Jump to content

Thoughts on Orlanthi marriage, and a scenario/campaign idea


Joerg

Recommended Posts

A newly married partner – in Sartar usually the newlywed wife – will enter the household or hearth of her husband. Most likely the newlywed husband will not be the head of the household, but a son, brother or nephew of the current head of the household.

Even if the marriage is a temporary marriage, the wife will bring a dowry to her new family. Her status in the household will probably depend on the extent of this dowry, but also on the skills she brings with her.

Still, the new household member will live among strangers she will have met onlyy a few times during the marriage negotiations between her birth clan and that of her new family in the advanced stages of negotiation. The initial negotiations often are on clan level, with the clan‘s traders acting as intermediaries (and often as diplomats, too). It is usual for the prospective couple to meet in person after initial cantact has been established – either partner or their households can refuse a tentative match, and the negotiators don‘t waste time on detailed arrangements without the consent of all involved parties.

Still, the birth clan of the bride (or externally marrying groom) will exert some social pressure on the potential bride to accept particularly advantageous deals.

The women of a clan keep track of family ties between the future couple. If there are strong religious elements in the marriage (basically with the bride and groom embodying their respective cults‘ deities), it is even possible that siblings (or more likely, half-siblings, from different clans) can marry, but usually the Orlanthi consider three generations as a safe distance between the future pair. Temporary religious marrigage may even occur within a clan. Bride and groom are considered to be their deity, even if they retain their clan membership.

Future partners of equally high standing may undergo a wedding contest, with two year marriages spent in either participant‘s home clan before deciding which clan the couple will live with. Any children born during that year will belong to the clan the couple resides with, so that full siblings may end up belonging to different clans or even tribes – a documented case are the children of Sartar and the Feathered Horse Queen. Their daughter Yoristina, born during the first year of their contest at Queen‘s Post, remained among the Grazers and inherited her mother‘s office, establishing the dynasty of Feathered Horse Queens, while their son Saronil who was born in Boldhome remained with his father.

A birth clan may allow a temporary marriage for love even if there is no significant benefit to such a match, which does open a backdoor to love marriage.

Children born to a couple before the marriage are legally part of the mother‘s clan, regardless whether the mother moves to her husband afterwards. There is no stigma to children born outside of the wedlock, and they usually receive a caring upbringing in their mother‘s birth household by their granparents aunts and uncles. When there is no such household left, the child may be given into fosterage, either with it parents, with another (usually more prestigious) household in the birth clan, or with a temple accepting such „orphans“.

It is possible for an Orlanthi woman to remain unmarried and still have a number of children. Having chidren is a measure of stts in itself for an Orlanthi woman, and may result in her attracting a husbnd to her household. Such a marriage may attract less dowry, but may also attract unusual skill sets or cult allegiances to a clan.

 

Idea for a (possibly short) Orlanthi campaign:

The characters are all newlyweds in a stead’s household. (This ought to be a fairly common situation given the custom to initiate the boys en bloc rather than individually, so that an entire age group in a household may come to age at the same time. Maybe add a few of the senior household members re-marrying, too.)

The new arrivals will have to establish their place and importance in their household, directing their marriage partner to intervene on their behalf with the esstablished household members. Animosities or agendas of their birth clans may cause problems or create scenario hooks. Especially so if a few of the marriages are the result of a peace settlement.

The new household should have a power struggle or some other fundamental internal difficulties, and possibly one or two dark secrets. (If the secrets are dark enough, this could be played with a Gloranthan adaptation of Call of Cthulhu…) Some dark secrets that get uncovered may concern a character’s birth clan rather than her new clan.

Additional drama can be created by household members returning after a longer absence – a mercenary or personal follower of the former tribal king returning to his birth household, a divorced woman returning, a rebel returning from temporary exile, a captive returning from slavery, or some NPC brides from standing feuds with a character’s birth clan thrown in by a malevolent narrator.

 

 

  • Like 2

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I wrote this in reply to the thread about where to start as a newcomer to Glorantha, but I noticed that I rambled way off-topic there while exploring this topic in more depth, so I cut this from my reply over there and present these thoughts here.

This does touch morality issues, especially how Orlanthi morality may differ from our Christian background. Take this as all the warning you are going to get if you are sensitive on sexual matters.

