How Have Your Gloranthas Varied?

[pachristian]

My most important variation: "Argrath" is a title not a name. I'm still waiting for a player to try to become king of Sartar. My rules are explicit: the game follows canon except where a player character steps into a canon role, in which case the NPC vanishes, and the PC takes over. (Mind you, it's not easy....)

[Monty Lovering]

1 hour ago, Thaz said:

In the shared Glorantha of Beer with Teeth :-

Ducks do indeed lisp.

Trolls talk in 1920's gangster ergot (We is Uz, this is DagoryInkearth and we is the boyz gunna make you gory)

The Dwarf of Dwarf Hold at least speaks in a thick Yorkshire accent (And what's tat to do with price o' fish in Pavis?)

Elves dont talk much at all but when they do it's like sunshine through the trees....which doesnt sound like anything and is confusing.

Bad Tradetalk sounds like Zomerzettt

Bad language skills result in conversations about Mushrooms. ("What did he say?" "Something, something, Mushrooms?"

Dragonewts alternately hiss and click and speak Received English in between. With occasional science terminology, 

Eeee by gum. I'd not thoht a'Yorksire accent like. Mayhap m'dwarves will be Yorkshire like en me elves Welsh. 

[Thaz]

4 minutes ago, Monty Lovering said:

Eeee by gum. I'd not thoht a'Yorksire accent like. Mayhap m'dwarves will be Yorkshire like en me elves Welsh. 

Overalls, flat caps and obsessions with t' workins o' mechanical devices loike. 

 

[Bohemond]

16 hours ago, jajagappa said:

I never did any during my face-to-face campaign days. 

But in my current PbF game, Ducks have a definite lisp. And Ravens always have a lot of interjected croaking sounds.

I'm not very good at accents, so I generally don't do them very much. But my newtlings sound kind of like Winston Churchill. For some reason, my players LOVE this. They have actively begged me to have them run into newtlings so I'll have to do 'the Newtling Voice'.

[davecake]

On 2/29/2020 at 2:48 AM, Qizilbashwoman said:

Babeester the Gor myth resonates with the story of Sekhmet, who was let loose to kill and her bloodlust got so bad they had to invent beer to make her dead drunk so she'd stop.

"Initiates (commonly known as Axe Sisters) must never love, make love, have sex, become pregnant, or even fake affection with anything but their goddess." - Sartar Companion

not lesbians, just Death Rune.

I kind of hated that Sartar Companion write up. I thought it was far too extreme. I certainly associated BG with the Sekhmet story, but I do not find Sekhmet to be loveless either. I never really accepted it for my Glorantha, so the entirely loveless version of Babeester Gor is one way my Glorantha has differed. It just seemed so psychologically implausible, there would be virtually none of them - let alone enough to be a major war cult in Esrolia. 

I think the RQG version of Babeester Gor is going to be more like Humakt - renouncing love and life ritually and formally, but not always practically. They do not marry, they avoid showing affection, they embrace death - but in private they may behave as soldiers always have, often with a great deal of beer involved, and should that awkwardly result in the occasional pregnancy they give it up to the temple at birth. 

They certainly aren't all man haters or lesbians (though the incidence of both is way higher than the general population I'm sure). What they are is fanatic haters of oath-breakers - quite literally in the rules, a Rune Lord has to have Hate(Oathbreakers) 90%+ - and that includes women as well. The BGs have chopped more than a few  treachorous Esrolian Queens to pieces over the years I am sure. 

Of course a Rune Lord of Babeester Gor isn't going to be a well balanced person - they are, after all, a worshipper of one of the most violent and effective Death gods. 

Edited March 5, 2020 by davecake
Spelling mistake

[Lordabdul]

13 hours ago, davecake said:

the entirely loveless version of Babeester Gor is one way my Glorantha has differed. It just seemed so psychologically implausible, there would be virtually none of them - let along enough to be a major war cult in Esrolia. 

You mean the way that Catholic priests and nuns are also banned from having sex, becoming pregnant, or loving anybody else than Jesus? (that last bit I have heard verbatim a few times in Sunday school when talking about nuns, by the way). Yeah, I hear there's not a lot of them around

Poking fun aside, why do you think it's implausible?

(personally, I probably prefer to have Axe Sisters able to drink and fuck as they please, possibly in a contest with Uroxi cultists... but maybe I'm thinking of Vingans... I would probably leave it up for the player to choose what they want)

[Ian Absentia]

27 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

You mean the way that Catholic priests and nuns are also banned from having sex, becoming pregnant, or loving anybody else than Jesus? (that last bit I have heard verbatim a few times in Sunday school when talking about nuns, by the way). Yeah, I hear there's not a lot of them around

Poking fun aside, why do you think it's implausible?

Not speaking for @davecake, the implausibility (and he describes it in his post above) is in the doctrine defining reality without exception.  I've known a couple of former Catholic nuns who found love other than Jesus to raise families, and am familiar with at least one Episcopalian priest who did so as well.  The doctrine and vows are ideal virtues; their actual behavior is another matter.  How the temple of Babeester Gor deals with earthly transgressions likely differs from the Catholic or Episcopalian churches, but I think we're all in agreement that the "implausible" part is that the transgressions simply don't happen.

!i!

