Eff

I don't think "what if slavery is better than freedom because the enslaved people are congenitally evil" adds much tension at all.

Not a hard antipathy to notice! After all, mysticism quite easily accommodates/accommodated itself to the world of the clapboard churches. It's no great surprise that Arkat's journey involves moving from the mystically churchly towards the directly pagan. Historically suspect to trace the Grail back to Nodens, but emotionally satisfying. In that spirit: The dire warnings about failed mystics carry no intrinsic metaphysical component. Orthodox or heterodox, the only thing that will assuredly happen to you once you've intervened in the temporal world is the fruition of your actions. The warnings are thus the more valuable.

I think the best way to put this is that the fandom treats Glorantha the way Tolkien treated Middle-Earth: as a kind of imaginary prehistory of the real world (aided and abetted by Greg Stafford being a gnomic cuss). So for a lot of people, of course the nonhumans have to vanish because you don't see any elves around here today, now do you? But if we understand nonhumans as variant consciousnesses, then perhaps there are elves still around in the sense of the variant consciousness that elfhood in Glorantha points at being an observable way of being human in the real world, though not quite with leaves for hair. And there's also the shockingly radical proposition of detaching Glorantha from that position of being imaginary prehistory and making it alien, or parallel, or if you've just finished snorting an entire rail of Gene Wolfe and looking at the art of the medicine bundles in the Nomad Gods rules PDF, perhaps a future.

I don't think Phargenetes Xocoyotltzin integrated the different components of the Red Emperor into a unity at all. That's pretty antithetical to the connection to mama Sedenya. I think a more interesting possibility is that he reincorporated Lunar traditions from outside the mainline red ones (carrying the Sword of Tolat, I mean Shargash, and marching to the aid of Arrolia) and these produced a more active Red Emperor. It's possible he also purged some elements out of the red emperor system, and these may then go on to join other figures who compete for Lunar legitimacy (Shadow's Good Shadow, Sheng, Ralzakark?).

Well, you see, when it's entirely fictional people and you're arguing that their fictional genocide is justified because of what is straightforwardly a conspiracy theory, then of course you're not doing anything questionable. It would only become questionable if this hypothetical person were to suggest, say, a series of death marches into inhospitable terrain and then confinement in concentration camps for the dastardly genocidal Lunars and their dastardly genocidal children.

The point is to avoid getting into the weeds of canon arguments, however.

I think that there is straightforwardly a gigantic swamp to wade into when considering this situation from a social perspective because the argument is built on population numbers at two separate dates. While it would be extremely improbable for the outlined situations to happen spontaneously and totally voluntarily for most human societies in the real world, it is of course always possible to argue that Sartarites or Gloranthans are different, that they have a protonationalistic urge to produce children for the nation among women in such numbers as to make this scenario socially possible and ethical. But since it is physically very unlikely, that short-circuits that. Besides, I'm not sure if the Babeester Gor of the recent texts actually would intervene in that situation given that she's been subtly redefined to defending "the Earth" rather than "women" generally, and given the whole focus on pregnancy in the recent texts for the Ernalda cult, would it be a transgression against the Earth to pressure people into doing what the Earth cults are apparently built around? Which would bring in the question of canon as well.

What's perhaps most relevant to using Bless Pregnancy for a babypalooza is that in a world without baby formula, there's a fairly hard limit on the ability to have children who survive past infancy- breast milk production, which in the real world is quite often inadequate for a single infant, let alone large numbers of twins, and which requires lactating women producing to excess to serve as wetnurses, who would be in shorter supply in this hypothetical situation of mass magically-assisted pregnancy. So quite apart from the social limits, there are clear physical limits at work here.

A lot of any deeper analysis would have to look at agricultural productivity per person, because I think with a large-scale die-off you're looking at the potential for population decline and slow recovery, if ever, as overall agricultural production dips in the generation that died in large numbers and thus the population stabilizes at a lower level, increasing very slowly overall. Ireland, for example, continued to decline in population for a century after the Great Famine ended, even as agriculture mechanized further, and only in 2016 did the population of the island increase past the point it was at immediately post-Great Famine. Now, we could say that magic would make up for the loss of production, but I'm skeptical. Why wouldn't that magic be used to maintain a higher equilibrium to begin with? What makes it more of an option after famines? Is it simply that the gods maintain certain population targets and shift magic to meet them?

