Eff

Yes. You have that motif, don't you? Uleria being feared or hated, and obviously part of that comes, in origin, from the desire to differentiate "our" mode of existence from "their" mode of existence- we think love is good, but these traditional people think love is suspicious and disruptive, and another part of it comes from the vicissitudes of desire, romance, sex, love, and human relationships. And then Uleria's property rights over that hourglass suggest, perhaps, that she's making a statement that Life, as a force, complicates and makes things difficult. Biological exuberance, if you will. So in that case, the "reciprocal initiation", the ability to participate and get juiced up, may well be this whimsical, mutable, difficult-to-predict thing. Among the various things Uleria serves, perhaps we can find "headaches" as well. I'm going off of the working assumption (which I suspect will likely never really be contradicted editorially) for the purposes of discussing multiple Gloranthas at once that divine cults don't vary significantly from place to place- that if Uleria is there, you get the whole shebang, rather than Pelorian Uleria having only two entrances to her temples (Lodril and Shargash are definitely into that in any case) and the sex work aspect, or the intimacy work aspect if you prefer, being carefully removed. And from that, you might think that "good women" like Dendara or her cultists as they are typically presented would perhaps resent the Ulerians who don't play the game of being good and who represent a kind of diffuse existential threat to Dendara/ns. But if that's not the case, then further exploration and development and playfulness is needed. (Going by those old Greg notes which equated Dendara with Vishnu and Yelm with Brahma, perhaps the conventional fan understanding of Dendara has been a bit anemic. Severely irony-deficient. Or maybe Greg wasn't aware of the story about Vishnu-as-Mohini attempting to seduce Brahma.)

What's interesting about the Uleria-Dendara relationship is what it might imply about Yelm and Dendara's relationship- is Dendara fine with Uleria (are Dendarans fine with Ulerians) because it means Yelm/Yelmites have less sex with her/them, or because Dendarans also have their side pieces? Not that those are the only two options, but given the dynamics of Dendara as a "perfect submissive wife", (with no small hint of irony in the Glorious Reascent, but who knows if it'll be ironic for RQG) there are some fascinating questions to ask about her relationship to sex work and sex workers and the motif of Yelmic sexism and patriarchy.

When it comes to cancer, the most effective treatments (radiotherapy, chemotherapy) involve damaging large quantities of healthy tissue. Even surgical excision still requires some damage to healthy tissue, and may require a full removal of an organ, or large parts of one. There is thus a necessity for a kind of synthesis, because there is no guarantee of returning to the thesis, absent the aftereffects of treatment. But of course, is a musical term, referring to multiple independent sounds and their synthesis into a piece of music.

Yes. Well, that's the benefit of being at the top of the twin pyramids of - you get to interact with the opposing arrowheads of two s at odds, or be between two cosmic mountains, depending on your preferences. (Or perhaps both, there was a time when Uleria had runes in her description.) Maybe that's contingent on being able to recognize that there are more entrances than just three, or that if someone thinks they only have two, they actually have at least four. Who can say? I'm running out of euphemisms and need coffee.

I would assume that, even if the priesthood offers the girlfriend/boyfriend experience, that the goddess embraces all kinds of sex workers, because it's still intimacy created by the exchange of money. It's like the three entrances to her temple- that's a sex joke. Anything built atop that is built atop the foundation of "Uleria's temples have three entrances just like her body has three holes, har de har", which doesn't invalidate the exegesis, but should, in my opinion, remind us that Uleria is universal and beyond propriety or respectability. Or ought to be.

The Telmori entry in the Bestiary assumes that all Telmori participate in the involuntary shapeshifting, in addition to the two little lines in the Telmor cult: "Initiate Requirements: Everyone born of Telmori parents is automatically an initiate. Those not born into the tribe must be adopted before they can join the cult." Now there's an immediate question here about people marrying into the tribe and whether their children count as "of Telmori parents" or not, and whether they in turn become involuntary shapeshifters and get a wolf companion- indeed, it is questionable from the text if there are any Telmori women at all, since the Telmori and their wolf companions fight "as brothers", not as siblings. EDIT: By "assumes", I mean that statements like "The Telmori have a simple and primitive physical culture. Since they weekly shed their hands and abandon their tools, they dare not make them too valuable." are somewhat difficult to square with a quarter to a third of Telmori not shapeshifting and presumably being able to pick up and put away dropped tools and possessions while their shapeshifted friends and family try to look sheepish in wolf form.

