Eff

You'll hit Sramak's river eventually. I think the currents get stronger the further out you go, and beyond a certain point even Waertagi ships will get physically torn apart, but that may just be my interpretation.

Alternately, and more firmly speculatively, the currents get stronger and force you into one of the Otherworlds that dot the physical edge of Glorantha like Altinela or Luathela if you go too far out, probably wrecking your ship in the process and leaving you, like Odysseus, to straggle ashore.

Wakboth is a mask of the self. What else could the incarnation of evil be but a funhouse mirror that magnifies your own perceptions of what is evil back at you? After all, if you were confronted by evils you didn't expect, you might gain some insight from the process, and Wakboth would be demoted from the Devil to a measly Cacodemon. 

54 minutes ago, Leingod said:

The problem with that theory is that Sartar's descendants all had a pretty decent number of kids. Of the ones who weren't assassinated young, the majority of them had 2-4 kids. Sartar's bloodline has never had any serious problem with fertility, they've mostly had problems with getting assassinated by Lunars (and sometimes Esrolians).

If every Sartar descendant has an average of three children, across, let's conservatively say five generations, there should be about 3,000 descendants of Sartar hanging around by the modern day. An average of two children does produce 486, a number just sufficient to make three or four modern survivors plausible. (An average of four children produces 12,500 modern descendants. And really we should be looking at 110 years as five and a half generations...)

Now, normally, the claim would go extinct for most of these descendants, but the precedent of Temertain, Kallyr, and Argrath shows that distant descent still produces a valid claim. We might well argue, too, that Sartar's descendants might only intermarry with higher nobility, but that also doesn't seem to be the case. The numbers are strange, because free interfertility is something that's practiced by the Sartar royal lineage, but the (prospective range of) numbers remain small enough that assassins can credibly wipe them all out. 

6 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

I'm struggling with this concept.  Boldhome has the Royal Road, but also seems very far to the east of the direct trade route between Peloria and Nochet.

Delecti, mountains, and steppes all sit in the way of the direct north-south routes, though.

1 minute ago, Jape_Vicho said:

Then my death is certainly close and caused by Too Much Glorantha Reading. 

Death, Illumination, the hand of Malkion scribbling all over your walls...

39 minutes ago, Jape_Vicho said:

I'm not sure I get this, you are making an analogy with the Bright Empire and chaos sprouting everywhere right? 

This is New Pelorian? I thought those comparisons with Newspeak on The Guide to Glamour were more on the jokes side. 

The Lunar Empire has, somewhere, an entire town of vampires. It's mentioned as one of the really Chaotic places in the Guide chapter on the Heartlands. Some of the vampires are used as the Red Emperor's personal bodyguards. But it's also a reference to Arkat. Arkat starts off as this Brithini kid who got raised by elves. And then he ends up experiencing several different cultures, and dying, and coming back, and realizing the connections between myths, and going deeper and further than anyone had before. And then he ended up dealing himself an unhealable wound, and then he ended up cursing Dorastor into the way it is currently, and then once he'd finally killed Gbaji, or absorbed Nysalor, or did a kind of personality shuffle, he immediately set about building his personal mythos and Otherside to prevent anyone from doing exactly what he'd done without learning his lessons first.

That's how Glorantha works. You discover this secret, forbidden, occult, or new thing (say, Air, or Death, or Illumination, or mythological correspondences, or draconic consciousness, or experimental dentistry). You end up causing it to run out of control (Jaldon may have been an exception here). You end up getting destroyed or absorbed by it (Jaldon is not an exception here). Then you come back, and this time around, you're sure you'll get it right! And you do. And then you cause new problems.

New Pelorian is canonically claimed to be a magical language that makes it easier to understand the Lunar Way and to become Illuminated, by the Lunar Empire. It was also, canonically, created by Great Sister during the period after the battle of Kitor. The Rough Guide To Glamour plays up the Newspeak portion of this because "death is life" is already a canonical expression of Illuminated thought, and because it's funny. But the Newspeak is something that's implicit in the idea of a magical language that reshapes your thought. But it's also true of any "mundane" language- all of them reshape your thoughts by learning them and speaking them. All language is magical, in that sense. New Pelorian is a glamour.

