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My immediate thoughts on Heortling (and Esrolian) marriage that inspired this is that sexual desire and love are both separated out as specific types of marriage distinct from the plain marriages. Comments from Chaosium staff that children without clear bloodlines are adopted in or taken care of by the clan temple have firmed this up- marriage in Heortling culture is not about love, or sex, or the production of children (after all, a child born out of wedlock belongs to mom's bloodline and there's no real sign they face discrimination), it's about creating kinship ties between different clans. And thus the triaty tribe. So there's not really any obstacle to same-gender marriages as such, because the point is merely to create those kinship ties and (from the King of Dragon Pass event with the "blood sister" ritual) these kinship ties may be created between people of the same gender. The difficulty, of course, is in determining who will take on the roles of husband and wife for the sake of patrilocality/matrilocality. Perhaps some kind of custody-sharing arrangement is in order... Now, fertility consultation in Heortling society could be an excellent subject for a lighthearted comedy piece/farce!

I have some very vaguely developed ideas about how to throw even more wrenches into the works by introducing gay marriages, in the form of an adventure/scenario where the PCs have to resolve a dispute between the different clans over who's going to move in with whom. Unfortunately, I need a better grasp of RQ before it could even approach playability.

Illumination is a psychological/mystical state that is most closely associated with the Lunars because the Lunar Way presents it as an aspirational goal that can be practically achieved by just about anyone and ought to be. Most other practitioners keep it more restricted or disguise it because the two most famous pre-Lunar Illuminates, Arkat and Nysalor, are both widely feared and hated for their ability to tear through restrictions and boundaries thought impermeable.

Heroforming is a strong level of divine magic where you physically incarnate your god in the material world. You do this by so strongly identifying with the god (both mentally and through your actions) that you're able to become their physical double. So if you're an Orlanth (or Sedenya) worshiper, you're growing extra arms, your skin is turning blue (or red), your every breath is a rushing wind from your mouth, etc. During this state, you can toss around divine magic like it's nothing (in Heroquest, which is the only system that has definite rules for this). You can be broken out of this state through what are called "Identity Challenges", where someone offers evidence or even proofs that you are not your god, breaking the connection. My thoughts on the matter are that there's no reason childbirth has to be 100% natural in Glorantha, and if you don't want to go through an accelerated pregnancy on the Hero Plane (albeit with the benefit of Chalana Arroy's good painkillers) or get a divine vaginoplasty of some kind, you could also be spiritually impregnated and then have to provide a body for the child out of clay or a doll or whatever, with the benefit of other Ernalda priestesses working to make the little child one of flesh and blood when the birth happens. Or you could have the baby delivered by snake/lizard messenger from the gods nine months later. There are a variety of options. There is a difference! It's possible to have the Heroplane just be an overlay over your eyes, something you're seeing at the same time as the material world, it's possible to be there in your spiritual body (as in a shamanic quest) and it's possible to fully bodily enter the plane. The deeper you go, the more you risk but the more you'll bring back.

1) The Runequest Classic material from Chaosium: https://www.chaosium.com/runequest-classic/ 2) The Nandan cult, as far as I am aware, only ever had a writeup in the Hero Wars supplement Storm Tribe, which is available here: https://www.chaosium.com/storm-tribe-pdf/ but is certainly obsolete. (The version of the cult given in here is straightforwardly a subcult for trans women Ernalda cultists, which I think is probably not the current intent, and they are totally unable to bear children, which is certainly not the case for the current conception of the cult from Chaosium!) I have no idea to what extent Nandan will appear in Gods and Goddesses of Glorantha or any future RQG supplements. 3) When writing out my thoughts I quickly realized several contradictions in them, so I need to develop my thoughts on this further, but I think the key difference lies in certain highly gendered tasks that are also fortuitously mostly irrelevant to Runequest/Heroquest play.

