dumuzid

The Nargan Desert lies in southern Pamaltela. In the Gods age it was a sea, the home waters of the Artmali Empire's Aquamarine Armada, but the Firefall scoured it into a great desolate waste. It is a sort of Pamaltelan mirror to the ruin of Genert's Garden in the north. I have read passing references to the Nargan's importance during the Hero Wars in Pamaltela. I don't know the details, but it involves Chaos monsters, which normally appear as one-off freaks in Pamaltela, emerging from the Nargan Desert in numbers not seen in Pamaltela since the Demon Wars of the Great Darkness. Among the evils of this outpouring will, apparently, be hordes of broo, previously unknown in Pamaltela in such numbers. I have also read that the source of these Choatic beings is Genertela, that by some strange interaction the horrors of Dorastor and the Wastes will be transplanted south to bedevil Pamaltela. Does anyone known more about this? Specifically, why, or at least by what agency, the Chaos creatures make such a long and unprecedented journey for their kind?

My question is: where does the other famous Wolf Pirate leader we know of, Mularik, go when Argrath and Harrek go their separate ways? The answer I found for My Glorantha is Rhis on the Castle Coast, recruiting residue from the Quinpolic League into a Hrestoli/Navigationalist army-in-exile to take to Dragon Pass for the war against Tarsh, with the promised goal of returning home enriched with Lunar plunder and supported by eastern mercenaries to drive Guilmarn and the Estaurenids from the former Quinpolic principalities, but that answer is tailored to the needs of my campaign.

My player characters are now heroquesting the myth, we covered ceremonial preparations and most of the first two stages of the myth in campaign today. --- In their experience of the myth an enormous iron-headed bolt came winging out of the north in Stage 1, and destroyed Artmal's cloud boat. Helera had to swoop her cloud ram low to the ground to save him. While Artmal composed himself Helera shot a winning quip to Cathora that favored Artmal, and helped kindle her interest in him. Artmal and Heler hunted with Cathora, and were taught by Cathora how to arrange the remains of their kills so that the beasts returned to life and health. When they had enough meat for the banquet of Fralar they headed for his Cave, and in their journey found remains of animals slain without care taken to ensure they recovered. At each such Cathora insisted that they halt their progress and repair the creatures as best they could. Some animals were lacking bones, and some bones were shattered completely, and creatures with incomplete skeletons rose with lames and limps. The Sun, looking down, saw tracks that showed the scattering of herds, but also footsteps surrounding the hooves, of two-legged folk guiding animals away. At Fralar's Cave the gods presented their hunt, but the Carnivore King scoffed. He blamed some of the hurts of his land on two-legged interlopers like them, and tasked Artmal and Heler to prove their good intent, and heal one of those ills: to hunt down the Striped Gyre-wolf, the Hobbler, render it incapable of recovery, and bring him proof of the deed. Hawks of the Sun saw the work of the Hobbler: animals, not slain, but stripped of pieces of themselves, and left to crawl along in agony. The Sun's hawks guided the gods to a wooded copse in the saddle between two hills, overgrown and crooked, and the Sun's Justice took shape in a body of Truth to accompany Artmal and Heler in the hunt for the Hobbler. From afar off the gods heard the Gyre-wolf gnawing on bones. Gorakiki was wake and moving in those woods, and no friend to the Hobbler; she spread Fear before the gods, and sank it deep into the Hobbler so that the Gyre-wolf peered beyond its den with its many eyes. Artmal and the Sun's Justice readied javelins, while Helera took a position to gore the beast with her long spear should it break and run. The first casts of the gods missed, or were dodged by the Gyre-wolf, but when Helera leaped out at it its effort to flee flopped it onto its back. Then a weakness of the Hobbler was revealed: its backbone was not firm and strong but spongey and soft, and once on its back it struggled to right itself. The Sun's Justice closed with the beast, and stabbed at it again with Heler, but its lashing limbs beat aside their weapons, and its wicked claws gored the Sun's leg cruelly. Artmal drew back a second javelin, and his shaft flew perfectly, plunging into the gyrewolf's chest and transfixing its heart, slaying it instantly. He invoked his mother's blessing to heal the Sun's leg, and the Sun cleft the Gyrewolf's heart from its body, preventing its recovery. The same cut freed the bones of the creatures the Hobbler had maimed, and a great kettle of hawks descended into the copse to seize the bones and return them to the wounded animals. Looking on from a hilltop in panther-form, Cathora saw everything, and her love for Artmal grew. --- And that's where we left off. We'll complete the heroquest during next week's session, which are sure to reveal further new twists to the myth.