But the glamour is important. You've gotta learn something like Aristotleian mechanics before you can get to the Newtonian, the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian, the relativistic and the quantum, etc. Trying to absorb vast quantities of information without having some kind of filtering or learning process is dangerous.

5 minutes ago, Jape_Vicho said:

Maybe they are used for an explosive and fast increase of population? So Redlands and the repopulation of First Blessed after the ravage of the Pentans surely saw tons of it but now that the heartlands are pretty crowded it might no longer be necessary or even be dargerous. It would be surprising really, I would have expected an state like the Lunar Empire to have put those rites at maximum power forever and later deal with the excess population, there are always new lands to colonize. This would in turn create the question of how many children do average Pelorian families have and such, but that is surely overanalizing. 

Well, that may be part of it, but I think there are two big explanations, one high-mythical and one low-mythical high-material:

Firstly, the high-mythical one: the Red Moon that hangs in the Middle Air is the Balance Moon of Natha, and this balance manifests firstly through acts of extreme violence to rectify imbalances, but secondly through the equation of opposing powers. Lunar Sacred Time rites place life and death in equal positions, and it's, all other things being equal, a 50-50 chance whether the world is recreated as a living thing, or stays dead. This is deeply important. Once your brain is Sevened enough, possibly even Eighted, you begin to understand that there's no reason, in the long term, to prefer life over death, because they're the same thing taken different ways. This is also, to quote from a very different context, a hell of a way to run a railroad. Or an empire. (It might be the case that this reality means you shouldn't be trying to run an empire guided by Sedenya at all.)

So the Lunar Empire spends massive resources exhorting everyone to make sure Sacred Time comes up "life", and by extension, the Lunar Empire, given the fantastical wonder grain that is maize, slammed the brakes on making full use of it, because you can only go so deep into exaltation of death and blood before Lord Death-on-a-Horse files suit for trademark infringement. And perhaps the Hon-eel Rites are not yet fully understood. And perhaps they should be explored deeper to see if there's some way to reconcile them with ruling an empire. And before you know it, you've got a whole town of vampires on your hand.

Secondly, though we have the low-mythical high-material one:

The Lunar Empire, following the defeat of Sheng Seleris, proceeded to significantly reshape the Lunar Way. One of the ways they did this was to create a magical language that attempts to get you to think in a particular way. We might want to ask why this had suddenly become necessary to spread the Lunar Way. Or, to put it another way, is this meant to open your mind to Sedenya, or close it until you can only approach Sedenya through a mildly safe path? One where you don't end up declaring "All life is slavery!" and just restrain yourself to Great Sister's favorite slogan: "Freedom is slavery!"

And with that in mind, the Hon-eel Rites offer an unrestrained path deep into Sedenyic mysteries. Something too valuable to get rid of, but something you don't want every Tatius, Denegeria, and Harvar playing with.

7 minutes ago, Leingod said:

You mean, a proper description of the actual rites? If so, I'm not really sure. It is kind of alluded to in stuff like the Guide; Hon-Eel is said to have discovered maize, she's strongly associated with imagery of human sacrifice alongside agriculture almost everywhere she appears in there (being depicted with a bloody sickle while dancing triumphantly over a man's corpse, for instance), she's stated to have rediscovered old Naverian rites of human sacrifice, so it's at least still there, but otherwise I don't know of any books that are still canonical that actually lay out the Maize Rites of Hon-Eel.

To add onto this, the Lunar Heartlands and Provinces officially don't practice the full Hon-eel Rites anymore. Since the Mask of Venerabilis, they ritually sacrifice an effigy made of cornstalks instead. Settlers out in the Redlands are somewhat more likely to practice said rites in full, which sounds like an opportunity for good times all around, especially for a full party of unsuspecting PCs! I suspect that, in Tarsh especially, the full rites get performed in secret or via plausible deniability as well, given the importance of human sacrifice in Tarshite history.

