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Glorantha’s Founding Myth and the Nature of Religion


mfbrandi

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Are ogres cannibals? Do they feast on other ogres? If not, than they are just external predators to mankind who happen to look very similar and who can have mixed offspring. Maneaters yes, cannibals only on others of their own kind.

IIRC ogres are the offspring of Cacodemon, which is in turn an externalized part of Wakboth the Devil. There may have been human hosts involved.

Do mixed offspring automatically join the ogre side of their ancestry? Apparently not, there seems to be some measure of choice, at least when the Cacodemon blood is sufficiently diluted.

10 minutes ago, Eff said:

Beyond the question of whether ogre communities, which have existed at least since the 80s, would be chowing down on babies or on teenagers insofar as having ordinary humans born among them, does it really matter for the point that being an ogre is not really within one's control?

Externalisation of defective children is practiced by many a human culture, the typical method being abandonment and exposure in the wild by humans, relying on external predators to do the deed. In the case of Gloranthan ogres, any offspring lacking the potential to become an ogre is defective, and may be culled. Waste not, want not...

There may be some measure of fate involved. If you are born to monster parents without being a monster, the odds have already been shuffled against you. You are the trollkin equivalent in the family.

If you somehow survive having been born to ogres without awakening your ogre ancestry, you may continue to live as a human, passing on that risky ancestry to any offspring you may have with compatible mates, whether ogre or human.

Things may get weird if a human with ogre ancestry becomes a man-eater. Such a person would be a cannibal.

 

For some species, being born to the right parents is only the beginning. A Kitori couple where both parents are full shapeshifters may pass on a certain runic preference, but without initiation into the Nightcult the offspring won't become a shapeshifter. From the description in TCS the mixed blood initiate has some agency whether to become an ogre or not.

How much does being or becoming chaotic play into this? Possibly by accepting the link to Cacedemon during initiation, the Chaos Features may or may not appear.

Now how much will a latent but existing Chaotic ancestry influence such a descendant? In case of feral broo, the racial behavior is hardwired, but how much does this go for their nephews and nieces from their "brother" (or was it sister?) Cacodemon?

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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On 10/9/2022 at 7:00 PM, Eff said:

But setting that aside, I think that if we ignore the direct text and look at the subtext, the problem with any grand effort to render Chaos a real cosmic threat of oblivion is that no culture in the setting attempts to do anything about Chaos overall. They drive noisome Chaotic critters away, Praxians go a step further and valorize Chaos critters as a foe to prove one's full masculinity, but the Storm Bulls who hang out near the Queendom of Jab are not attempting to marshal a campaign of extermination. They're interested in containing scorpionfolk raids and attacks. People's words are that Chaos is an implacable and inimical foe, but their actions with regards to Chaos are, in practice, "live and let live", "there won't be nothing if you don't start it", etc.

Most Gloranthan cultures don't have the unity, cooperation levels, or ideological coherence to conduct a war of extermination against Chaos. (Also, the history of Glorantha basically demonstrates that trying to go full Arkat on anything is the equivalent of nuking yourself to kill the cockroaches in your house.)

But there's a substantial gap between 'Chaos is bad, but if we go alone we die and who can trust those damn Warbles' and 'Chaos is part of society' I think you're ignoring here.  

Especially since, given Glorantha's history, a grand crusade against Chaos would probably trash everything more than Chaos can actually manage.

Glorantha is a place where grand ideological crusading generally ends in you either failing and everything gets trashed, or worse, you succeed and the damage is even higher.

(The second the Lunars decided to spread We are all Us by force, they began the process of setting up to eventually go down in apocalyptic flames.)

(This is how we know Argath killing the Gods won't lead to anything good because that kind of grand gesture by an obsessive man never, ever, ever leads to anything good in Glorantha.  All Argath is doing is setting the stage for the fourth age to be an even more ruined, declining age than the third and for the world to continue its re-enactment of the Godtime myth cycle.)

 

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10 hours ago, John Biles said:

This is how we know Argath killing the Gods won't lead to anything good because that kind of grand gesture by an obsessive man never, ever, ever leads to anything good in Glorantha.  All Argath is doing is setting the stage for the fourth age to be an even more ruined, declining age than the third and for the world to continue its re-enactment of the Godtime myth cycle.

Thanks for that, John. I used to think of it that way, and certainly an illiteracy plague was about the worst thing I could imagine. And I am not about to become an Argrath admirer, but doubts did creep in.

