Eff

Something that does intrigue me a bit is that starchy roots don't seem to have much of a presence in Glorantha as things currently stand. Manioc/cassava, taro, yams, sweet potatoes, and of course regular potatoes. Where might they be grown? Of course, given that maize was a lost God Time crop until Hon-Eel reintroduced it together with the proper rituals for cultivating it, perhaps potatoes (sweet and white) and manioc are also lost God Time crops, only awaiting some dedicated Heroquester to discover their secrets. And African/Oceanian crops have places where they would be likely to be cultivated in Pamaltela and the East Isles.

Hmm. I have fairly small-c catholic tastes, unfortunately, so I'd enjoy playing a pretty broad swathe of women in Sartar/Tarsh/Holy Country settings. Orlanth women/Vinga, Ernaldans, Issaries, Lhankor Mhy, Chalana Arroy, Humakt, Babeester Gor... those are the major player-characterish cults. I would probably my-Glorantha Ernalda and Babs a bit. Vinga is probably the most directly relatable cult to me, but that's because I'm also a somewhat butch lesbian and so the combination of masculine role expression and visible femininity (along with of course the intimations of women's homosociality, especially in older fan writeups) is very appealing. Lunar cults in general are also fairly appealing. I can't think of any that are specifically related to transness beyond a general appreciation for deliberate and conscious transgression in Lunat philosophy as a whole. I think my biggest wish would be a sense of where transness and LGBTness generally fits into Western cultures. Meriatan is probably gay, maybe bi, and that's about it, I think? There should be more about it in Peloria but I have a good sense of how to incorporate it into existing material subconsciously, I think. I think the only Heler iconography I can really remember off the top of my head is KoDP illustrations, yeah. Contemporary stuff is likely to be better just because of the more cosmopolitan influences going into the most recent art.

Some deities that ought to be important in RW mythologies are often surprisingly afterthoughts. Amaterasu and Susanoo, Sun and Storm, are virtually absent from ordinary Shinto rituals and it's rare to see them in shrines. Shapash, the sun goddess of Ugarit, appears to have gone completely without any worship as far as we can tell. Offering my own personal take as a trans woman, I think that there needs to be a lot of careful steps taken to flesh out Orlanthi gender (though the RQG core has a good starting position!) in order to strike a balance between using historically evident "constricted" expressions of variant gender (eg sworn virgins, hijra, kathoey, certain forms of being two-spirit historically) and providing something that allows transgender folks to play in Glorantha as ourselves. And Heler is of course tricky because most of the existing iconography is masculine.

And then you add Pella to the mix... Perhaps there's room to write a myth here. "How Orendara Sorted Out The Grain Sisters"?

I don't think there are any places where it's definite that rye and/or oats are used as primary crops, but rye and oats are both known in Pelanda, and I have a speculative construction of a three-tiered Pelorian agriculture with the rye/barley/oats (and possibly millet?) complex in the hills, wheat (as Pelora is the goddess of wheat to the Esrolians, which certainly suggests a connection with Peloria) in the flat country, and rice (domesticated wild rice rather than Oryza sativa, or maybe sativa is the third variety) in the river valleys, marshes, and floodplains. The hills would now to a certain extent be fortified with maize. Rye and oats are also both cultivated in Esrolia, oats are definitely cultivated in Maniria. Using RW analogies, perhaps Fronela cultivates rye and oats as their predominant crops, seeing as rye is the major staple grain in the cooler parts of Eastern Europe?

Obvious, Disorder is what happens when you remove the middle string of Harmony, causing the other two to get tangled. 😛

