Sir_Godspeed

Quote

Most shamans from the north of the Han River perform in Hwanghae-do style — named after a former joint North and South Korean province — and are called into the profession by spirit sickness. First they get very ill, and once they finally realize that this is a call to become a shaman, they accept their gods and do an initiation ritual. In many cultures around the world, this is a classic call to shamanic practice. This is the type of shamanic practice where shamans get possessed by otherworldly beings.

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.

1 hour ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

*shrug* I always connected them with the Lopers of Sechkaul, who learnt to teleport and got the Sword of Tolat from the Artmali, who in their worship of Artmal the artificer paint a third eye on their forehead even today. In ancient times they had settled the Southeast before Sshorg and the Flood.

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.

22 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

They are called Book Wyrms.

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.

 

6 minutes ago, Joerg said:

the Psstorlists

The quitetest Storm people.

6 minutes ago, Ian Cooper said:

I suspect some of this also gets to the worship of Chaos gods in Fonrit etc. With no hordes of chaos creatures spilling from nests, and no strong mythic history of chaos blasting the landscape the cultural hatred of chaos is just not so ingrained in the south.

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.

30 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Epic of Gilgamesh tablet 11

I sacrificed a lamb

The gods gathered around the altar like flies

 

This has always struck me as giving an interesting insight as to the Sumerian view of divinity🤢

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.

2 minutes ago, Tindalos said:

Pelandan Ideograms get an entire section in the Entekosiad (page 79 in the red version)

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

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

During his stint in Mexico, Greg (initially reluctantly) reconnected with the Catholic church as the local forms of shamanism in Oaxaca were firmly joined with Catholic rites according to his web diary of that time. Shamans don't appear to have a problem with monotheistic religions and their entities as a subset of their spiritual contacts.

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.

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Hey, that's something!! (Forgive fudged composite quote . . . not letting me bring in text across pages.)

Starting to build a dangerous picture of prehistoric Frontem that might finally reveal where the Tadeniti went.

It became an obsession today so I checked. The Guide has cattle in Jolar as well as Umathela. Conspiracy theories of garbled Pamaltelan records notwithstanding, it looks like some Doraddi managed to capture a few herds and the secret of sustaining them. Not sure how far they promulgated. This is good grist for differentiating what would otherwise be endless ahistorical savannah.

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?
 

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Our real world Bronze Age had literacy only in the shape of hieroglyphs reduced to a syllabary, with the alphabetic script emerging from the illiterate era of the Bronze Age collapse. Along the Oslir River, we have three alphabetic scripts  Cat-scratchsin, do-scratching, and Dara Happan. Prior to the Dara Happan system we have Pelorian glyphs which appear to have evey characteristic of a syllabary. (From what we know about these three scripts, all of them include symbols for vowels, unlike the original semitic scripts, an adaptation which may have been made by the Greeks or the Lesbos folk (from whom the Etruscans appear to have descended).

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.

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Western Buserian is awesome. I think it lines up with the fragments I'm starting to see in Talsardia. Somebody also brings cattle to Pamaltela of course but now that you mention it I don't know for sure if herding survives down there the way it might in Masai country, for example. 

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. 

5 hours ago, Ian Cooper said:

IIRC Sandy suggested that Pamaltela has more one-off monsters and less chaotic races. So it has the Mother of Monsters, not hordes of broo. Perhaps think about it like this. In most mythology when heroes fight monsters, they live in a known location, there at most a handful of them, and they are powerful enough to dispatch ordinary folks and barely break into a sweat. That is more the nature of chaos in Pamaltela than hordes of broo.

As Joerg points out, there was a 'geat chaos swap' envisaged at some point. No idea if that is still a plan.

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.

It's odd that we've never heard much of Pelaskite or Hendrikilander pirates, consider the myriad of places to hide, and the relatively rough terrain of their homelands.

Are lightning and thunderbolts separate concepts in Glorantha? I always assume that "thunderbolt" was a poetic name for lightning by referring to it by the sound it makes.

I've always had a fondness for wily, crafty characters, or characters who in other ways embody something that "breaks with the rules" (ie. changes the game in some way), so Larnste and Larnstings have always been sort of Dark Horse favorites of mine. I'd like to think the Mermen have all sorts if interesting takes on this, given that they *also* have a pantheon and mythic environment that is rife with incomprehensibly powerful monsters, dour fates and all that.

EDIT: I googled Mastakos to get a more thorough look into this, but google wondered if I meant "mas tacos". Not this time, google. Not this time.

6 hours ago, davecake said:

Gary the Calm zombie

Larnste is the Cosmic Court deity of change and motion. He is important to the Orlanthi, because he is the father of Kero Fin, and thus Orlanth's maternal grandfather. It is Orlanth's Larnsting Soul (his Secret/Inner Wind) which allowed him to do things that no other Storm deity did before him: form a tribe, convert allies from other tribes, hide away, flee, and regroup. The Orlanthi, at least the Heortlings, have since revered this aspect of Orlanth, and value cleverness, evasion, and subterfuge in the face of insurmountable odds or difficult problems, as much as they value outright bravery, brutality or tenacity. The Hendriki in particular are famous for their Larnsting secrets, which allowed them to survive both the Nysealorean Empire and the Empire of Wyrm's Friends.

Now, much of this is probably fairly well known to regulars here, so why am I doing this summary?

Larnste's main quality is change and movement, and aside from Air, I can't help but think that Sea is a good representative of this Rune/concept. So my question is this: do we know of any Sea deities with the Movement/Change runes? Or alternatively, do we know of any Sea deities that are either associated with Larnste by name (probably doubtful), or with change/movement in particular? Many of the Physical Sea deities (Neliom, Sshorg, etc.) take the form of dragons that bore or travel across the land, so that is arguably fitting. Others might be currents, essentially the liquid equivalent of winds or weather patterns , and we of course have Magasta, who while often depicted as monstrous, dark and dour, also does rotate the Whirlpool, in itself a kind of Movement Rune, I guess.

Anyway, this is just out of curiosity (and a desire to brainstorm something cool, as always).

Aren't there also mentions of massive Chaos-monsters traveling along specific routes in the Pamaltelan Veldt? These aren't your "planning to destroy the world" kind of Chaos monsters, I guess, but they are powerful enough to be equivalents of the Hydra in Dragon Pass, at least from how they're described in the Guide (I'm not sure if all of them are Chaotic, it's been a while).

And of course the Mother of Monsters who wander along the shores of - Onlaks, is it? - and gives birth to new monsters at regular intervals.