What's the Story of Elmal in Dragon Pass

[Aurelius]

I’m sorry for beating everyone’s favourite dead horse but since this is probably The Most Confusing Thing about Glorantha…

Quoting from a Sun Dome thread:

—

On 11/4/2024 at 5:07 PM, @Nick Brooke said:

There was a write-up of the Elmal cult in the HeroQuest book Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes, but the author has since repudiated it (and I'm not going to argue with him). You may have detected a recurring theme; I highlight it, because it amuses me.

—

I know all HWHQQW has been declared heresy wholesale, and HQG Glorantha is sort of a fork from the end of RQ3 running on a further developed fork of RQ2, but …

 

What happened with Cult of Elmal in Dragon Pass … it used to exist in a ”contemporary” setting at some point but nowadays is a historical curiosity. Can someone tell the story?

 

EDIT: I mean I’ve read Gloranthan Manifesto and Greg’s Elmal mea culpas but this story is a lot more recent — right?

[Brian Duguid]

For the in-world canonical perspective, see https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/use-of-the-old-name-of-elmal/.

If you really want to dig further, see https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/tag/elmal/.

Personally, I never much cared for either Elmal or Yelmalio, and find the whole thing no big deal (ironic that I am about to start playing a Yelmalio-worshipping character, of course).

[radmonger]

Between HQ/HW the rules changed so that what was a cult became a subcult. A Heroquest 'cult' was arguably misnamed; it more reflected the mythic potential of what is possible for a heroquesting PC to do rather than a description of current insitutional religion.

Also I think between 1621 and 1625 the influence of the Elmal subcult of Yelmalio somewhat further declined, ending the brief partial revival it had had as a means of resisting the Yelmalian Harvar Ironfist. Harvar ruled Orlanthi who weren't keen on that fact, creating a need for a myth to justify Yelmalions who chose to side with their clan leadership agaimst him.

 

 

 

Edited November 13 by radmonger

[Nick Brooke]

I told the story, on pages 60-65 of my free Manifesto. If you’ve read that and you still don’t understand something, please let me know. When we first learned about “Elmal,” the context was “Here’s an old Orlanthi sun cult that was replaced by the Sun Dome Temple back in your grandparents’ day.” And yet…

[Nick Brooke]

Oh, you went back and edited something? OK, I’ll try to keep up.

Jeff Richard wrote an article about the recently-restored Sun Dome Temple in Dragon Pass for Wyrms Footnotes #15 which gave them a large population of grey-skinned helot slaves. He then changed his mind about this, and says you shouldn’t believe any stuff you read in that article. (This annoyed my friend Martin, who had included Jeff’s novel notions in his excellent book The Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass, and had to excise them retrospectively).

Jeff Richard also wrote a still-extant Cult of Elmal for HeroQuest’s Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes book, and gave that cult Fire magic, for some reason. He then changed his mind about this, and says you shouldn’t believe any of the stuff you read in that writeup.

I’m beginning to think it would be a mistake to pay much attention to any novel ideas about Elmal and/or Yelmalio if Jeff’s writings are the only source. Luckily, we have Sun County, Life and Traditions under the Sun Dome, the Sandheart campaign, Gaumata’s Vision, Troubled Waters, etc. to sustain us.

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Aurelius said:

Can someone tell the story?

• Once upon a time, o best beloved, someone thought that any religion — a cluster of cults with pretensions — worth its salt should have deities covering all the important aspects of Cosmos. The sun seemed key to the cosmic order, so the Orlanthi — lightbringers, after all — clearly needed a sun god, but it had to be a domesticated sun, a little sun the Big O could blow around, because, o best beloved, Storm Kings have fragile egos.
  
  So someone hacked off the stroppiest bits of Yelmalio, and that is how Elmal the Lame was born. After the chisels were taken to his name, he could no longer say, “I, .” Clearly, he was no longer himself. Elmal was a lie told to bolster the catholic pretensions of an Orlanthism in truth struggling to achieve dominion over the middle air but claiming a done-deal universal despotism — “The sun? It is in my pocket.”
  