I have several objections to this. I'll start with the mostly purely Gloranthan one. Firstly, it supposes that the Lunar Empire performs a massive top-down social transformation within its borders, one which touches every single facet of daily life, solely and specifically for replacing the existing infrastructure of trade from the top down. This is completely uncharacteristic for them, and it raises the question of why they don't do this for any other facet of the Lunar Way, especially ones that would seem much more core to it than the question of which god the village merchants pray to to ensure their rice harvest makes it to market and fetches a good price. That is, why aren't they engaging in social engineering to crush Dara Happan traditionalism (which has been a frequent problem for the Empire!) or to eliminate slavery, or something? This ends up handing the Lunars a level of power they never really demonstrate elsewhere, and thematically disrupts the sense that the Lunars are trying desperately to balance forces that could very easily overwhelm them if they aren't handled properly. Secondly, there's not really any sense that the Lunars want to replace any gods beyond possibly Orlanth (certainly they suppress Orlanth's worship, but their rhetoric is about healing and calming him, not about eliminating him). In other words, if the Lunars make no effort to replace Ernalda in Tarsh, as opposed to explaining how Ernalda is related to the Red Goddess, and if they have a ready-made explanation for a Lunar relationship for Issaries, by declaring Etyries is Issaries's daughter, (or taking advantage of a pre-existing belief related to that), then why would they not do with Issaries what they do with Ernalda? Thirdly, I feel that this is something of a backwards way to approach things. If we see a pattern in Lunar deities where they more or less have a kind of non-overlapping magisterium with regards to the existing gods of various cultures, such that Irippi Ontor coexists with Buserian and Lhankor Mhy, Yanafal Tarnils coexists with Shargash and Daxdarius and Urvairinius and Humakt and Polaris and Yelmalio, Deezola coexists with Oria and Ernalda and Chalana Arroy and Erissa, Teelo Norri doesn't displace other youth and childhood deities, Jakaleel's spirit practices haven't wiped out existing spiritism, etc. etc., then why would we presume that a particular deity breaks the pattern? In other words, why wouldn't we assume Etyries is like other Lunar deities in that she's a deity that's been adopted and used for the purposes of running a multicultural empire that explicitly sets its ruling class apart from all the cultures that it rules and adopts specific deities that can be set above existing ones without creating problems? And then once we have looked at her from this functionalist perspective, we can develop the ways in which she fits this pattern. Fourthly, it's just not really fun to tell Sartarite and Praxian players, "Okay, here's this god of traders and rhetoricians and diplomats, but his cult was effectively wiped out and forced underground until this very year, (or is currently forced underground if you're playing at any point between 1602 and 1625) and all the cool stuff you can read about in the background materials... just doesn't exist anymore. It will all have to be reconstructed." And then there is no other option- Etyries isn't playable as of yet, and won't be playable until GaGoG comes out. It's bad from a "making Glorantha playable" perspective because it's taking core setting elements (most people are going to be reading Lightbringer stuff where Issaries is prominent as their introductory/early material) and severely restricting them in the most developed parts of the setting to play in. Fifthly, I do think it kind of degrades a major conflict in the setting. If the conflict isn't "Sedenya versus Orlanth" but "The Moon versus the Storm Tribe", the question of collaboration becomes a lot less complicated because it's a genuinely existential conflict. Ernaldans can't say that there's always another way when the Red Goddess wants to eliminate them entirely, etc., whereas if it's something where it seems like 90% of Sartarite life can go on as usual, just with some slight modifications to make Destor and Barntar the names you use in the ceremonies, then the internal conflicts within Sartar become much more mutable. Obviously this is less of an issue if you start at the default RQG date of post-Dragonrise, but pre-Dragonrise Sartar should be gamable and the conflicts caused by the occupation should be, and this is of course all my opinion, very much ones that aren't clear-cut for players, even if characters find it very clear-cut that Uncle Vengaharl did something unforgivable by going to the Seven Mothers temple in Wilmskirk for food for the stead during the Great Winter. That being said, I am only laying out my reasons why I find this perspective unconvincing for myself and arguing for why I think my take on Etyries is more fruitful.

I'm not sure that's the case. Apart from MGF as a principle, Lunar cults don't appear to generally displace pre-existing cults. Deezola doesn't replace Oria or Ernalda or Chalana Arroy or Erissa, Yanafal Tarnils doesn't displace local wargods, Irippi Ontor hasn't replaced Buserian. In general, Lunar cults seem to place themselves "atop" existing cults as a point of entry to the Lunar Way (and not incidentally form a kind of bureaucracy as a consequence). And we know that Issaries was the god of markets in Peloria before the Lunars, because Lokarnos is a god of wagons/tribute collection, rather than free trade, so unless we presume Etyries has completely replaced Issaries in the Empire, entirely unlike any other Lunar cult, I just don't see a Gloranthan reason why Issaries would be suppressed in Sartar. That being said, what does Etyries do that makes her cult a distinct one from Issaries? Perhaps Etyries focuses on the creation of large trading enterprises as opposed to the small individual traders of traditional Issaries life? (And of course the bookkeeping techniques associated with that.) So the markets will be sacralized to both under the occupation.

