Qizilbashwoman

this is unrelated entirely but boy howdy that reminded me to watch the new season of She-Ra, which dropped yesterday

It's from Pavis, Gateway to Adventure, page 391: ... and so forth

Ah Ralzakark the Unicorn Emperor. I thought he, uh died. Of "accidental" iron "poisoning". I thought the remaining ones were Ralzakark the Face and Ralzakark with the Scorpion Arm. I knew there was at least one "healed" broo, The Cleansed - a broo who healed its Chaos rune by drowning it in the Purifying Waters. It's a subcult of Zola Fel with the Water rune.

I'm here for the myths so yes. (There's no decent HeroQuest board.)

I thought Undeath was a Chaos subrune; Zorak Zoran doesn't have that rune and His cultists reanimate His slain dead and loathe Chaos. Lunar Way makes sense, but Chalana Arroy? That hurts my ... brain. I think it's my brain.

sorry, what

They had a lot to work through. HeroQuest has Orlanthi women essentially all having Earth runes and Orlanthi men having Wind runes in the first (elemental) slot; Solar Pantheon folk only change this by having men having Fire runes! (Vingans are women with Wind runes.) Also the whole "six genders four sexes" thing is definitely 100% not thought through at all. It's at least there so it's canon that Glorantha gives two fingers to Western Ideas, but it's not presented at all in the text. What do they mean by sex versus gender? That's not really how it works and two minutes with someone who understood sex-gender would have saved them a lot of confused players. I think Glorantha was always progressive - I mean, the plot of the Lunar Way is an exploration of patriarchy, matriarchy, and rebellion-fusion-, it's just that there was a lot of cultural change in the last decade in particular around sex and gender so there was a lot to shift!

All I know is all I want is Arkat cults. And I don't want Western ones. Argrath has Arkat's rune tattooed on his FACE, let's get that energy going in Kerofinela.

Well Primal Chaos can't really exist. It, too, breaks the compact, which means the Gods just smite it. It oozes in. Some Chaos corrupted divinities, and they work their Chaos through different ways: moral corruption, like Ogres, an existential threat present in Orlanthi clans that has to be constantly stamped out, or offers of magical power or eternal (un)life, or fertility, or Mallia's children (plagues), or what have you. Pocharngo just gives you, like, cancer. Radioactive, Chaotic cancer. So in that sense it's a spectacularly dangerous monster. You can stab broo; they are an enemy we know how to fight. Fighting a Pocharngo attack? Who has the equivalent of the Storm Bull but White Ladies?

all art is political the best explanation to date of this art IMHO is "woman looking down at her own body" because uh that's what you see. that's not what you see looking at someone else, it's what you see looking down (source: me looking down versus me looking in a mirror, where I look like, you know, a fairly average human being)

idk where you're looking, there's SO MUCH TIDDY in Glorantha. It's not specifically lewd except in the designs of certain deities, it's just "welcome to the Bronze Age, I am a fertility priestess". Player characters of Earth Goddesses (not the Death Rune kind) are portrayed with Minoan buxom clothing, including in recent publications. I think the latest Runequest has quite a few if I'm remembering correctly. But I'm 100% sure you're not gonna find it in colder climates, for sure. This is summer wear for Orlanthings - Esrolia, Prax, Kerofinela, Aggar, and so forth. Other Orlanthings are dressed for their roles as well: merchants are in merchant clothing: rich clothing in cities, travel wear for the road. Women who ride horses or are in cold climates are in pants, sometimes with overlaying skirts or wrapped dresses atop them if they are wealthy and urban. It's interesting to note that many Orlanthi cultists dress only in blue dye (woad) and maybe footwear and a hat. They are buck naked like Orlanth. So bodily exposure isn't limited to women!

well you're assuming that is identified as a major identifier for Ernaldans; maybe it is? Lhankorian faux-beards are an imitation of the god's notorious beard, Vingan dye of her hair, so it's entirely possible Ernaldan godhi wear false-breast pectorals. But not gold, that's the sun-metal! Copper is the Earth-metal. I'm a linguist and I also do anthropology and sociology and I cannot begin to explain the ways you are just entirely crashing the plane into the ground in this thread. I mean I could, but this board is not about disabusing people of basic facts about language, nor about classism, racism, and basic civility, which you seem free to want to pull the pin on and just throw directly into the crowd. Do you think maybe we could not do that as I feel like this is enough of a hellworld that I don't need to come into a Glorantha discussion and see someone clearly backhanding Englishes that aren't Oxford/Ohio Broadcaster? Because honestly it's pretty clear what you mean by that, and it's beyond ugly. It's not a dogwhistle at this point, it's a foghorn.

plutonium is soft, so not really. but you're now in the Bronze Age and contaminated with plutonium with no idea that you even HAVE to decontaminate, never mind figure out how to.

Well no, but there's also a difference between "roll on the Chaos mutation table" exposure and "The way Pocharngo attacks is to literally infect you with Chaos like cancer instead of doing points of damage". It's like the difference between an x-ray and being shot with a plutonium-tipped arrow.

