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Glorantha Book Club


Crel

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A novel I read recently, which other Glorantha fans may enjoy: The Grace of Kings, by Ken Liu. It's a secondary world fantasy set in the archipelago of Dara, inspired by tales from the Han Dynasty of China, with additional elements from Polynesia/Oceania. The story is a sprawling epic focused on a warrior and a trickster.

It's fairly low-magic, especially compared to Glorantha. The term "silkpunk" has been used; wuxia warriors, grand airships, and Imperial bureaucracies make it a good fit. I think the book's focus on the importance of stories, and how the gods subtly (or sometimes not-so-subtly) shape the world of Dara, will make Glorantha fans feel right at home.

I've recently started the sequel, The Wall of Storms. An early myth in the book, about how the years got their totem animals, is what inspired me to share the series.

Oh, and there's straight-up a heroquest at one point. I won't say more, for fear of spoilers.

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3 hours ago, Crel said:

A novel I read recently, which other Glorantha fans may enjoy: The Grace of Kings, by Ken Liu

I've read the first, and enjoyed it.  Haven't gotten around to the second yet, but the first had a lot of cool ideas.

 

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12 hours ago, jajagappa said:

I've read the first, and enjoyed it.  Haven't gotten around to the second yet, but the first had a lot of cool ideas.

 

So far, I'm enjoying it. Liu's continued use of summarization to focus on the broad strokes of years, rather than moment-by-moment details, drives a quick pace. 

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A movie night annex: 

Himiko (1971)

Freak Orlando (1981)

Fehérlófia/Son of the White Mare (1981)

Three separate movies with three separate takes on how mythology interacts with the modern, all absolutely fascinating visually. The last is the most conventional narratively, and features monsters that are amorphous amalgamations of military hardware, or rolling cityscapes with faces forming in the lights on skyscrapers. 

Insights into/correspondences with Gloranthan cultures:

Himiko: Urban Solar

Freak Orlando: Lunar

Fehérlófia: Horse Solar

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Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

"I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban," -Greg Stafford, January 7th, 2010

Eight Arms and the Mask

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Found a couple of freebies for Himiko and Fehérlófia, but could not find a full movie for Freak Orlando. These two are odd,  but they are travel to the “other world”  so should be. Thanks Eff, I will be watching these in the next couple of days!

 

himiko movie 1974
A freestyle, imagined telling of the life of shaman queen Himiko, who falls in love with her half-brother, making her powers weaken thus putting her position to risk.

 

Fehérlófia/Son of the White Mare (1981)

One of the great psychedelic masterpieces of world animation, SON OF THE WHITE MARE is a swirling, color-mad maelstrom of mythic monsters and Scythian heroes, part-Nibelungenlied, part-Yellow Submarine, lit by jagged bolts of lightning and drenched in rivers of blue, red, gold and green. A massive cosmic oak stands at the gates of the Underworld, holding seventy-seven dragons in its roots; to combat these monsters, a dazzling white mare goddess gives birth to three heroes - Treeshaker and his brothers - who embark on an epic journey to save the universe. Directed by Hungarian animator Marcell Jankovics (famed for his 1974 Oscar-nominated short Sisyphus), Son of the White Mare has been restored in 4K using the original 35mm camera negative and sound elements by Arbelos in collaboration with the Hungarian National Film Institute

- Film Archive.

https://archive.org/details/son-of-the-white-mare-feherlofia-1981-hungarian-film-english-sub-k-vzkl-4-b-9slvf

 

 

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I've finished the sequel, The Wall of Storms, and it's also good. If you like the first, I think you'll like the second too.

For Glorantha fans in particular, it continues to play with some cool stuff in the setting's mythology. I don't want to spoil too much (although it's not really a major plot element), but basically exploring the relationship between the gods and their worshipers, and how each impacts and perceives one another. There's some potential God Learner takeaways.

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Nonfiction this time, which to be fair is most of what I read nowadays. If sharing my reading list seems interesting, I'll continue doing it - if not, I probably won't bother.