Some potential setpieces: - Large Pelorian cities probably take out the city gods from their temple and parade them around in a massive day-long celebration on their holy day. Our intrepid barbarian heroes have just managed to get away from the Unspoken Word, now they have to make their way through the party without being seduced by Lunar blandishments and still evading the pursuing secret police. And for some unfathomable reason, there's all these people carrying large panes of glass around... -The heroes, having run afoul of a secret order within the Lion Society, have been captured and put into the Basmol Ruins, to be hunted to keep the Lion Society's elite sharp. These ruins were made for lion-people, with lots of open courts atop buildings laid out perfectly for sunning yourself, lots of broad ramps, and so on. Will Rokar/Hrestol/Siglat/Arkat's guidance be enough to let them escape, or perhaps even triumph over their captors?

There are basically two options here, as I see it: 1) Dara Happan religion is like Hellenic and Roman religion and initiation is a province of mystery cults and not an everyday thing. This would require a great deal of elaboration to make work within Gloranthan metaphysics and with existing material which very much suggests Dara Happans use theistic emulation magic which RQ calls Rune Magic. 2) Dara Happans don't initiate like Orlanthi in that the overwhelming majority aren't initiated into adulthood into the same god's cult. Instead you initiate into the city-gods' cult at adulthood and then into particular cults associated with your social role and move between them as that shifts. Obviously, I prefer this approach, in that it retains a lot of the Mesopotamian and Classical Antiquity feel of Dara Happa and Peloria by making DH spiritually a collection of city-states bound by shared cultural norms and also works without having to stretch the metaphysics too much. And how this manifests is that the average Dara Happan has more specialized magic than the average Orlanthi does. So Dara Happans are generally better in their particular field than Orlanthi but not as flexible. (In a military analogy, the DH phalanx would be difficult to break with a frontal assault but the looser Orlanthi warbands would be more able to flow around it and attack from its sides and rear.) The broader question is that this would possibly push things into HQ1 territory with regards to profusion of cults, though ruleswise it seems simple to just have a citygod overarching cult and note a few specialized variants.

Other good euphemisms for Z-guy: Dronar's tick Horal's burden Talar's rash The Wicked Hydrophobe Of The West

And, to be honest, the elementalism breaks down completely if you're in an spiritism-dominated culture or Malkioni country. It's kind of a shame that theism has such a dominant presence in Gloranthan discussion online- there's at least three other answers to any given question about the setting, and while Lunar ones are usually unhelpful...

I mean, I think the issue here is that the elements used have fairly strong connotations. The idea of a calm storm defies the basic metaphors we use to understand the world. It's downright paradoxical. Obviously, there's calm air, so perhaps the Storm element should "really" be the Air element or whatever. But a lot of Gloranthan definitions are built around these basic metaphors. The Fire rune is technically the Sky rune. The Sky is the heavens. The heavens are above us. They're perfect and unchanging, reliable. So the Sky is better than we are and by implication demands we submit to it. So the idea of a rebellious Sun requires quite a bit of work to fit in (unless it's as a cosmogonic rebellion against the Dark or the Earth or whatever). So I don't like the "elemental civilization" motif because I like Glorantha because of how anthropological it is. That is, elemental civilizations in fantasy fiction are generally similarly metaphorical and so they become a kind of extension of a psychological state, especially for the protagonist. To pick on Avatar: the Last Airbender for a moment, it's not surprising that it's Water and Air fighting Fire's attempt to dominate the world and having to try and persuade Earth to assist with difficulty. There's also nothing wrong with that. But when Glorantha is running on all cylinders (and it certainly doesn't always do so), then it takes these externalized psychological/metaphorical conflicts and reintegrates them back into people's heads without sacrificing the externality. That is to say, it is easy to imagine the internal conflict between self-aggrandizement and self-sacrifice within a person, but in the Gloranthan mode that I use, it can also be shown via Harrek fighting Jar-Eel. So Glorantha is in a way a playground where we can explore sacredness.