(EDIT: The primary source for this is the Redline History of the Lunar Empire, which is printed most fully in the Glorantha Sourcebook but also appears in part in the Guide. Venerabilis, for his part, got swallowed whole by a heron goddess, and it's hard not to see that as retribution for starving the Earth of much-needed blood.)

17 minutes ago, Jape_Vicho said:

One question that comes with the explanations of the thread is: how can you have an extremely centralized country (Boldhome is the center to all roads, everything produced in sartar goes through it, etc.) at the same time as an extremely decentralized country (tribes with total autonomy of their affairs and each composed of clans that mostly play very local, have little contact with the exterior and are constantly quarreling)?

You have constant tension between the royal household and bureaucracy and the local leadership. So you rely on a couple things- firstly, the sacral nature of the princedom. You make it clear, in other words, that taking you out isn't a move in the game, it's smashing the whole board. Secondly, you play the role of the good king to the hilt. You squeeze foreign merchants as much as you can so you can pass out lots of rings, you render extraordinarily just and fair judgements on matters of law, and you lead the odd military expedition. Thirdly, you implicitly reserve the bulk of the military power to the cities and tribes, by maintaining a small retinue. Fourthly, you make sure you have a source of extraordinarily effective military power (eg the Telmori) within your personal control. Fifthly, you divide and conquer by incorporating people who are loyal to you and your lineage, and serving as their protector, like the Ducks and the Alda-Chur tribes and the Alone tribes and the Sun Domers and the Pol-Joni and the Telmori again, so that any alliance against you can at best form a plurality but not a majority.

(Sixthly, and conspiratorially, you curse your bloodline with limited fertility to restrict the extent to which the royal family can grow. Not that Sartar would do such a thing.)

But it might also be worth ditching the assumption that Sartarites are provincial out of ignorance rather than provincial for cultural identity reasons. After all, who wants to admit out loud that Esrolians make good wine, or that silk really does feel lovely against the skin? Why, I *carefully sliding several baskets behind a convenient lounge* would never *throws a blanket over the lounge to hide the Moon Rune trim* purchase anything so tainted with the poison blood of Shepelkirt! *drains the last of the amphora of rice wine and then bites into a clove of garlic like an apple to disguise the smell*.

Or, to put it another way, people in a kingdom that has set its cultural identity around being Not Kethaelan first, and then Not Tarshite/Not Lunar second, may well exalt the "old ways" and the "simple life" while observing them somewhat in the breach.

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

It will be interesting to see if other regions can find their inner Sartar and give us a similar high-density encounter table. In my heart I would like that but I know that the tragedy of Time is that most of the best resource sites were discovered, developed and abandoned early on. Maybe in the Dawn Age. Maybe along the great watersheds that tie regions together and keep "obvious" short portage opportunities on the margins.
 

Handra, which has grown up into a city from a collection of fishing villages since the Opening (and has only gotten bigger since the time of the Guide as Quinpolic refugees flow in), seems like another crux of intersecting locations and exploitations to play with. 

14 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Land transportation is awful though, so only luxury gods or other lightweight, valuable items are candidates for long-distance trading, and even then only if there’s no local substitute. Trading through Dragon Pass is a bit like the Silk Road, only with far smaller populations at either end, and with less geographical divergence.

And if the city populations are sustained by trade, they will get a very nasty shock once we get decades of more or less constant warfare from now on...

Well, let's look at the Slavewall-Duck Point run, as Furthest to Slavewall and Duck Point to New Crystal are all by water. 

I count, using the Argan Argar Atlas hexes and following rivers as much as possible, 504 kilometers of distance to cover. 184 km of this is by land, 320 of it is by water. Going by the Runequest Glorantha numbers for land travel (taking an average between good and bad weather) and the Stanford ORBIS assumed values for riverine travel, it would take 22 days to ship goods from Slavewall to Duck Point. RQG uses somewhat higher numbers than ORBIS does for land travel, about a third higher. Assuming this applies to upriver riverine travel as well, the shipping time would be only 14 days. 