To offer a second- or third-hand summary that's hopefully neutral (and please correct me if I'm wrong on any of this, people who were there at the time!) -In the early Runequest material in the 1980s, the Orlanth and Ernalda cults are not restricted by gender. Women can become Rune Lords of Orlanth, Men can become Rune Priestesses of Ernalda, and this is backed up with assorted NPCs in official materials. -Vinga emerges in this period as the daughter of Orlanth and a goddess that (I think) is associated with Kallyr Starbrow and the basic "women warriors, red hair" elements are set here. -The version of the Vinga cult which you can find on @Jane's website (and that of John Hughes) more or less is developed during this period in terms of the social functions of the cult and becomes fairly widespread in the fandom. -In the 1990s, Greg Stafford presents his own version of the Vinga cult, which offers a very divergent take on the cult and which states that Vinga is the way by which women worship Orlanth (which of course invalidates the Orlanth women of the older materials) alongside the new Nandan cult as the way by which men worship Ernalda. This provokes a great deal of controversy at the time. -In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Hero Wars/Heroquest 1E material is published, and that has a great deal of involvement from people with the "fan" version of the Vinga cult. Vinga during this time is closer to that version. -Recent material (Heroquest 2E/Heroquest Glorantha/Runequest Glorantha) adopts a kind of compromise positions where Vinga and Nandan are described in the way of the 1990s version of the cult (Orlanth-as-a-woman, Ernalda-as-a-man) while still remaining generally compatible with the 80s/2000s version, and which ditches the gender restrictions on the Orlanth and Ernalda cults. My own personal take is that the specific situation in RQG took quite a bit of work to understand language-wise, but that's with me coming into it as someone with a bit of Gloranthan experience and preconceptions. I have no idea how someone fresh to the setting understands it.

You know what? Let's get wild here. What big livestock aren't present in this part of Genertela? Water buffalo? Unsuitable climate, though they may be a common sight in Caladraland. Bali cattle? Not really clearly distinguishable from zebu or domestic cattle. Gayals? Overlapping pretty strongly with Bison People. Llamas and alpacas? It exceeds credibility to describe them as cattle. Camels, though... Of course, the terrain is completely unsuitable, being a temperate rain forest/cloud forest. But there was a genus of camelid, Camelops, which was native to the relatively forested climates of western North American of about 10 million to 14,000 years ago. Camelops hesternus was bigger than modern camels, somewhat more robust in build, and with a short neck that distinguishes it from the High Llama. And camels do have fur structures that might be describable as manes...

The aurochs, according to a 1602 description, was born with reddish-brown fur, which darkened to brown or black in the adult bull but remained red-brown in the cow. In addition, the aurochs had shaggier, longer fur around the head and neck, similar to a bison's mane or the long fur of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_cattle . We know that the aurochs is probably independent from the redmane cattle, but it's possible they're related, since we know that aurochs return to Dragon Pass during the Hero Wars. Perhaps redmane cattle are a domesticated aurochs, unlike the lesser Uralda cows? Or, if we were being sillier, perhaps they're a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beefalo or other such bison/cattle hybrid, with an obvious mane and red fur...

The week of the winter solstice (Illusion week of Dark season) has major canonical holy days to Ernalda and Ty Kora Tek (commemorating her death during the Gods War) and to the Seven Mothers. The winter solstice itself has a holy day for Rigsdal among Orlanthi.

It would be fairly simple to interpret, on the basis that Sartar, an Issaries follower, was only a king due to being King of Dragon Pass and was Prince of the Quivini otherwise (and also on the slimmer basis that the Trader Princes of Maniria are also Issaries worshipers), that "king", "queen", "prince", (and other unattested titles) refer to formal representations of a particular god, with "king" or "warlord" referring to Orlanth, "prince" to Issaries, "queen" presumably to Ernalda, and so on down the traditional ruling ring. The ruler of Sartar being the Prince would thus be a political statement about their peaceful, amicable intent in ruling. As such, Kallyr, as queen and warlord and prince, would be concentrating executive power into her own hands. A controversial decision, but one that may also seem inevitable in the aftermath of the Dragonrise and the overall difficulty of knowing who to trust. (This also implies, together with the clan questionnaire answer about the lesson of the EWF being "priests shouldn't rule, kings should", that Orlanth Rex and the Alakoring rites displaced an older tradition where power was shared between different members of the confederation/kingdom ring...) Edit: the difficulty, of course, is that the language is thus entirely different from what we expect the plain English to mean and not in a consistent way, either.

