I don't really get what's the beef that the Elder Races have with one another

[Hellhound Havoc]

So recently I read up on why exactly are the Elder Races at war with one another for a thousand years and a half, and... I'm just not entirely sure why. But beyond that, I'm not sure what that adds to the setting. Why can't the Uz just be another kind of "people" who live around, for instance? I feel like it's meant to be taken as a sort of justification for something but idk, fantasy racism never jived well with me.

But maybe I'm misunderstanding something, so here's what I understood from reading a bit on why each of these hate one another.

Trolls x the rest - From what I got, folks in-world generally hate the trolls because a) they sometimes eat them, and b) their arrival in the world during the Great Darkness was pretty traumatic. The Glorantha Sourcebook says that a lot of stuff that folks thought was the trolls doing, was actually Chaos.

This strikes me as odd because I haven't seen anything to indicate that the trolls are stupid or amoral. Like, humans lived with them under the Only Old One, they can literally eat anything, I don't get why they would choose to make the people they're living with angry just to have a nice meal.

And besides, they're not particularly long lived so at least between them, humans, and dragonewts, whatever beef they had 1600 years ago must have surely died down, right?

Aldryami x Mostali - This one I kinda get, but it seems to me like it should be more one-sided. Elves don't live forever, but the Mostali do, so there are many Mostali alive today who probably were there to see the hijinks of the Elf King and Stone. Still, in Dragon Pass the Mostali are generally chiller, and I don't really see them interacting in any meaningful way. It's not like there's resources for them to compete over, is it just religion at this point? It must not be in the Aldryami's best interests to have the Mostali as enemies.

Aldryami x Humans and Trolls - It says that "elves don't like humans because they tear down the trees to make shelter, and the Uz eat the trees and also the elves." And like, I get that the elves would strongly dislike people chopping down trees, but these guys are vegetarians. Surely they understand the meaning of basic necessities, and that humans and Uz need that wood to survive just like they need to eat those leaves for them to survive.

This also calls back to "the trolls are dumb stupid monsters who will just eat other folks and antagonize them for no better reason than to fill their bellies when they could very well just eat literally anything else in the world, including the enemies of the elves."

Dragonewts x Others - I didn't find much on the dragonewts' relationship to the others. Humans are scared of them because dragons are spooky, I can't say it doesn't make sense after the whole EWF debacle.

All in all, I'm not entirely sure why it's still a status quo that they hate one another a thousand years later.

Another thing that I'm not entirely in love with, but I understand why it's the case, is why are the humans separated into cultures but the Elder Races aren't. Like, humans are divided into Praxians, Heortlings, Tarshites, etc. And then you have Trolls who are just... Trolls. Am I meant to believe that the trolls in the Shadow Plateau, with a long and proud history of serving a demigod for a thousand years, have more in common with the trolls on the other side of Genertela than with the Heortling clans who fought and bled at their side during their exile from Dragon Pass? Don't they speak different languages and have different cultural practices? Why are the trolls who live in the southern continent called "Jungle Trolls" while the humans who do the same aren't called "Jungle Fellas"?

I wouldn't normally have an issue with this. Like, Tolkien's orcs are just evil baddie magical creatures who are that way because they're magically evil and created by one guy for that purpose. But Glorantha does so much to make everything else feel alive that it just strikes me as strange when entire races are treated as being kinda monolithical, at least in culture.

But I get why that's the case, there's only so much you can write about a setting after all, and maybe Greg Stafford and other folks wanted to expand on this but just had more pressing books to write. That's totally understandable, but still, it's a part of the setting.

I hope I haven't come across as combative, I'm genuinely not sure if I have the full picture here, and a lot of this is just a matter of taste. If having the Elder Races hate one another is cool to you, that's great. I feel the need to highlight that because I'm not here in bad faith or to yuck someone's yum.

[Ormi Phengaria]

Trolls: It's not so much their proclivities towards eating other sapient beings which can cause issues. They're well aware that killing someone to eat them is considered rude at best. It's that they most often do so because their hunger just never goes away. Understand, first and foremost, that a troll is never truly satiated; they will always eat as much as they have the strength and willpower to eat. So without a method of controlling this hunger, they'll eat the food you give them, and then the food you didn't give them, and then the seed corn, and then the immature crop, and the trees, etc. This is of course self-destructive, but the hunger doesn't care. Every troll you meet who is genuinely interested in trade and peaceful relations is already exercising more discipline than you can really be aware of.

Aldryami vs. Mostali: "Just religion" accounts for a lot, especially because both of them have experience of being immanent parts of Aldrya and Mostal, respectively. By and large, they are both striving to make the world a place where the other is enslaved to their will if not completely destroyed, and have begun to put those plans into action. At its heart, this is a primordial conflict between Growing and Making, and the failure of First Age compromise. But some say they are each the scions of Grower and Maker both.

Aldryami x Humans and Trolls: Aldryami do recognize that humans and other animals use plant life for shelter and food, but they do not need shelter themselves and avoid killing plants for nourishment whenever possible. Aldryami have often been willing to compromise with humans, but consider that humans and trolls can destroy a forest in a few seasons which took centuries to grow to resplendent maturity. Imagine the perspective of beings with lifespans as long as those trees: some may be true elf-friends, but you can never trust their kin, nor humans as a whole, because they might act completely differently. The hardline Reforesters have a point, in that respect.

Dragonewts x Others: Dragonewts don't have any particular enmity for others, at least in terms of a grand agenda. Other beings are mostly distractions, sometimes useful tools for advancing their consciousness, but more often obstacles and entanglements. Now, the Inhuman King and his Priests might have deeper intrigues, but if that's the case, most dragonewts are as ignorant as anyone else.

Why are the humans separated into cultures but the Elder Races aren't: They are, in truth. Nearly all Gloranthan material is written from a (particular, scholastic) human point of view, with limited information on those kinds of intricacies. And the information which is gleaned is further limited by the kind of people interacting with humans in this manner. "Trolls" means kygerlithic trolls, dominated by Dagori Inkarth and Halikiv and to a lesser extent the Shadow Plateau, with others being largely unknown save for the most basic details. "Dwarfs" means orthodox Decamonists. Elves don't really have any detailed, reductive representation, and there may be more elves in "human cults" than any other elder race, but all of them are much more secretive as to their deeper natures, because they are made of plant rather than meat as are dwarfs or trolls. And "dragonewts" most definitely does not include New Wyrmish or other such oddities.

Basically, the things you are reading are very useful, but they're limited by the very perspective which makes them useful. And this is applicable to many humans, too.

Edited July 1, 2023 by Ormi Phengaria

[Richard S.]

In terms of cultural diversity, there definitely are different factions and subtypes within each elder race, but each race is more mythologically unified than humanity since each of the elder races has more or less a single origin point they can point back to: the Uz were born of Kyger Litor in the underworld, the Aldryami and Mostali were both created on the Spike by Aldrya and Mostal, respectively, and Dragonewts remember being born of immature dragons. All humans can say is that they're descended from Grandfather Mortal, which is also true of all the elder races except Dragonewts, and there's not an agreed on place where humanity first emerged. Also, each of the mortal elder races is very tightly tied to a single rune alongside man - darkness, plant, and stasis respectively - while humans only have the man rune, without a second unifying affinity.

[Ormi Phengaria]

Ah, on the contrary, it is well known in certain exclusive circles how humans trace their origins back to the single ancestral figure of Pink Monkey, a foolish being who traded his brachiation for a larger penis-to-body-weight ratio, his mighty screaming for whispered gibberish, and his spirit parts for spectacular magical powers, all of which he was bad at. All humans also share a deep, inexorable connection to the Thumb Rune.

[Joerg]

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

So recently I read up on why exactly are the Elder Races at war with one another for a thousand years and a half, and... I'm just not entirely sure why.