Wonder if there've been any stolen generations of Telmori children.

What theory? What people are reacting to is the statement that Orlanth only judges people on their deeds and yet simultaneously Telmori are banned from the cult due to being Chaotic/Chaos-tainted. So how do we reconcile these things together? Is it that Telmori failing to slit their own throats for being Chaos-tainted is sufficiently wicked of a deed to bar them from the cult?

You know, I think that you could run with this and the Free Army and make this whole incident part of an effort (by Argrath? by Argrath's supporters in Sartar?) to centralize Sartar and destroy the traditional tribal and city intermediaries and their independent power. Because nobody likes the Telmori and there's the whole "destroyed the Maboder" thing, they serve as the test case for setting up the authority of the Prince to destroy whole tribes as tribal governments. I doubt your game has done much if any groundwork to set this up, because it's a fairly specific thing derived from dull poli-sci books, but I thought of it and decided to say it for anyone to pick up and work with. Separately, another option for "why do the Wolfrunners exist?" would be that the Prince of Sartar, for ritual reasons, needs to have Telmori bodyguards, and having people with flayed Telmori skins as part of his bodyguard is how Argrath takes care of that ritual reason. Again, bleak. Many of my contributions haven't been the most happy in this thread.

Yes, it is very incongruous. I actually had never really considered the question of "why don't Telmori initiate to Orlanth?" before that article, because it never seemed relevant- Telmori have such an unusual situation that the idea that they mostly stick with Telmor and sometimes go into "professional" cults like Issaries/CA/Lhankor Mhy and sometimes have embraced cults that offer a possible modification to the werewolf curse, like the Lunars in the immediate timeframe, always was my default. But now I'm wondering just what's going on there.

I have to admit, my eyebrows raised quite high at Telmori being barred from the Orlanth cult but the Orlanth cultists (or the god himself, it's not entirely clear to me) being willing to make use of the Telmori as inferiors. But as for the Storm Bull cult apparently only being held back from exterminating the Telmori due to their insufficient numbers, well... isn't that interesting?

On a side note to one of my earlier suggestions, Argrath doesn't seem to have many, if any morokanth in his Barbarian Horde. It's entirely plausible he's just prejudiced against non-humans!

This thread takes as a premise that Argrath did in fact wipe out the Telmori in 1627, so arguing that he didn't, the Wolfrunner chit is just the Telmori, or it didn't happen at all, doesn't seem to help Mr. @Rodney Dangerduck with his inquiries.

A couple of other potential factors you can use here: -Argrath seems to have a number of Storm Bull cultists in his army, so it may be a way to keep their firm support by offering them violence against a "Chaotic"/"Chaos-tainted" target, in particular if he doesn't want to pillage Alda-Chur or deeper in Tarsh, or can't. -Argrath is aiming to distance himself from the previous princes Kallyr and Salinarg by emphasizing that he's for humans and against non-humans/werewolves. Perhaps around this time the three duck Sartar City Militia chits are dispatched to Delecti and the Ivory Plinth. -The Telmori, with their coincidental Red Moon associations, are a viable, ethnically distinct target for unifying Sartarites against the Lunars without going through the difficulties of purging every 7 Mothers convert. -Argrath believes that as Arkat reborn it is his duty to finish the job Arkat started through violence against the werewolves. -The Telmori refused to join Argrath initially and he takes vengeance against them as backsliders and forms the Wolfrunners as a positive side effect. -The Telmori stand in the way of Argrath clear-cutting their forested lands to fuel a heavily expanded weapons industry, and Argrath can sidestep the power of the oaths and obligations between the werewolves and the principality through mass murder. All of these are of course bleak, but ethnic cleansing and genocide kind of are that way no matter what.

It's mirroring the falling-out between the conspirators against Yelm (Murharzarm edition), (or rather the Glorious Reascent provided a prequel civil war between victorious divine rebels) and Humakt slaying Orlanth in the "Sword Story", so if we take it as true that they're the same entity, it perhaps becomes a mocking puppet-show of the gods' own actions and how they've doomed the world.

