What fun things can Heroquesters do in the Green Age?

[EricW]

A visit to the green age, where now dead gods like Genert walk untroubled, spreading their bounty and giving their gifts freely, where the people never age, where the authority of Yelm is absolute, where the Spike is the center of the world. 

What gifts can be retrieved? What dangers lurk in a place where death is still a secret under the watchful guard of Vivamort, where Malia is a healing goddess?

[hipsterinspace]

6 minutes ago, EricW said:

A visit to the green age, where now dead gods like Genert walk untroubled, spreading their bounty and giving their gifts freely, where the people never age, where the authority of Yelm is absolute, where the Spike is the center of the world.

The Green Age is prior to the Sun’s domination, that was Yelm’s Golden Age. The gods and people of the Green Age were benevolently provided for by the goddess Ga(ta) and her children, the deities of life and the earth. It was a period of experimentation, novelty, creation, and bounty rather than the fixed order of Yelm’s rigid cosmic paradigm.

It’s said to be extremely dangerous to visit, so wonderful and idyllic that it is difficult to leave once there. Any who don’t—or can’t—leave are likely lost forever. The powers of life, creation, generation, and the earth are going to be the main reasons someone heroquests to the Green Age. There will probably be a lot of strange flora and fauna, some of which might be able to be learned of or carried back into time as a boon. Dipping that far back into creation probably requires the quester to be illuminated.

[svensson]

Umm.... learn topiary? 😁

 

[Squaredeal Sten]

As I understand it - and the GM book isn't out yet, so there is a good chance I have it wrong-

You don't heroquest to "The Green Age', you heroquest to a myth you know about the Green Age.  So you can come back with things related to that myth. 

Now if you use advanced God Learner techniques you can step outside that myth, into associated Green Age stuff..  Then you are in uncharted territory, the GM's mind.  How do you do that?  I don't know, I'm not a God Learner.  Maybe you have to find a crumbling God Learner scroll to do that, and then read it using your knowledge of ancient Brithini.

Of course there is a high risk of getting hurt or killed, or just dumped out of the heroquest, especially if the GM draws a blank.  But if you picque his interest:

-you may get a novel Rune spell, or a Rune spell you ordinarily couldn't get, because in the quest you got in on the ground floor with the Aldryami.

- You many get a new attribute, good or bad, from interacting with X.  Maybe your skin and/or hair  turns a different color, maybe a Rune affinity changes, maybe a gift or geas.  Maybe a new or enhanced Worship skill. 

- Maybe Eurmal lets you borrow the sword Death, just for a little while.  Think of the implications of that.   Or maybe he plays a practical joke on you and you grow donkey's ears.

- Maybe you visit Orlanth's stead and help build the brand new benches for Orlanthi souls to sit and feast on and carve your initials in one if you are literate, or you travel with Issaries as his muleteer if you have a good animal; handling skill.   

-or you may get a new myth, which is an opportunity to start a new subcult or cult...

-you may resurrect the new equivalent to the Red Goddess, who won't be bound by the Great Compromise either .  ...

 

Edited April 13, 2023 by Squaredeal Sten
donkey's ears

[PhilHibbs]

What Greg has said about The Green Age is, don't go there. Everything is perfect in the Green Age. We are not perfect. Any imperfection that you bring will destroy the perfection of the age, and it will be YOUR FAULT that that evil entered the world. All you get from visiting the Green Age is blame for everything going wrong.

[svensson]

One somewhat serious. Kinda Ernalda-ish, right?

And one because, well, we are who we are. This one goes out to HOA Presidents everywhere...

 

[DrGoth]

1 hour ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

-  Maybe Eurmal lets you borrow the sword Death, just for a little while.  Think of the implications of that.   Or maybe he plays a practical joke on you and you grow donkey's ears.

- Maybe you visit Orlanth's stead and help build the brand new benches for Orlanthi souls to sit and feast on and carve your initials in one if you are literate, or you travel with Issaries as his muleteer if you have a good animal; handling skill.   

 

I don't think either of these is green age. Wouldn't the first be Golden Age and the second be lesser storm age?

[Squaredeal Sten]

36 minutes ago, DrGoth said:

I don't think either of these is green age. Wouldn't the first be Golden Age and the second be lesser storm age?

