How Glorantha has changed over RL time

[Aurelius]

What happened with the second l of Mallia?

[Joerg]

29 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

What happened with the second l of Mallia?

Possibly a Latin-literate editor, same thing that happened to Saggitus the Archer subcult of Yelm.

While Malia might be said to be a bad one, I wouldn't call her hammers.

[Scotty]

I've split off the Elmal part of this thread as it was taking over: 

 

[Aurelius]

From the Lords of Terror thread....

On 11/20/2024 at 6:29 PM, Jeff said:

For years Greg played around with the idea that the Orlanthi (like the Celts) practiced headhunting, and it fit into WBRM with the Headhunters unit. Than would of course be a perversion of this. 

Greg moved strongly away from the Orlanthi being Celt analogues (after King of Dragon Pass), and this fell out as well.  After getting all his old WBRM unit descriptions returned to him around 2015 or so, the Headhunters unit became tied not with ancient traditions, but instead became "this regiment consists of warriors from the Culbrea tribe. They received this name for their treatment of Lunar soldiers during their rebellion in 1622-1625, taking their heads as macabre preserved trophies suspended from their mounts’ harness and from their standards." 

Can anyone shed light into the story of how the Orlanthi ended up being like the Celts, why Greg changed his mind, and so forth? They still do bless the woad, but are there some particular Celtishnesses that were thrown out the window when they became ex-Celts, and was there some other inspiration replacing it? 

I also have a bit of a gut feeling that the Viking influences predated the Celt influences, but I have nothing to substantiate that, but I'm also curious if anyone can say something about when the Orlanthi stopped being landlocked Vikings as well?

[Nick Brooke]

Viking Orlanthi were in yer face by Cults of Terror (1981); there had been signs beforehand (werewolves, berserkers and einherjars).

Celtic Orlanthi were in yer face by the Red Box (1985), with woad, torcs, hillforts and chariots a-go-go.

Orlanthi stopped being landlocked Vikings when they became sword-and-sandal Mycenaean-thru-Classical Greeks for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (2018).

[Nick Brooke]

The way Jeff explains Greg moving away from old analogies is that when he started creating Glorantha these things were among his odd academic interests, not things he’d picked up from pop culture. He was leveraging stuff he’d read in myths and sagas and textbooks, not bringing Jim Fitzpatrick or Pat Mills or Ridley Scott into Glorantha.

Eventually, because we live in a wonderful interconnected modern world of wonders, people became familiar with the sources he’d been cherrypicking from, and exciting modern fiction and movies and TV shows and comics and video games made them accessible, so they weren’t niche weird academic things any more, and they carried too much baggage.

So Greg (by which, at this point, we mean Jeff) started stripping out older analogies that weren’t felt to be helpful any longer. I strongly suspect Skyrim was the tipping point: that video game now owns the “rebel Vikings vs. Romans, plus Dragons” space, and we’d feel uncomfortable nestled up against it.

But we’ve got almost fifty years of legacy products where the analogies are deeply embedded, they’re what some people love about Glorantha, and of course analogies can be extremely helpful. (It’s just that they can also be misleading.) That’s why the smart thing to do is to use several of them simultaneously, whatever’s appropriate to the stories you’re currently playing, and not to pretend they didn’t happen and that people who like your games are Doing It Wrong.

[Aurelius]

Thank you very much again @Nick Brooke . This stuff is tricky to figure out from a great distance, and I’m hesitant to make assertions myself because people get a bit touchy when an outsider tries to unpack all those real world influences. I don’t have the Bormandy kind of ammunition ready for debate. 😅

I wish Glorantha had an energetic PhD student looking at dusty manuscripts and interviewing the early creators before too much is lost. 

[scott-martin]

2 hours ago, Aurelius said:

I wish Glorantha had an energetic PhD student looking at dusty manuscripts and interviewing the early creators before too much is lost. 

Well it has you now! Most of the early creators got opportunities to get pretty mouthy in those manuscripts and some are still around to answer follow-up queries. And one of the things about our thing is that more draft documents keep showing up than we have any statistical right to expect. 

--

Remember the woad years? The vikings come early because Harald Hardrada is a mask of Hal Foster . . . not the art historian, the illustrator.

[jajagappa]

4 hours ago, Aurelius said:

I wish Glorantha had an energetic PhD student looking at dusty manuscripts and interviewing the early creators before too much is lost. 

