Sir_Godspeed

Like @Joerg and @g33k I also have a fondness for the pseudo-Dark Age Germano-Celtic look & feel of the Heortlings. I don't wholly oppose Hittite or Near Eastern inspirations (and I believe there are some really clever switches going on - like replacing Celtic Oppida with Near Eastern hilltop palace complexes for the Heortling fortifications), but going full Mycenaean is a bit too much for me. Thankfully, we have more-or-less period-appropriate inspiration (as period-appropriate as the pesudo-Hellenic aesthetics of various Solar & Pelorian people) in the form of Hallstatt & La Tene Celts. Hell, if you want to integrate with Hittites and Anatolia, you've even got the Galatians, who were smack dab in the middle of it (albeit a thousand years later than Hattusa, not that it really matter, considering the vast time difference between the heyday of Sumer, Mohenjo Daro and the Hellenistic cultures mentioned above). It should be mentioned that, from what I can tell, 13th Age in Glorantha, is mixing the Hallstatt/La Tene visuals with the Mediterraean influences - to great effect, based on what I've seen. Look at these guys!: Clearly a clan chief or tribal king discussing matters with his most trusted shield-thanes. The left one might be an Elmali, if we want to get cute with it. Speaking of cute, look at this little guy, looks straight out of a Sartarite woodcarving!: Heck, he's even got storm runes on his shield and sword! Admittedly, you might want to "Mahabharatize" some of those Hallstatt people, but that's what's fun and clever about Glorantha: it's its own thing, at the end of the day.

*grumbles in a West Country accent* Bloody budget cuts.

Having just finished Esrolia: Lo10kG now, I'm moving on to the Book of Heortling Mythology, and in one section ("The Palace of Gold"), it lists mosses as part of the Yellow Forest, which I'm not sure if meant to imply that they are part of the Embyli complex. This is kinda weird, since mosses aren't even vascular plants. Hell, ferns, which ARE vascular plants, and thus more closely related to gymnosperm and decidious tress in the RW are relegated to the Slorifings, who are said to not have descended from Aldrya at all. Personal thoughts: Mosses are the descendants of a primeval child of Flamal, who were some of the first to cover the land, and as such they are more closely tied to Darkness(?) and even Water (although neither rain nor rivers or lakes apparently existed in the Green Age....) than later Flamali. They were effectively considered archaic even by the end of the Green Age, and have since just sort of hitched a ride with other plants. They do not produce humanoids aside from tiny moss-sprites. (Maybe they also mixed in with the Red Elves/Slorifings, as the massive marshes in Pamaltela, which are the main domains of the Slorifings are presumably also thick with mosses - incidentally both of these reproduce with spores). EDIT2: After a bit of looking around, I can't tell if the Will-o-Wisp depicted in the Guide is given a mythic origin, so I'm just going to go ahead and claim that Will-o-Wisps are a kind of moss-sprite I mentioned above. Perhaps they're the moss-equivalent of dryads or nymphs or something, just teensy. They hang around other Flamali because - and I'm just spinning a yarn here - the Moss God died during the Gods War, and they've been parentless ever since. Humans have a hard time connecting to that thread of things, but some Aldryami heroquesters have awakened and connected with larger divine moss entities. Plot hook(?): Delecti used the local nymphs in his swamp to corrupt the Will-o-Wisps to his will, so that they maliciously lead adventurers to their deaths, however if an adventurer party managed to get a particularly clever elf party member with them, they might do something tricksy to get the wisps to their side again.... (EDIT: RW biological relations are of course merely suggestive of Gloranthan relations, not to be taken literally, still I think mosses deserve their entirely own category, moreso perhaps than ferns.)

Change and Movement appears to have to share a Rune, while Law and Stasis gets one each, even if the incarnation of Stasis, the Spike, was instrumental in the expansion and formation of the Cosmos through innovation. It's enough to make a sane man go Eurmali.

You're right, of course, and my mixed Lutheran and Pentecostal upbringing should've helped me avoid such a Latin Catholic-centric comment. Still, overall I more or less stand by what I said, with the added caveat that this logic was obviously only accepted by some Christian clerics, far from all.

In Scandinavia you have the folklore of the utburd, literally "that which is taken out(side)", and refers to a child who is not baptized and buried in the wild (or sometimes babies who were put out there to die if they were born outside wedlock). As the stories go, they would haunt passersby, wailing softly, and when someone came closer to check it out, they would leap up at them, cling impossibly tight, and grower larger and heavier until the person either died, or managed to give them what they wanted: a name. "Eg døyper deg på von, Anten Kari eller Jon" (I christen you by chance, Either Kari or Jon). A bit random, but it's one of the more interesting folklore consequences of Christianity views on baptisment and the afterlife, I think. And a damn good plot for a horror movie (as the Witcher 3 apparently also thought, since there's a mission with a very similar being in there).

