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

[JRE]

The passage of time does not change habits and cultures as much as it does in our Earth because many of the reasons for conflict and hate are revisited frequently in the Godtime.

I belong to a school that considers the Godtime is actually a yoke limiting change and new thought in Glorantha, so only those that are truely revolutionary can bring something new to Glorantha and usually will be sorely punished by the "Cosmos", represented by the mortlas still following the customs of the God War. It is even worse for the Elder Races because they are mostly closer to their deities, so change is even harder for them that it is for humans.

So that something happened a thousand years ago or before Dawn, it is bound to be still remembered and even revisited all the time, making change very hard. That is what heroes end up doing, proposing or opposing change, as they are the ones that can do it or avoid it.

[Hellhound Havoc]

1 hour ago, JRE said:

So that something happened a thousand years ago or before Dawn, it is bound to be still remembered and even revisited all the time, making change very hard. That is what heroes end up doing, proposing or opposing change, as they are the ones that can do it or avoid it.

This is a very interesting thought, and also gives a different meaning to the Hero Wars "bringing end to history as we know", if that means severing the God Time fully.

...I have absolutely no idea what repercussions that might have, though. Magic would probably just cease existing innit? Since it exists by the friction between the God Time and Time.

[hipsterinspace]

On 7/1/2023 at 4:39 PM, 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.

As others have mentioned, Aldryami are specifically tree-people, not just plant or nature. Very closely tied into that is the fact that Prax actually used to be a gigantic forest of redwood trees before the dawn. During the darkness the forest was clear-cut and fed to Oakfed (likely along with it's Aldryami denizens) to keep the people from freezing to death, and the elves still really resent that.

[mfbrandi]

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

idk, fantasy racism never jived well with me … 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.

I have every sympathy.

The cynic in me says that these two are related: the elder races and the humans are all people (and all stand for humans) but the humans are the colonisers (or the Aryan Nation, or whatever) and the elder races are the colonised, the first nations, the aboriginals (more generally: the other). We dehumanise some humans, now they are just animals, and we all know that true humans are individuals and have cultures, whereas animals are types and have natures. So distinctions among the elder races cannot be due to culture and subculture, they must be due to pseudo-scientific subspecies (like trollkin) or castes (in the sense that social insects might have castes). Othering complete, cue cannibalism and genocide. It is all in fancy dress, and the “animals” are draped in religion, but this is the armature of the thing, right?

I am not blaming the creators of Glorantha for inventing this stuff: it is everywhere. But we can bin the bits we find intolerable and use what’s left to satirise American exceptionalism or the delusions of the British Empire — I had a headmaster who said, “Well, of course, the Chinese don’t get addicted to opium.” — or … take your pick.

It seems to me that when someone asks about a design choice — “why are so-and-so so savage?” (meaning “why did the designer make them like that?”) — they might often get a diegetic answer — “they had a rough childhood and they don’t know any better” or “a big god did it and ran away” — which rather misses the point. (Though, yes, design choices can snowball.)

I have zero interest in attacking Game Designer X for being a racist or an imperialist or whatever nasty flavour we might from time to time think we detect in any game world, but we shouldn’t let a sensible avoidance of mudslinging inhibit us from discussing settings. So thanks for starting this thread. Right, that is more than enough from me for the day.

[hipsterinspace]

53 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

The cynic in me says that these two are related: the elder races and the humans are all people (and all stand for humans) but the humans are the colonisers (or the Aryan Nation, or whatever) and the elder races are the colonised, the first nations, the aboriginals (more generally: the other). We dehumanise some humans, now they are just animals, and we all know that true humans are individuals and have cultures, whereas animals are types and have natures.

This kind of othering isn’t necessarily subtextual to the elder races as much as it’s fully textual to in-world beliefs about the Hykimi animists, especially in the case of their relationship with the Malkioni. The peoples of Danmalestan colonized lands that were once the territories of many different Hykimi groups, with conflicts like Akem breaking the Eleven Beasts Alliance punctuating much of their early history. In the wake of this, some of them assimilated with the Malkioni (or other non-Hykimi groups), like the Pendali of Seshnela, while others continued to fight back, like the Telmori, who would side with Nysalor in an attempt to take their revenge on Akem and their other foes.

