Eff

It works like in Return of the Jedi, though more broken up. You throw away your weapons and armor and only then do you fight. Or, symbolically, you reject Zorak Zoran and what he represents. Now in actual play or personal experience, this probably looks different- you might "defeat" Zorak Zoran by giving up your heat, or you both beat each other beyond the point of moving around, and you crawl to the top of the hill, only to see the horde of critters ascending after you... but the main factor here is that you toss away, give up, or cede protection and weapons and even the signs of life rather than become like Orlanth, or like Inora, or like Zorak Zoran, and it is only then that you move into the domain of Arroin and High King Elf, who die and return.

Section 2.7 lays this out in full detail, but there are two rules which this applies to. First one of these concerns Flaws and tactics. What happens is that when you use a tactic that overtly contradicts your Flaw, you take a hindrance on the roll for that tactic, and if there's a dubious conflict there or you have an ability you can use to try and overcome that Flaw's effects, you can roll that out as a contest- your Flaw against base resistance. Degree of success determines the penalty you take from it- on a defeat, no penalty, the Flaw is overcome, on a victory, you take -5 and an additional -5 for each success you received. Second one comes into operation during general narration. If the Flaw is relevant to the ongoing story, and you choose to act in accordance with it, the GM "might impose a hindrance on further actions". But if you choose to resist it, it's a simple contest- find an Ability that can produce a credible tactic for resisting the Flaw, use the Flaw's rating as the resistance, victory allows you to overcome the flaw (and possibly take a penalty on a relevant Ability) and defeat means you succumb to the Flaw and the GM might impose a hindrance on further actions. So the answer is "it depends"- when the Flaw is interfering with a specific tactic, you're trying to roll over the Flaw. When the Flaw is interfering with actions outside of a specific contest, you're trying to roll under the Ability you're using to resist and overcome the Flaw. There's a minor rules hole here- when you spend Story Points on the first instance of Flaws, do they add successes to the "your" roll, the Flaw, or do they add successes to the resistance, the "GM" roll? But in any case, I think that these rules might be better served as a paired set of options that don't have to be used simultaneously, like a softer form of picking a Sequence type to use. I wouldn't allow the use of Flaws as if they were Abilities, because they're specifically something which works against the character when they're trying to overcome obstacles or answer questions, and they "mirror" your highest, second-highest, and lowest abilities (depending on how many you take). If a player wanted to describe something about their character that was sometimes a hindrance and sometimes a benefit, I would have them make a paired Ability and Flaw that reflected the same fact about their character. The one instance where I could see Flaws being usable as if they were Abilities might be in a PVP-heavy game where you could use your Flaws solely to put hindrances on another PC, but even then, that would be a fairly abstract rule that would demand the specific game carefully frame what could be used as a Flaw, I think. I think that broadly I would not allow Flaws that weren't relevant to the genre of the specific game- "Hideous Visage" should only be a Flaw if it's something that would consistently interfere with the character's ability to overcome obstacles and answer questions. It might be appropriate for a game where you need to interact with high-society intrigue where appearance might well be an essential part of getting people to listen to you, but I wouldn't say it's relevant to a superhero game generally. Somebody like the Thing or Chamber with angst about their unusual appearance should probably have that Flaw clarified to emphasize the psychological aspect- their hang-up about their appearance causes them internal problems more than external problems.

There's at least one myth which, disconnected from obvious EWF influence, suggests that yes, he was at one point. What that says to me is that you can't just arbitrarily conjure things out of nowhere and nothing- the changes encounter inertia or resistance- because we don't really have an example of an entirely ex nihilo alteration like this. The closest might be Zistor and Zazistor, who... had to be constructed in the material world rather than via pure mythological manipulation.