The Flintnail cult is absolutely responsible for construction and maintenance in Suntown, same as the rest of New Pavis, and if memory serves it's a matter of canon that they at least laid the foundations of Sun Dome. In my campaign the players once infiltrated the Sun Dome vaults for a heist by posing as an architectural inspection crew from Dwarf Hill.

The only times my character imposed public executions from the position of king were with war captives. In one case the culprit was guilty of crimes against duck-kind (the great duck hunt), so the manner of punishment was left to the discretion of a duck weaponthane from my character's community. execution was rendered right there on the battlefield, while others were tending the wounded and stripping the dead; I seem to recall he ran the prisoner through, then burned his duck-feather cloak. no great fanfare. the other time was with foreign mercenaries proven to be in league with chaos cults, specifically thanatar and cacodemon. our community was founded on battle against chaos monsters, and very few rules of war were being observed on either side. those prisoners my character gave to the Kyger Litor and Zorak Zoran cults, as sacrifices towards magic for the decisive clash. The executions were quite public: visually, if you could see in the dark, and audibly, as the cries echoed up from the caves beneath our city for some time. these are cases of a troll king rendering judgment in an extremely heterogenous community, using mostly Esrolian practice as guidelines, and so wouldn't be a good model for many places outside the old Kingdom of Night

I think that identification works on several levels.

In My Glorantha there is absolutely a lost Vadeli Talar caste (perhaps produced through congress with an enslaved goddess of Pamalt's household, in Chir) that the others are quite pleased to be rid of (for the moment), not least because I could not resist the idea of the Vadeli Empires of old being ruled by 'Yellow Kings'

There's some level of mythic resonance between Argan Argar and Benjamin Disraeli

One of the core themes of my 'Quest for the Bones of Artmal' campaign is the mythic desolation left by the dismemberment of Artmal in the Storm Age, which was only exacerbated by the early 2nd Age heroquesting of Garangordos, the founding tyrant of Fonrit, and subsequent history. The Storm and Darkness story of the original Artmali is a tragic spiral, as their gods and protectors are picked off by the Gods War and they reach into new, Chaotic places to replace the lost--until they were decisively overpowered by the past masters of that sort of thing, the Vadeli. The subsequent fall of the Vadeli Empire(s) of the Darkness freed the Artmali, or Veldang, people of what is now Fonrit, but neither Artmal nor the Blue Moon were restored with the Dawn. Based on the stories in Revealed Mythologies about Afidisa, the Veldang woman who negotiated their settling in Pamaltela with the household of Pamalt, I hypothesize that there was once a whole pantheon of Blue Moon Immortals not too dissimilar from the Lunar Immortals of the Third Age, memory of which was already mostly lost within Time before it was stamped out fully by the slavers of Fonrit. Within Time, the Veldang people's ability to access their myths and bring power from them into the Middle World was always limited. The Veldang people of the Dawn were peaceful fishers and hunter-gatherers, rather like how the early Artmali of Pamaltela seem from their myths. They rejected the urban past of the Artmali and Vadeli, including whatever lore of their ancestors' gods could be gleaned from those ruins, but the oral traditions that might've otherwise transmitted knowledge of the Blue Moon gods and immortals seem to have been severely disrupted by the Vadeli conquest and the disasters of the late Darkness. When Garangordos arrived from the south in the early Second Age, already brimful with power from long preparation, there was little the Veldang or their Aldryami neighbors could conceivably do to oppose him. What Garangordos did was a feat of heroquesting at least equivalent to what the likes of Harmast Barefoot and Arkat achieved in Genertela at the end of the First Age, but accomplished towards comprehensively vile ends. He structured his magic around the myth of Pamalt's Necklace, the rough Pamaltelan equivalent of the Unity Battle or I Fought, We Won. In the myth Pamalt gathers together a great band of immortal followers, the metaphorical Necklace, with whose combined power he is able to overcome Vovosibor, the Filth-That-Walks, save Pamaltela from Chaos, and bring about the Dawn. Garangordos did much the same, gathering followers to fill each place in Pamalt's Necklace into his hero band, the Glorious Ones, and by the combination of their personalities and arts he structured his Necklace to found the Fonritian dystopia. Legend preserves a moment in that process where Garangordos could have allowed a Veldang woman to join his Necklace in the role of Afidisa, but he refused her. This interaction of myth and policy put the Veldang into a new category of being within the society Garangordos was building: non-people, not recognized within the Necklace, without the rights of full people and so imminently exploitable. Mythically, the Veldang become the 'great threat' the Necklace of Garangordos defeats; their defeat and servitude is the foundation upon which Fonritian society is built. The Fonritian slavers regard rebellion against this order as an upwelling of Chaos, much like how the Dara Happans view insubordination to the Emperor. Garangordos led his followers to conquer and enslave the Veldang, and part of that slavery meant erasing every link they could find between the Veldang and their gods. The worship of Blue Moon entities is suppressed among Fonrit's slave population. When relics of the old Artmali ages are unearthed, they tend to disrupt the enslaving magic that undergirds Fonritian society and lead to sudden, violent slave uprisings. On this basis, I think it is reasonable to assume that the myth I shared above is probably unknown among modern Fonritian Veldang. When their owners permit them to marry, I would expect that they must use the ceremonies of Agimori or Umathelan cults, lacking their own. If the myth above were promulgated in Fonrit it would provide the Veldang a pattern on which to base their own courtship rituals--assuming they had the freedom to do so. Part of my campaign is that my players are steadily unearthing long-lost Artmali myths through direct experience of the God Time, like good old-fashioned Travel & Journeyers. Should they get all the way to Fonrit they'll be bringing Artmal and Cathora along with several other lost cultural treasures of the Veldang inheritance.