The overall freight charges, using the ORBIS assumptions, indicate that the price of grain would about double from being shipped this distance. (By comparison, shipping grain from North Esrolia to Duck Point only increases its price by about 20%. Shipping a fine wine like Vinavale Red that distance only increases its price by 2.5%! Salted pork would rise in price by 5% over that distance, while shipping it from Slavewall would bump its price by 20%) So it's just at the edge of tenability for excess Tarshite grain to flow into Sartar. Happily, however, shortages of labor in Sartar seem likely, and the historical result tends to be the adoption of more capital-intensive production practices. Less happily, the response of many Sartar elites was to welcome the arrival of slave-worked latifundia as a means to keep wages out of the countryside, it seems. More happily, the latifundia are all burned now.

More extended analyses (what is the price to ship from Glamour to Nochet, etc.) will require substantially more time and the stitching together of multiple AAA maps. But overall, the price of high value-added goods doesn't seem to be a daunting one for profitability- even as basic a condiment as raw garlic would only jump in price by 67% if it were shipped from Slavewall to Duck Point. 

If you want to trade anything from the Oslira watershed to Kethaela, you have precisely three options:

1. Shipping it via Bagnot or Dunstop to Queen's Post, then across the Dragonspines to Rich Post and down to New Crystal City
2. Bagnot through Dragon Pass proper, around the Upland Marsh, to Duck Point and down to New Crystal
3. Slavewall to Alda-Chur, Alda-Chur to Jonstown, and then a variety of routes to either Duck Point or Wilmskirk, from either of those down to New Crystal or Karse.

Meanwhile, the two primary roads through Prax come through Jonstown and Swenstown. They offer (long, dangerous) land routes to Kralorela and Teshnos as well. Meanwhile, the Royal Roads all connect to Boldhome at their near-center, and are so heavily improved that curving around the Quivin Mountains to the east is almost certainly better than the direct route via Two Ridge and Runegate to Duck Point.

Sartar should not be thought of as a rural polity that's away from everything. Sartar is the lynchpin that connects Prax, Peloria, and Kethaela together via roads. (Note that if Delecti didn't exist, the Dragon Pass route would be much easier to trade by, so we can assume none of the Princes honestly tried very hard to get rid of him.) Sartar is one of the main trade clearinghouses of two segments of the continent. Goods from the Seshnelan and Ralian and Teshnan and Loskalmi trade funnel through Sartar to meet goods from the Pelorian and Kralori and Pentan and Praxian trade. Boldhome should perhaps be thought of like Chicago in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, grown disproportionate over its position as a transport hub drawing in so many goods from the "interior" with a near-direct connection to the "exterior".

So with that in mind, Boldhome is large, but Boldhome isn't a city of Sartarites, it's a city of Sartarites and everyone who's got enough fingers in the trade going on to want to keep a permanent eye open there. It's a city which undoubtedly has substantial warehouses and thus needs people to mind those. It's a city that undoubtedly received a great deal of discreet investment from Belintar, a bit from Rikard Tiger-Hearted, a great deal from the Lunars, a substantial quantity from Tarshite families, Gold-Gotti, Esrolian Great Houses, the Talar of God Forgot, undoubtedly hefty chunks from Praxians... (Perhaps even sources not usually suspected as having business interests of the conventional kind discreetly fund things- the Grazelanders, Ethilrist, the Shaker Temple, the Beast Men, Delecti, Cragspider, Isidilian the Wise, the Inhuman King...) There's a lot of money here. Perhaps that's what the prophecy Sartar fulfilled was.

In any case, my new campaign, "The Wolfrunners of Wall Street", is planned to begin starting in April... 😛

2 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

Hmm. Slowly tortured to death (Bloody Tusk), vs. clinically killed w/ subsequent corpse antics (Delecti) / utterly annihilated by an irresistible force (Crimson Bat). Let me think about this one...

