Eff

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.

I think the crux of Rokari and New Hrestol Idealist societies is the question "Why are zzaburi necessary for society to function?" That is, if we have a social order which contains within itself an entire "theistic" or "animistic" society in waiting, why would that fail to function if the zzaburi were removed? And if it would continue to function, why do zzaburi continue to exist? It's easy to see ways that New Hrestol Idealism, with its vision of caste mobility, would be able to preserve zzaburi as long as its social order exists, but for Rokarism, where it's explicit that zzaburi focus exclusively on an abstract religious practice that is not just irrelevant to the lives of the majority of the populace but explicitly hostile to them, it raises the question of why this order has been stable for the past few centuries. One answer might be that zzaburi are functionally irrelevant- they have no social cost to their existence, and they offer no social benefit. But that's hardly satisfying, of course. So I think the likely answers probably exist in the space between "zzaburi are beneficiently fundamental to the social structure in an inarticulate way" and "zzaburi are malevolently fundamental to the social structure because the Rokari social structure exists to exploit the other castes, so it's stable in the same way that warrior aristocracies are stable." But maybe I'm missing something, of course.

Encountering Invisible Orlanth in the Guide, outside of its proper context, I came to an entirely opposite conclusion, that here was something that threw the few acres of hill country and its conflicts into a different light. After all, I reasoned, if Invisible Orlanth is debatably acceptable in Carmania, which to me clearly seemed one of the ideological centers of the Lunar way in modern Glorantha, and regular Orlanth is noted as a common cult in the same section, then clearly we have a region where the supposed eternal opposition between Red Goddess and Orlanth didn't exist, or was present in some fashion that didn't mean constant violence. That sort of naive accommodationism is now, if not dead, at the very least firmly staked to its coffin, of course. That was back when you could believe that the Lunar Provinces weren't essentially under perpetual military occupation and ready to explode all over again in an orgy of bloodshed at any major setback! As things stand now, Invisible Orlanth is mostly interesting because of the storm-god genealogy for Malkion/the primordial Malkioni. The "aeolian" tendency. At the time I had such naivete, I also failed to grasp the other side of this coin- Invisible Orlanth and Storm Pentans as potentially radical democratizing forces in their cultural context, and thus as inevitably "frauds" in the sense that they offer the potential of liberation. Thus, they are consequences of the Lunar Way, and possibly even "adjuncts" to it, and so inevitably Chaotic in some fashion. It's no wonder that Charg is just full of obvious Storm Bulls and yet treated with such terrible premonitions- even the "opposition" are still Chaos-tainted by their belief in dangerously emancipatory nonsense!

I've been working on a square map of the Lunar Empire and extending it to the southern border of Sartar means that there's a tiny corner of Dragon Pass and then a lot of Arstola and far eastern Ralios along the bottom. 😆

By the time Arkat joined the Humakt cult, he was already no longer abiding by Brithini restrictions as a Hrestoli man-of-all/knight. So although there's an easy way to avoid the convolutions of trying to retrofit the Arkat backstory into a model of the Malkioni where there's no objection to non-zzaburi doing some theurgy- just say that the Brithini, who are already no longer a factor in modern Glorantha, all practiced appropriate forms of sorcery and rejected even the accommodation of the mortal Malkioni- this way does not explain why Arkat joining the Humakt cult offended his Seshnelan allies so. Certainly we can perform additional corkscrew maneuvers to make this backstory consistent, but I think at that point it's worth reminding ourselves that Arkat's backstory as we now know it was written when devout Hrestoli and Brithini alike refused to engage in theistic worship, and that if that component has been removed entirely as a Malkioni aspect, we probably need to invent a new backstory for Arkat which takes the new version into account. Of course, at the same time, even in the older model, there was clearly a great deal of "paganism" in the early Hrestoli societies, because otherwise the Seshna Likita and Serpent Kings materials make little to no sense, and Arkat's worship of Humakt presumably goes well beyond the "tolerable" warrior societies in some fashion. So there are difficulties or gaps whichever version we use, or to put it another way, no model of Malkioni society, old or new, is quite capable of offering a consistent picture of what we know about Malkioni societies. The new model is one where the only Malkioni that matter in description and background materials are frequently zzaburi, because they have the remnants of monotheism, the old model is one where it's exceptionally difficult to understand how the tension between "pagan" and "pious" can remain consistently alive, rather than the one or the other being extinguished- after all, the power structures of society favor "pious" Seshnelans and Loskalmi and Safelstrans, and yet "paganism" remains viable across centuries, and also clearly, "pious" Malkioni have to have some way to avoid reliance on earth goddesses for agriculture or else "pagans" would hold the balance of the power, with the food supply in their near-exclusive control.

