Eff

Well, the player in my current game started out as a jeweler... But we took a different approach, and completely hacked off the economic subsystems very early on. I think, though, that if actual players are proposing this, that there are three basic options here, which you can present to the table: 1) Fold this in as the basis for the mythological and legendary play. Becoming preeminent horse traders and trainers means that now the players interact with horse spirits and godlings, with donkey, mule, onager, zebra, and quagga spirits that might want to know just how fluid the lines can be between categories of being- can they become as swift as a horse? Can the zebra change their stripes to racing ones? Perhaps even Praxian cattle spirits become relevant. And of course you'll be thrust into the world of the Feathered Horse Queen, of Galanini and Pentan shamans traveling from afar, and Char-un equine eugenicists. 2) Turn the game into an economic one and keep the scenarios going based on more low-key fantasy challenges to the aspiring expert horse trainer. Eventually they end up oversaturating the local market for riding horses, so they have to start looking further afield, or perhaps (especially if you have PCs with other elevated communicative skills) making their own markets by talking people into building up a "pony express" courier service, or a force of "dragoons", or outright cavalry (proceeding into training up warhorses). 3) Decide that the game's economics rules are inadequate to represent the realities of running a horse-training enterprise with a nose-to-feedbag margin, and that proceeding down this road will inevitably lead to it proving a bunch of horse feathers, and either backing away from the proposal or leaning into it as a source of farce or moderately black comedy. I think that the collective horse sense of your table will guide you to the option that works best for what everyone wants to play.

So there are a couple of factors to consider with Lodril here. Firstly, Lodril is the father of Quivin, who is the tutelary god of the Quivin mountains that form the geographical core of Sartar and are where Boldhome is located. In addition, we can probably presume that, since Sartar himself only receives cultic devotion from the elite as part of the "Orlanth Rex" cult, that Quivin is also the primary tutelary god of Sartar for day-to-day, ordinary people purposes. So Quivin is clearly relevant, possibly highly so. What does it mean that Lodril is Quivin's father, then? Let's say that this is an objective fact that everyone peering into the Godtime would accept, because there's none of this postmodernist materialist cynicism or what have you in decent Gloranthas. If Lodril is Quivin's father, and Quivin is a cultic presence throughout Sartar, we can presume that Lodril also has some cultic presence from his son's worship, even if it's just as an invoked name. Because everyone will know and acknowledge that Lodril is Quivin's father, even if Lodril is absent a presence in Heortland worship. But let's say instead, with our nasty contemporary critical-theorist brains, that "Lodril is Quivin's father" is a culturally bound or subjective statement- the people of pre-Sartar looked at the facts, at the ways that they interacted with the god of the big mountains, and concluded that this guy's father was Lodril. From that, we can conclude that they know of Lodril and consider him mythologically important enough that certain mountains are his progeny- that not all the high places belong to Orlanth, some belong to Lodril (just like Stormwalk seems to belong to Storm Bull). So either way, we come towards a position where there must be some sort of space for Lodril in Sartar. Either Lodril has a cultic space because of Quivin's position in Sartar specifically, or Lodril has a mythic space such that Quivin is understood to be a Lodril-mountain and not an Orlanth-mountain, Larnste-mountain, Kero Fin-type mountain, etc. The primary way to interpret this so that Lodril has no presence in Sartar, then, is to assume that "Lodril is Quivin's father" is either an out-of-universe statement, a truth which exists only in player knowledge, or that it's an inorganic subjective statement- scholars, poets, or both created this relationship because Quivin needed a father or Lodril needed a son, but they had knowledge of the strange foreign gods of Caladraland and Saird in order to make their compositions, and Lodril is an alien presence on the Sartar soil. But perhaps the most important factor here is that there is no clear way to resolve this within the ambit of our existing sources, we are dependent on an interpretative framework to make our resolutions. So ultimately, the presence or absence of Lodril in Sartar is up to you! (Note that Lodril appears in the King of Sartar myth of "the first camp" as Veskarthan, as a friend of Umath. Note also this quote from Greg Stafford, in re "evil uncles" in the ritual of Orlanth initiation:) https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/home/gloranthan-documents/greg-sez/orlanthi-initiation-rites/ (Of course, neither source- King of Sartar's myths, Greg Stafford- is really what you'd call a reliable one.)