This excerpt from the article reminded me of the Wheel of Time books. While having nothing to do with shamanism itself (the magic on those books is mostly a lot more like Gloranthan sorcery - albeit less Platonic idealism and rituals and more "mentally applied physics"), the books have channeling (its name for magic-using) coming up in a person usually around puberty. For those who are not taken into the learning institution, they usually get sick and either mentally block the ability to channel, or in some cases die. Anyway, a bit tangential, but the commonality of "crisis as cause of initiation" is a good story-telling device, and tool for world-building as well.

I've been trying to find some parallel in the Danmalastan myths we have. I considered perhaps that they were some surviving branch of the Viymorni who were out for more Mostali secrets after Vadel soured that relationship - but that's super-speculative, they could be descended from any of the five other Danmalastani groups as well, or indeed it's questionable whether the Six Original Peoples is relevant to ascertaining their identity/origin at all. I *am* tempted to relate them to the various other Western groups we see popping up in Pelanda/Sweet Sea area though, as opposed to the Zaranistangi. And even if they're blue-skinned, there are other candidates for that, given the various Blue Folk over there.

I legitimately broke out in laughter over this. Well done.

I rather imagined someone walked in among the racks of scrolls, and finding a passageway with new scrolls they'd never seen before. Walking around and around in twisting ways, the finding themselves somewhere else entirely. A side-effect of concentrated knowledge and sacred geometry and all that. The quitetest Storm people.

The Doraddi seem to hate Chaos though (inasmuch as they hate anything, like jungle) - and when comparing with Peloria's relative lack of focus on Chaos as an existential enemy despite being in central Genertela, it seems like there is more at play.

Well, crud, I'm all out of reactions again. Suffice to say I was about drop a big fat laugh emoji for this. (And to be fair, Sumerians gods were pretty dickish).

Yes, I attempted learning Tamil, and although it's an abugida and not a true syllabary, it was close enough for me to get a certain feel of the logic behind it.

Ah, I see that now! So, the writing is verified, then, and according to the commentator "still" in use in temples. Good to know.

Indeed, the topic of Latin-American syncretism is a huuuuuuge field within Latin-American anthropology, at least. On a different note - and it's perhaps dubious to call it shamanism (then again, these are often externally imposed categories anyway) - when I was doing my fieldwork in India, many people in the town I lived in visited the local Pentecostal pastor to have evil spirits driven from them. These people were overwhelmingly Hindu, and would arguably have gone to whoever was seen as efficacious. Very pragmatic.

Umathela I could've seen coming - since it's a different climate and geographically distinct, but Jolar surprises me. Of course, in the RW, clover is quite nice for both cattle and horses (although maybe not as their entire staple, I have no idea), so Gloranthan clovers (or horses/cattle) have something going on to differentiate that. Or maybe some of that grass finally managed to take root - either naturally (seeds from ballast, f.ex.) or actively planted. Who knows what is going on. Someone could even make up a heroquest that makes their flock of cattle able to digest pamaltelan flora, or something.

First off, thanks for adding to my understanding @Joerg, I wasn't aware that the stars were stuck on the other side of the sky dome at some point (though I did know the entire skydome was luminous prior to Lorion getting up there, at least according to some sources). I also seem to lack some knowledge on this Zator. All I can find about him is that he was a planet that disappeared (around Umath's rebellion that claimed other planetary sons??), I wasn't aware he was the original sage of the Kingdom of Perfection (or whatever one would term that polity). Is this from ReAscent or somewhere else? The wiki terms a lot of the Pelandan roots we see "ideograms". I'm not sure if this is an innovation of the wiki, or if it's from the source texts (I don't recall ideogram being used in either ReAscent nor the Entekosias), but if they indeed are "ideograms" and not just "phonemes" or "roots" then that would imply that some form of writing system is in place. Perhaps some intermediate between cave painting and hieroplyphics, but certainly not alphabetical. I suppose I'm a bit biased in thinking that some old Pelandan stuff as older than what we see in Dara Happa, if only because Pelandan words from the Entekosiad seem to have retained more archaic features (internally capitalized letters to signify ideogram changes, ie. "BusEnari" vs. Dara Happan "Busenari".) It's a profoundly tentative position, I admit.

Good question. The Doraddi have the "Milk Antelope", don't they? They might be the closest thing to cattle the Veldt has. I guess it depends on whether we imagine cattle to be able to eat the Pamaltelan clover (iirc) that the Six-Legged Empire's horses couldn't digest. EDIT: clover, not cloves. My English still has a lot of holes.

I'm a bit reticent to get into the whole phenotype stuff, but I guess you can argue that the Thinobutans are to the Pamaltelans/Agi what RW Melanesians* are to Sub-Saharan Africans*. They look superficially similar from an outsider's perspective, even if they have been separate population pools for hundreds of thousands of years. (*Dubious categories, I'm aware, hopefully you get what I mean.)

