John Biles

This is why Orlanthi society is not marked by uprisings of slaves and stickpickers.

The sum of oppression + apparent weakness of a regime has to hit hit a certain level before people revolt. England basically had a single Peasant revolt on a large scale in its history and that required *the Back Plague* to set the stage. And even that was put down by the King lying to them. Rebellions within the ruling class are a lot more likely. A third factor is that a society with a lot of inequality can survive if most of the population feels it is possible you can rise to the top by your own strength.

Filth and squalor isn't necessarily a source of disease in Glorantha - disease spirits are what do it. But I think an important part of it is that a lot of trolls' bellies are never full and cave trolls and trollkin are usally not going to care about hygiene unless you ride them like a horse.

Originally, the answer was 'because they will break caste, lose their immortality, and swiftly die' Today, it's more on the lines with 'Learniing magic is very hard and the rest of society will butcher you first and many of you will cause disasters because you are trying to do experiments with nuclear reactors when you never finished high school.'

Because one of the great strengths of the Lunar Empire is that they generally don't allow any part of the empire to be in a constant state of anarchy. Throw out the class system and you lose access to the magical benefits of your strain of Malkionism.

Tapping Chaos is like getting rid of nuclear waste by eating it.

1. Animist societies don't see spirits as simply disposable goods. 2. As others have said, tapping utterly destroys something in a way too reminiscent of, say, Gorp at work. 3. The modern world doesn't have talking trees, nor do rocks potentially have souls. Large parts of the Earth were not destroyed in Godtime and lots of Earth societies believed that the world should not be approached in the way Robber Barons did. 4. Being associated with the Vadeli makes anything suspect. 5. Some ancient peoples did have limits on exploitation of the natural wold, such as the kapu system in Hawaii, the landscape management of many Native Americans, and so on.

I operate on the idea that Arkat and Nysalor both got maneuvered to kill each other by Gbaji, who predates either of them (having clashed with Elmal before time even started) and that he basically won. What was left of Arkat, his purpose ended, wandered off to try to find another one. Nysalor was dead, and the stage was set for the Age of Empires.

There's also an illiteracy plague for a while. And Argath is worshiped in the Fourth Age.

Since we don't have the end of the Third Age detailed much for anything outside Central Genertla, it's hard to say what the Fourth Age really is. Especially since the Argath Saga is only one possible end to the story.

The western saints seem underdeveloped because only fanwork ever really detailed the west very much. With the exception of Mongoose Runequest. which got decanonized.

In the Western cosmology, the Invisible God literally made the runes, including the infinity rune. They're all his flunkies. The theistic gods which are the shadows the runes cast on the walls of the universe do what he intended them to do. He can make a super-duper-infinity rune if he finds it useful. His creations can think they're defying him, but in the end, he's the boss.

There is one Godtime but it contains contradictory truths. The more people who believe a truth, the easier it is to reach and relive correctly. You can prove that Zorak Zoran is Shargash, naked, but it won't be easy unless you have a large community that already believes that. You can prove that Yelmalio = Elmal, that they are not the same, that Yelmalio is the little brother of Elmal or vice versa, that Yelmalio and/or Elmal were created by the God Learners, and thus should both be avoided, etc.

The Invisible God *made* the runes, his believers believe. And he's the font of sorcery, an entire category of magic. So from their point of view, all those other gods are just his creations.

Saying which is more true is hard in a world where Heroquesting can prove contradictory things in the hands of different people. And those contradictions are baked into the Godtime by the Great Compromise itself.

Smell Food is known as 'Smell the Blood of an Esrolian' for reasons known mainly by the mostly forgotten Ernalddottir Giant-Killer cult (see below). Seven League Stride is an obvious one. And the obscure Ernalddottir Giant-Killer cult (Nearly wiped out when the subcults created by the God-Learners were wiped out with the God-Learners), in which Ernaldadottir takes out 7 giants with her domestic skills - sewing their clothing into a trap as they sleep, poisoning their breakfast, singing High C to escape out a glass window, tieing shoe laces together so they fall off the cloud, and styling their hair so it blinds them, and the like.

Arolanit yet stands between Erontree forest in the north and the Castle Coast to its south. Volume 2, Page 413 of the Guide to Glorantha.

There is a great scenario for Trail of Cthulhu set in the 50s connected to Jack Parsons (with various famous sci-fi authors of the period as PC options) The God-Learners would have totally tried to build a rocket to get to the Moon, the Stars, the Skydome, etc. Probably powered by an imprisoned diety.

If Socrates was Goranthan, he would 100% be an illumnated initiate of Nysalor. Asking questions which bring enlightenment / piss people off is his jam.

Given Plato was a wrestler before he was a philosopher, that fits. Plato was the name he wrestled under, which meant Rock and I'm not joking.

My understanding of Loksalm is like this. In an ideal world, everyone would work their way up through the castes and become Men-of-All. But most people won't make it - they'll rise to some point and stay there, because mastering all the castes in order to be free of them is hard. Indeed, I expect a majority stay in the dronar caste because they don't want to be a soldier. But one of the most important things about the system is that everyone, even the kids of talars, experience how the dronars live. And that helps make a better society where the rulers don't have the kind of cognitive bubble that most rulers have. (And there are no child rulers, one of the great banes of civilization.)

My own take on the Morokanth success was Eurmal found it amusing.

In the Heroquest era, Pella was goddess of pottery, one of Ernalda's handmaidens. Now she's no longer directly worshipped like a lot of minor gods and goddesses.

The biggest difference between Glorantha's mystics and Buddhism is that Buddhists have compassion as an element of the eight-fold path and Goranthan mystics think there is no good or evil, just relative positions they've risen above.

Templates, I think. It's easy to do in Firefly, anyway.