These conflicts predate history, and the brief lull of the Unity Council was an exception to the natural order.

 

 

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

But beyond that, I'm not sure what that adds to the setting. Why can't the Uz just be another kind of "people" who live around, for instance? I feel like it's meant to be taken as a sort of justification for something but idk, fantasy racism never jived well with me.

The uz are a species of underworld demons, descended from voracious breeder and raider demigods (and ultimately deities). Already before the diminuations of the Gods War (Dark Trolls hurt by Yelm, Cave Trolls by Pocharngo, Cold Trolls by Pamalt) the uzuz ancestors like Gash and Gore would leave Wonderhome and go hunting for exotic culinary experiences in other places.

Back before Death came into the world, eating another being was little more than an inconvenience of transitory nature to that being. After Death had entered the world, the trolls had been hurt bad by the shenanigans of the other races and tribes of deities, and they were out for revenge.

So that's why the uz don't mind eating sentient beings.

 

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

But maybe I'm misunderstanding something, so here's what I understood from reading a bit on why each of these hate one another.

Trolls x the rest - From what I got, folks in-world generally hate the trolls because a) they sometimes eat them, and b) their arrival in the world during the Great Darkness was pretty traumatic. The Glorantha Sourcebook says that a lot of stuff that folks thought was the trolls doing, was actually Chaos.

This strikes me as odd because I haven't seen anything to indicate that the trolls are stupid or amoral. Like, humans lived with them under the Only Old One, they can literally eat anything, I don't get why they would choose to make the people they're living with angry just to have a nice meal.

Experiencing different tastes is a form of cultivation for trolls. This includes sentient food.

The Kingdom of Night (led by the Only Old One) saw the humans (especially the Esrolians) live under the hegemony of the trolls, and even the Heortlings who collectively were evenly matched to their troll neighbors were paying the (reciprocal) Shadow Tribute.

 

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

And besides, they're not particularly long lived so at least between them, humans, and dragonewts, whatever beef they had 1600 years ago must have surely died down, right?

Their matriarchs tend to be immortal demigoddess Uzuz who feel the grudge. And Gbaji's wounding of Korasting's womb added injury to insult, and the mere presence of trollkin keeps reminding them of the injustices dealt to them. The Tax Slaughter just added the Heortlings to the foes from the Gbaji Wars.

 

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

Aldryami x Mostali - This one I kinda get, but it seems to me like it should be more one-sided. Elves don't live forever, but the Mostali do, so there are many Mostali alive today who probably were there to see the hijinks of the Elf King and Stone.

Clay Mostali (aka ordinary dwarfs) suffer attrition, and it takes extraordinary dwarfs to achieve diamond status with better chances at immortality.

Greatway (and its dependent dwarf settlements) and Nida were at odds with one another about the Second Council participation and the God Project, possibly leading to mutual recycling of groups of dwarfs caught away from their secure homes.

Nida was wrecked by Gonn Orta early in the Second Age, causing a massive need for replacement of lost dwarfs, even including the higher up diamond dwarfs and Elder Mostali.

Humans as well as Chaos invaded dwarf strongholds, causing attrition, and retaking lost complexes caused attrition too.

On the aldryami side, you have dryads with life expectations of millennia, as well as great trees. And you have ancestral spirits available as advisors or teachers.

 

The mostali who witnessed High King Elf slaying Stone (causing the Spike to implode, parallel to Zzabur breaking the world and the Chaos Horde invading from the Bridge of Slime) succumbed to the experience, and aren't around any more. (At a guess, High King Elf would have had problems to escape that deed.)

 

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

Still, in Dragon Pass the Mostali are generally chiller, and I don't really see them interacting in any meaningful way. It's not like there's resources for them to compete over, is it just religion at this point? It must not be in the Aldryami's best interests to have the Mostali as enemies.

Both Mostali and Aldryami have less interaction in the Dragon Pass area after losing a great many strongholds during the Gods War, with only occasional attempts to recover those (like the Aldryami Reforestation project).

The Mostali long term projects for Dragon Pass are less obvious than the Aldryami Reforestation. They seem to take exception at the Reforestation efforts (see the last scenario in the RQG scenario The Smoking Ruin).

 

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

Aldryami x Humans and Trolls - It says that "elves don't like humans because they tear down the trees to make shelter, and the Uz eat the trees and also the elves." And like, I get that the elves would strongly dislike people chopping down trees, but these guys are vegetarians. Surely they understand the meaning of basic necessities, and that humans and Uz need that wood to survive just like they need to eat those leaves for them to survive.

This assumes that the Aldryami are more altruistic than the combined Western First World in their treatment of refugees flooding into their territory.

 

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

This also calls back to "the trolls are dumb stupid monsters who will just eat other folks and antagonize them for no better reason than to fill their bellies when they could very well just eat literally anything else in the world, including the enemies of the elves."

There is cooperation between Uz and Aldryami, e.g. in the Bee Tribe. Rarely as equals, though.

 

 

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

Dragonewts x Others - I didn't find much on the dragonewts' relationship to the others. Humans are scared of them because dragons are spooky, I can't say it doesn't make sense after the whole EWF debacle.

Dragonewts have their ancient agenda, and all others (including the Elder Giants who opposed them way before the Green Age) mainly are disturbances or consumables for that process.

 

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

All in all, I'm not entirely sure why it's still a status quo that they hate one another a thousand years later.

There are limited resources in terms of territory and magic that create tensions and conflict. There are opposing agendas. And there are old grudges embedded in the cultures.

Moreover, a happy coexistence of all the species makes for a rather dull gaming environment. There can and will be local cooperation - the Jrusteli agreement (now broken by the Slon Mostali) worked well for centuries. You can build a new Unity Council in your campaign, in the face of rising Chaos and Cataclysm - go for it! But keep in mind that there will be conservatives fighting tooth and claw against such woke ideas in all of the groups concerned.

 

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

Another thing that I'm not entirely in love with, but I understand why it's the case, is why are the humans separated into cultures but the Elder Races aren't.

Life span, and different divine ancestry.

There is racism amongst the Aldryami - survival of the more aggressive or sturdier forests in face of competition is their way of Growth, too, ever since the Grower outgrew the equilibrium of Growing and Making (and Taking). And it will be the Gardeners who are at the forefront of these internecine conflicts, rather than the bow-armed guardians.

The Errinoru jungle is fragmented into ten territories, with one (Laskal) devoid of a Great Tree and central authority. The two tribes east and west of Maslo couldn't be more different in their outlooks, the tribe to the south of the bay is somewhere stand-offish and doesn't interfere in either of the other two affairs with humans.

The Mostali have difficulties agreeing on the priorities of the repair of the World Machine, with Slon successfully recruiting the formerly independent Jrusteli colony into their Somelz project. Slon and Nida are on good talking terms via their satellite strongholds.

Greatway has been on the verge of open rebellion against Nida since the collapse of the Bright Empire, with only temporary unity against the Zistor project of the Machine Wars. (Making the rent for magic and items lent to the humans and trolls of the force opposing the Zistorites a lot more expensinve than their presumed comrads had expected.) 

Of the two Kralori/Shan Shan Mostali strongholds, one was annihilated by Kralori dragon magic (or possibly False Dragon Ring magics), while the other north of Teshnos survives in strict reclusion, refusing to acknowledge Iron. The central Pamaltelan dwarf stronghold practices Vegetarianism, possibly in cahoots with the local aldryami (not necessariy Errinoru yellow elves, but possibly local Green or Brown elves of the higher and colder ranges).

Dragonewts have two distinct major cultures - the Kralori imperial way and the Dragon Pass reign of the Inhuman King (mirrored in the transplanted colony of Ryzel and possibly a mobile dragonewt city in the Elder Wilds), plus a number of leaderless ("barbarian") colonies like in Vesmonstran and Teleos where reincarnation from the Egg is not a matter of hours. (It still has to happen somehow.)