  After an initial rush of blood to the head, this came to seem a terrible idea: if all the big religions have the important elements covered, how do we have war between the elements? Instead of the wind at war with the sun, we just have air religionists (with a domesticated sun god) at war with sky religionists (with a pet air god) — the imagined grandeur of as above, so below is abolished (or heavily diluted). “Hey, does this thing have a reverse gear?”

Of course, the trouble with these just-so stories — myths, if you like — is that most of them (especially those told by me) turn out not to be true. But maybe there is this: if Elmal or a prominent Elmal cult have come to seem a mistake or a distraction, don’t bother with in-world explanations meant to straighten things out — Earth decisions don’t need Gloranthan justifications.

Edited November 13 by mfbrandi
fire reference removed

[Aurelius]

1 hour ago, Nick Brooke said:

I told the story, on pages 60-65 of my free Manifesto. If you’ve read that and you still don’t understand something, please let me know. 

aaaand my apologies, I missed pages 60-61 of the Manifesto reading up... 

...but that said, I greatly appreciated this added detail...

45 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

Jeff Richard wrote an article about the recently-restored Sun Dome Temple in Dragon Pass for Wyrms Footnotes #15 which gave them a large population of grey-skinned helot slaves. He then changed his mind about this, and says you shouldn’t believe any stuff you read in that article. (This annoyed my friend Martin, who had included Jeff’s novel notions in his excellent book The Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass, and had to excise them retrospectively).

Jeff Richard also wrote a still-extant Cult of Elmal for HeroQuest’s Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes book, and gave that cult Fire magic, for some reason. He then changed his mind about this, and says you shouldn’t believe any of the stuff you read in that writeup.

...which greatly expands on the whats and the hows of the topic. 

Has @Jeff written anything about what:s and why:s of the major change? 

(Pardon if I appear to be curious as a toddler werecat, but for me, understanding the underlying intents, structures and paradigms is key to understanding surface, and that's why I'm always chasing the Making of. The Well of Daliath is very deep for someone who's trying to catch up after leaving Glorantha during the Hero Wars era.)

[Aurelius]

45 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

if all the big religions have the important elements covered, how do we have war between the elements? Instead of the wind at war with the sun, we just have air religionists (with a domesticated sun god) at war with sky religionists (with a pet air god)

If I had ever been to a Lore Auction, I would have asked Greg to contemplate on this precise question. 

The difficulty is, perhaps, that from an anthropological perspective, it is strange to have air people fight sun people, because all sun people breathe air and all air people eat foods grown in sun.

And if I understand correctly Greg's early masks were more about history and fantasy, and later masks were more about anthropology and shamanism.

(I'd buy a leatherette gold leaf collector's edition of a well-written Greg Stafford biography, and I never buy collector's editions of anything.)

[AlHazred]

2 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

I’m beginning to think it would be a mistake to pay much attention to any novel ideas about Elmal and/or Yelmalio

All of these "Elmal" and "Yelmalio" things pain me so! There is only one "Cold Sun God" and that's Tharkantus; all other writings referring to any other Sun Dome God need desperately to be put to the Torch of Truth! My poor Tharkantus; look how they've massacred my boy!

Edited November 13 by AlHazred

[Nick Brooke]

Here’s the sitch. Greg was writing one of his First Age Harmast novels, and found himself wondering: before the God Learners came along and rationalised everything by merging elemental pantheons, who was the Sun God of the Orlanthi?

And then he rationalised the disappearance of that ancient cult — which, after all, nobody in RuneQuest times had ever heard of (like so many other ancient cults named only in passing in the Stafford Library) — by tying it to the origin story of the Sun Dome Temple in Dragon Pass (which we knew from Cults of Prax or the Dragon Pass board game or both had been introduced in fairly recent decades by the House of Sartar for some namby-pamby “elemental balance” reason).

