Eff

I assume she dies sometime during the Greater Darkness and comes back to life with the rest of the gods at the Dawn, or perhaps a little earlier. Yes, Babeester Gor does appear before this, but that's myth, etc. (If you want a naturalistic timeline, perhaps there's a Young Ernalda Adventures where she has her first confrontations with Nontraya and Zorak Zoran where Babeester Gor first appears.)

I, for my part, am using "nature spirit" as a structural role that's played in folklore rather than a strict category that requires a Spirit Rune or whatever. Not least because, say, a nymph or genius loci has a body that consists of their entire associated location, because they are the place.

Setting aside the "plot" reasons, here are some of the subtextual or background factors going into this- the very early batches of Gloranthan mythology are being put together from the stuff that was available in a popular context and a little bit of more academic material. Some of the stuff that's going into this mix is Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and the story structure he puts forth in that book which involves a journey into the underworld and a confrontation with a father-figure. Another bit of stuff that's going into this mix, I'm sure, is an outdated theory of comparative religion that was common in the 19th century, which understood religion as following a course of evolution with the progress of society, and part of that theory of teleological religious development was the idea that solar worship was succeeded by worship of storm or weather gods. This was in turn built on looking at Egypt (where the understanding many non-Egyptologists have even today would be that the sun god Ra or Amun-Ra was the head of the pantheon of gods universally) and Greece (where the solar figures Helios, Hyperion, and Apollo are clearly subordinate to the storm/weather god Zeus) and seeing this as a historical evolution. Or to put it another way, the storm gods displace the solar gods. The solar gods are older figures of authority. So the Lightbringers Quest combines these factors- the Sun is the father figure that the Storm must confront, which Campbell calls "Atonement". What does the Storm have to atone for? Displacing the Sun. And then from there you have mythological motifs like the story of Persephone where something is taken into the world of the dead and the world of the living begins to die as a consequence, and it becomes "kill the sun, go to the underworld, apologize to the sun, the sun returns, life goes on". (Note that Glorantha largely discards the actual teleological evolution aspect- Yelm and Orlanth establish a mutual peace rather than Yelm submitting to Orlanth- but pieces of it remain and occasionally come to the forefront.) I hope this "background" material is also helpful.

I think that broadly, I take it more in the sense the Greeks used it- even Zeus Horkios, Zeus-we-swear-by, is bound by oaths by the River Styx, because of reasons that feel like they're probably retrojective explanations of the existing oath by later individuals. So it's meaningful in the King of Sartar original because of that subtitle: "how one man became a god". Argrath is already doing what gods would do, foreshadowing his apotheosis. And then this is queasy and spooky because it's tantamount to declaring yourself a god, and it also speaks to the tangle of Argrath between cynicism and idealism. Does it bind Argrath any more than any regular oath would? Well, perhaps his apotheosis is preconditioned on his fulfillment of the oath. Or perhaps it keeps him out of the cycle of death and rebirth and renders him an undead monstrosity until he fulfills it. But Fate, like Luck, doesn't seem to be extraordinarily powerful here.

None of that was a justification of Argrath, which is itself a separate matter, it's a way of interpreting Argrath as a person, a character, rather than as a plot function. In this specific instance, someone who's deeply unpleasant as a person, has reasons for being that way, and perhaps can be made to have reasons to be a different way. One other option, of course, is to use Argrath (or Jar-Eel or Jaldon or whoever) as a fiction suit to project into and experience vicarious enjoyment, which is an orthogonal approach, but one that probably does require more editing to cut down on the grim aspects that I assume aren't in anyone's fantasies. But if you stick to the board game and making swordfighting sounds while moving Argrath and the Sword Brothers in a stack down the Royal Roads...

Hold on, though. Who says that this must be the case, that Argrath is required to be this object because of a rule that's straightforwardly an exaggeration from "oaths must be abided by, lest the being you swore by bring their wrath down" to "oaths turn you into a deterministic piece of clockwork if you swear them on the right object"? That, too, is also a choice.

You can do similar kinds of analysis for Argrath too. However, Argrath carries symbolic importance Harrek doesn't, as an avatar of the orange/brown side of the wargame board. Pulling at the threads of Argrath means pulling at the threads of Sartar/Orlanthi/Orlanth, because he's been made into this figurehead of one "side" in the factional struggle. Argrath is a bastard, a sociopath, an inhuman monster, for many people talking about Glorantha, in part because his function to them is to blow up the setting. To take all that loving anthropological material about the Orlanthi, the gorgeous lozenge in an infinite pool, and smash it into pieces and then let the pieces reconstitute themselves. For another set of people, Argrath is monstrous because fandom discourses around the Lunars from the Orlanthi perspective frequently appear monstrous, and so Argrath is a means to condense this perspective into a figurehead to attack. For some people, Argrath is a force that keeps the setting on a predetermined critical path towards its inevitable end, and they seem to see this as a positive. In all of this, of course, Argrath is not really a person at any point. Argrath moves in a unilateral way, operating without doubts or concerns or introspection. Argrath is an object, and there's a limit as to how interesting a pure object can be without some anthropomorphism. So what I think about Argrath is- he's a fraud and knows it. Argrath is a guy who's suffered. At the hands of the Lunars when young, and then for an extended period at the hands of the Bison People. Like certain other figures in Glorantha, he psychologically displaces his righteous anger at the people who are currently keeping him in the degraded state of a slave but who he also depends upon onto other figures who have hurt him but that he isn't dependent on. So much so good. In the approach of the boring master planner Argrath, I might then go on to say that the White Bull is simply a means for bloody revenge against his tormentors, extended out to all the Animal Nomads- the eschaton is upon you, follow me and be my cannon (cult) fodder. I think it is probably better to understand Argrath as someone who has internalized some of these conditions, such that when he has an encounter with the sacred world of Prax and is treated by the White Bull as if he were Praxian, he can't believe it. He assumes, perhaps, that he's managed to trick this spirit, and that even the transcendent beings are fools, gullible, easily led by the nose, and from there he becomes a conspicuous liar, deceiver... trickster. Not that he's a Trickster, oh no, that's displaced onto the recurrent elusive Elusu. So Argrath "tricks" Harrek, "tricks" Mularik, "tricks" Leika, "tricks" Annstad and Onjur... but he isn't, really. People can see who and what Argrath is off of the bat, right down to the very obvious damage. (My Argrath probably has a limp or an unusual gait from having been hobbled at some point early in life.) Maybe some of them even care about Argrath. And maybe there's a certain desire in all of this to gain control over the situation through "acting out", as a coping mechanism for having spent so much time with nearly no control over any situation. Which in turns makes it pretty easy to manipulate this Argrath, though not always predictably so. Of course, all of this does somewhat diminish the power fantasy of Argrath as super-GM, planning all of future history out in advance, but phooey on that power fantasy and its inverse. Anyways, healing this Argrath would be a tricky proposition, but I think there are multiple angles and approaches to doing so. Now, a word of caution here- this does, I think, require some fairly careful work at the table to avoid racializing things such that Argrath becomes an angry white guy stereotype, or having Argrath be a victim of white slavery or what have you. But that's work that Glorantha always needs to be done at the table.