Impressive work on their part intuiting the existence of a god that seems to have a cult in Fonrit and maybe Umathela.

Why would it be? @Godlearneris talking about Death used as a transient thing to cut bonds and ties, rather than Death being a consistent symbol of freedom. I'd even argue that it's entirely appropriate for Death to be present at both ends, shearing away the ties of previous social existence in order to render the enslaved person symbolically less than fully human, partially an object, but also breaking the ties of enslavement and producing freedom.

Reproduction through non-heterosexual means? In Glorantha???

I don't think such a cult exists in any official source that's yet been published. There may be a fan source that I have not personally read which has it, but I think it will have to be invented. Now, there are a few questions you would want to ask while engaged in invention- how does this magic interact with Oath, Ban, or Harmony? Does it shatter chains or allow you to slip out of them (i.e. do magical bonds come back into effect after the spell runs out if they still had time remaining)? How systematic is this magic? Are we considering a figure like Spartacus, Nat Turner, or John Brown? Or one like Harriet Tubman, Robert Smalls, or Sojourner Truth? That is, is this the cult of someone who led a forcible uprising, or someone who led others to freedom? Or both?

Lodril's "Smoldering Rebellion" is, based on the Red Book of Magic, the only Rune spell associated with liberation, freedom, or (stretching it) anti-slavery activity which exists in Glorantha which is articulated in a public source. If we extend things further to symbolism, the Red Goddess and Seven Mothers cults, especially the Yanafal Tarnils cult, are of course deified revolutionaries and rebels, and their curved blades include literal adapted peasant weaponry like sickles, scythes, and butchering equipment like the kopis and makhaira, along with the invocation of related "peasant" weaponry like the naginata and bill or billhook. So they also work. In a more abstract sense, Orlanth has his freedom gig, but of course in his mythology it is very obscure whether he was actually directly subordinate to the Bright Emperor/Yelm or whether he was always on the "outside", rebel within the order or bandit outside of it. And within the mythical realm, the myth of the gazelets in King of Sartar also positions Chalana Arroy as a rebel figure.

Except that in the text where Yelm confronts his Other, that Other is very specifically named as a number of individuals, only one of whom is Chaotic. So we have to cut that element out of things, or perhaps we have to go to a subjective understanding of Chaos where Orlanth and Kargzant and Shargash were once Chaotic and Other but now are not Other and so not Chaotic. That doesn't appear to be where you are going with this, of course. And if Chaos = Other = oblivion, then perhaps the Other does not exist, which is certainly a standard way to understand that construct, but if so, what does "integrating the Other while keeping it Other" mean? What does "integrating oblivion while keeping it oblivion" mean? But they're not rendered insane. They are physically transformed into goat people with a high percentage of mutations. In the myth, Ragnaglar, the ur-perpetrator, is treated as insane, but in the text we are discussing, the worldly perpetrators physically transform into broo. And you're largely ignoring this. Everything you're saying dodges straightforwardly around this physical transformation, and effectively elides it, because if we accept what the text says, then the specific rape-culture association you're deploying here does not work. The culture does not directly shield rapists, because rapists turn into mutant goat-men who are explicitly driven out from the community. Now, I personally don't like that motif, I think it's very poorly conceived because of the associations you're building here, which are straightforwardly derivable from the Thed myth, and how it grinds them to a halt. But it's certainly present in the text, and by removing it, or by removing broo entirely, as is my typical approach, I am deliberately and consciously altering the text to produce "My Glorantha". And so it is inappropriate to present "My Glorantha" as simply the product of the texts taken as themselves, because it's not- it's been redacted, both deliberately and unconsciously. Is there a deep moral difference here between being born an ogre and spontaneously becoming one at adulthood? Beyond the question of whether ogre communities, which have existed at least since the 80s, would be chowing down on babies or on teenagers insofar as having ordinary humans born among them, does it really matter for the point that being an ogre is not really within one's control? Unless we're going for "children in Glorantha are full moral agents and are capable of damning themselves by becoming ogres", which is certainly an option. I think taking very specifically vicious interpretations of ogres actually makes that option starker- if ogres are simply secret cannibals, then the unfairness of being shaped into the skin of an ogre is something direct, but if ogres are defined by having the mindset of a cosmic rapist, then it's quite simply a statement that some things in the shape of human beings are intrinsically evil. And this is related to the notion of the Other. There's a pretty straightforward reason I didn't say "Other" or capitalize "Otherization" in the passage you quoted there, and said "Chaos" and "otherization". But hey, if the answer you're providing is that Lunar mysticism is about piously declaring that small-minded rapists (broo) and broad-thinking rapists (ogres) are to be integrated while keeping them rapists, because as Chaotic beings they are aspects of the Other, what makes it not straightforwardly evil and antagonistic at that point? That's probably not what you intended to say, but it's certainly a consequence of deciding to define Chaos in the terms that you have and then carrying it forward to the point of tangling up the abstract construct of the unknowable Other with the concrete, material actions that broo and ogres represent and perform- if these are part of the Other, and Lunar mysticism is about integrating the Other while keeping it Other, then what exactly prevents the "rape is no biggie" interpretation from being an accurate one?

