Sir_Godspeed

For all I know Bill might be a Christian and you know this from prior conversations I don't know about, but otherwise please let's not assume each other's religious views (unless you mean in a wider cultural sense, which makes sense, but isn't quite clear). I personally appreciate the context though, my knowledge of the early Islamic ummah is very rudimentary, and as you mention, Bilal's identity is assumed to be known by the viewers. Anyway - I'll be on the lookout for Bilal, even the interesting setting and story aside, the animation looks gorgeous (especially the backgrounds/environment).

Sacred Time rituals are basically that in a fashion. Not the Globe, exactly, but not too far off from Greek theatre or, for that matter, Balinese Hindu-Buddhist theatre iirc. Lots of audience participation, etc, which might not be the norm of scripted long-form theatre as we think of it, but a sense of fixed dramaturgy. That being said, it wouldn't surprise me if Nochet has dedicated places for "secular" (not that there's really a clean line there) performances as well. There is an upper class there that could serve as patrons for writers and poets, for example, and there is a mass audience in search of entertainment - and there are the literary-minded who might seek to preserve history through dramaturgy or make some kind of polemic statetement. The ingredients are there! And if the Greek inspiration for the Kethaelan Orlanthi extends beyond aesthetic design, we might see palace/great hall orgies/feasts involving the host hiring a few actors or poets to come and perform a smaller play, recite some epic poems and the like. Thinking about it, temples might hold public theatrical performances on Holy Days as well. I believe that's something Indian temples have a history of doing. Just spitballing here.

Ah, I was of the erroneous understanding that letters of credit usable at multiple locations as opposed to just between two partners was a medieval (in the west) or Tang dynasty innovation. This is all news to me. I am aware that the Gold Wheel Dancers died out in the Dawn Era, but I had no idea that they apparently turned into coinage. O.o

The 1620s are so jam-packed with events that I need to really read up on the timeline of events someday, as character are jumping all over the place constantly in my mind. Been a while since I read King of Sartar, but it is of course intentionally obtuse, so not sure how useful it is for this sort of thing.

Glorantha is overall more like the classical world in economic regards (with maybe some medieval stuff in there - although that might be too Eurocentric), is my impression, although I freely admit that my economic history knowledge is fairly shoddy and mostly related to Early Modern market development and onwards.

Ah, gotcha. Thanks.

Moving up in life!

I misspelled inter- as intra- but you got my meaning anyway. Thanks for the response!

I'm not terribly well-versed in the history of tabletop gaming, what is S&S? Also, on a tangent, it's nice to see women get mentioned in the annals of nerd history. I know too many folks who view ladies as newcomers (or worse, invaders or appropriators) of nerdy stuff, and it's just good to have more references in the bag to disprove the notion. This is probably old news to everyone here, though. My Latin is a bit rusty, but "Ab Chaos, lux, lex et legumes." means "Out of Chaos, light, law and peas", right?

I could be wrong, but doesn't this mean that Glorantha is incredibly more financially and economically advanced than RW iron age/classical societies? We partly already knew this due to the widespread availability of coinage, admittedly, but the potential for a banking system spanning the entirety of Central Genertela raises a lot of potential. That being said: do different Sun Dome Temples accept securities/warrants on an intra-Temple scale? Ie. if someone deposits coinage or bullion in one temple, then gets a writ or seal of warranty, can they then go to another temple and have it withdrawn (with some fees, one assumes)? Or is their banking practices limited to each temple's local area?