The secret fourth option: listening to interminable before-dinner speeches, dinner monologues, and after-dinner lectures with slides (Ethilrist). 

It is well-known and well-understood that many great magical events in Myth and Time are the result of many people working independently yet together in a kind of stand alone complex. It is also known and understood that there are crossover points where different myths collide and different pathways taken between the myths. 

What is not understood, except by the Arkati guardians, is that these I Fought We Won events are naturally massive crossroads. And so, we can understand why there was no ritual reenactment of the Kalikos Icebreaker quest as part of Sacred Time before the Lunars- because who else is known for breaking the Ice? Zzabur. Carrying out this quest means having a cavalier attitude towards the very likely possibility of temporarily inhabiting the shape of Zzabur, a possibility it boggles the mind to contemplate. In addition, of course, Zzabur was a somewhat interventionist presence in the Middle World until the disappearance of Brithos, so he, Zzabur, may well have reacted unkindly to such intrusions upon his definitely-not-a-godhead. 

MGF (Maximum Gloranthan Favor) option: children of a fox woman have natural abilities to create small illusions, normally when playing make-believe or telling stories, but not under conscious control. If they are initiated into adulthood as an elura (normally this involves womanhood) then they can do so consciously, otherwise this ability weakens or fades. Optionally, the sign of this ability is a little fox tail and/or tufts of hair that resemble fox ears. 

The Alda-Chur and Alone tribes remain outside of Kallyr's authority during her rule, and only come back during Argrath's first campaign in 1627, as far as I know. 

The City of the White Moon presumably would also be a Hidden Castle after its disappearance, though there's not much information about said disappearance or how to gain access. 

19 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

I understand your point and reasoning for it, but where does it end? Can Broos join Stormbull or Kigor Litor? What about Trolls in Yelm? Mostali joining Aldrya?

I'm reminded of the D&D issue of the Paladin hanging around with the CE Assassin... just because that's what the player wants to do.

Obviously, it's your Glorantha... and by definition, it's not really the Glorantha as envisaged in the printed material.

Why not? In circumstances where a broo PC or Mostali PC can contemplate joining enemy cults, they're already well outside the norms of their society, such as it is. Perhaps they've decided to "defect" and work directly against the people they came from. Perhaps they're suffering such advanced culture shock that they want to reclaim (in the broo's case) the ability to exalt violence and destruction, or (in the Mostali's case) the sense of being encompassed in an all-surrounding community. 

Now, I don't know just how open the Yelm cult is likely to be, and where a variant open enough to allow Uz to join would be. (Pent? Kralorela?) But the same potential factors are still there. 

More broadly, the vast majority of people playing Uz or Mostali or Aldryami are, I think, playing them specifically to dive into the weirdness of their societies and cults. And those who suggest joining opposing cults are probably doing so for their own dramatic or role-playing reasons. Even if they're mostly ignorant about the setting, someone who picks a dwarf and says "I want to worship a goddess of trees and nature" is still making a statement about what they want to explore in the game. 

So the issue is just whether the campaign can support such a character in the first place given its aims and goals. It's fairly likely that, yes, a campaign where you're all playing younger members of some clan somewhere in Sartar is not going to be able to accommodate a broo Storm Bully. Sure. But that's an issue of miscommunication between the players as to what the campaign is supposed to be like. 

Well, it's not necessarily a worldbuilding flaw. It's an artifact of the limited perceptions of the assumed character types of Runequest Glorantha's PCs, and it's something that is fundamentally interchangeable. If you're playing, say, Carmanians or Heartlanders, giving barbarians bizarre magic that you don't understand is also something that's doable and vital. Hsunchen in this model don't have to bother with needing 10-12 Rune Points to really go wild with shapeshifting, because they're strange, often scary people- but if you were playing an all-Hsunchen party, or a mixed group, then they'd have limitations (probably not quite as demanding as the basic RQG model for shapeshifting in an all-Hsunchen group, of course) and their abilities would be framed within the basic Runequest limitations. 