 

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

Like, humans are divided into Praxians, Heortlings, Tarshites, etc. And then you have Trolls who are just... Trolls. Am I meant to believe that the trolls in the Shadow Plateau, with a long and proud history of serving a demigod for a thousand years, have more in common with the trolls on the other side of Genertela than with the Heortling clans who fought and bled at their side during their exile from Dragon Pass?

Yes. They share ancestresses, which cannot be said for their relation with any of the humans. (Except possibly some of the Tusk Riders, and if so, that was a mistake.) Those Heortlings were the ones who first betrayed the cause against Gbaji by taking down the soft (and rich) target of Dara Happa, and then betrayed Arkat's Command to compensate for this betrayal by sharing the riches of that conquest as an expansion of the Shadow Tribute (which many ceased to pay, too). Before the Sunstop, relations were if not cordial then at least cooperative. After the Battle of Night and Day, Palangio intercepted the Shadow Tribute, the reciprocal tribute that united the Theyalan peoples, and when it took on again after Arkat removed the occupation, the betrayal of Arkat's cause stood between them. The Shadowlords provoked the Heortlings, and the Tax Slaughter resulted. Yelmalio once more polluted troll hunting lands.

 

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

Don't they speak different languages and have different cultural practices? Why are the trolls who live in the southern continent called "Jungle Trolls" while the humans who do the same aren't called "Jungle Fellas"?

The Hsunchen (Hykimi/Fiwan) coexisting with the Errinoru elves have similar pan-continental languages and practices - Bat Hsunchen from Laskal and from Teshnos speak the same language, and Damali from western Genertela and the Shan Shan mountains speak the same language. The Basmoli of Prax speak the same language as the Basmoli of Tarien - all of this despite displaying different human phenotypes (races). The Praxian Basmoli are of the Wareran phenotype, the Basmoli of Pamaltela are of the Agimori phenotype. The Bat Hsunchen of Laskal are of the Agimori  phenotype, those of Teshnos are of the Vithelan (Eastern) phenotype, and same for the Sofali off the Pamaltelan and Teshnan coasts. While the local totem animal may be a different child of the ancestral totem deity and require some differences in diet and habitat, the culture still is shared.

The non-Hsunchen humans have vastly different ancestries. The Doraddi (including the Kresh and the black ancestors of Fonrit) are descended from the Agitorani, the last and most successful attempt of Pamalt and his friends to create humans. (There may be some admixture by former Fiwan/Hsunchen.) The Thinobutan Agimori in their diaspora are not descended from the first drinkers among the Agitorani, they have eight different ancestors created from clay by their own creator god (who bears similarities to the Fiwan Earthmaker and yet has significant differences as patron of agriculture and technologies). The various Thinobutan-descended populations don't share much of their cultures, except for memories of the Great Outrigger.

Dara Happans were made by Yelm and his friends in a manner similar to Pamalt and his friends, however there was no such thing as immortality for the first batch, or any First Drinker shenanigans. Orlanthi (and other Theyalans) on the other hand are the lesser children of lesser Storm and Earth deities, and various other lesser deities following the Storm King under his Earth Queen, including previous ruling husbands of the Queen.

Further west, animal totems produced both the Hykimi Hsunchen (possibly slightly polluted by the Kachasti Speaking Tour) and the Beast Totem Civilizations of the Pendali, Enerali and Enjoreli in the "Old Religion" belt between the Theyalans and the Malkioni, with the Entruli possibly another such case. Different pastoralist animal totems are found among the Hill Barbarians (nowadays Orlanthi) bisecting these Old Religion lands, with people of ancestry comparable to the Beast Nomads of Prax. (The Beast Totem civilizations may be offshoots of these Hill Barbarian animal totems, or variations of the Hykimi, under different civilizing influences from Earth Cults and Logicians than in Genert's Garden, which produced the Animal Nomads and the Hyalorings.)

The Ancestors of all these groups are a persistent presence from the Spirit World, activated regularly in ancestor worship rites practiced by all humans, even by the Hsunchen and the Malkioni. Not enough that you have conservatives holding out against any new ideas, these conservatives have actual instruction by their ancestors!

 

16 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

I wouldn't normally have an issue with this. Like, Tolkien's orcs are just evil baddie magical creatures who are that way because they're magically evil and created by one guy for that purpose. But Glorantha does so much to make everything else feel alive that it just strikes me as strange when entire races are treated as being kinda monolithical, at least in culture.

But I get why that's the case, there's only so much you can write about a setting after all, and maybe Greg Stafford and other folks wanted to expand on this but just had more pressing books to write. That's totally understandable, but still, it's a part of the setting.

I hope I haven't come across as combative, I'm genuinely not sure if I have the full picture here, and a lot of this is just a matter of taste. If having the Elder Races hate one another is cool to you, that's great. I feel the need to highlight that because I'm not here in bad faith or to yuck someone's yum.

You raise valid questions. There is another layer of extelligence (oral traditions, art and written records) to Glorantha - the presence of the ancestors who may be contacted in the Spirit World, a realm both timeless and within Time. This additional layer (and rather active prophecies and divinations by the cults) create different dynamics than our modern (Western) world.

[Hellhound Havoc]

Thank you @Ormi Phengaria for such an indepth answer. I'll respond to you and @Joerg in different ones because it'll be confusing otherwise.

3 hours ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

[...] It's that they most often do so because their hunger just never goes away. Understand, first and foremost, that a troll is never truly satiated; they will always eat as much as they have the strength and willpower to eat. So without a method of controlling this hunger, they'll eat the food you give them, and then the food you didn't give them, and then the seed corn, and then the immature crop, and the trees, etc. [...]

This is an interesting read of them, and if so then I totally get how and why they'd have serious grievances with most other people, but I never had the impression that they're always hungry, just that they're kinda dumb and crude - according to the human-centric book, that is. Like, to take the Glorantha Bestiary:

Quote

 

Trolls are the Eaters. They can eat anything: pine cones, gravel, moss, flesh, trees, other trolls; anything they can bite or chop into pieces small enough to swallow. Trolls thrive best on organic matter, and dirt and stones are usually only eaten as snacks or as a last resort. Their favorite foods are dwarf and elf. Their least favorite foods are feces and air.
[...]
Only rarely is a troll concerned with more than the most basic types of satisfaction: food, shelter, and comfort. By human standards, even wealthy trolls live amidst squalor and wretchedness. A troll that is hungry, eats. When angry, the troll kills. When tired, the troll sleeps. It does not matter whether the troll sleeps under a rotting horse carcass or satin sheets, except that the horse makes a tasty midnight snack.

 

To me, this sounds more like they're a race of big dumb brutes rather than perpetually hungry; but it'd make sense if they were, because this reads almost like anti-Uz propaganda tbh.

As to the Aldryami and Mostali, yeah I understand... mostly. I understand why the dwarfs have an issue, but I'm not sure why the elfs would. Like, the elfs simply grow, it's the Mostali who live forever and probably want to avenge Stone and whatnot. Still, I'd like there to be some room for them to put that behind them, it feels a bit exceedingly deterministic that they're bound to kill and die for this, but that's not a flaw or anything, just my personal preference.

Honestly, I don't like the Aldryami a whole lot and I think that's colouring my perception of them. I just resent the perception that "nature and growing = trees and forest." You can see that too in Prax, as it's described as a grassland because the god who lived there died. It bothers me in part because one of the most important biomes where I live is a form of grassland / savannah similar to Prax, and it's hugely important for the ecosystem, so having the elfs just existing to yabber about cutting down trees but not having a similar people to yabber about animals eating grass- with the implication that the forest is somehow "more alive" than the grassland and chaparral - just makes me a bit angry at them.

