Bits of Glorantha you ignore

[Alex]

On 10/18/2021 at 7:30 PM, ffilz said:

I love it all.

That's quite the plot twist.

[Akhôrahil]

On 10/18/2021 at 8:30 PM, ffilz said:

I love Ducks. I love Jack-o-Bears. I love it all. 

God-forming Uleria?

[ffilz]

17 hours ago, Alex said:

That's quite the plot twist.

I’m confused…

[Alex]

3 minutes ago, ffilz said:

I’m confused…

As best as I can recall, you often have long lists of things in Glorantha you ignore.  Just not in the "bits of Glorantha you ignore" thread!

[ffilz]

2 hours ago, Alex said:

As best as I can recall, you often have long lists of things in Glorantha you ignore.  Just not in the "bits of Glorantha you ignore" thread!

Have we talked somewhere else?

I have shared in this thread what I ignore. 

This most recent bit about the creatures happens to be an area where at least from RQ1/2 I am happy to use everything. There are some creatures in RQ3 Glorantha material I don’t use. I have the RQG Bestiary but haven’t done a deep dive to know if it has creak wouldn’t use. 

[Monty Lovering]

On 11/10/2017 at 11:34 AM, Joerg said:

Babeester Gor cultists in the party. A non-chaotic subcult of Thed... nothing wrong with Earth Axe women, whether as hunters or as bodyguards, or people clad in trophies of vanquished foes, but I don't need this cult as played by too many (male) players.

One of my current players is a very axe-solves-problems Babeestor Gory (sic).

She's sixteen. Has actually transitioned from Pathfinder to RQ better than most of the (much older men including her dad) players after I took over as GM at the end of a PF campaign.

But, yes, I think that guy's should normally not tread there unless they are going to play with sincerity rather than as some kind of parody.

[jenh]

3 hours ago, Monty Lovering said:

But, yes, I think that guy's should normally not tread there unless they are going to play with sincerity rather than as some kind of parody.

I feel certain that I'm going to regret asking this and gaining fresh causes of disappointment, but what problems in the portrayal of BG followers do (too many) men fall into? Or should I just be grateful that I can't think what a parody would look like?

[Monty Lovering]

Eh, well I have two teenage (15/16) girls in my player group.

So Uleria is the goddess of seamstresses and seamsters... if they read Pratchett they'll get the joke and will therefore old enough to, but I'd still not play it as the canonical cult as, just no. Inappropriate. 

And broo... even without minors at the table I'm not overly enamoured with their method of reproduction. Something that could actually be genuinely uncomfortable for people with good reason doesn't fit in.

So, IMG, being broo is a parasitical disease.

Broo are asexual and produce eggs internally. These hatch into larvae that migrate to the digestive tract. Unless the broo regurgitate the larvae, they are consumed from within, the larvae pupating and then erupting from the broo as an immature broo, often killing the host. They will carry certain characteristics of their host.

So broo are rather driven to get rid of the larvae, which they do by capturing substitute hosts, which they then vomit the larvae into.

They then grow inside their new host's digestive tract. As they grow they will slowly change the host's behaviour to allow the developing larvae the maximum chance of survival; male hosts will become gluttons, which can explain the distention of the abdomen characteristic of broo parasite near pupation. Female hosts will stop menstruating, for similar reasons. If the host is threatened they will flee, either seeking out broo (broo will recognise the host as such), or hiding away apart from raids on local habitations for food. Eventually the larvae will pupate and seven days later drive the host to seek solitude so they can erupt from their abdomen in safety. As with instances where a parasite develops inside a broo, the broo will take certain characteristics from the host, but basically it will be an anthropoid with horns either of a goat (if a human, elf, troll or dwarf was the host) or of the host species (although hornless broo are known from instances where they, for example, parasitise predators), but always unmistakably broo unless Chaos says otherwise.