Of course, there are many different perspectives. Even by the early 90's as Greg worked on his DH and Lunar documents, there was a shift towards older Mesopotamian/Middle-eastern cultures vs. earlier Celtic/Viking models. E.g. in discussions on Saird/Imther, Greg and I leaned towards ancient Anatolian cultures including Hittite. And the shift towards Lunar satrapies certainly had the Persian Empire in mind.

[M Helsdon]

My vision of Glorantha was heavily influenced by Luise Perrin's RQ2 illustrations. Always had an ancient world feel.

[Aurelius]

6 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Remember the woad years? The vikings come early because Harald Hardrada is a mask of Hal Foster . . . not the art historian, the illustrator.

I don't -- but if there's a story related to the topic of the thread, I'd like to hear it!

6 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Well it has you now! Most of the early creators got opportunities to get pretty mouthy in those manuscripts and some are still around to answer follow-up queries. And one of the things about our thing is that more draft documents keep showing up than we have any statistical right to expect. 

I've seen the academia from the inside and escaped with my life and my sanity. Nothing anyone can say will get me back in. 

[scott-martin]

2 hours ago, Aurelius said:

I've seen the academia from the inside and escaped with my life and my sanity. Nothing anyone can say will get me back in. 

This is far more fun, inverting the secular academy where few admit the game keeps getting dumber and the prizes get dumber too. Here the game was always just a game and yet the stakes are as high as we want them to be.

"Woad" emerges in the third published iteration of the Orlanth cult, which like Nick says is the red box that helps bring our thing into the description-rich 3E era. Before this, you really needed to squint to see anything "celtic" within theyalan culture, especially the highly urbane Sartar of WBRM and early published adventures . . . but explicitly "teutonic" theyalans were almost as challenging to spot up to that stage as well.

Reading more closely, I think the 3E "four cultures" character generation system (surviving in sublimated form in the Guide) did something very interesting here by encouraging people to interpret the theyalans as a composite of all the "barbarians" laid out in Fantasy Europe: these are "Gauls" and they are also "Vikings" and for that matter you model them the way you might model "feudal Europe" (i.e. "SCA Normal") as your baseline setting or more fictional warrior-driven tribal societies like Rohirrim or Cimmerians.

What all these cultures have in common is a doughty brawler ethic combined with what might be viewed as a taciturn refusal to form a sustainable centralized state. To the extent to which celts and teutons align with this central trope, they're practically interchangeable from a mechanical perspective: one big holding bucket. Only the details need to change to distinguish one regional tribal confederation from another, or from the Cherokee to give another example from the book. 

Glorantha already had a homegrown culture more directly derived from the Cherokee and the Genertela Players Book establishes that those people use the "nomad" backgrounds instead anyway so the theyalans inherit all of the "barbarian" elements people might want to bring to their gloranthan game. As far as I know, this is the first place theyalans are described as having "steads" and "carls" as well as "torques and golden neck rings" in the third age or any other time. Suddenly they need to become both teutons and celts. And the long struggle of the influences begins.

To my inexpert eye it's all more or less heathen. I only know that the "teutonic" layer is slightly older because Greg was documentably obsessed (like to the point of seances) with Hardrada and the sagas in the years that ramp up to WBRM, whereas "celtic" material takes a while to appear in his other work and even then his sources skew saxon for about a decade, after which like Harald (relation inferred) says, a broader pool of references emerges in the publishing.

Greg's foundational point of contact with late antiquity was Prince Valiant's time in Constantinople, but because Val was usually only visiting on business trips the real focus remained on what Merlin and Arthur were getting up to back at base or how the relatives left on Thule were doing. All of them together are the ancestors of our barbarians. We can honor them but we are not them; we find our own families, build our own archaeology, furnish our own sagas.

All that said "Bormandy" was always kind of goofy, if we can't noprize it (as done elsewhere on this site) then it's good to let it go as a somewhat unconvincing juvenile translation of something that holds up better.

Edited Friday at 11:06 PM by scott-martin
seance is more than a track on the polanski macbeth soundtrack

[AlHazred]

From my original RQ2 books, I always got the impression Sartar was a typical D&D setting, just Bronze Age.  But it had Alchemists' Guilds, and mercenary bands, and sheriffs, and sacred prostitutes, and so on. My DM used Gary Gygax's streetwalker table for random priestesses in the Temple of Uleria in Apple Lane. It was not-quite-D&D-but-close.

I actually got a better idea what was intended for Glorantha with RQ3 and the Mythic Europe setting, which I loved. And then Thunder Rebels and Storm Tribe came out and firmly solidified what I wanted to play and run. 

Edited Sunday at 05:56 PM by AlHazred