Peace between the Red Moon and Orlanth

[soltakss]

10 hours ago, GAZZA said:

10 hours ago, Joerg said:

There is no way that Orlanth can abandon his marriage to Ernalda. Without her, he is no king, not the principal heir of Umath. Maybe you need to find a way for Sedenya to become both husband of Ernalda and wife of Orlanth, in a menage a trois similar to that of Daliath, Framanthe and Sramak(e). Sedenya should have the altering sex down pat.

OK so that means I apparently understand less about Heroquesting than I thought I did (and believe me that is saying something; I am now wondering if I actually have a negative amount of knowledge).

Not at all.

HeroQuesting is tricky, with no real right or wrong answers, despite what anyone tells you.

10 hours ago, GAZZA said:

Let's suppose we have Bob the Orlanthi Hero. He goes on an experimental Heroquest and discovers a myth that shows Orlanth was actually originally a member of the Sky pantheon that co-opted a barbaric storm god's powers after defeating them, and then subsequently went on to off Yelm etc.

Bob returns to the Mundane plane.

My understanding is that this does not retroactively change the myths of all Orlanth worshippers, nor even at Bob's only temple (even if Bob is the high priest). My understanding is that at best all this does is allow Bob to create a Hero cult or subcult that has these heretical teachings - in effect, the best you can do with a Heroquest is to establish a competing religion, not alter an existing religion in place.

That is exactly how I play it. You don't change what's in place, but you could create a new religion that is vastly more popular. That's what Monrogh did, he created a version of Yelmalio that was vastly more attractive to Elmali than Elmal, so they mostly flocked to his new versoin of the cult.

10 hours ago, GAZZA said:

Now, if Bob's hero cult proves to be very useful and/or popular, it may eventually supplant existing older versions of Orlanth, and thereby organically eventually become the mainline Orlanth cult - but that is only "from now on", not retroactively.

Therefore, it seems to me that an Orlanthi hero quester could theoretically find/create a myth whereby he gives Ernalda the flick and goes for Sedenya without busting anything - such a hero would "simply" have created a new (presumably illuminated) subcult of Orlanth that may or may not eventually supplant the Ernalda-loyal version. I'm not going to suggest such a hero quest would be easy, or even feasible, but it's not clear to me that it would be utterly impossible.

Again, yes, agreed that it should be possible but difficult.

10 hours ago, GAZZA said:

Though I confess it's not clear to me how, if these limits exist, that Nysalor was able to wound Korasting, since that would seem to mean that even if he did that, he'd simply have created a new variant Kyger Litor cult that, evidently, few trolls would follow. So it seems that some hero quests must be able to alter things "without consent", as it were.

What Nysalor did was to wound Korasting and create a new form of trolls. he did not change all existing trolls to Trollkin, but he did curse the trolls so that they gave birth to stunted trollkin. Essentially, he affected "all" trolls, as "all" trolls come from Korasting. He did not affect Mistress Race Trolls (too powerful) nor Hot Trolls (Not tied to Korasting) but did affect Dark Trolls and Cave Trolls.

So, yes, it still comes under your banner of things you understand.

10 hours ago, GAZZA said:

A roundabout way of saying that I know bugger all about Heroquesting, I suppose.

Not at all, I think you have grasped it really well.

10 hours ago, Joerg said:

There is no way that Orlanth can abandon his marriage to Ernalda.

Although Joerg has explained subsequently, I think that he meant that the Orlanth-Ernalda bond is extremely strong and so is very difficult to break.

It is possible, but would need a HeroQuest of epic proportions with a lot of support from Orlanthi. changing a cult by force from the outside is very difficult, changing it from the inside with support is easier. So, all you would need to do is to get all the Orlanthi to support you and do the HeroQuest. Simples.

Of course, if you don't do it for all Orlanthi, you could get a single Clan to support you, or a Bloodline, or members of a single Temple. That way, you can establish the Myth and then repeat the HeroQuest again and again, spreading it further.

[jajagappa]

10 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Always room for one more.

No, always the same one, just in a new book. 😉

 

[DrGoth]

On 6/12/2020 at 6:02 PM, Elcid321 said:

Hi everyone, i'm here asking a few questions that came to my head.