 

I know about Jeff's Samastina campaign that is reflected in the copious examples in Heroquest Glorantha, which highlights how you can be movers and shakers in Glorantha. I don't think that would be feasible for introducing Gloranthan gaming to the German market, which had a lot less exposure to the wealth of information, so I decided to go for glimpses of what happens if you travel with those movers and shakers while dealing with less impetuous but still quite powerful events and magic - not the kind you do with your personal spells, but the greater magic that comes from the cultic activities of your communities.

The Samastina campaign as published in the samples of play in Heroquest Glorantha and in the Prince of Sartar webcomic introduces us into the dynamics of Esrolian noble houses of the highest tier (Houses Norinel and Delaeos), and gives us a few glimpses on how these urban and nobility clans might work. We find a high number of personal retainers - like a hero's or chieftain's retainers - from outside of the House, outside of the core Orlanthi culture. I found that experienced troubleshooters and travelers tend to end up like this, with magical specialists and native guides entering the original group as attrition makes the players look out for replacement character. I like to let this evolve through the campaign, though, so I looked for another way to start my scenario with an as diverse group as possible while staying inside the clans and tribes of Sartar.

And that's where Orlanthi marriage customs come in. The clans may be the legal definition of the extended family, but that's a male-oriented (at least in Sartar) and formal definiton. There is always another way, and following the Ernaldan influence, I noticed the importance of the Orlanthi hearth (which John Hughes already established in Thunder Rebels, if a bit too domestic and rural for my gaming taste) and of blood relations.

A clan is not a monolithic, we all share the same blood extended family. Quite the opposite, really. The different households don't intermarry, so while you may address the people in the hearth next door as your cousins or remote uncles and aunts, you have very weak blood relations with them, if at all. While I am sure that there will be children in every clan whose parents both are members of that clan, they aren't born from marriages, but from youthful dalliances in the time between adulthood initiation and marriage. Female initiation occurs individually, upon physical maturity. Little has been published what is involved there, but I am sure there is a lot of sex education, impounding of blood relations and blood relation taboos involved. Basically, the recently initiated woman is out there, available for sexual experiences, and the cult of Ernalda expects her to make those experiences, in her own time, but to make them. Virginity is a fringe value for cults like Babeester, artificially preserving (or ritually repairing) that childhood state for magical benefits.

Unless the clan is struggling to feed everyone, a new child is a blessing regardless who was the father. So what if he was rather irresponsible - we are talking about Orlanthi men, which means about boys playing at adulthood until they start to recognize consequences, then boyishly dashing off trying to repair what they did. Endearing to the Ernaldan women, through a magic of its own that pierces through their normally calculating nature.

A young woman freshly out of initiation will have been given a very strict list of hearths to avoid dalliances with, both within their own clan and in neighboring clans which have sisters or more importantly aunts and grand-aunts living in them. Note: not clans as a whole, but households where blood-related folk live. First cousins should be avoided outside of magical rites (which always produce children that bear features from the divinities embodied in the rite, in addition to those inherited from the physical parents, thus reducing the degree of incest and in-breeding), second cousins are reasonably remote so that children wouldn't suffer from a reduced set of direct ancestors (not only genetically, but also magically - blood connections do count when calling upon divine or ancestral aid). And by this definition, a majority of the clan's young louts more or less fresh out of initiation are fair game for sexual experimentation, as are the unmarried males that have a few more years behind them, or the personal followers of distinguished leaders that come from outside of the clan. Then there are those clan members under magical influence (Yinkin, Eurmal, Orlanth Niskis, Heler, Ernalda, Vinga) who aren't forbidden when they are ridden by their personal magics.

Publishing a culture with same sex or transgender sex relations might be a bad move, reputation-wise, for a gaming company that wants to cater for young adults in a repressive morality society. Nevertheless, these are some of the facts of Glorantha. While not exactly published, we know that Orlanth has a more than just comrade-in-arms relationship with Heler. We know that unmarried Vingans can take official wives, and we know that there are married Vingans who have male husbands. Looking at Orlanthi genealogies, we find lots of evidence for Vingans taking at least temporary marriage vows and producing offspring. The mothers of Vingkot, Tarkalor and various other prominent warriors in Heortling history are Red Women.

We don't have any written myths about Ernalda consoling another goddess or simply enjoying mutual attention as precedent for same sex relationships in Orlanthi society, but conversations with Greg left me convinced that such myths would exist. They are probably among the many secrets that most Orlanthi males (and thus also the majority of players) never are going to learn much about. Likewise there have been few myths or stories about what happens consensually in practically all-male camps e.g. on military campaigns or when out in the wilderness. Or whether the presence of adventuring females in the camp who remain unavailable would change anything about that.