Here's how I interpret it, which is very much not how most people interpret it. This is not just non-canon, but arguably non-fanon as well: The gods are people and have the capacity and willingness to act. When you heroquest, you're not really replacing your god, you're following in their footsteps and doing what they once did to get a similar kind of outcome or benefit from it. Now, you're temporarily inhabiting their "space", you're doing the early stages of what Elder Scrolls calls "mantling", so there's a connection there, and that connection is why you can benefit, but there's still a distinction between you and the god you're following. So you could climb the Hill of Gold fifty or a hundred times and kick Zorak Zoran's butt each time, but that wouldn't change Yelmalio all by itself. It would probably push you further and further away from Yelmalio, because you're not getting the lesson Yelmalio's teaching. You would have to do more than that- you'd have to either bring vast quantities of force to bear to reshape Yelmalio the way you want him to be, which does well at getting people to stay quiescent (Nysalor) or lose parts of themselves (Kyger Litor), but not so well at getting people to actively do things, or you'd have to talk the god or gods in question into accepting this redefinition of themselves. I'd put the Goddess Switch into the latter category- the God Learners talked/browbeat the two goddesses into agreeing they were basically interchangeable, they swapped places, but then it turned out they weren't, and that they had different interests and thus offered different magic, and things went to hell. Or to put it another way, to get a god to change how they act (such as by granting new powers to people) you need to get their consent to keep doing it, just like with a person. And if you make use of abusive violence to extract or coerce their consent, then, like with a person, there are other forces which will object to this and take action against you. And to bring it back around to Yelmalio... the insight that Yelmalio had atop the Hill of Gold is a pretty important one to him, I think. Trying to get him to reject it would be like trying to get people to reject a core belief they hold about themselves. Not impossible, not very practical, either via humane or inhumane means.

So there's a distinction to make here between the rice farmers and the wheat farmers. Rice farming has some important sociological effects that are generally agreed to exist as a consequence of rice- tighter social norms around labor exchange. Everyone in the village has to help out their neighbors when called, and the consequences for failing to uphold this can be pretty dire. There's also the material aspect of maintaining an irrigation system for controlled flooding and draining of ricefields- this is a big, complicated thing which must be manipulated in complicated ways and which everyone has to work together on to keep it functioning. In exchange for all of this, rice is about four times as productive per land area used than wheat, or barley, or millet. One social effect- wheat villages and rice villages may well have stereotypes about each other- wheat villagers being seen as lazy, unhelpful, or gullible, rice villagers being seen as greedy, petty, or controlling. In the real world, maize is in between the two- more productive than wheat/barley/millet, less productive than rice. Maize also can grow on more marginal land than any of them, so one of the historical effects of the spread of maize was the expansion of cultivated land into rougher terrain. One of the possible social effects of this would be the introduction of maize farming into areas like Arir and Darsen that are uplands not noted for their fertility, which can be countered with the non-edaphic Hon-eel cult, which creates potential tensions there between the "new" farmers and the older hill people, but another aspect of this would be the presence of maize fields in wheat-and-barley villages on the "edge" of their territory and assigning them to particular family members as their responsibility. Is this a way to manage independently-minded people by giving them a space where they're freer and away from the suffocating center, or is it an insult, a kind of internal exile? Probably varies from household to household and village to village. Now the nature of the Guide Lodril-village is one where there are 50-100 people per extended family, which suggests that we aren't dealing with villages as we think of them. Mandan earth lodges were large enough to house 30-40 people, so we need something bigger. We need large compounds of several buildings. At that point, each extended family might well be a small village in itself, and any fortifications would be built into the compound rather than the village as a whole (particularly to store food). The Guide also does not suggest that this is a manorial economy where rural nobles oversee serf labor, so we're probably dealing here with the informal hierarchy of big-men, and each village might well have an appointed headman or headwoman who's the one who's responsible for interacting with the higher ranks of society, collecting taxes for delivery, and maintaining public infrastructure like roads. And these don't have to be the most powerful big-man or big-woman in the village, and indeed a lot of tension can come from situations where a headman has been appointed to cause problems for a local leader. All of this is of course speculation. One wild possibility- Lodrilli were actually formally freed by the Lunars as part of the liberation of Peloria from the Carmanians, and like the Han supplanting the well-field system with land markets and emphasizing the peasant freeholder, peasants in the Lunar Empire are free- but continually in danger of falling into indebtedness, tenancy, and wage labor. Which also is an area fruitful for creating tension- put a peasant family that's fallen on hard times and has to send most of the younger generation away to work as wage laborers and another peasant family that's looking to take their farmland and relieve their overpopulated compound right in the path of the PCs and watch some sparks fly.

