Eff

20 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Where's the harvest spell? How many player characters use it every year? The Grain Goddesses teach Bless Crops and Barntar teaches Plow for the sowing but does Ernalda support her own unrecorded version of Food Song on the other end of the cycle?

I feel like the "Grain Goddesses" probably do teach their own unarticulated version of Food Song, or many such versions, for properly preparing food for consumption. I go back and forth on whether they or Babeester Gor teach the Food Song that stabilizes food for long-term storage. Soaking acorns to make them edible, properly shucking maize ears, tapping rice off of a wild rice plant (though perhaps it's Shargash/Tolat who shows you that specific rhythm), knowing what proportions of wheat to barley to use for what type of flour, and what kinds of either... all of that is, in its own way, arcane knowledge if you're not in a community where it's done regularly. Just look at the question of whether to wash rice or not! 

Is this something that's interestingly gameable? Well... yes, I think so, I've contemplated basic scenarios where it would be relevant, (Ernalda priestess attempts to raise rice for Lunars caught in Handra by the Dragonrise, for one) but it's also better to keep in the background for the kind of play most people are interested in. 

A potential factor for consideration here is that there's quite a lot of flexibility of interpretation of what forms Orlanthi societies can take. Is a clan a unit of 1-4 villages that take up a contiguous patch of land? Is a clan a collection of a (home)steads with a central "town" area that holds the sacred precincts? Is a clan centered in a single village with outlying (home)steads and urban representatives in towns and cities? Is a clan a group of people spread out across a number of proximate settlements where they live with people from other clans? 

The assumptions between and within texts vary between the first three, with the fourth not explicitly excluded. And in turn, urban settlement patterns are of course going to be built atop these rural settlement patterns. Is a "market town" specifically a junction point between clans, or is it a concentration of people where it's convenient for access? Does a "natural" city develop from clustering homesteads, from villages merging, or from the construction of particular multi-clan structures and the economic development of certain services? 

How far does the clan structure reach? Are there bloodlines without clans, or truly clanless people? What's the status of outlaws, or of cultists of Humakt and Babeester Gor who have "severed" their kin ties, if that's still a factor in your Gloranthas? Should we read "house" in Esrolia or the Lunar Empire as license to give them house societies, a la Levi-Strauss? Or nascent class-based societies? 

Sartar itself feels like it must or ought to be unusual, since the Dragonkill obliterated most of the humanlike relationships to the terrain and then Sartar itself is the product of settlement, of attempting to transform or eliminate the relationships the "nonhumans" of Dragon Pass and the Pony Breeders had. Its cities are all planned ones in origin. I could well imagine a vast gulf once you cross the Deathline between northern Heortland and southern Sartar, or perhaps a borderland between the two settlement patterns. 

These are mostly food for thought, of course. 

5 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Is there a Glorantha that runs everything on spells with no skill checks? Is this . . . animism?

Pretty sure I've been to one of those, frequently, and it's nice, you frequently run into Susan Sontag and Christopher Isherwood, and who wouldn't want that in a fantasy roleplaying game, but if there's a serious question up for dispute, things take quite a while to resolve, and it gets really slow if there's more than a bilateral negotiation necessary. Those paired d10s are flawed in some ways, just like those paired d20s and those APs and MPs and HPs and other HPs, but they do have their advantages at times.

46 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

one of the more interesting things we've learned about early cities such as in Sumer is that collective society was not at all like life later on. One of the most significant things about urban life in early Mesopotamia (which changed later on in Assyria) is that it truly was communal. We find private areas, but none of them have stoves and seem to have been for younger couples. Society was organised not around families but around temple communities. The temple and its bureaucracy were the absolute organising agent for daily life. The civic leader, who was usually also the head of the priesthood, ran the daily life of the community and was at the top of the civic bureaucracy. This individual was called the ensi "leader of the ploughed lands", which in later times was just a term for king.

People ate in mess halls that doubled as sleeping places. These are what are known later as "bars", actually. Women brewed beer, which at the time was thick porridge with an alcoholic content that ensured it wouldn't give you waterborne disease. The importance of this role is underlined in the many Gilgamesh stories, where the "barmaid" - an entirely incorrect translation - is the person responsible for civilising Enkidu. People would drink stronger drink and enjoy entertainment. There is also evidence that sexual activity happened in these areas as well.