Certainly, in real life, obsessive and charismatic leaders are a nightmare. And the Iliad is a nice lesson in the mess heroes will make. And KoS plays it both ways, as there is also the strain of the Devil is coming back and who can you turn to this time? And perhaps it is hubristic to hope to break the cycle, but if the apocalypse is gliding toward us on its shiny metal rails, anyway …

But how should we look at the killing of the gods? Yes, you could view it as a rejection of the sacred or a trashing of potential allies, but there are other ways to look at it, too. As a liberation from otherworld excuses for not looking for mundane solutions to political (and other) problems. As the trashing of a huge stockpile of WMD — as nuclear disarmament. And it is not a mundane world action — it is a symbolic or otherworld action — so rather than being another battlefield atrocity, no real people are harmed (just a bunch of cardboard cut-outs).

But, you know, an illiteracy plague. Yuck!

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15 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

 

Certainly, in real life, obsessive and charismatic leaders are a nightmare. And the Iliad is a nice lesson in the mess heroes will make. And KoS plays it both ways, as there is also the strain of the Devil is coming back and who can you turn to this time? And perhaps it is hubristic to hope to break the cycle, but if the apocalypse is gliding toward us on its shiny metal rails, anyway …

But how should we look at the killing of the gods? Yes, you could view it as a rejection of the sacred or a trashing of potential allies, but there are other ways to look at it, too. As a liberation from otherworld excuses for not looking for mundane solutions to political (and other) problems. As the trashing of a huge stockpile of WMD — as nuclear disarmament. And it is not a mundane world action — it is a symbolic or otherworld action — so rather than being another battlefield atrocity, no real people are harmed (just a bunch of cardboard cut-outs).

But, you know, an illiteracy plague. Yuck!

The thing is that Argath isn't breaking the cycle.  The gods mostly died in the wars with Chaos that led to the Great Darkness.  Killing them all just re-enacts that and furthers the process of Glorantha declining into Chaos.

But the real problem is that wiping out the gods wipes out the divine magic that central Genertla depends on in order to have a functional society.  What Argath has done is equivalent to a luddite declaring we're too dependent on technology, so it's time to destroy all technology then somehow wiping it out.

Illiteracy because your writing system is magical is only the tip of the iceberg - every aspect of life just got wrecked.

Just look at what happened when only Orlanth died - it was hideous.  Now imagine if all the gods were dead and everyone in central Genertla stripped of their chief tool for dealing with problems.  *With* magic, they couldn't actually live better than the real bronze age.  Without it, it's going to be a disaster.

(It probablly means the people who still have sorcery and spirit magic are going to roll over them like a tide.)

So I can't help but see it as being the same as if someone somehow wiped science and technology out of existence, because that's one of the roles their religion serves for them.

 

 

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6 hours ago, John Biles said:

So I can't help but see it as being the same as if someone somehow wiped science and technology out of existence, because that's one of the roles their religion serves for them.

And yet we have the story: “What’s the Fourth Age like?”; Greg points out the window.

I tend now to see the myth of how Glorantha thins through successive cycles of destruction as an aetiology of our world. I wouldn’t want everyone to agree with me — how dull that would be! — but maybe one day one person?

Oh, and treating theistic magic like a science providing lots of shiny tech tools, didn’t someone try that? Remind me how that worked out for them.

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1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

And yet we have the story: “What’s the Fourth Age like?”; Greg points out the window.

I tend now to see the myth of how Glorantha thins through successive cycles of destruction as an aetiology of our world. I wouldn’t want everyone to agree with me — how dull that would be! — but maybe one day one person?

Oh, and treating theistic magic like a science providing lots of shiny tech tools, didn’t someone try that? Remind me how that worked out for them.

Don Cupitt, the non-Realist theologian (and my ethics tutor) demanded of religion that there be "No more pixie dust".

I think he and Greg would have got on well.

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33 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Don Cupitt, the non-Realist theologian (and my ethics tutor)

Very cool. I remember 1984: David Jenkins (the Bishop of Durham) and his comment on the resurrection as not “a conjuring trick with bones” and Cupitt’s Sea of Faith on TV. (Which kinda loops us back to old Ludwig, again.)

I sometimes think Gloranthaphiles are over-impressed by conjuring tricks with bones — though in fairness to them, that may just be with their pretending-to-be-a-Gloranthan hats on. Still …

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1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Very cool. I remember 1984: David Jenkins (the Bishop of Durham) and his comment on the resurrection as not “a conjuring trick with bones” and Cupitt’s Sea of Faith on TV. (Which kinda loops us back to old Ludwig, again.)