53 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

So distinctions among the elder races cannot be due to culture and subculture, they must be due to pseudo-scientific subspecies (like trollkin) or castes (in the sense that social insects might have castes). Othering complete, cue cannibalism and genocide. It is all in fancy dress, and the “animals” are draped in religion, but this is the armature of the thing, right?

There’s actually a pretty wide cultural variance within different groups of the same elder race, even if they speak the same language and follow the same traditions. The Uz of Dagori Inkarth are culturally distinct from those of the Shadow Plateau, likely in part due to very the thing that seems to keep the elder races relatively united in purpose: the strength of their traditions of ancestral worship. Dagori Inkarth is more culturally “trollish” and suspicious of humans than the relatively more cosmopolitan trolls of the Shadow Plateau, likely because they’re ruled by Mistress Race trolls and, as such, more strongly Kyger Litor-aligned, while their Argan Argar cult lacks the same prestige as the one in the lands once ruled by his son. More broadly, the strength of Kyger Litor and Aldrya, the respective ancestral mother goddesses of the Uz and Aldryami peoples, seems to be the key part of understanding why they remain so much more unified (and distinct from humans) as cultures.

Edited July 4, 2023 by hipsterinspace

[Jeff]

When we talk about cultures in Glorantha, we are always really talking about cults. All of the Elder Races (lets ignore the Triolini for a moment) have maintained a direct lineal connection to their ancestral founding deity who defines what it means to be a person - Kyger Litor, Aldrya, Mostal. All dark trolls are initiates of Kyger Litor as that is part of what it means to be a dark troll, but some are initiates of another deity as well. Same deal with with Aldrya and the elves. We get differences between troll and elf groups from these secondary cults (so for example the Shadow Plateau trolls love Argan Argar, which has an impact on their society), but all Elder Race societies have those core cults driving things.

Humans don't have that connection. We could all worship Daka Fal - we all have ancestors after all - but we have no single ancestral founding deity (most of our stories say we were created by a bunch of deities - who might not even include our main deities!). Orlanth is not the ancestral founding deity of the Orlanthi - the Vingkotling are long dead and even among the Orlanthi, only about a third are initiates of Orlanth. Same thing with Yelm or Yelmalio. The human cults of Dragon Pass allied with the Elder Races at the Dawn, only to discover other humans that were unaware of their cults. Some Malkioni view this is a sign of human superiority; others view this as a sign that humans are the most broken of the sentients. 

[Squaredeal Sten]

On 7/2/2023 at 11:48 AM, soltakss said:

.......

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.

 

However in Time there is plenty of provocation: Guide to Glorantha explains it in the Elder Wilds section, of all places: When the Unity Council broke up because the trolls didn't trust Nysalor, the elves attacked the trolls as Nysalor inflicted the Curse of Kin on them.

So it turns out the elves are the bad guys.

[Qizilbashwoman]

8 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

So it turns out the elves are the bad guys.

anyone who plays ttrpgs already knows this surprising fact

[Manunancy]

In glorantha too you should never work for a dragon or trust an elf....

[Eff]

On 7/2/2023 at 1:00 AM, Hellhound Havoc said:

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.

I think the best way to put this is that the fandom treats Glorantha the way Tolkien treated Middle-Earth: as a kind of imaginary prehistory of the real world (aided and abetted by Greg Stafford being a gnomic cuss). So for a lot of people, of course the nonhumans have to vanish because you don't see any elves around here today, now do you? But if we understand nonhumans as variant consciousnesses, then perhaps there are elves still around in the sense of the variant consciousness that elfhood in Glorantha points at being an observable way of being human in the real world, though not quite with leaves for hair.

And there's also the shockingly radical proposition of detaching Glorantha from that position of being imaginary prehistory and making it alien, or parallel, or if you've just finished snorting an entire rail of Gene Wolfe and looking at the art of the medicine bundles in the Nomad Gods rules PDF, perhaps a future.

[Squaredeal Sten]

6 minutes ago, Eff said:

......So for a lot of people, of course the nonhumans have to vanish because you don't see any elves around here today, now do you? ....

Of course the trolls are still around.  If you don't beleve me then just spend some time looking at Quora.

