Sir_Godspeed

If we take the Dwarfs by their word, then Mostal is not so much a conscious entity, an anthropomorph, as it is the gestalt world-system of the cosmos. So what does that leave us with? Also, this arguably also puts Mostal at the level of the Invisible God and Glorantha/Arachne Solara as these meta-deities that either create, sustain or ARE the world personified. Then again, action attributed to "Mostal" might as well have been done by True Mostali in the God Time. Outsiders wouldn't have known the difference, and one can wonder whether the Mostali would have known either ("We are merely tools", as it were). The snippet about the Malkioni invading and terrorizing native Vadeli was one that intrigued me something fierce when I read it the first time. Can't help but wonder what it elucidates. Can't help but theorize that Zzaburite versions of God Time events is severely redacted, revised, or simply focused on things other than, well, people. His is a history of the devolution of intellect and mind into gross matter, impermanence and delusion, and one meant to serve as evidence for his grand hypothesis/world model, at that. It's a diagnosis over an unsatisfying universe, and that takes precedence over talking about which individual sapient bodies did what to who and where. A bit like Plato, I suppose. In summary, my guess is that the Western understanding of history was basically syncretized already in the God Time, or at the Dawn, whichever makes sense. Multitudes of people painting themselves into a cohesive, common, narrative, working backwards, perhaps. Still wondering how Malkioni/Danmalastani (whether seen as mind-intellects/archetypes or actual living people) and the Mostali fit together. They share so much I can't help thinking they have some common origin or at the very least some other commonality beyond just being neighbors.

Oh yeah. I suspect a lot of Pelorian and Pelandan gods ended up like that.

I was apparently thinking of Rakenveg.

Isn't there a Dara Happan hare/rabbit god who is a trickster? Never heard of a sanctioned cult for it, though, but then that doesn't mean much. Then there is of course Tunoral of Vanch, the raccoon thief good, effectively a trickster. But Vanch is outside Dara Happa.

Yeah, I'm leaning towards an independent tradition myself.

Yeah, this is something that you're not alone about. It's a part of a much broader issue of combat-centricness of roleplaying, a massive topic in its own right. It's why we don't hear a lot about the brewer god or the carpenter god either. It's not like vingans are all warriors, and nandans can't be warriors, but stereotypically, they kinda replicate some stereotyped gender roles (probably influenced more by Real World stereotypes than in-universe Orlanthi ones, imho)

I love the idea that Bijiif was a horndog, lol. You should check out the "Your Dumbest Theory"-thread. It's not actually dumb at all, hence the compliment! They do seem to behave similarly aggressive and, well, vivaciously, you might say. Very dynamic and expansionistic, and perhaps similatly passionate at impulsive. At least if we disregard the deeper, more profound currents, which perhaps have more in common with Darkness. Sea and Storm interact a lot mythically, interbreed a lot, fight a lot, become buddies, etc. so that's there too. Some Storm move into the Sea (Ygg, Brastalos, etc.), and some Sea move into Storm (Heler, others possibly), and they co-create new races (various races of merfolk). While much of water was involved in interacting with/invading the rest of the cosmos, we shouldn't underestimate the sheer massiveness of Sea. The abyssal depths are for all intents and purposes their own world. Additionally, Sea has its own lineages of life and spirits and so on, so it CAN go at it alone, but it doesn't HAVE to. Again, I think it's quite a lot like Darkness in this respect. Parts of Darkness certainly interact with the rest of Glorantha, but there's stuff out there so deep and dark that it hardly has ever been interacting with other elements, simply because it's so vast and impenetrable.

As for the Alkothi. I might be in the minority here, but I can't imagine a large city-state functioning without street-sweepers, scullery maids, garbage collectors, potterers, basket-weavers, cooks, clothes-washers, bakers, lamp-lighters, bricklayers, masons, carpenters, redsmiths, barbers, brewers, sex workers, poets, scribes, weavers, midwives, wetnurses, tanners, etc. etc. In other words, I just can't imagine the City of Hell, the Capital of Murder, the Enclosure of Gore to be ALL that different from most other major cities in the sense that the vast majority of people inside it are going to be ordinary Joe Schmoes, who may or may not think that bloodsport and demon visitors or whatever is just one of those things that you gotta get used to, ya know? "Eh, the anguished moans of the slavering underworld spirits are roiling in the shadows? Ah, yeah, they'll do that every now and then. Just remember to prick yer finger and run it along the windowsill and you'll sleep like a dog, trust me. Anyway, that'll be two coppers for the cheese, nice to do business with ya. Oh, and check out the pile of skulls on the temple corner, they sometimes have a good story if the priest has consecrated them recently, cheers!" (I am now fully awaiting someone to drop a massive text about how they bake their bread from innards or someting equally hoakey, but hey, that's how it is with these sorts of things)

