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Bits of Glorantha you ignore


Jon Hunter

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On 11/5/2021 at 11:41 PM, radmonger said:

I don't see how this can be true. Humans gathering food for other humans to eat is a sustainable calorie model; it's how any society that has less than 100% of people working in agriculture works. What changes if the 'other people' lack thumbs?

In summation:

1/ You mention agriculture.  Neolithic subsistence pastoralism bears little resemblance to what we understand when we use the term agriculture.  Morokanth do not plant crops, they are nomads.  Pastoralism in this form is essentially intensive foraging that includes grass in the calorific intake.  This bears no resemblance to the neat rows of planted crops we associate with medieval or even modern agriculture, and is an even more basic model than what most people understand when one mentions pastoralism.  This is stone age subsistence herding, which suffers from a lot of systemic instabilities even when using hardy animals like goats.  Herd Men are a lot less hardy than most Prax beasts.

2/ This is not a model where humans are gathering food for other humans.  This is a model where we have a group of mildly physically disabled humans (most have one or no thumbs) looking after (and allegedly not eating) a large group of physically able but extremely intellectually disabled humans, using only neolithic technology.

3/ The model proposed is that morokanths are not meat eaters, and that they train herd men to forage edibles for them.  No other tribe in Prax needs to train their entire herd to forage to bring them food, and the amount of time this would involve would be prohibitive, and ultimately unnecessary, when if morokanths are vegetarians (as is proposed), they could simply cut out the middle men and do their own grazing, thus saving themselves hundreds and thousands of hours of unnecessary work training herd men not to eat what the herd men forage.

4/ Morokanths, like other Praxians, being nomadic, likely have no means of storing their food surplus that is more complex that clay jars and baskets.  They will not have granaries or hay sheds.  The great survival advantage of pastoralism is that meat on the hoof doesn't need refrigeration, and the grass it requires is normally plentiful (except during winter, when, because you are nomads, you "up sticks" to warmer pastures).  That means if the morokanths get raided, their food surplus is very threatened, as it is very difficult to load panicking herd men with jars and baskets of food and then get them to all run in the same direction cohesively while the tents burn and the enemy is screaming in their faces.  Now logically the morokanths can potentially set up caches against such possibilities, but all the items in caches spoil over time, and that would be tremendously wasteful, so logically they would need to retrieve food from the caches, which will potentially expose the cache each time this is done. 

5/ All the extra effort that the morokanths need to go to in order to keep this model viable is grossly inferior to a model where there are no herd men to care for and each morokanth spends a couple of hours a day grazing.  Calorifically, a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is very reliable and allows for a lot of free time.  Pastoralism by comparison likely emerges when population pressure increases the competition for game to the point where it becomes necessary to guard your game animals, combined with the domestication of infant animals taken as pets when their parents have been hunted.  In Prax, competition for herds is intense, and no tribe is as disadvantaged as the morokanths, whose animals are far slower, weaker, and allegedly are not to be eaten by morokanths, despite the fact that other tribes are on record as eating herd men.

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12 hours ago, Vile Traveller said:
21 hours ago, soltakss said:

There is a banned image of a Morokanth and his prize herd cow, it is worth tracking down.

IIRC that was the image that got Triff kicked off the Mongoose forum and prompted him to start up BRP Central.

It was indeed, so it was a good thing for a number of reasons.

13 hours ago, Rick Meints said:
21 hours ago, soltakss said:

There is a banned image of a Morokanth and his prize herd cow, it is worth tracking down.

No, it really isn't.

Don't worry, nobody is going to post it here, I hope.

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10 hours ago, Darius West said:

In summation:

1/ You mention agriculture.  

2/ This is not a model where humans are gathering food for other humans.  

3/ The model proposed is that morokanths are not meat eaters, and that they train herd men to forage edibles for them.  

4/ Morokanths, like other Praxians, being nomadic, likely have no means of storing their food surplus that is more complex that clay jars and baskets.  