Maybe I'm dumb, but given his name and association with cattle-sacrifice, I've always associated Buserian (and the feminine Pelandan BusEnari, wich both seem to derive from the archaic Pelandan "Bus" ideogram, which means cattle) with western cultural influx rather than Pentan/eastern influx. Given the successive waves of Storm Cattle peoples (Tawars and their derived groups) that migrated up the Janube river basin from Fronela in the late Golden or early Storm Age, I'd assumed that this was the natural migration path of the cattle-sacrificing beared scholar guy as well. We know that Bisos appears to have arrived in the same way, having become integrated into the Pelandan/Wendarian pantheon at some point (to the point of being given a native genealogy, much like Buserian would get in Dara Happa). It gives us a common hypothetical western origin of both Lhankor Mhy and Buserian, meaning that we could arguably say that they originate from the escaping Danmalastani (Malkioni) scholars (of which the Zzaburi are also bearded and tall(-hatted), of course) - I forget whether it's the Tadeniti or Kachasti/Kachisti who are hypothesized as the originators, but the speculative trajectory I see is something like this: Fleeing Malkioni sorcerers -> Migratory Storm scholars -> Pelandan/Pelorian scholars. You could also argue that star-lore only really becomes useful AFTER Umath wrecks the sky, since prior to that, the Sky was so utterly regular and predictable that no one really needed to specialize in order to learn it. This could be used to explain why stargazers did not become specialized until after Storm bull people became a thing. Besides, during Yelm/Murharzam's heyday, you could probably just fly up to the stars to talk with them rather than having to gaze at them from towers anyway. And lastly, before Storm/Cattle people became a thing, you would probably not sacrifice cattle, but stuff like birds and people ("sacrifice" being a very different thing in an existence that lacked actual Death). If looking at origins within Time, then Pent was empty during the Gray Age (aside from trolls, Hsunchen and Aldryami, if I recall correctly). Contrary to the ReAscent's polemics, Peloria was not invaded by horse nomads - the horse nomads originated in Peloria, as they were refugees from Dara Happa during the Ice Age, who used the newly introduced horse to survive outside the Dome. To me, that seems to make an "introduction" of Buserian "from" the Jenarong to the Pelorians a little absurd. The Jenarong ruled at Dawn, as native Pelorians. Then they got kicked out by the revitalized urbanists, to their land of exile, Pent, where they have stayed mostly since. Anyway, sorry if I misunderstood things. We're in pretty esoteric areas now, and I've been known to get things mixed up. Also, deepest apologies to OP for getting dragged into this maelstrom of nerdery.

Cool! I'll get right on reading it, interesting stuff. A friend of mine who did her Master's fieldwork in Tuva (Russia, bordering Mongolia and China, iirc) had a few sessions with a local shaman in their apartment. Shamanism does survive in Scandinavia as well, with the indigenous Saami traditions, incuding the rune-drum and other activities. To give people an example: a couple of years ago a local politician in Norway's northernmost county claimed in social media that he had been ganna (cursed, bewitched) by Saami detractors. It became a bit of a joke on a national level, sure, but locally there was more of a complicated view on the whole issue.

That fits with the Doraddi mentality as well - where individual contests of strength and skill - including outright duels - are their preferred method of warfare ("Hero's War"), as opposed to massed armies engaging in large field battles ("Ancient Warfare"), which is seen as primitive and self-destructive. This single-hero/duel outlook fits better with a terrain where the main threats are solitary giant monsters as opposed to raiding parties of broos and scorpionmen or the like. Of course, there are nuances to this - Orlanthi have a bit of both, for example. (All this being said, the Guide does give us the impression that Pamalt's Veldt is probably one of the most comfortable, friendly, and most peaceful places in Glorantha - at least so far).

You'd think the sand bars in the Rightarm isles would make for good pirate escape locations, if you they assault with smaller ships (ie. the enemy can't pursue you over a shallow, but you can cross it, and continue on your merry way) - however, if it's assumed that the native Ludoch and inhabitants are anti-piracy to an overwhelming degree, I guess that's a no-go.

All right, all right, all right, this is more like it. EDIT: Bonus points if it's possible to play around with the anthropomorphization, so in addition to two-legged vegetative giants, you've also got four-legged things, and maybe something like a giant banyan who moves on a mass of root-tentacles, like some kind of leafy giant octopus.

Honestly, the lack of ent-sized treemen being unleashed on someone who's angered The Forest seems like a missed opportunity. IMG there are a few of these ancient giants, possibly first-generation seedlings of the local Great Tree or [insert mythic explanation], mostly slumbering, but who can be awoken with rituals for various purposes. I know it's outside established lore, buuut, um, I plead Rule of Cool. Although hordes of runners overrunning the offenders with a million tiny branches gouging in every orifice like a brambly tidal wave is also pretty evocative.