Sister, actually. But yes.

I would suggest that it is possible to interpret the texts that exist in such a way that we can talk to each other about Glorantha(s) on some level other than simply holding up a specific interpretation and broadcasting it. I would also say that our specific Gloranthas are generally redactions, with material edited out and added in by the redactor(s), but that's actually too pedantic even for me in this context.

Decline is inevitable because of an eschatological event that may or may not happen in the future, and which is laid out in some sources as part of a cyclical pattern of destruction and rebirth? "Improvement is possible" is a narrative of progress, which is a term typically used to refer to the belief in the teleological nature of progress? The problem with Orlanth killing Yelm is that anyone opposed Yelm at all? Are those really universal truths about all Gloranthas, or even the core overlapping Gloranthas? Or are they particular interpretations of Glorantha?

If they're able to recover, I'm reasonably sure that there's not really a narrative of decline in play, because things would only be able to get worse. And since they're able to recover without devastating other parts of the world, I'm more than "reasonably" sure. I'm completely sure that there, regardless of any intentions on the part of the authors, is not a narrative of decline in play, because improvement is possible. Just like decline is possible. I don't know who you're addressing with "narrative of progress" there, though.

Except that the point of the fall of Yelm is that it was also a tyranny. The Syndics Ban leads to declines and improvements in different areas of Fronela. The Closing ends. The Dragonkill comes after the EWF (another tyranny) collapses. I would say that Glorantha is clearly written somewhere between Hesiod and Whig history, where events cannot be consistently and clearly folded into narratives of fall or progress. The fall of Mernita is perhaps the best example of this- Mernita is destroyed because of the desire to create a makeshift, shrunken Golden Age under Manarlavus's Dome intersecting with the desire of the goddess of Mernita to reject the absolute authority of that previous time. Where is the Golden Age in this? Does it lie in the past when women didn't talk back or refuse your orders? Is it in an indefinite future in a city which doesn't seem especially better than any other Pelorian city at this time? What's left is a kind of contingent history- because these factors came together here, this tragedy ensued.

I think it certainly is in dispute to claim that Greg Stafford saw Glorantha as being in line with Hesiod's cosmology of decline, because there are many ways in which it is instead in line with modern historical and anthropological beliefs about the development of human societies. Not to mention that for Hesiod, his different ages were marked by different kinds of humans who declined in morals, but what I asked about is the idea that Glorantha is declining as an environment, rather than the people within it. Argrath isn't opening his mouth and spewing out an inexhaustible river of corruption which makes people wickeder in Mr. Biles's understanding, I presume.

Where does Greg Stafford refer to the Third Age of Glorantha as a "ruined and declining" age? When was that source written?

Generally, in the real world, the internal perspective and folkloric memory of slavery focuses on the ability of the enslaved person to trick the slaver into setting them free, rather than through becoming swole enough to bust open a manacle. I would suggest that Gloranthan contexts probably could stand to draw from that as an inspiration.