[Hellhound Havoc]

2 hours ago, Eff said:

I think the best way to put this is that the fandom treats Glorantha the way Tolkien treated Middle-Earth: as a kind of imaginary prehistory of the real world (aided and abetted by Greg Stafford being a gnomic cuss). So for a lot of people, of course the nonhumans have to vanish because you don't see any elves around here today, now do you? But if we understand nonhumans as variant consciousnesses, then perhaps there are elves still around in the sense of the variant consciousness that elfhood in Glorantha points at being an observable way of being human in the real world, though not quite with leaves for hair.

And there's also the shockingly radical proposition of detaching Glorantha from that position of being imaginary prehistory and making it alien, or parallel, or if you've just finished snorting an entire rail of Gene Wolfe and looking at the art of the medicine bundles in the Nomad Gods rules PDF, perhaps a future.

Yeah, I personally don't feel too compelled about the whole "this is sorta kinda like our world, but in the very distant past" that Conan and others like to have. I appreciate that Glorantha is its own thing - that's what I like about it, it's not our world because in our world we can't change stuff by taking enough drugs to take down a small horse and vanishing for a few weeks.

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, Hellhound Havoc said:

in our world we can't change stuff by taking enough drugs to take down a small horse and vanishing for a few weeks

We can’t? Why did no one ever think to tell me this?

[What follows is stated assertively — for simplicity — but imagine it hedged with “what ifs”, “alternativelys”, and “YGWVs” at every turn.]

I like to imagine Argrath’s little Feric Jaggar rant as delivered word-for-word by a non-Homo sapiens. Haven’t we all imagined that it is the trollkin — who are “human” too — who shall inherit the earth? But enlo, durulz, newtling, … just take your pick. And if the people after the world has been remade are one, that is not to say that they all have to look the same, is it? If the “monsters” have vanished, maybe that is just to say that “othering” is over (if you don’t see the “elder races” as intrinsically magical). The people of the Fourth Age may be as scaly, feathery, or barky as you like — the important thing is that they have shrugged off the habit of binding themselves to the bloody loops of Godtime and have entered linear time proper. They don’t feel the laws of nature as a yoke. They have escaped magic … or magical thinking.

This is, of course, to read against the grain (of fannish interpretation, at least), but I like to find eucatastrophe in the very thinning of Glorantha (a happy ending without a restoration of the Golden (or Green) Age) — don’t weep for the superheated war of all against all, but embrace the cooling world on its slow sane slide toward the Void. Don’t mourn the loss of T. rex, but delight in the jackdaw, the coot, the swift, and all the other quotidian dinosaurs. “Worse than a romantic, I’m a sentimentalist,” said Archie Shepp.

The point is not that Fourth Age Glorantha = Earth, but that it is like Earth in lacking miracles. Every world is like that. Has to be. But nothing is “lost”. We have our myths, but they are not history; they were never meant to be. Glorantha up to and including the Hero Wars is a thought experiment in the clodhopping literalisation of myth — of turning myth into an Avengers or Transformers movie — but in the end, even superhero Argrath found that unsatisfactory and fed Orlanth-as-Optimus Prime into the car crusher … straight down the memory hole of blessed oblivion.

And if that all sounds too cheery and optimistic, comfort yourself that no one has explained any of it to Wakboth, who is consequently pulling himself together, dusting himself down, and beginning his long slow slouch toward Bethlehem. 😉

[Bohemond]

I think it's important to recognize that these races tend to need things that harm the other races. Trolls are voracious eaters and left unchecked can devour literally everything. A group of trollkin are like locusts, so if they get onto your tula they will just eat until they can't eat any more, which can easily destroy herds and fields. Troll eating is horrific to humans--they don't cook their food so they will literally just rip a chunk off a still live animal or human. In battle, they sometimes sit down to eat the people they've just killed, as well as their own fallen. They are just as bad to Aldryami forests. And they love eating dwarves because dwarves go into their rock gullet but are more easily digested, which is very pleasurable for trolls. In a world where food production is a serious challenge, where famine and starvation are legitimate threats, and whole cults exist to counter that, trolls are the embodiment of one of the most dangerous principles in the world. Trolls NEED darkness, whereas humans and elves NEED sunlight. 