I feel hopeful about the vote tomorrow, as an American. I've already turned my ballot in (thank goodness for universal voting by mail), so I have one less worry there, too!

Shields in Dune have two effects, story-wise: 1) They emphasize the mismatch between the effete and decadent Imperium and the practical, hypermanly Fremen. 2) They make most high technology ineffectual as a tool of violence. The former is really very dependent on the context of what you're doing with your game's setting- if you're not running the basic conflicts of Dune, that factor doesn't matter or may be reversed. But the latter is mostly relevant because it does have an immediately relevant effect on QW games- it limits the tactics that can be used in a situation where there are shields. Using an ability that involves guns, energy weapons, etc. when shields are in play would be ruled as out as a viable tactic for overcoming a story obstacle or answering a story question. So that's how I would model that kind of motif- this is something that shapes the viability of abilities and tactics, but is not an ability itself, though having or not having shield access may be part of particular occupation keywords or other abilities.

The Iron Pillar of Delhi is probably the most interesting example of corrosion resistance from iron produced in antiquity, as due to the high phosphorus content of the finished product and its weather exposure it appears to have formed a natural iron phosphate coating on its surface. It's doubtful this was intentional, but it may be possible that the wood used for the smelting was chosen for its phosphorus content somehow, which in Gloranthan terms suggests the possibility of fuels used in forging and smelting passing properties on to the finished product.

I suspect the intent was to tell people "there are places and people that you just have to make up the details for" and unfortunately this was not a good way to communicate that idea, in the end.

Bronze alloys are overall more ductile than the high-carbon cast irons, and bronze weapons in the historical RW Bronze Age tended to be made via casting and then work-hardening the metal portions from a relatively high-tin alloy. Bronze armor tended to be made from a relatively low-tin alloy that would be cast into ingots and flattened into sheets and shaped from there. Bronze can't be tempered the way most steels and cast iron can, because quench-hardening requires the characteristics of the carbon-alloy crystalline structure. Instead, copper alloys and copper itself are annealed (heated to soften them and then cooled, which can be done via quenching for nonferrous alloys) and then work-hardened to reach the desired material properties. All of this is for real-world copper alloys- Gloranthan metals have been frequently said to be analogues rather than exact duplicates of the real metals, so if you want to have tempered bronze or wrought bronze you are of course free to.

The Red Goddess disclaimed any connection with Dendara to Valare Addi because she got a glimpse of a certain document which equated Dendara with preservation and decided to get out ahead of anyone claiming that she was just the 9th avatar of Dendara, before the final, 10th Kalki/Chakravartin avatar who will arrive on a white horse to end the current Glorantha so that a new one can be created. Secondarily, Valare Addi misheard "Shakyamuni" terribly when Sedenya explained it all to her and started a brief dance craze on the Red Moon.

Mmm. I think I would say that the functional role of the Invisible God in a Malkioni context is to distinguish between the demiurgic Malkion and the greater being that all Malkioni (including Brithini) agreed must have created the ultimately flawed Malkion. But of course in the Revealed Mythologies material, creation proceeds through the various manifestations of Malkion, all of whom have their own names, except for the initial progression from 1 -> 3 (Matter, Energy, Intellect). So in this Malkioni context the Invisible God is invisible because it predates any means of detecting its existence. And by the time that the Carmanians are engaged in their anabasis, the broad split over whether to understand the demiurge as good or evil is already taking place, and Syranthir's people are firmly on the Irensavelist/"evil demiurge" side, which they assign the name Makan (in response to the Makanist propositions of certain God Learner groups yada yada). Once they've developed their own religious identity, though, they reframe matters so that there's a good demiurge and a bad demiurge who are initially equals, and then the Revealed Mythologies Malkion the Seer/Sacrifice is reframed as a servant of the good demiurge. So I think that equating Yelm = Idovanus and Orlanth = Ganesataurus doesn't really work, because nobody else in Glorantha sees them as initially social equals/twin siblings, Yelm really isn't depicted in a demiurgic role of creating the material world, and of course, there's that whole Truth and Lies thing with Idovanus and Ganesataurus. I think that Lodril and Dayzatar are both better equations for Idovanus (Dayzatar probably somewhat better as a truth-associated deity and an abstract being of light, but Lodril does make things with his hands) and Ganesataurus, if you have to equate them with anybody, would probably be best-equated with Kazkurtum = Basko, a celestial entity of Darkness with the Illusion Rune, and so associated somewhat with lies and deception. Or with Trickster, if you want to make Trickster malevolent enough, and then the Yelm and Orlanth battle would be an example of the kind of lesser skirmishes between Truth and Lies where it may be unclear who's on what side, just enough to satisfy sun-worship and storm-worship and get the Light and Dark phases in.