It fails to incorporate the "primordial"/"formless potential" motif, but it also runs into problems when we take a look at how the concept of the Other is used in the existing texts, so that we must say that there are Others and Others, that the identical proper noun refers to two different things without clarification. I think that on this level it works as a literary device- Chaos creatures stand in metaphorically for Otherization run amok. But treating this as a literal phenomenon in the diegesis- well, for one thing, the source text we're discussing indicates that committing rape has a cumulatively increasing chance of turning you into a broo. Does this mean that broo are the consequence of Otherizing rapists and that if Orlanthi hated rapists less, this mutation wouldn't happen? How do we square this with the extent to which the broo exist as a consequence of injustice towards rape survivors, as from most versions of their origin story? How do we get from the metaphorical level to the literal level of the text where literal, diegetic actions will diegetically transform you in a literal sense into a literal different category of being? I'm saying "literal" quite a bit because I don't think this approach actually engages with the parts of the text which are difficult to reconcile with perspectivism. Are people born ogres, with unusually sharp teeth, because Gloranthans otherize cannibalism too much, with the exception of Praxians? Would a member of the Cannibal Cult turn into an ogre outside of Prax? On the metaphorical level, ogres are straightforwardly a representation of otherization run wild to the point of believing that anyone outside of yourself could be a secret devil-worshipping cannibal. But on a literal, diegetic level, the relationship being such that xenophobia literally warps reality until otherized individuals grow sharp teeth and get a hankering for long pork starts off asinine and quickly becomes offensive. And this is the same problem with your presentation of the Lunars- metaphorically, the basic answer is that the Lunars believe that the Lunar Way allows you to heal the wounds that Chaos represents through incorporating Chaos into the universe rather than rejecting it, thus metaphorically rejecting otherization. But within the diegesis, if Chaos is the wounds of otherization, then if the Lunars diegetically believe in making it part of the harmony of the universe, their solution to otherization is to keep otherizing, and if they diegetically believe in healing those wounds, then they're no longer philosophically pro-Chaos, they're philosophically anti-Chaos. Which involves redefining another textual aspect until it means the opposite of what it appears to say. Your approach may be self-consistent in its own terms, it certainly is a variation of Glorantha, but it gets there, in my opinion, by discarding aspects of Gloranthan texts. Which is what my point continues to be.