I recently finished re-reading Walter Burkert's Greek Religion. To my understanding, this is one of the "core texts" for the study of Classical religion. When I was in college I mostly studied language and philosophy - I didn't get to Classical culture and history until I began reading on my own - but I think Burkert was the text assigned for the Greek Religion course.

Why the Greeks? Isn't Glorantha "Bronze Age?" Well, nominally. Beyond my personal fascination with the Classical period, I feel Greek Religion is relevant for Glorantha nerds because the most important element of Gloranthan religion remains present: the omnipresence of the divine. Further, I find studying the Greeks helpful because we just know so much more about them. More texts survived, than from the "proper" Bronze Age religions of the Near East.

For me, the most useful takeaway of this re-read was the notion of "civic religion" in the Classical period. Burkert does a good job emphasizing how varied the typical Greek's worship was. It's a polytheistic nuance which I think is often skipped over in Glorantha, because our roleplaying characters generally have fierce dedication to one or two deities. Refusing to worship the city's gods - refusing to be a lay member, basically - wasn't just a religious matter. It was a political matter, too.

Currently, I've been working on the city-cult of my Esrolia project, and I found thinking about "civic religion" this way helpful. Creating a distinction between "city gods" and "foreign gods," and then exploring how they interact. I like using Greek elements in Esrolia because I see them both as feeling like sophisticated urban cultures, with the city at the heart of life. Of course, this parallel also works for the ancient cities along the Tigris and Euphrates, with their tutelary city-gods, and constant squabbling amongst one another for dominance.

I'm not sure I can recommend Burkert to the average Glorantha fan. I find the plethora of details in his book inspiring, because it excites my mind's generation of Glorantha details. How are sacrifices made, and why? What do city festivals look like? How does traditional ritual and current myth/belief intersect? And so on. But, if you're not somewhat familiar with Classical literature already, I think this book would be more confusing than helpful. Burkert makes pretty regular reference to the historians, the philosophers, and the playwrights, without necessarily using supporting summary. The book's accessible for the history enthusiast, but I bet it'd be a frustrating read if you're not familiar with the works of Herodotus or Plato.

TLDR: Greek Religion is useful for My Glorantha, because it provides accessible details of actual ancient religious practices which often aren't available for older civilizations.

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And let's not forget some 'inspirational classics'...

- Soldier of the Mists, Gene Wolfe

- The Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien Jr. [Numenor = Jrustela]

- The Ten Thousand, MC Ford

- First Man In Rome, M. McCullough

- Stonehenge, B. Cornwall

- Pllars of the Earth, K. Follett

und so weiter...

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1 hour ago, Crel said:

TLDR: Greek Religion is useful for My Glorantha, because it provides accessible details of actual ancient religious practices which often aren't available for older civilizations.

I might look this one up for my pseudo Atlantis campaign for my nieces.

I have some good generalized gaming sources [Trojan War by AGE and GURPS Classical Greece] but something a bit more specific might not hurt in my portrayal of the Olympians. Hopefully something a little less dense than Edith Hamilton.

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39 minutes ago, svensson said:

Hopefully something a little less dense than Edith Hamilton.

It's been a while since I've skimmed my copy of Hamilton's Mythology, but I'd reckon Burkert's more dense, not less. It's a book of history, not mythology. There's loads of good stuff, but like I said above, I wouldn't call it "accessible." Maybe a good translation of Hesiod?

(And if someone has a verse translation you'd recommend, could you let me know? 😄)

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  • 5 months later...

Calling on Chalana Arroy to do a little thread resurrection, because I've been reading another book I feel other Glorantha folks may enjoy…

I'm currently working my way through We, the Navigators: the Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific by David Lewis. It's a fairly readable description of how Pacific Islanders continued to navigate from island to island, beyond sight of land, during the 20th century. The book cautiously extrapolates how thorough the navigating arts may have been in the past (especially around the point of European contact) based on what survived into the 1960's, when the author interviewed and sailed with indigenous navigators to study their traditions.