1.- would it be possible for orlanth and the red moon to find peace? and how?

2.- what would be the effects in the world if peace was managed?

 

I certainly hope so. Otherwise the world is all screwed up by the time the Hero Wars are over.  There is always another way to violence and Glorantha after time began is built on compromise.  How?  That's up to the PCs and GM. Anything that seems reasonable to them.  I can think of a couple of answers.  Sedenya and Orlanth split the middle air. Yelm doesn't always rule the sky. Half the time it's in darkness.  So it could be a time thing.  Another option is exactly what they rule in the middle air.  Orlanth is storms and wind.  That's movement in the middle air.  Sedenya is in origin a Solar goddess.  The glowline is the light of the moon.  So Orlanth might be the movement of the middle air, Sedenya might be the light of the middle air.  Those are examples (even if you don't think they are good examples) of a relatively even split.  You could take other examples where one or the other dominates but does not destroy the other. E.g., taken as a servant/lover/concubine.  Look how Orlanth tamed and employs Daga.

Yes, any of those does run into the problem of Chaos (Sedenya pro, Orlanth against). But both of them have changed.  My understanding is that if either of them wins completely it's bad news for Glorantha. My take on the Hero Wars is that it is about finding a way in which neither of them wins completely.  That may not be easy, but who said being a Hero is easy?

As to what it means, that depends on what the answer to how is.

And think it's impossible for Storm Gods to accept chaos under any terms?  Go ask Humakt about that.

[Akhôrahil]

3 hours ago, DrGoth said:

Otherwise the world is all screwed up by the time the Hero Wars are over.

That's basically the canonical answer... the future is a post-apocalypse after Argrath and his ilk ruin the world.

Edited June 14, 2020 by Akhôrahil

[DrGoth]

1 minute ago, Akhôrahil said:

That's basically the canonical answer... the future is a post-apocalypse after Argrath and his ilk ruin the world.

Only by KoS - which, at least when it was written, was never meant to be 'the' canonical future

[Eff]

Broadly, the problem with making peace with Sedenya is that she's too large and too small of a concept. 

That is, most religious understandings delineate several "levels" of divinity. You have the greater gods like Orlanth and Ernalda, who oversee the medial gods of their household and children, and in turn these are served by the little gods, including ascended heroes. And then above the greater gods you have the vast gods, like Umath and Gata, who encompass the totality of the thing they represent. (The Malkioni call these Eransachula, and the greater gods on down are Srvuali and Burtae). 

Sedenya is, according to the Lunars, the Ultimate Knowable Moon, the Eransachula of the Moon Rune, and thus an equivalent of Umath or Gata. Thus, a wedding of Orlanth and Sedenya (or more appropriately in the cosmological worldview, a wedding of Sedenya and Ernalda) would necessarily position Sedenya as the superior partner because She's the greater entity. Except that Sedenya is also a greater god, an entity that went around performing concrete cosmogonic acts in the mythic past, and also a medial god through Her Masks, and also a lesser god in the form of the ascended Teelos, which are all definitely Her. So a Sedenya-anyone marriage is quite impossible, because you're attempting to define a relationship that is really four different simultaneous relationships at once. 

That is, if you completed a wedding between Sedenya and Ernalda, Sedenya would be, simultaneously, 1) symbolically ruling over Ernalda (not an extant relationship anyone has with Ernalda), 2) co-ruling with Ernalda in an exchange of sovereignty for power like Orlanth does, 3) submitting to Ernalda as a Husband-Protector or Wife-Protectress who offers herself up as a servant to Ernalda like Yelmalio-Kargzant-Metsyla, Argan Argar, etc. do*, 4) expressing her devotion to Ernalda as her divine patron by symbolically marrying her in the way a particularly arcane heroquester might. 

Now if you can get anything coherent or sensible out of that tangle, let me know, but in the interim, any effort that doesn't focus on a symbolically lesser, more defined deity seems like it's going to not just fail, but explode catastrophically partway through. But in turn, the lesser deities would be insulting to use as wedding pawns except with equally lesser deities in the barbarian cosmos. Which would satisfy no one involved currently. Perhaps a post-Hero Wars cosmos would have more room to incorporate the cosmologies together. At the very least, we know moonstones continue to exist, which suggests that whatever happens to Sedenya, her power still remains active in a way that wasn't true before 1227 ST. 

