Hemp and Hazia

[Rodney Dangerduck]

In Glorantha, is there a connection?  I want to have a village where they grow hemp to make rope.  Would there also be a Hazia side business?  Trouble is, Hazia might be the main business, and not sure I want that.

[svensson]

There are other plants to make rope with other than hemp. Jute, manila, etc.

Second thing, the hemp used to make rope is almost an entirely different thing than the THC producing cannabis plant, especially after 50 years of hippies eff'ing with it's genome. The dope we smoked as kids would make lousy rope and has less than a quarter of the THC component of plants now.

As for using hemp in your game or writing, it's pretty easy to explain the uses of hemp other than as a recreational drug and say that hazia has that market locked up.

Depending on when you set your campaign, it may not be that much of an issue. Once Solanthos is deposed, the Yelmalions of Prax schism between those in New Pavis' Suntown and those still living in the County and until the issue between Belvanni and Vega is settled, the Church and the militias have far more to do than inspect farmer's fields.

[Rodney Dangerduck]

2 hours ago, svensson said:

There are other plants to make rope with other than hemp. Jute, manila, etc.

IMO jute & manila do not suit the climate in Sartar.  I may add in fibers from tree barks such as cedar & linden.

I like your quite realistic idea that the village grows best hemp for rope, which makes for lousy weed.  Maybe the PCs will try to struggle as drug lords, hopefully not.  🙂

Edited Monday at 10:20 PM by Rodney Dangerduck
Typo, add tree barks.

[Memestream]

You could both connect the two and keep it clandestine under the pretense of a local sect of tricksters.

Basically, they make rope really wrong, like so terribly wrong they wind up with (a) hazia(-like substance?). You could in turn represent this by depicting usage and trade of hazia in that village as something of a local scandal, or at least embarrassment.

[svensson]

45 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

IMO jute & manila do not suit the climate in Sartar.  I may add in fibers from tree barks such as cedar & linden.

I like your quite realistic idea that the village grows best hemp for rope, which makes for lousy weed.  Maybe the PCs will try to struggle as drug lords, hopefully not.  🙂

'Failure' is also 'an adventure' 😆

[svensson]

20 hours ago, Memestream said:

You could both connect the two and keep it clandestine under the pretense of a local sect of tricksters.

Basically, they make rope really wrong, like so terribly wrong they wind up with (a) hazia(-like substance?). You could in turn represent this by depicting usage and trade of hazia in that village as something of a local scandal, or at least embarrassment.

Not to be too picky here, but even during the worst of the cultural lockdown on hazia it still produced a significant percentage of Sun County's income. And this income largely went to farming peasants. There is a VERY good chance that that income was streamed into taxable assets [livestock, structures, dowries and bride-prices, etc.]. This then means that Sun Dome Inc. also received roughly the same percentage of its income from illegal hazia crops.

And while the Sun Domers are certainly xenophobic, hidebound, rigid and repressed, nobody ever said they were stupid. The temple hierarchy knew good and Yelm-damned well where those extra Wheels were coming from.

Look, suppressing the hazia trade would be almost simple for a society with as much control as the Sun Dome County of Prax has. All you had to do was force the militia to do their two weeks' annual service in areas other than their native villages then award a tax remittance to families of the file that found and destroyed the most hazia in a calendar year. Perhaps sweeten the pot by adding a cash bonus. And the Counts and the Temple both were smart enough to know this.

But that never happened. Oh, a couple of farmers a year were tried, convicted, and sent to the salt mines for image's sake, but since those salt mines are a temple monopoly sentencing hazia farmers to the mines never actually removes the convicted farmer's work from the economy.

Edited 19 hours ago by svensson

[Diadochoi]

Hazia is mentioned far more times in Runequest/Glorantha publications than hemp, so there is lots of freedom for GMs (not just YGMV)

e.g. Pavis Gateway to adventure: hemp 1, hazia 41   or   Life and traditions under the sun dome: hemp 0, hazia 111

Only Ships & shores of southern genertela mentions hemp as many times as hazia (6), and on p76 it explains the problems with hemp rope. It also lists rope being made using flax, papyrus, leather and coir fibre. Cotton can also be used to make rope and is available.

 

Separate question, in Glorantha is hazia = hemp  or is it an unrelated plant?

[Ali the Helering]

I am unclear as to why one would want to make the two dissimilar.  The dual usage makes great sense to me in areas where it is grown on a large scale.

IMG the Pentans use the steppe variety in exactly the way that Herodotus described the Scythians doing, casting buds onto braziers in sweat lodges.

[Joerg]

4 hours ago, Diadochoi said:

Separate question, in Glorantha is hazia = hemp  or is it an unrelated plant?

Hazia sort of resembles saffron in that it is made from the stamen of some flowering plants from the Eastern Rockwoods.

[MOB]

4 hours ago, Diadochoi said:

Separate question, in Glorantha is hazia = hemp  or is it an unrelated plant?

Unrelated.

16 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

I want to have a village where they grow hemp to make rope.  Would there also be a Hazia side business?  Trouble is, Hazia might be the main business, and not sure I want that.

