Sir_Godspeed

Beaco Quaracus is a reed-and-wood joiner genius, who can build anything from anything. As long as it's made from reed and boards, of course.

43 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

Yes but again, I'm not sure if you become the god as they did that thing way back when in God Time, or if you become the god as they do the thing right now through you. Does that make sense?

These options aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

6 hours ago, seneschal said:

First Google Plus and now Yahoo eh?  Something tells me maybe these guys aren't our friends atter all.

Yeah, relying on these social media networks for fan groups is dicey.

Which reminds me that sooner or later Facebook is going to get shut down too. Probably later, but still.

It's probably too optimistic to expect a return to specific fan forums like it used to be back in the noughties.

Good question. While Time is referred to as a god (the youngest god), I am not aware that it is worshipped anywhere by anyone, thus I'm not sure if they're capable of "striking back" as it were, like other deities have been known to do.

1 hour ago, Runeblogger said:

You're going to love this one-shot when it comes out in the Jonstown Compendium:

By the way, what title do you prefer?  The authors are undecided...

THIS POST WAS MADE BY DUCK BANDIT GANG.😤😤😤☝️🦆


REAL BILL HOURS, WHO UP?🤑







(I regret nothing)


Although I do preger "Bandit Ducks!" for the catchiness.

11 minutes ago, DannyK said:

I like that — the First and Last Duck, rumored to be Grandfather Duck.

The EWF knew him as the Dragon-Duck, the God Learners as the Reconstructed Duck.

 

The great thing about looking for a guy is he can turn up whenever the campaign starts to run out of steam.

Ah, the Dragon-Drake.

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Love it. One super easy suggestion would be to pick a favorite Carl Barks travel plot . . . maybe "Lost in the Andes" or "Race to the South Seas" or even "Serum to Codfish Cove" if you want to put your people in parkas . . . and repaint all the surfaces with what you see in Glorantha. Doesn't have to be hyper canonical. Ducks see the world from a different angle anyway.

That's a good point. If it's the Ducks who are the PCs, you can do well to do some genre-messing. Stuff that's very serious for other races might be silly for them. And conversely, stuff that's comical for other races is deadly serious for the Durulz.

The issue with retractively changing the past is that it may very well be possible, but considering that it's already happened, we cannot reliably verify that it.... happened.

You know?

For example, the unified Lunar goddess might always have existed, or we might have a case where Sedenyan Heroquesters managed to imprint their idea of a unified Lunar goddess backwards into Myth so strongly that she has now always existed.

The same goes for Yelm. Was there always a Great Sun, or did someone manage to heroquest a Great Sun into being retroactively by mashing together the different mythologies of the Little Suns?

In the end, of course, it doesn't matter for practical purposes. The apes have always ruled the planet. Humanity has always been their prey. How could it possibly ever have been differently?

Wait, are the PCs the bounty hunters or the Ducks?

One minor niggle I have is why bounty hunters would pursue a small group of Ducks across Kethaela and out to sea and into Prax. Seems like it would be more profitable to call it quits and go back to Sartar and try and rustle up some other Ducks. Maybe you could have the Ducks running off with something particularly valuable to get the ball rolling - or maybe the Ducks start killing off some of the bounty hunters, which causes the bounty hunters to go into grudge-mode or something.

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

What really gets me about Bronze Age cities is how small they are, compared to even modern villages. 

Population-wise, area-wise or both?

3 hours ago, AndreJarosch said:

Adulthood starts at Initiation, which isn´t taking place when you turn 20, but more like 15 years. 
So building a family can easily start at anything from 16 to 36. 

I use 20 in my Glorantha, because "children can happen", you don´t have to be married. 🙂

 

Sex is easy, marriage is hard.

EDIT: I go off on a bit of a tangent, I hope you don't take this as an attack on your post.

If I remember correctly, the average of marriage age in rural peasant societies in the early modern era (14-17th centuries) was about 27 for men, and 20-23 for women. This was not hugely different from the preceding Middle Ages, iirc. The Bronze age might've been different, but I suspect not.