The original Sekhmet myth has Ra send Sekhmet as the incarnation of his vengeance/his eye to kill humans conspiring to destroy him, but then Sekhmet continues killing humans indiscriminately, at which point Ra dyes beer red to make it look like blood and gets Sekhmet blackout drunk, and when she wakes up she's not interested in killing anymore. So I think that the healers of Healer Valley would have done nothing wrong, based on the source material used.

There's such a web of Sun Jr. entities- beyond the ones we've discussed, we've also got Yelorna, Sun Daughter, Halamalao, Metsyla, I believe there's an East Isles one, and who knows what's up with Galanin... I think you're just forced to, at some level, invent your own jigsaw pieces to make it all work. Or, alternately, insist the jigsaw pieces are actually all just the same piece... Glorantha isn't real. When you say that "it is never going to be a deep and unanswerable mystery to any inhabitant of Dragon Pass whether Yelmalio and Elmal are the same or not", I can say that it is, and I have interviewed over 4000 Orlanthis as evidence, and we are both on the exact same ground- we are talking about something that is, in conventional definitions, unknowable, because it concerns something that is definitionally untrue. We can talk about the contents of a given book or online essay or whatever and know things in those contents because those contents are a matter of truth, but there is no statement either way on that matter- even the revelation of the Many Suns appears to be a moment of mystical insight rather than a matter of reasoned argumentation, which might well suggest that it is a deep mystery that, within the imagined fictional universe we conjure up, cannot be approached rationally. Or maybe nobody noticed it until Monrogh had a snakes-biting-their-own-tails moment and figured out the structure of benzene. Now, having said all that, what I am pointing to is not whether there is any such disagreement or not. The Greg Stafford quote is instead about how there are two (plus) ways of making Gloranthas, one where the Elmal material of King of Sartar is used and one where it isn't, and that these are both equally true. That is, there are multiple Gloranthas in which each one may or may not have any disputation about this status or not. That's the key factor here- at that unenlightened stage, there was no singular true Glorantha, there were many Gloranthas. There was nothing, to Stafford, higher than that which was produced through play, at that time.

What on Earth are you talking about?

Welcome to the "weird corner", then! On that weird end of things, of course, we have the thirty-year-old essay on Elmal: "I am not dismayed by disagreements since then. (I am dismayed, instead, by people’s hurt over this change.) I am glad that the Yelmalions insist that their god, Yelmalio, is ancient with history stretching from before the Dragonkill War. They insist that we brought back Elmal by our heroquesting. I expect them to swear by this, and to proffer artifacts and tales to prove that it is Yelmalio who was the original sun god for us. To them Monro, perhaps the most honorable man I have ever met, preserved the original form of our Godtime worship and maneuvered to remove the last of his True Believers from among our corrupting influence. I do not disagree with this, and am proud of my little part in liberating them from us." Or to put it another way, in 1993, Francis Gregory Stafford seemed to believe in some kind of compatibilist vision- the Gloranthas without Elmal and those with Elmal were in some sense equally "true", equally grammatical statements in the Glorantha-language. I am sure he recanted this later, and revealed that there was, in truth, a true Glorantha that mere mortal players varied from in their weakness, rather than the disturbing grim vision of Glorantha as a series of objects constructed by playing games. But in the weakness of compatibilist anarchy, a deeper trap lies- if the "discoverer" could be wrong- why should we give his words and thoughts particular credence? The hierarchy of source credibility, the vision of the holy canon assembled, trembles like a house of cards. Elmal is only the beginning- look into the origins of Caladra and Aurelion, and you might well go blind. Look long upon Balazar, and you might begin to hear a shrill whistling at the edge of perception. What was I talking about again?

That is an arguable interpretation, but of course other possibilities exist, here in this thread where we can speak idly and casually. I think there's some interesting work that could be done with the Bat being a Hero by boardgame rules. But I think that CA-of-Cults-of-Terror probably wouldn't turn Bat cultists away if they needed medical care. Chalana-of-the-recent-incarnations? Who can say? Perhaps she's indifferent to the continuation of existence, or perhaps her cultists are consistent enough to yank IVs out and unplug equipment if they identify a Bat cultist in the ward.