Real-life matriarchies tend to be the opposite of patriarchies in that instead of men controlling everything, women control territory and play a central role in running lives, as in Esrolia, but men are appointed by men and affirmed by women's councils to operate in the marginal spaces. In other words, men have their own spaces on the margins. This should be familiar to North Americans from the Longhouse cultures of the North American Northeast, including the Wabanaki or Dawnland Confederacy of what is now the Maritimes and Northern New England, the Haudenosaunee or "Iroquois Confederacy" (which heavily influenced the American ideas of democracy), the Huron Confederacy and others. This pattern is also familiar from many other places around the globe, from East Africa and Southeast Asia. One such society developed in Han-speaking South China in the 6th and 7th centuries when the wealth provided by silk production, strictly women's work, meant that women no longer needed to marry to survive; a fun survival of that era is a large number of terms that refer to lesbian sex. One of the difficulties is that in real life, matriarchal societies rarely browbeat men into slave status; there is no equivalent to the violence of patriarchy. This is not a feminist talking point, this is just anthropological fact. Men still have power, they just no longer have power over women, and usually require agreement with women, who control reproduction and land, to declare war. One of the more famous matriarchal societies is in Sumatra and is a Muslim community, the Minangkabau. Esrolia is only unrealistic because in a "real world equivalent" of it, there'd be titles and stuff for men, and they'd live in men's houses when they weren't engaged in marriages with women. Men would spend their time "overseas" trying to make money and fame in places where men get respect, then come back and impress ladies so they could try to get some children out of it. This is what the Minangkabau men do! In fantasy games, the appropriate term is generally dystheist, because gods exist, you just hate them and think they bad.

Pocharngo is a Chaos deity known as the Cosmic Cancer and It is associated with Movement/Change and Chaos runes. I'd certainly be concerned about Chaos features triggered by Pocharngo's influence as Its attacks are to inflict harmful change - hence Its title, Cosmic Cancer. I don;'t know what that means in re: Primal Chaos, but I do know it means getting a Chaos mutation from It isn't just about, say, having a deeply unwholesome claw arm show up as with other kinds of Chaos exposure.

It is known. (I hate that show but it's a good catchphrase.)

Is the Piku of Apple Lane the god Three-Eyed Piku? I thought he lived under Kitor in Carmania. I know basically nothing about Apple Lane, a weird hole in my awareness. Well we know a large contigent arrived in Pithdaros, as you said, in 719. They are now Hrestoli. There are also the Pygmies, who are sometimes described as being Agimori immigrants as well; some are in Prax like the Men-and-a-Half and others are elsewhere and might not be related.

Well, because it's fiction. But in terms of Glorantha, some of these things actually do exist in game: I discussed this in another thread, actually! Rufelza (the embodied Red Goddess) hated slavery. Teelo Norri was a 13yo slave who turned into the goddess embodied as Teelo Estara and She banned slavery immediately and set up poor houses and orphanaria (damn you, Futurama, for that excellent word). Her life experience informed her identity as a god. The Dara Happan Empire was still separate at the time and thus subsequently it had its own series of slave bans; the First Prohibition is how Valare, known as the Addi, the author of the Entekosiad, was discovered. She had run away to the Lunar territory because she was due to be sold into slavery eventually and the announcement of the banning of slavery led to rioting. Once Teelo Estara proved Herself subject to the Great Compromise and thus divine, She ascended as the Red Goddess. Her followers then could do whatever they wanted, particularly after the Red Emperor had his soul shredded and was compromised by the very noble houses he used to control.

These are the Third-Eye Blue, who might be descended from the Zaranistangi with much intermarriage or might just be cultists of Piku. The eye being blue I think is key to the thing, either as a memorial to their ancestors, who were definitely actually blue, or to Piku, who is in fact blue. Opening their blue eye to the metalworking magics he stole from the Mostali... The game might just be like "you assume Genertelans are, like, all white people" or else they are supposed to have lost the blue and regained it only magically through initiation because of intermarriage with locals (there weren't THAT many Zaranistangi in Genertela). They certainly aren't just unexplained Agimori, although there are absolutely plenty of Agimori in Genertela.

I mean, uh, we did hear about that. We Hate Darjiinian Usurpers is still used as an excuse by Alkoth to grab victims. The last non-Mongoose release of material discussed Shargash raiding the Darjiini. For example, Dorkath, the Manimati city, has a bell tower in case Alkoth decides to go on a "crusade", which includes taking prisoners for mass human sacrifices. "The city is famous for its splendid bell tower, a soaring edifice that towers over the Frangin Quarter. The bell only rings to the sound of the Drums of Alkoth to signal a city-wide evacuation. ... When the war drums of Alkoth beat, all of Henjarl trembles."

Isn't that how he saved Melib from Sshorg, by human sacrifice to Tolat?

The Zaranistangi are technically para-Artmali, right? I understand that they are not descended from Artmal but are like his kinfolk also from the Blue Moon. The Three-Eyed Blue who stole ironworking are Zaranistangi; Three-Eyed Piku is the son of Dengbalu, who offered human sacrifice to invoke Tolat against Sshorg to save his people from drowning in Sechkaul. I remember reading somewhere that Dengbalu, who had the Sword of Tolat, brought bat-winged trolls back with him from the Blue Moon Plateau to Melib before he began his pilgrimmage to the West.

Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes is a truly fantastic lore product and explains a lot.

In narratives of Glorantha in and out of the Entekosiad, there are many hints that the Blue Moon being struck from the sky was related to the ascent of the Sun. Annilla (name spelled 14 different ways) is a Bad Bird for the Rinliddi and thus a demon bat who killed Yelm. Elsewhere she poisoned the Sun, thus enabling the Rebel God to kill Him. We know that the Darsenian myth says that Brightsun usurped his appointed role as warleader and seized political power, pushing out the rightful queen-goddess (it was the Green Age, so hard to distinguish the two). Was this an earlier, native Pelorian myth rewritten and eventually mostly erased in favor of the Orlanth/Rebel-kills-the-Sun during the codification the World in the early days of the Dawn? The entire blue streak thing is a little confusing.