What was I talking about? How to present Orlanthi culture, and how the female, Ernaldan side creates an entirely different sort of network than the Clan.

Let's have another look at the Esrolian Enfranchised Houses like Norinel or Delaeos. Unlike Sartarite clans, I think that these are all closely blood related - matrilineal clans tend to be. While there may be the occasional son important and impressive enough to bring a "foreign" woman into the house, the next generation will in all likelihood be blood related to everyone else in the House, except maybe for a few children out of ritual concourse. There will be side lines - I did research on House Norinel, and I decided that I would have the main NPC for my scenario descended from a sister or first cousin of Queen Bruvala. Depending on the fertility and death rate of the ruling branch of the family, such side branches will sooner or later form a less prestigious side branch of the House, and finally a House of their own if they prosper despite that lower prestige, or they form the pool of brides given away to other houses in those cases of non-matrilocal marriages. Branch houses can make loyal clients because of the hold the Enfranchised House will have on their ancestresses, so allowing or disallowing the formation of such is a matter of Grandmother policy.

Matrilocal marriage are in the minority in Sartarite clans. Grandchildren from their daughters that remain in the clan are a lot more common. A few of these may have fathers from other households of the same clan.

BUT: Children belong to a household or hearth, not to the clan in general. The hearth will contain or have contained at least one of the grandparents of a child, many of its uncles and cousins, and possibly half-siblings. Full siblings are likely only if the child was the product of a marriage that lasted longer than a year (or a serial chain of year marriages).

As long as the household stays with the clan, its members will belong to the clan. Single persons may leave the household, and most likely the clan, too - some for limited time (year marriages, exile, captivity or slavery), others for life (for pretty much the same reasons, only without a time limit). But at times of crisis or overpopulation, the entire household, or a significant branch of it, may pull its roots out of the clan and move on to another clan, or to a life in a rather distant city beyond hope of keeping regular contact with the clan.

It will be the household more than the clan that keeps ties with its daughters and granddaughters in other clans. Or, more specifically, with the respective households of these daughters and granddaughters. These households will be in-laws of the clan, but specifically of the birth household of the bride (or in the rarer matrilocal marriages, the groom).

 

I wonder how many marriages among partners of status will be preceded by mutual matrilocal and patrilocal (assuming the couple has offspring in these marriages) year marriages before giving permanent marriage vows? The mythic and historical precedence is right there in the wedding contests with the representants of Kero Fin. There is the added benefit that no matter which side will be chosen for the (more) permanent marriage, both households will continue the bloodline of the couple. The price will be that full siblings will grow up separated from one another.

However, all of this has lots of story potential. Think about the drama of the half-sibling Harmastsons who sprang from Harmast's Niskis rain rites during Palangio's prolonged drought. Discovering siblings thought lost to the ravages of war and occupation, finding that a rival or worse one of the foes is one's half-sibling, or even "I am your mother, Luke" (as per Darths&Droids) are the very stuff of storytelling. Game of Thrones has this trope with the identity of Jon Snow, too. Unclear or unexplained parents can be a story hook.

 

I wonder how much being born out of a marriage will result in extra blessings for a child, and what if any are the curses this brings. The children of Harmast were born from the rain rites, and carried both the blessing and the curse of a heroic or divine descent. The old Central Casting supplement by Jenell (then Paul) Jacquays had such circumstances of birth or conception figured in the extracurricular character design tables.

 

A typical Orlanthi childhood would see the child grow up in an age group with siblings, half-siblings and first cousins in their hearth possibly even including uncles/aunts or nephews/nieces, making little or no differentiation. (Post-war circumstances left my own mother growing up like that...) Even wet-nursing the children would have been a distributed task between the mother and any other aunt currently nursing. There would be the grandmother and possibly grandaunts, and definitely lots of aunts, and few of these would be blood-related to any but their own children or grandchildren. Gender separation of children wouldn't start before they turn 6 or 7, although preferred choice of assigned toys or tasks may start earlier. Personal choice of roles and skill-forming tasks by the children will be accepted, though possibly after some parental resistance.