Part of the issue here is that there's a difference between reaching adulthood and working up the necessary acumen and resources to start one's own family. According to tradition, a child was made an adult at age 15 in Lutheran Norway, at which point they were eligible to take up apprenticeships, work at sea, or otherwise be gainfully employed, however they very, very rarely married at this age, because there were expectations to be fulfilled. The parents of the prospective bride, for example, if they were in somewhat good standing (ie. not desperate to marry off their daughter) would evaluate suitors' financial status, and older suitors obviously had a better chance there, and they would also scrutinize not only familial status, but the skills, reputation and achievements of the suitor himself. The would-be bride would also be a part of this, with more or less agency according to lots of different variables that I don't need to go into here. 

Long story short, many people, due to practical and financial concerns, didn't really have the opportunity to start families and procreate until sometime in their mid-twenties. While the example I am using is from the decidedly un-Gloranthan 16th/17th century Norway, to the best of my knowledge these basic dynamics have been pretty common through many eras and areas.

The teenage marriages tend to be outliers from the very wealthy (dynastic alliances) or the very poor (child marriage is often a desperate attempt to reduce the burden at home, and ensuring some measure of support for the one married off. Harsh, but there are often few other choices).

Early betrothals do pretty frequently occur though, but they might last several years as the families wait until the would-be-couple are deemed old enough and sustainable.

There are some differences at play here though. Admittedly, the Orlanthi are a lot less stuck up about premarital sex than Lutheran Europeans (they remind me more of some Melanesian trends in courting I've read about, but that's really neither here nor there), although on the other hand they also have easier access to birth prevention that the aforementioned RW people (through magic and/or herbs, iirc - and of course, it's not like every sexual encounter is potentially childbringing, ie. oral, manual, etc.). Another difference is the collective housing and living of the Orlanthi. This might mean that there is less emphasis placed on the bridal couple's ability to support themselves before they are married, which might bring the marriage age down. On the other hand, Orlanthi society is a good deal more gender-egalitarian, so women might collectively and individually work to prevent marriages from occuring too early (due to health concerns as well as simply not wanting a character to enter her "Ernaldan" stage too early. "Let the girl live a little before she settles down, there's always time for childrearing later!" might be a common sentiment.)

In summary, there are probably a number of factors that prevent Gloranthan "generations" (the time from birth to parenthood) being shorter than somewhere in the 20-25 ballpark.

This is just my impression, as always.

4 hours ago, David Scott said:

That's a very good point. In the case of the GLs and Dragonkill, there were few if any survivors. So it's the case of peoples external to the event looking in for memories "and they disappeared "...

Catastrophic mass-deaths make genealogy very difficult. My dad used to do a lot of genealogy research for our family, and the main tool for that were parish registers ("kirkebok"). They worked pretty well back to about the early-to-mid 1400s (ie. the tail end of the main Black Death epidemics) if I recall what he told me correctly, at which point they lack a great deal of names and dates are uncertain at best.

In an oral society this effect might be even worse - especially when taking collective trauma, and even potential taboos into account.

Oh, and of course, the deaths of key ritual experts (Lhankor Mhy scribes, nobles, other literates or other poets) would also create a kind of bottlenecking effect where the knowledge that is preserved comes mostly from those lineages that did not live in that area or participate in the invasion.

8 minutes ago, M Helsdon said:

The impression I get from more recently published sources, is that Ernalda has a very significant political/economic/divine presence in Esrolia, but could be in error.

You're probably right. The interaction between and roles of the different Earth Great Goddesses is complex enough in and of itself, but probably even more byzantine in Esrolia and Nochet.

I read Esrolia: Land of 10k Goddesses a while ago, and there is a piece that talks about how Ernalda in Esrolia has a more limited role than elsewhere, as there are more named goddesses to cover some of things she does elsewhere, and so Esrolian Ernalda is often associated more simply with good fortune - are these priestesses dedicated to that version of Ernalda, or am I reading too much (or too little) into it?

Also, I am quite fond of logistics, so that sounds fun.

I can't comment on whether Rokarism is a mockery of Malkionism (although I agree that they are quite unsympathetic, which they have in common with the Solar patriarchies, for instance), but it doesn't exactly feel that much worse than, say, the Brithini.

Given that the Brithini explicitly severed their ties with Malkion during his exodus, I'm not sure if Brithinism counts here as defining what Malkionism is (altough they share the castes, runic worldview, sorcery and the urban principles).

