasy world you can create using its rules, and Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha's, well, just look at the title, is valuable there. A starting character in RQ2 does not start the game in a context where Argrath, Jaldon, Jar-Eel, Cragspider, Ethilrist, or Androgeus is relevant to their personal lives. They don't even start in a context where Flash-Jak would be relevant! These characters can be made relevant to the initial situation, but it isn't baked in. An RQG starting character does start with Argrath, or the FHQ, or the Red Emperor, being relevant to their personal lives through the character creation system. By default, these characters are baked in to whatever comes next.

I think this very firmly reinforces my point in that post. Deviating from "Argrath is consistently present to give your characters orders" is a "crazy campaign", whether it's "being the great hero who defeats the evil empire" or "explor[ing] ancient ruins all day and forget[ting] the big plot". RQ:RiG very firmly sets up its premise as I said, or actually even more firmly than I said, since I didn't spell out that there's only one side to pick.

So, the way that the West End Games RPG approached this question was twofold. Firstly, the scope of play would be limited. Player character groups would be presented with situations that weren't of galactic scope- they wouldn't be involved in defending the Rebel "hidden fortress", they wouldn't be facing a Death Star, they wouldn't be drawing laser swords with Darth Vader- and instead they would be defending a lesser Rebel base, they might be facing a torpedo sphere, and there were the Inquisitors to use as minor Jedi opponents. Secondly, though, the character templates groups were presented with would also produce a zoomed-in fractal of the characters of existing Star Wars media (at that time, the movies and the comics and the very early novels). You had smugglers and bounty hunters and decrept Jedi and quixotic lunatics and brash pilots and confident pilots and big strong aliens and droids. So the intent was that you would be playing through your own zoomed-in Star Wars stories which were effectively disconnected from the movies. The big boys and girls might show up for cameos, but it was far more common to have ersatz equivalents (eg Kaiya Adrimetrum for Mon Mothma) to fill a similar role. Now, it's worth questioning how effective that was in practice, but that's the very obvious intent. To contrast, Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha's text produces player characters who are consistently in contact with Argrath and subordinate to him through the process of character creation alone. By default, that fractal zoom isn't possible, because player characters aren't placed into a Hero Wars in miniature, they're placed close to the center of the main event and the text tells the group implicitly that the primary characters will be a continual presence. So the WEG method isn't in place there. Of course, it's far from the only method that can be done to avoid player characters all being born to be sidekicks. Because what these methods really do is support a more important principle that applies much wider and broader than to games with an existing "canon": that the player characters' actions, and the players' actions in playing them, matter. They mean something. The thing that they mean is of course extremely contingent. If you play Ben Lehman's Polaris, your characters are caught in a tragic spiral in a world that's fighting a rearguard action against its end. Nevertheless, player character actions still mean something. What they choose to do matters, both in negative and positive ways. So the question for any Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha game, like with any roleplaying game, is- "what depends on the player characters? what are the tipping points that hinge on their decisions?" If that answer is "nothing" or "nothing of consequence", then you have a problem. If the Hero Wars are about the fate of Glorantha, the players are told by the game text that the Hero Wars are what's important to the characters they are creating, and the player characters aren't able to affect their course or their outcome in a way that matters... what was the point of playing, if not to "know what happened" by "experienc[ing] it for yourself"?

However, a Gloranthan minotaur is a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a human being, like the Greek singular Minotaur, rather than, say, a gigantic vole with the face of a cat who walks upon its hind legs, or a bull with large butterfly wings, a hybrid of Bos taurus and Troides minos. There is obviously a family resemblance here, one which is probably mediated through the transformation of the singular monstrous Minotaur into a species of many minotaurs in fantasy fiction in the 20th century. A Gloranthan harpy is very obviously not a smeerp being called a rabbit. She has wings, and is birdlike. And as harpies do not have any developed Gloranthan presence beyond a vague definition that was just now declared largely meaningless in this thread, there is very clearly not a "real" answer. And as harpies are clearly pointing to something from folklore, rather than if you were to call them "Jud the Ineffable Vugs" or "smeerps of the second water", then it is entirely appropriate to offer answers which draw from that folklore, rather than sitting on our hands waiting for someone to anoint an answer with the oil of canonicity.

A true Loyalty (Argrath) 90 knows where to get pitch, naphtha, and lighter fluid in a hurry to help the Prince with any, um, ignition problems.

The metaplot as it exists hinges on a particular interpretation of Argrath, of course, so breaking free of the fetters of the metaplot can begin very well by purposeful reinterpretation of Pretty Boy Maniskisson to acclimate oneself to flexibility, possibilities, and openness.

Ah, yes, it could be the case that Argrath really does love being repeatedly body slammed, and that really is victory wine, not blood, which is filling his mouth right now. And the part where he had to spell out that his servants needed to murder one of his former boon companions was actually his plan all along, and he knew that the giant bird would step in before he dueled Harrek one-on-one. Nothing but overwhelming (moral) victories for the Prince of Small Dragontooth Energy.

That's not really relevant to whether he's contemptible or not, as compared to his repeated failures to Thomas Becket Mularik, the parts where he runs and hides without a fight... There's also the part where he needs to be saved by a large bird from writing checks with his mouth that his body can't cash.

The difficulty with dumping the Last Prince of Sartar is that forever afterwards he'll insist you didn't dump him, it was he who dumped you. Which is to say, one of the most important Argrath-functions is as a punchline, or a punching bag. Like Ethilrist, as a figure himself he's pretty contemptible at the baseline. It's his backers and patrons that are more interesting, whoever you determine those to be. Of course, I love the little monster, so he gets to be Glorantha's Nastiest Twink in my games.