The best-tasting Man Rune beings of all are aldryami, of course

My understanding is that mostali don't taste particularly good, but eating them brings on powerful hallucinogenic trips based on the mostali's caste.

The RQ:G campaign I run is exploring further an further into the myths of Artmal, the Blue Moon, and the Artmali people. Today I unveiled the myth we'll be heroquesting next week, towards the end of Sea Season in 1627: Artmal and Cathora, the 'How I Met Your Mother' story of the Artmali people. I've made a few suppositions going in to writing it. One is that the myth takes place in the Late Golden Age, after Umath's fall but before the death of the Sun. It needed to take place before the Artmali came to Earth in the Storm Age, but not too far before, and it felt right to have the story of Artmal finding love and starting a family come after his aiding Tolat/Shargash in defeating Umath. I tried to echo the feel of the Wendelian phase of Pelandan myth, so the story has a pastoral, Arcadian feel tinged with the growing disruption of the age's end--the forces of Pre-Dark creep in at Stage 2, in the form of the Striped Gyre-Wolf. Another is that I hypothesize a connection between Artmal and Heler, based on other myths describing Artmal and his people traveling on 'boats made of clouds, or clouds shaped like boats.' It seems to me that Artmal and Heler have some sort of link that would be unknown to the Orlanthi of Dragon Pass and deliberately suppressed in Pamaltela by the Fonritian slavers. I'll have some comments to add to the thread later but now, for whoever cares to read, I present: Artmal and Cathora A Myth of the Late Golden Age

Sharks are the offspring of Zorak Zoran and Varchulanga, one result of the myth 'Zorak Zoran Learns to Swim'

When the campaign I just described was getting started, I read a post on these forums to the effect of 'Storm is the most protagonistic element, but Darkness is the most heroic," that got me looking into the cult lore of Argan Argar and the Only Old One. I really fell in love with the Kingdom of Night as presented in Esrolia: Land of 10,000 Goddesses, the 'Wooing of Esrola' and 'Norinel & Kimantor' myths, and the idea of the Earth+Darkness+Harmony mythic complex that undergirded Esrolia and wider Kethaela up to Belintar's time. I also got a kick out of the idea of playing a character so at odds with the preconceptions people would have about someone described as a 'troll warrior' in any other setting: an honorable, compassionate, socially adept Argan Argar speartroll governed mainly by the Harmony and Movement runes. I really enjoyed roleplaying the nonhuman aspects of being a troll: in the first scene of the campaign, in an Orlanthi market, that troll bought a bolt of linen from a stall and, to the horror of the linen merchant, started unwinding the cloth and eating it like fruit-by-the-foot candy, complimenting the seller on the taste of the dyes. I loved digging into things like the terminology trolls use for the textures perceived with Darksense. By playing that character and actively trying to embody the myths of Argan Argar and Only Old One I was effectively able to weave those stories into the campaign, and help make the new story a bit like them. We even heroquested the Wooing of Esrola over Sacred Time at the end of 1626. Which leads to a nice final answer to the initial question: I wanted to a play a troll in RQ:G because I wanted to experience troll myths within the game and share them with my group.

Based almost exclusively on the write-up of Fralos, Seshnela in the Guide I posit that lions are the favored cult animal of Artmal, and the Artmali have kin ties to the big cat hsunchen peoples.