This puts the oceans of Glorantha into my mind, due to the book's connection with the pre-industrial world. How would the Wolf Pirates make their circumnavigation? How do the peoples of the East Isles navigate their archipelago? And so on. The detailed use of stars to map their way across the waves, the sensitivity to the swell patterns of waves, and so on, all help my brain slowly imagine a worldview with fewer Western abstractions. The methods of the navigators aren't just about getting from island to island; they present a cohesive cosmological view of their world.

Even outside of a context like the East Isles, I feel the description of celestial navigation could still be relevant for games around Dragon Pass. How does one know when to turn landward toward Corflu? Which star does one follow to cross the Mirrorsea to Karse? And so on. We, the Navigators also helps remind me of how important the heavens are to many ancient cultures. It plays an important role in how people experience time. I think we sometimes skim past this as a way of experiencing the world, because we interact with it through abstractions like the Theyalan calendar, whereas our adventurers might know when holy days approach from when a constellation crosses behind Kero Fin. I feel the sky or heavens are sometimes dismissed as "a Solar thing," but the celestial clockwork is an important part of everyone's life, even if they worship the Storm or the Earth as the supreme deity.

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2 hours ago, Crel said:

This puts the oceans of Glorantha into my mind, due to the book's connection with the pre-industrial world. How would the Wolf Pirates make their circumnavigation?

They'd rely on Imperial Age maps, acquired from the Malkioni - probably in the 1615 plundering of Sog City, then expanded with knowledge stolen in the City of Wonders 1616.

I wouldn't expect Harrek to be literate in a great variety of languages, which means that he must have some literate followers on his ship. He might have basic literacy in New Pelorian as part of his Dart Competitor training, but that won't buy him any knowledge about the Seas from plundered or copied writings in the places he visited.

 

How did the Westerners do it? I think they must have some sorcery which will make a current give off a glow to the caster,  and possibly help identify the sea entity one wants to communicate with (using another spell, I suppose).

Waves and water currents are (parts of) manifest deities in the surface world, Sorcerers should be able to summon (an avatar of) the entity and have a conversation or negotiation with it - the sea sorcery developed by and inherited from the Waertagi is one of the better known sorcerous schools.

The current will have sensory input from the length of its existance - in case of normal rivers from their source in the Deep Downbelow (through all their parent currents) all the way to their headwaters. And they'd know about land (aka Food) on their way, and of sea bottoms that form obstacles, feeding places, and dumping (sedimentaiton) areas.

There are orphaned, dammed, tamed or redirected rivers, and probably sea currents, too. Major cataclysms, Lodrilic activity underwater or even piercing the water surface, stronger currents dumping stuff... new sinkholes from Maranic tectonics, or underworld cavities pushing upwards...

Waters are fluid, and will adapt.

 

2 hours ago, Crel said:

How do the peoples of the East Isles navigate their archipelago?

Lots of tradition, visible mountains, sacrifices dedicated to a named current or a named island deity...

Reading the waves might be part of it, but then there are regions like Dang Leng Dang where all conventional wisdom fails. The Maslo people and their brethren Thinobutan outrigger folk have inherited Sendereven methods of navigation, and might have an advantage over the common East Isles sailors.

 

2 hours ago, Crel said:

And so on. The detailed use of stars to map their way across the waves, the sensitivity to the swell patterns of waves, and so on, all help my brain slowly imagine a worldview with fewer Western abstractions. The methods of the navigators aren't just about getting from island to island; they present a cohesive cosmological view of their world.

IMG there will be use of conch shell trumpeting to communicate with the waves and currents for Masloi and East Islanders. Possibly conch shells mounted on paddles, possibly receiving modulations of the sound from the current or wave they are interacting with, changing the tone or the tune of the melody in harmony with the player.

 

2 hours ago, Crel said:

Even outside of a context like the East Isles, I feel the description of celestial navigation could still be relevant for games around Dragon Pass.