The important bit is that food was collectively held and cooked. There were no private kitchens and few private sleeping areas.

There were separate individuals in charge of the military, the lugal "big man". The lugal was a war-leader. This was a separate and independent structure that was responsible for city defense and for raids.

In later times, the terms ensi and lugal both are translated "king", but in earlier times their roles were extremely different.

So why am I mentioning this? In later periods, wealth created independent, family-based patrilineal lineages and lifestyles began to change. Assyrians in particular had brought in a different social model and it sort of fused with the older system. I think in many ways this is a good way to understand the Big Houses of the Lunar Empire. They create social structures similar to that of the smaller original city-states and their central temple on a much much larger scale.

It is worth pointing out, though, that the Epic of Gilgamesh (and probably the Bilgamesh poems unless they significantly antedate Ur III) postdate this state of affairs- they were composed when lugal, ensi, and en had become hierarchical titles. I think it might be worth looking at this as a "primordial", "green-age" state of affairs which Lunar society may attempt to recreate (pulling out the Entekosiad and expanding the premise of what its T&Js mean) but which must struggle against the Curse of Buseryan, he who babbled the thoughts of humans with writing so that they could never again build a ziggurat tall enough for the Sun to descend herself into the world, but instead could only rest upon it as a footstool.

(Note for the unwary reader: that entire "Curse of Buseryan" is something I extemporized just now from a mix of Snow Crash, Symphogear, and the Torah. Please, for the love of Sedenya, don't go haring off looking for Gloranthan sources on this.)

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

So that was Greg’s vision in 1988, but no one would have been able to read that off of the RQ2 battle magic rules:

Ignite would be fine, and there is an appeal to small household magics that make permanent changes (and to spells with multiple uses/manifestations), but that vision of bladesharp as a knife-grinding magic and glue as a pot-fixing spell didn’t make it to the “first generation” rules. Was that just for wargame reasons, a change of mind, or … ?

[Apologies that this is a bit (old) rulesy, but it would have been mad to move it to another forum — and I think it does bear on the “is crafting spellcasting?” theme.]

RQ-with-the-lizard-and-lady-on-the-cover has a very specific objective for the game, and a specific intent behind that objective. You play a sword-and-sorcery fucko, who's on a quest to get themselves a Rune or two. Not to mention that the lead on producing RQ was Steve Perrin, with Ray Turney then coming on, and Francis Gregory Stafford taking a less direct role in making the specifics of the game. All of which is to say that there are a couple of reasons why this vision of daily life isn't a part of the Runequest-with-L&L milieu- one, the mode is one where you're playing someone at least partially divorced from everyday life, and two, there are multiple creative voices working here. 

Now, fast forward to the 1990s, when Hero Wars emerges, and it does validate this view of the setting, with the common magic even children might have, but also there the creative voices had changed in makeup- FGS was decades older, and to my understanding the division of responsibilities between FGS, Robin Laws, and other contributors was significantly different. And Hero Wars in turn has a somewhat different intent and objective. 

All of this is to say that there are clear limits to this kind of backward reasoning and picking out the envisioned intent of Gre(at)(g)S(is)t(affo)(e)r(d) from it. 

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Hmm … a fascicle, a fasces? I can see the Sartar “resistance” marketing department saying, “Shall we stick an axe through the middle of that to keep the Ernaldans happy?”

As for the BUF emblem, it does look suspiciously like an O for Orlanth with a lightning bolt through it. BUF Orlanthi. BUFO. Bufo bufo. Mr. Toad.

[I think you will agree we’re better off not actually illustrating these painfully obvious points.]

A fasces has all the sticks in order, these are more like tumbleweeds. The business end of a broom duplicated over itself. 

The vajra or thunderbolt began as a sling bullet, and then mutated spontaneous into a mace or club, with a ribbed head. As Buddhism carried the thunderbolt north and east, the head doubled, the ribs became prongs, and a whole family of thunderbolt types emerged, sometimes merging with the bell to produce bells with prongs on the handle, and Tantric ways proceeded to assign a great deal of symbolism to this shape. 

To contrast, the Hellenistic thunderbolt is irregular in shape, a bunch of sticks tied together but sticking out at all angles, though a triune profile seems fairly common on coins (along with pentuple ones) and is probably a missile, a javelin or a thrown object. 