 

3 hours ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

Why are the humans separated into cultures but the Elder Races aren't: They are, in truth. Nearly all Gloranthan material is written from a (particular, scholastic) human point of view, with limited information on those kinds of intricacies. And the information which is gleaned is further limited by the kind of people interacting with humans in this manner. "Trolls" means kygerlithic trolls, dominated by Dagori Inkarth and Halikiv and to a lesser extent the Shadow Plateau, with others being largely unknown save for the most basic details. "Dwarfs" means orthodox Decamonists. Elves don't really have any detailed, reductive representation, and there may be more elves in "human cults" than any other elder race, but all of them are much more secretive as to their deeper natures, because they are made of plant rather than meat as are dwarfs or trolls. And "dragonewts" most definitely does not include New Wyrmish or other such oddities.

This is an interesting, if a bit funny notion, thank you for bringing it up. I wondered about this, but I feel like it's a bit inconsistent.

Like, sometimes it feels like the writing in the books are very firmly "from outside". When the guide describes the stars in the night sky and the constellations, it's being reliable; but when it describes things other than humans, often it isn't.

For instance, this paragraph from the Glorantha Sourcebook:

Quote

 

The forms of the Chaos were many, and not important here except to note that evil demonic armies were called Krjalki in Western manuscripts. In those same ancient manuscripts, this term is also used to (mistakenly) denote the various forces of Darkness, and even other human tribes who allied with them to fight Chaos (such as the Orlanthi). This is one of those many cases where the mortal victims of the Greater Darkness confused the real enemy of Chaos with those People of Darkness, who were not only allies but bearing the real brunt of the fight against the invading Krjalki, often unsupported or opposed by humans.

 

Bringing up that humans mistook the Peoples of Darkness for Chaos is interesting, but that feels like something from the trolls' POV, doesn't it?

[Hellhound Havoc]

30 minutes ago, Joerg said:

The uz are a species of underworld demons, descended from voracious breeder and raider demigods (and ultimately deities). Already before the diminuations of the Gods War (Dark Trolls hurt by Yelm, Cave Trolls by Pocharngo, Cold Trolls by Pamalt) the uzuz ancestors like Gash and Gore would leave Wonderhome and go hunting for exotic culinary experiences in other places.

Back before Death came into the world, eating another being was little more than an inconvenience of transitory nature to that being. After Death had entered the world, the trolls had been hurt bad by the shenanigans of the other races and tribes of deities, and they were out for revenge.

So that's why the uz don't mind eating sentient beings.

That makes sense, but it's been what, at least 40 generations since then? Surely the culture has changed, what with them being so close to humans in the meantime. I understand that Zorak Zoran's influence and such might be powerful, but it feels a bit strange that every single of all trolls would keep that tradition from so long ago. Especially in Dragon Pass, where The Only Old One integrated to the point of even looking human.

But as you say, their matriarchs are long-lived and there was the Tax Slaughter... but that was still a thousand years ago. And the trollkin had no one's involvement, right? It was just Chaos, Gbaji being a bastard. And all of this just makes the Unity Council seem weirder, like:

39 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Moreover, a happy coexistence of all the species makes for a rather dull gaming environment. There can and will be local cooperation - the Jrusteli agreement (now broken by the Slon Mostali) worked well for centuries. You can build a new Unity Council in your campaign, in the face of rising Chaos and Cataclysm - go for it! But keep in mind that there will be conservatives fighting tooth and claw against such woke ideas in all of the groups concerned.

Because on the one hand, there are metaphysical and centuries-long reasons for these peoples to hate one another... then how the hell did the Unity Council form in the first place? Especially since it was so close to the Great Darkness and all the evils that happened there.

Like, I get cultural conflict, I'm not advocating for that - the Lunar Empire faces Sartar and that's cool. I just don't see what's fun about them treating one another monolithically, so to speak. 

45 minutes ago, Joerg said:

The Hsunchen (Hykimi/Fiwan) coexisting with the Errinoru elves have similar pan-continental languages and practices - Bat Hsunchen from Laskal and from Teshnos speak the same language, and Damali from western Genertela and the Shan Shan mountains speak the same language. The Basmoli of Prax speak the same language as the Basmoli of Tarien - all of this despite displaying different human phenotypes (races). The Praxian Basmoli are of the Wareran phenotype, the Basmoli of Pamaltela are of the Agimori phenotype. The Bat Hsunchen of Laskal are of the Agimori  phenotype, those of Teshnos are of the Vithelan (Eastern) phenotype, and same for the Sofali off the Pamaltelan and Teshnan coasts. While the local totem animal may be a different child of the ancestral totem deity and require some differences in diet and habitat, the culture still is shared.

Sidenote, but it feels so strange to me to read "phenotype" just a couple of paragraphs away from "and these guys are the sons of the gods" lol like could you take a bit of earth from the ground and extract Ernalda's DNA? Pretty bonkers.

But anyway:

47 minutes ago, Joerg said:

You raise valid questions. There is another layer of extelligence (oral traditions, art and written records) to Glorantha - the presence of the ancestors who may be contacted in the Spirit World, a realm both timeless and within Time. This additional layer (and rather active prophecies and divinations by the cults) create different dynamics than our modern (Western) world.

This makes sense and I hadn't really considered that. Like, it's one thing to have 40 dead generations of your clan being just... dead. It's a whole different ball game when those 40 generations can and will scream at your face for cooperating with "our ancient enemy."

Thanks for the response!

[Richard S.]

24 minutes ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

To me, this sounds more like they're a race of big dumb brutes rather than perpetually hungry; but it'd make sense if they were, because this reads almost like anti-Uz propaganda tbh.

It's not propaganda, it's pretty accurate actually, but Trolls definitely aren't just big dumb brutes. Trolls, and all the elder races, are fundamentally different from humans in how they think and act. What's logical and right to us may not be for them, and vice versa. I'd recommend checking out Trollpak to get a better understand of why they're the way they are. Unfortunately we don't have similar resources for the other races yet, but if you take into account that trolls are the "most human" of the elder races you can get a pretty good idea of how alien the others are.

32 minutes ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

Honestly, I don't like the Aldryami a whole lot and I think that's colouring my perception of them. I just resent the perception that "nature and growing = trees and forest." You can see that too in Prax, as it's described as a grassland because the god who lived there died. It bothers me in part because one of the most important biomes where I live is a form of grassland / savannah similar to Prax, and it's hugely important for the ecosystem, so having the elfs just existing to yabber about cutting down trees but not having a similar people to yabber about animals eating grass- with the implication that the forest is somehow "more alive" than the grassland and chaparral - just makes me a bit angry at them.

I'm pretty sure Prax was always plains, Genert's garden was in what is now the Wastes. Also, the Aldryami aren't "nature and growing", Aldrya is explicitly a forest goddess. Grasslands are more the domain of the grain goddesses I feel, and nature in general belongs to Arachne Solara.

[John Biles]

Here's the thing about the trolls.  The original, primal trolls were quite intelligent, the so called 'Mistress Race Trolls'.  Unfortunately, since they had to leave Wonderhome thanks to Yelm, they've been going downhill, which got worse after The Battle of Night and Day so that now half their births are trollkin, who are extra dumb with cheese.  But Dark Trolls aren't geniuses either.

Also, while Trolls can eat anything... that doesn't mean they want to.  Imagine if you could live off tar and gravel and it still tasted like tar and gravel.  Elves, humans, etc, OTOH, are pretty tasty.

Why are the Elves still mad at the trolls?  Imagine if a group of beings ate your hometown and half your neighbors. And your pets.  Would you care that they needed to eat to live? 

The Elves dislike Mostali, because Mostali look at them and their forests and think 'I can burn all that and use it to fuel my smoke spewing forges'.

