Your Dumbest Theory

[g33k]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

And little "tailors."

Needed to sew hyena-hides back together.
Otherwise Genert will be skinless, and... angrier than expected.

[scott-martin]

The god Yelm mutilated and chained was Lodril. The god Orlanth murdered was Polaris.

At a certain point these stories are synopticised differently.

[PhilHibbs]

On 2/1/2022 at 5:02 PM, scott-martin said:

I really like slowing the year to make room for Moon Season.

Just borrow ("liberate") one week from each season, add them to Sacred Time, and you have six seasons of seven weeks each.

[scott-martin]

4 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

Just borrow ("liberate") one week from each season, add them to Sacred Time, and you have six seasons of seven weeks each.

This makes so much sense they must've already tried it in the early wanes and then for some reason adopted / returned to the theyalan 5x8 + 2. I wonder what went wrong.

[PhilHibbs]

After rearranging the calendar into seasons of seven weeks each, the culmination of the Lunar plan is the New Sun Stop that extends the year by another seven weeks, giving Glorantha the perfect 7 × 7 × 7 year.

[scott-martin]

Much of what mystically sensitive people in Dragon Pass lived through in the years leading to 1625 cannot be objectively substantiated by the geological or archaeological record but instead had more the character of a long nightmare or prophetic experience, a kind of long communal dream.

For them, it "happened" . . . but then again, from outside, it didn't. Think of the prophetic visions of Matthias Stormberger, a sense of moving forward through time while the profane world froze solid. A chance to gather symbolic insight that would become essential in the apocalyptic future to come, a kind of pre-opening-night preview for friends of the theatre whose input might be useful when tickets go on sale.

They dreamed years of search and tribulation. And then, depending on your point of view, either they woke up or the outer world joined them, the dream became contagious, a shadow projected backward in time as the dragon pressed snooze. Have I already done this one?

[jajagappa]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

This makes so much sense they must've already tried it in the early wanes and then for some reason adopted / returned to the theyalan 5x8 + 2. I wonder what went wrong.

That is the Vithelan system per the Guide p.112: "The Vithelan cultures persist in using six seasons of 7 weeks each. This method is widely popular throughout Kralorela, the East Isles, Teshnos, and Vormain"

Who comes from Kralorela to destroy the Empire?  Sheng Seleris.  Therefore, Sheng used his greater knowledge of the association of those dates to his advantage.  The Empire had to purge its use after he was gone to keep him in Hell.

[scott-martin]

29 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Who comes from Kralorela to destroy the Empire?  Sheng Seleris.  Therefore, Sheng used his greater knowledge of the association of those dates to his advantage.  The Empire had to purge its use after he was gone to keep him in Hell.

This is one of the reasons we have this thread, thank you both for the revelations.

[Ormi Phengaria]

On 7/26/2022 at 12:11 PM, scott-martin said:

The god Yelm mutilated and chained was Lodril. The god Orlanth murdered was Polaris.

At a certain point these stories are synopticised differently.

Chaining heat into stasis, and remaining imperiously in place as the hot center of the universe! I had already thought about "Lodril Umatum," but not considered it from that angle before. Neat.

[moonwolf8]

When Greg Stafford had his revelation about Glorantha back in the 60's he was connecting with a vision of a post singularity world.

I first read about the Singularity in an article in The Futurist by Ray Kurzweil.  In it he wrote: "The Singularity is a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so fast and far-reaching that human existence on this planet will be irreversibly altered. This merger of man and machine, coupled with the sudden explosion in machine intelligence and rapid innovation in gene research and nanotechnology, will result in a world where there is no distinction between the biological and the mechanical, or between physical and virtual reality."  Kurzweil completely ignores the mean rate of failure which I estimate to be 8 months give or take 5 weeks.  At the time I read about it it seemed like a video game turned inside out.  Now it sounds more and more like an environmental disaster.

