Sir_Godspeed

This is very ingenious. Also sort of an indictment of microtransactions when I think about it.

I don't think it's a clear line between the two in Star Wars. I remember reading interviews with Lucas where he straight out says that none of the droids in Star Wars are actually sapient, they are just programmed with different personalities - but then later in the expanded universes we have all sorts of shenanigans, including droid rebellions and force user droids and so on. The basic B2 battle droids were able to wisecrack, which is obviously mostly for the children in the audience, and I believe was explained away as poor programming or something in the background books. The more advanced droid commanders were sometimes more stoic and robotic, and other times more human-like in their behaviour. Hard to tell, really. The Techno-Union was one of the other forgettable Separatist sub-groups like the InterGalactic Banking Clan and whatever other groups got put together with the Trade Federation. They designed (and possibly built) the "super battle droids", which are the ones in dark grey, with no neck and wrist-mounted blasters. The Geonosians (the desert planet locust-like people in Attack of the Clones) also produced them. Well, in the new continuity all bets are off, but in the old maps the "known galaxy" (most of which is part of the Republic and later the Empire) covers about two-thirds of the galaxy. The third, hidden part, is known as the Unknown Regions, and is unexplored due to a lack of stable hyperlanes. https://i.redd.it/97xct8ap4g411.jpg The main large empires I can think of from there is the Chiss Ascendancy (also verified to exist in the new continuity) and maybe the Killiks (intelligent hivemind space bugs) and a few others. None of them are stated to be as big as the Republic though. And then there are the Yuuzhan Vong, which were extra-galactic invaders who bio-engineered all their equipment, space vessels and weapons, were cut off from the force, and stripped planets of their resources. I'm pretty sure they aren't canon anymore though. There might be more, I'm not an expert on this stuff - and of course you can pretty much pick and choose what you like and don't like. Old Star Wars canon was of VERY uneven quality.

The Nemoidians (Trade Federation) created an entire droid army. As did the Techno Union (Skakoans, wookieepedia tells me). And of course Jabba famously accepted C3PO as a gift and used him as a translator. There are probably more examples out there, but overall I think the idea is that droid usage is fairly common, but since we mostly follow human actors, we also mostly see human-droid ownership relations. I'm also not really sure if it's correct to call the Galactic Civil War (original trilogy) or the First Order Conflict (new trilogy) a "backwater". I have no problem seeing that there is more to the galaxy than these conflicts, and I can also go along with that these conflicts mean more to humans than they mean to others (even if the old expanded universe worked pretty hard to show just how human-supremacist the Empire was), but "backwater"? Eh, not according to most published maps and such I've seen. Human bias? Definitely, though.

The difference is between in-universe representation and out-of-universe representation. People who make these (imho very valid) complaints make it as a criticism of the wider media industry, both in front of and behind the camera, and focus on the impact of actual, real human beings. So having a dizzying array of aliens isn't going to do much for them (although having actors of color portray various groups, such as Klingons in Trek for example, does count in the sense that it gets actors in front of the cameras, even if they are playing a possibly iffy trope and being othered as non-humans). Basically, the in-universe perspective doesn't usually factor into the representation critique, as it tends to be rooted in real-world issues and disparities. This is something nerds/geeks like myself don't always "get", because we're so immersed in the fictional world that we consider its internal working moreso than maybe the industry workings that produce these fictional universe. From an in-universe perspective, it can create some weird dissonances though. For example, the Resistance in the new trilogy is very diverse in terms of human beings (which, it should be emphasized, is a good thing for the industry and in a wider cultural sense), but it has almost no speaking roles for the non-human aliens - which creates this weird scenario where the Resistance - by in-universe standards - comes off as weirdly speciecist and alien-exclusionary. Admiral Akhbar seems to be the only ranking non-human, and he gets killed off without any remark or note in TLJ, leaving an almost human-only remnant. It's as if we have two human-dominated groups in the Resistance and the First Order duking it out without really considering non-humans are beings with active agency beyond being set dressing*. It's... kinda iffy, imho. But then again, as I said, I am one of those nerds who can get in-universe-myopic. (*Which, in an industry-sense makes perfect sense, because that's what they almost literally are - but from a narrative sense it gets weird.)