So: heroic King Tarkalor gets associated with cult founder Monrogh (an established figure from Cults of Prax), and that weird fragment from King of Sartar explains why you might read about “Elmal” in old myths but you won’t meet many Elmal cultists if you’re playing RuneQuest games.

Two problems, though:

1) The excellent quasi-historical computer game King of Dragon Pass gives everyone the impression that to understand backwards hill Orlanthi you have to include the Elmal cult and ignore everything King Sartar did, while not needing to know anything about the history of Sartarite / Lunar or Dragon Pass / Holy Country relationships.

2) HeroQuestWorldWars players didn’t understand the background, and wanted to play sexy exciting chad Elmal cultists now now now, even though our primary source said, pretty much in so many words, “And that’s why you won’t find any Elmal cultists in Sartar today, O Best Beloved.”

And, for whatever reason, publishers encouraged this nonsense. Until they didn’t.

Edited November 13 by Nick Brooke

[g33k]

49 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

If I had ever been to a Lore Auction, I would have asked Greg to contemplate on this precise question. 

The difficulty is, perhaps, that from an anthropological perspective, it is strange to have air people fight sun people, because all sun people breathe air and all air people eat foods grown in sun.

And if I understand correctly Greg's early masks were more about history and fantasy, and later masks were more about anthropology and shamanism.

(I'd buy a leatherette gold leaf collector's edition of a well-written Greg Stafford biography, and I never buy collector's editions of anything.)

I think you're mistaken not to place myth, anthro, shamanism in at the very genesis of things:  though he later outgrew it, Campbell's work was pretty foundational to Greg's Glorantha, and I remember reading that Greg was already self-identifying as a shaman in his college years (tho my own suspicion is that was likely heavily-influenced by 60's California counterculture & new-age "pseudo-shamanism" and at least as much about college-Greg scoring chicks and semi-legitimizing interesting drugs as "religious;" but I cannot clearly cite sources for my suspicions).

 But conflict is part of the human experience; and of course essential for a wargame (noting that WBRM was the original Glorantha game, created (albeit not published) before even the 1st run of D&D was printed) & equally-essential to early-days RPG's.  But it's the "human experience" that drove Greg in this regard, I think.

He wanted cultures that were jostling against one another, stealingborrowing bits of culture, conquering one another, migrating to new lands & new neighbors, etc.  He was exploring mythological and anthropological themes, and a mythically placid & peaceful world wouldn't drive his themes forward.

So Umath, the primal air, was born from Earth and Sun, and burst into being between them; sundering that marriage & setting up an nice mythic hostility between Storm & Sun.

[Aurelius]

17 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

1) The excellent quasi-historical computer game King of Dragon Pass gives everyone the impression that to understand backwards hill Orlanthi you have to include the Elmal cult and ignore everything King Sartar did, while not needing to know anything about the history of Sartarite / Lunar or Dragon Pass / Holy Country relationships.

If it's any consolation, Glorantha has suffered very little from audiovisual mass media hijacking its canon, compared to, say, Middle-Earth...

Thanks for sharing all the history, here and in the Manifesto, it is much appreciated.

[g33k]

36 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

... 1) The excellent quasi-historical computer game King of Dragon Pass gives everyone the impression that to understand backwards hill Orlanthi you have to include the Elmal cult and ignore everything King Sartar did, while not needing to know anything about the history of Sartarite / Lunar or Dragon Pass / Holy Country relationships ...

Honestly, I think this is foundational to the flamewar level of heat in the Elmal/Yelmalio conflict.

For many fans, KoDP (and hence Elmal) was their introduction to Glorantha; everything that contradicts it will be seen with a jaundiced eye.

There was, for a while, a less-heated but no less partisan RQ2-v-RQ3 "which is best" rivalry which -- as best I could ever determine -- was largely (though not entirely, to be sure!) between teams formed of "mostly played RQ2 as 1st RQ" players vs "mostly played RQ3 as 1st RQ"  players.  These days, with MRQ & RQ6/Mythras & the relatively-RQless HW/HQ era & a couple of never-were unpublished ms's, & now RQG, that old debate is less-often seen... but I presume most of the grognardia stands ready to defend their old stances.   People have preferences... who knew??!?
 