More recently in a YouTube video with Neil deGrasse Tyson he suggests the singularity will begin in 2029 with the development of a neural net interface for home entertainment. 

Deteriorating environmental conditions are rising authoritarianism will make refuge in online video games more and more enticing.  Every laboratory in the world using Computer Assisted Design will have access to multiple online videogames to harness the processing power of thousands of linked human brains.  When the number of people online exceeds 2% of the global population the system will overload flooding the airwaves with scores of online videogames at 40 Megahertz.  The frequency at which the human brain can pick up radio waves.  This cacophony of sensory impressions will be known as God Time. 

After 13 months give or take 3 weeks the Singularity will reboot.  This 2nd Singularity will be known as the Golden Age.  During this event video games will shift from Class based level systems to Skill based simulations.  There will be three more reboots known later as the Storm Age, Dark Age and Silver Age.  After the 5th reboot ends the world's population will be too low to sustain further reboots.

There were no video games in the 1960's when Stafford had his vision.  With no frame of reference for open world video games where your character starts to move in a curve around the edge of the map Stafford imagined a flat world.  He received no expansion packs which is why we've spent most of the last 40 years revisiting Sartar and Pavis over and over again.

The Rockwood mountains correspond to the Urals after they've been overlain with several scores of videogames and after the oceans have risen 25 feet.

Ritual reenactment of stories stabilizes the cacophony of scores of videogames playing simultaneously in our heads which is were the emphasis on Heroquesting comes from.  This reduces the death rate of the population from 33% to a mere 16%.  Hence the more you participate in passion plays, folk plays and community theater the better your chances that you and your family will survive the Singularity.  This is also why Heroquesting is uncertain.  You and your community may be used to a Sims version of World of Warcraft but every now and then your going to get Shadow of Mordor, Final Fantasy 14 or Neverwinter Nights.

The Arkat/Gbaji wars; the Dragonkill/Closing; and the Hero wars all happen roughly 541 years apart.  The time it takes the global population to approach 2.5 billion people. 

The myths we know are the myths known in the time of Harshax, not the actual myths of people in the 3rd age.

Your Glorantha Will Vary is a warning to adapt your game story to reflect the environment outside your door.  This includes your social environment as well as your physical one.  For example if you live in Alabama adapting "Chilling Tales Beneath the Chinaberry Tree: A Collection of Alabama Folklore and Ghost Stories" by Johny Odam  into a collection of Heroquests for different Gloranthan cults you will be connecting more fully with your local environment.

 

   

[scott-martin]

15 hours ago, moonwolf8 said:

Ritual reenactment of stories

Great to see you again, how have you been?



 

[moonwolf8]

48 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Great to see you again, how have you been?

Two of the books I'm reading now are "Southern Cunning: Folkloric Witchcraft in the American South" by Aaron Oberon and "Folk Witchcraft: A guide to Lore, Land, & the Familiar Spirit for the Solitary Practitioner" by Roger F. Horne.  Oberon says that: "Although there are no "Traditional Land Spirits" in the US there are a multitude of spirits that are tied to places and landscapes.  Many of these pop up in urban legends as ghosts, devils or even cryptids."  After reading that it popped into my mind that Virginia's legendary Bunny Man; about an escaped lunatic in a bunny costume wielding an axe, would make a fine localized male aspect of Barbester Gor.  Since I know in RL that rabbits are associated with the moon and gay sex I also have an alternate story that when the Red Emperor set out to seduce Gorgorma he met Barbester Gor on the way and accidently seduced her by mistake.  The Bunny Man is the unintended consequence of that meeting.

[scott-martin]

36 minutes ago, moonwolf8 said:

Southern Cunning

Stand in the place where you live indeed. How exciting to see the entirety of the Harry Middleton Hyatt books up on the archive where they belong, accessible to all who know how to look. Here if you want to develop "teenage dirtbag tidewater Orlanth" and his blockbuster bride for local markets.