On the topic of interbreeding: Star Wars uses the term "near-human*" for a variety of species that are your garden variety of "rubber-forehead aliens". You know, stuff like Zabraki (Maul's species) or Chiss (Admiral Thrawn's species). If it looks so much like a human that a human actor could play it in live action with only a few minor prosthetics, then chances are it's a near-human in the background (at least the old one). It's been a while since I read up on this stuff, but I believe the canonical explanation was that all these species originated from populations of proto-humans being abducated/transplanted throughout the galaxy by whatever "ancient forerunner space empire" was most in vogue at the time of writing. Usually pre-Rakata, iirc. As far as I know, this is a similar explanation for the same phenomenon in Star Trek and Stargate, because turns out that bloated sci-fi franchises tend to use a lot of the same tropes. Anyway, mechanically, not only does this mean that there might be some inter-species fertility (since these are either sub-species or species close enough to maintain compatible genetics), but of course that much of the architecture and equipment in Star Wars can function with a one-size-(mostly)-fits all proportions. It seems like the question of fertility should be one answered on an individual gaming group basis. If some players want their characters to be hybrids, or have mixed heritage, or even have their characters hook up with kids, then at least there is some background basis for this. Whether they decide that mixed children are infertile, or that mixed children default to one look or the other, or have mixed characteristics I wouldn't personally want to force from a rules perspective. (*Kind of a human-chauvinist term, but they are the most numerous single species in the Republic/Empire, so it's unsurprising. )

A while back, while agonizing over increased automation, and mainting some skepticism to the claim that lost jobs will be replaced by new jobs in other sectors, I proposed the idea that as businesses lay off workers in order to replace them with robots and other automated processes, the businesses would have to "buy out" their former employees with stock options and bailouts, ensuring that the capital produced by automatons would come to the benefit for everyone who generated the capital necessary to invesnt in automation in the first place. Then I realized that I had essentially reinvented communism (or at least cooperatism), so eh... probably not going to go anywhere anytime soon.

If you want to get cute with it, name your locust swarm spirit "Pazuzu".

I like that idea also. When I was developing my own fantasy setting, I made it so that the familiars/pets of magicians were selected based on near-human intelligences, and a magical talent. Anyway, diverting a destructive animal flock - or indeed attracting a valuable prey species - seems like exactly the kind of thing you'd want your shaman available to do, so this all seems good. EDIT: Although, for simplicity's sake, it might be that in most cases of animal groups, their collective spirit is basically just a localized/particularized version/instance of their overarching totem spirit. So a large herd of wild pigs/boars coming down would essentially have some kind of version of Mralot(a). But other ideas include some kind of ancestor spirit - perhaps the "founder" of the herd/flock. Just my two clacks.

Jebus.

No, that was the HUAC's goal after all, good riddance.

Warning: some Gloranthaphile meanderings intruding into a gaming thread. I swear I have a point, though. Ernalda - or really, to put it into a wider perspective - the Great Earth Goddess(es) isn't/aren't going to manifest in the same way in all regions. Clearly, Balazar has its own peculiarities, and the various powers and aspects of the Great Earth Goddess (whether you call her Ernalda or Ernalda-Esrola-Maran, the Land Goddess or whatever else) are "filtered" through mythic influences and geographical features. It's pretty clear that *some* form of the Great Earth Goddess is active in Balazar (things grow there, after all), but what manifests, and what is reachable for people is clearly different, and arguably more limited, than in most surrounding regions. So, does that mean that Hearthmother *is* Ernalda, or that Hearthmother is an idiosyncratic, localized manifestation of the Great Earth Goddess Archetype, or some other thing? Tough to say. And honestly not necessarily all that pertinent to us. I'm tempted to argue that it's useful to consider Hearthmother as a particular manifestation of the greater Earth Goddess complex of deities, but filtered and put togethered according to local particularities. What this means, is that Hearthmother has very little of Esrola (the physical bounty of the earth, including farming) about her, but more Ernalda (the spiritual powers of the earth, ie. powers of marriage, love, togetherness, community, sexuality, etc.) Mahoma (the hearth, a form of earth-tamed fire, as it were), and the Lady of the Wild (imho some kind of manifestation of earth powers, whether separate from the Trinity of Ernalda-Esrola-Maran, or a part of them - focus on gathering and prey beasts, aligned the beast rune probably, and therefore tying into that whole Hykimi/Hsunchen thing as well - stuff overlaps). I hope this made some sense. The "tl;dr" of it is that even if we identify two entities with each other, and argue that they are in fact the same, they can still manifest in pretty significantly different ways.

Lekka are prehensile? I can't remember that EVER being brought up in any of the SW stuff I've watched or read. Huh. EDIT: Also I thought they were called "lekku", but apparently I got that wrong. I don't know what systems you use, but giving them a charisma/charm bonus might be a possibility, as they are seen as attractive (the women moreso, but I remember some stuff about the men commonly being sought as dancers as well, might be some more fan-made ideas). Obviously, there is also the the issue of slave trade and in-universe fetishizing of twi'lek women, but that's less of a stat thing and more something that needs to some out in actual roleplay.

