God/Cult of Metal workers!

[radmonger]

It was Eurmal who did the stealing,.

And he only stole the hardware, not the operating procedures, maintenance or production manuals.

[French Desperate WindChild]

5 hours ago, g33k said:

I do not think the smiths of Humakt needed to steal the secrets.
Iron is the metal of Death:  Humakt knows its secrets!

I totally agree 

[soltakss]

On 10/11/2023 at 1:49 PM, g33k said:

Iron is the metal of Death:  Humakt knows its secrets!

Iron was invented by the Mostali to kill Aldryami and Uz, so comes later than Death. As a Darkness Power, Death might originally have been made of Lead but each deity who used it probably forged a weapon from their own metal.

[g33k]

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

Iron was invented by the Mostali to kill Aldryami and Uz, so comes later than Death. As a Darkness Power, Death might originally have been made of Lead but each deity who used it probably forged a weapon from their own metal.

YGWV!

Yes, the Mostali "invented" iron; and yes, Death came (cosmologically) before iron.

IMG, Death-metal derives so much from the Death Rune that Humakt knows its secrets from the "Other Side" than the Mostali approach it.  It was Humakt himself who revealed thesecrets of iron to the Humakti smiths; no Mostali secrets were stolen, and the Mostali bear no grudge against the Humakti for knowing the secrets.

 

Edited October 15, 2023 by g33k

[Joerg]

2 hours ago, g33k said:

YGWV!

Yes, the Mostali "invented" iron; and yes, Death came (cosmologically) before iron.

IMG, Death-metal derives so much from the Death Rune that Humakt knows its secrets from the "Other Side" than the Mostali approach it.  It was Humakt himself who revealed thesecrets of iron to the Humakti smiths; no Mostali secrets were stolen, and the Mostali bear no grudge against the Humakti for knowing the secrets.

 

IMG, the iron caste of the Mostali would have been started after the birth of Umath unhinged the World Machine and made Mostal unresponsive towards the pleas of the Mostali for instructions. High King Elf striking down the base of the Spike using Death, killing Stone, would be a much later incident, with the majority of the Mostali of that time already the self-replicating Clay variety.

The birth of Umath "dismembered" the World Machine. His subsequent crash into the northern Pillar halfway between his birth and the death of Yelm destroyed one of the stopgap measures the Mostali had devised to keep the remains of the world machine running as smoothly as possible, the four pillars preventing the sky dome from wobbling.

In the Vadel story in Revealed Mythologies, Vadel is given the Iron Spirit Prison for his return expedition into Bamatela. This would be in the late Golden Age, with the first rivers (including Neliom) already on dry land. This is Fourth Action, Multiplication, and not yet Fifth Action. Whether Malkion's Expulsion Walk is (a cognate of) the killing of Grandfather Mortal is a different question.

Iron Dwarf received the sword from Eurmal after Orlanth had slain the Emperor. He remade it as an axe, laying no claim to sword-smithing, or creating the original sword of Death. (Other than Eurmal having removed it from the base of the Spike, exposing it to what lies beyond Subere's Vault).

I sort of question the existence or at least the mythical relevance of Humakt before becoming and/or receiving the Sword of Death. He would have been little more than an interchangeable Storm Brother with an above-average score at the court of Kargan Tor. Sure, there is a brother of Orlanth in the Fighting Pit, but Humakt's next significant act after slaying Gramps Mortal and failing to prevent Orlanth from slaying the Emperor with Humakt('s toy) is severing his kinship ties to Orlanth and the rest of the windy family using the sword.

What Humakt gained from joining Eurmal on his Deathbringer quest is the experience of becoming the sword, of becoming the harbinger. This may help inform a metal worker about some of the quirks of the different material, but it doesn't impose any skill at metalworking.

Undergoing the experience of being re-shaped into an axe might have given Humakt the metalworking experience - gained from the Iron Mostali.

Edited October 15, 2023 by Joerg

[g33k]

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

...

Undergoing the experience of being re-shaped into an axe might have given Humakt the metalworking experience - gained from the Iron Mostali.

There is a nice symmetry, here!

Humakt gets a smithying, the Mostali get a specific, blacksmith'ed form of Death.
 