Orlanthi are a bit of two minds about sticking to expected roles. On the one hand, they give high status to those who fill their assigned place in society e.g. as hard working carl feeding and protecting the family, on the other hand they admire the freedom-seeking adventurers that go to places and dare anyone to stop them from doing what they want and who challenge the conventions.

A mother or grandmother will wish her children to provide her with more offspring - this is a sure sign of status in Orlanthi society. The stay-at-home sons and the dutifully married-off daughters will do so, and spread her status to more than her current clan. At the same time she will probably desire that some of her daughters or granddaughters remain with the household so that they have some female especially motivated to care for them come old age. If they are lucky, they will have a daughter who is of sufficiently high status to have a matrilocal marriage (or should that be uxorilocal? Matrilocal in terms of which hearth keeps the children).

Much of this can be in the character background unless you play the character straight from the initiation into adulthood. I mean to present Orlanthi characters as quite likely married and parent of a few children - e.g. substract 15 from your age, and roll a d10. If you roll over that number, that character is still unmarried. Roll as many D6 as you are over 15 - depending on marital status, cult and gender, characters will have a child with a chance between 1 in 6 and 5 in 6 for each year after their initiation. Ideally have the characters roll this up for their (known) NPC siblings before deciding more about their own character.

Many families will have a set of stolid children who follow the well-trodden ways of the steadholder and a set of let's say wild children who spend more time away from the stead than the steadholder is really happy to not to have their help (while at the same time sometimes being relieved not to have their unconventional understanding of helping underfoot).

This doesn't mean that the "good" son or daughter who conform to the socially accepted role don't make good adventurer characters. They simply have other triggers to go adventuring than the wild sons or daughters have. Also, this is no binary state - all manner of shades of grey are there in-between. You can have the responsible farmer whose sexual orientation doesn't further the birth of children, or the reckless adventurer fulfilling his or her mother's dream of bountiful (and honorable) hordes of offspring.

Give your campaign characters the example of siblings, uncles/aunts or cousins to conform to or to contradict. (Do so with pre-generated characters, too, as secondary handouts. Relating these facets of their culture to a character they have played, even if only in a one-shot, will make them understand the culture better. And this advice works for any culture, not just the Orlanthi.)

 

Lots of considerations. I guess too many to put in short background introductions, so I guess I will have to work them into some sample character backgrounds, without providing stats or career choices for the character - pretty much a "pick your family background" sheet, or perhaps an interactive tool very much like Jacquay's Central Casting, only tooled to the various cultures.

Anyone game to contribute ideas or even backgrounds?

 

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

34 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Branch houses can make loyal clients because of the hold the Enfranchised House will have on their ancestresses, so allowing or disallowing the formation of such is a matter of Grandmother policy.

This is in line with my thoughts on the client houses: at some point the Enfranchised House becomes 'overcrowded' and certain side branches are 'pruned'.  They are in effect kicked out of the Grandmother's hall, usually transplanted into some location useful for the Enfranchised House, and owing tribute and obligations to the parent house.  There are also branchings off these subsequent client houses as well, though most try to maintain ties with the originating Enfranchised House and not necessarily with the client house they branched from.

So in my current Nochet campaign, House Lorionaeo is a distant branch/client hall of House Hulta.

45 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Give your campaign characters the example of siblings, uncles/aunts or cousins to conform to or to contradict. (Do so with pre-generated characters, too, as secondary handouts. Relating these facets of their culture to a character they have played, even if only in a one-shot, will make them understand the culture better. And this advice works for any culture, not just the Orlanthi.)

In both my Orlmarth and Nochet campaigns I've provided short genealogy charts to show how the varied characters are related (including where their mothers came from).  I've found this useful in tying various background stories together, though there are certainly more aspects that could be drawn on as you suggest.

 

48 minutes ago, Joerg said:

The old Central Casting supplement by Jenell (then Paul) Jacquays had such circumstances of birth or conception figured in the extracurricular character design tables.

I always enjoyed working through this in my own character designs.  I've not gone to this level in either of my current campaigns - have left most of the character background to the players, but then drawing on their suggestions for certain interactions.

In my Nochet campaign, as I've wanted to emphasize the connections one makes within a city of that size, I've had the players identify six key relationships for their character such as best friend, current mentor, and greatest rival.  Where such NPC's overlap there are both interesting stories, and the potential for challenging conflicts.