Possibly more so in a desert of shifting dunes than on the seas.

 

2 hours ago, Crel said:

How does one know when to turn landward toward Corflu?

The Zola Fel is mighty enough to be noticeable quite a way out in the Rozgali (and probably silty enough, too).

The Condor Crags are quite a landmark, towering as far above the sea cliffs of Prax and the Wastes as those are towering about the marshy beaches below them. The outline of those cliffs will be readable to experienced navigators, too.

 

2 hours ago, Crel said:

Which star does one follow to cross the Mirrorsea to Karse? And so on. 

Mirrorsea navigation will include reading the sea bottom using the lead, not just for fathoming but to get a read of the sediment or sedentary benthic growth.

 

2 hours ago, Crel said:

We, the Navigators also helps remind me of how important the heavens are to many ancient cultures. It plays an important role in how people experience time. I think we sometimes skim past this as a way of experiencing the world, because we interact with it through abstractions like the Theyalan calendar, whereas our adventurers might know when holy days approach from when a constellation crosses behind Kero Fin. I feel the sky or heavens are sometimes dismissed as "a Solar thing," but the celestial clockwork is an important part of everyone's life, even if they worship the Storm or the Earth as the supreme deity.

Whenever I think of the Gloranthan sky - whether day or night - it strikes me how different it is from what we can experience on this planet. The stars rotate as if you were observing them from a really high latitude, places most people never visit. At the same time, the sun  and the planets move across the sky like in an equatorial place. And the Red Moon, Zenith and Stormgate are fixtures above, unmoving  Then there are the irregular wanderers, Orlanth's Ring, the Blue Streak, and the Juggernaut, or the three visible Jumpers.

Stars don't rise or set - the ones near the horizon may dip below the surface, or come up above it, near the Winter solstice, which offers a 16 hour night to admire them, making all of them visible unless you are in a valley or have other such obstacles obscuring the horizon. Planets do rise, from two locations in the East, and they set in two rather separated locations (or areas, in case of the Southpath) in the West. There are at least two planet-rises and settings visible each night, more often three when the night is long enough for Mastakos/Uleria giving a repeat performance. Most other planets use the entrances and exits more sparingly.

Lightfore marks the start and the end of the night. On equinox nights, it rises in the same constellation that it sets in. In summer, it sets ahead of the rising constellation, in winter it lags behind.

The heavens provide a precision clock, with Mastakos/Uleria offering an easy tool to keep track of the hours - just divide the arc of the sunpath in eighths, i.e. quarter the distance between the horizon and Pole Star, and you have the full hour positions. The tilt of the Sky Dome and the Sun Path doesn't affect that measurement, as it hinges on the two gates of the Sunpath. (It does affect the Southpath, in addition to other weird mechanics that I have been told could be calculated.)

But then, longitude is not a problem on Glorantha - the world has a single time zone all across the Surface World. At least, not a problem connected to time, finding out how far east or west your position is remains a navigational challenge.

There appear to be magical devices that point towards the temple they were made in/for, which should allow triangulation if you have a set of three or more such pointers, sufficiently separated on a base line. We are dealing with the geometry of a mainly flat surface. Take a map of the surface of Glorantha, and put strong pins into the positions of the three temples. Have two contraptions that allow you to put their two arms at the exact angle between a pair of pointers. Take two measurements and glide those contraptions so that they touch both pins, and find the one position that allows you to have both connecting points on the same spot - that's your position on the map.

If you don't have such devices, you may try and use the position of the Crater as one such landmark. It is easy to find, right below the Red Moon. Find a second land mark, put one of the contraptions described above into use, and you will get a circle on the map which will go through your position. Additional data like the fathoms, the material on the sea bottom (if within reach of your lead) will help you determine the position on this circle.