 

*Minor note: when Esrolians say that Orlanth is the most favored of the Husband-Protectors, they're compromising between an understanding of Orlanth as subordinate to Ernalda and an understanding of Orlanth as coequal to Ernalda, but these twin understandings are also present in existing Heortling mythology, which does point to a potential way to reconcile Sedenya to the Storm Tribe...

Edited June 14, 2020 by Eff

[scott-martin]

4 hours ago, Eff said:

wedding between Sedenya and Ernalda

There's a lot in that one. I never got the sense the trad red earths were thinking along these lines (probably preferring to work through the red emperor as intermediary instead, the so-called "Cherry Vanilla" work) but MGF dictates that somewhere between Tatius freezing the grant funding and the post-Hendira purges a few desperate women able and motivated to think around the box got the hell out of dodge. I wonder where they end up. Some future Tarsh splinter sect could easily form around one or two key revelations opposed to all currently known factions. It would be nice if a few end up heading west to hook some reviving Menena into the mix. Cragspider would also be interested if Arachne can at least watch. And Great Sister may finally have had enough. But the weird thing is that the farther out you go, the less important the ernalda marriage really is. Even at her biggest, the earth queen is really just a mask of Glorantha herself. Things might get complicated enough that Chalana and/or Uleria get put forward as cosmic mothers, in which case only they are really worth Sedenya's time. 

What I would do is start with a lost diary of Deezola and let it loose. Intricate notes on how to summon or awaken her own personal "ginna jar," a kind of external soul. That would probably overcome a lot of obstacles.

[Eff]

1 minute ago, scott-martin said:

There's a lot in that one. I never got the sense the trad red earths were thinking along these lines (probably preferring to work through the red emperor as intermediary instead, the so-called "Cherry Vanilla" work) but MGF dictates that somewhere between Tatius freezing the grant funding and the post-Hendira purges a few desperate women able and motivated to think around the box got the hell out of dodge. I wonder where they end up. Some future Tarsh splinter sect could easily form around one or two key revelations opposed to all currently known factions. It would be nice if a few end up heading west to hook some reviving Menena into the mix. Cragspider would also be interested if Arachne can at least watch. And Great Sister may finally have had enough. But the weird thing is that the farther out you go, the less important the ernalda marriage really is. Even at her biggest, the earth queen is really just a mask of Glorantha herself. Things might get complicated enough that Chalana and/or Uleria get put forward as cosmic mothers, in which case only they are really worth Sedenya's time. 

What I would do is start with a lost diary of Deezola and let it loose. Intricate notes on how to summon or awaken her own personal "ginna jar," a kind of external soul. That would probably overcome a lot of obstacles.

I've started wondering if Androgeus, with his reconciliation of opposites by way of constant alternation between different faces of whatever she does, is really a "superhero" for the Moon Rune, and thus we might see a convergence of certain dissident trends right in the Old Tarsh/Grazelander/Beast Valley belt, where the histories indicate Androgeus found themself defeated in zher attempt to support a Tarshite rebellion... But that's not a comforting thought, since they're ending up right at ground zero without many, if any of the revived foolishnesses of the ancients to defend them. 

 

[Vili]

On 6/12/2020 at 11:02 AM, Elcid321 said:

1.- would it be possible for orlanth and the red moon to find peace? and how?

2.- what would be the effects in the world if peace was managed?

1. Yeah, absolutely.

The moon is actually a giant ovum up there, waiting to be impregnated. Orlanth is faithful to Ernalda, so what we need is his little brother to do the job.

The name of this myth is Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star. Remember, Obi Wan's voice tells Luke to forgo the machine (Mostali) help and to use his organic, maybe Aldryami, but most essentially Draconic intuition, when blowing his load. That's when he becomes a man.

It becomes the PC's job to find the myth of Luke Skywalker and do the Hero Quest.

2. Ouroboros

Its a Draconic illumination. Life begins anew. Let there be Light and Dark. Maybe the Moon is actually an ovum of Glorantha the spider herself.