55 minutes ago, Joerg said:

A mother or grandmother will wish her children to provide her with more offspring - this is a sure sign of status in Orlanthi society. The stay-at-home sons and the dutifully married-off daughters will do so, and spread her status to more than her current clan. At the same time she will probably desire that some of her daughters or granddaughters remain with the household so that they have some female especially motivated to care for them come old age. If they are lucky, they will have a daughter who is of sufficiently high status to have a matrilocal marriage

I like this concept, and it explains why in my Orlmarth campaign, the daughter and granddaughter of Morganeth White-eye stayed with the clan instead of marrying off elsewhere.  

I've also used the ritual Harvest Bride marriage as a method to connect bloodlines within the clan.  It's a year marriage where the victor of the Harvest Games (the Barley King) ritually marries the Harvest Queen (chosen by the Women's Circle/priestesses of Ernalda from the unmarried clan women).  The participants in a given year in the Harvest Games must be unmarried men and cannot be from the same bloodline as the selected Harvest Queen.  The child of such a union remains with the Harvest Queen's household (even if the Harvest Queen subsequently marries outside the clan). 

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Another question is how the clans and the hearths will deal with those of their kin that maintain an on/off membership - adventurers who take very extended sabbaticals, mercenaries or followers of kings and heroes, members in specialist cults rising in the cult hierarchy and moving to the temple.

Unless they left in a row short of kin-strife, I expect that their birth households will always be happy to receive them. If they have married into another clan, they will return as guests, but they will be able to demand the greeting of kin from the clan - anything less would be a significant insult to both the individual and the new clan. A similar, but legally different situation occurs when sisters who married into different clans visit one another. If the host sister has sufficiently high standing in her household, she can press for the kin greeting. If she is a new arrival or a low status household member, the greeting for the sister (and her clansfolk) may be rather frugal.

This sister side is all very relevant to the long form of my scenario, or rather for side scenarios, so I would really appreciate opinions or other input. This might come across as authoritative souding text, but I am truly fishing in murky waters here.

 

I mentioned the return of household members after a longer absence in the first portion of this thread.

A typical case would be the end of a marriage, with the former wife leaving the household. Even widows might have this option, especially if still of an age to birth more children. What does a steadholder or more importantly his wife do with a daughter of the household returning to her birth clan and hearth? If they are a generation apart, there is little problem, since the steadmistress will be the mother or aunt of the returning woman. Her status would be sufficiently higher to avoid being challenged. But what if the returning woman is the sibling or cousin of the steadholder, with sufficient familiarity and influence in the rest of the clan to impose her will on how the hearth is run? What if her status surpasses that of steadholder and steadmistress?

I suppose that a marriage implies a suspended membership in one's birth clan, so no adoption rite is required once the marriage was ended.

Trying to marry her off again, possibly in a hurry, might cause as many problems as keeping her in the household.

The clan could try to find a husband willing to join the clan, creating a new hearth for the returnee. If her dowry was good enough, the clan might support a new carl household. If not, the husband's dowry (or other valuable possessions or skills he might bring into the clan) might make up for the difference. But there might be a case where this solution would result in a carl's daughter being relegated to a cottar's "steadmistress," a situation with lots of disruptive potential. Less of a problem if the returning woman is an accomplished specialist of some kind, which will earn her new hearth the rank of carl (or possibly higher) even without fulfilling the agricultural requirements from the beginning. A clan letting too many of its ranking specialists live under lower class conditions will face internal problems, and will be known as misers by outsider visitors.

One possibility could be to assign such a returnee to another household which lacks a steadmistress, whether due to a divorce, the steadholder being a widower, or there being an unmarried older son of the house sufficiently remote from the blood line of the returnee. Such a match would not build new ties to other clans, but might be valuable for the internal peace of the clan. The deal could be sweetened by opening a new hearth, with all the caveats and problems mentioned above.

 

Households take pride in sons and daughters that become the companions of important people, even though this usually means they are leaving their household and their clan for a long time, if not for good. I used this theme for my scenario, too - the long dead husband of the primary NPC was such a man. Companion first of Sarotar, then of Dorasar, then returning to his birth hearth after some tragedy struck and he had to replace his brother, and taking over clan leadership as his qualifications easily surpassed those of any other candidate.

Every clan will have a couple of ambitious leaders eyeing the position of the chieftain, including the current holder of that position. Having one such accomplished if irresponsible heroic adventurer return to the clan won't cause any of them happiness. There is only one clan champion, but there may be several such adventurer characters. They aren't likely to be happy with a subordinate position in the clan ring, either, and there are only so many warrior or magician positions in the ring without unbalancing the clan's magic.