Elves are similarly a threat to human food production--they dislike the human tendency to cut down forests and till fields because to elves that is constraining the natural development of vegetation. I imagine that aldryami look at fields and grain silos like abattoirs or slave colonies, where their little plant brothers are tortured to prevent them from achieving their natural growth and are then slaughtered just when they are about to reproduce. Dwarves view vegetation rather the way humans view mold--something disgusting that gets everywhere and ruins and sickens things if you don't clean it away regularly. 

Dwarves need order and perfection, and no other species lives up to their standards. Humans and elves and trolls just run riot over everything and cause trouble for the project to repair the World Machine, so not only are they a nuisance, they are a nuisance that is actively getting in the way of the dwarves' primary agenda. They also view pretty much all organic things as components for their own projects--when they need troll gall bladders they just go out and harvest them, which understandably infuriates whoever is on the receiving end of that treatment. Because their own society is generally so rigidly structured, they are inclined to look down on other races as -at best- children that need to be taught how to be seen and not heard. They find biological reproduction unpleasant and disgusting, so the fact that other races actively celebrate it grosses them out. Their rigidity also makes cross-species understanding hard to achieve because they literally can't understand how other species think. (I suspect the elves have the same problem). They make horrifying weapons that other species can't understand and can't easily defend against, especially iron, which is toxic to trolls and elves. They are also locked in conflict with both trolls and elves for control of the same basic resource--the earth itself. 

Dragonewts are simply unpredictable because their thought patterns are utterly alien to anyone who's not a dragonewt. It's nearly impossible to predict how they will react to something, which means you can't easily make peace treaties with them--how would know they would actually keep them? You kill them and they come back--that's absolutely terrifying! In that sense, they're sort of like zombies--driven by an alien mindset and even if you kill them you can never be sure they won't return. 

Think about how easy it is for two historical human cultures to misunderstand each other. To take just a few more extreme examples, white Americans often struggle to understand the concerns of Black and Native Americans and can't understand why those groups won't just let things like slavery and genocide go. Nazis demonized Jews to the point that many literally regarded them as inhuman, and white supremacists view Blacks as less-evolved humans ("they don't feel pain like we do..."). If that sort of monstrosity happens in our own world, and not even two centuries ago, imagine how much more antipathetic actually different sentient species would be to each other. 

Edited July 12, 2023 by Bohemond

[DrGoth]

On 7/11/2023 at 10:13 AM, Eff said:

I think the best way to put this is that the fandom treats Glorantha the way Tolkien treated Middle-Earth: as a kind of imaginary prehistory of the real world (aided and abetted by Greg Stafford being a gnomic cuss). So for a lot of people, of course the nonhumans have to vanish because you don't see any elves around here today, now do you? But if we understand nonhumans as variant consciousnesses, then perhaps there are elves still around in the sense of the variant consciousness that elfhood in Glorantha points at being an observable way of being human in the real world, though not quite with leaves for hair.

And there's also the shockingly radical proposition of detaching Glorantha from that position of being imaginary prehistory and making it alien, or parallel, or if you've just finished snorting an entire rail of Gene Wolfe and looking at the art of the medicine bundles in the Nomad Gods rules PDF, perhaps a future.

My Glorantha varies - it is not the prehistory of the RW.

And the shape of the 4th age is not fixed.

[Richard S.]

I've never spoken to anyone who sees Glorantha as a prehistory and I don't see any evidence for it in the material we have. The Elder Races might be fading, but magic itself doesn't seem to be at risk. Even if we take KoS literally, iirc it only says the relationship between gods and men was changed, not that it was destroyed. And no mention was made of how sorcery and spirit magics were affected, if at all.

Edit: of course, since Greg was a shaman, it's completely possible he didn't see the supernatural disappearing as a necessity for it being a prehistory.

Edited July 12, 2023 by Richard S.

[scott-martin]

The notion of the disenchanted "iron cage" of late capitalist blah as the projected outcome of a fantasy setting is fertile enough in an elegiac kind of way but it's been done. Dragons live forever but not so little boys, as it were. The magic goes away. They set aside childish things and have what was once considered the adventure of productive adulthood, only returning at the end. King of Sartar plays with this as the trolls have died out, the gods are gone, the moon leached of color and orbiting now, Merry and Pippin a little taller than Bilbo, etc. A suitably deadpan archaeological take would be funny and to be fair some people are playing around with "the academic record" these days.