There are different kinds of rationales and purposes for sacrifice. I'm pretty sure Troll gods want sacrifice because, well, they eat, and it's a kind of prestige food. I doubt that's why most Orlanthi gods require blood sacrifice. It can be a required restitutionary sacrifice, like someone being punished instead of the community as a whole (ie. a scapegoat), or, depending on the angle, nobly giving their own life instead of having the community suffer (ie. the lamb of God, as it were), and then there are sort of quid-pro-quo (I bet the yanks here are tired of hearing that phrase, my apologies) where someone is given great blessings, but will eventually have to return to their benefactor to repay them with their life. Earth is big on that last one, I believe. Earth also has a - if I dare say - pseudo-incestuous thing going on with the sacrifice of kings who are sons of earth goddesses, but then also spawn the next generation of holy kings. When looking at the section on Dawn Era Dragon Pass and its surroundings, I believe we already then find a number of survival settlements that practiced human sacrifice, and I suspect the eventual Lightbringer cult integrated those beliefs into the more coherent Heortling synthesis after a few decades/couple of centuries. To those settlements it was probably a survival secret for the Darkness (ie., in lieu of sun and the goddesses' natural vitality, one offers mortal blood as a substitute), but it probably goes back even further. Earth-cult human sacrifice is imho likely a Green Age practice, which took on a decidedly darker tone once true Death was released into the world (and the sacrificed husband-sons did not get reborn as reliably and completely as they once had). This is a bit up to interpretation, of course. This may or may not overlap with Green/Golden age Moon cult practices - but this leads us down the Entekosiad rabbit hole, which is deep and confusing, and not directly relevant to third age Orlanthi for the most part, so I won't dwell on that. I'm not sure whether the Orlanthi sacrifice war captives, a relatively common practice in the RW.

But the specific words containing apostrophes are intentionally made to be a non-English language, therefore we can at best guess that the name has been transliterated into English ortography from whatever writing system this fantastic language uses, but that still leaves us with no real hint at purpose what the apostrophe serves. Does it mark a contraction? Does it mark a glottal stop? Does it delineate stems in a compound word? Does it refer to a sound not otherwise marked in the Latin alphabet such as a clicking sound? Does it SOMETIMES mark elision and OTHER times a glottal stop? WHEN? How do we tell them apart? WHO KNOWS. Certainly not the reader, because 90% of these languages are evidently made up haphazardly and don't have any pronounciation guide. Hence my point on it being an, for want of another term, "exoticism crutch". It's the same reason why you give aliens or demons or whatever names with x's in them, even though the letter x is mostly just a dumb accident of Greek and Roman ortographic history. It boggles the mind why a completely alien culture would create the same exact odd duck of writing that combines the k and s sounds and sometimes just pronounces the s sound. The answer is of course that it's less about the sounds and more that the writers knows it just gives off an impression of exoticism or possibly ancient age. The alternate is that it's due to a complex in-universe linguistic history where the aliens have names that humans for some reason chose to use the letter 'x' in whenever clusters of 'ks' came up, and possibly in some cases where an initial 's' came up. But that's a hell of a thing for a reader to just infer when, I dunno, the "Great Director Xaxarbaxxus" lands with his galaxy destroyer or whatever. (The RW language of Nahuatl (Aztec) uses 'x' to mark a "SH"-sound, whereas the IPA uses it to mark a rough throaty sound, like in Scots "loch", and Old Spanish and Basque uses/used it to mark the less rough throaty sound found in "Xavier"/"Javier". If a writer chooses to adapt a letter to a specific sound like this, that's admirable forethought, although it should probably be explained to the reader at some point for clarity.) Tolkien, funnily enough, admits to using such aesthetic tropes when he talks about choosing 'c' over 'k', and using 'q' over 'kw'. He agonizes a bit over it in a few of his letters, but argues that in order for the elven languages to come off as ancient, beautiful and cultured, 'c' is a better choice than 'k'. His choice is very deliberate, and as a result also very consistent ('c' is pronounced as a k even where it in English would be pronounced as an 's', ie. "Celebrimbor" being "Kelebrimbor", etc.). Just to be clear: not every writer making up a fantasy language should need a linguistics degree, that's clearly absurd - but I think it's good to give your imaginary language some thought, if only to make pronounciation for readers easier, or to have some personal foundation in case you want to build on it later.

I hope you get a speedy recovery!

I forget the specifics - could you elaborate?

It's especially funny, since he's the product of mass-utuma, bringing it all back to draconic shamanism again!

I suspect the whole idea of spears being a "lesser" weapon that swords is a bit of a cultural bias that's stuck for some reason, maybe simply because a sword is usually more expensive to buy and therefore usually the property of landed elites who tend to be more trained by default, although who knows. Anyway, as you mentioned, spears are perfectly able to win out against swords. As far as I know it's really up to individual prowess, possible support, and of course dumb luck.