I've spent a little bit of time thinking about Greymane as part of running a game that started in Esrolia. So none of this is "canon", of course. I think that my intuition about Greymane is that his ability to present a united Solanthi/Ditali front against the Holy Country and then Esrolia and Caladraland derives from him being outside of the traditional hierarchy- he's not a Trader Prince, he's not a tribal king, and he makes use of tactical polygyny as well. So his agenda is not one which benefits one group of Wenelians at the expense of the others, it's an "apolitical" commitment to extracting wealth from the Holy Country to restore the glory days of the Manirian Road. I've assumed that part and parcel of this is that he's officially detached from the Trader Princes, so the Holy Country can't respond simply by strangling the Ditali cities one by one and plundering and devastating the cities to keep Greymane in line. I think his main advantage at the operational level is thus that he can give way against expeditionary forces- his strongpoints are in Solanthi country, and in order to engage in reprisals against individual tribes and clans, Holy Country armies need to scatter, where they can be defeated in detail. The Lion King's Feast I don't know the details of, but I do think that the notions about "Lunar agitators" driving Solanthi and Ditali raids are a political cover- Greymane can always order the "agitators" expelled if and when the Holy Country delivers on bribes and thus reconcile. This is in keeping with him playing both sides right up until the Battle of Pennel Ford, where his attempt to keep Esrolia and Caladraland weak and divided runs directly into Harrek. And overall, Greymane kept all those people together because he succeeded. Following the old lion meant Esrolian finished goods and Caladraland raw materials flowed westward. Addendum: I think Greymane's run of victories happen in large part because the Holy Country is dealing with pressure from Wolf Pirates and Lunars simultaneously, and thus faces three "fronts". If they could concentrate force against him, things would be different, but at the same time, Greymane enters the field because there are clearly opportunities. I think his early reputation was built in intra-Manirian wars, perhaps winning some victories against the Pralori.

I don't see it as "papering over thematic incoherence" so much as I see it as the product of unclear and incoherent thinking about Chaos because the signifiers of Chaos across Gloranthan texts point in directions that make it very difficult to cohere Chaos as a concept without ignoring large parts of it to produce a coherent subordinate Chaos. That is, I don't think the incoherence is a deliberate choice. And I mean, there's a simple answer to why the perspective and voice of Chaos in Gloranthan texts is vanishingly rare (apart from the "what my parent said" and "what the religious authority told me" for broo and ogres)- Chaotic creatures do not have interiority. That is an answer that is at least consistent with the 2007 text, and it may have been the intent of Stafford all along. But I find it entirely unsatisfactory. So Chaos is sometimes a product of externalized subjective social tensions, but sometimes it isn't, and is instead a literal and material phenomenon that creates (often divine or spiritual) social tensions. Well, that's a good example of what I'm pointing to- there's no coherence possible with Chaos as the texts portray it. So the Lunars embrace Chaos by actively seeking to eliminate Chaos, indeed being one of the few groups of people in the setting who actively work towards it? This is a very torturous reading, and it's what I meant by "deflect the Lunars into an unchallenging opponent"- they (in this formulation) don't actually believe that vampires are potentially moral subjects, they believe they can transform vampires into something else which would be a moral subject, and that this will eliminate vampires forever, etc. In other words, the questions the Lunars raise are whether it's better to try and transmogrify people in the hopes of eliminating the problem they represent or to kill them, which I find both unchallenging and frankly unduly biased towards the Lunars. Speaking of course as an unfettered Lunar partisan.

I think it is absolutely a dead end, in that in attempting to use it to interpret Chaos as antagonist, you discard the parts I specifically singled out, and indeed, what the text says Chaos is- an absence of physical or psychic substance that draws the revulsion of the world and this revulsion produces the characteristic physical mutations of "Chaos features" in order to encyst the absence or lack. But this absence is not one which can be identified, because there's not a consistent way to declare broo or ogres or scorpionfolk or huan-to or gorp or dragonsnails or bullsitches are each, as a group, lacking in something that real beings have. They exist in continuity with real beings, so if we take this text seriously and in context with the rest of the Gloranthan texts concerning Chaos, we must conclude that the absence or lack is unknowable and undefinable. And indeed, your answer goes into another direction- Chaos as external projection of subjective social tensions. A perfectly adequate response when it comes to gregarious Chaos critters, though I struggle to imagine what social tension Hungry Jack represents. I think it's a direction that falls apart even further when you consider the whole fountain of Chaotic substance in the depths of the Underworld, though, because clearly Chaos is not a totally sociologically generated phenomenon in the text. And then of course if Chaos is "rejection of change", what exactly does the Lunar position on Chaos signify, apart from another way to deflect the Lunars into an unchallenging opponent?