Every year Don would lead a group of philosophy and theology students to his graveside.  He said that it was very interesting that every year there were votive offerings placed there!

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Killing the gods should be taken with a grain of salt. And paraphrasing Gibson, There is still magic here, but it is unevenly distributed. 

I suspect even the illiteracy plague may be better for human long term options than a Sheng Seleris / Ralzakark combo building pyramids of skulls all over Central Genertela and lording it from the unconquerable Black Death Star.

Things can always get worse.

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Firstly, the apocalyptic material in King of Sartar is impressionistic and deliberately contradictory. It needs a heaping helping of salt. 

Secondly, the "illiteracy plague" specifically is probably a play on history and specifically on the discontinuity of scripts that accompanies certain areas in the Late Bronze Age Collapse- Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary vanish, the Indus Valley script falls out of use, and then entirely different forms of writing emerge to write Greek and Indian languages somewhat later. And this in Glorantha, to go with the end of the "Bronze Age", becomes an "illiteracy plague". But it's not universal in the real world, or absolute. Written Ugaritic stops being used, but it clearly is the source of the later abjads and Phoenician alphabet. So there's a great deal of room to interpret the extent and meaning of this reference. 

So, thirdly, Argrath doesn't kill the gods in King of Sartar. There is a source ("Argrath and the Devil"), where Argrath, at an indeterminate date and in a mythologized story, takes actions that may be interpreted as killing off the gods. There is a source ("Argrathsaga") where Argrath, when he causes the Red Moon to fall, changes the way that humans relate to the gods. There is a bit of diegetic interpretation of the first source which places it during a pre-Moonfall event in Argrathsaga, from "GS". These do not add up to a clear and evident picture of what's going on "after Glorantha". What we think is happening in this timeframe largely is a consequence of our interpretation of what we read. (At least until any hypothetical, ghostly "end of the Hero Wars" timeline which sets everything down in precise order emerges.) 

Now, there's a bit of extratextual knowledge, of Greg saying that the post-Hero Wars Glorantha is like our modern, contemporary world. So perhaps that means it's disenchanted and without magic, but of course, Greg was, to my understanding, not someone who believed the contemporary world was disenchanted, so that also doesn't really pin down the fate of Glorantha. Like our world, its fate is still open, and its history hasn't ended. 

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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

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On 10/17/2022 at 6:38 PM, John Biles said:

Most Gloranthan cultures don't have the unity, cooperation levels, or ideological coherence to conduct a war of extermination against Chaos. (Also, the history of Glorantha basically demonstrates that trying to go full Arkat on anything is the equivalent of nuking yourself to kill the cockroaches in your house.)

 

Forget a war of extermination against Chaos. Do they lack the unity, cooperation levels, or ideological coherence to kill off local broo or scorpionfolk, who are largely mundane threats without massive supernatural might? Even if, as we are assured, especially recently, that everyone except the Lunars are united in hating Chaos? 

And, no, that's not what the history of Glorantha demonstrates. No grand depopulation occurs as part of Arkat's crusade. 

Quote

But there's a substantial gap between 'Chaos is bad, but if we go alone we die and who can trust those damn Warbles' and 'Chaos is part of society' I think you're ignoring here.  

Especially since, given Glorantha's history, a grand crusade against Chaos would probably trash everything more than Chaos can actually manage.

Wouldn't this imply that anti-Chaos is morally worse than Chaos, then? 

Quote

Glorantha is a place where grand ideological crusading generally ends in you either failing and everything gets trashed, or worse, you succeed and the damage is even higher.

(The second the Lunars decided to spread We are all Us by force, they began the process of setting up to eventually go down in apocalyptic flames.)

Where does this occur, specifically? It would only apply to Arkat if you take the rare position of Nysalor and his groupies being totally innocent of wrongdoing. It wouldn't apply to the God Learners in any fashion, because they were spectacularly non-ideological and divided on what their beliefs ought to be in light of their discoveries. I wouldn't even apply it to the Lunars, because describing them as "spreading We Are All Us by force" in the context of invading Sartar is fairly baffling, let alone it leading to their defeat. Where else would this be, then?  

Quote

(This is how we know Argath killing the Gods won't lead to anything good because that kind of grand gesture by an obsessive man never, ever, ever leads to anything good in Glorantha.  All Argath is doing is setting the stage for the fourth age to be an even more ruined, declining age than the third and for the world to continue its re-enactment of the Godtime myth cycle.)