So, here's the thing, imho: A lot of the negative information we have on Vadrus is from the perspective of Orlanthi, followers of a different, and arguably rival, cult. It's a bit like reading a Catholic writer to learn about Gnosticism. The information is likely... skewed. Did Vadrudi see themselves as a "Hurt Everything Clan"? Did they see their exploits as purely destructive? Did they see their pairings as abductions, their internal structure as rule of the strongest? We have no idea. Because they pretty much died out during the Greater Darkness, and whatever survivors clung on either turned to animism, other gods, or were converted to Orlanthism/Lightbringer cult in the Dawn Age. I'm not suggesting that all we know is wrong and actually Vadrus was a completely misunderstood goody-two-shoes, but let's be brutally honest, his mythical function is kinda just to serve as a foil to Orlanth, someone on which to heap most negative Storm aspects, and that should, if nothing else, inspire intrepid myth-makers to imagine other perspective, and the version that was forgotten.

Saw these and immediately thought they could make some pretty striking Chaos monsters: https://www.patreon.com/posts/april-release-49874904 The moose made me think of Ragnaglar, and the one with the vertical mouth made me think of perhaps something like the Black Eater, while admittedly not Chaotic - or maybe one of the other two of the Trio.

Storm Bull is a brother of Vadrus, not a descendant, though.

Yes. As mentioned, it seems like there's a running theme of the Vadrudi having gained some dominion over water. Possibly connected to Vadrus either having kids with water goddesses (the implication of rape is always present, but not said out loud) or possibly it might come from Heler, aka. The Blue Woman (Heler can be both male and female and androgynous) who Vadrus saved from the Blue Dragon (who may or may not have been Heler too, in their "sovereign" form). EDIT: Note that Orlanth is credited with the same dragonslaying and heler-saving feat. One may have stolen the feat from the other, or it might be a weird meta-Storm kinda deal.

One example comes to mind. According to the Book of Heortling Mythology, Umath seems to have spawned a daughter of his own, Serenha in his (literal) wake, without anyone involved. She doesn't figure much in mythology beyond being supposedly the mother of some of the spirits/elementals that Kolat later allies with, but there are some neat ideas about her. I personally think it would be neat if she turned out to be another name for Entekos, the Pelorian goddess of "right air".

F**** Beekes, always such a bummer, man.

Oh, definitely.

It's worth mentioning that these ideas have never really been supported by mainstream archeology.

That's possible. It's also possible that the Uz, being creations of interactions between Darkness and the Man Rune/Grandfather Mortal, are predisposed towards bi-sexual reproduction/dimorphism (whichever term is more appropriate) because that's just one of the qualities of that Form Rune.

I would PERSONALLY argue that Earth being stereotypically female or feminine is less of a universal fact about Glorantha, and more a particularistic accident of Genertela. To put it bluntly, Genert was murdered, and most of those left were his (sister-)daughters. In Pamaltela, we see a different Earthen gender dynamic, imho. And there's always the Mostali, of course, who, while in a sense connected to all Gloranthan matter, certainly seem more directly associated with solid matter, as it were. ... Now, WITH ALL THAT BEING SAID, I think the feminine side of Earth is somewhat tied to the direct, observable continuity of life. I'm going to borrow some observations from some old anthropologists here, specifically, Sherry B. Ortner, who pointed out that it's a lot easier to see a woman giving birth and conclude that life comes from women, than it is to make the connection to a male ejaculating creating life as well. That's not to say cultures don't (The Greeks made some bizarre conclusions),but the point is, giving birth is so solid and powerful an image that it's hard to overrule it with other symbolism. For Earth, procreating by itself is adequate and fine, but in order to diversity and spread, it seems to prefer to interact with male (or "counting-as-male") consorts, in order to mix and innovate. This could be argued to make the Earth vaguely hermaphroditic, but the main point is simply that Earth carrying forth life as opposed to its partners doing so kinda code it, or stereotype it, as feminine. Being material products of Earth makes her our Mother, for better or worse. This is my interpretation, of course, and one partly improvised at that. Another, equally valid, answer is simply "Well, I guess there's a lot of Earth goddesses in real world mythology, and also New Age ideas popular when Greg wrote this stuff kinda went hard with the idea of a universal mother goddess that supposedly predated patriarchal Indo-Europeans", but that's out-of-universe and so a less satisfying scratch to our curious itch, imho. Now, I should say that this model of unsexed to sexual reproduction and gender roles is more of a God Learner construct than it necessarily objectively existing in Glorantha. It's a lot more complicated. Sky Gods emanate their descendants sometimes, for example, and lots of Darkness gods have explicit genders. It's more like a... overall, general trend, and not some hard rule to get all fixated on. EDIT: Forgot to mention that all of this is predicated on sex as participants in reproduction, and not a comment on overall gender roles, where there is a lot more diversity.