So in the real world, what happened during famines or prolonged loss of agricultural productivity is that peasant families would feed young and middle-aged adult men and women first, followed by teenagers, and would essentially leave young children and the elderly to die from malnutrition or starvation. Supposedly, the "Great Winter" in 1622-23 is followed by unproductive years in 1623-24 and 1624-25, only regressing to the mean after the Dragonrise. So these "young children", assuming that this means less than eight years old (halfway to initiation for boys), would have been five years old and younger in the Great Winter, meaning at vulnerable ages for dying in real-world famine scenarios, and a number of them would have been born in the lean years. If they are present in great numbers, it therefore must follow that the Great Winter could not have been very bad, much less bad than a lean year in the real world. And so it's only the elderly that died disproportionately. But perhaps by "young children", what was intended was the very natural reading of "three years and younger, disproportionately less than a year old", and we are meant to assume that there's a large gap wherein children too young to contribute to meager agriculture died off in 1622-23, along with the elderly. But from the straightforward English, the Great Winter seems like it might well be nearly demographically invisible in the medium term, whacking the tip off the population pyramid but not massively slimming the population down.

I think that this response is a fairly characteristic one in assuming that the Lunars by some method end up being a fairly purely antagonistic entity, such that the entirety of the ruling classes are people who are varying degrees of actively exploitative and the objectors having left the Lunar Empire entirely. I would question the assumption that the Lunars need to be antagonistic on this kind of broad level. I think, for example, it's fairly easy to look at Rome and the process by which Roman citizenship expanded, until the high point of the Edict of Caracalla, and look at this as a process by which the specific Roman method of exploiting the subjugated socii transformed over time into an ostensible principle of equality. Or at how Cicero's theories of the natural law carried implications about justice and human rights which have been used for millennia for popular causes that would have horrified him. (You can obviously pull out many more examples from human history, but Rome is a subject where common knowledge makes it easy to point to.) So with that in mind, you could look at the Lunars as an entity that is multipartite and has different forces acting within and without, rather than one which is one thing or has conveniently become one thing. You might even, without taking any horrifyingly radical steps, produce a kind of synthesis where the conflicts are resolved through all parties changing and adapting. But my brain may have been ruined by reading Fanon at an impressionable age. It is rather light on the sturm-und-drang apocalypticism that you can't actually interact with or affect, to be sure, but I also read Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness at impressionable ages too. Zelazny's fantasies feel truer to the Glorantha of not-yet and cor.flu and duckburg point, from my end of things.

I think the fundamental problem with playing with Lunars as anything more than "defectors from decadence" who see the error of their ways eventually is that it's intrinsically political- the Lunar world is one where politics is immanent and ever-present, and the pretense of playing apolitical "barbarians"/heroic Greeks cannot be maintained. I say problem, but really it's just as much a fundamental potential, so long as you remember to take all the nonsense about how the Lunars/the scientific revolution are simultaneously a threat to the cosmos and poor and feeble, looking with jealousy upon mighty Sartar and place it in the appropriate receptacle.

I think that unless you want to posit a Glorantha where Lunar mystics regularly commit suicide because the difference between death and life is an illusion, this line of thinking is fairly out of keeping with what has been presented. It is of course fairly easy to posit examples of how you could take the things which have been presented as parts of Lunar philosophy and produce coherent reasons why ideas of the reconciliation of opposites don't lead to indifference to death and mass destruction. You could, for example, draw analogies to how Christianity, despite "my kingdom is not of this world", has not died out due to the entire Christian population embracing breatharianism. Or how ritual suicide followed by mummification is a feature of some Buddhist groups but not all of them, and is typically not done via violent means. Because if we took this proposition as a given... we would have to wonder how the Lunars accomplished anything at all, because clearly the distinction between accomplishment and failure is an illusion too.