[Nick Brooke]

That's a take, but it misses something important.

MOB's excellent book Sun County came out in the summer of '92, and was a playable RuneQuest campaign setting out in Prax, based around a Sun Dome Temple that worshipped Yelmalio. It kicked off what we're apparently contractually obliged to call "the short-lived RuneQuest Renaissance" of the early nineties. It was the bees' knees: a collection of new, playable Gloranthan RuneQuest scenarios, the first for eight or so years.

Greg Stafford's excellent book King of Sartar came out in the winter of '92, and was a consciously unplayable system-free compilation of disparate source material (meaning: Greg didn't have to revise away inconsistencies between his various drafts, as they were now a feature, not a bug). A gaggle of geeky overenthusiasts read its account of how the Elmal cult had recently become the Yelmalio cult, added 2+2 to get 22, decided that Sun County must be completely inaccurate and diskarded it uterly (in different directions, because geeky overenthusiasts never agree about anything).

They were, of course, idiots. But it meant there were already partisan battle-lines between people who could read (and played RuneQuest) and people who couldn't read (and didn't play RuneQuest), even at the height of that first RuneQuest Renaissance.

tl/dr: we knew people were capable of being dicks about "Elmal" (and overreacting to other stuff found only in Greg's deep-dive sourcebooks) many years before Hero Wars or King of Dragon Pass.

Edited November 13 by Nick Brooke

[M Helsdon]

4 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

(This annoyed my friend Martin, who had included Jeff’s novel notions in his excellent book The Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass, and had to excise them retrospectively).

I wouldn't say annoyed, more mildly peeved, as it necessitated a bit of a rewrite just as the POD was being prepared. Wyrms Footnotes#15  was one of the seeds of what became The Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass. 

These things happen. I treated it much like I did requirement changes to a system undergoing sea trials: unfortunate but necessary. 

And my current project has the.... Elmalio cult as a feature, obviously Yelmalio but in a different cultural context.

Edited November 13 by M Helsdon

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Aurelius said:

understanding the underlying intents, structures and paradigms is key to understanding surface

If our aim is to understand how the surface got that way, sure. But isn’t our main purpose to take the chaotic palimpsest and scribble on it some more? And if we are pretending to be Gloranthans, for them author intent is not recoverable. 😉

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

or them author intent is not recoverable

Oh I think a lot of LKM "forensic sorcery" operates as their substitute for good old necromancy. You can't summon up a dead author / ancestor because we self-consciously reject DKF but you can rewind the textual record and with the right rolls come back with new information about its context. 

Doing this might create the equivalent of a self-aware "grimoire" like in the HQHW era, a living transmission that connects the present (reader) to a past. 

[Nick Brooke]

The Death of the Author is a necessary precondition for serious textual analysis, it is known.

[scott-martin]

2 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

The Death of the Author is a necessary precondition for serious textual analysis, it is known.

"For the making of an oracular head, hunting a head is required." - (Y)Eco

Anyhow more thought on this later but the sun is shining, albeit cold.

[Nick Brooke]

That’s the secret, Scott. It’s always cold.

[Aurelius]

4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

If our aim is to understand how the surface got that way, sure. But isn’t our main purpose to take the chaotic palimpsest and scribble on it some more? And if we are pretending to be Gloranthans, for them author intent is not recoverable. 😉

Glorantha is madness. To interpolate between the more or less canonic points we have, you gotta understand the method to the madness.

I'm being a bit difficult in this thread because I want to understand why and how some things were declared by heresies and replaced by more purist truths. So ... just join me on this path where we seek to build a nuanced understanding of heresy, as that is our path to the light of truth. 😈

3 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

The Death of the Author is a necessary precondition for serious textual analysis, it is known.