Feel free to steal it! This becomes even easier after Argenteus dies- clearly, Moonson has turned his back on the Empire in its occlusion! (And if they make it all the way to the 1640s, they eagerly flock to Phargentes the Younger when he marches south.)

This is going to get deep into the mythological weeds very quickly. After all, does Sedenya's "struggle for control of the Middle Air" mean that after she wins people will all breathe moonbeams instead of air? Or is she trying to replace Orlanth in his metaphysical "King of the Gods" role, sort of walking up to Ernalda and telling her, "Babe, you could do so much better than this himbo" and lowering her sunglasses meaningfully? I have my own answer, but it's fairly deep myth and not really relevant to the lay Lunar unless they're of a mystical bent. Well, moreso than usual. You're using the default post-Dragonrise date for this game, right? 1625 or thereabouts? If you are, bear in mind that a number of tribes and clans embraced the Lunar Way. So a full-on purge of Lunars is not practical and probably doesn't happen. So if your character is just following a Lunar cult, Seven Mothers or whatever, you could be one of those, furtively worshipping in secluded services among the "collaborator" clans. Or if you're a Tarshite, the Fazzurite faction there is loosely aligned with Sartar while being strongly Lunar, which would probably force some official tolerance. If you're a full Heartlander (or at least from further north in the Provinces), perhaps you are a Lunar dissident. You've concluded (maybe after seeing the Dragonrise or Harrek's rampage or some similar Lunar disaster) that the Empire has it wrong, is misunderstanding Sedenya's will. Perhaps Moonson has been deluded by his wicked Carmanian/Spolite/Dara Happan/Pelandan/Orayan/Provincial counselors. Perhaps the current Moonson is a fake! You're probably not a pacifistic White Moon cultist, though. You may also have simply gone a little native and started identifying with the Sartarites. You might well be able to get away with it if you praise Orlanth loudly and publicly enough. (Perhaps you've determined that Orlanth has been healed, what with his Ring having all 11 lights in it again).

It's my firm belief/firmly part of my Glorantha that the traditionalist Ernalda priestess attitude towards the Lunar Way can be summed up as: "If Sedenya thinks she's so important she can marry Ernalda too."

A more subtle aspect of Sedenya is that her cycle is not a circle, but rather what Douglas Hofstadter calls a "strange loop"- a circle-like object that nevertheless changes slightly every time it completes a loop. (Imagine a Lunar missionary drawing the Moon Rune, and then, in a flash of crimson light, pulling it up from the ground to reveal that it's a 2-dimensional representation of a 3-dimensional barred helix.) The basic way to illustrate this is through what Rashorana tells Gerra- "to live is to suffer, but suffering is not life". Life = Suffering, Suffering ≠ Life. For the everyday Lunar follower (apart from providing an aphorism you can quote whenever things go poorly or you want to annoy people), what does this mean? I would suggest that the most exalted way to perform Lunar magic is to complete a circuit but do so in a way that produces something new. Which means that if you can do that for your everyday activities as much as possible, then you'll surely have luck and the Goddess's blessing! In addition, the Goddess moves in an unexpected direction (the barred helix interpretation of the Moon Rune would be spiraling towards or away from the viewer). Misdirection is a holy art for Lunars to practice. Easier than meditation to work into the adventuring life, too.

I think my answer is that, IMO, "Ernalda" is the name the most familiar Orlanthi use for the Great Earth Goddess and it's convenience that causes us to use that name for the sake of communication. That said, if everything is made of everything and the pure beings are all gone, it's not incorrect to say that all the gods are manifestations of a particular primal power in varying degrees. It's just that it's only the Lunars who have hit upon this exciting conversational gambit so far.