Good point.  .Though I am unclear between Green Age and Golden Age, Green Age looks to me like the Aldtyami version of Golden Age.   And I don't know exactly when Eurmal began messing with Death.  And I'm pretty sure Orlanth's stead exists in Golden Age, he had to have some place to go to and from in the legend.  But if you don't like these, make up your own.  Pick a god and interact.  Maybe any member of the Celestial court?  Get to know Uleria and gain a gift or geas or boon from her?  I can see the GM having some very humorous opportunities there.  A, um, boon from Uleria - and then dump him out of the heroquest.  This is still more merciful than everyone blaming you in accord with Phil Hibbs' suggestion.

 

 

Edited April 13, 2023 by Squaredeal Sten
boon

[radmonger]

Orlanth is the son of Umath, whose arrival is the beginning of the end of the Golden Age. So any Orlanth cultists trying to access anything before that will just find themselves ending the golden age earlier.

This is much less true for other cults, but every human cult, even Uleria, has a limit. Any events before that are never personally re-experienced by humans, only known of by second hand accounts from the eider races. Of those who share their stories, the one Theyalans tend to believe are the elves; hence their name for the age.

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

What Greg has said about The Green Age is, don't go there. Everything is perfect in the Green Age. We are not perfect. Any imperfection that you bring will destroy the perfection of the age, and it will be YOUR FAULT that that evil entered the world. All you get from visiting the Green Age is blame for everything going wrong.

Well … if evil entered the world anyway, perhaps we should each of us visit the Green Age once to assume our share of the responsibility, rather than letting some other poor schmuck take all the blame. It is our sacred duty, really.

[PhilHibbs]

3 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I can see the GM having some very humorous opportunities there.  A, um, boon from Uleria - and then dump him out of the heroquest.  This is still more merciful than everyone blaming you in accord with Phil Hibbs' suggestion.

Yes, I certainly concur that the "don't do it, you will suffer, it will be terrible, end of" answer is unsatisfying.

[David Scott]

6 hours ago, EricW said:

A visit to the green age

The Green Age covers a very specific part of the Golden Age (or is even its own section), between the creation of the Dragonewts and the creation of beasts (the Man Rune comes after the Beast Rune). The Green Age is where the Plant Rune (Flamal) created things. There's some order to the Green Age:

Guide to Glorantha page 116:

1. Ferns and mosses (Slorifings)
2. Conifers (Vronkali), the conifers.
3. Then Yelm arrives (Flower Bringer)
4. Deciduous plants (Mreli) 
5. Broadleaf plants (Embyli)
6. From here, the elf empire grows to its peak in the Golden Age

If you visit here, it's a plant wonderland full of Dragonewts. So wondrous magical fruit, seeds, spores, plants. 

The Guide 154, goes on to say: The Green Age, dangerous to visit, where differentiating events (the discovery of death, or sex, or suffering, etc.) mark the end of the Age

But doesn't specify the danger. I suspect it's Dragonewts and the issue that the man rune doesn't exist yet, so your existence here is fundamentally wrong.

[scott-martin]

6 hours ago, EricW said:

What gifts can be retrieved? 

Seeds for this and that. The memory and cyclical promise of summer when you're hungry or cold. A fresh start.

6 hours ago, EricW said:

What dangers lurk in a place where death is still a secret under the watchful guard of Vivamort, where Malia is a healing goddess?

It's awful tempting to just never come back from the garden. That's okay, maybe it's even your goal. But in that scenario nothing is retrieved. And the coming back is what hurts.

2 minutes ago, David Scott said:

Dragonewts

This is important.

[Joerg]

6 hours ago, EricW said:

A visit to the green age, where now dead gods like Genert walk untroubled, spreading their bounty and giving their gifts freely, where the people never age, where the authority of Yelm is absolute, where the Spike is the center of the world. 

All of this sounds like the Golden Age rather than the Green Age.

 

6 hours ago, EricW said:

What gifts can be retrieved?

As has been said above, you can be the first to do thing X - it is your fault that the world (of the Golden Age even) is less perfect than the primordial Green Age.

Take harvesting, for instance - in the Green Age, your harvest might have come to you, or at least you would not have had to work hard to receive it. By Yelm's many mistakes, the Golden Age forces people to work in agriculture - they need to prepare the fields or gardens, sow the seeds, possibly water the crop, and then harvest the fruit of the labor. Whoever thought that would be a good idea?

 

 

6 hours ago, EricW said:

What dangers lurk in a place where death is still a secret under the watchful guard of Vivamort, where Malia is a healing goddess?