[scott-martin]

Thinking harder about where metallic dwarf castes come from and what gods leave behind when they die, I also had reason recently to look back at the old Elder Secrets list of which cults can harden which metals to become suitable houses for death.

Babeester and Maran Gor have iron. So does Gorgorma. Ur-metal is somehow compatible with the malign earth. Babeester retains the broad earth ability to work with copper as the de facto warrior cult of that pantheon.

Lhankor Mhy also has iron but has never bothered to collect the lore to work with the other metals. Maybe this is a legacy of his ancestral link to Urtiam.

Tsankth and Wachaza have iron, again as de facto warrior cults, but Magasta does not despite his intimate relationship with death.

Lodril does not have lo-metal, quicksilver or lead. That's okay because in the Holy Country they have other routes to those metals.

Iron is native to Orlanth and Storm Bull as two of the primary warrior cults of their pantheon. But Orlanth also gets native silver, which has perplexed some people. Historically the Lunar Way got access to silver "from associate cults" but now I think this has vanished . . . neither Yelorna nor Uleria are associated and they really don't share this magic freely.

I don't think the real magic properties of enchanted silver and tin or the mysteries of sa/lo have really been explored in non-military context but Bertalor is the nominal authority on the subject.

[Joerg]

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

ron is native to Orlanth and Storm Bull as two of the primary warrior cults of their pantheon. But Orlanth also gets native silver, which has perplexed some people. Historically the Lunar Way got access to silver "from associate cults" but now I think this has vanished . . . neither Yelorna nor Uleria are associated and they really don't share this magic freely.

Orlanth did conquer the Sky World (whose star metal is silver) and even successfully defended the skies against Tyram the Sky Terror, casting him down from the skies. That conquest is also the source for those star captains who helped out the Vingkotlings (Liorn, Forosil, Sedenor, Garan, and likely others whose folk perished in the Great Darkness). His Ring (the Sky Bear) is a prominent celestial feature emerging from Stormgate, as did all the stars upon Zator's escape from Umath's invasion. If the stars get silver, so does Orlanth.

 

Bertalor is as much an authority as Plentonius (and almost a contemporary), and works from an incomplete collection of facts.

Edited October 17, 2023 by Joerg

[Richard S.]

I can't post the excerpt since it's too long, but there's a more modern list of which cults can enchant which metals on page 14 of weapons & equipment. All of the lunar cults except for the red goddess and seven mothers have enchant silver natively, so I think they're the "associates" mentioned for those two, probably because all of the rune magic for the RG and 7M comes from associates/subcults.

Some other possibly interesting things are that Lodril can enchant quicksilver/aluminum and lead now, Aranea can enchant silver, and the Invisible God's sorcerers only know how to enchant iron.

Edited October 17, 2023 by Richard S.

[scott-martin]

10 hours ago, Joerg said:

If the stars get silver, so does Orlanth.

I don't recall this coming up in the email newsletter era so will simply have to treat it as the top revelation of the season. For the Dawn Age Pelorians, the initial lightbringer contacts probably looked a lot like starlight tribes returned from ancient times to brighten a dark world. Only later do they learn a separate word for "storm." In this model, the north never really bothered to assign native bronze a mythic role in its metallurgy but instead relies on Lodril's ability to alloy copper with tin (and maybe some additional metals that look like silver) into what Pelorian "brass." This alchemical wedding of earth with heaven is a cult secret and probably at least mildly taboo in formal yelmic doctrine.

Later the bright points in the sky were sorted into pro- and anti-yelmic families, with some getting classified as "storm stars," others as "sky stars" and one or two big enough to be planets or moons. Uleria is a planet. Sedenya is a moon. Entekos is a planet and a storm goddess or "air" with lunar associations. But Orlanth's association with silver remains embedded in the metallurgy of the southern coast, land of the "grey ones," the silver people, the silver age, the silver empire.

Note that water forces also conquer heaven but do not get true silver secrets. What they have instead is the mystery of "quick" silver, heavy water that sinks or (when purified with the Lodril secrets that they did actually take), rises to the surface. This is the alchemical mystery.

And IMG now crazy old Gringle needed a Third Eye Blue and an Uleria on site and on payroll because he was engaged in the great work of breeding bullion itself.