People returning from captivity pose a different problem. Did they lose status during captivity? Do they suffer from traumatic experiences during captivity? Are they even whole, or have they been broken? Their birth household is expected to take them in and to give them both care and tasks that are in keeping with their (current) abilities and their self-esteem.

 

Then we have widows (and widowers from outside of the clan), probably with a number of children being raised by the household. What are they going to do? Weaken the wealth of the household that raises their children by taking their dowry back to their birth clan? Weaken the clan wealth by allowing themselves to be married off by her in-law clan to yet another clan? Forget about their blood kin and remain in the clan without a husband? Remarry in the clan, attracting a husband of probably lower status and age? (And creating the problem for the clan once again when this younger husband, who came as a stranger into the clan, gets widowed, and has children of his own in the clan? Note that husbands marrying into a Sartarite clan often do so without the safety of a dowry.)

Thanks Simon Bray for giving me that conundrum of a lower status widower in the 2016 run of The Wolf that Came in from the Cold. I'm passing that on, now.

 

 

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

they will return as guests, but they will be able to demand the greeting of kin from the clan - anything less would be a significant insult to both the individual and the new clan

That sounds like the start of a good scenario.  Why are they insulted when they return?  (Perhaps it's just an oversight?  Or the hosts were distracted by some unexpected event?  Or the hosts were responding to some prior perceived slight?)  And what do they do in consequence?

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

A similar, but legally different situation occurs when sisters who married into different clans visit one another. If the host sister has sufficiently high standing in her household, she can press for the kin greeting. If she is a new arrival or a low status household member, the greeting for the sister (and her clansfolk) may be rather frugal.

In Nochet, we'll have both this in the Sarli district where the Sartarites and Heortlings reside, and the reverse with brothers in much of the rest of the city (likely with 'expected' actions prompted by the women they've married).  And Nochet gets more complicated by the presence of various societies and temples that are intended to unify parts of the city together, but if brothers have not only married into different houses, but have joined competing societies or rival temples, then there is an added level of tension.

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

One possibility could be to assign such a returnee to another household which lacks a steadmistress, whether due to a divorce, the steadholder being a widower, or there being an unmarried older son of the house sufficiently remote from the blood line of the returnee.

The invasion of 1602, the subsequent tribal struggles, and Starbrow's Rising in 1613 may well have complicated this where many steads may lack their original headman.  What has the clan ring done subsequently with these steads?  Have they given them to a loyal thane who has relegated the steadmistress to a lesser status?  And what does this mean to returning characters?

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

26 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

This is in line with my thoughts on the client houses: at some point the Enfranchised House becomes 'overcrowded' and certain side branches are 'pruned'.  They are in effect kicked out of the Grandmother's hall, usually transplanted into some location useful for the Enfranchised House, and owing tribute and obligations to the parent house.  There are also branchings off these subsequent client houses as well, though most try to maintain ties with the originating Enfranchised House and not necessarily with the client house they branched from.

So in my current Nochet campaign, House Lorionaeo is a distant branch/client hall of House Hulta.

Nice to see I am not totally off the book with these musings.

When it comes to Esrolia, we are in the strange situation to know quite a lot about urban clans aka Houses, but little about the rural ones. From the category "Axe Orlanthi" we can assume that there will be less matrilineal clans outside of the cities, but probably alongside with those that resemble those urban houses.

On the other hand, we have 25 000 Sartarite-descended residents of Nochet who form clans or houses in an entirely urban environment with no chance to practice any agriculture or even horticulture beyond keeping a number of pigs and some poultry. This is the equivalent of 50 small clans, or up to eight normal sized tribes in Sartar.

I guess a number of these urban clans will be clients of enfranchised houses owning the buildings that the Sartarites occupy. Wealthier urban clans will own their place, and enjoy much the same status as lesser, independent Esrolian houses in Nochet, despite often being led by men and failing to have Grandmothers to address for the real deals. Do you have any thoughts on these?

26 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

In both my Orlmarth and Nochet campaigns I've provided short genealogy charts to show how the varied characters are related (including where their mothers came from).  I've found this useful in tying various background stories together, though there are certainly more aspects that could be drawn on as you suggest.