 

 

[French Desperate WindChild]

the main point in my oppinion is difference. As you may have between two clans of the same "people" just because grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grand father had an affair with a woman of the opposite clan, imagine when you think about other races

 

I don't knwo where trolls are presented as dumb. they have degenarated trollkins and cave/great trolls but the standard dark troll has the same intellectual capacities than humans. And what about the mistress races, who gains so power that they become demigodesses ?

from my perspective:

 

Trolls are different, they have a far different culture and history. Now you,  people of the day, fear troll not only because they eat what they want but

- they are people of the night. If they attack you at home it is during the night when you don't see, when maybe you sleep. If you attack them during the day you have to find their cave, and there... you don't see

- they are stronger than you, they send wave of trollkins and when you don't have any more magic, their powerfull warriors kill you with all their magic.

- they ambush, when you are honorable

- they are ugly, so ugly than the most ugly of you seems beautiful

- their goddesses and gods are terrible and terrific, they love blood and send demon to fear you

but you don't know if they have conflict between them, because you don't know if they have kingdoms, feud, and things like that. You are not troll ; you fear them you don't know them and don't try to know them.

You fear what they are able to do, so you hate them. They are underworld horrors, not surface people

 

Elves (green / brown / yellow) are different. they have a far different culture and history. Now you people of the fields and cities, fear elves not only because they live in deep forests hidden from others and iou can't see them before they see you but

- when you try to have more hides to farm and have more food by cutting their forest, they kill you and your family.

- And sometimes even when you do nothing they kill you because they want to grow their forests and take your hides when you just want to live. Elves are bad

but you don't know if they have conflict between them because you don't know if they have kingdoms, feud, and things like that. You are not elf; you fear them you don't know them and don't try to know them.

You fear what they are able to do, so you hate them. They are wood, not flesh.

Dwarves are different. they have a far different culture and history. .Now you people of the fields and plains, fear dwarves not only because they live under mountains you cannot visit but

- They have secret plans. You don't know their plans but for sure, they plan to kill your bloodline, your kingdom, maybe your race.

- They have secret weapons so destructive you cannot resist.

- You never have seen them but you sure they have the largest armies of the world, full of iron and weapons breathing fire and metal. If they want, when they want, to attack you, you know that if there is any chance to not lose the war, the price will be huge.

but you don't know if they have conflict between them because you don't know if they have kingdoms, feud, and things like that. You are not dwarf; you fear them you don't know them and don't try to know them.

You fear what they are able to do, so you hate them. They are stone (clay), not flesh.

 

 

That's a human perspective. Of course some are XX friends, some are curious, or open... but just some and pretty sure that a lot of esrolians/lunars/grazelanders/pentans/kralori and some sartarites think the same about Praxian, and some clans think the same about other clans etc...).

And of course Troll thinks the same  (with there own value, history, etc...) about the other races

Same for elves, dwarves, merfolks, etc..

 

[Jeff]

From the perspective of humans, all of the Elder Races are mysterious. They are all older than any extant human culture, and all have individual members that remember the Dawn. There are obvious differences between green, brown, and yellow elves, and the Lhankor Mhy cult records ancient conflicts between these groups. Two main troll queendoms are active in Dragon Pass - that of the Shadow Plateau has a long tradition of interaction with humans. However, the queendom of Dagori Inkarth is feared by all, and the trolls claim that the Great Troll Mother herself resides beneath the Castle of Lead. Meanwhile Cragspider the Firewitch has her own domain, and the terrible Zorak Zoran is mighty there. 

All of the Elder Races have much longer memories than us humans. The green and brown elves live 200 to 300 years, and dryads even longer. There are plenty of elderly elves who remember the Inhuman Occupation and when the Orlanthi settlers first returned to Dragon Pass. The political squabbles of human groups means little to them. Who can really distinguish between those humans that follow the Red Moon and those of Sartar Dwarffriend?

Although dark trolls only live a little longer than humans, Mistress Race Trolls are immortal. Most Mistress Race Trolls were born in Wonderhome, before the Dawn. The race was already diminishing in the First Age before the Curse of Kin. Arkat and his companions were the last MIstress Race Trolls born in Time, until recently. That means the Mistress Race make the Antediluvians from Vampire games look like spring chickens. Some are many thousands of years old. They barely recognize the dark trolls as their descendants - the trollkin are hated mockeries. The Mistress Race remember Osentalka! They remember the Broken Council! They remember the betrayal of the dwarves and elves, the fickleness of the dragonewts.

 

But the prize goes to the dwarfs. They are all immortal, unless they deviate from their function. But most dwarfs have no interest at all in human society and cannot tell one human from another. If the price is right, they will work for whoever, but that price is always very high. And all of the remaining True Mostali (like The Dwarf) are from the Godtime and predate the dwarves. And the Mistress Race.

[Jeff]

Just now, Jeff said:

From the perspective of humans, all of the Elder Races are mysterious. They are all older than any extant human culture, and all have individual members that remember the Dawn. There are obvious differences between green, brown, and yellow elves, and the Lhankor Mhy cult records ancient conflicts between these groups. Two main troll queendoms are active in Dragon Pass - that of the Shadow Plateau has a long tradition of interaction with humans. However, the queendom of Dagori Inkarth is feared by all, and the trolls claim that the Great Troll Mother herself resides beneath the Castle of Lead. Meanwhile Cragspider the Firewitch has her own domain, and the terrible Zorak Zoran is mighty there. 

All of the Elder Races have much longer memories than us humans. The green and brown elves live 200 to 300 years, and dryads even longer. There are plenty of elderly elves who remember the Inhuman Occupation and when the Orlanthi settlers first returned to Dragon Pass. The political squabbles of human groups means little to them. Who can really distinguish between those humans that follow the Red Moon and those of Sartar Dwarffriend?

Although dark trolls only live a little longer than humans, Mistress Race Trolls are immortal. Most Mistress Race Trolls were born in Wonderhome, before the Dawn. The race was already diminishing in the First Age before the Curse of Kin. Arkat and his companions were the last MIstress Race Trolls born in Time, until recently. That means the Mistress Race make the Antediluvians from Vampire games look like spring chickens. Some are many thousands of years old. They barely recognize the dark trolls as their descendants - the trollkin are hated mockeries. The Mistress Race remember Osentalka! They remember the Broken Council! They remember the betrayal of the dwarves and elves, the fickleness of the dragonewts.

 

But the prize goes to the dwarfs. They are all immortal, unless they deviate from their function. But most dwarfs have no interest at all in human society and cannot tell one human from another. If the price is right, they will work for whoever, but that price is always very high. And all of the remaining True Mostali (like The Dwarf) are from the Godtime and predate the dwarves. And the Mistress Race.

Of course this has cultural influences. Dagori Inkarth is ruled by a council of Mistress Race Trolls born before the Dawn. There are Great Trees in Arstola as long lived as any redwood or sequoia. Their followers come to them and they are unchanged from the time of their great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents. 

[dumuzid]

3 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

Because on the one hand, there are metaphysical and centuries-long reasons for these peoples to hate one another... then how the hell did the Unity Council form in the first place?

This story starts in the Darkness, when most of the gods and most of the world were dead, but life clung on in hidden and protected places.  The City of Nochet was one, though impoverished and sapped of people and strength by the dying of the world.  They could still grow food, but the city was grown too weak to defend itself, and its former defenders, the Storm peoples, were similarly reduced.  There was another place where life clung on, the Shadow Plateau and the Palace of Black Glass atop it.  The trolls of the plateau survived, led by the son of Argan Argar, Ezkankekko.  Ezkankekko was neither a man nor a troll, but something else.  He could take the form of every group of people me met: among humans he could seem human, among trolls he seemed a troll, likewise for aldryami, dragonewts, etc.  He was always a tall, dark version of the peoples he met.  His trolls were starving after enduring a long siege by the monsters of Chaos, and so Ezkankekko reached out to his neighbors and struck a deal with Queen Norinel of Nochet.  They married, Ezkankekko brought trolls to defend the city, and the Norinel provided food to sustain the trolls.  The Esrolians called Ezkankekko 'Kimantor,' which means "the man you cannot see."