5/ All the extra effort that the morokanths need to go to in order to keep this model viable is grossly inferior to a model where there are no herd men to care for and each morokanth spends a couple of hours a day grazing.  

If you are merely expressing how this could not work in the real world, I'll just agree and save time.

If you are saying this can't work in a world where the gods are real, magic is plentiful, and all of the physics/geology/similar do not necessarily apply in exactly the same way, then I disagree. The food situation is different when you have spells that can help grow it, find it and preserve it. To me this is akin to saying how Gloranthans are screwed without the modern medicine we enjoy today while not factoring in the affects of magic spells. I've never felt that Glorantha works well because it adheres to all of the real world realities. After all, Glorantha isn't a planet, and it doesn't orbit around a sun, so not having a creature's digestion fit with how things work in real life falls pretty far down the list of my concerns. Maybe Waha changed how their stomachs work. Maybe their teeth can chew things differently as part of the covenant. I'm more into how the Morokanth have to deal with being mistrusted and despised, and how they also present some very cool roleplaying opportunities. It's been that way for me since I first played through Borderlands. I didn't stop playing because I thought pizza would upset their stomach, or that they didn't have a silo to store surplus grain in, and certainly not how neolithic hunter/gatherer theories ruined my willing suspension of disbelief. When my character visited Gonn Orta he thought Mr. Greatness, the morokanth with the one magical thumb, was super interesting. That's why I asked Simon Bray to draw a picture of him giving the thumbs up in the Gloranthan Classic version of Griffin Mountain. I didn't contemplate whether it meant he could now use a hoe more effectively to gather roots.

In the end, please continue playing the morokanth however you want to in your game. 

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On 11/5/2021 at 2:32 PM, jajagappa said:

The current statement is in RQ Bestiary p.51: "The morokanth are primarily vegetarians but do eat herd-men as part of their religious practice"

Can I suggest to tweak this phrase's meaning in order to make morokanths adhere to everyone's expectations?

I mean, if one wants vegetarian morokanths, one can claim that this religious practice requires eating herd-men maybe once every year.

If one, instead, wants their morokanths to be carnivores, well, they can argue that "yes yes, morokanths are herbivores, but you know, because of "religious practice", they are required to eat meat every eight hours".

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4 minutes ago, Meleros said:

I mean, if one wants vegetarian morokanths, one can claim that this religious practice requires eating herd-men maybe once every year.

Perhaps they simply classify herd-men as "vegetables".

Feel free to move this post over to "Your Dumbest Theory".

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14 hours ago, Darius West said:

In summation:

1/   Morokanth do not plant crops, they are nomads.

This is a false dichotomy. Many real world nomadic hunter gatherers plant crops; they merely do not tend them.  Those hunter-gatherers, using no metal tools, keep non-physically active elders around for the sake of their practical and cultural knowledge. Training the young and fit how to dig when and where Grandmother tells them is a problem real-world societies solve without metals or magic.

With the even longer cultural memories allowed by summon ancestor Rune magic, you know where great-Grandfather scattered some seeds, and so where an apparently barren landscape has water and roots available for the digging. You don't need to harvest and store food in bulk if you are the one who knows where to dig.

Fun fact: real-world tapirs actually do this, except minus the Rune magic and the digging. Tapirs are literally rain forest creatures that can survive partial ecosystem collapse by  spreading the seeds of the plants they like to eat. 

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/250054520_Feeding_habit_of_the_Brazilian_tapir_Tapirus_terrestris_Perissodactyla_Tapiridae_in_a_vegetation_transition_zone_in_south-eastern_Brazil

YGWV, but to me, that resonates with the idea of Prax's Green Age, when a Morokanth could once effortlessly feed themselves on fruit and seeds. But now things are different. Asrelia's bounty has retreated beneath the surface, and only those with thumbs can access it. Without adopting the Covenant, they would not survive.

But maybe one day, things will be as they were, and they will never have to suffer the foul taste of meat again...