The broad issue is less about social power, which is kind of secondary (people are generally playing heroes or otherwise exceptional people) and more about subtler dynamics like the active/passive dichotomy, where the question is more "Is it possible to be both conventionally womanly and an active rather than passive figure?" In other words, if I'm playing an Ernaldan or a Dendaran, am I supposed to be a passive and reactive figure, someone who takes her actions outside the scope of conventional RPG play, in order to be mythologically appropriate? And if I'm not, or if I want to define my Glorantha so that the femininity of Ernalda and Dendara doesn't forestall being an active presence, how then do I do so, within the mythological context? King of Dragon Pass (and the brief appearance of definitely-Ernalda in Six Ages) are of course immediately relevant as examples of how women are and can be active presences while remaining archetypal in their femininity. And, if we look at the cultural stereotypes that are embedded at least back to King of Sartar (and probably a bit before that) then we can by implication see that the typical Humakt and Lhankor Mhy are understood as behaving in a somewhat feminine way, and so we have some basic roadsigns as to how we can construct this presence. And all this is without neglecting unconventional femininity within Gloranthan societal contexts, of course.

Thank you, that's a huge compliment! https://eightarmsandthemask.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-axe-and-sealed-jar-babeester-gor.html?m=1 This is a bit more of a variant Glorantha, I think, but it also touches on gender roles via the Babeester Gor cult and four short myths.

Shinto doesn't really have that penumbral lay-and-initiated relationship, though? Miko and kannushi also are only debatably god-talkers/theists in Gloranthan terms, given the highly propitiatory feature of much Shinto practice... I mean, she is consistently described as one of the major gods and her cult has representatives at every Earth temple at a minimum. So she's at least as widespread as dedicated Water and Fire cults, I think.

I also have a blog/website for Gloranthan material, of which https://eightarmsandthemask.blogspot.com/2019/12/what-reed-woman-told-me-excerpt.html?m=1 is probably the most immediately relevant in playing with gender and womanhood. I also have a Vinga story there but it focuses on some specific experiences of womanhood rather than more generic ones.

The broad difficulty here is that the defining events which have hitherto been described in initiating terms are ones that emphasize passivity on the part of the initiate. You can see this in the Ernaldan outline- "this passivity is key to Ernalda's power". Or in what appears to be the defining Dendara event, where her virtuousness lifts her into the sky away from the impure world. Or in the Lives of Sedenya, where the passages of the Red Goddess primarily consist of having things done to her- impregnation by Umath, shot down by Lukarius, impaled and tormented by the Devil, etc. There are active feminine deities, but they're subsidiary in several senses. So my thought is that you're going to have to make up a lot of stuff from the existing material. (Eg: reframing the Ernaldan initiation to be about the active creation of the adult self rather than by the parthenogenetic impregnation with the adult self via passive experience. Or a Dendara initiation which consists of a series of active tests of Virtue that culminates in a moment of ascension.) But I do look forward to seeing this project develop and would be quite willing to offer my thoughts.

90% of the population is rural, and the craft guild members would probably identify more strongly with the gods of their particular craft than with the Talking God who blesses the guild structure, so that in particular still fits well with my assumption that "lay member" describes people associated with different but still related gods rather than a distinct indifferently religious population. More broadly, though, does it make sense for every major cult to have a penumbra of specific lay members many times the size of the initiated? Especially for the "profession" cults which are fairly narrow in focus, like Humakt or Babeester Gor?