In turn, the western Levantine understanding is that thunder is speech, a voice pronouncing a curse or an exclamation. The vajra is also called a "diamond scepter", so we perhaps must conclude that thunder and thunderbolts are passed around casually and loosely, almost slatternly. 

The pattern is that these spirit magic spells come from a variety of implicit understandings of what spirit magic is and from the basic practical aspects of magic. Preserve Herbs would be utterly useless if it followed the basic "grammar" of spirit magic or Rune magic, summoning spells similarly, so they break the "rules" of the system. A cohesive grammar would require a broad reframing of the system- perhaps these kinds of enduring magic should be sorcery, if we're wedded to 2 minutes/15 minutes as the spirit/Rune magic duration, but it would also be quite bizarre for preserving herbs to require literacy and experiences of henosis and divine gnosis, as apparently sorcery is meant to be. 

This does make it hard to design your own spirit magic spells, just like you could in RQ2, but perhaps that's a feature, not a bug? 🤔

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

(Or after Banks, in a post-scarcity economy — it is all relative — we go to war over ideology. But we don’t have any of that in Glorantha, so all is sweetness and light.)

This, I declare, is ideology. 

31 minutes ago, Agentorange said:

Now, in a way you have sort of got to the heart of what I've been trying to articulate with this. Durev is part of the old HQ approach to things. To be honest until the  facebook post I'd never heard of him. I just used him as an example because he popped up in the conversation. Now as I suspected and Nick confirmed you can't just write up the Thunder Rebels version of him slap it into the JC and expect to get away with it. Quite apart from the legality of it it would feel ( to me anyway ) like plagiarism - like nicking someones work.

Having said that he does seem to have a life outside of HQ, you've referred to the BHM ( which I don't have - another one to add to the list 😆 ). So....what makes one source acceptable to use.....but not another. If   I were seeking inspiration for the sartarite crafts book  you suggested ( and I have no intention of writing such a thing - I wouldn't have a clue where to start ) what would make the BHM an acceptable source, but not the TR from HQ ? if you see what I mean

There is absolutely no difference between the two in terms of acceptability, to my mind. Whichever source you draw from, Thunder Rebels or the myths Stafford and others wrote as background for Thunder Rebels and Storm Tribe as collected in The Book of Heortling Mythology, you're still drawing from the well of an older version of the setting with significantly different cosmology and outlook as to how to interact with that setting, and part and parcel of that cosmology and that outlook is a particular "anthropological" way of building out the setting from its base setup which produced Durev, Voudisea the Lance Goddess, Enferalda, and all the rest. 

So one answer is to try and take those bits and bobs which you enjoy or find intriguing and work them into a shape that fits into the cosmology and outlook of Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. Good luck, have fun, it will almost certainly be an uphill struggle given the formation of RQG as a reaction to Hero Wars and Heroquest, but it's an option. Another answer, of course, is to simply fork Glorantha from that Hero Wars vision and present your own alternate developed vision, whether explicitly or implicitly, in Jonstown Compendium products. This probably won't sell well, but perhaps there are people who feel underserved by the current vision who would appreciate it. And then a third option is to simply do your own thing without selling it, and present it publicly or not, without commercialization. Many choices. 

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

I love it. The usual suspects are unlikely:

Dara Happa still resists the five-element model, opting to either stick with four or sublimate straight to "six" without making space for the air. The archaic west struggled to fit its more fragmented elemental system (best embodied in the alchemical metals, including "zrethus" and "uleria" as well as the problem with quicksilver) into the five-element model. Pamalt simply doesn't seem to care because every entity is an individual with a name and personality . . . and not so much a representative of a larger state of matter. 

A vithelan origin hypothesis would also be really useful for giving us at least two somewhat overlapping primal magic frameworks there: the binary calculator that generates something like hexagrams out of the fundamental eight power situations, and the mutual generation / mutual overcoming matrix of the elements. The tension between these frameworks in turn generates their history or whatever they have there.

It's not hard to find some resonances of ZZBR's sigil if you look, though it does suggest some fascinating resonances for ZZBR himself. (Is there a way to turn "ZZBR" into "BLVTSKY" or appropriate reduction? Without having to do three impossible things before breakfast?)