 

 

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2 minutes ago, Meleros said:

If one, instead, wants their morokanths to be carnivores, well, they can argue that "yes yes, morokanths are herbivores, but you know, because of "religious practice", they are required to eat meat every eight hours".

Excellent line of argument, well made, counsellor, but on the whole I think "YGWV" is the more straightforward and robust approach.  Then we don't also have to rationalise the text in RQG ("primarily as slaves" (*)) too, and we're saying explicitly which version works best for us, which ideally spares confusion of expectation later.  After all, YGHV'd here already, we're all doing the Lore equivalent of Karallan's Plight all the time.  "Follow Chosen Sources."

(*)  And no doubt we could.  If you especially want gramnivore herdmen and obligate hypercarnivore morokanth, that already requires quite the population of them to prop up the biomass pyramid, but add in lots more still as additional slaves, then done!  By that point we necessarily have far more herdmen than human Praxians, which seems like a notable factoid it's a little surprising wasn't mentioned to us earlier, but not impossible either...

 

4 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

If you are merely expressing how this could not work in the real world, I'll just agree and save time.

Mind you, in real-world biology, turning a human into a grass-eater would be quite the big anatomical and metabolic stretch.  Now I don't know what the standardised exchange rate between that and two points of one-use rune magic is, but for me it sounds a much bigger one than that implied by the Revisionist take (that they now have the instincts to harvest and the ability to live on Praxian roots), that Darius won't hear of.

Now of course, one person's grating implausibility is another's high-fantasy sensawonda.  My personal bias here is very likely that I'm not the biggest fan of the Dark Fantasy/Horror aspects of the setting, so there's not a huge amount of payoff for suspending my disbelief in this case.  Even if the RQG take in turn becomes Post-Canonical and we go back to the RQ2/3 one, I think I'll be sticking with this.

 

15 hours ago, Darius West said:

All the extra effort that the morokanths need to go to in order to keep this model viable is grossly inferior to a model where there are no herd men to care for and each morokanth spends a couple of hours a day grazing.  Calorifically, a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is very reliable and allows for a lot of free time.  Pastoralism by comparison likely emerges when population pressure increases the competition for game to the point where it becomes necessary to guard your game animals, combined with the domestication of infant animals taken as pets when their parents have been hunted.  In Prax, competition for herds is intense, and no tribe is as disadvantaged as the morokanths, whose animals are far slower, weaker, and allegedly are not to be eaten by morokanths, despite the fact that other tribes are on record as eating herd men.

But "grazing morokanths" and "allegedly not to be eaten" herdmen are neither what Current Canon(TM) state or imply, nor what anyone's been arguing in this thread.  (At already excessive length in my own case, I feel, so I'm attempting to keep the reiteration of points we've evidently been talking past each on to a relative minimum here.)  Or perhaps I'm suffering a sense of humour failure here (and indeed elsewhere) on intentional hyperbole.

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10 hours ago, Alex said:

But "grazing morokanths" and "allegedly not to be eaten" herdmen are neither what Current Canon(TM) state or imply, nor what anyone's been arguing in this thread.  (At already excessive length in my own case, I feel, so I'm attempting to keep the reiteration of points we've evidently been talking past each on to a relative minimum here.)  Or perhaps I'm suffering a sense of humour failure here (and indeed elsewhere) on intentional hyperbole.

You say it isn't part of the present canon, but look at the character Egajia Chewer of Flesh.  The implication of this character being that morokanth don't eat meat, and she is an oddity who does so for religious reasons.  Greg Stafford decided to retro-engineer morokanths to make them more "acceptable" late in the story.  So is that canon?  It certainly shouldn't be, because it doesn't work within the lore or any sensible model of physical anthropology (that being the crux of my position on the matter).

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11 hours ago, radmonger said:

This is a false dichotomy. Many real world nomadic hunter gatherers plant crops; they merely do not tend them.  Those hunter-gatherers, using no metal tools, keep non-physically active elders around for the sake of their practical and cultural knowledge. Training the young and fit how to dig when and where Grandmother tells them is a problem real-world societies solve without metals or magic.

