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Well, the rites improve the maize harvest, rather than being required for it, and officially you're supposed to use a cornstalk doll as an effigy instead. Officially. The reason for the human sacrifice is, on a level that's, in-setting, deep lore, but out-of-setting, fairly basic, that maize is a crop sacred to the Blood Sun of Chen Durel, who made blood rain from the sky to water it. So the crop grows best when the soil it grows in is watered with human blood, symbolically. Out of setting again, the motifs here are a mixture of Aztec human sacrifices and Robert Graves's theories about primordial matriarchal religion- the Earth is hungry, and blood is one way to feed it, a way that doesn't require the hierogamy/divine marriage of the land goddess to some fertilizer deity. As such, Hon-eel provides a truly independent Earth that nevertheless needs to be satiated through human sacrifice, one which coexists with the less thirsty ground of barley and wheat. I'm fairly sure the sacrifices are mostly of condemned criminals, and performed at the opening of planting season, which would be in Sea Season and potentially again in late Earth Season if the climate is good enough for two crops a year. The sacrifices are justified, I think, as a means of redemption and purification- by dying for the corn, you achieve liberation from your misdeeds in life.

That end-of-second-act low point will get you every time! But leaping off of that, this implies that becoming a hero involves acts of editing and redaction, processing the events of your life such that they produce a narrative, an arc of flight over the course of your life, and promulgating them. But the events that are outside the narrative remain, free for the creative quester to take up and riff upon... (Is this why Ethilrist's History of My Black Horse Troop is so exhaustive in detail? Shielding himself from creative deconstruction? I suppose that explains just why Keener Than always knows which side to join...)

So let's say that I'm an independent scholar/chinless noble twit with academic pretensions and I want a full, 216-chapter edition of the Abiding Book to study. Where would I find one? -Rokari use the Sharp Abiding Book and consider the other 144 chapters to be potentially polluted with the errors of Godlearnerism. Would they have full editions of the Abiding Book available for public/semi-public inspection? -Loskalm's New Hrestolism rejects the Abiding Book entirely. I would assume that the related schools of Fronela also do so, because they're all coming from similar contexts. I suspect there are not many copies of Makanist lies in the Loskalm libraries. -Akem and Arolanit are Brithini-ruled. They might have Abiding Books out of completeness. -The Navigationalist School would almost certainly use the full Abiding Book, or possibly some other redaction, as they rely on textual interpretation of passages that Rokari ignore. But by 1625, the Navigationalists are underground or refugees. It might be a bit difficult to contact them to ask to look at their books. -The Castle Coast probably would use the full Abiding Book, since they retain pre-Rokari post-God Learner Hrestolism. Not sure how many they would have, but they're a definite source. -Safelster has a mixture of Rokari and henotheistic schools, alongside Arkatism. So the question here is whether schools like the Chariot of Lightning and Stygianism would use the Abiding Book, that is, if they're descended from God Learner schools or if they're not so descended. This would thus also apply to the Trader Princes of Wenelia. -The Sedalpists of Umathela presumably use the Abiding Book, but it may be a redacted version. -Presumably, Knowledge Temples in Kethaela, Teshnos, and Fonrit would also have some copies, out of pure completeness. -Vadeli would also presumably be able to provide a copy. Are there any others I'm missing?

Theatrical productions in Glorantha seem to be slightly anachronistic not just for the Bronze Age (about which theater nothing is really known) but also for antiquity in general. We have in the Puppeteer Troupe complex dramas with multiple roles, major parts and bit parts both. This is certainly not Aeschylus's or Sophocles's tragedies, which were marked by having two and three actors, as a significant shift from the actor-and-satyr-chorus plays of Thespis. We are probably looking at something more like Roman theater, if not medieval European or early modern drama, in terms of its complexity and extent. But the forms are probably more antique in style, alternating between tragedies and comedies, probably with multiple subgenres within these two.

My understanding is that in canon, potatoes are not grown in Genertela, without any statements about the other continents. In older canon, potatoes were definitely grown in Genertela, and potato bread formed the staple of the charity food provided by the Seven Mothers cult. Maize is definitely present in Glorantha, of course, and was brought back into the Lunar Empire by Hon-eel in 1492. (Possibly it returned to Chen Durel at this time.) Beans are mentioned a few times in the Guide with reference to Seshnela and Safelster. There are, of course, both Old World (broad/fava beans, soybeans, garbanzo beans/chickpeas) and New World (black beans, navy/haricot beans, pinto beans, kidney beans, lima/wax beans, runner beans, year beans, and tepary beans) plants which are called "beans" and grown for dried pulses (and the fresh legume in the case of soy and haricot beans). Legume and pulse crops in Glorantha as a whole are largely ignored in favor of focusing on the grains, so it probably isn't possible to determine whether we have a genuinely fusional situation where the crops are both American and Eurasian, or an infusional one where maize and possibly a few other American crops have been added to an essentially Eurasian cultivational package. At least, not from the text alone. Of course, the presence of "peppers" with a plural, rather than the singular "pepper", would tell us we're dealing with the Capsicum and not solely Piperaceae and/or Zanthoxylum plants. The Guide indicates that sweet/bell peppers are grown in Kralorela to the extent that particular cultivars can be world-famous. Which pushes things for me more towards a fusional understanding where any crop can be found wherever in Glorantha it could plausibly be, in my Glorantha(s).