But one way the Gloranthan project has been exciting since the very first page it emerged as a commercial enterprise is that it replaces the secular received history of that iron cage world with a secret history better suited for an equally mythic California. If we cultivate a particular sense of present, Glorantha becomes a viable version of our past. And when both of these axes of time are reenchanted we see that the dragon does in fact live forever. And of course given the nature of dreams we should not be surprised that past and future converge. This is when they converge.
 

Edited July 12, 2023 by scott-martin

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

The magic goes away.

Yes, but (and I suspect you agree with at least some of these) …

• I don’t think the notion of thinning was forced on the fantasists by killjoy scientists
• thinning as elegiac or just plain miserable is only one way to take it
• we don’t need to daydream dragons to be able to “tolerate” a mundane world
• at last count, I think our oh-so-mundane world had about four times as many species of dragon as species of mammal

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

four times as many species of dragon

That's not even including the ones who made the biggest jump of all

 

Edited July 12, 2023 by scott-martin

[DrGoth]

On 7/12/2023 at 12:46 PM, Richard S. said:

I've never spoken to anyone who sees Glorantha as a prehistory and I don't see any evidence for it in the material we have. The Elder Races might be fading, but magic itself doesn't seem to be at risk. Even if we take KoS literally, iirc it only says the relationship between gods and men was changed, not that it was destroyed. And no mention was made of how sorcery and spirit magics were affected, if at all.

Edit: of course, since Greg was a shaman, it's completely possible he didn't see the supernatural disappearing as a necessity for it being a prehistory.

As I said, I don't support it, but I have heard it.  I think it comes from some of the style Greg used way back in WBRM.  My copy (actually the AH dragon pass) is packed away right now, but I think it went along the lines of "looking back in to the dim past we cannot now tell who won the hero wars". The implication being drawn it is the real us looking back and so...

As I said, I don't support that theory.

And I'm far from convinced Greg meant it to be read that way. He could just as easily have been writing from a Gloranthan pov.  

[French Desperate WindChild]

15 minutes ago, DrGoth said:

As I said, I don't support it, but I have heard it.

same for me, if I remember what I read, something like (with my words) :

"what is the future of Glorantha ?" and Greg watched the window and answered "this"

Probably with better words and grammar than me ^^. with the meaning you want.

But in all cases, Glorantha, for me, stops with the publication

 

[Bohemond]

On 7/2/2023 at 2:59 PM, JRE said:

The passage of time does not change habits and cultures as much as it does in our Earth because many of the reasons for conflict and hate are revisited frequently in the Godtime.

I think this is a very important point. In Glorantha, myth recapitulates social action and social action recapitulates myth. Almost all important social activities/practices/groups have at least one myth that justifies them, and most myths act to create social activities and practices. It's the chicken and the egg--both came first. 

"Why do we hate the trolls, grandpa?" "Because Orlanth fought and defeated them."

"Why does Orlanth fight the trolls, grandpa?""Because they are horrible monsters that we need to fight." 

People tell the myth of Orlanth defeating the Dark Woman because people need myths to use as tools to protect themselves from trollish aggression. And people are a target of trollish aggression because the myths reinforce the hostility between them and the trolls. 

As agnostics sometimes say today, it's awfully convenient that God turns out to hate exact/y the things his followers hate. 

Edited July 13, 2023 by Bohemond

[Ynneadwraith]

On 7/4/2023 at 12:57 PM, mfbrandi said:

It seems to me that when someone asks about a design choice — “why are so-and-so so savage?” (meaning “why did the designer make them like that?”) — they might often get a diegetic answer — “they had a rough childhood and they don’t know any better” or “a big god did it and ran away” — which rather misses the point. (Though, yes, design choices can snowball.)

This. People provide a Watsonian answer to a Doylist question. It's not 'what is written about X' it's 'explain to me that Glorantha is a better experience for X being written the way it is'.

In my personal opinion, it's not. One of Glorantha's greatest strengths is the depth of its human cultures, which surpasses pretty much anything else that I've come across. Why would we not want every bit as much depth applied to each and every aspect of Glorantha, elder races included?