When not commanding the defense of Nochet against successive waves of Chaotic invaders, Kimantor ventured out into the dying world to find other outposts of life, and he taught others to do the same.  They were called the Kimantorings, his companions and messengers.  They found the surviving outposts and redoubts of the peoples of Dragon Pass (humans, aldryami, mostali, dragonewts even some of the last Gold Wheel Dancers.  Kimantor made pacts with all of them, requiring tribute and loyalty from these survivor groups in exchange for his friendship and protection.  Half of all the tribute gathered was offered for exchange at night markets run by Ezkankekko and his followers where members of this survival network could come to make Equal Exchange, an Argan Argar concept where each party in a bargain gives only what they consider equal to what's being offered them.  Survivors came to trade what they could part with, and left with things they could not make or grow themselves.  In this way the survivor groups staved off starvation and malnutrition, and increased their prosperity a little in spite of the failing world.  Though many parties to these survival pacts had hated each other in earlier ages, they accepted Kimantor's deals now as their only alternative to extinction.

As the Darkness drew towards its deepest point, Wakboth the Devil finished killing off his rival Chaos gods and asserted himself as the final and greatest Lord of Terror.  He gathered the Chaos monsters who had survived to that point in the Gods War into a last great horde, and they marched on the greatest center of surviving life they could perceive, the survival network pulled together by Ezkankekko.  The peoples of the survival pacts banded together behind Ezkankekko to form a common force to defend their homes from the Devil's horde, called the Unity Army.  They stood their ground before the Devil, fought him, and destroyed his army--the way the Esrolians tell it, the final battle was outside the ruins of Nochet, which was evacuated and abandoned earlier in the struggle.  The Devil fled east into the Wastes, where he was met by Storm Bull and ultimately pinned under the Block.

After the war the world began to heal, and the peoples who had contributed to the survival pacts and the Unity Army desired to maintain the friendship and benefits that had come from their mutual support, and prosper together in the new peace.  They formed the World Council of Friends, AKA the Unity Council, to continue sharing and working together, with representatives from each of the members peoples and Ezkankekko as a sort of president-emeritus of the group.  Fractures spread slowly, as members of the old pacts grew stronger in the restored world and gradually ceased to feel the old deals were necessary, and their connections were strained by long wars with the several successive Solar regimes in the north.  The Unity Council finally broke over the issue of the project to create a new god within Time, which Ezkankekko argued against.  The Unity Council broke, its factions fought, the God Project party won, the naysayers were cast out, and the Bright Empire of Nysalor followed.  The Second Council was made up of the winners of that civil war; the Third Council was the ruling council of the EWF in the Second Age; neither ever succeeded in fully restoring the unity that existed at the Dawn.

TL:DR - The Unity Council was formed because its members had banded together in the face of extinction, and in the first centuries after the Dawn that experience remained strong enough for them to set aside their old grudges and cooperate; it fell when those members ceased to consider unity important enough to continue compromising for.

[scott-martin]

23 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

I'm not sure what that adds to the setting.

Just to piggyback around everyone else so far (insightful stuff all around) to address this point  . . . 

Once upon a time, near the origin of the setting, the antagonism among the elder races was much more foregrounded than it is today because the folkloric and commercial fantasy sources were much closer to the surface. Greg moved in the same circles as Poul Anderson, for example, and so the notion of an endless existential schism between "elves" and "trolls" or "goblins" or a seasonal conflict between "seelie" and "unseelie" or other "courts" was in the air at the time. It was just something that happened when you posited multiple poles of consciousness around a core humanity: the easiest way to model their interactions with each other in our absence was opposition based. They must resist synthesis because if they wanted to assimilate they would have merged by now. The fact that they remain distinct and alienated from each other suggests something fundamentally irreconcilable in their very nature.

Great, how boring. But over time, the execution gets more nuanced as their folkloric origins recede and they become something truly rooted (displaying my native grower bias here) in the Gloranthan deep past. What they all have in common is that they are "elder," archaic, previous efforts to embody consciousness before human cultural diversity came along. They emerged at specific times and in specific places, specific ecologies or arcologies if you prefer . . . relatively specialized and narrow ways of being in the wider world. The elves are limited to their forests, the dwarves live under their mountains, the triolini do not walk and the crude but resilient trolls "prefer" to persist in the wastes nobody else wants.

For each, the happiest memories are from when they were alone in the world. The worst moment was when circumstances forced them into contact and as others note, some still bear the trauma and the shock. These are their thought leaders. They drive religious policy, and back in the archaic where they live, religious policy is existential. It's who they are. They can't really leave that world without abandoning their otherness to join the rest of us here in the cosmopolitan now where the world is made of everything. Many have made that journey within time. Many still refuse it. That's okay. The dragonewts have a lot to teach about that process of transformation and liberation.

So they fight because that's an artifact of where they come from and where they are. Strategies of consciousness that could consolidate have already done so: in my Glorantha, for example, the various mostalite communities were literally not birthed but "made," repurposed from orphaned man rune materials to the glory of the machine, while a lot of people we now call "uz" were originally scattered divergent dark cultures (digijelm, tamalites, shadzorings, probably some but not all "andins," etc.) welded together in the dawn age crusades. Others might still make that leap into compatibility but the clock of time is ticking pretty loud now. Hurry up please. But the ones who can fight their way free from hate have largely moved on by now. We're dealing with recidivists, ghosts from the deep archaic. They come up with all kinds of excuses and justifications for their grudges like the ones you've seen in this thread. 
 

[Ormi Phengaria]

6 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

To me, this sounds more like they're a race of big dumb brutes rather than perpetually hungry; but it'd make sense if they were, because this reads almost like anti-Uz propaganda tbh.

Sometimes even seemingly honest accounts can seem like crude and mean-spirited portrayals simply because we lack the perspective to really understand them. Trolls might be the closest elder race to humans in terms of their basic drives and culture, which kind of exacerbates this problem, but the troll umwelt is still not something humans can readily understand just by looking at them. They feel space and sound in three high-fidelity dimensions with their face. Their vision is black and white, but also with sharply contrasted reds. Tastes and scents are whole other worlds unto themselves. Trollpak gets into and hints at a lot of this (and also makes the perspective you are reading it from much more front-and-center than introductory materials may seem.)

7 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

As to the Aldryami and Mostali, yeah I understand... mostly. I understand why the dwarfs have an issue, but I'm not sure why the elfs would. Like, the elfs simply grow, it's the Mostali who live forever and probably want to avenge Stone and whatnot.

Possibly an important insight: elves grow in the same way that gardeners grow. They are active shapers of the world and not passive recipients of biomass.

7 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

just resent the perception that "nature and growing = trees and forest." You can see that too in Prax, as it's described as a grassland because the god who lived there died. It bothers me in part because one of the most important biomes where I live is a form of grassland / savannah similar to Prax, and it's hugely important for the ecosystem, so having the elfs just existing to yabber about cutting down trees but not having a similar people to yabber about animals eating grass- with the implication that the forest is somehow "more alive" than the grassland and chaparral - just makes me a bit angry at them.

That's completely valid. The Aldryami are not representatives of "nature". Nature is a spider-woman who will chew you up and spit you out. Aldryami are rather representatives of woody plants and forest ecosystems particularly, with grasses and sedges and rushes and all sorts of others being more closely associated to Ernalda and land goddesses.

7 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

Like, sometimes it feels like the writing in the books are very firmly "from outside". When the guide describes the stars in the night sky and the constellations, it's being reliable; but when it describes things other than humans, often it isn't.