Forget a war of extermination against Chaos. Do they lack the unity, cooperation levels, or ideological coherence to kill off local broo or scorpionfolk, who are largely mundane threats without massive supernatural might? Even if, as we are assured, especially recently, that everyone except the Lunars are united in hating Chaos? And, no, that's not what the history of Glorantha demonstrates. No grand depopulation occurs as part of Arkat's crusade. Wouldn't this imply that anti-Chaos is morally worse than Chaos, then? Where does this occur, specifically? It would only apply to Arkat if you take the rare position of Nysalor and his groupies being totally innocent of wrongdoing. It wouldn't apply to the God Learners in any fashion, because they were spectacularly non-ideological and divided on what their beliefs ought to be in light of their discoveries. I wouldn't even apply it to the Lunars, because describing them as "spreading We Are All Us by force" in the context of invading Sartar is fairly baffling, let alone it leading to their defeat. Where else would this be, then? Is there any reason behind microwaved Tolkien to assume that contemporary Glorantha is "ruined and declining"?

Firstly, the apocalyptic material in King of Sartar is impressionistic and deliberately contradictory. It needs a heaping helping of salt. Secondly, the "illiteracy plague" specifically is probably a play on history and specifically on the discontinuity of scripts that accompanies certain areas in the Late Bronze Age Collapse- Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary vanish, the Indus Valley script falls out of use, and then entirely different forms of writing emerge to write Greek and Indian languages somewhat later. And this in Glorantha, to go with the end of the "Bronze Age", becomes an "illiteracy plague". But it's not universal in the real world, or absolute. Written Ugaritic stops being used, but it clearly is the source of the later abjads and Phoenician alphabet. So there's a great deal of room to interpret the extent and meaning of this reference. So, thirdly, Argrath doesn't kill the gods in King of Sartar. There is a source ("Argrath and the Devil"), where Argrath, at an indeterminate date and in a mythologized story, takes actions that may be interpreted as killing off the gods. There is a source ("Argrathsaga") where Argrath, when he causes the Red Moon to fall, changes the way that humans relate to the gods. There is a bit of diegetic interpretation of the first source which places it during a pre-Moonfall event in Argrathsaga, from "GS". These do not add up to a clear and evident picture of what's going on "after Glorantha". What we think is happening in this timeframe largely is a consequence of our interpretation of what we read. (At least until any hypothetical, ghostly "end of the Hero Wars" timeline which sets everything down in precise order emerges.) Now, there's a bit of extratextual knowledge, of Greg saying that the post-Hero Wars Glorantha is like our modern, contemporary world. So perhaps that means it's disenchanted and without magic, but of course, Greg was, to my understanding, not someone who believed the contemporary world was disenchanted, so that also doesn't really pin down the fate of Glorantha. Like our world, its fate is still open, and its history hasn't ended.

Now, going by Weapons and Equipment, that 1040L per year per player means that they could maintain a palace apiece, or a stone keep apiece, or share a palace plus many other improvements, or a stone keep and fortified community. However, building a palace takes a minimum of 10000L, so a minimum of 10-11 years to build up the cash. A stone keep would take less time to save up for- 8000L, so 8-9 years. So this scheme ultimately seems entirely in keeping with the player-facing options for using their money, and is perhaps entirely in keeping with the rules text around money and prices.

1) Jar-eel's harp, throughout decades of Gloranthan artwork, is consistently tiny. It's clearly a triangular lever harp, and so played as a "knee" or "lap" harp, but small enough to actually be played with the arm as the only steadier, and it seems to consistently have a small number of strings, perhaps 12, maybe 19 if we make some assumptions about non-representative art. But possibly even fewer. 2) A harp that small would not be audible for any great distance, and real-world harps for concert settings are much larger, yet Jar-eel is known as a capable musician. So either this is a decorative harp, or... 3) Magical amplification is an option, and it's one that Jar-eel makes use of. 4) So we've got amps, we've got a harp that might have as few as six strings... 5) Hey, wait, the ancient Greeks and Romans had a keyboard-operated water organ. 6) They also had cymbals. 7) Snare drums could certainly be built, and tom drum equivalents certainly existed. 8.) Looks like a pretty large swathe of rock-n-roll is open to use in Glorantha now!