I am well aware of this behavior amongst nomadic hunter gatherers, in fact I am assuming active nomadic replanting methods by all Praxian tribes as part of any model I am working with. 

When I say they do not plant, I am talking about monocultural rows of crops in an agricultural model akin to those practiced by agricultural societies, not the well studied hunter-gatherer replanting models.  I am also well aware that hunter-gatherers have a lot more spare time than agriculturalists, which is why I cannot see morokanths spending the bulk of their time training herd men to do tasks that they could perform for themselves vastly more efficiently.

Back to your alleged false dichotomy however, I would also point out that in your model it would not be the morokanths doing the planting, it would be their severely intellectually disabled workforce that would be performing the task you are referring to.  Does this still sound plausible to you?

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16 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

If you are merely expressing how this could not work in the real world, I'll just agree and save time.

Okay fine, you have conceded that it can't work in a realistic setting.  I like to keep my Glorantha realistic, as it allows my players to have a predictable real-world sense of what is physically possible, and this in turn enhances the sense of the power of the magic when they employ it.  Immersion is what it is all about imo, and realism in terms of mundane physical systems is important to help people suspend disbelief and keep things consistent.

16 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

If you are saying this can't work in a world where the gods are real, magic is plentiful, and all of the physics/geology/similar do not necessarily apply in exactly the same way, then I disagree. 

I could plausibly make the argument that Glorantha is a perfectly ordinary planet, and that what we are seeing is the people of that ordinary planet with the remnant of a prior very high technology that now appears like magic, trying to make sense of that world after a cataclysm, and coming up with imperfect models (like the Lozenge theory; don't tell the Flat Earthers about Glorantha ffs😁) and understandings that are similar to those of humanity's own past, but I won't.😇

16 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

The food situation is different when you have spells that can help grow it, find it and preserve it.

Yes, we have game rules that explain how these magical benefits accrue, and they are consistent within the game world.  We have a measure of what it possible.

16 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

To me this is akin to saying how Gloranthans are screwed without the modern medicine we enjoy today while not factoring in the affects of magic spells. I've never felt that Glorantha works well because it adheres to all of the real world realities. After all, Glorantha isn't a planet, and it doesn't orbit around a sun, so not having a creature's digestion fit with how things work in real life falls pretty far down the list of my concerns.

On the contrary, Glorantha is a real world, where magic interacts with a more mundane physical reality.  While things are made out of runes, the fact is that it is still a facsimile of bronze age earth, and like tales from Earths own bronze age cultures there are stories of fantastical beings.  For a very long time, humans didn't think the Earth orbited around the Sun, and for a while there you could actually get tortured by the inquisition for suggesting such heresy.  Yes, morokanth digestion matters, because meat eating morokanth are better for the lore and better for modeling a fictional society that can actually work within the world it occupies.

16 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

Maybe Waha changed how their stomachs work. Maybe their teeth can chew things differently as part of the covenant.

 Blame Greg.  Late in the day, he decided that morokanths were herbivores and it doesn't work.  If morokanths were herbivores, then there is no earthly use for them to maintain herd men, in fact they go from being a very plausible tribe of meat eater  to being one of vegetarians that should have gone extinct in the First Age from having a stupid economic model for surviving an arid to semi-arid (god-war blighted) environment.

Worse still, when humans won in Waha's Covenant Lottery, the inference is that they went from being vegeatrians and no smarter or dumber than the other beasts to becoming intelligent riders and meat eaters of the now non-sentient beasts who were once their equals, yet in Greg's new version of reality the morokanths remain vegetarians, and cannot actually ride the herd men they have "won".  To rub it in further, Waha doesn't give the morokanths thumbs (unless they perform a hero quest apparently).  