Speaking as a fan of many of your works on the Lunar Empire, I hope it doesn't take murder to seriously figure them out. That said, I can appreciate that as a very thanatarian angle. 

[mfbrandi]

39 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

we seek to build a nuanced understanding of heresy, as that is our path to the light of truth

We do, and it is. One way of coming to grips with the old heresies — I fondly imagine in my dotage — is to inscribe new and ever more outlandish heresies. The road of excess and all that.

[Joerg]

When did we first learn that Lightfore was Yelmalio?

[Aurelius]

Googling around being curious about Joerg’s question I discovered a lively piece on Elmal-related design behind-the-scenes from Jeff. 
 

 

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

When did we first learn that Lightfore was Yelmalio?

I wonder whether we ever learned it? On the one hand, we have statements like:

• Kargzant = Yelmalio
• Yelmalio = Lightfore
• Lightfore = Antirius

You might think that from browsing the Well of Daliath entries for those entities and get that vibe from the modern tendency to attempt to tame the booming and buzzing of the phenomena. But on the other hand one might think:

• Antirius != Kargzant
• Lightfore != Kargzant

… if one were open to the ramblings of Plentonius:

• The bright god [Lightfore] rose and went to War against the destructive god Kargzant … slowly Lightfore drew Kargzant to him, so that his erratic movements had to come to time with Lightfore’s. — GROY, p.50
• [T]he realms of Day and Night switched places. [Kargzant was either eclipsed or (less commonly) renamed] Kargzant was defeated, ridden by Lightfore. Antirius, stronger and brighter than that old sun, rose. — GROY, p. 36
• Kargzant appeared in the sky more than 100 years before Lightfore. (See GROY, p. 5, text and footnotes.)

Kargzant is the cold sun of the nomads and Antirius and Lightfore are the pets of the sedentary Dara Happans. We have an as below, so above story where struggles on the ground are reflected in descriptions of the sky. Did the sky really change to suit the earthbound desires of the Yelm cultists? I like to think some rogue sun or other still rules the day sky and that attempts to say that all “non-Yelm suns” must be the night lamp we call Lightfore are just blather and wishful thinking.

Yelm remains as dead as Nysalor. Yelmalio is nobody’s slave. And if Kargzant were the light of hope when all seemed hopeless but the enemy of the Orlanthi and the Yelmites both, wouldn’t that be delicious?

Part of the — deliberate? — confusion is that Yelmalio has to do double duty in his role as “light in the darkness”: he is both the winter sun (day time) and the night light, because the “murder of the sun” brings both the night and the winter. Ho hum!

Of course we might still say that the Arkat = Gbaji = Nysalor move is still available — suns which apparently fought each other are really the same.

On a more prosaic note, some things you already know:

• Cults of Prax and Cults of Terror don’t mention Lightfore (as far as I can determine).
• In Wyrm’s Footnotes #10 (1980), Lightfore is a “grandson” and favourite worshipper of Dayzatar and the first successful planet (wandering seems to be associated with heroquesting here). I honestly couldn’t say how that sits with being the immortal part of Yelm that didn’t go to the underworld if Yelmalio (not mentioned) = Lightfore.
• The RQ3 Gods of Glorantha box has Yelmalio as “the shining light of the sky when both the sun and the night are absent.” This gives him a nice liminality and makes sense of the crepuscular magic of catseye. Possibly a “sun god” who is no sun at all, just the light of the sky dome and not a star seen at night. Antirius and Lightfore don’t get prosopædia entries.
• The Glorious Re-ascent of Yelm (GROY) seems not to mention Yelmalio, and that must have been a choice.
• King of Sartar (2015 version, anyway) seems not to mention Lightfore, Kargzant, or Antirius, but of course does have Elmal and Yelmalio.

So I would guess — my knowledge is generously described as partial — that in the early 1990s, Greg hadn’t revealed Yelmalio to be Lightfore. But when? Dunno.