I mean, yes, Storm Bulls exist to be mocked and have been for quite some time. However, I think that that 2007 text is very problematical in that if you take it seriously, that Chaos manifests in Chaos critters as an ineffable lack or void that cannot be explicitly identified, but is intangible- well, then you'd start drawing some parallels to how this line of rhetoric is applied in the real world, and start asking some very hard questions about why "the world" singles out particular people or beings for its hatred and attempts to torment them. But that's very firmly and clearly a dead end, because the tangle of Chaos does not allow you to achieve anything fruitful from it, not even a mean-spirited parody of Gnosticism. So you must cut the Gordian knot in order to make something coherent, and at that point you might as well cut in different places and make something more humane. Now with that being said, mystical enlightenment does not, in the real world, always mean touching a void, and even in Glorantha this is not clearly the case. For example, draconic mystics are easy to interpret as attempting reunification with a broader world-soul (and the EWF would be running a chintzy attempt at hastening Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point). Many other mystics might well be seeking something more like a pleroma, a tumescent fullness rather than a welcoming gap. But setting that aside, I think that if we ignore the direct text and look at the subtext, the problem with any grand effort to render Chaos a real cosmic threat of oblivion is that no culture in the setting attempts to do anything about Chaos overall. They drive noisome Chaotic critters away, Praxians go a step further and valorize Chaos critters as a foe to prove one's full masculinity, but the Storm Bulls who hang out near the Queendom of Jab are not attempting to marshal a campaign of extermination. They're interested in containing scorpionfolk raids and attacks. People's words are that Chaos is an implacable and inimical foe, but their actions with regards to Chaos are, in practice, "live and let live", "there won't be nothing if you don't start it", etc. And in this light, the Lunar "error" is not in that they have a fundamentally wrong view of Chaos, it's that they admit out loud what other people mumble. Chaos can be lived with and accommodated. Which in turn suggests that perhaps the text and subtext are at odds with one another, but there may well be a way to reconcile them. (Or else we could toss that aside and rededicate ourselves to the insistence that a dozen goatmen shivering in a cave somewhere are chewing holes in reality with every breath, but that the only credible response to this is to leave them alone unless they're being a nuisance for other reasons.)

Well, Tolat is about concrete violence, like swords and blood and so on, stuff that's metaphorically close to sex already, and Ethilrist is about the abstract violence of reading the volume of your memoirs that traces your entire family tree at helpless, innocent people. Frightful stuff.

Well, that and the the "serpents of the deep" or tannim, presumably cognate with other (frequently serpentine) watery monsters in neighboring mythologies, though Ltn/Lotan/Leviathan gets individualized in poetry. "Tiamat" may even come from the same root as tehom, as Apsu/abzu was a similar concept of cosmological deep waters that predated the Enuma Elish and got personified as Tiamat's husband and counterpart, fresh water to her saltiness.

Ethilrist and the Black Horse Troop sit at an uncomfortable nexus where they have a materialist understanding of the Underworld as a physical place where you can walk in and out, with difficulty, but the rest of the world around them treats the Underworld as a spiritual place that cannot be treated as if it was a materialist one. As such, I think that Ethilrist has some kind of treaty or contract with whoever leads the Demon Horses down in hell which allows Demon Horses to be reincarnated through normal horse foals (where they presumably grow up uncannily quickly, stare creepily [assuming horses can stare in any other way] at random passers-by, neigh and whinny in spooky ways, etc.) in order to maintain a consistent number in the middle world, furthering that uncomfortable nexus by applying contract law to death and rebirth. I don't think this a "Heroquest" in the sense that there's a mythological pathway that anyone can follow Ethilrist down- I think it's still a "Heroquest" in the sense that you're stepping outside of the normal material world, but it's not one where you Meet With The Goddess and then contemplate Woman as Temptress before you get your horsey Ultimate Boon- for one thing, it seems extremely unbelievable to me that Ethilrist has sexual thoughts that involve living beings rather than abstract states of violence.