Both of these are Golden Age conditions. Accessible even for worshipers of Orlanth through myths of Orlanth's youth, including the early contests, or the cave incident with Yinkin, or Orlanth and Yinkin fathering the clouds upon Helera.

[Richard S.]

5 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

You don't heroquest to "The Green Age', you heroquest to a myth you know about the Green Age.  So you can come back with things related to that myth. 

From what Jeff's said recently, I think that old KoDP model has been ditched. As it stands now, a myth is just a map of showing key points in the hero plane and how to get past certain obstacles, not a tunnel that you're forced to follow. Anyone can step outside the myth into the wider story of creation if they're willing to face the danger; the God Learners just had a lot of practice at it, specialized magic to help them, and thanks to the monomyth a much better understanding of what they could encounter at any given point.

[Squaredeal Sten]

2 hours ago, radmonger said:

Orlanth is the son of Umath, whose arrival is the beginning of the end of the Golden Age. So any Orlanth cultists trying to access anything before that will just find themselves ending the golden age earlier.

This is much less true for other cults, but every human cult, even Uleria, has a limit. Any events before that are never personally re-experienced by humans, only known of by second hand accounts from the eider races. Of those who share their stories, the one Theyalans tend to believe are the elves; hence their name for the age.

Heroquesters only ever have second hand accounta, whether from the Elder Races or from human priests.  Of course your Adventurer may be a member of an elder race: Uz are very playable. And Uleria is not just a human cult, she is a principle, was there for the second wave of gods to descend from the first. But I can see what you are saying, the farther back you go the less accurate and complete the myths will be. 

This would be one of the reasons it is more dangerous / full of surprises / full of opportunities to get dead or just not  come back.  I also like the idea that your quester may like the Green Age so much that he stays there.  Fill out this new character sheet! It may disrupt your campaign though.

I sort of like the idea that an Uz would go back to the Green Age and try to eat the first of those pesky Aldryami, or eat  Flamal before Flamal gets that ball rolling.    But how to get there?  His or her legends will lead to Wonderhome, not to the plants basking in the (shudder) sun.  Sure you can deviate from the path but that is such a big deviation.

[Squaredeal Sten]

1 hour ago, PhilHibbs said:

Yes, I certainly concur that the "don't do it, you will suffer, it will be terrible, end of" answer is unsatisfying.

Actually your answer is good and contains a Greg Stafford world design insight that informs us all.  Unsatisfying? Tempting of course, it's a variation on "don't eat the fruit of that tree".  My advocacy of mercy is from a GM viewpoint, not a Gloranthan lore viewpoint.

[Richard S.]

I like to imagine the green age kind of like the stereotypes of our mesozoic era. Warm, wet, and full of giant plants and scaled or feathered creatures. Beasts may not start appearing until later in the age, but there's a much greater variety of now-vanished draconics. You can go there to bring back earth, plant, or dragon secrets, but the sheer amount of life and growth going on is dangerous and even hostile towards mortals, who have too much death in them. You might find your feet trying to grow roots, or vines sprouting in your hair, or feel the inner Beast try to take over and send you running wild. Hills and mountains might suddenly decide to get up and walk to a nicer spot, or river dragons could flood across the land devouring everything in their path, or the sky might come a bit too close and burn you into fertile ash. In any case, if you're deep enough in the god time to even reach the green age, going back is going to be incredibly difficult even if you can make yourself do it.

I'm with Hibbs and Sten on advocating mercy if players do somehow end up there, unless they try to take advantage of it, but I don't think it should be a place anyone should be going intentionally unless they're an elf, a dragonewt, or an earth hero.

Edited April 13, 2023 by Richard S.

[French Desperate WindChild]

Reading David’s answer I just think that the only option for a human to visit green age and not be cancelled or destroyed by what destroyed the green age is the elf ritual of adoption.

you visit the green age and step by step acclimate yourself to this age : your beast rune is % per % transformed into plant rune.

Maybe your man rune too in this « station » and in the next one (age of elves I would say) you get back your man rune (or a part of it) but now you are a elf.

That would explain why it is so dangerous to become an elf and so many don’t survive the green age

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

2 hours ago, David Scott said:

Dragonewts

This is important.

30 minutes ago, Richard S. said:

I don't think it should be a place anyone should be going intentionally unless they're an elf, a dragonewt, or an earth hero

… or left-handed? I am beginning to suspect one enters the Green Age through the looking glass.

[radmonger]

1 hour ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Heroquesters only ever have second hand accounta, whether from the Elder Races or from human priests. 