Most of the difficulties people are struggling with here are an artifact of presuming that each cult must have one object of worship. But let's say you have subcults, and people can engage with these gods within the structure of the broader Yelmalio or Ernalda or Orlanth cult. This makes it easier to cope with how these blue-collar skills, like carpentry and weaving, can have a continuum between their aspect as everyday tasks and their aspect as specialized trades which require a lot of specialized knowledge. 

Or, alternately, we can say that these are inherently simple tasks anyone can do, and carry no "magic", no secret power associated with being initiated and learned in the secrets of the task. Which I personally think is a bunch of hooey, but you do you, everyone has their own Glorantha and their own understanding of what "magic" means in it. 

49 minutes ago, radmonger said:

So humans don't inherently have the plant nature; whatever plantlike stuff may or may not be present inside their body is not normally integrated into their consciousness, or part of their psychology.

Presumably a human with a plant rune is consciously aware of the process of digestion, and can choose to alter their metabolism in desired ways. This may be why most depictions of elves show them as skinny.

 

The same could be said of "animal stuff", that too is not integrated into our consciousness as a separable quantity. Human consciousness, though it may be partible into components that emerged at different points in our evolutionary history, can only ever be defined in species terms as "human". It is, however, a metaphor of instrumental use. 

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

Where do you get the mitochondria - Plant Rune connection from?

Intestinal flora because of yeasts and other anaerobic funghi? In the real world, plant life is defined by chloroplasts as endo-cellular symbionts (excluding stand-alone cyanobacteria, purple bacteria, dinoflagellates etc. and being murky on lichen or corals), and only if we are talking about eucariotic plants, with mitochondria, too. In Glorantha, the inclusion of Mee Vorala even takes autotrophy (or should one say photophagy) out of the definition.

 

From the inclusion of fungi and algae (and cyanobacteria) in the umbrella of the Plant rune, indicating that it can't be treated as equivalent to the real-world kingdom of life. So perhaps it's a question of shapes, or perhaps it's a question of general life pattern of "passive feeding", or similar, but the precise details are less important than the problematized nature of "human" once you expand that out beyond . Even in terms of psychology, if we can classify certain things as "beast psychology" for  we can surely classify things as "plant psychology" for . It does disrupt those nice paired Traits, though. 

So  is denoted as a shape, and  has been a condition or modifier as recently as the Guide but may instead be a personal rune now, judging by the procedural rhetoric of smiley codes. 

What that would mean, taken directly and simply, is that  is something that can be applied to , , , , , presumably others, and also . You can be a dragon and a hominid, a dragon and an animal, a dragon and a plant, a spirit dragon, a chaos dragon, and of course, a dragonewt dragon. This has some shockingly radical implications, but luckily RQG with its visions of natural essences tamps them down by keeping Dragon well away from the character sheet. 

Now with that said, I find myself somewhat bemused by the thought that shapes are somehow absolutely mutually exclusive when humans have  as well, and if that's because of real-world biology, they should also have because of mitochondria, intestinal flora, etc.,  because they do have a latent potential to become a bodiless spirit... but that's the trouble of a game mechanic that ostensibly represents pure psychology getting tangled up in metaphysics.

4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

To me, this suggested a variation on the familiar creation myth in which a monster/giant/dragon is killed and dismembered to create the world: Arachne Solara/Glorantha uses all of her body to create her web/the cosmos, that is why Glorantha is dead and Arachne Solara is only a ghost. The act of creation is looped, echoing, and/or eternal.

Glorantha is Glorantha. What would it mean for her to use all of her body and there still to be a lozenge at the end of it? Of course, with that Jungian Cosmic Man archetype, there's a straightforward problem that dogs us down to the present day and the realm of scientific cosmology- what is "nothing"? The disassembly of Ymir or Pangu is the culmination of a process that doesn't begin with vacuum or absence, but with formlessness, incoherence. The infinite cold of Niflheimr and the infinite heat of Muspelheimr meet and create Ymir and Audumbla. The formless mass of generic stuff coalesces into an egg, separates into yin and yang, and the interplay of the two generates Pangu.

The world was chaotic waters, and the breath/wind/spirit of YHVH moved on the face of the waters and made the earth from them. Izanagi and Izanami, youngest of the generations of primordial gods, churn the gelatinous oil-slick of the earth with a jewelled spear from heaven, and then the salt drying from the brine makes the first island. The universe expands from a singularity to its current state over some time between 10 and 20 billion years.