Edited June 14, 2020 by Vili
s/forego/forgo/

[scott-martin]

1 minute ago, Eff said:

I've started wondering if Androgeus, with his reconciliation of opposites by way of constant alternation between different faces of whatever she does, is really a "superhero" for the Moon Rune, and thus we might see a convergence of certain dissident trends right in the Old Tarsh/Grazelander/Beast Valley belt, where the histories indicate Androgeus found themself defeated in zher attempt to support a Tarshite rebellion... But that's not a comforting thought, since they're ending up right at ground zero without many, if any of the revived foolishnesses of the ancients to defend them. 

Love it. When King of Sartar hit the first time there was some speculation that "Shadow’s Good Shadow" was a kind of mask for what Androgeus may be evolving toward. Hey, it was the '90s, we were all smaller then and lore was scarce at the time. But if there's any connection there, Moon Rune has a lot of refinement ahead before shaking free from empire forever. This part probably starts in Furthest where the hunt for dank memes may even be what calls Androgeus back in the first place . . . I don't see much interest in my friend the yellow bear there even in theory but the Halfbird may have other hedhead secrets ready for fancy boy to misunderstand. A real pentheus type, IMG he meets a poetic and gruesome end.

This reminds me Androgeus' affiliation with Old Tarsh is complicated unless there's something we just don't know. While the Shakers undoubtedly preserve phallic female mysteries the Exiles hate the moon and presumably reject the Hon-Eel formulae. Maybe the Rising triggers when the superhero comes bearing renewed understanding and then the moon isn't so hateful to old earth any more. And looking at her original origin, I wouldn't be surprised if he's the real moon the mothers were seeking but didn't get quite right. Either way, no marriage is required because she is already his own wife and vice versa. 

People looking here tend to come back to the Skanth/Skath hermaphrodite entity of Dorastor, which has yet to produce a satisfactory baby but keeps trying. A lunar aspect sheds new light on why important people in the empire collect the failures.

[Rodney Dangerduck]

On 6/12/2020 at 11:26 PM, Joerg said:

There is no way that Orlanth can abandon his marriage to Ernalda. Without her, he is no king

If the only reason he is King is because of a marriage, he is no King.  He is consort of The Queen.

Are you saying that Argrath is forced to throw down the Moon and slaughter millions of people because Orlanth is a dolt, or, alternatively, Ernalda is an <insert nasty misogynist phrase of your choice here>?

[jajagappa]

4 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Are you saying that Argrath is forced to throw down the Moon and slaughter millions of people because Orlanth is a dolt, or, alternatively, Ernalda is an <insert nasty misogynist phrase of your choice here>?

From the famed Argrath's "It's a Wonderful Life"

"What is it you want, Inkarne? What do you want? You want the Moon? Just say the word and I'll throw a dragon around it and pull it down. Hey. That's a pretty good idea. I'll give you the Moon, Inkarne." -Argrath

[Joerg]

2 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

If the only reason he is King is because of a marriage, he is no King.  He is consort of The Queen.

Are you saying that Argrath is forced to throw down the Moon and slaughter millions of people because Orlanth is a dolt, or, alternatively, Ernalda is an <insert nasty misogynist phrase of your choice here>?

Well, Orlanth is a dolt. And yes, what you describe (male authority without having to listen to the wife, or wives) is an emperor.

Slaughtering millions of chaos-worshipers offers a space in a very special Otherworld, methinks. Argrath apotheosizes.

[Rodney Dangerduck]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Slaughtering millions of chaos-worshipers

The vast majority of Lunar citizens (and subjects and peoples) do not "worship" nor "embrace" chaos.  If religious, most just accept it as part of the world.  If not, they ignore it the best they can and move on with their lives.

I can agree with you that Orlanth is a bit of a dolt.  🙂

Edited June 15, 2020 by Rodney Dangerduck

[John Biles]

If an equal marriage is the necessity to be a King and not an Emperor, then the Queens of Esrolia are actually Empresses.

On 6/14/2020 at 9:24 AM, Eff said:

Broadly, the problem with making peace with Sedenya is that she's too large and too small of a concept. 