[moonwolf8]

I looked up Harry Middleton on the Barnes & Noble website.  Sounds like good material for a family of Poverri Fishermen.

[moonwolf8]

The Sartar clans are divided into five factions:

The Old Wind Faction:  Does not accept Lunar missionaries or Lunar gods.  Maintains covert shrines to Sartar even though most of them had little regard for the Founder before the Lunar invasion.

The New Wind Faction: Grudgingly accepts Lunar missionaries assesses the Lunar gods to see if they offer anything useful not already available through the Storm pantheon. 

The Trade Wind Faction: Made of clans that maintain a shrine or temple to either Issaries or Argan Argar.  Views the Lunar Empire as a big cash cow and they intend to milk it for all the coin and goods they can get. 

The Moon Wind Faction:  Made up of clans that have completely abandoned the Storm gods to embrace the Lunar Pantheon.

The Solar Wind Faction:  Made up of exiles and opportunists from throughout the Lunar Empire. Mostly traditionalists among their old homelands not many of them embrace the Lunar gods.

 

The Heortlings are sheep people and view Ragnaglar and Thed as goats.  The Kostaddi are descended from goat people and view Ragnaglar and Thed as antelopes.  Being subject to the whims of Sable riders is like being dominated by Ragnaglar and Thed too the Kostaddi.  The lost antelope people viewed Ragnaglar and Thed as sheep.

Edited August 3, 2022 by moonwolf8

[Eff]

11 hours ago, moonwolf8 said:

The Sartar clans are divided into five factions:

The Old Wind Faction:  Does not accept Lunar missionaries or Lunar gods.  Maintains covert shrines to Sartar even though most of them had little regard for the Founder before the Lunar invasion.

The New Wind Faction: Grudgingly accepts Lunar missionaries assesses the Lunar gods to see if they offer anything useful not already available through the Storm pantheon. 

The Trade Wind Faction: Made of clans that maintain a shrine or temple to either Issaries or Argan Argar.  Views the Lunar Empire as a big cash cow and they intend to milk it for all the coin and goods they can get. 

The Moon Wind Faction:  Made up of clans that have completely abandoned the Storm gods to embrace the Lunar Pantheon.

The Solar Wind Faction:  Made up of exiles and opportunists from throughout the Lunar Empire. Mostly traditionalists among their old homelands not many of them embrace the Lunar gods.

 

The Heortlings are sheep people and view Ragnaglar and Thed as goats.  The Kostaddi are descended from goat people and view Ragnaglar and Thed as antelopes.  Being subject to the whims of Sable riders is like being dominated by Ragnaglar and Thed too the Kostaddi.  The lost antelope people viewed Ragnaglar and Thed as sheep.

You can probably find the "taotie" sheeplike motif from Shang bronzes somewhere in Glorantha, and that's probably where the lost antelope people lived and settled down and made sheep monster art. 

[Ali the Helering]

12 hours ago, moonwolf8 said:

The Heortlings are sheep people and view Ragnaglar and Thed as goats.  The Kostaddi are descended from goat people and view Ragnaglar and Thed as antelopes.  Being subject to the whims of Sable riders is like being dominated by Ragnaglar and Thed too the Kostaddi.  The lost antelope people viewed Ragnaglar and Thed as sheep.

While Ragnaglar and Thed just wanna be loved, and don't know why they get the bad press.  Fake news🙂

[Joerg]

Those factions are dividing individual clans just as much as the dominant factions in a clan may cause inter-clan troubles.

The division into "rebel tribes" and "appeaser tribes" that was pushed in the Sartar RIsing series always struck me as rather un-Orlanthi. Several thousand tribesfolk following a single policy?

The Solar Wind folk would be restricted to some of the new Enstalos clans who escaped being sent into the Zola Fel Valley Grantlands. Not even Wulfsland has that many folk from the Heartlands. A faction like this sounds more likely for lowland Tarsh, really, although Tarsh has a reputation as Lunar zealots, probably thanks to Moirades attracting such folk with his incarnation of the Provincial University (countering that of Mirin's Cross).