Let's put it this way- is it at all credible to believe that for, say, the Issaries cult, that there's a substantial amount of people who are just "lay members of the Issaries cult"? Or the Humakt cult? For those cults, we recognize pretty obviously that everyone involved in the cult on a regular basis is an "initiate", someone who is dedicated to the god involved, and the lay members of the ceremonies are the people of the community that the initiates belong to, who participate in the ceremonies of the accepted gods without dedicating themselves to said gods. And on another level, passing into adulthood, or citizenship, or similar, is "initiation" as you learn the secret knowledge necessary to enter into the new community, such as by discovering that you have a Star Heart or whatever. We also have fairly firm statements that Sartar is the "Kingdom of Heroes", in large part because the use of overt divine magic is common there (and by implication, uncommon elsewhere!) So, with that in mind, is contact with the Otherside then something that, in general, only 1% or so of the population ever experiences, and the remaining 99% only glimpses it in sacred ceremonies or sometimes receives blessings secondhand? Obviously, put like this, it sounds vaguely distasteful, and you could argue that everyone has access to magic via spirit magic, battle magic, common magic, talents, whatever you want to call it. That's not necessarily an argument I want to have, because in the end it's mostly aesthetic. Rather, what would it take to reconcile these things, such that the Otherside is close enough to taste for even the most miserable and downtrodden, and yet at the same time, places like Sartar or Loskalm are extraordinarily magical places, fairly crackling with currents of power? One solution is that Sartarites are relatively unique in that their rites of passage directly connect you to Orlanth and Ernalda without the benefit of any intervening masks or emanations or ancestors. In other words, in, say, Wenelia, your typical masculine Solanthi will be initiated into adulthood through their Solanth rites, whatever those are, which in some way reflect the Pit of the Strange Gods initiation of Orlanth without being the wholesale thing, and then the vast majority will comes out an "Initiate of Solanth", in RQ terms, with access to whatever limited Rune Magic that grants, and then they'll approach Orlanth through more minor faces and gain specialized Rune Magic without the broad general-purpose magic going for Orlanth Adventurous or Orlanth Thunderous gives you. And then it's only dedicated people who go further and into direct contact with the greater gods. What does this mean in rule terms? I have a very limited idea- to a large extent, I think it's honestly outside of rules entirely. If you're making a PC, you're either already playing an exceptional person who's going straight for channeling the full god into themselves, or you've agreed to play regular Orlmarths and Vasanas and thus would be forebearing the flashy stuff regardless. And as far as NPCs go, it can be handled by guidelines which say, "ordinary NPCs from these cultures have limited Rune Magic, select from these options or make up your own, with no more than X spells available", etc. Some immediate objections I can see: 1. Doesn't this just bring back the Heroquest 1E model of infinite subcults, which everyone agrees is not representative of Gloranthan reality? My answer is that this is certainly a risk, but that the main difference I see is that the Gloranthan model I am trying to produce here is one where contact with the numinous world is ordinary to the point where it occurs via naturalized, ritualized invocations, leaving the world of creative play with the divine and the spiritual and the essential for PCs and their opposite numbers. In other words, a place where magic is rich and part of daily life and the strange and wonderful is right around the corner, but also one where people try desperately to shape and confine the strange and wonderful to keep themselves safe. And thus, the PCs, as part of the Hero Wars, are tearing apart the old order just by being their lovable selves and tossing Thunderbolts at sassy bandits or Mindblasting insolent innkeepers. 2. Why doesn't everyone live like Sartarites? What causes people to fall away from deep contact with the divine? Apart from the social benefits of not having to worry about people summoning elementals or tossing lightning from hand to hand during arguments about where one hide begins and another ends, I would suggest that the primary cause of this is a cycle of stasis and motion, wherein people develop a rigid approach of contact with the Otherside that allows it to be more consistent and less dangerous, which leads to contact via safer masks and hypostases, which in turn eventually leads other people to attempt to deal with their own alienation via seeking out a deeper, higher power. And then before you know it, you're leading people in Waltzing and Hunting Bands or instructing an unearthly child as she instructs you or minutely examining a fancy picture book for the clues about creation you are sure it must contain.

Well, not to be overly puckish, but if Sedenya makes any mistakes, (and assuredly She does, and corrects them too, for things must turn), then her biggest one, judging from the Guide, is doing too much to hold the world together, allowing parasites like the Blood Sun to profit off of Her glory and light. But as for things coming through, well, yes, that's Taraltara the unknowable, her foot and leg coming down and resting upon Sedenya her footstool.

-An Etyries priestess gives a speech explaining the particulars of the Lunar Way's approach to Chaos, sometime during the 6th Wane. More generally, Sedenya's transcendence occurred at the deepest levels of the Underworld, right about where the Chaosium would be. So in a sense, the Lunar Way is probably animated in its attitude towards Chaos by the sincere, honest, and absolutely Truthful knowledge that Chaos is essential for the continued existence of Glorantha. As such, since we cannot get rid of it, we need to make it ours. But this may just be an allegorical statement- it is enough to understand that the Lunar Way is a pathway whereby the Many can become One, and this must necessarily include Chaotic things, which are part of the Many. And of course, other mystically enlightened beings seem somewhat indifferent to Chaos- dragons, Metsyla, etc. Which is to say that the closest things to inquisitors in the Empire, the Lunar Examiners, are going to be examining you for your ability to embrace Chaos and give that walktapus a big warm hug, rather than guarding against Chaos.