My immature imago broo are nasty and fast, quite capable of severely injuring or killing the unwary and unarmed who get in their way when they seek isolation were they predate on anything they can kill. They kill, eat and sleep and reach adult size with a year if there is enough food.

This nicely avoids the rape-y aspects of canon broo, and fits in well with their Malia focus. It also means if broo raid small settlement and infect all the men, women and children there, they will then go on with their daily activity until they all gather together in a barn or some such whilst the larvae within pupate, all emerging within a minute of each other. Which gives wonderful scenario for PC's. And yes, of course I've seen Alien/s.

 

[Monty Lovering]

13 hours ago, jenh said:

I feel certain that I'm going to regret asking this and gaining fresh causes of disappointment, but what problems in the portrayal of BG followers do (too many) men fall into? Or should I just be grateful that I can't think what a parody would look like?

 

I am extrapolating the way I have seen guys play female characters. There's a tendency for them to end up like a grown-up version of Mathilde from 'The Professional' in which Leon did not die and trained her, with various tropes added (on top of beautiful & deadly, men-hating, overly-sexualised, perpetually under-dressed, with even more offensive depictions of sexual orientation or kink). Someone could take that forumla and make a BG character a joke.

The girl in my PC group has it judged perfectly. Probably plays to her cult's 'type' better than the other people round the table, and she actually 'read ahead' and chose BG as I was not offering that as an initial option given where the campaign started, but as she was like "I wanna be BG", I was cool with changing that.

I should say I am thinking when I was a teenager. With my current group, most of them played women in the last (Pathfinder) campaign but in a kind of they just happen to be female way that wasn't offensive.

Maybe now as an adult playing with adults and with RPGs having matured a bit, let alone other attitudes, it would be different.

But my first question to a guy wanting to play BG or Vinga would be, why? 

 

[dumuzid]

1 hour ago, Monty Lovering said:

But my first question to a guy wanting to play BG or Vinga would be, why?

Not quite two years ago, in the last RQ:G game in which I was a player, the players took on secondary characters as the scope of the game expanded.  I was playing an Argan Argar troll, who by that point in the campaign was the king of a small new community on the edge of the Grazelands.  I took on an Esrolian Babeester Gor axe woman as my secondary character for a number of reasons.

The simplest answer to "why a Babeester Gor" is that it's a great combat cult, and from a pure gameplay perspective my group needed a combat monster after our Humakti player left the campaign.  I didn't want to play a Humakti myself for that role because we'd just had one.  For the purposes of storytelling and mythic resonance though, I really liked the idea of adding a Babs warrior to the group because my troll character was building a cadre of professional warrior-magicians based on the Kimantorings, the professional army of the Kingdom of Night, and I knew that BG axe women were deeply intertwined with that tradition.

Her backstory was that she'd fought against the Lunars in the Esrolian war, followed Argrath east to Pavis, and out in Prax ran seriously afoul of a Bison Tribe khan who did not take the rejection of his marriage proposal reasonably.  She went into Dragon Pass with Argrath in 1627, but split off to join the player community when she heard that her old comrade from Pennel Ford (my troll) was now king of a town that housed a major Earth temple.  She made a natural choice for the town's martial champion, among its existing cohort of Old Tarshite axe women.  She beheaded a chaotic great troll champion in single combat when mercenaries from the Lunar Empire invaded our valley, and made friends with the ghost of a Vingkotling king.

The community's primary war spirit was a local river demigoddess, a daughter of Shargash and the Oslir river.  In the finale of that campaign, with the demigoddess's guidance, my axe woman swore a marriage vow to Shargash in exchange for even greater martial power to defend the great earth temple at Heruvernalda, and so ended the campaign as a sort of Esrolian Marazi Amazon.

[Monty Lovering]

39 minutes ago, dumuzid said:

Not quite two years ago, in the last RQ:G game in which I was a player, the players took on secondary characters as the scope of the game expanded.  I was playing an Argan Argar troll, who by that point in the campaign was the king of a small new community on the edge of the Grazelands.  I took on an Esrolian Babeester Gor axe woman as my secondary character for a number of reasons.

