Glorantha but in the Modern Day.

[Anlúan]

This is not something I'd ever really want to run, more just a thought experiment.

What would Glorantha be like in 5600ST, if we were to assume they progressed at a similar rate to Earth?

What would Cults be like? How would Runes fit into a modern world? Would they progress differently to Earth due to these factors?

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, Anlúan said:

What would Glorantha be like in 5600ST

The opening credits from the movie version of HAIR. In fact, go ahead, play the whole movie.

1 hour ago, Anlúan said:

What would Cults be like? How would Runes fit into a modern world? Would they progress differently to Earth due to these factors?

Traditionally they always move at the same long-term rate as we do because the differences balance each other out. Same number of hours in the year, same human parameters, same relative threat/comfort level, same 600-year aeonic cycle. After all, they're really just us more or less.

Conventional cults are underground legacy organizations often originating in spontaneous shamanic contact and then networking from individual centers. They bicker. Much of their original function has been usurped by what we would call "guilds" mechanically: affinity groups that support secular skills, keeping most people gainfully employed and emotionally engaged. 

If you look hard you can see the gods everywhere but contact is fugitive and initiation rare. These contacts inflict what we could call a kind of SAN damage making it more challenging for someone to interact with mainstream everyday life. Use the Call of Cthulhu character sheet.

[Anlúan]

2 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Use the Call of Cthulhu character sheet.

I love this.

[AndreJarosch]

I had the same thought experiment a while ago, but i ended up in STAR TREK allegories!

Glorantha is a cube, and you can´t have a Starship Enterprise to explore other planets, but you can have cultures and belive systems like in ST. 

The Uz would be the Gloranthan Klingons (ill mannered, warlike). 

The Aldryami would be the Borg (hive mind?). 

The Mostali would be the Romulans (secretive, paranoid and seeing everybody else as treacherous heretic people). 

The Issaries Cult could be like the Ferengi. 

And the Federation? The Lunars of course ( friendly, including everone that wants to join)!

😉

 

[John Biles]

The distant future of Glorantha entirely relies on how the Hero Wars end.

If Glorantha can't escape its cycle, the death of the Gods at the hands of Argath and/or the Devil prefigures a new Great Darkness that ends in the near oblivion of the world around 2100 and some kind of fundamental re-invention of the world... and the world destroys itself again before 5600.

The Greg Stafford vision is that everyone but humanity dies and the Fourth Age is an age of mundanity, so 5600 looks like Earth tech in a different geography.

It could be that the Mostali fix the world machine and it remains static / controlled cyclical still in 5600.

Perhaps the Loksalmi triumph and 5600 is an age that resembles Plato's Republic but with sorcery added.

 

[Alex]

1 hour ago, John Biles said:

The Greg Stafford vision is that everyone but humanity dies and the Fourth Age is an age of mundanity, so 5600 looks like Earth tech in a different geography.

It could be that the Mostali fix the world machine and it remains static / controlled cyclical still in 5600.

Perhaps the Loksalmi triumph and 5600 is an age that resembles Plato's Republic but with sorcery added.

The three things really trend in the same general direction.  "More Materialism."  In fact any of them would work to do a full Tolkien "the world made round" lead-in if you want to see Glorantha as a Mythology for America...  Look at the myth-maps in CoRQ or the GtG, plenty of geographic -- and astronomical -- changes there!

Edited November 7 by Alex

[Malin]

The one thing I know for sure is that there will be even more variants of Yelmalio that people bicker about....