In all of this, there are transformations and transmutations, but the connection to the primordial state of disorganization remains. The aesir have their shameful connection to the autofertilization of Ymir, the Four Heavenly Beasts aid Pangu in growing to encompass the world and remain to this day, the great serpents of the chaotic waters remain in their depths to this day, and the ways of the underworld and of the dead were the way they are before Izanami died. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation glows for those who have eyes to see wavelengths in the single-digit millimeters. 

So what would death mean in such an exalted context? What kind of transformation is that, if we take it that Glorantha is dead?

And a followup question: in all of these mythologies, there is a primordial multiplicity of entities. Even Ein Sof is an unstable state that condenses to produce the separate tzimtzum, the conceptual space of differentiation of selfhood. Who was hanging with Glorantha/AS when she organized herself into the basic lozengitudinal shape?

Quote

"The turtle couldn't help us."
-It, Stephen King

Quote

"Orlanth cast about for help or guidance and was answered by Sofala, the ancient Turtle Grandmother. She owed Orlanth a favor, and agreed to bear them across the seas to the best of her ability."
-King of Sartar, Greg Stafford

Quote

"Orlanth gave command of the stead to Elmal, his loyal thane, and they traded shields as a token of their bond."
-King of Sartar, Greg Stafford

Quote

"A! Lucifer, that risedest early, how fellest thou down from heaven; thou that woundedest folks, felledest down together into earth."
-Isaiah 14:12, trans. John Wycliffe

Why was Theya important enough to those crazy folks living in the time after Time began to call themselves her people? Why did she stop being important, and when? When does the "Lightbringers Quest" become standardized as 7(+) specific people, with those names?

Perhaps it is this- Theya appeared to people to explain to them that the gods were back, to reawaken the connections. But this must have been news for many people, who were sure that gods like Humakt and Elmal or Orlanth had remained alive and in the world. They had to invent stories, like the one where Orlanth went to the underworld carrying Elmal's shield and Elmal ruled the stead with Orlanth's shield, so that you couldn't tell who was whom, to straighten it all out.

But Theya herself would be an intermediary, an interpreter of who had done what and gone where. Such would be intolerable- the direct mystical revelation against the body of established knowledge. Thus, the Lightbringers were woven together out of a body of myth that put them together already, producing a mostly-coherent mythic complex which could challenge Theya and displace her position.

It only worked partway. Theya lost relevance even as they took the name of her devotees, the mystic speakers to the morning star, those that climbed toward heaven, and made it their own. But what remained? Contact with the stars. The Lightbringer mythplex had to be bent out of shape. And because they had to retain that myth where Orlanth and Elmal traded places, there would always be some confusion, some uncertainty, an essential crack in the wall for the dawn's early light to seep in, or perhaps a gap in the wall's crenelations for a high-jumping star to vault over.

At 130% Spirit Combat on the shaman-to-be, the most likely outcome in each round is the Bad Man winning, with a majority of outcomes by a narrow margin (52%), followed by a tie (36%), followed by shaman victory (12%), and then both losing (2%). On average, the shaman will get between 0-1 abilities and 1-2 taboos. If they fight it out to the last possible round, it is 7,057 times more likely they will have the maximum possible number of taboos than the maximum possible number of abilities, and they will on average have 0-1 abilities still but 3-4 taboos.

But let's bump this up to 150% Spirit Combat on the assistant shaman. What does that change? They still come out, on average, with 0-1 abilities and 1-2 taboos, but pushing their luck to the last round means 0-1 abilities but only 2-3 taboos! Wowza!

Taking things up to 175% Spirit Combat does finally get you to a point where on average you get 0-1 abilities and 0-1 taboos, and if you push your luck to 6 rounds, you get 1-2 abilities and 1-2 taboos. So in conclusion, if the math for this system was worked out intentionally, the idea appears to be that shamans should have 1 or at most 2 abilities at most to start with, and with 0-2 more taboos than abilities. But with an additional slot-machine-jackpot chance of getting something more. Sucker's bet, imo, but you also have to just sit there and let the Bad Man do whatever he wants to you because you can't disengage until the random roll says.