Edited March 4, 2020 by Ian Absentia
Eliminating redundancy

[Ali the Helering]

13 hours ago, davecake said:

I kind of hated that Sartar Companion write up. I thought it was far too extreme. I certainly associated BG with the Sekhmet story, but I do not find Sekhmet to be loveless either. I never really accepted it for my Glorantha, so the entirely loveless version of Babeester Gor 

I completely agree, but if you want to go that route you could have the cult providing a home for the Heortling female psychopath. 

[Sir_Godspeed]

44 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

You mean the way that Catholic priests and nuns are also banned from having sex, becoming pregnant, or loving anybody else than Jesus? (that last bit I have heard verbatim a few times in Sunday school when talking about nuns, by the way). Yeah, I hear there's not a lot of them around

Poking fun aside, why do you think it's implausible?

(personally, I probably prefer to have Axe Sisters able to drink and fuck as they please, possibly in a contest with Uroxi cultists... but maybe I'm thinking of Vingans... I would probably leave it up for the player to choose what they want)

I think the problem is a) what kind of love are we talking about (it certainly doesn't have to be limited to romantic/sexual love), and b) the "fake affection for anyone other than the goddess", which can be read a couple of ways (I assume they don't mean that it's okay to fake affection for the goddess, but for others it must be genuine, that seems a bit odd), but I take it to mean that they can't even show affection for anyone else. That seems implausible to me. 

[Richard S.]

Once again, can you please move the Babeester Gor discussion to another thread? Discussing what's canon is completely anathema to the purpose of this one.

[Lordabdul]

1 hour ago, Ian Absentia said:

the implausibility (and he describes it in his post above) is in the doctrine defining reality without exception.

I think a lot of people are reading the rule/sourcebooks' description of cults as "this is what all initiates in this cult behave like", but that's not how I do it, if only because, otherwise, everybody ends up being a stereotype. I read it more like "this is what most initiates of this cult are told". Priests and nuns are told they can't have sex with anybody, but there's evidence that it wasn't uncommon for secret tunnels to be built under convents for priests and nuns to have nightly visits. Plus, you know, the more creepy things about priests. Another example: women were not technically allowed on pirate ships but we know there were a good portion of women there, including a couple of famous pregnant pirate captains/bosuns. The world is full of rules not being respected. Of course people don't respect rules. Especially if they have sexy sensual Earth priestesses waiting in the next room, and a big axe to show anybody who frowns upon anything they might do.

1 hour ago, Richard S. said:

Discussing what's canon is completely anathema to the purpose of this one.

Well hopefully I'm bringing this back on topic, i.e. making my Glorantha vary by treating cult descriptions as simplified high level rules, and having the reality diverge from that, just the same way real people diverge more or less from the rules of the groups they belong to.

[Bill the barbarian]

On 3/1/2020 at 9:48 AM, Bohemond said:

I'm not very good at accents, so I generally don't do them very much. But my newtlings sound kind of like Winston Churchill. For some reason, my players LOVE this. They have actively begged me to have them run into newtlings so I'll have to do 'the Newtling Voice'.

They can attack us on the beaches, they can attack us on the river, they can attack us beneath the waves, we shall never give up, we shall never surrender!

Now that’s a variation, I can get behind!

[Bakemono]

On 2/27/2020 at 12:59 PM, Minlister said:

@7Tigers Oh, yes, indeed, hardly a Copernican revolution!! I just want to confront my players with this problem when they have dealing with the Morokanths. And being hunted in the Praxian wastes by man-heaters is something else! But you are right, the simple fact that they think they are man-eaters could suffice.

Also, all the winners of the Waha compact eat the losers on a regular basis, so why not the Morokanths? 

Yes, that last part sounds weird for me too. What was the point of the compact if not eating? Losing sentience doesn't seem to help anyone. 

[Richard S.]

9 hours ago, Bakemono said:

Yes, that last part sounds weird for me too. What was the point of the compact if not eating? Losing sentience doesn't seem to help anyone. 

The beasts get to eat the bounty of the earth directly, receive the respect and protection of the people, and are guaranteed to go straight to Eiritha when they die. The people get the service of the beasts for labor and sustenance.

[Ironwall]

12 hours ago, Richard S. said:

The beasts get to eat the bounty of the earth directly, receive the respect and protection of the people, and are guaranteed to go straight to Eiritha when they die. The people get the service of the beasts for labor and sustenance.

There were no losers only different prizes. Personally for my glorantha every tribe and herd beast cheated to get the results they wanted nobody lost 

[Darius West]

I once had a Vingan player called Tora who had become a refugee in Esrolia after the fall of Sartar.  Being female and a warrior, she was far better received than her male friends by the sexist Esrolian matriarchy, who were in need of warriors given the alarming rate of Lunar expansion.  Tora then parlayed her slim influence to over-reach her authority amazingly and organize the various Holy Country defenses into a trap involving the building of a great big wall manned by Orlanthi and Dwarves. The Wall itself involved plenty of sorcery, gnomes, and lava. More amazingly, she had never read Gloranthan history and did it all spontaneously, earning the sobriquet Tora the Glorious and becoming an Esrolian general with lands and title thereafter.  So in a way, my Glorantha didn't vary, the deeds remained the same, but the actors changed.