Even there you have a slant, though in this case you'd strain yourself to see it. The star seers in central Genertela have the most complete knowledge of the sky lore among anyone, but many others still know things about the sky that they do not, and the star seers themselves know things they don't share with outsiders. But you get enough to use as an overview, and careful study of that can reveal further questions to push you along.

7 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

Bringing up that humans mistook the Peoples of Darkness for Chaos is interesting, but that feels like something from the trolls' POV, doesn't it?

It's also the PoV of people reading into very limited, scarce records and clues of the Great Darkness and making inferences about a subject (Chaos) which is notoriously difficult to pin down with true precision.

[Hellhound Havoc]

3 hours ago, dumuzid said:

[...]

TL:DR - The Unity Council was formed because its members had banded together in the face of extinction, and in the first centuries after the Dawn that experience remained strong enough for them to set aside their old grudges and cooperate; it fell when those members ceased to consider unity important enough to continue compromising for.

Very well-written, thank you. I had the broad strokes of this story (the Only Old One came down to Esrolia, he was looking for unity to deal, etc), but I didn't know the finer details. That made more sense.

EDIT: Oh also, part of what got me wondering about this was a thread from a couple years ago that showed up in my readings where you delineated some of the possibly optimistic outcomes from the Hero Wars. I've read this a couple times now and I thought I could come up with a different 4th Age "ending" so to speak where the races didn't really need to vanish into the woods and "leave the world for the humans", but the more I read in this very thread, the harder it seems for that to happen. Which doesn't bode well for when Wakboth comes.

5 hours ago, Jeff said:

and the trolls claim that the Great Troll Mother herself resides beneath the Castle of Lead.

I do wonder if they're right about that sometimes. Kyger Litor was a goddess but also an ancestor, after all, what if she really is there but can't do anything due to the Great Compromise? Very spooky to think about.

Thanks for the answer Jeff!

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

For each, the happiest memories are from when they were alone in the world. The worst moment was when circumstances forced them into contact and as others note, some still bear the trauma and the shock. These are their thought leaders. They drive religious policy, and back in the archaic where they live, religious policy is existential. It's who they are. They can't really leave that world without abandoning their otherness to join the rest of us here in the cosmopolitan now where the world is made of everything. Many have made that journey within time. Many still refuse it. That's okay. The dragonewts have a lot to teach about that process of transformation and liberation.

This is a pretty sad bit of worldbuilding, tbh. But that last part does strengthen my White Moonie inclinations; truly the only way to break this cycle would be by some form of illumination or another, I suppose. 

 

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

So they fight because that's an artifact of where they come from and where they are. Strategies of consciousness that could consolidate have already done so: in my Glorantha, for example, the various mostalite communities were literally not birthed but "made," repurposed from orphaned man rune materials to the glory of the machine, while a lot of people we now call "uz" were originally scattered divergent dark cultures (digijelm, tamalites, shadzorings, probably some but not all "andins," etc.) welded together in the dawn age crusades. Others might still make that leap into compatibility but the clock of time is ticking pretty loud now. Hurry up please. But the ones who can fight their way free from hate have largely moved on by now. We're dealing with recidivists, ghosts from the deep archaic. They come up with all kinds of excuses and justifications for their grudges like the ones you've seen in this thread. 

Very well put. I do feel like - and I haven't really finished King of Sartar but I'm pretty sure I'm incorrect in this assumption - but I feel like the future coming of Wakboth will only be defeated if compatibility and compromise is found, however tenuous. And I get the impression that this compromise will turn up in the Hero Wars.

But yeah, that's material for a game session for sure! 🙂

56 minutes ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

That's completely valid. The Aldryami are not representatives of "nature". Nature is a spider-woman who will chew you up and spit you out. Aldryami are rather representatives of woody plants and forest ecosystems particularly, with grasses and sedges and rushes and all sorts of others being more closely associated to Ernalda and land goddesses.

8 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

Yeah I understand that, I guess it's just my personal vendetta speaking out loud against them because I really do dislike the "walking trees who protect the forest" thing. no real logical reason either, but I'm slowly growing to appreciate them.

Semi unrelated, but I do wonder if Waha or Storm Bull feel similarly about protecting the migrations of the Praxian Beasts. Mammal migrations are hugely important for ecosystems, and Lunars putting a toll booth in the wrong place or some well-intentioned Pavisite deciding to dig irrigation out into the plains could be a serious disruption. I have this (very barebones) concept of pretending like Greg Stafford translated incomplete Godlearners documents, and Genertela is actually in the west side of the rectangle instead of the north side. Valind and the great fire desert are still there, though, which would mean the "forests of Sartar" actually into rainforests, partially fed by dust drummed up from the Wastelands by the Desert Winds of the Storm Bull.

I think I'd like the elfs more if they were in a position such as this, where they can't be the relatively easy moral position to defend of "we're also protecting life, you can simply not chop down trees!" and sorta need to protect the grasslands too. I don't know, it's late in my country and I'm rambling at this point. 

 

Thanks again everyone for the very informative responses, this gives me quite a bit to think about as to how to tweak my home game - and how not to, too, as I realise I wasn't taking a lot of info in consideration.

Edited July 2, 2023 by Hellhound Havoc
I forgot to add a little detail and didn't want to create another post and a notification for all involved

[scott-martin]

8 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

Yeah I understand that, I guess it's just my personal vendetta speaking out loud against them because I really do dislike the "walking trees who protect the forest" thing. no real logical reason either, but I'm slowly growing to appreciate them.

Trust your uh gut. Anything you don't like in canon can be reframed if you find the right argument that accepts all the textual and experiential data we have about the setting while making room for additional Gloranthan Fun. For example I don't think they are all that enty myself (more of a radically divergent man rune species occupying a specific religious niche like the dryads in Robert Graves or how trolls start out as h. gigantopithecus survivals trapped in a h. sap. world) but recognize that most everyday Gloranthans think about them in those terms and most fans have worked to capture that perspective. We can both be "right" and propagating my take gives me a way to keep my critics amused. But in my Glorantha most elves are not trees grown to resemble people but people (drawn from a broader class of "people") who deliberately grew to resemble tree consciousness.

But it's that broader class of people that brings us here today. On the one hand, you're right, the human cultural diversity of Glorantha is celebrated and rich, and one of the deep themes of the setting is how humans who start out in very different places can learn to cooperate and get great shared outcomes. This is Greg the optimist, high on the civil rights struggle and the interplay of philosophical currents from all over the world. In a fantastic setting, we can extend that diversity to fairly extreme permutations of body and mind . . . and then because the world itself is alive, to the rocks, seas and waves themselves. How great!

Unfortunately, Greg was not a utopian thinker so there had to be room for the intractable prejudices that have managed to take over in our history again and again, setting progress back between generations. We can cooperate any time. He just didn't have complete faith in our ability or will to do it in a crunch and the farther back he looked in our history, the worse it got. So the oldest people in the setting who predate h. sapiens itself tend to be the most emotionally rigid and in-group oriented, stuck in their niche or consumed by what to me might be the narcissism of incomprehensible differences. They are awesome but they are stuck. 

Ultimately I think the optimism wins out and so the ability to empathize outside the in-group becomes a fairly universal trait for "humanity" in the setting. Anyone human from any culture, no matter how exotic or conventional, can make friends when you put them in an adventuring party and force them to depend on each other for survival and other common goals. This can easily stretch to embrace tree people, rock people and so on. It can be a broad tent. But the people who don't embrace that basic lesson are on the road to extinction. The world keeps making new people. Maybe they can learn what they need to know next time.