Which gives you that sense Nick is talking about, of having a world your character understands, that can be fitted into percentile-roll skills, and then forcing them into confrontation with a weirder, stranger one they can't always understand or predict, let alone control. The biggest weakness here is, of course, the need to do a lot of work to make the game playable from a variety of different angles, (a substantial portion of which will fall on the players no matter what Chaosium or JC authors do) but that's not the worst weakness to have, since people playing in Glorantha have already been accommodating that. A secondary weakness is understanding how Runequest works well enough that you can give strange people funky magic without it causing trainwrecks, but that's an issue with any gaming system when you try to be creative with it. 

EDIT: I am saying this from the perspective of someone who would definitely houserule/revamp sorcery if I were to run a game set in the parts of the world where there's lots of it floating around, mind. 

The hints of Lunar Magic we've gotten from the RBoM suggest that at least some of its mechanics (special skills for adjusting (at least) spirit magic) could be repurposed for EWF magic. 

9 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Not to cloud the dance floor (a cloud like a star) any further but I suspect the Sartar Rising poets are a lot deeper in sky magic than I am with their juggling stars and planets and such. We can all fight over whether this means they were close to the Kallyr court or simply rocking adjacent mysteries . . . this is a good fight to have.

Being a simple and uncomplicated person, I really do see the Dragonrise as a straightforward application of sympathy and contagion. The visiting team had set up their set of identifications so they could force the local sky to hold a certain configuration (perpetual full). Home team finds a weak entry point and within the ritual vocabulary becomes identified with the ring. The sky can't reject the ring once it's there. Everyone knows the ring contains a green star so the perfection of the ritual stage requires a green star to emerge from somewhere. As above, so necessarily below. The dragon emerges. Little orange stars exit as the ring does. The sky gets on with its work.

The simplicity may be a tell that Kallyr and her tricky sky people truly weren't in the loop or at least involved with the ritual planning. All we really know is that they had orders not to molest Pole Star if they could help it, which seems to be a concession to her known all(eg)iances. 

It raises a great question whether Burbustus magic is intrinsic to the Reaching Moon network or just a local flourish designed to set the temple into the local ecology. If Burbustus runs the Yara temples in the east, that's awfully interesting. If he doesn't, that's interesting too because then the question is how those temples work, why they changed (feedback from local sacred mountains?) and whether Storm Pent has anything to say about Reaching Storm when that happens!

 

My immediate thought is that the Reaching Moon operates by holding a celestial body in a seeming stasis, which requires some kind of sovereignty over the sky to function. But asserting that sovereignty allows other entities with claim to that sovereignty to challenge you directly, if you can get in. 

Orlanth is one of them, but Moon goddesses participated in killing Yelm alongside Orlanth, so I would assume Lunars have fairly easy ways to hinder any recreation of the Doom Conjunction. But some representative of Night also was an earlier challenger (and in between, Water, in the form of Oslira). So while Burbustus may be the name used in Dara Happan texts, I rather suspect that he's a draconic version of our good friend from Pent and points east, Basko, who has a great deal of human sacrifice magic. Which is certainly essential for the temple's operations. 

29 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

The CHDP chronicler doesn't appear to have had access to the Sartar Rising books and the architecture of their ritual sabotage is a little clearer in some respects there. 

The real goal was apparently always creating a sympathetic opening for the green star to make an appearance above and be answered by some dragon power closing the circuit below. The timing indicates that they wanted to be as far from the site as possible before that proton torpedo went off. At best, it covered their retreat. At worst, it looks like a suicide mission.

CHDP is very careful about assigning plausible deniability. Even Orlaront says he didn't know the magnitude of the dragon power they were calling up. He gets banished anyway as Starbrow is "seeking to contain what had been awakened." Maybe someone somewhere is trying to cover up an inconvenient truth. I have always been in love with the CHDP account so really can't say.