Great question, and I think @Akhôrahil's answer is phenomenal, and possibly the best we're going to get.

Don't they have that? Moonswords, etc.?

Keep in mind that most Gloranthan cities are relatively small (1000-5000 people), so the "dissolute" can't as easily disappear there as you might think. Most people have at least a vague understanding of what groups they belong to. Major cities like Nochet or Glamor are the exception. Perhaps it's as likely for the "dissolute" to set up residence in the more unregulated shantytowns or surroundings villages of an urban centre, and then wander in to look for jobs or the like. This probably varies culturally - not all cities will have those (for example in areas of endemic warfare). In medieval Europe, there was the idea - at least in some areas - of the "one year and one day", where if one could survive in a market town/city for that period, one would be free of one's prior obligations to the feudal lord. I suspect this concept is somewhat fanciful rather than something that was widely respected, but hey. I don't know if Glorantha has anything similar. Not that feudalism as such is typical of Glorantha, and urban Orlanthi preserve their clan ties rather than dissolve them, but perhaps the Lunars have some notion like this - they're quite big on new beginnings and manumissions and the like (in addition to its opposites, of course.)

I seem to recall something from the Guide or Sourcebook about the first Mortal in some cultures/contexts being female, and others male. Don't know if others can verify/falsify this EDIT: I just remembered that I'm pretty sure Kralorela has the first mortals as a pair, Grandmother and Grandfather.

I am talking about written language. (Originally topography, but expanded to written words in general).

I am aware, although it's not a universal usage, and there are other RW usages as well, such as in Hebrew where double apostrophes are used to mark acronyms. My point isn't that fictional languages should follow RW (or, let's be blunt here, English) usage, but rather that once you decide to stuff in an apostrophe in a fictional language, it should be there for a reason and not just because it looks cool, which imho is usually the reason why we see them so often. I didn't mention RW usage because I wasn't talking about RW language, basically. My point about Klingon was not to say "ah, Klingon uses it correctly as a glottal stop", because there's no real right or wrong way to use it in a made up language. My point was just to mention an artificial language that chose a function for the apostrophe and then applied it consistently. Which I think is a good way to make up languages (unless you want to get really indepth with irregular verbs, grammatical artifacts, non-integrated loanwords and archaisms in your artificial language, which you can do, but it's a bit of a pain for the reader, to be honest. Not that Tolkien let that stop him. ) There's always the argument that most of these writers are English and so would default to English grammatical usage, of course, but that raises the question why they would make their imaginary language chock-full of contractions or elisions to begin with, like a writer typing out dialectal speech phonically for a culture that we haven't even been able to get to know yet, "y'all catchin' m'drift?" Going down that hole quickly just becomes a bit nonsensical, like wondering what phoneme Chris Metzen left out when he made up the names "Quel'Thalas" or "Gul'dan" for Warcraft. Applying Occan's Razor and say that a lot of apostrophes are added because they look exotic is imho the more commonsense way. Anyway, sorry if this came off as a bit terse, I didn't intend to, but now that I look back at it, I might've gotten carried a bit away. It's one of those things that honestly don't really matter, but I get worked up over it because apparently that's how my nerd brain works.

"S'lon" Pet peeve of mine: errant and seemingly aesthetic-only apostrophes jammed into words to make them seem fantasyish. Just rubs me the wrong way. Glad they did away with this one. (One of the only times I can remember apostrophes being given a specific function in a fantasy language is from the Wheel of Time, where they seem to delineate the different roots in compound words - but not even that is entirely consistent, I think. In Klingon it apparently represents a glottal stop, which is probably the most functional usage for it I've seen.) /rant, I guess.

Basically, the Heortlings originally had a story about Orlanth killing a dragon. The early dragon mystics "discovered" that this myth actually had an addendum, or alternate version, where Orlanth instead communed with the dragon and awakened his own inner draconic nature. This seems to be the mythic basis for the later stuff. Alakoring was not happy, to put it mildly.

I mean, there is: Slorifings. Fern-elves. Pity they're stuck in those giant country-sized fens on either edge of Pamaltela, though. They'd be nice to have scattered about here and there.