1 hour ago, Erick Eckberg said:

The players were tasked, by their patron, to capture or kill a group of bandits harrying the lands.  Upon dispatching the lone sentry and bursting into the ruins they used as a hideout, the Humakti moved to slay the scoundrels.  Another player said, "Whoa!  A Humakti would never act so dishonorably!"   He read an excerpt concerning honor in general, as well as one aimed particularly at the Humakt cult.  The offending player reconsidered and changed his actions, already regretting having attacked the sentry from surprise.

This got me thinking....    Humakt, and his cult, embody Death and the Death Rune.  Just as Orlanth embodies Air & Movement and Ernalda Earth & Harmony.  Many other deities/cults share these runes, but these deities own them.  How is Death necessarily honorable?  Death is uncaring of such human inventions.  Why would the Humakt cult put such a huge emphasis on honor?  To stymie death?  (your foe surrenders and drops his weapon, honor bound you must spare him, robbing death).

Yanafal Tarnils....   He, in a way, turned his back on Death and turned towards the Red Moon.  He has altered some basic tenets (such as resurrection) already, so I can definitely see them incorporating the ideals of honor into their new cult.  I get it.

Humakt?  Yeah, there's the attachment to the Truth Rune, but truth doesn't necessarily equate to honor.  Death Rune = Cold, Merciless, Cruel, Relentless.  Honorable?   I don't think so.  Death knows nothing of honor.  Visit a battlefield and see.         

This is heretical, but... perhaps Humakti honor codes are the main thing which keeps them socially tolerated. Death is indifferent and often cruel, but there are a lot more non-Humakti and if you actually kill indifferently or cruelly, that ends with you rushing to meet Humakt personally, but a lot of the non-Humakti probably preceded you in the process. So the non-Humakti push for restrictive codes which make it very hard for Humakti to actually kill anybody they care about, and the Humakti push for codes which make them important, and this meets in the middle with a system of honor that requires people treat Humakti with respect or flirt with death but also keeps Humakti predictable and easily outmaneuvered, because they've got the power of death on their side.

Now, textually, this just isn't there. Honor in-game is entirely a list of things PCs shouldn't do or get slapped for, with minimal aspect where honor can be insulted or infringed upon, where it can drive someone to behave very disruptively indeed. I think this is entirely because of the fear that Humakti PCs will produce all manner of difficult, explosive situations and prove hard to write prewritten scenarios around.

"Every six hundred years you have come" is Gbaji's second-greatest trick. The greatest, of course, is when he tells you he can take the blame for your own actions.

I think that the spider woman will always be there blowing kisses as long as things don't get damnatio memoriae enough to erase her presence. The elevation and centralization of Ernalda is of course easily psychoanalyzed- if you've gotten hierogamized to the notions of active and passive principles, all bursting with gender, then what better way to avoid the contradictions of making Ernalda permanently play catcher when you can clearly see her pitching in this grainy video of a 1977 Red Sox game than to make her the world itself? She can't act on anything because there is nothing to act on which is not her. That this process makes star pitcher Orlanth the rightful lord of the universe and resolves the agonizing tensions of that board game with the Androgeus and the free dinosaurs for the taking, the possibility of getting your perfect doomstack wiped out by something as asinine as a good roll taking out Ethilrist, triggering a Doom Run, and then Keener Than is entirely out of position; well, that's a benefit (never mind the hazard).

From all of this, the fear of entropy is obvious in origin, and so entropy becomes the great enemy that all acknowledge as such, except for that powergamer in the cheap seats with the red hair who keeps making out with her latest girlfriend.

With all of that said, the spider accepted the powergamer, and her hand (or her pedipalp) holds back any assertion of "rocks fall, everyone dies". So it goes.

What does Ernalda think about all this? The last time I asked her she just started laughing.

3 hours ago, Bohemond said:

I'm not familiar with this 'first confrontation with Nontraya and ZZ' that you mention. Do you have a source or a specific myth for this? I'm really trying to flesh out Ernalda's mythology for my campaign. 

I made that up on the spot, because Zorak Zoran and Nontraya are parts of the myth of Babeester Gor's emergence and Ernalda's death/slumber, so if you want a Babeester myth cycle where her creation takes place earlier, you need to displace them back earlier into myth-time. There is nothing from "canon" or existing texts that it is referring to beyond that. 