Here's another possible answer- "invisible" might mean, especially in the crossover zone of Carmania, something that's on the far side of the Sky Dome where you can't see it, like the Invisible God logically would be (being outside of the universe), and like Annilla, the invisibility-granting Blue Moon, definitely is. Invisible Orlanth's name may be derived from the behavior of the Broken Plant/Orlanth's Ring, and claiming that the regular emergence from Stormgate is because Orlanth moves on the far side of the sky, in the invisible realm, or this may be retrofitted onto the belief that Orlanth has encountered the Invisible God and thus stepped outside of the universe. What does this mean? Well, it implies some things about Annilla and the Blue Moon and those mysterious blue sorcery-users who were in Pelanda long before the Malkioni started colonizing and migrating, but it also suggests we can identify potential other "invisible" entities by looking for strangely-behaving planets and stars. This also may be the operating metaphor of the Lodril Invisible Spear secret society- even though Lodril has no visible presence in the heavens, he can affect them, just as peasant revolutionaries can affect elite politics.

Are you illiterate, my man? For the benefit of the audience, an edit: when I said "I" and "me" in the post Jeff is quoting, I was putting myself in the position of a Gloranthan- a Pelorian peasant, and then by comparison, a Malkioni/Rokari peasant. I thought that this was obvious, because I talked about "me" trying to avoid getting violently assaulted by a Shargashi. Shargashi do not exist. So when I talked about the Invisible God being not relevant to "me", I am not talking about myself, but the imaginary Rokari peasant woman. This is thus a frustrating reply to receive, because from my perspective, it seemed pretty obvious my post wasn't talking about my personal opinions of the Invisible God and was talking about peasant opinions, so talking about the intelligentsia of societies following philosophical, abstract entities was, from my perspective, completely ignoring the conversation and contents of the post.

Yelm is the Sun, and of course I benefit from him because I, as a Pelorian peasant, need light to see and the Sun is so much cheaper than firewood and candles. Maybe I don't quite see what the benefit of sacrifices to Buserian is to me personally, but I know that scribes are very important for making sure that my taxes get recorded properly so I don't get my legs broken by a Shargashi again, and for other things too. There's an overall social order, and I can easily see how the tithes fit in, because there's social integration there. The Invisible God is now so depersonalized in the de-Christianized Malkioni that there is no remnant of any sense that he's at all relevant to me. He's almost purely an abstract Prime Mover, a purely philosophical entity. And the social order that is relevant to me is detached from the Invisible God and the zzaburi, because it's ancestor worship and agricultural gods and crafts gods. In fact, not only are the saints now Theosophical Ascended Masters, they're also not accepted by the Rokari, so even the ancestor worship is disconnected from the Invisible God except in the most abstract terms. And what happens is that people end up either bringing back in a little bit of that Christianity, to make the Invisible God interventionist enough to send his only beloved son Malkion into the world, or they take up the Indian elements and make zzaburi brahmins outright and suggest that anyone who does religious activities as an authority figure is a zzaburi. I think that says something about how unstable the Rokari as described are, that we either back away from them or slide in another direction entirely. Which is most obvious for the Rokari because the various softenings of the new Malkionism are least present there. EDIT: What I find most interesting is that not many people are going for the idea that Malkioni are in fact, as a society massively powerful because they have the benefits of large-scale sorcery spread out among the people alongside the benefits of theurgy and spiritism. We can all agree that there's a rough balance of power between the "four ways of doing magic", it seems.

