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Trolls from the Blue Moon Plateau


Nel

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What can you tell me about the trolls from the Blue Moon Plateau?

According to the 1st volume of the Imperial Lunar Handbook (page 12) they are winged, but I haven't found any mention of that in the Guide to Glorantha.

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You need to reel in @boztakang to get up to date info on these. Bear in mind that the Guide is an overview of Glorantha and  can't cover small areas and details. The blue moon plateau is a secretive and dangerous place. I'll have a look in trollpak to see what it says. ILH1 is not considered a true reflection of glorantha anymore, but if you want winged trolls, you can have them as YGWV.

Edited by David Scott

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Search the Glorantha Resource Site: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com. Search the Glorantha mailing list archives: https://glorantha.steff.in/digests/

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The winged trolls actually came from some of Greg's writings  so it wasn't something that the ILH-1 authors made up.  That said there's many other things in Greg's writing that doesn't appear in or is ruled out by the Guide so winged trolls may not actually exist.

Trollpak did have a lovely encounter of blue moon trolls being pulled around in a flying wagon being pulled around by giant luna moths (they also used the moth scent to mark tarkets so that the moths could track them).  Sadly when it came to the RQ3 version (reprinted in Into the Troll Realms), someone looked up the ENC rules and decided it could no longer work.  So instead the assassins there are following the Luna Moth instead.

There is a city on the Blue Moon Plateau which was given to the trolls by Magnificus (Mask of the Emperor that killed Sheng Seleris) in order to pacify them (Fortunate Succession p60).  This is probably the city of Lakistalia where the Duke of the Blue Moon lives (Guide p347)

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I honestly don't have a whole lot of new insight on the Blue Moon plateau. 

The trolls there are extremely secretive, and strong in Illusion, so you could certainly put just about anything there that you wanted to.

Here's what the new HQ trollpack has to say on the region:

Quote

Long ago, in an age forgotten or never known by all but the most ancient of Uzuz, an enormous goddess or monster fell from the sky, leaving behind a massive corpse of stone and earth glowing with a light that no living creature can see. This region is called the Blue Moon Plateau, and is shunned by humans and other mortals who find its energies incompatible with health and sanity.

Trolls, however are more resilient than other races, and late in the Gods War, certain elements of Boztakang’s army settled there. When some of those early settlers became ill, Boztakang befriended, tricked, or took as a lover (depending on the teller) the mysterious entity or power behind the blue moon (or its corpse.) In doing so, he learned secrets that allow trolls to safely live in this land without ill effect. He taught those secrets to many of his followers, who have guarded them jealously ever since, operating behind a veil of illusion and mystery, well protected from outside forces, hostile or benign.

The natural protection of their home, in conjunction with obsessive secrecy and isolationism bordering on xenophobia has kept the trolls here safe from all the various disasters that have decimated the populations of other troll areas. No outsider has any real idea how many trolls actually live here, but everyone agrees that it must be far and away the largest “civilized” troll habitation left in the middle world.

The rise of the Lunar Empire has encouraged or enabled the blue moon trolls to take a much more active role in the outside world (or, possibly, just exposed their activities to a larger audience.) From the earliest days of the empire, rumors of trollish collaboration have been as persistent as they are unprovable. Though never officially acknowledged, Blue Moon cultists are “known” to have served the Empire as assassins, spies, messengers, magicians and mercenaries on many occasions. Such rumors have become less common since the Eldest Kin of Dagori Inkarth’s declaration of war on the red moon, but most everyone believes that the blue moon cultists have simply become more careful and secretive in their support. 

Edited by boztakang
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I think the Phantom Cities of the Plateau are echoes of the original Mernita.  The Uz do not live there but herd their sacrifices into the city so that they disappear mysteriously.  Some of the sacrifices do not disappear but remain behind as oracles of the Blue Moon.  

 

 

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Probably about 10 years ago or more I played a Hero Wars game with Greg Stafford at Tentacles where every player represented one of the seven tribes of the Blue Moon Plateau. Five of these were ordinary trolls, one had bat wings instead of arms, and one (of more recent origin) had bat wings in addition to arms. The game was an interesting exercise in resource control and managing a mega-project to recover a huge artifact for the never-ending appetite of the Great Mother. Unfortunately, the Lunars wanted that artifact, too, and happened to control the territory between the place where we found it and the plateau. All the tribes suffered from the trollkin curse, the winged ones included, so they were closer to Dark Trolls than e.g. jungle or cave trolls. I played the wings for arms tribe, and made them heavily reliant on their insect herds (and there, especially the maggot stage) for activities like burrowing, construction or manufacture. Their other speciality was to act as airborn scouts and hunters. The wings were an ancient gift or trade with the resident bat goddess. The origin of the  six-limbed fliers may have been as recent as the EWF, but was tied to the same bat goddess. We didn't address the topic of interbreeding, but at a guess I would expect this to be a dominant maternal inheritance. No idea whether the trollkin wings are very functional, but they definitely contributed to the tribal resources.

Book of Drastic Resolution: Darkness p.73 names two blue moon bat goddesses, the Mahaquata and Q(u)atanara, ancestress of winged trolls. Both are mentioned in the Dara Happan alphabet in the Guide (p.349), although Quatanara isn't indexed.

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Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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19 hours ago, Joerg said:

Book of Drastic Resolution: Darkness p.73 names two blue moon bat goddesses, the Mahaquata and Q(u)atanara, ancestress of winged trolls. Both are mentioned in the Dara Happan alphabet in the Guide (p.349), although Quatanara isn't indexed.

I think Mahaquata and Quatanara are the same deity (Mahaquata is the Dara Happan version).  Pavis: Gateway to Adventure p324 calls her the Black Bat rather than the Blue.  

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Quatanara is a bat-winged goddess. It is possible that the armed and winged dark trolls were created in her image, while those with wings instead of arms are mirroring Mahaquata. It is possible that Quatanara is more Lunar than Mahaquata.

Edited by Joerg

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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38 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Quatanara is a bat-winged goddess. It is possible that the armed and winged dark trolls were created in her image, while those with wings instead of arms are mirroring Mahaquata. It is possible that Quatanara is more Lunar than Mahaquata.

Possible but unlikely.  Mahaquata is to Quatanara as to Jagrekriand is to Shargash more like, an enemy image of a god.  

As to the two different types of Bat-winged trolls, you don't need two different deities to explain the variation.  The older version is probably the four limbed version (as per the modern bat).  The six-limbed version may have been influenced by either the Lunars (Arachne Solara has multiple limbs) or through the EWF (Ruler Dragonewts with wings).  This could also mean there are four-armed trolls running around.

 

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Here a reference to Quatanara, that maybe of interest. There's a bit of interpretation by another person on this page, but it's mostly by Greg.

http://web.archive.org/web/20050313102842/http://www.glorantha.com/new/q-and-a/moon_names.html

@Ian Cooper also wrote an article called The Blue Moon Tradition in the Four Scrolls of Revelation for CO2 in 2002:

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Like other moon goddesses the Blue Moon has many aspects. She is known by many peoples and by many names. Among the trolls she is Annilla is the Blue Streak and Hidden Mover. Mahaquatta the bat of Death. and Quatanara the goddess of the Blue Moon Plateau.

 

Edited by David Scott
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Search the Glorantha Resource Site: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com. Search the Glorantha mailing list archives: https://glorantha.steff.in/digests/

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