Is there any reason behind microwaved Tolkien to assume that contemporary Glorantha is "ruined and declining"? 

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

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1 hour ago, Eff said:

Is there any reason behind microwaved Tolkien to assume that contemporary Glorantha is "ruined and declining"?

Never mind the tedious Mr. T. — the Society for the Appreciation of the Golden Age didn’t start with him. Surely, Stafford is riffing on Hesiod’s Works and Days, with the Hero Wars roughly corresponding to the Heroic Age (“the godly race of the heroes who are called demigods, our predecessors on the boundless earth”) sitting between the Bronze Age and Hesiod’s own (M. L. West’s translation) :

Quote

Would that I were not then among the fifth men, but either dead earlier or born later! For now it is a race of iron; and they will never cease from toil and misery by day or night, in constant distress, and the gods will give them harsh troubles … Decency and Moral Disapproval will go to join the family of the immortals, abandoning mankind; those grim woes will remain for mortal men, and there will be no help against evil.

Plausibly, we are to take Glorantha’s Fourth Age as corresponding to the time of Hesiod’s fifth men, with Hesiod our scribe in the time of Harshax. So someone in Glorantha at the end of its Bronze Age might be expected to look back and see a long period of decline — I don’t say that they are objectively right, but they might well see it that way — and look forward and see war getting into its stride. Tough times coming.

Not mad, IMHO, to see thinning as a theme, but I like to think that Stafford’s KoS can be read as more than a SAGAish “no more pixie dust — innit awful!”, that it also allows a reading of “no more gods digging up my lawn — how restful.”

Edited by mfbrandi
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2 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Never mind the tedious Mr. T. — the Society for the Appreciation of the Golden Age didn’t start with him. Surely, Stafford is riffing on Hesiod’s Works and Days, with the Hero Wars roughly corresponding to the Heroic Age (“the godly race of the heroes who are called demigods, our predecessors on the boundless earth”) sitting between the Bronze Age and Hesiod’s own (M. L. West’s translation) :

Plausibly, we are to take Glorantha’s Fourth Age as corresponding to the time of Hesiod’s fifth men, with Hesiod our scribe in the time of Harshax. So someone in Glorantha at the end of its Bronze Age might be expected to look back and see a long period of decline — I don’t say that they are objectively right, but they might well see it that way — and look forward and see war getting into its stride. Tough times coming.

Not mad, IMHO, to see thinning as a theme, but I like to think that Stafford’s KoS can be read as more than a SAGAish “no more pixie dust — innit awful!”, that it also allows a reading of “no more gods digging up my lawn — how restful.”

Where does Greg Stafford refer to the Third Age of Glorantha as a "ruined and declining" age? When was that source written? 

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

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8 minutes ago, Eff said:

Where does Greg Stafford refer to the Third Age of Glorantha as a "ruined and declining" age? When was that source written?

I think I was pretty careful not to claim that. I just said that Stafford was riffing on Hesiod (and a zillion authors since), and that isn’t in dispute, is it? Nor that Gloranthans claim to see a pattern of destruction and remaking of their world.

And I definitely don’t want to tell @John Biles why he picked that phrase. That would just be rude of me, no?

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4 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

I think I was pretty careful not to claim that. I just said that Stafford was riffing on Hesiod (and a zillion authors since), and that isn’t in dispute, is it? Nor that Gloranthans claim to see a pattern of destruction and remaking of their world.

And I definitely don’t want to tell @John Biles why he picked that phrase. That would just be rude of me, no?

I think it certainly is in dispute to claim that Greg Stafford saw Glorantha as being in line with Hesiod's cosmology of decline, because there are many ways in which it is instead in line with modern historical and anthropological beliefs about the development of human societies. 

Not to mention that for Hesiod, his different ages were marked by different kinds of humans who declined in morals, but what I asked about is the idea that Glorantha is declining as an environment, rather than the people within it. Argrath isn't opening his mouth and spewing out an inexhaustible river of corruption which makes people wickeder in Mr. Biles's understanding, I presume.

Edited by Eff
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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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2 minutes ago, Eff said:

I think it certainly is in dispute to claim that Greg Stafford saw Glorantha as being in line with Hesiod's cosmology of decline, because there are many ways in which it is instead in line with modern historical and anthropological beliefs about the development of human societies. 