That's an analogy. I am using that analogy to explain why understanding the Rokari doesn't mean thinking that they're a morally neutral society or social order, both absolutely and relatively to Glorantha as a whole. I also assumed that you were using metaphorical language when you said "us moderns" were closer to Rokari, because the literal comparison would be nonsense. So in that assumed metaphorical language, the point is that I know, personally, far more people who are ideologically committed to egalitarianism to the point of utopianism (New Hrestoli) and far more people who have unusual, expansive ethical precepts and are willing to embrace what is generally condemned (Lunars) and far more people who have mystical predilections or are friendly to mysticism (both) than people who are hidebound conservatives that believe social mobility leads to apocalypse and that mysticism is a negative thing (Rokari). All of these are, again, metaphorical terms to counter what appeared to be a metaphor about Rokari being more like modern humans.

Being able to understand the Rokari is not the same thing as finding them palatable or protagonistic. It is fairly easy to understand why some people find fascist ideologies attractive without yourself finding fascism attractive. And I mean, I know a lot more Lunars and New Hrestoli, metaphorically, than Rokari. Especially on a social level.

I don't really care about making them palatable, I care about making their society look like one that could possibly exist in a material world populated by human beings and interacting with competing societies. The Rokari can be as evil everyone has their own point of view and nobody is evil in Glorantha no matter what they do as you like, I just think that Glorantha is better when it's populated by humans so that there's something to contrast the supernatural beings against.

The temple family interacts with a god who is important to you and directly relevant to the world of your society. The zzaburi interact with a god who is not important to you and irrelevant to anyone but the sorcerers, because of how abstract it is. The extraction of wealth to support the temple family gives something back, but the extraction of wealth to support the zzaburi, given the assumptions made in the post up to that point, gives nothing back to anyone, because there's not really even room for people of other castes to have interest in the zzabur philosophy in the current model, especially for Rokari. In other words, the former is arguably unjust in a way that requires quite a bit of work to figure out, the latter is unjust in a way that makes it seem incredible no dronari or horali would have figured it out. And of course, in the Runequest Glorantha rules, sorcerers are not really capable of winning a fight against a few dozen people, so even the threat of incineration to repress both the peasantry and the armed populace seems rather ineffectual. My argument is that Malkioni societies should be adjusted such that they are unjust in a way that requires quite a bit of work to figure out. Entirely so that I don't feel vaguely unclean at the kind of implicit degradation-kink roleplay necessary to play Malkioni characters who are intended to be non-zzaburi and thus too stupid to see what should be obvious given what has been laid out, and not for any reason such as thinking it would make these societies stronger, more interesting, and more fun to play in and interact with. They don't appear to have physically exterminated the indigenous population to replace them with settlers, but instead use them as a perpetual source of labor (in the grim layout I've put together). Not really enough genocide going on for that to be the appropriate analogy.

And building on this, Invisible Orlanth would seem to be in line with something like Zurvanism, as an alternate, possibly dubious tendency within the broader Zoroastrian-esque Carmanian religion. Of course, Zurvanism was fatalistic and that doesn't seem much like Orlanth, so perhaps it's somewhat closer in effect to the "Mazdaist" reaction to Zurvanism of firmly reasserting free will and denying the importance of any transcendent time-controlling deities. (With the Chariot of Lightning as the even more syncretic Manichaeism?) At least, in a Glorantha where it's not yet another anti-Lunar response.