The simplest answer to "why a Babeester Gor" is that it's a great combat cult, and from a pure gameplay perspective my group needed a combat monster after our Humakti player left the campaign.  I didn't want to play a Humakti myself for that role because we'd just had one.  For the purposes of storytelling and mythic resonance though, I really liked the idea of adding a Babs warrior to the group because my troll character was building a cadre of professional warrior-magicians based on the Kimantorings, the professional army of the Kingdom of Night, and I knew that BG axe women were deeply intertwined with that tradition.

Her backstory was that she'd fought against the Lunars in the Esrolian war, followed Argrath east to Pavis, and out in Prax ran seriously afoul of a Bison Tribe khan who did not take the rejection of his marriage proposal reasonably.  She went into Dragon Pass with Argrath in 1627, but split off to join the player community when she heard that her old comrade from Pennel Ford (my troll) was now king of a town that housed a major Earth temple.  She made a natural choice for the town's martial champion, among its existing cohort of Old Tarshite axe women.  She beheaded a chaotic great troll champion in single combat when mercenaries from the Lunar Empire invaded our valley, and made friends with the ghost of a Vingkotling king.

The community's primary war spirit was a local river demigoddess, a daughter of Shargash and the Oslir river.  In the finale of that campaign, with the demigoddess's guidance, my axe woman swore a marriage vow to Shargash in exchange for even greater martial power to defend the great earth temple at Heruvernalda, and so ended the campaign as a sort of Esrolian Marazi Amazon.

And this ^^^ is immersive and sincere and knowledgable.

Wouldn't dream of denying it.

I would also want to know why someone would want to play a dragonewt or elf or troll.

I'm fine with character ideas as long as they are not basically treating the the non-human character as some kind of rubber suit with a zipper down the back. You want to be a troll? Play a troll. Etc..

[dumuzid]

3 minutes ago, Monty Lovering said:

I would also want to know why someone would want to play a dragonewt or elf or troll.

When the campaign I just described was getting started, I read a post on these forums to the effect of 'Storm is the most protagonistic element, but Darkness is the most heroic," that got me looking into the cult lore of Argan Argar and the Only Old One.  I really fell in love with the Kingdom of Night as presented in Esrolia: Land of 10,000 Goddesses, the 'Wooing of Esrola' and 'Norinel & Kimantor' myths, and the idea of the Earth+Darkness+Harmony mythic complex that undergirded Esrolia and wider Kethaela up to Belintar's time.  I also got a kick out of the idea of playing a character so at odds with the preconceptions people would have about someone described as a 'troll warrior' in any other setting: an honorable, compassionate, socially adept Argan Argar speartroll governed mainly by the Harmony and Movement runes.

I really enjoyed roleplaying the nonhuman aspects of being a troll: in the first scene of the campaign, in an Orlanthi market, that troll bought a bolt of linen from a stall and, to the horror of the linen merchant, started unwinding the cloth and eating it like fruit-by-the-foot candy, complimenting the seller on the taste of the dyes.  I loved digging into things like the terminology trolls use for the textures perceived with Darksense.

By playing that character and actively trying to embody the myths of Argan Argar and Only Old One I was effectively able to weave those stories into the campaign, and help make the new story a bit like them.  We even heroquested the Wooing of Esrola over Sacred Time at the end of 1626.  Which leads to a nice final answer to the initial question: I wanted to a play a troll in RQ:G because I wanted to experience troll myths within the game and share them with my group.

[jenh]

7 hours ago, Monty Lovering said:

I am extrapolating the way I have seen guys play female characters. There's a tendency for them to end up like a grown-up version of Mathilde from 'The Professional' in which Leon did not die and trained her, with various tropes added (on top of beautiful & deadly, men-hating, overly-sexualised, perpetually under-dressed, with even more offensive depictions of sexual orientation or kink). Someone could take that forumla and make a BG character a joke.