I have vague memories of participating in a discussion where we discovered that strangers meeting somewhere would start reciting their lineages in order to find their degree of blood relation or at least family ties with the person they met. Given the six degrees of separation principle for our modern, way overpopulated world, Orlanthi probably wouldn't have to go that far back. On the other hand, they are as likely to discover ancient feuds as they are to discover kinship. How do they deal with that?

26 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

[Central Casting]

I always enjoyed working through this in my own character designs.  I've not gone to this level in either of my current campaigns - have left most of the character background to the players, but then drawing on their suggestions for certain interactions.

When I fleshed out my character Freca of Karse, I used Central Casting for inspiration, too, but when I decided to rewrite his history to fit into the Gloranthan incarnation of the city of Karse, I looked at the various stages of his youth and his childhood.

As an urban character, I defined his background through the age group playmates and later street gangs. I suppose that most of us experienced some form of tribalism between neighborhood kids. In a city that is too small to harbor entire clan groups, and with mixed ethnic backgrounds to boot, I decided that something like the Pavis street gangs mentioned in the "Welcome to the City" section were a necessary step in the development of the urban characters. Giving him a captain as father that moved from Nochet to the City of Wonders, then having him follow his mother to her folk in Seapolis while the father went on expeditions for the Godking, and finally being taken as an apprentice by his jeweler uncle in Karse, meant that I got to give him encounters in various environments - a bit like a modern army brat or diplomat's child. These did fall into various stages of his childhood, though.

So, I retroactively had this character experience the city first as the member of a youth gang, creating a number of friendships and dislikes with characters already present in the city description, and coloring his young adult and later his adult relationships with those people. I also worked in the adventures the incarnation from the other setting had experienced, translated into Gloranthan events. (If that character comes across a bit like a Mary-Sue in my attempts to write his stories, non-Gloranthan versions of those events were actually played out and were inflicted on me and my fellow players by a cruel GM who retaliated in a friendly hostile way for a few years of my GMing. That other incarnation still sees occasional play with a couple of fellow grognards.)

Doing this stuff retroactively, after getting to know that character, allowed me to go a lot deeper than you can for a new character. I do thinkt that there is a way to provide such depth with an algorithmic aid.

The Central Casting books (which were tailored to various background genres) were probability tables that you rolled on, like many other products from before the time when personal or hand held computers invaded our pen and paper roleplaying. There were other, similar products in that time, like the Midkemia city populating tool that appeared under the name of RuneQuest Cities and as part of the Thieves World box.

Nowadays I would let an application generate a couple of options for the player to choose from rather than letting the dice do all the choosing or letting the player do all the cherry-picking.

Would there be a market for such applications? Some of my gamer friends from those old times make applications for a living, and are looking for ways to combine hobby and professional life.

26 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

In my Nochet campaign, as I've wanted to emphasize the connections one makes within a city of that size, I've had the players identify six key relationships for their character such as best friend, current mentor, and greatest rival.  Where such NPC's overlap there are both interesting stories, and the potential for challenging conflicts.

True. My first actively used campaign setting which I used as a starting point for a small number of published or magazine scenarios, intermingled with scenarios of my own, used a rather old fashioned brute force approach to create player character cohesion. I demanded that all of them would be regulars in a certain tavern in the city of which I had only a street plan and a vague idea how it would be populated. I provided a few valued NPCs and a few rivals, and then had most of my scenarios set somewhere else within reasonable travel distance. The players did connect to various groups and people of note in that city, though.

While I never fleshed out a metropolis like Nochet, I came up with groups rather than individuals for the city of Karse, which is rather detailed in the old Midkemia Press/Chaosium product. (I am a bit ambitious, so I dated the status quo in that book to about 1614 S.T. after making the necessary adaptations to Glorantha, and went on to explore Karse through its history and future...) I first encountered this in a German translation, and adaptation to a different role-playing game's setting (Midgard, a German system and world) which I had plundered and extended for my own campaign setting before finally getting my grubby paws on RuneQuest - the Games Workshop edition of RQ3 was the first that made it into any well-supplied FLGS in my hunting grounds. That campaign setting was used by other players from my game, too, which is how I got to play in my own setting.

It took me a few years of playing (mostly GMing) RuneQuest in my RQ-Vikings-themed fantasy world of my own before finally playing in Glorantha. Discovering the presence of the same Karse in Greg's experience of Glorantha, and to boot right next to the Hendriki in the Holy Country, made me adapt my character.