Fair enough, but I am not claiming that Stafford is pushing a narrative of inevitable decline, I am suggesting that maybe he is offering a subversive take on thinning, one in which the world reaching its thinnest is the eucatastrophe. If right — and at least nine times out of ten, I am wrong — that would make Stafford an anti-Tolkien not a wannabe Inkling.

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This is an epochal thread. I aim to get to it one of these days. For now, a box of my school crap just worked its way loose and what do I find, complete with period post-it note? Part of how I worked my way into Glorantha as Glorantha worked its way into me.

IMG_6513.thumb.png.2b6a7a44a2dfba0cb2efcae277dd77cb.png

The note says "I'm leaving Brigadoon," which is funny in context of conversation elsewhere. And then as the pen was dying, "it is the end." So sort of a suicide note for a pre-disenchanted fourth age never signed or sent with decades in the meantime . . . but really just a dramatic beat I found worth saving for later. Turns out the forest was always waiting behind the iron cage. We just had to get through it.

Or something. The decision to exit Brigadoon can be apocalyptic, unraveling the entire deal they had with god if Harry makes it across the village boundary before they catch him. It can also be an exquisitely gentle thing like a unicorn vacating its territory, you just slip out the back by moonlight and then the real story starts.

Founding myths are interesting. More later!

 

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3 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Glorantha is certainly post-apocalyptic, multiply so.  Fall of Yelm, fall of Mernita, Syndics Ban, Closing, Dragonkill, one could go on and on.  It is clearly written as a descent from a Golden Age. 

Except that the point of the fall of Yelm is that it was also a tyranny. The Syndics Ban leads to declines and improvements in different areas of Fronela. The Closing ends. The Dragonkill comes after the EWF (another tyranny) collapses. I would say that Glorantha is clearly written somewhere between Hesiod and Whig history, where events cannot be consistently and clearly folded into narratives of fall or progress. 

The fall of Mernita is perhaps the best example of this- Mernita is destroyed because of the desire to create a makeshift, shrunken Golden Age under Manarlavus's Dome intersecting with the desire of the goddess of Mernita to reject the absolute authority of that previous time. Where is the Golden Age in this? Does it lie in the past when women didn't talk back or refuse your orders? Is it in an indefinite future in a city which doesn't seem especially better than any other Pelorian city at this time? What's left is a kind of contingent history- because these factors came together here, this tragedy ensued.

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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

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6 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Nonetheless, the effects on society are devastating, and it takes the affected areas centuries to recover.  While a narrative of progress is nice, it doesn't bring the dead back.  Not even the Compromise achieved that, except for the privileged deities.

If they're able to recover, I'm reasonably sure that there's not really a narrative of decline in play, because things would only be able to get worse. And since they're able to recover without devastating other parts of the world, I'm more than "reasonably" sure. I'm completely sure that there, regardless of any intentions on the part of the authors, is not a narrative of decline in play, because improvement is possible. Just like decline is possible. 

I don't know who you're addressing with "narrative of progress" there, though. 

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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4 minutes ago, Eff said:

If they're able to recover, I'm reasonably sure that there's not really a narrative of decline in play, because things would only be able to get worse. And since they're able to recover without devastating other parts of the world, I'm more than "reasonably" sure. I'm completely sure that there, regardless of any intentions on the part of the authors, is not a narrative of decline in play, because improvement is possible. Just like decline is possible. 

I don't know who you're addressing with "narrative of progress" there, though. 

Decline is inevitable, because of the Devil's return.  'Improvement is possible' is a narrative of progress, and yet is overturned again and again.  Simply because the apocalypses (sp?) destroy tyrannies doesn't mean that they are anything other than ghastly massacres of innocents and disruptions of society and community interactions.

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1 minute ago, Ali the Helering said:

Decline is inevitable, because of the Devil's return.  'Improvement is possible' is a narrative of progress, and yet is overturned again and again.  Simply because the apocalypses (sp?) destroy tyrannies doesn't mean that they are anything other than ghastly massacres of innocents and disruptions of society and community interactions.

Decline is inevitable because of an eschatological event that may or may not happen in the future, and which is laid out in some sources as part of a cyclical pattern of destruction and rebirth? 

"Improvement is possible" is a narrative of progress, which is a term typically used to refer to the belief in the teleological nature of progress? 

The problem with Orlanth killing Yelm is that anyone opposed Yelm at all? 

Are those really universal truths about all Gloranthas, or even the core overlapping Gloranthas? Or are they particular interpretations of Glorantha? 

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

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