These methods require a two-dimensional map of the world. Such a bird's eye view of the world doesn't come naturally to a sailor, though. The natural experience of a journey is that of a thread, with observations around you. Old road maps are like this, or the experience of your navigation device in your car. There are old pilgrims' road maps that combine several such threads to a topological map that bears little similarity to a topographical map, resembling a subway-plan.

The experienced navigator knows how to follow a thread, how far he can deviate from it and still come back to the originally planned course, and where and when to expect other routes connecting to this one.

An experienced navigator should also know how to find a course after a storm has driven his vessel away from course, with wave action and cloud cover preventing any accurate observation of how the course changed. But while such conditions last, any navigational device but magical pointers and the lead will be useless.

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Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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  • 3 months later...

I just finished reading The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy by Alain Bresson, and I want to babble about how that might relate to Glorantha & the Hero Wars. So I'm gonna do that, and none of you can stop me. 😛

I found the book interesting, but I would only tentatively recommend it to folks who are similarly over-the-top nerdy about the ancient world (such as Jeff, Martin, Ludo - looking at you, Mr. Spreadsheets - Joerg, and myself). It is, after all, a book making an academic argument about the role of market economics within the ancient world (esp. the Athenian Empire, and the Hellenistic period). Beware - Here Be Mathematics! Fairly readable, but not something I'd recommend to a broad audience.

But screw all that, going into detail's probably not helpful or interesting. I'd rather muse on Glorantha while staring at the book's reflection. What are some of my takeaways?

  • As I've generally suspected, Archaic/Hellenistic Greece doesn't seem like a good cultural model for Esrolia or the Choralinthor region. A major factor is climate. Esrolia's harvests are much more stable than, in particular, the harvests in Attica, which drove development of the Aegean World. Problems demand solutions.
  • The silver from the mines at Laurion was more important than I anticipated. Now, a military historian is going to see history as battles, and an economic historian as economics; but the thesis that Athens's mines at Laurion were the "engine" which developed the Aegean region makes sense to me.
  • Transitioning from the ancient world to the mythic world, this makes me wonder "Where's the silver come from in Glorantha?" A mission to wreck the Red Emperor's silver mines - ruining Lunar trade - feels like the seed of secret missions. Or, establishing a new source of value for any faction. This takes on a mythic cast when I remember that metal is the leftovers of gods. How do poets talk about silver, and it's celestial associations? (In RQG, Moon; personally, I see it as the "celestial feminine.") Heroquest to kill a Star Maiden, and establish a new silver mine? Or, find the mine (her corpse), then quest to ally with her and have access to the mine? Free her from dwarves living in her left shin?
  • It seems like Nochet and Esrolia have an analogous relationship to Athens and the Black Sea. Grain goes into the big city, and the big city creates stuff to trade back to the farms. The challenge is that Athens has Laurion, whereas I'm not sure what Nochet has. It's not clear to me how the cycle of trade got started in Nochet. In 1625, the engine keeps chugging because that's just where you go. But what started that process? What began the magnetism in Dormal's day?
  • Given Esrolia's general uber-prosperity, the Great Winter must have hit even harder than I've generally felt. I might explore this with a flashback adventure sometime. Or, just exploring Esrolia strategies and experiences more deeply during that time. It feels to me like the notion of "A failed Esrolian wheat harvest" is colloquial for "the impossible happened." My brain wanders in this direction because in ancient Greece, strategies for scarcity/famine drove a huge amount of economic activity, and also regulation (Ex: in many city-states, it was illegal to export grain).
  • Perhaps the general "flow" of economics is silver from the north (more dead celestial deities in that area?) down south for goods created by artisans living off Esrolia's grain surpluses. Goods go north, silver does Stuff. Maybe people come from the west to trade for said silver? And Dormal just made it easier.
  • This could lead to another economic element in the Hero Wars - the Red Emperor goes a-conquering because of a massive trade deficit in silver. What I'm thinking of here as a terrestrial parallel is the economic pressures/silver deficit which contributed to British colonialism in India.
  • I suspect the Esrolian grain surplus is locally productive, not internationally productive. This is because central Genertela is not the Aegean ocean (shocker, eh?). Transport of meaningful quantities of grain is slow and cumbersome, mostly overland. Possible exceptions for the other former Sixths, along Choralinthor Bay. I don't see Esrolia feeding Sartar, Tarsh, Maniria, etc.