Isn't it mortals who summon the Bat? ---- In any case, an obvious reason why the Red Goddess would be understood as worse than the Bat by divine cults is that the Bat merely destroys ephemeral mortal humans in a way that might even be helpful in the right circumstances, but the Red Goddess, by being a liminal entity between divine and mortal, an entity who has embraced time and entropy, an entity who introduces the possibility of voluntary changes to the gods and the gods' world, is a threat to eternity and the eternal by disproving them as meaningful.

Well, I do think that broo mercenaries aren't at the level of the Bat, morally... but that does speak to the underlying question of whether Chaos should be understood as having a moral valence outside of the beliefs of Gloranthans- i.e. is the most salient factor the use of Chaos or Chaotic beings, or is it what the Chaotic (or non-Chaotic) beings do? I, of course, am a radical on this issue, and believe fairly firmly that the text is only even marginally consistent if we assume that Chaos doesn't have a moral valence.

I don't see how being carriers for diseases makes them intrinsically less trustworthy, though. (They're also probably not that much worse than some historical armies in that regard.)

So, they're like historical real-world mercenaries except they engage in somewhat more bestiality?

To diverge just slightly, the historical timeline of the spread of the pre-Moon and early post-Moon "Lunar Way" is also fairly unclear. There are seven years between the downfall of the Carmanian Empire and the rise of the Red Moon, and a further three before the Red Emperor becomes sole emperor of Dara Happa. It's entirely possible that the river valleys weren't eager to adopt the teachings of Living Goddess Teelo Imara and Lunar religious dominion took hold gradually there and more quickly in the flatlands, Pelanda, etc.

Well, looking at it from another direction, broo are a despised minority without any hope of blending into local communities, so taking the chance of switching sides would probably be influenced by whether they'd be cutting themselves off from safe ground. And as far as morality goes, broo as they're presented aren't significantly worse in effect than most professional and semi-professional armies have been throughout history, especially mercenary bands. It would seem strange to presume that they're therefore significantly less trustworthy without some underlying assumption that they're motivelessly malevolent.

Why would you suspect that?

Some thoughts here: First of all, a general methodological comment. With the Glorious Reascent (never mind the canonicity thing, the Guide and Sourcebook all depend on it) and the Stafford Library books that follow it, we have a historicized narrative- The GR is a nationalistic document like the Enuma Elish, providing a mythological understanding for the victory of Khordavu over the horse emperors, the rejection of the horse culture, the supremacy of the three cities along the Oslira over the other urban settlements and the peasants, and the primacy of Raibanth within the trio. But as a document, it's also intended to be read as if it were made like the Enuma Elish or the Prose Edda, stitching together other sources into a narrative but leaving some of the sewing visible and other edges still ragged. And the Gods Wall is, within that imagination, a source that demands interpretation but which we are led to understand has always been interpreted wrongly or incompletely, most succinctly through the millennium-long game of Where's Wally Where's Humakt that ended in an admission of defeat- the Gods Wall doesn't have Humakt on it, so it doesn't have every real or authentic god on it. So we should keep in mind that the Gods Wall is a nexus of doublethink- it both represents the correct order of creation and does not represent it, and the intellectual environment of Dara Happa and the Pelorian cultural sphere will be aware of this. We can assume a great deal of mental flexibility about the Gods Wall, (or perhaps the reaction of Poe scholars if you bring up the symbolism of the orangutan in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"- "we don't talk about the Gods Wall".) This is one line of attack on this situation- Dara Happan intellectuals can reconcile just about anything. Another line of attack is to look at the Glorious Reascent closely. In the myth of Yelm's wedding contest, Verithurusa appears as one of the defeated participants. So we can infer that there's some pre-Lunar mythological presence of an entity named "Verithurusa". There is also a statement in the same section that Yelm is "not part of all males". Which also offers some mythological presence for entities that are neither male nor female, and entities which are bearded but not male, in Dara Happan mythology. Which makes matters much simpler- however Dara Happans process this statement about Yelm, this can be applied to any identification of Verithurusa with Verithurus. A third line of attack is to look at the imaginary linguistics of the Dara Happan writing system- "Verithurus" looks like a masculine name, with a masculine -us ending, but it's really got a null ending, which is only questionably masculine, because the feminine form is "Verithurusa" and not "Verithura". So whatever fine distinction exists between -us/os/as, um/om/am, (silent), and a/ya/ia as grammatical markers of gender, we can attribute to that distinction as many soporific arguments between peevish Yuthuppan scribes as we find necessary. A fourth line is to look at the specifically Dara Happan mythology (although Life of Sedenya shouldn't be neglected as a counterpoint). The Verithurus planet descends into the underworld and doesn't come back. There is no Verithurus after this point, and there's a figure "Jernedeus" that seems to stand in for the original Verithurus in parts of the Glorious Reascent. Verithurus descended into the monstrously feminine world, and so it would not be out of keeping with Dara Happan misogyny as a motif for them to understand this contact with femininity as causing a gender change in the fallen god, now goddess. (Of course, going back to Life of Sedenya, it seems that the Red Goddess would say that she was always a she, but we're not talking about her and her postmodernist ways, now are we, etc.) There's a fifth line of attack here, which is quite simply- Dara Happans are, in the precanonical texts, straightforwardly wrong. Their insistence on a perfectly static mythological world where nothing changed is directly contradicted by the Glorious Reascent and Entekosiad. Maybe Dara Happans, after a long day out on the estate wishing they had more peons and slaves to brutally beat and maim, slink back into the villa, put a blanket over their head in a room that gets absolutely no moonlight whatsoever, and quietly, guiltily, misgender the Red Goddess.