Don't be ridiculous, the gods have always had the same relationship to Chaos unless they were Lunar or Chaotic (but I repeat myself! Bazinga!): seeing chaos as inimical to all life and engaged in perpetual struggles against it but not necessarily violence please don't take the things that we've said as implying that massacring Telmori babies is justified by their Chaotic taint sorry, don't know what that was, but yes. Constantly fighting Chaos. Uniform opinions on the subject, no matter what those satanic verses may tell you in your "textual sources". Next you'll be saying there was a time when we weren't at war with Eastasia.

Ah, my oh my, I forgot Daka Fal, associated with Thed, friendly to Seven Mothers. Satan-Wakboth must have been whispering hard that day, to think that the judge of the dead might have a strong connection with Chaos, despite Chaos always having been planned as purely an unraveling or disintegrating force.

There's a kind of interesting logic to the compatibility table as it exists as a textual object in Cults of Terror, rather than with the intent as perfectly and flawlessly transmitted by the holy prophet GS more than thirty years later. The "cults" all seem to have logical, consistent worldviews... that aren't all that compatible with the further revelations that all of Glorantha was a grand Manichean-but-sexless struggle against Chaos that was simultaneously totally amoral. Seven Mothers are studiously neutral to the potential targets of conversion, with the exception of Krarsht and Thanatar, and the only entity they really are enemies with is Mallia. They're associated with Primal Chaos, but fortunately the prophet GS didn't put that horned rune into their panoply before everything calcified on the runic symbology front, so we can have the delightful specter of Orlanth, Ernalda, etc. being too stupid to understand that the Lunar way is an ideology and that the Seven Mothers are not separable from the Red Goddess, the one leads into the other. Bat cultists appear to be friendly to Eiritha and Daka Fal, but this surely must be a misprint, it contradicts the received authorial intent of GS. Kyger Litor despises Chalana Arroy- I'll have to check Trollpak to see if this is contempt for wussy "healing" and "medicine" or what, but it's fascinating to think of KL as a "hateful" cult that might be hurtful to a White Lady. Studiously contrary to the eternal GSian intent, to be fair.

Of course, that crazy old sourcebook has some weird stuff in that cult compatibility table, doesn't it? Crimson Bat cultists are neutral towards Orlanth, while Orlanth cultists are enemies of Crimson Bat cultists. They're hostile towards only four other cults in that wild book, in fact: Storm Bull, Zorak Zoran, Thanatar, and Vivamort. Imagine, if you will, a situation where you have one group of people who are studiedly neutral towards a second group and another group are frothing-at-the-mouth hostile towards them- which would you think was likely to be in the right? In fact, the first group is only hostile towards berserk murderers, vampires, and people who secretly murder other people to eat their brains, metaphorically speaking. Of course we know that in Glorantha it's simply a matter of perspective, and there's no way to step back and consider the actual situation that is happening here and what it might mean and how we might think of the people involved. Furthermore, even if you do that impossible action, you can't pull back yet further and consider if you want to mold or change that situation, adjust the entries on the sacred chart in the holy books, such that perhaps the situation is less ambiguous or has more room for the second, totally nameless group of people to be less rabid. There's simply no way to do this. If Glorantha varies, that happens without any intent or thought or consideration from anyone. The easiest and simplest solution, I think, in the absence of holding property rights by law, is to simply declare that mischievous entries like Humakt being neutral to Primal Chaos, Pavis being friendly to Seven Mothers, and the like, well, they were simply whispered into the author's ear by Satan. Or Wakboth. Or whatever you call it.

To be fair, back in Cults of Terror, Chalana Arroy was also hostile to Zorak Zoran. But you're right! Unless you take a level of extremely cartoonish moral relativism, puffing on a bubble-pipe and declaiming "who can say whether healing the sick is good or not?", positioning the Chalana Arroy that in Cults of Terror had a clear line drawn between "chaos gods with actual mortal adherents" like Bagog, Krarsht, Thed, Nysalor, the Bat and "gods who deliberately work to undermine me" like Mallia, Thanatar, Vivamort and Primal Chaos as hostile to the Red Goddess despite her mortal adherents indicates either that Chalana Arroy has gone all problematical on us when we weren't looking... or that the Red Goddess is worse by far than any of those, such that Chalana Arroy's beliefs about healing and mercy are overridden.