I would ask the player what they wanted from this request, what their intent was. How I play it *in general* is that time is stretchy and normally long periods can pass on the Otherside without much time at all passing on This Side, because that's a very basic motif for spending time in fairyland or other supernatural worlds, and doing the Taro Urashima or Rip Van Winkle thing without any context or setup first is pointless. So if their answer is "I want to speedrun becoming a Rune Lord or Rune Priest", that's not a thing we can discuss entirely in the context of the game and we need to zoom out and talk about why they want to speedrun it and whether that's a good idea, what the consequences of it might be. And if their answer is "I want to know what happens if I do this," then that's potentially interesting, I certainly don't know, not even in my own mind, what the consequences would be, so I might well say, "I need time to prepare what this interaction should be like mechanically, so if you want to go ahead and do this, your character's interactions stop right there and are held until next session." Or maybe I have a general sense of what these kind of interactions should be like in mechanical terms and I say, "Go ahead and roll it." 

And then from the mechanical interaction, whatever shape that takes, there are obviously consequences to this. It's not a normal activity, and there's clearly some reason why that's the case. Maybe what happens is that learning from the Second Son doesn't increase your skills beyond a normal training roll, it just moves them around and you've had other things drained to make you eloquent in Stormspeech, because you've forgotten some things of the paltry material world. That's an interesting potential consequence! Or maybe things you learn from demigods directly aren't stable in your head and the skill fluctuates somehow. Or maybe I think that this isn't going to go anywhere interesting with the consequences and the player agrees and we drop it, the Second Son says, "I have a life, you know," and we move on. 

42 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

If Belintar’s theory is right and Ginna Jar is the ghost of Ernalda (and if time works before Time and if time travel doesn’t), then Ernalda must die before the other Lightbringers meet Ginna Jar.

And if someone suggests that Ginna Jar is Arachne Solara and the ghost of Ernalda, I shall scream.

That’s a lot of ifs. The Spartans wouldn’t be impressed.

And given how unobservant the big O. is (and how happy to monologue into empty space), his wife might have been dead a long time before he set off on his quest.

Of course, a ghost is partially synonymous with a spirit, and there is a little phrase called "the ghost in the machine". Keeping entirely within linear time and ignoring a certain topic which was quite hastily chopped out of this thread, there is still quite some uncertainty here. Then again, if Ernalda's body is the earth and the soil and the rock, such that the cleft of the Ezel temple is the gap of her vulva, her wandering spirit, her ginna-jar, is what she probably uses to interact with the world the vast majority of the time. 

13 hours ago, Scorus said:

The contest between the Bad Man and the shaman to determine the number of starting taboo and abilities doesn't make sense to me. The errata clearly indicates that the results of the contest are practically predetermined, even a master shaman will have to roll very well to get out with less than D6-1 taboo and the Bad Man has to roll a 96-100 for the shaman to even have a chance at getting an ability. The errata confirms that in response to a question. So why even have a contest? It strikes me as something out of Paranoia: trick the player into thinking they have a chance (if they don't know the Bad Man's spirit combat score).

I'm wondering if it was designed for a POW+CHA vs. POW+CHA style of spirit combat instead of the new skill-based system (just as the Spirit Block rune spell was written under the old system until changed by errata), and then awkwardly retconned to fit into the new system. A new shaman's POW+CHA would likely be around 30-35, so it would give them a real chance at getting at least one additional ability. And that would explain why it listed the Bad Man's POW (which is unnecessary) instead of its spirit combat skill (which is).

Has anyone used a different contest system to determine starting taboo and abilities for shamans in their game?

I think it's entirely aimed at trying to gussy up "you get 1-5 taboos and 1-x abilities" from pure rolling on tables. 

How I might do it is to swap the assumptions- the Bad Man isn't strong (modest spirit combat damage, spirit combat skill that's similar to a prospective shaman's, but is very durable (buckets of MP) and can easily disengage, doing so after taking spirit combat damage. Challenging him requires accepting a taboo, damaging him gets you a shamanic ability, and then you can hold him in place by accepting a taboo to prevent him from running. So you can take your chances on pressing your luck and pushing for more abilities, taking more taboos with them. Or you can get lucky (high damage rolls, he fails to break off) or unlucky (he's still quite capable of fucking you up) and get extra abilities or fewer, to keep the basic principle of semi-randomized quantities but also giving players the choice on whether to keep gambling or not.