Let's get stupid. We've got a goddess named Charmain who presumably had some cultic existence around Lake Oronin before Syranthir arrives. We have a "child" of hers, Carmanos, who gives the followers of Syranthir an endonym and eventually a toponym- Carmanians, Carmania. I think we have a bit of a shibboleth situation here- Charmain uses that pesky /ch/, Syranthir's followers say it "sibboleth" (well, "carmain" or "carman"), and then we have the terminal masculine -os added on. Leaving aside the question of whether this is "Charmain's boy" or "Boymoding Charmain" or "Char Aznable", the noble caste are karmanoi, firmly with a hard-c or /k/. But I suspect that the Pelandan peasantry of Teelo Estara's day would have referred to themselves as under the reign of the "Charmanians" (the dipthong compressing down), part of the empire of "Charmania". /ch/ is supposedly rare and foreign to Dara Happa, but Charmain herself would also be foreign to Peloria, given that Lake Oronin replaced a "mountain of fire". I suspect linguistic difficulties like these would be understood as part of the Combine and Separate sorcerous actions acting on gods/the world...

It would have seemed weird, I think, to believe the Sun was cold and dead. However, I don't think there's any coherent answer here because the Elmal material was produced initially under a very different cosmological understanding of Glorantha, one where it was plausible for a god to be both a hypostasis of a bigger entity (the Sun Horse that pulls the bigger disk) and a separate celestial entity in its own right (yellow planet). It is not so plausible now, so the Elmal material cannot ever be truly coherent in its own terms.

Well, there's an implicit 3 in there: 3. The Praxian religious system doesn't consider the recruitment of broo (or the use of any of the Chaotic spirits from Nomad Gods up to and including Thed) a source of impurity that puts the gods' noses out of joint. Which does resolve that disparity for this specific case. We can also propose a 4 and a 5: 4. Because Praxians are known for their stern attitude towards Chaos and Chaotic things, most of the rest of Glorantha should be at most as willing to tolerate interactions with Chaotic entities on this level, and probably more tolerant, on an overall social level. 5. If this level of interaction with Chaotic entities is generally acceptable on a religious level, then it is extremely questionable whether the absolutist statements about Chaos's inimicality towards life should be taken as truthful on their face, and if we do take them as truthful on their face, we should then question the competence of the gods directly. This is of course disquieting and upsetting and all that, but perhaps it's worth playing out.

Making the curse a product of initiation allows players to more easily justify violence against Telmori because now they chose evil/chaos, and it removes many kinds of thorny questions about whether collective punishment is bad from the equation by assuring us that no children are affected and nobody is affected unless they chose to be. As such, the intent might just be that there are no good Telmori in the context of areas intended for play, and "good Telmori" refused to initiate to Telmor.