That is, most religious understandings delineate several "levels" of divinity. You have the greater gods like Orlanth and Ernalda, who oversee the medial gods of their household and children, and in turn these are served by the little gods, including ascended heroes. And then above the greater gods you have the vast gods, like Umath and Gata, who encompass the totality of the thing they represent. (The Malkioni call these Eransachula, and the greater gods on down are Srvuali and Burtae). 

Sedenya is, according to the Lunars, the Ultimate Knowable Moon, the Eransachula of the Moon Rune, and thus an equivalent of Umath or Gata. Thus, a wedding of Orlanth and Sedenya (or more appropriately in the cosmological worldview, a wedding of Sedenya and Ernalda) would necessarily position Sedenya as the superior partner because She's the greater entity. Except that Sedenya is also a greater god, an entity that went around performing concrete cosmogonic acts in the mythic past, and also a medial god through Her Masks, and also a lesser god in the form of the ascended Teelos, which are all definitely Her. So a Sedenya-anyone marriage is quite impossible, because you're attempting to define a relationship that is really four different simultaneous relationships at once. 

The highest level of gods are dead or basically gone and don't matter.  No one worships them and they're basically out of the story.

So while a few Lunars might cry foul, basically Orlanth and his various sub-cults are as complicated as Sedenya and there's not really a problem in that regard.

Except he wants to gut her like a trout and she wants to strangle him.

And the whole Chaos thing.

 

[Sir_Godspeed]

As far as I understand, Orlanthi notions of rulership derives from marriage to the sovereignty powers of the Earth. Orlanth is not an exception to this; he is the model for it. 

I honestly think, at least in deep time, that the Dara Happans believed the same, but they either forgot, or consciously supressed it, hence Aether and Gata's relationship, followed by Yelm's much more patriarchal marriage to Dendara, who is severely neutered in nature compared to Ernalda. Hm. There's some myth-theorizing here that's better left for another thread.

Edited June 16, 2020 by Sir_Godspeed

[Eff]

2 hours ago, John Biles said:

If an equal marriage is the necessity to be a King and not an Emperor, then the Queens of Esrolia are actually Empresses.

The highest level of gods are dead or basically gone and don't matter.  No one worships them and they're basically out of the story.

So while a few Lunars might cry foul, basically Orlanth and his various sub-cults are as complicated as Sedenya and there's not really a problem in that regard.

Except he wants to gut her like a trout and she wants to strangle him.

And the whole Chaos thing.

 

I mean, Lunar cooperation is pretty much essential for something like this. Not just in a pragmatic sense, but in a mythical sense, a forced marriage would be invalid and would catastrophically backfire on anyone attempting it. 

But never mind that, the biggest problem is that if we acknowledge that Sedenya and Orlanth are essentially similar, then we would be faced with a bigamous marriage of equals, something Heortlings don't really accept. Where polygamous marriage occurs, it's between one superior partner and several inferior partners (eg Vingkot's wives don't have names). So to this extent, the Heortlings would require somebody to be demoted to a side piece. Which, in the most direct formulation, where Sedenya and Orlanth are scrapping over sovereignty right now, just means that one or the other must triumph and become the Monarch of the Gods. (We can presume Sedenya would demand to be addressed as "Queen of the Gods") 

Granted, in Esrolia Orlanth is a subordinate partner to Ernalda, and the Esrolians developed a much more powerful pro-Lunar contingent, in part because Sedenya wasn't inherently a cosmological threat. 

I think that personal animosity between the gods is pretty overstated. Followers of Orlanth aren't commanded by their god to automatically go murder any Lunar priestesses, after all. There's clearly some extent to which coexistence is possible. 

And the Chaos thing is, well, Orlanth doesn't actually command that you go out and fight Chaos. That's Storm Bull, and Storm Bullies are not exactly the model of ideal behavior for Orlanthi. Orlanth commands that you hold to the laws in order to defend against the threat of Chaos. So there's still room for coexistence even before we get into the complex attitude towards Chaos that the Lunar Way has. 