In most cases, anyone heroquesting from Orlanth's stead will have prior personal experience of the initiation paths that lead to that stead.

To start somewhere else, they would need to either learn a different set of initiation paths, or accompany someone else. Or maybe be a shaman, and so get to start from wherever they are. 

 

 

[PhilHibbs]

14 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Actually your answer is good and contains a Greg Stafford world design insight that informs us all.  Unsatisfying? Tempting of course, it's a variation on "don't eat the fruit of that tree".  My advocacy of mercy is from a GM viewpoint, not a Gloranthan lore viewpoint.

True, there's a tension between perfect world building and fun game playing. I suspect that things going horribly wrong and turning into a disaster is entirely within Greg's definition of a fun game. Not everyone has as robust an attitude as that. I've also had great times in roleplaying games when everything is going horribly wrong and ends up in a total disaster, but it isn't everyone's cup of tea.

An alternative outcome to you coming back with the blame for whatever imperfection you took there is that if you resist the temptation to exhibit that flaw, then you are stripped of it entirely along with a chunk of your Man Rune. And whilst you might not think that being stripped of a flaw is a bad thing, then if the temptation is carnal then you might lose your sexual desire. If it's violent, then you could lose the ability to fight. If it's pride then you could lose all your ambition. Some might prefer to take the blame.

[Akhôrahil]

One of my favorite things with a "Green Age" feel is a "heroquest" you can do in Ars Magica, where you visit the Garden of Eden. In order to do that, you first need to fully impersonate an animal (trivial for Bjornaer, demanding for everyone else). Then you can hang around there (in Ars Magica terms, it's a really deep Regio) and do  your stuff (the best use is likely learning the Adamic language). However, at some point Adam and Eve get booted out, and then you're detected and thrown out as well (do not try to fight the angel with the burning sword).

The really Green Age thing about this is that now whatever kind of animal you took the shape of is considered just as fallen as the serpent. And those animals know it, and they know it's your fault and they hate you for it.

Edited April 13, 2023 by Akhôrahil

[DrGoth]

20 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Good point.  .Though I am unclear between Green Age and Golden Age, Green Age looks to me like the Aldtyami version of Golden Age.   And I don't know exactly when Eurmal began messing with Death.  And I'm pretty sure Orlanth's stead exists in Golden Age, he had to have some place to go to and from in the legend.  But if you don't like these, make up your own.  Pick a god and interact.  Maybe any member of the Celestial court?  Get to know Uleria and gain a gift or geas or boon from her?  I can see the GM having some very humorous opportunities there.  A, um, boon from Uleria - and then dump him out of the heroquest.  This is still more merciful than everyone blaming you in accord with Phil Hibbs' suggestion.

Fair point about Orlanth's stead. So that interaction could be either golden or lesser storm. And yes, the Celestial court must be there in the Green Age.

[Gray Mouser]

Quote

One of my favorite things with a "Green Age" feel is a "heroquest" you can do in Ars Magica, where you visit the Garden of Eden. In order to do that, you first need to fully impersonate an animal (trivial for Bjornaer, demanding for everyone else). 

 

Quote

you visit the green age and step by step acclimate yourself to this age : your beast rune is % per % transformed into plant rune.

As Jeff pointed out in his Heroquesting posts, a crucial step is "Identification". So according to the character runes, which character/deity will he identify with? It will not be a thunder brother, sword, Axe Bearer, etc. For example the character of Vasana has the following runes: Air 90% (air does not exist yet); Death 75% (death does not exist yet); Earth 20% (OK); Movement 75% (OK), Truth 70% (OK). So the identification may be done on these three runes. So Earth: phylum --> reptile; organs: genitals, bones. This is the basis for determining identification. Movement: changeable, energetic, rebellious, ambitious. Truth: objective, the torch of truth. The result must be something strange to destabilize the player. The GM declares that the character identifies with the Three-Tailed (Movement) Snake (Earth) Guardian of Sexual Truth (whatever it is). Yanioth: Earth 90%, Beast 85%, Fertility 85%  so OK Identification with young earth goddess, not a big change). Etc.

Yanioth will probably come back with the knowledge of a new myth about the goddesses of the earth, new rune spell/power related to Fertility. For Vasana, this could imply a more significant change (related to the Sexual Truth?).

I suspect that the danger is greater for characters like Vasana than those like Yanioth

Edited April 14, 2023 by Gray Mouser
spelling error