Upper Heartlands nobility would mostly be Lunar. "Duke" Raus with his non-Lunar ancestor worship seems to have been elevated to that title for his previous work in Lunar Tarsh. I wonder what are his ties to the various Eel-Ariash clients.

[Akhôrahil]

10 hours ago, Joerg said:

The division into "rebel tribes" and "appeaser tribes" that was pushed in the Sartar RIsing series always struck me as rather un-Orlanthi. Several thousand tribesfolk following a single policy?

Dorastor: Land of Doom is very clear that the faultlines between appeasers and traditionalists run within the tribe (and very likely with in the clans as well). I also really liked how Red Cow pushed the in-clan factionalism. 

[AlHazred]

On 8/2/2022 at 7:31 PM, moonwolf8 said:

The Sartar clans are divided into five factions:

The Old Wind Faction:  Does not accept Lunar missionaries or Lunar gods.  Maintains covert shrines to Sartar even though most of them had little regard for the Founder before the Lunar invasion.

The New Wind Faction: Grudgingly accepts Lunar missionaries assesses the Lunar gods to see if they offer anything useful not already available through the Storm pantheon. 

The Trade Wind Faction: Made of clans that maintain a shrine or temple to either Issaries or Argan Argar.  Views the Lunar Empire as a big cash cow and they intend to milk it for all the coin and goods they can get. 

The Moon Wind Faction:  Made up of clans that have completely abandoned the Storm gods to embrace the Lunar Pantheon.

The Solar Wind Faction:  Made up of exiles and opportunists from throughout the Lunar Empire. Mostly traditionalists among their old homelands not many of them embrace the Lunar gods.

There are rumors of another faction, made up of the scum of the Lunar Empire, sent to the Sartarite front to try to dredge some good fortune from their lot in life. Made up primarily of particularly... aromatic... barbarians from tribes "broken" by the Empire, they form the sixth faction: the Broken Wind Faction.

I'll show myself out...

Edited August 4, 2022 by AlHazred

[svensson]

3 minutes ago, AlHazred said:

There are rumors of another faction, made up of the scum of the Lunar Empire, sent to the Sartarite front to try to dredge some good fortune from their lot in life. Made up primarily of particularly... aromatic... barbarians from tribes "broken" by the Empire, they form the sixth faction: the Broken Wind Faction.

I'll show myself out...

Please use the downwind door.... 😉

[svensson]

I believe that Heroforge is a cunningly devised plot to dethrone Sid Meier from the title "Greatest Time Waster of All Time"

 

Prove me wrong.

[svensson]

22 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Dorastor: Land of Doom is very clear that the faultlines between appeasers and traditionalists run within the tribe (and very likely with in the clans as well). I also really liked how Red Cow pushed the in-clan factionalism. 

"Nobody can make you do anything" is just another way of saying "We'll argue about EVERYTHING".

I'm sure there are Irish and French gamers wishing that the clans of Sartar would get their act together. Not that we Americans have any problem with that... NopeNopeNope.... *sigh*

[Akhôrahil]

50 minutes ago, svensson said:

"Nobody can make you do anything" is just another way of saying "We'll argue about EVERYTHING".

I'm sure there are Irish and French gamers wishing that the clans of Sartar would get their act together. Not that we Americans have any problem with that... NopeNopeNope.... *sigh*

I can't remember where I heard/read the sentence "the Welsh were fighting their traditional enemies, the Welsh". Although it does sound like Blackadder.

Edited August 4, 2022 by Akhôrahil

[svensson]

15 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

I can't remember where I heard/read the sentence "the Welsh were fighting their traditional enemies, the Welsh". Although it does sound like Blackadder.

Scotland would be on the sidelines cheering, but a clan feud has broken out over a stolen cow from 500 years ago...