I think that simply calling the Ring to its rightful place in an otherwise sanitized ritual sky wouldn't have bought them anything beyond a short-term stalemate motivating the empire to torch the jungle, as it were. They needed to flip the board and put the empire on the defensive. That requires opening yourself up to something bigger than what you started out with. All the orange stars were in play but on a perfect mirror something green was required . . . and then the ground rose up to meet it.

Because I like human drama I side with CHDP and think they were making a huge leap of desperation and faith that they'd draw a better card from the deck. Other people have more worldly perspectives.

My thought, after looking at Sartar Rising again, is that the idea was to hop between Sky World heroquests, going from Orlanth's approach to the Celestial City (which could be from a number of mythical instances, and this crossover probably makes the second part possible) and then switching over to Burbustus against Yelm. Since the Temple of the Reaching Moon was meant to subjugate Sartar, and Burbustus became Yelm's throne, a heroquest wherein Burbustus defeated and overcame Yelm would thus invert the authority created by the myth and defuse the ability of the Reaching Moon Temple to claim sovereignty over this piece of ground. 

But in order to get onto that quest, you'd need to be recognized as a dragon... Which opens up the possibility that the Brown Dragon awoke because it felt the threat to a fellow dragon above it. 

And this is still in its way a desperation, Death Star attack sort of mission- it's hugely risky, could kill off the last remnants of the House of Sartar as far as the Iron Ring is aware and finds credible, and ultimately all it does if performed "correctly" would be to buy time with the Reaching Moon Temple remaining out of service and needing a lengthy time to prepare it for consecration again. 

2 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

'The myths can be changed. Maybe this time the Dragon will devour the Emperor ... I have heard there may be a fourth dragon in our land. My associate Garstal claims to have seen this "Jarn-thing" ... ' 
—Minaryth Purple, The Gathering Thunder p. 50

Totally agree here, it's definitely his style. When he becomes king, it was Kallyr who did all the heavy lifting with the rebellion, and it more or less falls into his lap.

And the Red Emperor isn't present at the Dragonrise, so I don't see any reason to assume Minaryth is talking about a literal devouring there rather than the summoning of draconic aid into their attempt to reenact the Doom Conjunction.

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

It’s worth mentioning that the Dragonrise being unintential is a retcon - in Sartar Rising, it’s clearly Orlaronth’s and Kallyr’s plan all along.

I don't think that's the strongest interpretation of the text there (leaving aside any silliness about canon). There's nothing in the scenario about asking the dragon to do anything specifically, and the main focus in the description is on Kallyr striking a deal with the dead dragon that gets the dragon to withdraw its hostility to the Orlanthi. You can read that as "emerge here on this date and eat these people", yes. But to go back to the first edition of King of Sartar, the Composite History of Dragon Pass indicates that Orlaront was not aware of the Brown Dragon, and it's only Argrathsaga that insists that the Dragonrise was consciously planned, and Argrathsaga attributes this to a plan between Minaryth, Orlaront, and Argrath. And in Sartar Rising, both Minaryth and Orlaront are clearly aligned with Kallyr. 

All of which is to say, I read the scenario in Gathering Thunder as Kallyr and Orlaront looking for draconic help, perhaps negating the Lunar use of dragonewts, but not expecting what they actually got. Which is consistent with Moirades being able to move quicker than Kallyr after the Dragonrise in the first edition of King of Sartar. 

Just now, Orlanthatemyhamster said:

Jeff has been trying to remake Argarth in his own image since Greg died, you only have look at his White Bollocks campaign to see that. If not Glorantha. So that's a conversation ender for me.

Sorry to have wasted your time.

That's fair. I will simply note that that's only really a subsidiary thing for me compared to things like the sheer stupidity of summoning a dragon to create approximately 14-15 feuds against you from the tribes you'll need behind you 100% if you want to actually pull off your restoration of Sartar and the way that, in sources going all the way back to the early 90s at least, Kallyr is consistently described as acting as if she didn't expect this outcome.