I agree with you that in general Glorantha does best when people from diverse backgrounds can set aside their prejudices and share what they have. The tragedy ("not a utopian thinker") is that there are always people who reject the shared solution of a survival covenant . . . and in deciding to go it alone they might or might not win, but the collective outcome is poorer than it might've been otherwise. Some people's Hero War is like that, a doomsday scenario of universal exhaustion. Maybe the rest of us will be somewhere else, "this is how we walk on the moon," so to speak.

[Qizilbashwoman]

10 hours ago, scott-martin said:

previous efforts to embody consciousness before human cultural diversity came along

i'm reminded of the early modern K'ich'e Maya narrative of the many creations in the Popol Vuh: first purely earth, then wood and reeds (now New World Monkeys), and finally real humans from divine blood and cornmeal. Between each, the world suffered a catastrophic crisis.

[scott-martin]

6 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

i'm reminded of the early modern K'ich'e Maya narrative of the many creations in the Popol Vuh: first purely earth, then wood and reeds (now New World Monkeys), and finally real humans from divine blood and cornmeal. Between each, the world suffered a catastrophic crisis.

Love it. And the Merovingian, Persephone and their flunkies as survivals from "a previous matrix" . . . built on code so archaic it's practically alien to the modern physics engines. Having space for people older than the current human model in a game lets us wallow in a kind of dream logic with all its potential dream antipathies. Maybe in the terminal third age they start dreaming different. 

[Hellhound Havoc]

21 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

I agree with you that in general Glorantha does best when people from diverse backgrounds can set aside their prejudices and share what they have. The tragedy ("not a utopian thinker") is that there are always people who reject the shared solution of a survival covenant . . . and in deciding to go it alone they might or might not win, but the collective outcome is poorer than it might've been otherwise. Some people's Hero War is like that, a doomsday scenario of universal exhaustion. Maybe the rest of us will be somewhere else, "this is how we walk on the moon," so to speak.

Your entire comment is really good, but this part is the one that sticks with me. Probably the part I like the most out of any in Glorantha's history is the I Fought We Won, the Unity Battle. It's such a beautiful piece of worldbuilding that to think that it could never happen again because there are metaphysical and unsurpassable reasons for everyone to bloody hate one another is pretty disheartening.

I don't mind the idea that it might be hard. Like, reconciling the Orlanthi and the Lunars will be very hard because there's mythological opposition there regarding Chaos, but it is possible through compromise. An Uz can compromise and try to exert self control, a dwarf can compromise through fairness, but the position of "no tree should be felled" is such an absolute that I couldn't see any compromise.

However, people have mentioned that elfs have compromised in the past, and that there have been alliances and whatnot, so it's bothering me less and less.

Like, as hard as it is, there's hope in that notion. Not the bloody, individualistic sort of hope that "an argrath will come and wipe the moonies from the face of the earth", but rather hope that if everyone can be sensible for a little bit, things will be all right. I think that's at the heart of Glorantha in a way, just as you said, there's that civil rights vibe that it's delicate but it's possible. An emblem of this is when Annstad falls in love with Jar-Eel - which I'm not sure where it comes from because I've only seen it in the Glorantha wiki and don't remember that in King of Sartar, but I think it's a nice thought.

[AlexS]

9 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

sorta need to protect the grasslands too

Hi @Hellhound Havoc, greetings from down the road in São Paulo. As someone who works with indigenous and traditional communities in both the Amazon and the Cerrado (for non-Brazilianists on the thread, that is the grassland-savannah biome to which the OP is referring) I do hear you on the whole ‘real nature is the deep forest, everything else is a degraded lesser form’ thing. It does carry some awkward colonial echoes of the North American wilderness cult à la John Muir - but then RuneQuest was born in California (and Glorantha emerged there, even if she was born with Greg in the Midwest).

However, I don’t think you need to make the Aldryami lose their ‘foresty’ nature to deal with this. As @Ormi Phengaria has pointed out, the grasses are as sacred as the trees, they just have different mothers. The interesting roleplaying opportunities come from thinking about where the two meet, as a fluid frontier zone with religious and political as well as ecological elements (and family ones too - Aldrya is a daughter of Ernalda, so the grain goddesses are kin even if their followers sometimes see each other as competitors).

For a Brazilian equivalent, think of the islands of rainforest planted by the Kayapó on the edge of the Cerrado; in Glorantha they could be human Aldrya cultists summoning the power of the forest into the lands of the Grain Goddesses. This doesn’t have to be either/or choice of forest or savannah, but rather part of a mosaic - just as the Orlanthi have both herders and farmers, something like this could emerge as part of a pluralistic Earth/Plant Rune cultural-ecological system.

That makes it quite different from a totalitarian Reforestation like the one planned by hardline Grower ideologues among the Aldryami as their contribution to the Hero Wars. That is more like the eucalyptus monoculture spreading across the part of the Cerrado where I was doing fieldwork this week - it claims to be a forest (and the carbon-capture cowboys would love us to believe it is a forest so they can get access to climate funding) but it destroys more life than it can ever nurture.

The best place in Glorantha to explore these forest/farmland dynamics is Northern Esrolia, and @Crel does this brilliantly in his ‘To Hunt a God’ cult/adventure pack, which is set in the Aldryami forest near Sylthi (you can find it in the Jonstown Compendium section of Drivetrhu here). The encounters in ‘To Hunt a God’ include a great range of Aldryami, from Deep Forest Gardeners to battle-oriented Yelmalio cultists, and are set up to encourage PCs to think about the range of motivations and worldviews that exist within even a relatively small Aldryami society.

[Hellhound Havoc]

36 minutes ago, AlexS said:

The best place in Glorantha to explore these forest/farmland dynamics is Northern Esrolia, and @Crel does this brilliantly in his ‘To Hunt a God’ cult/adventure pack, which is set in the Aldryami forest near Sylthi (you can find it in the Jonstown Compendium section of Drivetrhu here). The encounters in ‘To Hunt a God’ include a great range of Aldryami, from Deep Forest Gardeners to battle-oriented Yelmalio cultists, and are set up to encourage PCs to think about the range of motivations and worldviews that exist within even a relatively small Aldryami society.

Amazing comment, thanks a lot fo the indication and for the thoughtfulness, I'll take a look at To Hunt a God. Your point about the hardline reforestation being similar to the eucalyptus plantations really gives me a different spin on it, I hadn't considered that there might be an ideological component to the whole thing. Cheers!

[soltakss]

On 7/1/2023 at 3:08 AM, Hellhound Havoc said:

So recently I read up on why exactly are the Elder Races at war with one another for a thousand years and a half, and... I'm just not entirely sure why. But beyond that, I'm not sure what that adds to the setting. Why can't the Uz just be another kind of "people" who live around, for instance? I feel like it's meant to be taken as a sort of justification for something but idk, fantasy racism never jived well with me.

But maybe I'm misunderstanding something, so here's what I understood from reading a bit on why each of these hate one another.

Other people have given very detailed answers.

Mostal, Aldrya, Kyger Litor and Zorak Zoran did bad things to each other in God Time, so their descendants and followers hate each other. For example, Zorak Zoran arte all of Flamal's Plants once.

In the 16 centuries after God Time ended, the Elder Races have fought and hated each other because of the God Time feuds, with a few notable exceptions, embedding the hate very deeply.

 

[Qizilbashwoman]

4 hours ago, AlexS said:

eucalyptus monoculture spreading across the part of the Cerrado

i'd like to take this moment to give the men who deliberately imported eucalyptus trees a nice boot in the snoot, "why yes let's plant poisonous explosive fire trees since we are running out of whales to use as fuel"

Edited July 2, 2023 by Qizilbashwoman

[metcalph]

21 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

i'd like to take this moment to give the men who deliberately imported eucalyptus trees a nice boot in the snoot, "why yes let's plant poisonous explosive fire trees since we are running out of whales to use as fuel"

Guess you haven't found out about their habit of dropping huge branches (capable of killing people) without warning?