Snakepipe Hollow is a place that has gone sour. A Chaotic army was entombed there before time began, trapped in mortal clay (or loam, or sand, or sandy loam, or sandy loamy clay) on multiple levels. I suspect they're pretty angry, in a whole lot of pain, and because this event took place in a cosmogonic context, Snakepipe Hollow pulls Chaos in from outside the universe because its myth/history, of Chaos creatures coming into Glorantha and ending up within Snakepipe Hollow, recurs again and again. Actually fixing Snakepipe Hollow would require something quite a bit different from repeated search-and-destroy missions.

It is known that falling too deep into debt in Casino Town can lead to a term spent salvaging in the Machine Ruins. But actually cheating, or, god forgot to forbid, robbing the Casino, will earn you a place in a very special Hidden Castle. The music, at least, is charming.

I have good reason to believe that there is a potion derivable from such plants as the beans of the Glycine genus, the yam, the oil of a palm tree's kernel, etc. which would be a most effective thing against Prince Argrath, one which would be irresistible in alchymical preparation. Such a potion might well drive him to an overindulgence that would immiserate some aspects of the Dragonspear. This would perhaps be necessary, but not sufficient. Other such necessary-but-not sufficient aspects of Anti-Argrath Action (the other AAA) would include a tactical use of tantric liberation against Annstad of Dunstop to impair Argrath's infiltration of the Lunar Way, hiding the Red Moon briefly to hijack Argrath's oath, and possibly diverting influences like Mularik and Gold-Gotti.

By the Guide, she began as a follower of Aranea, and by the Sourcebook, she ascended by and as Arachne Solara. Arachne Solara, by the Guide, is depicted with a halo of white fire when depicted as a spider-woman. But apart from that, I'm not sure there's much else elaborating on it. So I think we can assume that Cragspider's ability to reconcile Fire and Darkness is because she's gotten a look at Infinity up close and personal, and any details beyond that are left as an exercise for the interested reader.

In contemporary indio Mexico, the hummingbird is sometimes seen as a psychopomp or messenger from the underworld, so I suspect that this is what drove that revelation, (knowing that this would have been around the time he was in Oaxaca). Two different visions of Death. (The Mexica associated the hummingbird with Huitzilopochtli, the fifth Sun, who famously dismembered the moon goddess, giving her a lunar cycle, but I'm unsure if that has any relevance.)

There are also hsunchen reindeer herders in northern Fronela, but on the other side of Erigia, the reindeer herders are the non-hsunchen Eolians. An interesting puzzle.

There is another timeline counting down, of course. Though not a prophetic one, at some point the Seventh Hell will pop open like a kinder egg to reveal a Sheng Seleris with another few hundred years of austere meditation under his belt. Historically, Sheng secured Prax and Teshnos to find weapons, and it's possible that with the Holy Country stalled, the goal became securing the Praxian weapon sites and possibly dismantling or containing them. Granted, this seems to have failed, but the Self tends to fail against the Other.

As far as motives, this seems fairly simply motivated by the Building Wall Battle two years earlier. The road south was firmly blocked (and would remain so for nine more years), so the Lunar command looked to Prax. The immediate justification according to the CHDP was heavy Praxian raiding against the Pol-Joni, who it seems immediately turned around and began raiding the Lunar expedition once it jumped off (from Swenstown, probably). This is also right after the Wolf Hunt and 1607 also sees 3000 casualties in the Far Place, so quite possibly this expedition was in fact primarily aimed at getting relief from the Praxians and winning concessions for trade at a time when Lunar forces are at an ebb. In that sense, it was a clear success- peace was made, the Lunars had a minor victory at the Tourney Altar to point to as cause for that victory, and they could begin studying Prax's magic in detail. If we take the references to an incarnation of Waha in CHDP as meaningful, it was an enormous success and laid the groundwork for First Moonbroth and a lasting peace with Waha that would require a resurrection of Jaldon to break. Of course, the troops on the ground got a rough handling, but that seems to be the soldiers' lot for the 17th century.

Yes, they could come from the Red Goddess, but I have to admit that I don't see the benefits of such an elaborate shell game and making the Lunar religion a grandiose Punch-and-Judy show.