That's all at the moment. If more thoughts burble to the surface, I'll post 'em.

What have y'all been reading?

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For a city like Nochet, you cannot think of a minor (in terms of population) player. You need something like Alexandria (for the wheat trade) or Antioch, which mixed land trade and sea trade, linking the Mediterranean with Persia and the Silk Road. Both exceeded Nochet's population in their heyday, even without magic. Nochet actually combines both, in my opinion.

Antioch is for me the best ancient city, though you could argue for the trade center it replaced, Tyre, as another alternative, as they were the gateway between the Mediterranean trade and the continental trade to Persia and further East. Alexandria tried to replace Tyre too, but it was too isolated to really attract the Eastern trade, though Egyptian grain was enough to make it great. In the same way, I think what made Nochet great is the meeting of continental trade through Dragon Pass with the sea trade with most of Glorantha, supplemented by the bounty of Esrolian crops. The trader princes replaced part of it during the Closing, but only after the opening did it recover its position as the largest city in the world.

Unfortunately I cannot recommend a good book on Antioch, specially of the good times before Christianism, when it was the most wicked city in the Mediterranean. If you really want to think about grain and trade, or why the Romans ate Egyptian wheat and not Gaul's wheat (mostly), try Paul Erdkamp's, The Grain Market in the Roman Empire: A Social, Political and Economic Study, but it is quite specialized and pricey.

I do second Nick Brooke's recommendation of Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds and its two sequels, though the sequels are simply good, rather than brilliant.

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5 hours ago, Crel said:

It seems like Nochet and Esrolia have an analogous relationship to Athens and the Black Sea. Grain goes into the big city, and the big city creates stuff to trade back to the farms. The challenge is that Athens has Laurion, whereas I'm not sure what Nochet has. It's not clear to me how the cycle of trade got started in Nochet. In 1625, the engine keeps chugging because that's just where you go. But what started that process? What began the magnetism in Dormal's day?

Artisan-grade spidersilk comes down the Creek-stream River from the troll arachnid farmers around Skyfall Lake.  Enough spices come north from Caladraland that, according the recent Equipment book, Esrolian cuisine is famous for its gumbo.  Add to these an abundance of local copper as @jajagappa suggests, pearls from the Choralinthor, elf-goods from Arstola Forest, troll-goods from the Shadow Plateau (some of the best dyes in Glorantha come from the shells of their beetles), dwarf-goods from Gemborg Mine...and the list goes on.  Then stack on the artisans supported by Nochet's grain surplus, turning a lot of those materials into even more valuable finished products.  Nochet is a nexus for trade in all sorts of high value goods, many of them with excellent value to weight/volume ratios.

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On 7/6/2021 at 9:01 PM, Sir_Godspeed said:

Cool! Thanks for the recommendation. Ancient Chinese airships sounds cool as hell.

According to "Martial Arts movie history", the Wudong Monastery invented flight during the Tang Dynasty, and they didn't need any airships, just 5 hours of Horse Stance per day and some lead weights. 🙃

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Glorantha Book Club — 4/13/22

I recently learned about an unfamiliar complete Roman epic from a footnote, Statius's Thebaid, or "Song of Thebes." The translation I found by Jane Wilson Joyce was a brilliantly fun read. (Well, I'll admit "fun" might be qualified by "fun for a certain type of reader.") The Thebaid is a Latin retelling of the war between Argos & Thebes driven by the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles & Polynices. While before & after the Thebaid are fairly well known from the plays of Sophocles (Oedipus Rex, Antigone), the story of the Seven Against Thebes itself isn't one I was familiar with from standard lit/Classics readings.