All right. My interpretation is that the Rokari and "Hrestoli" represent clear majorities of Malkioni together, followed by Safelster's Arkatisms. Groups who are outside of this, like the Castle Coast, Arolanit, the Trader Princes, etc. are minor, based on Chaosium staff saying directly that they are minor when asked. I'm focusing entirely on Rokari because the non-Loskalmic Malkionism in Fronela is very tenuous and intermingled with Orlanthi practices- they may be almost "Aeolian" or they may be something quite different, but we don't know. Loskalm is explicitly a utopian state that does not work and must change when in contact with the outside world- it doesn't have to make perfect sense because the conditions which allowed it to exist no longer are in force. Arkatism is also explicitly "henotheistic", which in the previous mode of Malkionism would mean allowing the worship of "pagan" entities and in this mode remains undefined- does it reference whether zzaburi caste restrictions are looser, or something very abstract and nearly meaningless? Who can say? But the Rokari are well-defined and their caste lines are firmly drawn. We know that for sure. And the answers that have been given to explain the new mode of Malkionism indicate that the ancestor worship and theistic worship are performed within the non-zzaburi castes. So zzaburi are defined not by being religious specialists, but by being sorcerers (who use sorcery to worship the Invisible God etc. etc.) A Rune Priest is not acting as a zzaburi unless they're a Lhankor Mhy or Chalana Arroy one who's casting sorcery. Would it be more sensible for zzaburi to be "religious specialists"? Sure. That's, as I posted previously, a valid Glorantha. But it does not appear to be what is intended in the recent sources, where the intent seems to be a 1:1 relationship of zzaburi to sorcery and sorcery to zzaburi and of men-of-all as having sorcery through being able to be zzaburi.

Well, let me respond to the section that's at least a coherent reply rather than an absurd line-by-line which ignores that sentences build upon each other. "The peasants do not have their own entirely independent source of beneficial magic". "Both the peasants and the nobles also receive Caste Magic through the guidance of the Wizards (sic) and so on, thereby creating an interlocking society." Both of those things are false, or rather, not evident at all in what we are being told about Rokari society by Chaosium. Peasant worship of earth goddesses for agriculture is led by clerical figures from the dronar caste, just like horal worship of totemic spirits for combat is led by horali. Talar ancestor worship is led by either dronar shamans or talars themselves. Zzaburi seem to have no role. The dronars and talars and horals receive caste magic through adherence to the strictures of the Invisible God cult, not via zzaburi intervention. We are indeed repeatedly told by Chaosium that zzaburi dedicate themselves to sorcery and nothing else, that they need all of a human lifetime to become accomplished at it. So in terms of reading the public-facing sources, the sources simply do not support that these proposals you have made are part of the Chaosium understanding of the setting. But reading them as additions to the setting, what they're doing is moving the zzaburi more towards being brahmins, in that they oversee all areas of religious activity and the most important aspects of it are their exclusive province. They are responsible for holding the collective memory of civilization by maintaining the religious code, with the Abiding Book and whatever other scriptures you want to retain or invent serving for the Vedas and so on. That's certainly a workable editing of the setting! It makes Rokari and Malkioni society make more sense. I have my qualms about it personally, just because I think there are some really unfortunate resonances between Teshnos, the extent to which Malkioni castes are modeled on the varnas, and the extent to which Seshnelans continue to be depicted and read as white. But it's a perfectly good Glorantha. It's just not the one that is being provided to us by Chaosium at the moment. What's also kind of funny is that the problem isn't that the society is unequal, it's that the inequality would be exceptionally visible to every member of it and the masses would be alienated from the ideology of rule! It's not about moral condemnation of the Malkioni or Rokari, it's about whether their society is plausible. Now, the Chaosium answer seems to be that Malkioni are not really human and don't behave like humans do, but I'm currently striking that as an obvious error mentally. Anyways, the point of my posts has been to try and develop Rokari and by extension Malkioni society under the Chaosium model by pushing and pulling it. "Cartoonishly sweeping statements about Seshnegi society" is just baffling- Seshnela isn't real, there's no Tanisorians who would be deeply offended by my reductive interpretation of the culture. Seshnela isn't real, so we can talk about it without having to pretend that it is real and that there must be inarticulated depths to it when we want to articulate some of those depths.