Yes, but the fact that the Crimson Bat can grant these kinds of spells suggests that she has some kind of authority as an ancestral or sovereign figure with regards to bats, in the same way that Telmor or Basmol does.

Well, the Red Book of Magic has hsunchen transformation magic which involves becoming a red bat, which explicitly cites the Cult of the Crimson Bat. The Guide also indicates the Pujaleg of Laskal worship the Blue Bat and the Red Bat as their primary deities. Seems likely that there's some kind of connection there, or at least that bats have an overall Moon connection, like foxes do.

Well, you don't need stallions to make effective chargers. Steppe peoples, for example, used mares almost exclusively and fought with a mixture of archer and lancer cavalry, at least some knights used mares or geldings for their heavy chargers in medieval Europe... A gender ratio of 1:10 stallions before castration seems like it would outweigh any beliefs about the necessity of stallion virility, and of course, mythologically the Little Sun lost his spear...

I'm glad that you decided not to make even more of a point of nitpicking over whether I used the appropriate language to make absolutely clear that I meant initiation into Mallia, which is explicitly what "female" broo/broo born with vaginas must do because Thed loathes them and won't accept them already. Because that would have been rather exhausting to do for a minor thing. I think that you're putting a lot of emphasis on the Bestiary as an objective source when in this specific passage, it says also that "female" broo automatically initiate to Mallia because they don't like the boy's club that the Thed cult is, (and what happens to "hermaphrodite" broo? Oh well, not the first time Glorantha has stumbled on gender) and then goes into some statements about how "of course" Mallia initiates are monogamous unlike polyamorous Thed broo, and it's very clear to me that it cannot be an objective source because of how it contradicts itself and how it adopts a perspective which assumes the reader is a Gloranthan person who would know that Mallia is monamorous (because they both start with an M?). I think that to a large extent broo are presented as if they were intrinsically evil, but this also contradicts a lot of things that have been said about Runequest and Glorantha over the years, and it is possible to read them in another way, and it is in some ways better to read them in this way rather than argue that it is possible for things to look like people but be sufficiently unlike people that they are incapable of moral behavior, because that ethical dilemma is fundamentally uninteresting to me. (What does it map to in real-world terms?) It also really runs against the basic cycle of abuse metaphor that's all over the broo and Thed, as much as I find it distasteful. So that's my reasoning for picking this interpretation.

Well, no, that section is from an in-universe perspective. It's not an objective statement from out of Glorantha that broos are definitely biologically compelled to make the world a worse place. And indeed, it's possible for broo to do things like altruistically heal people, so even if this biological compulsion exists, it textually cannot be overwhelmingly strong. Which is to say, in order to assert that broo are a direct threat to the cosmos beyond being an unstable ecological presence (itself rather questionable textually- how do they maintain themselves in a stable population, as is also asserted in the text, if that is the case?) you would need to explain away things like the Wild Healer.

I mean, yeah, she is a survivor. That's just text. Ragnaglar violently assaulted her. Sorry, I don't like it either, but it's there.

I don't know what the canon answer is or if there is one, but in the big broo metaphor of cycle-of-abuse, broo reproduction is clearly the result of Thed's influence in essentially metaphysically raping all of her children by dictating how they are allowed have sex- it must be violent, it must be traumatizing, and it must result in the death of the other partner in a gruesome, painful way- and so we could hope that broo don't reproduce in that fashion if they're free from Thed's tyranny. But that's why I'm pretty down on broo as a major part of Glorantha, because of that central metaphor being focused on a rape survivor reenacting her trauma by raping all of her mortal progeny in an abstract fashion.