10 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

i focused on the Armenians because where they live have many similarities to Dragon Pass. Most areas are actually classified as Mediterranean climates or are mountainous areas so they are just a hair too cool to be Mediterranean (so they get actual snow in winter). The Viking one I picked only because I wanted to show the actual size that longhouses can get.

Also, the Longhouse Cultures of the Northeast of North America wasn't just *pre-*Columbian; it lasted a long time after. Longhouse politics affected early American political thought and social life - the word caucus is an Algonkian word and it was no accident that the first woman's suffrage movement happened at Seneca Falls.

Never implied they were "just" pre-Colombian, but they *originated* prior to European colonization. Unlike, for example, the equestrian prairie cultures.

9 hours ago, Joerg said:

According to the map on the Ban in the Guide (p.201) neither Erontree nor Winterwood were affected by the Ban. Neither were Ygg's Isles.

Adding ancient logging rights of the Yggites to this, I am not sure that the Yggites had a scarcit of lumber. Their islands are within sight of the mainland, making the sea voyage free of fear of the Closing.

We've been over this before, but didn't the Ban cut off their access to Erontree? They were reportedly eating their own children after all.

Additionally, we don't really know what "logging rights" entail, specifically. Quotas, purpose, earmarking, etc.

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

Yes, originally, the God Learners took the Malkioni Scriptures and went through them, almost line by line, working out which were true scriptures and which had non-Malkioni influence. They produced the Abiding Book as a result, unless that was the one that write itself out of thin air. 

The tricky bit was when they tried to find new ways to differentiate between true Malkioni and non-Malkioni influences, as some of it looked very similar. So, they used non-Malkioni techniques, probably reasoning that if they could do something using non-Malkioni techniques then it wasn't true Malkioni and could be removed. The deeper they looked, the more they got sucked in, until they mostly concentrated on the non-Malkioni stuff. Eventually, they categorised the non-Malkioni material in the same way as they did Malkioni material.

I like the description of the first God Learner HeroQuestors. They found a way into the Storm Realm and sent experimental HeroQuestors there, but none came back. So, they sent a small party of HeroQuestors and none came back. Then they sent a dozen HeroQuestors and none came back, then twenty, then fifty, then a hundred HeroQuestors and one came back, barely alive, to tell their tale. Success!

My impression was that the original Abiding Book wrote itself out of thin air on Jrustela (I'm a bit unclear as to whether this is some snippet of surviving GL propaganda or whether it literally happened), and that the Rokari later went through it line by line and eliminated everything they deemed non-orthodox to create the Sharp Abiding Book. Maybe this happened twice, I don't know.

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

That haircut is distinctive . . . 

His Fire Rune is clearly very powerful.

10 hours ago, Minlister said:

Personally, for "darkness" house I used Pictish brorch, both impressive and impervious to light!!

 

 

I suggested those as possible building-styles for the Yggites, due to their relative lack of need for large amounts of lumber, protection against winds, and high degree of defensibility in a (presumably) pretty violent Vadrudian society - but you make a compelling case here as well.

19 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

I continue to find it implausible that the most feasible plan for clan housing would not be used. The large main hearth area would still be square! Individual housing is direly labor-intensive and materials-intensive and practical only in intensely-settled places like cities, where clan is broken up.

The entire structure of Orlanthi life is around clan on top of the history of how archaeology tells us people lived. The pre-modern Hemshin only didn't make longhouses because of the extreme peculiarity of their geography, it was one of the most notable things about them.

I would be onboard with longhouses, but Chaosium seems to currently be going in a slightly different, more Mediterranean direction.

My interpretation of multiple sub-dwellings of semi-free dependant tenant farmers (ooph, a mouthful) is based on the idea that the (idealized) distinction between free and semi-free is the ability to maintain a full oxen plow-team. This, imho, implies separate fields to plow, because if they had all been living in the same household, I am somewhat uncertain why they would divide the plots into different properties and divide access to the plow-team. A main dwelling of the free farmer, with multiple sub-dwellings of semi-free dependants makes more sense in this regard. The same also goes for the idea that another term used (in-universe) for semi-free Heortling farmers is "sheep-men", which for one, again refers to the lack of a complete oxen plow-team (to the best of my knowledge) but imho also to that they do still possess their own flocks of sheep which their graze on their own grazing ranges (the existence of commons will have to be discussion for another day). Lastly, there is also the term "cottar", which I am aware is being phased out as inaccurate, but if it still carries any weight, it does literally refer to a cottager or crofter, ie. a tenant farmer living on an outlying plot.