It's nice that you don't think it's true. But the dilemma here is simply that we are told that Rokari society, like all Malkioni societies, has an entire non-sorcerous society within itself, on top of which is layered zzaburi sorcerers. But the Rokari are not massively stronger or wealthier than non-Malkioni societies. So either Malkioni spiritism and theism are ineffectual compared to the spiritism and theism of other peoples, or zzaburi sorcery is an ineffectual, marginal addition onto their spiritism and theism. And if we assume the zzaburi take significant resources- that there is a meaningful upward flow in Rokari society from drones and horals and talars to zzaburs- then they would be parasitic. And the first term there is broadly accepted. And of course, behind the scenes, all of this is derived from the Malkioni developing as a "purely sorcerous" society in a system where that was an equally capable worldview and magical methodology to theism and animism/spiritism for forming social structures upon and then having sorcery be redefined to the inherent province of a tiny elite. And then systematically closing off various attempts to syncretize old system and nascent new system by emphasizing that Malkioni worship the exact same gods and brutalize very similar spirits to what Sartarites do. So if we want the Rokari wizards to be anything other than an instrument for proto-Marxist propaganda, we kind of have to solve this dilemma and answer just what it is that they do, what social function they have, without falling back on "they cast sorceries on the peasants for the benefit of all", which is now absurd when peasants have their own, entirely independent source of beneficial magic, which is just as good as the Sartarite kind. It makes them look ineffectual.

Well, that's the thing, right? Malkioni societies are roughly on par with non-sorcerous societies in terms of agrarians pushing non-agrarians to the fringe, while supposedly fully containing an entire non-sorcerous society within themselves and ostensibly gaining benefit from their sorcerers by concentrating resources on them. So if XsubMalkioni is approximately equal to XsubOrlanthi, and XsubOrlanthi is (Theism+Animism) and XsubMalkioni is (Theism+Animism + Zzaburi), either their Theism+Animism has to be worse or their Zzaburi ineffectual. Which is what I mean by parasitism- Zzaburi suck in resources but, unlike a warrior aristocracy or temple hierarchy, would give approximately nothing back. Which is also a consequence of how Malkioni societies post-bathwater incident have become increasingly less "Malkioni"- the laws of Malkion no longer applying to the peon drones and horals, etc. Because if you had some kind of social order where every class was integrated into it, you could at least envision the worthlessness of the zzaburi being difficult to grasp for people within the system. But post-bathwater incident, talars and zzaburi sit atop a mass of conquered subjects who have had "dronar" and "horal" applied to them after the fact, and this is used to describe Malkioni societies right down to the Gloranthan contemporary. There is no social integration, supposedly, and the Malkioni would seem to most closely resemble European colonialism in Africa in their social order. I think that's not good, as awful as we agree the Rokari to be.

Well, to unpack this argument a little bit more, Malkioni societies are not massively more successful than other forms of social organization. There has never been a time when God Forgot had an empire dominating all of Kethaela. Umathela hasn't expanded wildly out of the initial settlements, and so on, and so forth. Indeed, examples like Hrestol, the Serpent Kings, and the God Learners suggest that it is stepping outside of the assumptions of the default social order which is necessary to achieve an enduring advantage over other societies (temporarily). What you might even call "heroism". So the "protect and enhance society" part would seem to have close to nil effect, because Malkioni society also practices the same kind of theistic and spiritistic magic that their competitors do, but have minimal advantage over them. Which would suggest zzaburi are, in practical terms, parasitic- they take and give nothing of value back. (And I mean, they can't even give philosophy back, because the Rokari philosophy would only be relevant to the congenital elect of the zzaburi. If Malkioni had a stronger belief in reincarnation, that would at least be understandable, but that's not quite evident in the existing sources.) Another alternative might be that Malkioni theism and spiritism are simply less effective and sorcery makes up the gap. That when they perform their ceremonies and rituals, they get worse results than members of other societies do. Almost as if their worship was, in some fashion, misapplied... EDIT: As far as Brithini go, well, Brithini are consistently depicted as inhuman monsters, and it's entirely believable that inhuman monstrous entities that pretend to be vaguely humanish would be socially strange and implausible. And if for some sick, demented reason you thought the Brithini ought to be basically human, the Brithini caste system is one that ensures kinship between members of the castes and so softens the hierarchical nature of it- there are reciprocal bonds there which weaken hegemonic power.