Well, I don't think Ernalda is an "earth" goddess while being an Earth goddess. That is, if you take a look at general Orlanthi mythology, you have two Earth triples, both following a maiden-mother-crone motif (and although that motif is largely illusion in the real world, Glorantha does make use of it), Voria -> Esrola -> Asrelia and Babeester Gor -> Maran Gor -> Ty Kora Tek. So where does Ernalda fit in to this scheme? Where's the younger Ernalda, where's the older Ernalda? If we look at the story of Orlanth's fight with the Evil Emperor, I think it might be best to interpret what we see as a magical duel. Orlanth pits his Motion, his Change, his power of Becoming, against the Emperor's Stasis, his power of Being. But since the two power runes involved are opposites, there's a stalemate. Orlanth can't win, the Emperor can't hand him a lasting defeat. It's only when Orlanth brings in another power, Death, that Orlanth is able to win. I would argue that this is Orlanth demonstrating Mastery, that he is showing that he can control forces outside of himself. (The myth of Orlanth and Ernalda's romance also has elements of this, but I'd have to do a closer reading to tease them out.) So what is Ernalda, in this? Ernalda appears to represent sovereignty here. Yelm holds Ernalda prisoner, and she can only be freed by his defeat, that is by Orlanth taking away Yelm's rulership of the universe. Ernalda is then freed, and Orlanth is in a position to become King of the Gods. But Ernalda can't actually belong to any one person. Yelm was a tyrant for thinking that, and Orlanth, too, fails to defend the universe from Predark/Chaos. It is only with the Ritual of the Net, embracing a plurality of sovereignty, that the universe can be defended successfully. One of the few Ernalda-centric myths we have is the one where she teaches humans the Flax Dance, Goose Dance, and how to sacrifice. This would, of course, posit her as a wielder of Death too, but this time back in the Green Age, as she separates humans and gods and tells them who sacrifices and who is sacrificed to. It's thus not really surprising that Ginna Jar is understood as either Ernalda's ghost or Glorantha's ghost or Arachne Solara. I think that to a very large extent Ernalda is like Sedenya (and the Esrolian Imarja is the equivalent of Sedenya's Taraltara) in that she's both a relatively minor goddess originally (Sedenya the Turner who helped slay Murharzarm, Ernalda the earth goddess of Saird? Wenelia?) and the sovereign power of the universe. If we were being Lunar about it, we would say that Esrola and Ty Kora Tek and all them are just her Masks that she uses to communicate different aspects of the Earth to others. So to that extent, perhaps "Heortling" is best translated as "person who sticks forks into electrical sockets to see what happens". Imagine offering sacrifice to this truly arcane and supreme goddess for your little hide of land, and expecting her to answer! And yet answer she does. EDIT: A charming yet unfortunately confusing possibility is to have "ernalda" be a generic title for Orlanthi goddesses- they're all the ernaldas. So Mahome is the Fire ernalda, Heler is the water Ernalda, etc. etc. In this case I'm drawing upon the genericization of "Asherah" from a goddess to a title in western Fertile Crescent mythology.

Some things that are immediately relevant to you as a regular Lunar, IMO- The Lunar Way is built around a broad cycle that is reflected in everyday people's lives and the world around you. The phases of the Red Moon are meant to teach the world of this and remind the followers of the basic cycle. There is an even broader cycle, that of Sedenya's Masks. The current Mask is agreed to be Natha, the Balancing Moon. To that extent, the ruling principle of the Lunar Way in this current period is Balance. As an ordinary person, you need to seek Balance within yourself and within your life, you need to help perpetuate the Balance that Moonson and Great Sister and their servants are creating for the Empire (I assume you're not playing a dissident Lunar), etc. Lunar Balance is not pacifistic in outlook. Natha is the most martial aspect of the Red Moon, so it's fully accepted that violence and disruption and seeming destruction of existing Balance is necessary to create true Balance. Lunar ideology focuses on the notion of reconciliation of seeming opposites. Thus, even if you're faced with apparently invincible obstacles or obstinacy, don't worry. Sedenya will guide you to Balance there as well.

I think Biselenslib is an earth goddess if she's firmly elemental, yeah. But she might be a water goddess because she's a wetland bird. That's a possible mythical interpretation, but (out of Glorantha) I think it's a metaphor for water being fluid and changeable. There are Staffordian statements about the gods being actually genderfluid or similar, although I couldn't cite them directly. So perhaps the tendency for Water deities to be fluid, hermaphroditic, etc. is a consequence of them being so alienated from the lives of land people that they're experienced more directly without the comforting filters of myth? But then of course we have Heler, who is certainly textually fluid while being firmly ensconced within land people's myths.