So what do people think a Caladralander settlement looks like? What does a powerful Chieftain/King's residence look like? Do we know of any actual named tribes there? Do we know if they have any cultural idiosyncracies in terms of organizational or structural traits? (matrilineality, neolocality, polygamy, archaisms like fixed partner groups that exchange partners between them (I am totally blanking on the term now, even though it's literally anthro101), or something else? Centralized granaries (except for tubers, maybe?) with redistributionism, or localized ones? Preference for pigs and sheep over cattle? Authority of priests over kings (ie. little Alakoringite influence)? I'm game for some speculation. They seem like an Orlanthi group that has the potential to add to the diversity of expressions, much like Esrolians already do - although I suspect the Karkudja are not quite as radically divergent from the Heortlings we are familiar with.

According to my days of browsing Wookieepedia, most clones were phased out by the time of the original trilogy, and were replaced by volunteer stormtroopers. This was the old continuity, of course, so it may or may not have any weight today. Also, I never bothered to remember the sources, because... well, fan wiki-trawling.

The Heortlings also have a really weird story about a monster that keeps devoring its young until they escape. It seems to describe the creation of the first living people (but not what kind, ie. whether mortals, gods, or something else), but also at the same time the emergence of such concepts of self, movement, otherness, and so on (depending on how much you read into it). The story is almost entirely disconnected from the rest of the Orlanthi mythos, as far as I can tell, and more than anything reads like a children's story, but I'm wondering if it's not some kind of Green (or Creation) Age snippet of narrative that survived, and just seems almost incomprehensively weird due to the Green Age being... well, weird.

Comparisons to real-world analogues does often end up in discussing those real-world things instead of the main topic. GG.

Another important aspect is something that plagues a lot of authoritarian and totalitarian states: inefficiency, infighting, sycophanty. When there is one supreme ruler that decides who rises or falls in the ranks, then essentially all politics boils down to pleasing this despot, which includes hiding failures rather than fixing them, pumping up numbers instead of truthfully reporting deficits, backstabbing colleagues instead of jointly taking credit, etc. etc. This glaring inefficiency was well-documented during both the Ultra-Nationalist regime in Japan, under the purges of Stalinist Soviet Union, or during the Third Reich. This ties into the point of "If At First You Don't Succeed, You're Dead", but goes beyond just field operations and into stuff like fiscal policy, project management, law enforcement, logistics and commerce, and all sorts of things. The Empire is likely quite shoddily put together by the time of the original trilogy - which does help explain why it collapsed so quickly after the figurehead died (of course, Disney in the new continuity had to invent this really eye-rolling Der Untergang scenario where the Emperor decided that his followers should unwittingly destroy the Empire after he was gone, so eh... I prefer the political collapse with infighting Diadochi scenario of the old expanded universe.)

I wonder what his worship is like in an area with little plowing. A big strong god of hoeing, perhaps?

She at first tried to prove that Entekos and the Red Goddess were the same. The Red Goddess punished her for this by blinding her. The Entekosiad is the literary work (heavily annotated and commented) where Valare then tries to prove that Entekos and Dendara are the same instead, basically. But that's not really doing the text justice. It gets weird. Green Age weird.

The prequel trilogy is abysmally written (though I will argue that it was pretty good at getting across the scale of SW rather than the three-dozen fighters that attack the Death Star) and so the political background for the crisis was mostly expanded in the novels and comics (which makes sense since Star Wars movies are primarily children's entertainment - don't hate me just because it's true). But basically, I believe the general gist is that the Trade Federation - a merchant cartel roughly similar to something like the Hanseatic League or possibly something like a coalition of Korean chaebol - decided to bully a planet in the Outer (Mid?) Rim into accepting lowered tariffs (or possibly removing them altogether) which would free the Federation's ability to make higher profits and act as they wished. Naboo was moreover to serve as an example for other planets to follow suit. They did this because the Republic had been very gridlocked and ineffective in recent decades, which both frustrated merchants but also allowed them to do as they pleased. That's my understanding at least.

The Seven Mothers can be seen as a mockery of the Lightbringer Quest, arguably. But then again, arguably any Lightbringer quest used simply as a ressurection spell is imho a bit of a mockery considering the profound cosmic significance (accepting differences, recognizing guilt and repenting) of the original quest. When I first started trawling the web for discussions on Glorantha, I came across a thread on another website where people described the duel in the Tower of Dreams as "Arkat and Nysalor entered the tower. Gbaji walked out of it." Probably not very accurate, since whatever version of Arkat emerged from it seems to have been a pretty decent fellow afterwards (unless you believe the accounts that paint the Autarchy as a despotic hellhole, which I don't think I do), but damn if it didn't sound cool and ominous to me at the time. On another note, I'm not sure how you can curse an entire land to be chaos-ified unless you have some fingers dipped in Chaos, so Arkat was probably more far gone that it's usually let on, imho. I know that the Lunars associate Nysalor with Rashoran(a) (Laid out in the Sourcebook at least), but are there any other sources for this? Really? Well damn, that's news to me. Where is this from?