As always, this is just my personal interpretation, and I should probably add that I have a feeling that Chaosium might also not be going in this direction. And I do like the longhouse, and also the mediterranean square courtyard-house so I'm not super-upset whatever solution works out.

We should probably also keep in mind that it's not like any of these residential patterns necessarily exclude each other. There are bigger and smaller longhouses (and even an outlying semi-free family can still number enough to construct and maintain their own mini-longhouse, if we go by what I've read about Norwegian archaeology, although I don't know how it looks like in say, precolombian longhouse cultures or the Caucasus), and the shape and construction of dwellings is going to vary greatly on climate, access to building materials, surrounding dangers, and in Glorantha, construction myths.

EDIT: Had a look through the linked article about Heortling housing from 2016, and clearly this topic is something that has been discussed at length several times.

12 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Learning God Learner magic is "bad" because it challenges the entrenched authorities who got where they are in a more conventional way. They have a lot of ego wrapped up in doing everything in the right order. Some authorities enshrine God Learnerism as a useful scapegoat for discrediting everything they don't like.

 

As I understand it, God Learnerism is in a sense relativizing what various cultures hold as gospel, allowing people to radically question what are held to be profound truths. Suddenly your storm god isn't THE storm god, but just another expression of a pattern of interacting runic ideals. That kind of relativism is not very popular with people who hold those ideas to be the truth, and the truth to be the basis of their very existence and survival.

Not AS relativizing as, say, certain forms of mysticism, I bet, but intolerably abstracting for your average theist or whoever.

EDIT: For a real-life example, I grew up with some very devout relatives who found the idea that members of other religions could make just as strong a case that *their* religion was true to be patently absurd, and honestly pretty offensive. The idea that my relatives' god and the god of some other people might both be equally plausible was unthinkable. Basically, "relativizing" their own worldview and trying to see something from another religionist's point of view was not only undesireable, but practically impossible.

Yeah, the distinction between True/Ancestral Mostali and Clay Mostali/Dwarfs is really murky, especially in older material (assumedly because that hadn't been quite worked out yet).

To the best of my knowledge (possibly gleamed from this very forum, or some kind of message thread elsewhere), Pavis' parentage was the product of some kind of movement that looked either to the World Friends' Council of the Dawn Age, and (possibly by extension) back into the Green Age. Something something refining the Man Rune. But then people here tell me that the Dwarfs don't have the man Rune (sounds like a game convention rather than actual worldbuilding sense, but who am I to say) so maybe that's overreaching Pavis' and his forebears motives.

Yeah, that's odd. It's almost tempting to say that perhaps they weren't wives after all, but possibly high-class hostages (in the medieval sense) or perhaps priestesses or something - however these seem a bit fanciful. The simplest explanation, that they were exogamous wives, does still seem to be the most likely one.

The implication of the practice of agnatic seniority is interesting too - ie. younger brothers of the deceased having inheritance priority over the sons of the deceased. It's not exactly super-rare (iirc. it occurs in some Slavic and Gaelic cultures, as well as some Old Norse cases, albeit being subject of rivalries).

As @Joerg mentioned, the practices of a central stead with (outlying?) tenant (or unfree)-steads and some live-in servants/slaves is very reminiscent of 1800s residential patterns I'm familiar with from Scandinavia (but I'm sure it occurs in many other areas as well). To be honest, it's how I imagine a number of Orlanthi steads in my head (moreso than the pseudo-medieval village cluster of houses) but there's a certain overlap.

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

On a HeroQuest.

One of our PCs had a BattleCat, which was basically a tiger that he could ride. It was an allied spirit as well, which was handy.

I don't know if there's anything in the already existing material about this, but personally I'd imagine some kind of giant demigod-like Alynx could make for a cool mount for a Yinkin/Orlanth-worshipping Orlanthi hero or whatnot. We have flying bulls and giant flying rams, so I mean, why not.