I did run a Karse development wiki for a time, until the provider folded. I managed to salvage those files, and now I discovered that I can be my own host I will need some copious amount of free time to put that up again.

Even before I started to play RuneQuest, I made a somewhat systematic study of urban fantasy roleplaying products - probably due to the fact that shortly after I had created my campaign setting mentioned above, a number of city settings reached the German market, as translations or English originals. Many of my favorite products were constructed by the Midkemia Press method (Carse, Tulan of the Isles, Thieves World), but these all were quite limited in scope, and not quite applicable to metropolis settings like Nochet, Sog City, Glamour or the bigger Fonritian city states. One publication which did a fairly good job of providing a mix of eagle eye view and ready to use detail was the AD&D setting book for Lhankmar. Other publications (like e.g. Minas Tirith for ICE's Lord of the Rings RPG) didn't offer anything more than I had already created for my own setting. (It took me a few more years to finally get a hold on a copy of Pavis...)

I guess you define Nochet in a similar way for your game - a few slightly more detailed settings, not necessarily with detailed house or even floor plans, but probably less generalized than the overview map availablle on glorantha.com, and a healthy vagueness for everything else that isn't directly involved in your game.

I found that even so, the game will create new knowledge as you advance through your game. How do you handle this growing body of campaign canon?

If I find the copious amount of free time to visit my Karse project again, I will probably also take up my 3D-modelling of that place again, and a GIS tool to provide all the available info on the various buildings. All of that has become a lot easier to operate and to host in the years since.

26 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

I've also used the ritual Harvest Bride marriage as a method to connect bloodlines within the clan.  It's a year marriage where the victor of the Harvest Games (the Barley King) ritually marries the Harvest Queen (chosen by the Women's Circle/priestesses of Ernalda from the unmarried clan women).  The participants in a given year in the Harvest Games must be unmarried men and cannot be from the same bloodline as the selected Harvest Queen.  The child of such a union remains with the Harvest Queen's household (even if the Harvest Queen subsequently marries outside the clan).

Looks like I under-estimated the potential for this. Thanks.

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

32 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

In Nochet, we'll have both this [kin that married out of the clan visiting] in the Sarli district where the Sartarites and Heortlings reside, and the reverse with brothers in much of the rest of the city (likely with 'expected' actions prompted by the women they've married).  And Nochet gets more complicated by the presence of various societies and temples that are intended to unify parts of the city together, but if brothers have not only married into different houses, but have joined competing societies or rival temples, then there is an added level of tension.

This leads me to a couple of questions and observations.

Nochet folk are members of their houses, their cults (with possibly rival temples to the same deity to choose from), and societies that may be some of the city's militias or guild-like structures joined by individuals rather than by houses or households?

And to what degree and conditions are there inter-marriages between Esrolian and Heortlanding or Sartarite-descended houses/clans? Are there urban Esrolians who practice patrilocal marriage, or a balance of matri- and patrilocal ones (referring to the couple as future parents here)?

In other words, they have multiple obligations that might become exclusive to one another?

Not restricted to Nochet - can a household or bloodline abstain from their clan's feud with a clan their daughters married into?

Quote

The invasion of 1602, the subsequent tribal struggles, and Starbrow's Rising in 1613 may well have complicated this where many steads may lack their original headman.  What has the clan ring done subsequently with these steads?  Have they given them to a loyal thane who has relegated the steadmistress to a lesser status?  And what does this mean to returning characters?

Good point. Is the wife of an exile considered a widow during his absence? There is mythical precedence with the protectors of Ernalda during Orlanth's exile, including Orlanth himself in disguise.

Is the selection of the steadmaster and steadmistress a clan affair, or is this an affair of the hearth? If the hearth decides on this, and the clan ring begs to differ, the ring can push their agenda by threatening to alter the allocation of land and herds to that hearth.

Note that a hearth will be the core to a number of relationships to other clans. All those wives will have their blood kin observing closely how the clan ring treats their household. They may scorn good-for-nothing husbands for not promoting their wives' status within the hearth or the clan, but they are as likely to bring perceived sleights before their own clan ring, initiating the preliminaries to a law-suit. Any marriage is always also a business deal between clans.

There ought to be room for scenes like Odysseus' (Ulysses in many of the English renditions) reunion with his wife Penelope. Or Agamemnon's with Klytemnaestra.

Edited by Joerg

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...