[Leingod]

27 minutes ago, Eff said:

And the Chaos thing is, well, Orlanth doesn't actually command that you go out and fight Chaos. That's Storm Bull, and Storm Bullies are not exactly the model of ideal behavior for Orlanthi. Orlanth commands that you hold to the laws in order to defend against the threat of Chaos. So there's still room for coexistence even before we get into the complex attitude towards Chaos that the Lunar Way has. 

One of the strictures of a Wind Lord of Orlanth is literally that they must fight Chaos (and chant a challenge even if the Chaos monster can't understand human language) wherever they find it, with the only outs being stuff like "If you can't handle it on your own, you're allowed to leave to go find help."

So on a pretty fundamental level a major and widely-worshiped aspect of Orlanth (i.e. Orlanth Adventurous) is bound up in fighting Chaos. Just because he isn't as obsessive and single-minded about it as his brother isn't the same thing as "there's room for coexistence," unless you're willing to count cases where the Orlanthi just aren't strong enough to wipe out whatever well-established nest of Chaos is around. Which I don't, because that's like calling the Sartarites who were just waiting with clenched teeth for the first opportunity to start chopping off Lunar heads as "coexisting" with the Lunars.

[Eff]

2 minutes ago, Leingod said:

One of the strictures of a Wind Lord of Orlanth is literally that they must fight Chaos (and chant a challenge even if the Chaos monster can't understand human language) wherever they find it, with the only outs being stuff like "If you can't handle it on your own, you're allowed to leave to go find help."

So on a pretty fundamental level a major and widely-worshiped aspect of Orlanth (i.e. Orlanth Adventurous) is bound up in fighting Chaos. Just because he isn't as obsessive and single-minded about it as his brother isn't the same thing as "there's room for coexistence," unless you're willing to count cases where the Orlanthi just aren't strong enough to wipe out whatever well-established nest of Chaos is around. Which I don't, because that's like calling the Sartarites who were just waiting with clenched teeth for the first opportunity to start chopping off Lunar heads as "coexisting" with the Lunars.

Wherever they find it, though. Under most circumstances, that's a defensive posture, because you're finding Chaos because Chaos is sticking its nose in your business or that of your community. There are no communities of Wind Lords forming sanitary cordons around Larnste's Print or Snakepipe Hollow or the Devil's Marsh, it's Storm Bulls who form those special communities. Because it's not about crusading against Chaos, it's about maintaining the integrity of the world where Chaos actively intrudes into the world. 

Which opens up room for philosophical debate about whether the Red Goddess's approach to Chaos is one of actively welcoming further intrusions or one of maintaining the integrity of the world by binding Chaos up further and tighter within it. Obviously, this latter is going to be a bit disingenuous in that the Lunar Way sees Chaos as a vital essence of the universe, but there's still that room to hash things out, rather than an absolute conflict. 

[DrGoth]

41 minutes ago, Leingod said:

One of the strictures of a Wind Lord of Orlanth is literally that they must fight Chaos (and chant a challenge even if the Chaos monster can't understand human language) wherever they find it, with the only outs being stuff like "If you can't handle it on your own, you're allowed to leave to go find help."

So on a pretty fundamental level a major and widely-worshiped aspect of Orlanth (i.e. Orlanth Adventurous) is bound up in fighting Chaos. Just because he isn't as obsessive and single-minded about it as his brother isn't the same thing as "there's room for coexistence," unless you're willing to count cases where the Orlanthi just aren't strong enough to wipe out whatever well-established nest of Chaos is around. Which I don't, because that's like calling the Sartarites who were just waiting with clenched teeth for the first opportunity to start chopping off Lunar heads as "coexisting" with the Lunars.

It does depend what you mean by "coexistence".  There are plenty of examples in our history of societies that each would have liked to make the other disappear, but have coexisted because they simply couldn't achieve it.

But unless Lunar and Orlanthi coexistence is to be anything other than armed to the teeth hostile coexistence, one or the other probably has to change in some way.  For example, either the Lunars go "Yep, we were wrong about chaos, we are all us - except for chaos" or Orlanthi Wind Lords have to fight bad chaos (to some definition of bad chaos) but not good or controlled chaos.  Those are both big big changes, but that's what happens at the end of Gloranthan ages.