Let me use more precise terminology. The multiversal entropy-eating world-destroying Messiah of the Age of Science Jerry Cornelius that you encounter in Final Programme through English Assassin I will call "the English Assassin" and the one in the "real-world"/mundane sections of The Condition of Muzak I will call "Muzak Jerry" and when referring to the multilayered combination of assorted JCs, I'll say "Jerry Cornelius". So, there is a sense in which the English Assassin is a fantasy that Muzak Jerry is having. This fantasy is something Muzak Jerry believes is cool, supercool, ultracool, especially as opposed to the rather deadbeat teen Muzak Jerry. Over the course of the quartet, the unified Jerry Cornelius as this metafictional entity comes to understand a couple of things, and wrapped up in this is the recognition that Una Persson, who unlike Jerry Cornelius doesn't condition her style on allegiance to a particular moment of mass culture, is cooler. So when reading Harrek as a Jerry Cornelius-like entity (to go with Harrek as a partially inverted Elric), we have The Berserk as a fantasy, we have Muzak Harrek as a constructed entity fantasizing, and so on. Now, Muzak Harrek doesn't seem to like The Berserk or think The Berserk is cool. Whereas Muzak Jerry imagines himself having kinky genderbending sex, Muzak Harrek sees The Berserk as only able to sublimate sex into violence (eg the story about Harrek going to a brothel and just tearing the place apart and then paying for all the damages afterwards). Muzak Harrek emphasizes the lonely nature of The Berserk, disconnected from all other human beings except Gunda. And then to really throw a curveball here, Muzak Harrek (and Muzak Jerry) aren't inherently metafictional disconnected entities at all, they're interpretable parts of the overall Harrek the Berserk/Jerry Cornelius that are dissociated from the public personae they use, and for Jerry as a combined being, his adoption of Pierrot as an identity is a way of accepting that the world has moved on from the years of his youth without having to abandon the selfhood he likes and enjoys inhabiting. Harrek doesn't seem to like the selfhood he inhabits. Maybe he does, maybe you can frame him that way, but as far as getting out of that selfhood, well. I can certainly think of many people of my acquaintance or friendship that had a similar understanding of themselves as necessarily brutish, destructive, violent, and animalistic, as needing to put on a mask of hypermasculinity to distract. But as far as voicing how they got out of it, well... it's pretty radical.

A Cornelius-like entity, certainly. But a different internal tension- Jerry the eternal teddyboy is unreservedly cool, the kind of cool entropy monster you can admire, and Harrek's Condition of Muzak-self doesn't seem to think Harrek's all that cool. But at least there's an Una, though said slightly differently.

The Anaxial's Rooster text seems to imply that nymphs can take on the form of a creature like the one the one they're speaking to, rather than must, to me. Presumably with some kind of "tell", but it's the same thing as the sexiness/antisexiness stuff- nymphs are close enough to people to understand how we tick, what turns us on. Maybe even better than we ourselves do. Of course, for the Greeks, nymphs were ambiguous figures who sometimes killed or took people away. The hedgehog's dilemma again.

I think there's room for a redemptive reading of Harrek, but it's fairly radical and dives into the extent to which Harrek is a sharply critical presentation of the alienated sword-and-sorcery hero. He's Elric seen from the outside- a terrifying killer, equipped with a horrifying, demonic magical object that seems to possess a will of its own, he betrayed his own people, he has only one or two friends at a time and he ends up fighting with most of them- but he's also an anti-Elric, big and muscular and described as animalistic. That's not the redemptive reading though, the redemptive reading asks if we should understand Harrek as someone trapped in this inverse Elric shell and struggling to break out, to articulate authentic desires rather than passing performative enactment of whims.

The boundaries between natural and artificial are some of the few things you can say are definitely artificial! When we think about "nature spirits" as encounters with a world that works according to alien purposes, it's worth pointing out that there are many gregarious peoples who would understand urban or constructed environments as "nature" in that sense, with "nature spirits" more akin to Fritz Leiber's paramentals/Our Lady of Darkness, or the demon in the telephone system in Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, or the implications of the lyrics of the Talking Heads song "And She Was". Which opens the door up for two-way "encounters with nature spirits" where the PC is on both sides of the structural relationship. Which is, like the homoerotic desires encoded in Pelorian interactions with Luxites and Lowfires, only natural.

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.