Chaos in Glorantha really refers to a couple different things, out of universe. On one hand, there's the unformed or unsorted "existence before existence", the Kaos of Greek myth, the tehom of Genesis 2:2, the Ginnungagap of Snorri Sturluson, etc., which can also be translated as "void". On another hand, there's the transcendental "materialized ideology", the Chaos of Moorcock and Games Workshop, which is a kind of intangible or ethereal quality that causes icky mutations and typesetting that GoES LIke ThIs. On a third hand, there's the "moral tehom", Chaos as the source of evil in the world, which is Chaos as Poul Anderson used the term. These three hands make a fourth: "Chaos" as "gnosis of cosmic horror"- the universe begins from transcendental malevolence, which is continually present and warping reality. The transcendence of mysticism reveals only the vile genesis and the universal perversion, which is why mystics seek nonexistence- they've hit 0 SAN and have rolled "clinical depression" as the consequence of that exposure to sanity-blasting metaphors for Howard Philips Lovecraft's insecurities about special relativity. They also make a fifth: Chaos as metaphorical depiction of reality. Because Chaos is "unformed" or "void" but also evil and "contagious", Chaos may be used to depict things that the author views with contempt and disgust to warn people away from them via using Glorantha as an artistic medium. But there is also a sixth: Chaos as metafictional seepage. When we attempt to reconcile the Satanic Chaos with the Jerry Cornelius Chaos, we have a difficult puzzle in explaining why sometimes an activity is morally neutral (Cannibal Cult) and sometimes cosmically unraveling (ogres). The verbal stumblings that tend to be produced by these efforts are thus Chaos contaminating our speech and rendering it incoherent. And of course this incoherence spills over into how to interact with Chaos, whether in the game or in the metagame. If Chaos is malevolent and an intrinsic quality, surely unceasing opposition is necessary and it would be only righteous to go into "Gaumata's Vision" fully prepared to kill all those ogre and lamia kids with "nits make lice" in your player notes, since they are built for nothing but evil. Which is to say, the trifold aspects of Chaos, which confuse contingent qualities like moral decisions with intrinsic qualities like "do you have a tentacle for an arm", pushes us towards justifying genocide in play. Or we reject one or the other of those things, and adopt a vision where Chaos is totally willful or totally absent intrinsic moral character. Truly, your Glorantha must vary, because taking the thing at a whole seems unsustainable. In all this, the underformed void of pre-existence is easy to make drop out, because it's not relevant to the present of the setting. But if we actually baked the rejection of one or the other of those things into a formalized change to the setting, we would lose the most important part of Gloranthan play: killing broos playing secret ogres Lunar discourse. And that, I think, may well be intolerable.

Well, if it exists outside of creation but acts upon it, parsimony would suggest that it is such, simply because of how Chaos is defined as "outside Glorantha". And of course the kind of transcendent entities like Ourobouros that encompass all of existence and nonexistence within themselves have to, by definition, be Chaotic. But then, because Chaos is also within Glorantha and "everything is made of everything", the real question is whether there's anything which is rigorously provable to be totally non-Chaotic.