Well, not exactly. My opinion is that the Queen and King positions are inherently unequal and the Queen is superior to the King. The Queen is the avatar of the land, the King is just some dork who thinks he has what it takes to be anointed and blessed by her. The problem (and it's a perennial problem within existing Gloranthan material, alas) is that there's an implicit passive/active distinction which is heavily gendered. It's not as bad for the FHQs, because most of them are historical actors and they appear to hold the real balance of executive power in Grazer society. To be honest, though, I think the Queen has been the superior partner for most Kings of Dragon Pass. The Beast People live in a way that the Lady of the Wild would appreciate, and Ironhoof was King of Dragon Pass when she was the sovereign power. Tarsh tolerates human sacrifice to a degree most Orlanthi and Pelorians find disquieting (look at how eagerly they've adopted the Hon-Eel maize fertilization rites) and Arim the Pauper was King of Dragon Pass when he codified early Tarshite society. The main exceptions seem to be Sartar and Argrath (now that I think about it, Tarkalor vanishing after Grizzly Peak may have been him sacrificing his body to Dragon Pass) and Sartar seems to merely prove an equality between Heortling life and Grazer life? And then they split their kids between them. I mean, I don't really have a problem with the King having a massive disadvantage. It's like the fight with the Bad Man in the Runequest Glorantha rules for becoming a shaman- the odds are stacked so high against you that only the very lucky or the naturally powerful are able to awaken their fetch without having taboos imposed on them. If you want power over the world, you have to accept the world pushing back.

Hmm. I have a theory that the Six Portions are representations of the elements, especially since Vrimak has an obvious association with Fire, Kazkurtum with Darkness (the reign of Kazkurtum is the period when no stars are visible in the sky anymore/the true stellar knowledge of Buserian is extinguished- Sheng's "Celestial" Empire presumably did the latter and thus earned him the sobriquet Kazkurtum after he was defeated), BernEel Arashagern a weaker one with Water, Bijiif possibly Earth? As Yelm's Shape? But Enverinus is also very obviously Fire and not Air... I developed this from thinking about why there are, in Lunar cosmology, six elements and seven souls, and then I realized that the Seventh Soul isn't revealed until after the First Battle of Chaos, so far as we're aware. So my thought became that the Sedenya Portion of the Lunar soul is your Chaos portion (or something like that), and then I realized that Antirius, as Yelm's Justice, would be a balancing force and the Moon rune is also called the Balance rune... So Antirius would be Yelm's Moon portion. Obviously, since Yelm is lord of the Sky, all of his portions are celestial in nature. This is definitely a very rough theory, I will admit! Well, as for the procession of Yelms, two thoughts: During the Storm Age and part of the Darkness, the overlord of the Sky appears to be Orlanth, having demonstrated mastery over at least two of the Cold Suns/Little Suns and being the god who destroys Tyram the Sky Tyrant where the surviving celestial gods are largely helpless. But this may be a relic of Orlanth having developed mastery over the Universe by that point. Does it have to be a big yellow ball? Should we classify the previous White Sun of the Green Age, prior to the rise of Brightface, as a previous Yelm?

Maybe? But I don't think so, given that Arraz has associations with martiality as "leader of the star captains" and Dara Happa in Time has a military record of, well... They won a lot of moral victories, at least! Of course, I have no idea who's Yelm currently. Two silly suggestions: It's Antirius, the shattering of Yelm is a metaphor to describe the procession of Yelms, Plentonius even says that the Sun which rises at the Dawn is Antirius, it's been Antirius all the way through, or at least since the Sunstop when the Sun became weaker. Alternately, it's Elmal, the Guardian Sun of Six Ages, who really did become Yelm by defeating Valind's effort to usurp the Sunpath, and foisted his mortal people off on Kargzant and Yelmalio.

For a somewhat more tongue-in-cheek possibility, the inconsistencies around Arraz's geneaology are explicable if we assume he's a brother of Dayzatar and Lodril by marriage rather than by birth... I think this distinction in Dara Happa probably dates to the Ten Tests. Murharzarm declares that the punishment for polygyny is to have multiple wives, which to me suggests a custom that is disfavored now but must be accounted for. And he says this to Lodril, a god of the previous generation or previous generation but one. Of course, it may have originally been a passing joke exalted as a bit of wisdom in the aftermath of the Flood...