Should you do either of this in your game? No, should is the wrong word. YMGV.  Could you?  I think that the way Glorantha is defined that yes, either could be made believable through the play of a suitable campaign. Of course, you could just as happily do something completely different.

Although maybe even that is overstating it.  As Eff pointed out, the Orlanthi command can be read as defensive.  And it may depend on what exactly rates as a manifestation of chaos that a wind lord must fight.  

Edited June 16, 2020 by DrGoth
clarification

[Nick Brooke]

Orlanth: "Chaos is utterly antithetical to existence. So the Gods made a Great Compromise to bind Chaos into its place within the world of Glorantha, creating the new world of Time."

Sedenya: "Chaos is now a part of Glorantha. You don't have to like it, you don't have to use it, but it's there: that's the world the Old Gods made. Now let me teach you how we can use it for good."

I can see plenty of room for reconciliation between these positions. But I'm a cheerful optimist, and believe in progress.

(In the nineties, Greg Stafford once wrote that the mythic opposition between Sedenya and Orlanth was necessary, was required by the cosmos, and could only end if Orlanth were slain; at the time, I talked him around to "bound," instead, but we agreed that might be Lunar propaganda. But as Jeff has wisely said elsewhere recently, leveraging Greg's unpublished musings is a mug's game)

[redmoongoddess]

The only thing i'm getting from this is that if there is no way Sedenya and Orlanth can accept peace, then the only option is practically the total culture genocide of either the Lunars or the Orlanthi. That's pretty fucked up. And apparently that is canon according to Greg. People say WH40k is dark? It's got nothing on Old 'G. (And also Glorantha is just better written in general imo.)

In my Glorantha they can make peace with each other, even if one of them has to change massively to do so. (Probably Sedenya.) But that doesn't seem to be in Greg's canon. I like Eff's post, even tho I'd prefer Sedenya to be one who you can reason with. I hope it doesn't make me appear to be mentally idiotic for preferring it over canon. IMHO Everyone's Glorantha Should Vary. 

[John Biles]

1 minute ago, redmoongoddess said:

The only thing i'm getting from this is that if there is no way Sedenya and Orlanth can accept peace, then the only option is practically the total culture genocide of either the Lunars or the Orlanthi. That's pretty fucked up. And apparently that is canon according to Greg. People say WH40k is dark? It's got nothing on Old 'G. (And also Glorantha is just better written in general imo.)

In my Glorantha they can make peace with each other, even if one of them has to change massively to do so. (Probably Sedenya.) But that doesn't seem to be in Greg's canon. I like Eff's post, even tho I'd prefer Sedenya to be one who you can reason with. I hope it doesn't make me appear to be mentally idiotic for preferring it over canon. IMHO Everyone's Glorantha Should Vary. 

We never got the Lunar version of the future of the Hero Wars and possibly never will.  It would likely be the same thing you don't like, just the other way around.

Though it strikes me that the really appropriate thing, given the past, is that Argath kills the REd Goddess, then discovers he screwed the universe and has to find a way to bring her back, which then leads to reconcilliation.  

 

[Sir_Godspeed]

4 minutes ago, redmoongoddess said:

I hope it doesn't make me appear to be mentally idiotic for preferring it over canon.

Not in the slightest. 

As a general rule, I tend to prefer not to "lose" cultures/factions/groups in fictional universe. The idea of the Lunars or Orlanthi having to disappear bums me out (although the canon does allow for some survival of Lunars in *some* sense). 

[DrGoth]

3 hours ago, John Biles said:

We never got the Lunar version of the future of the Hero Wars and possibly never will.  It would likely be the same thing you don't like, just the other way around.

 

The way I understood it was like this:

Think of a hand fan, 

The guard at one end is KoS, the guard at the other end is the never written Lunar book.  Both of them leave the world in a mess (but very different messes).  The ribs and leaf spread in between are the different stories that a role-playing group can tell.   Some 'good' endings, some 'bad' endings. Some neither.  All up to the group.  Your story. YGMV.   There's so many ways it could turn out.  My understanding (and I repeat that again deliberately) was that there is a vast range of possibilities spread out before you through which you can find your own story.

Edited June 17, 2020 by DrGoth
typo