Eff

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.

Yes. To invoke the specter of myth-as-just-so-story, both the story of the Bad Emperor and the story of Orlanth outlawing himself offer a basic guideline of what kingship and leadership mean- the negative example and the positive example. Goofus stacks the rules in his favor, Gallant accepts the principle of judicial independence. (Our other Goofus, Bad King Urgrain, takes impartiality too far by accepting bribes but not letting that stop him from ruling against the bribers!) By the time you get around to the opening contours of the story of Orlanth and Yelm, things are already well on the downslope.

As for what makes someone a god, I believe that Street Fighter: the Movie posits that the answer is levitation via superconducting magnets.

If it's just a reiteration of the Orlanth myth, he won't have anything to say about it because he'll be dead before the high priestess can shack up with anyone else. But why would this lead to the formation of a new clan? Orlanth, uh, kind of already had a clan, as did Ernalda, within the myth. (Also, I kind of have to wonder how this shacks up with things like free will and consent, for that matter.)

It's a full-throated struggle, based on the Ironhoof/Lady of the Wild, Arim/Sorana Tor, Sartar/Feathered Horse Queen, and Argrath/Inkarne relationships and what is implicit in them. The question is less "is this a joint rulership?" and more "can they stop trying to devour each other long enough to act politically?"

Why would this happen?

The description of Zistor's defeat and destruction suggests that we have some propagandizing going on by the later interpreters, of course. Describing Zistor as "screaming as if it were in pain"? This is very straightforward editorializing. As for why the Zistor/Zazistor complex was unacceptable... well, surely that depends on why the God Learners became unacceptable, yes? The one should inform the other, with Zistor as an offshoot of that project. That being said, I am very doubtful that you can just wander off to the last days of the Machine City, as opposed to finding yourself within the remnant dreams of what the Machine City could have been, or what its opponents thought it was.

What I am suggesting is not that humans are essential or seen as essential, but that they are largely irrelevant- one of the components of the greater forest, a set of inhabitants that have their own difficulties and create their own issues- and that the Reforestation isn't actually aimed at exterminating humans, or at extermination at all, or even necessarily at significantly shifting the balance of biomes on the face of Glorantha, because that would be extremely silly. Elves and dryads of fire-dependent species, shade-intolerant species would be- what, killed at birth? Treated as traitors to elfhood, to be on constant watch? Asininity. Elves deserve much better than to simply be agents of self-involved paranoia about what the grass is whispering about (non-specific) you at night.

Elves are aware of what the succession of vegetation is and the need for continual death and regrowth, rather than aiming for a world of nothing but old-growth forests with dead canopies forever and ever. As such, the Reforestation is a magical working not to encroach with forests (though this happens as dormant dryads and shannassee groves are called to wakefulness) but to bring grasses and shrublands outside of the forest proper into the Aldryami community. The arrival of the Fire Elves is not in service of some messianic rescue, but will instead be the incorporation of flames and controlled burning into the Aldryami worldmind to transform Gata into Gaia. (Some psychic sensitives report dreams of a world where there are nothing but black daisies and white daisies covering all of Glorantha, or where this world is watched over by a weltgeist they call 'Lovelock', but we can probably understand these as anxieties spilling over.) It is also possible that this is a recurrent event- we go from Gata to Gaia and then back to Gata when the delicate homeostasis is disrupted. This Tau-Iota-Tau Synthesis model is probably a Lunar prank, though!