I'm not sure how best you could make elf PCs in a Middle-Earth game using BRP, but I think one possible approach would be that the spiritual sensitivity of elves renders them much more open to the world and baleful influences with it, such that they have greater skills but concurrently face greater challenges- where a human or hobbit might feel uneasy about a particular place, and a dwarf might comment on its hostile mood, an elf might well have to contend directly with the hostile spirit of the place to stay there. Of course, this makes elves an interesting addition to a party, but I think that in any Middle-Earth game you need to directly address elves and dwarves and humans and hobbits and how they have different but related struggles as part of explaining how to play and run the game. So that's just something to fold in there. Now, the roguelike Sil just uses humans/edain as a challenge mode, with average human stats set at 0 and elf and dwarf stats going up from there (with Noldor stronger than Sindar or dwarves). But playing a Silmarillion kind of game is different, although there's some promise in a flashback/forward-style game where your ancient elf PCs every so often go back to particular moments back in the day where their current elven mopiness had its origin...

Yes. I agree completely.

For an immediate example of the last, here is Maimonides on angels: (A Guide to the Perplexed, 2:6) Now for Maimonides, God is directly present in pregnancy, through the sending of angels, but he concludes that the force of heredity and reproduction, as he knew of it, (or in modern terms, DNA, meiosis, gametogenesis, and fertilization) was the angel, rather than there being a separate malakh/entity which manipulates the process. This is tangible, accessible divinity, but it is not a divinity which serves as a substitute for life.

So we come to understand ourselves better through what, in this version, is realizing that merely suppressing the "gods" is insufficient, we must kill them/feed them to the devil instead, which is how we come to understand ourselves better? Because we've snuffed out portions of ourselves, or permanently cut their tongues out? I would say that it is not presented as something which obviates any need for labor, nor is it presented as a unique source of dependency, since hypothetically, spirit magic and sorcery and mystical magic/worldviews also allow people to live and survive as well as users of divine magic. Or to put it another way, methods other than submission to the gods allow you to live and thrive in the world. Why does the possible "tangibility" or "accessibility" of the divine necessarily obviate human effort for you? I don't actually see where the two things come together- it only barely makes sense in the context of Christianity and Islam, in that if you take statements about divine omnipotence literally (which is philosophically a minority position, the more common one historically has been to understand the power of God as constrained or limited by other aspects of God) then you could say that obviously prayer could provide for all your needs and no effort is needed. But there are many other possibilities beyond that, which do not suggest that this is possible, let alone desirable.

Do Gloranthans in the present of the setting not have to "shift for themselves"? And that's not true of "IRL religions" generally. It's true for some contexts, most of which are very historically contingent.

I think my problem with that reading is that it is coming after a long period of imprisonment and incarceration of the gods, rather than their running free and causing problems. This sort of dampens any kind of metaphor about growing up by abandoning the gods, because it's not just abandoning them, it's very specifically destroying them in this reading, I think. Almost a fusion of an Oedipus and Electra complex together at that point, understanding gods as "parental" figures who humanity must move beyond to reach childhood's end. (I also don't think this reading can be fully sustained given the whole "But it's still here, and now it's invisible instead!" passage in King of Sartar, but in the event I suppose it could be interpreted as the everpresent threat of Mommy Sedenya coming to revert humanity to dependent childhood?)

And because Middle-Earth's history is significantly sparser and less sociological than Glorantha's, I think putting together a serious timeline like the RQG family history would involve significantly more invention. If you're making someone from Bree in a game set during the time period of TOR (between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), what events would they reasonably have been involved with in Eriador that could be found in the appendix timelines? Let alone for someone from a much less detailed area like the Woodmen or Rohan or dwarf communities not under the Lonely Mountain? If I wanted to have that kind of feel, I think I'd adapt it much more abstractly- a set of questions which are more about the outlook your character has from interacting with Middle-Earth. Perhaps a brief lifepath system that asks whether your Bree character interacts more with the Shire, with Rangers, "with elves" (probably via book-learning more than via going out and gatecrashing dinners at the Grey Havens), with dwarves, with trolls and giants, with orcs (i.e. via traveling in dangerous territory!), or mostly with Bree itself. Maybe with options for "the land" as well, to emphasize the almost animistic landscape of Middle-Earth. And then from there you have the kinds of plot points and worldview options that RQG family history gives you.