If the only way to stop being anthropocentric is to stop being anthropos, then anthropocentrism is inevitable for humans, so of course if you view anthropocentrism as a negative you believe by implication that there's the capacity to decenter the anthropic without departing from it. Now there's an interesting implication in all of this, which has to do with the "changeling" motif and the supposed grand exterminationist ambitions of the Elder Races- the assumption that elves aren't human is rather absurd if you look at it through a runic lens, since they have the Man rune. But if you take it as given that elves, or trolls, or dwarves, are nigh-universally opposed to the existence of humanity in its present state, have grand revanchist ambitions to not only wipe out the humans but also the landscape of human existence, then perhaps you might say that someone who's an elf-friend, or a human you see in a dwarf caravan moving aboveground, isn't really human anymore. That parts of their selfhood must have been taken out and replaced with counterfeit equivalents. That they've been replaced with a changeling, a being with unknowable but probably negative motives.

That wasn't quite what was being discussed, though, so I didn't discuss it as a possibility. I actually don't think that the "naive theist" is much less dangerous, if at all, because the reality of the situation is that they will still interact with the world in a way that causes changes and upsets and disruptions, and while they may not have the capacity to have a particular level of dangerous intent, they also don't have any preventative safeguards that the "reflective illuminate" (setting aside godlearners for a moment, as they have nigh-universally been used as a pejorative from some point in the early 80s until 2020-2021 across the fandom) likely has knowledge of. And of course at the same time, the ability of the "reflective illuminate" to turn knowledge into malevolence is similarly limited by action-reaction effects. Or to put it another way, it's not simply a matter of a static absolute like truth nor a totally malleable void, but malleability within limits.

I have a longer, more practically applicable disquisition related to this topic in the process of refinement and editing, but you're right that it would be deeply unsatisfactory if the matter was as simple as "people in Glorantha define their world through the free choice of myths". Here is what I think is better and more meaningful- it is possible to shape the world and alter it through interacting with myths, but in a constrained fashion. What has come before- what has happened- cannot be erased without resetting the entire universe. This process therefore proceeds through reinterpretation of the existing myths and through the explicit creation of new ones- which connect onto the old myths. There is also inevitably pushback. Acting on "the world" means the world acts on you, acting on a particular god or hero or daimon means that they act on you as well, and no one knows the consequences in advance. Nevertheless, within these limits, staggering changes may arise, cloaked in "time-honored disguise", wearing costumes borrowed from those "spirits of the past".

The other side of this, of course, is that the initiation is a safety valve. The meaning of nonhumans in Glorantha can be a very thorny rosebush indeed, and one way of avoiding getting scratched is to put a little decorative brick barrier up, and on one side are the elves with their pretty flowers, and on the other side are the humans admiring. You do need to clip and trim, but you always do, it's a question of how one should do so.

I would say that, for my part, the entire Aldrya initiation is straightforwardly modern in its approach, in that it defines "elf" in purely biological terms and makes it a binary of elf/non-elf. (It also makes certain assumptions about genitalia in Glorantha that are probably not intended.) There's a subsidiary question of whether literalizing these kinds of initiation rituals actually conveys a similar meaning to what the real-world initiation ritual means to the people who practice it and those who undergo it, but that gets into the question of whether Glorantha's "middle world" should be understood as a material world in contact with the spiritual one of the "hero plane"/"gods war"/otherside or not. In any case, the problem I have with the Aldrya initiation is the implication that Aldrya's for elves only, which certainly seems to make Glorantha significantly more rigid in terms of how people interact with the divine- the literalized religious devotional practice of initiation to the tree goddess, who might be very relevant to appease or curry favor with if you rely on orchards, coppicing and pollarding, or are just a charcoal burner, is apparently closed to entire categories of being based on their literal, material body. (As opposed to taking a transformation like wearing bark clothes and a bark mask and literalizing that into a method to "become an elf" for ritual purposes, to name one alternative off of the top of my head.)

This is a meaningless question. Glorantha is an invention, and the act of interpreting Glorantha is the act of changing and creating Glorantha. So there is no "Gloranthan perspective" which we can ferret out to discern the truth about harpies. And the fact that they are called harpies, rather than an invented name like grotaron or wind child or jack-o-bear or walktapus, tells us that they are in continuity with the entity from our orthocosmic world. It is part of the basic process of understanding Glorantha to read "harpy" and think "harpy". So we can take what we know about harpies and apply it to Gloranthan ones and see if there's anything which shakes loose creatively from doing so. And if we want to say that these harpies are devoid of connections to the real-world ones, well, that's silly.

Let me tell you about harpies. So in the days of yore, there was a personification of storm winds and their destructiveness called "the swift robbers" or "the snatchers". They would steal food from your hand, like a gust of wind might. They would steal people and carry them to the Erinyes for judgement, or to Tartarus for torture. They were Zeus's creatures. They were the harpies, and in the Homeric period, they were young women with wings and perfect hair. They were cruel, of course, for they were associated with the Erinyes and with mighty Zeus. But by the days of Aeschylus, they had become wingless, constantly weeping, poor dressers, and compulsive snorers. Virgil may have added the part about them shitting all over things, or them being vulture hybrids, with skinny faces and hungry eyes. Or it may have been in some other author. But in artwork, they remained winged women, the epithet of the fair-haired stayed down to the end of the Classical era. So there are clearly at least two types of harpies, one that's ugly and disgusting and doesn't brush their teeth, and one that's beautiful and swifter than anything, with gorgeous hair. There might be a third type that's openly sexual and fetishistic. Anyways, flip a coin for which one is Chaotic.

"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a goofus." - Talor the Laughing Warrior, seconds after learning he'd volunteered to be the ball in a friendly game of Trollball with dad's new friends.