After the death of Yelm, people called "Men of Gold" appear in the Hyaloring myths in Six Ages, appear to collectively compete with the other named Lesser Suns. Obviously, this is more than a continent away - but they are implied to be mortal (possibly semi-divine of some kind), and they are Solar.

Since this thread was revived, I thought I'd add that I'm not a huge fan of runes being atoms (Although I realize that might be a bit of a dead horse at this point). For one thing, I'm not a huge fan of the rune-symbols literally being the runes-in-themselves. I'd prefer a worldview where the graphical depiction of a rune invokes the rune, yes, but that doesn't mean the rune-in-itself has any one or other physical shape, since it's not a physical object. Ever since I became aware of Glorantha and the runes, I interpreted them essentially as Platonic Ideal forms. Mundane fire has its properties because it is a replication, or subgradient, or iteration of the Fire Rune, which is not an object, but a metaphysical concept, a blueprint for physics, if you will. To use an analogy, pure Creation is indifferentiated like a ray of white light. Runes act as lenses, so that when pure creation passes through them, the light is given its properties. Shape, extension, and so forth. Different runes interact in different ways, creating increasingly complex and almost impossibly varied expressions. In this worldview, when a God Learner used the "RuneQuest Sight" (hate that internal capital letter outside of logos, btw) they were not really seeing/sensing a ton of little runes mushed together in a literal fashion, but rather seeing what can at best be described as the influences, filters, molds, etc. that shaped the matter they are analyzing. Runes collectively make up the Matrix that allows differentiation of Chaos into Cosmos. I should add that I think my personal view goes pretty well with @Jeff's cabbalistic/alphabetical "language of creation". Whether you term it a syllable or phoneme of creation, or a platonic ideal that can be mixed and matched, or lenses through which the raw light of creation passes - the end result is that you end up with runes less as objects and more as the possible categories of existence that informs the nature of objects. Anyway, that's just my personal interpretation.

I was considering highland South India and Sri Lanka for some visual and possibly social cues for the the Karkudja. Obviously there is the issue that the major societies of this region practices pretty intensive and large-scale irrigation farming, so that's something that doesn't quite fit, but I believe highland areas might fit the bill. Between Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala there are slash-and-burn groups primarily living in fairly small villages, and I believe the same might be true for central Sri Lanka - others might know more about this than me though . I mostly stuck to the coastal delta region of Tamil Nadu when I was there. Another potential alternative is the wider Melanesian/Polynesian region. Lots of garden horticulture, semi-permanent villages (lasting 5-10 years tops, with some governmental stone-built exceptions), complex cultic and ritual complexes, mix of large scale warfare and ritualized champion warfare, etc. But then I don't want to "steal" too much of the potential "thunder" from a future East Isles sourcebook, if that makes sense.

Charles, your ideas remind me of a concept in the Elder Scrolls universe (itself strongly inspired by Gloranthan metaphysics) called Mantling. Mantling is one of several identified forms to achieve apotheosis in the Elder Scrolls (the world itself is called Nirn, but I'll go with the franchise name for recognizeability). It involved invoking the identity of a god to such a degree that one melds with them, effectively becoming that god themselves. Possibly changing the identity and personality of that god permanently. It it summarized like this: "Walk like them until they are forced to walk like you." And sometimes like this (in the particular esoteric way of Elder Scrolls "deeplore" texts): "[O]ne and one, eleven, an inelegant number. Which of the ones is the more important? Could you ever tell if they switched places?" Anyway, this aside, I think there is a very fertile field here to explore to what degree divine personalities and practices are static, dynamic, and so on. The idea of the Compromise would imply that the core identity and agency of gods is static since the Dawn, however whether this is truely factual is arguably up for debate. Additionally, there is the question of whether indeed many of the acts ascribed to the gods themselves in the God Time where done by that god/rune-in-itself, or whether they indeed were carried out to a large extent by worshippers identified as them (ie. effectively "mantling" their god). There's even the possibility that the "active-self"/"ego"/"personality" of gods is not an original quality of the runes they spring from/are, but that this is some kind of superstrata applied entirely by the efforts/influences of worshipper, successively over generation and millennia. God is the way he is because we thought he was like that and we made him like that, as it were. Heretical to rune-purist grognards, perhaps, but then we are engaging in some theoretical God Learning here, so why not.