Not quite two years ago, in the last RQ:G game in which I was a player, the players took on secondary characters as the scope of the game expanded. I was playing an Argan Argar troll, who by that point in the campaign was the king of a small new community on the edge of the Grazelands. I took on an Esrolian Babeester Gor axe woman as my secondary character for a number of reasons. The simplest answer to "why a Babeester Gor" is that it's a great combat cult, and from a pure gameplay perspective my group needed a combat monster after our Humakti player left the campaign. I didn't want to play a Humakti myself for that role because we'd just had one. For the purposes of storytelling and mythic resonance though, I really liked the idea of adding a Babs warrior to the group because my troll character was building a cadre of professional warrior-magicians based on the Kimantorings, the professional army of the Kingdom of Night, and I knew that BG axe women were deeply intertwined with that tradition. Her backstory was that she'd fought against the Lunars in the Esrolian war, followed Argrath east to Pavis, and out in Prax ran seriously afoul of a Bison Tribe khan who did not take the rejection of his marriage proposal reasonably. She went into Dragon Pass with Argrath in 1627, but split off to join the player community when she heard that her old comrade from Pennel Ford (my troll) was now king of a town that housed a major Earth temple. She made a natural choice for the town's martial champion, among its existing cohort of Old Tarshite axe women. She beheaded a chaotic great troll champion in single combat when mercenaries from the Lunar Empire invaded our valley, and made friends with the ghost of a Vingkotling king. The community's primary war spirit was a local river demigoddess, a daughter of Shargash and the Oslir river. In the finale of that campaign, with the demigoddess's guidance, my axe woman swore a marriage vow to Shargash in exchange for even greater martial power to defend the great earth temple at Heruvernalda, and so ended the campaign as a sort of Esrolian Marazi Amazon.

Some months ago the campaign I run featured a bandit gang in the Praxian wastes structured around a demon of Chaos, Death and Disorder. Skyath Red Hand was born from the savage, internecine struggles for vanishing resources between the survivors of the Earthfall, before Waha showed them new ways to survive. Skyath is essentially a scavenger and cruel thief, and can grant his worshipers great powers for deceit and unreasoning violence, particularly the bare-handed sort. He is a Medium Demon per the rules for demons in the RQ:G Bestiary, and appears as a SIZ 25 skinless baboon with an assortment of features associated with all the major Praxian tribes, varying from manifestation to manifestation. He bears a Chaos Mutation that grants him blinding speed even by the standards of demons, but no inherent power to grant such to his followers. His progeny are the Black Claws, Small Demons created by suitably gratuitous and remunerative acts of banditry and slaughter dedicated to Skyath. They share his runes and often possess leaders of the bandit-cult to hide from the watch of the Storm Bulls in clothing of flesh while traveling the wastes.

the dark parts are where she's a troll

One that came up in my campaign today: Artmal and Cathora, told in Revealed Mythologies. He saw her from the sky, and descended to Earth to court her. When he met her father's requirements and her own she went with him up to the moon, and bore him two hundred descendants before she first voiced her homesickness for Earth and her parents. After three hundred children she and Artmal led the Three Hundred Families down to Earth from the Blue Moon, which had become too crowded.

One thing I've read of that makes dawn a little different in Glorantha is that the shadows left by night don't give way as easily as they do on Earth. They sort of linger and cling as the growing light forces them back.

I did some significant reshuffling of the feudal structure in Seshnela for the purposes of my game, mostly for the sake of having a more legible political landscape for my players to navigate. I also turned up the Hrestoli tendency in Pithdaros circa 1626 several notches, to make it a more naturally welcoming starting place for pretty heterogenous central Genertelan player character group in the Seshnelan arc of the campaign. IMG Count Jahiz of Oradaros is a fully open Hrestolist with several Men-of-All in his court, for instance, rather than just a rumored supporter.

Seconding this one, so many great portrayals of heroquesting and living in a world where most people really believe in gods and spirits

I dunno, some art posted ages ago from the pending Gods book showed Bozkatang with Mahaquata flapping around him, i think there's still canon support for Mahaquata and Lesilla being at least permutations of the same deity. I've always been quite fond of how the trolls found celestial castoffs like the Blue Moon and Black Sun and raised them back up as powers to help them fight the Chaos War. The Blue Moon secrets held by the trolls should be key to unfolding elements of the Hero Wars like the return of the Zaranistangi and the quest for the bones of Artmal. They certainly are in my campaign.

I've theorized elsewhere of a bat-troll-Artmal worshiped by the Blue Moon Plateau trolls

The Dara Happans know that Shargash and the Blue Moon are siblings. It is a little surprising that Dara Happans know about Artmal, but maybe there's stories about him visiting Mernita that haven't come to light yet.