In time honoured fashion, they hide their hazia crop deep inside their hemp fields.

[Jeff]

1 hour ago, MOB said:

Unrelated.

In time honoured fashion, they hide their hazia crop deep inside their hemp fields.

MOB's right, hazia and hemp are completely unrelated. Unlike the Lunar Empire, I rather doubt Argrath and his allies care in the slightest whether farmers grow hazia or not. 

[Rodney Dangerduck]

8 hours ago, Jeff said:

MOB's right, hazia and hemp are completely unrelated

Thanks very much Jeff and MOB.  That's exactly the question I wanted answered.

[Nick Brooke]

8 hours ago, Jeff said:

I rather doubt Argrath and his allies care in the slightest whether farmers grow hazia or not. 

Heh. I think Argrath cares a great deal about having a secure supply of hazia; he doesn't mind all that much where it comes from, though. 

[Ian Absentia]

12 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

I am unclear as to why one would want to make the two dissimilar.  The dual usage makes great sense to me in areas where it is grown on a large scale.

Hemp specifically?  At a practical level, refining one quality improves that usage significantly, though at the cost of other qualities.  The follow-on question is whether or not one can afford to differentiate the cultivation into separate crops. The botany of desire reaches into Glorantha as well.

!i!

[John Biles]

2 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

Heh. I think Argrath cares a great deal about having a secure supply of hazia; he doesn't mind all that much where it comes from, though. 

The money Hazia brings means you can just let the market handle ensuring a supply, given the demand.

[MOB]

5 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

Heh. I think Argrath cares a great deal about having a secure supply of hazia; he doesn't mind all that much where it comes from, though. 

Given King Argrath is hosting a pretender (Belvani) in Pavis, to maintain the delicate status quo it would seem Countess Vega has turned a blind eye to the illicit hazia trade heading north upriver from Sun County.

[svensson]

1 hour ago, MOB said:

Given King Argrath is hosting a pretender (Belvani) in Pavis, to maintain the delicate status quo it would seem Countess Vega has turned a blind eye to the illicit hazia trade heading north upriver from Sun County.

Well, perhaps I'm wrong but Sun County's export of hazia has always seemed to be a struggle to get the Lunars to use it but keep their own people from using it. If the County profits from a drug that damages Lunar society then, from the County's point of view, that's just comeuppance for the damage the Lunar Empire did to the County.

If that's the case, then I very well could see Lady Vega turning a blind eye to the export of hazia but come down like bag full of Wheels on anyone caught using it themselves.

[Note: I say this because there is a correlation between Central and South America's export of cocaine [etc.] into the US and the feelings many citizens of those countries have about America's interventionist policies for the last two centuries. I'm a veteran of that war and after I got home I did a LOT of reading to understand the reasons why we were there. Because of that, I can see the County having these motives.]

[MOB]

49 minutes ago, svensson said:

Well, perhaps I'm wrong but Sun County's export of hazia has always seemed to be a struggle to get the Lunars to use it but keep their own people from using it. If the County profits from a drug that damages Lunar society then, from the County's point of view, that's just comeuppance for the damage the Lunar Empire did to the County.

As @Nick Brooke  has noted elsewhere, 

"People only ever thought hazia was “illegal” because the Lunars insisted it should be a taxed monopoly, and the Sun County puritans didn’t like people using it religiously or recreationally. In post-Lunar Sartar, those constraints don’t apply."

Back when the Lunars ruled Pavis a lot of the hazia trade (out of Sun County, up to Pavis and then back to Dragon Pass and beyond where there is a demand for the stuff) was actually through proxies/unwitting dupes/unindicted co-conspirators/active agents of the Krarsht cult. Even the Lunars weren't very happy about this.

49 minutes ago, svensson said:

If that's the case, then I very well could see Lady Vega turning a blind eye to the export of hazia but come down like bag full of Wheels on anyone caught using it themselves.

When the Sun County authorities decide to catch someone using Hazia to make an example of them, indeed yes.

BTW, Hazia cultivation/consumption exploded in Sun County during the Summer of Love (when youngsters ask their now very conventional, strait-laced Sun Domer parents about this period their moms and dads tend to blush or quickly change the subject). These days it's really not mild "recreational use" per se that bothers the Sun Dome Temple, but if you imbibe enough of the stuff you start experiencing weird out-of-body visions and may start to perceive things that ordinary citizens don't need to see. Definitely avoid staring at the Sun while partaking...

Edited 9 hours ago by MOB

[svensson]

Yeah, I could see some old coot in a Retirement Tower having some memorable conversations with Yelm on a hazia trip. 😆🤣

As for the legality of hazia, for the last couple of generations it's been illegal to a greater or lesser degree. By this point, it's nearly 'traditional' for it to be illegal, at least for the 1625 generation. And Lady Vega has to keep those puritanical types happy in order to keep the support of the Sun Dome hierarchy so she's not likely to rock the boat.

And Lunars or no Lunars, Gim-gim or no Gim-gim, the Krarsht cult is eternal. I don't see the political upheavals bothering their operations all that much.