I understand why we haven't got that. There's only so much brain-hours available to create such depth, and it's been spent in the most part on the human cultures (and even then only a few of them). For me, the obvious next thought is 'we have some brain-hours now, let's spend them on adding depth and complexity where it needs to exist'. Luckily, with the gold that is YGWV we have the permission to do that (unlike more restrictive IPs).

Trolls I can get on board with, though I'd like to see more cultural variety. Aldryami I find singularly uninspiring, which saddens me as a die-hard 'elf person'. I've yet to come across someone's version of Glorantha that has made aldryami 'click' for me, or thought of a way to do it myself. Mostali I sort of don't expect to find compelling as I rarely find dwarves compelling, but that's more of a personal failing than anything else. If injecting a little more cultural variety to break up their monoliths would provide more opportunity to make them compelling, I'm all for it.

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, Ynneadwraith said:

Trolls I can get on board with, though I'd like to see more cultural variety. Aldryami I find singularly uninspiring, which saddens me as a die-hard 'elf person'. I've yet to come across someone's version of Glorantha that has made aldryami 'click' for me, or thought of a way to do it myself. Mostali I sort of don't expect to find compelling as I rarely find dwarves compelling, but that's more of a personal failing than anything else. If injecting a little more cultural variety to break up their monoliths would provide more opportunity to make them compelling, I'm all for it.

You should post more. The most generative approach for me is to treat each of these parallel approaches to consciousness as an unstable cultural coalition organized by distinctions that matter enormously to them but are hard to translate to people on the outside. Thus each of the troll strongholds IMG has a separate origin and expresses its own prehistoric panoply of dark entities underneath the Kyger overlay . . . even using the different published variants of the cult for local flavor.

The dwarves never resonated with "Doyle" either so beyond fairly crude satire he didn't spare them the cycles. IMG the key to their civilization is that each of the extant colonies was not born that way but literally made, assimilated into the mostal complex from existing raw man rune materials. Conquered. Again, each colony has a different original situation and so is constantly facing a different set of internal recidivisms that surface interactions with their remote immune system rarely even hint at. Of course this does make the mostal orthodoxy into the assholes but this is a Doylist bias that isn't really worth fighting against . . . the important thing is to be able to get far enough into the heads of individuals (already an oxymoron in orthodox terms and paradox = heresy, the computer is your friend) to make them playable. To give them the chance to concoct a soul.

(Some people enjoy making the elder approaches "alien" to an extreme as a dramatic challenge but as more or less a human being sharing this hobby with other human beings I don't worry about it too much. If I wanted to be ostentatiously weird other games already provide malkavians.)

Which brings us to elves. I spent a lot of time in my youth getting really into the Frazer mythos, the whole seasonal ritual & romance of the dying & resurrected vegetable god. I have a Plant rune score. However, I recognize that most of the time what we call vegetable consciousness is really just more humans operating on a different emotional economy that looks superficially "archaic" relative to modern factory farming and its bronze age equivalents. I don't really ask them if their veins pump sap instead of blood or if they actually die in the fall or simply sleep a lot more. Or never sleep at all in the cosmic south. What matters is that the various cyclical routes in and out of death matter a lot to them and they have fought merciless wars over what we would consider fine points of timing. None of this is likely to ever get much in the way of brain hours as far as the publishing goes. That's okay. Let the publishing emphasize how our elves are different. It's a marketing thing.

 

Edited January 4 by scott-martin
soul

[mfbrandi]

Welcome to the hive mind, @Ynneadwraith. Once you have learned to float above the pointless arguments — and I am sure you’ll pick it up much quicker than I did: I am a construct of very little RAM — it can be a fun place.

10 hours ago, Ynneadwraith said:

Why would we not want every bit as much depth applied to each and every aspect of Glorantha [as to its human cultures], elder races included?

Because it is good to have gaps left for us to make forays into ourselves, rather than turning the already dense palimpsest into a black page? Not that I think that is the reason, of course: I suspect that somewhere along the line, some of the creators drank too deeply of the Orlanth–Ernalda Kool-Aid. There is probably some tension between passionately filling in the detail of an “invented world” and providing just enough detail to prompt us to exercise our own imaginations, no?

So relish the bits Chaosium cannot be bothered with — they are yours. Sure, you can vary your Glorantha, anyway, but it is probably easier to recompose and improvise on I Got Rhythm than to attempt that with some bit of late Webern, no?