The book is filled with heroics and melodrama; super-human heroes overwhelmed by rages and passions, as the gods drive warriors on both sides to frenzy. There are few moral heroes here, and for me that was part of the attraction. A gory war story which views the war as a horrible evil, not as embodying martial honor.

I think there's a lot of Glorantha and RuneQuest in this book. Maybe even moreso than the Iliad or Mahabharata! Well, for my Glorantha, anyway. On a trivial level, the combats feel somewhat RuneQuesty; there are many, many severed limbs, at any rate! 😄 But also the way Statius frames each hero's spotlight feels to me like "ah, yes, this is when they've cast Shield, or True Weapon..." and then you can also tell when the spell has run out. One hero is swallowed whole by the earth (Create Fissure), another wrestles with the local river-god after polluting him with corpses. Book VI, a series of funeral games at the epic's mid-point, could be grabbed nearly whole and used as a game session to honor a fallen character. Throughout, the humans feel, to me, especially human. I think it's because most of the heroes don't feel idolized. They're lamented.

Like most epics, the gods are omnipresent even (or especially) when the humans reject them. They feel more active than Glorantha's gods, but throughout the tale their actions feel like the type of thing we'd expect in Glorantha when adventurers break social taboos. In particular, the Thebaid very much emphasizes treating slain enemies as people, not carrion (something I now plan to remember for my own players).

A lot of the stories in Glorantha have a basically positive "spin." Sartar's pacifism, Lunar equality, Orlanth's honor & heroism, Ernalda's generosity. But we're entering the Hero Wars, and that means a lot of people are going to die. That thought was in my head through much of the piece. It's a brutal, sorrowful, unnecessary war, and it's a war which spawns more war, and yet more still in the following generation. The Hero Wars can be seen this way. An adventurer from 1625 ST might, by the end, feel very much like Nestor in Homer's Illiad; an old man who has seen terrible conflicts for his whole life, and yearns hopelessly for more level heads to prevail. The Seven Against Thebes was just one of many such conflicts for Nestor. I imagine the Dragonrise, or the Battle of Heroes (1628 ST), might be looked back on as the opening salvo in a similar way.

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  • 1 year later...

Glorantha Book Club - 1/23-24

Haven't done one of these in a while! I recently finished reading Gary Ferguson's Spirits of the Wild, and it felt especially relevant for brainstorming myths and adventures in Glorantha. The book's a short collection of folktales and myths from around the world rewritten by the author. What made it “click” for me was:

  • The collection's sources are diverse in both time and space. They range from antiquity to around the 18th century, and from the Pacific Northwest to Southeast Asia.

  • Each story explains why the world happens to be a certain way.

The stories are generally short and pleasantly written, just a couple pages. Many of them would adapt well directly into a heroquest. The emphasis on explanations is also helpful for getting in the “mythmaking” frame of mind. While not all myths are creation stories, Ferguson's collection provides many variation on that theme.

Another perk is that it looks like the book isn't terribly expensive when buying used. 😁 Which is nice because I have no clue where I got it.

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20 hours ago, Crel said:

Glorantha Book Club - 1/23-24

Posted my current reading over on FB, but figure can repeat here:

Recently finished the available two volumes of Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy. The first two volumes are intersecting tales from two different characters, each told in first person voice, so limited perspectives. Based on African myths so very different stories than typical fantasy and very non-traditional characters (including shapechangers). They are decidedly dark fantasy, not quite horror, and have some very different takes on spirit world and vampiric beings.
 
Currently reading the last volume of R.F. Kuang's Poppy War trilogy. East Asian foundation in this case and a lot of focus on shamanism. The trilogy recasts much of early to mid 20th century Chinese history including the brutal occupation by the Japanese into a magic rich fantasy setting. The horror of warfare (and use of magic as a weapon) is very evident.
 
In the Marlon James' works, there's some interesting aspects of loss of memory which I could see tying into events such as the future Manirian Memory Removal. 
Both works have interesting (and different) takes on shamanism, witchcraft, and the Spirit World. 
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