Oaths with magical force exist all over Glorantha beyond the Humakt rune spell, which is special because it instantly kills you if you break it. But there are plenty of examples in setting material- Broyan dies because he broke his oath to protect the City of Wonders, for example. That didn't happen because of the Humakt rune spell, because it was caused by a Darkness entity of some kind/the Kitori, but it still had force. Oaths in this setting have magical power, depending on who you swear them by. And these are binding on broo as well, because there are specific Chaotic entities that can slither out from those bindings (Krjalk, maybe Cacodemon) and broo aren't generally worshiping them. And that's why it's an effective tactic- broo are perhaps not especially inclined to do this out of the goodness of their hearts, but there's supernatural power backing the oath up and if they break it, they get hurt. That's probably not good psychologically for broo, although it's at least predictable, unlike their abuser mother goddess, but this isn't about helping broo, it's about whether it makes sense for it to be the case that massacring intelligent creatures on the basis that they have a tainted/polluted origin is something that not just Storm Bulls but every Gloranthan is cool with and potentially willing to participate in, minus pacifists who can't participate directly. I mean, from the setting itself, they are not any kind of existential threat. Even people who hate Chaos are cool with using broo as disposable weapons rather than declaring "nits make lice" or "Waha will know his own" out of a need to preserve their own, explicitly fragile and marginal existence. So if RQ stats are accurate representations of the body and mind of broo, then presumably their bulkier, more muscular bodies don't translate into them being supersoldiers in some fashion. Easy enough to elaborate why. I think that the legal definition of personhood for broo in various cultures is kind of irrelevant- animals are definitionally not people, but there are also always social limitations on the level of arbitrary violence that can be applied to animals before someone's behavior becomes problematic, disturbing, or unlawful. My general intuition is that fighting a broo one-on-one is probably seen positively if recklessly, but murdering one in their sleep is seen as a sign of dangerous tendencies, and that even if we accept broo are seen as animals generally it would be like learning someone was attempting to proactively extirpate wolves and foxes, as opposed to shooting ones that intrude on your farm. Broo are sufficiently like people, and are metaphorically treated as people, so I assume that they will surrender given the right conditions, because the text of Glorantha suggests they are people and surrendering/throwing down their arms is something people generally will do. The point of the scenario would be that the only way that the broo can pay is with things that are likely or obviously Chaotic, and as such are nearly worthless, but the rules of honor (and this would be the case in canon Glorantha) demands that the ransom be accepted, and so this produces an adventure of finding some Lunar or Borist who can and will pay a fair price for the things. "It's an instinctive and even religious imperative." Religious imperatives are not always things you can disentangle from basic material conditions, especially in Glorantha. And broo are material creatures. They don't even have the magic digestive systems of uz. They need food and water that won't kill them. But to put this another way, I don't see anything in the sources which indicates broo have any less free will than humans do in Glorantha. We have the Wild Healer of the Rockwoods, of course. We have Ralzakark's Sword Broo. Neither seem to be Illuminated. Broo can also choose to embrace Mallia for relief from Thed. So they have at least that level of free will. And humans also get divinely punished if they leave the "pantheon" in the sources, so in that sense humans would also lack free will in Glorantha because of that constraint. Now, it's possible to achieve an elevated level of freedom for broo and humans alike with Illumination, but it's not categorically different in any source. I just don't see where there's anything which distinguishes beliefs about broo lack of free will as metaphysically true rather than a common belief. (Granted, even if it were the case that broo explicitly don't have free will and are just mechanically monstrous, I would probably respond by not having them in my Glorantha, because then the text would be making the assertion that the cycle of abuse is truly inescapable, because that's the [really really eyebrow-raising] metaphor going on with Thed and the broo- Thed suffered traumatic violence and reenacts that violence on her mortal children and they in turn end up generally reenacting forms of that violence on the world around them- but sometimes they escape. On their own or with the help of others.) This question absolutely comes up with orcs, and Tolkien spent a considerable amount of time trying to justify the existence of orcs to himself and failed totally.

There's a pretty massive contradiction in there. If they're so much more dangerous than humans, they would have no need to rely on attacking food and water supplies, which is fairly self-destructive. That's a tactic that emerges from an inability to secure things with direct force, and indeed a level of weakness such that broo need to scorch the earth frequently to achieve any level of security. Which suggests that in a military conflict, broo crumple like paper. (Entirely plausible given everything about them.) Well, alternately, they could be just plain evil and poison things because it's in their nature, but frankly that's an unpleasant road to walk down for Glorantha and unless it becomes a statement in formal textual canon I'll stick with treating broo as having dissectable motivations and behaviors.

Ah. We found the one broo-focused scenario that might actually be interesting: dealing with the consequences of broo ransoming some captured broo and what kind of potentially-dangerous artifacts they'd offer as payment, and safely dumping them on the market. (Which you could probably do with scorpionmen or huan to, for that matter.)

I don't think there's any reason to believe that broo represent a dire existential threat to anyone. They have a grotesque and awful method of reproduction, they are trapped in a cycle of divine parental abuse in which one of their few reliable methods of escape is joining a divine racketeering gang... But there's a decided lack of broo as an agent of terror. You have "armies of broos" marching out of desolate places every so often, but if they're not accompanied by bigger, meaner/weirder monsters, they're just mooks and distractions. Now we could presume that this is because every human civilization except the Lunars practices "murder/castrate every broo you come across" religiously, but I'm not sure that's obvious and there are some good reasons not to assume it's the case. Not least that Praxians, with that Hate (Chaos), are still entirely fine with hiring broo as disposable mercenaries instead of reenacting Sand Creek or Katyn with them. Of course, it's plausible for people in the setting to believe that broo are an existential threat ( because they're chained within unglamorous social assumptions ) but you seem to be suggesting that this is an objective fact of the setting. (On top of all this, it's rather interesting to me that it's broo and not scorpionmen or ogres who get these kinds of questions attached to them. Partly it's because they've been standard mooks in old RQ publications, but I can't help feeling it's also that broo are pathetic and it seems potentially viable to wipe them out.)