One note: the fact that we're getting our perspectives from people on the fringes of the Empire is a major factor in shaping how we understand the Lunar Way as it is practiced. The Moon seems preeminent because you have upwardly mobile provincials being dedicated and pious to win some favor and respect from the Heartlands, and the kind of people who have genuinely missionary zeal, and the kind of people who you put somewhere they can't do any harm, and the kind of people who have big ideas and need space in which to work them. But in practical terms, the Sedenya cult consists of weirdos with a mystical bent, the Seven Mothers are assorted weirdos (Jakaleel, Teelo, Danfive) or bureaucrats (Deezola, Irippi, Yanafal), Etyries is a merchant, Valare and Kana are even more cloistered weirdos, Hwarin and Hon-eel are Provincial cults... So in the domains of existence that are important to noble Pelorians, they are still as in charge as they have ever been, and Yelm clearly rules the universe, with his loyal daughter, Sedenya, showing recalcitrant people how to achieve peace with that fact. Of course, outsiders see the Moon ruling over the Sun, but who cares what they think, right?

The fundamental "problem" with Glorantha is that it approaches too close to realism, in that its societies, its on-the-ground perspectives, are implicitly similar in complexity to real-world societies, rather than the abbreviations useful for gaming and playing. Imagine being a worldbuilder and facing the task of coming up with a Turos for each Pelandan city! Or filling out all 49 major epithets of Orlanth and Ernalda (let alone the possibility they have 294 minor ones...) But in the real world, every city-state in the Levant appears to have had an individual Ba'al and Asherah during the early Iron Age. I haven't counted the number of epithets Odin and Freyja have (nobody actually knows for sure given our corpus of skaldic poetry is a bit limited) but it's certainly well into the double digits. And of course, when we say we have a good understanding of Orlanthi or Praxians compared to Lunars in terms of daily life, we're comparing apples to oranges. We know most of what we know about the former in terms of rural agricultural life. We know much less about urban Sartarites in their daily lives, or about the Oasis People of Prax. (Granted, Pelorian rice farmers are also not likely to become adventurers conventionally...) That being said, having made some efforts at writing things set within a stable Lunar Empire, I think the big difficulty is that it demands a much more internally-focused genre playbook than most roleplaying games are able to deliver on, let alone deliver it while remaining just as capable of delivering things like Borderlands. The big inspirations I found myself relying on were things like paranoid fiction, spy and mystery novels, etc. So if anyone has a good way to play out Six Days Of The Condor or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or Twin Peaks... Which is why, getting back to the initial topic, the tack being taken of "The Big Sun and Little Sun cults are for most intents and purposes identical across cultures and we'll use the same names of Yelm and Yelmalio for them" is in many ways a blessing, in that there's an anchoring allowing you to use "Ehilm" and "Worlath" and "Humct" by putting out a handout that just says "this is what they call X here." Maybe if you're feeling bold, you might invent a subcult and a Rune spell associated with it.

Well, that's why I specified folk etymology- it's not true (probably), but it's something people would tell themselves without the knowledge of the sacred mysteries of Sedenya that explain why curved blades. Fortunately or not, my suspicions in that area are that it's related to human sacrifice (see also the myth in the Entekosiad where Jaganatha appears to inform the High Gods that their rule will end because they have refused to allow human sacrifice...)

A backronymic/folk etymology micromyth: Yanafali use curved blades because when Humakt tried to slay his apostate follower, his sword bent.

There's a great old Glorantha Digest post, I think it was, where Brithini humor is discussed. They have weekly 15-minute humor breaks, where one of the seven approved jokes are told, and then very occasionally laughed at. One of the real kneeslappers is "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

I mean, maybe Brithini do. But Brithini cycles can be measured in the centuries in any case.