This is one of those things where we run into multiple layers of interpretation when it comes to Glorantha. On the face of it, the texts we read about Glorantha sound kind of omniscient and neutral, but on a closer inspection, they're often implicitly written from the perspective of Orlanthi, or Orlanthi-adjacent cultures. Chaos is a major threat and concern among the Orlanthi and in cultures that have had a lot of dealings with the Orlanthi, such as the Trolls of the Shadow Plateau, the Praxians and so forth. However, Chaos as "The Big Bad" is not really acknowledged by every other culture. To the Malkioni, the greater existential threat is usually various forms of ignorance, wrong knowledge or being lead astray, such as falling to theism or spiritualism, losing sight of the Invisible God, and so forth. The Malkioni group trolls, barbarians and Chaos all together in the term "krjalki". Monsters. To the Dara Happans, the greater existential threat, as discussed above, what brought down the Golden Age and nearly broke the cosmos was rebellion and insurrection. Failure to acknowledge the right hierarchy, to obey one's (legitimate) superiors and to act in one's station is what breaks the world. The above examples are stereotyped, of course. Both Malkioni and Dara Happans know what Chaos is, and generally oppose it in most of its forms, but they lend less ultimate weight to it than the Orlanthi and friends. There are other cultures that we know less about. The Vithelan cultures (Kralorela, Teshnos, East Isles) differ in various ways, but seems to have in common that they don't quite follow the same God Time procedure as the rest of Glorantha, with the absolute low-point of near-exinction of the Greater Darkness seemingly not even taking place in the East Isles, for example. The Pamaltelans, interestingly, seem to have a view of Chaos that's perhaps loosely analogous to the Orlanthi view, ie. as the Big Bad, but honestly I'm not sure if I have too much to go on there. Certainly the Doraddi detest the Chaos monsters that infest their lands, and celebrate Pamalt for burning them by dipping the sky dome onto them, as well as condemning the Chaotic fall of the Artmali empire, but whether this seeps into their general social values and concerns as it does with the Orlanthi ("doing XYZ is a chaotic act and is taboo", etc.) I don't know. And of course the Fonritans have incorporated active chaos worship into their religions, which is pretty far out.

Yup. I don't think we know too much about the internal politics of the Pentan nomads, so I honestly do not know. This is a twofold issue, so I'll try to answer both in turn: 1. It seems that when gods are killed like Vadrus was, they effectively cease to be valid recipients of worship, no longer being active observers of the world. How exactly this works I'm not entirely certain, but for all and purposes, while we still know Vadrus was there, and we know he did various things, he was effectively retroactively erased in some respects. Timey-wimey weirdy stuff. And just to be clear: if you WANT some radical Storm cultists revive Vadrus, then go for it. Sounds nuts. I love it. 2. A Violent wind. Not quite sure what else. Orlanth has certain spiritual and communal and even fertile aspects to his wind (delegation, community oaths, spreading spores and seeds, bringing fertile rain, the breath that fills everyone's lungs, and possibly the air that carries people's voices and so on), but Vadrus seems more clearly to have been a violent storm. This is likely a simplification, but it's what we're left with. Vadrus' children encompass a range of wind-identities that might give us some clues as to what his "portfolio" were, as it were: winter storms, sea storms, etc. It seems he conquered Sea at some point. One thing that should be mentioned is that, to some extent, it's not just a matter of runes and all that, it's a matter of these gods serving a particular narrative role in the mythos of whoever is telling the stories. Gods aren't just "gods of", they're characters who do stuff in stories.

It does make sense for the Harono-Nochet story to be a (First Age?) Esrolia-centric understanding of Ernalda's concubinage with Yelm. It also makes sense with the dragon, given Yelm's association with the dragon in his throne. And lastly, Orlanth is blamed for killing Harono, which is quite fitting. A version of Yelm's killing that's very unflattering to Orlanth. Which is partly why I suspect it's a Dawn Age story, predating the Lightbringer missionaries and their version. (a Yelm acceptable to Esrolia much like Dendara might be an Ernalda acceptable to Dara Happa.) The only thing that's slightly off is the fact that the Harono temple is used for stargazing/astrology, I guess? It's entirely possible that Esrolia's Harono is a slightly different slice of the Ruling Sky than Yelm, one that intersects between both Yelm and Arraz or something like that.

Very interesting thought! He is a bit of an enigma.

Isn't Kajabor's whole deal that he utterly destroys too?

This seems like something that should probably be hidden with spoiler tags, tbh.

Ah, that's it, I forget.