I'm actually relieved that's it's not more than the 'standard' horror. Thank you.

[Ali the Helering]

Hit Girl out of Kick Ass?  What a Fighting Style if accompanied by twin labrys!

[Orlanthatemyhamster]

On 10/18/2021 at 9:34 AM, Darius West said:

Actually another pet peeve that I have with the present Glorantha canon is this whole idea that Morokanths aren't able to eat meat, i.e. are not carnivorous/omnivorous like humans.  I cannot get this idea to make any sense whatsoever, and so I have removed it entirely from my Glorantha.

Think about it...

Waha's Covenant specified that the winners get to ride and eat the losers, but have an obligation to look after them too. 

Let's ignore the other logical problems with Waha's Covenant (such as what exactly was the competition, and why did Humans have to compete against so many different beasts when the beasts apparently didn't compete against each other, etc.)  

This leaves us with the outcome, which was that humans an morokanth won, but somehow morokanth cannot eat meat, despite the fact that they are effectively the ultimate winner of the entire contest, having beaten the humans.  This doubles down in contradiction when you consider that the humans of Genert's Garden likely didn't eat meat either before Waha's Covenant.

This also makes no sense in the context of the spell Alter Creature.  Humans who have the spell cast on them devolve into simpleminded grass eaters who lack the power of speech and reason.  Cast the same creature on a human again and they become normal humans and are able to think and eat meat again.  So... What happens if you cast Alter Creature on a morokanth...?

Also the whole notion that morokanth can make herd men into something of economic value other than food and hides is pretty ridiculous.

 

It's a PCism just like much of Sartar, that post modern utopia.

*Politically Correct or Player Character, take your pick.

[Sir_Godspeed]

On 10/29/2021 at 4:31 PM, Monty Lovering said:

I'm fine with character ideas as long as they are not basically treating the the non-human character as some kind of rubber suit with a zipper down the back. You want to be a troll? Play a troll. Etc..

Ironically, trolls are probably the most humanlike of all the Elder Races.

[Akhôrahil]

32 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Ironically, trolls are probably the most humanlike of all the Elder Races.

Yeah, trolls are people. I would allow a troll way before a non-broken dwarf (or Heaven help us, Dragonewt).

[Monty Lovering]

1 hour ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Ironically, trolls are probably the most humanlike of all the Elder Races.

Uz say human most uz out of the ancient foes. And taste better than Mostali. 

[Monty Lovering]

51 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Yeah, trolls are people. I would allow a troll way before a non-broken dwarf (or Heaven help us, Dragonewt).

I think that Elder Race PC's living outside their race are ALL very very odd indeed, but could well end up aping (trolling? dwarfing?) human behaviour from exposure and to try to fit in.

I think an apostate dwarf who worships Issaries would be one hell of a PC to play. 

[Akhôrahil]

29 minutes ago, Monty Lovering said:

Uz say human most uz out of the ancient foes. And taste better than Mostali. 

I believe the consensus among trolls is that dwarves taste great, but come in annoying Iron cans.

[dumuzid]

My understanding is that mostali don't taste particularly good, but eating them brings on powerful hallucinogenic trips based on the mostali's caste.

[Ironwall]

7 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Ironically, trolls are probably the most humanlike of all the Elder Races.

Makes sense both are descendants of grandfather mortal in the beast-man dichotomy

[Monty Lovering]

22 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

I believe the consensus among trolls is that dwarves taste great, but come in annoying Iron cans.

Bad taste go in can, bad taste come out of can!

[dumuzid]

The best-tasting Man Rune beings of all are aldryami, of course

[Ali the Helering]

2 hours ago, dumuzid said:

The best-tasting Man Rune beings of all are aldryami, of course

All you can eat salad bar.  What's not to love?