Rick, you say that Waha might have changed how their stomachs worked.  I would have assumed so too.  I would have assumed that Waha would have made both humans and morokanths into sentient meat eaters for winning the Covenant lottery.  Apparently however, while Waha bestowed intelligence on morokanths, he didn't change their digestion, any more than he gave them a physique for riding beasts, or thumbs.  Doesn't that seem unfair?  I thought so.  

16 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

I'm more into how the Morokanth have to deal with being mistrusted and despised, and how they also present some very cool roleplaying opportunities. It's been that way for me since I first played through Borderlands. I didn't stop playing because I thought pizza would upset their stomach, or that they didn't have a silo to store surplus grain in, and certainly not how neolithic hunter/gatherer theories ruined my willing suspension of disbelief. When my character visited Gonn Orta he thought Mr. Greatness, the morokanth with the one magical thumb, was super interesting. That's why I asked Simon Bray to draw a picture of him giving the thumbs up in the Gloranthan Classic version of Griffin Mountain. I didn't contemplate whether it meant he could now use a hoe more effectively to gather roots.  In the end, please continue playing the morokanth however you want to in your game. 

Rick, I love morokanths and I want them to have justice, instead of this late-in-the-lore rewrite that bowdlerizes them.  The morokanths as written up in Borderlands were unequivocally meat eaters.  They eat the herd men they herd, as well as other Prax beasts, as is the way taught by Waha and Eiritha, of whom they are some of the most fanatical adherents.  I liked Mr Greatness a lot too.

My morokanths are the mafia of Prax.  You want to save your cousin from Impala slavery?  Do a deal with the morokanths.  Problems with your ransom?  Talk to the morokanths.  Need a loan to make bride price?  Morokanths.  Someone goes missing while taking a piss at night?  Morokanths. 

My morokanths are dug in like ticks in the Southern Paps.  They are intimately involved in loan sharking, ransoms and slavery across Prax, and have huge influence over the politics of the High Priestesses of the Paps.  They don't pursue power for the love of it, but because they need it more than the other tribes do, due to their physical disadvantages. By keeping their non-herdman Prax beast herds comparatively small, they reduce their likelihood of being raided, and most Praxians won't raid the morokanths to run off with their herd-men, because its a little too close to cannibalism and they aren't ogres.  They will do so if the tribe needs any food asap, but Praxians are not going to rush to eat mock pork.  I also play morokanth thumbs as being among the more numerous magical items of Prax, and hero questing morokanths bring home a thumb for their clan once per Sacred time as it is a comparatively low risk hero quest.  My morokanths also dominate the Black Fang Brotherhood, and it fits with the lore for them to do so, given their darkness connections and the need for an ambush based fighting cult, as well as their New Praxian underworld connections.  It all fits together.

My players understand that if they get ransomed, it is likely that they will be held by the morokanths and handed off to Humakti representatives at Pimper's Block once the ransom is paid.  They understand the dire risks in taking a loan from the morokanths.  They understand that the morokanths are not Praxians you want to mess with lightly, and that they have a place that works within the milieu of Prax.  Immersion.

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20 minutes ago, Darius West said:

Back to your alleged false dichotomy however, I would also point out that in your model it would not be the morokanths doing the planting, it would be their severely intellectually disabled workforce that would be performing the task you are referring to.  Does this still sound plausible to you?

The thing you regard as impossible, even given magic, does literally happen in the real world:

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2017/10/are-zombies-real

I see herd men as similar to the Haitian 'zombies', those unfortunate individuals who have lost their personalities, memories and volition to drugs and ritual torture. But such a zombie is still smarter than a smart animal, a raven or pig. So they understand, and may speak, simple language. They would need minimal training, and maybe a  Command Rune spell or two, to do any straightforward task. And they have a useful working life of at least a decade, maybe two. So a week, or a months, training is a minor overhead. Some herd men are even adequate crafters and fighters, when a Morokanth does the thinking part of the job.

If you prefer a model of herd men where they are vertical cattle, then so be it. But I don't think you can justify that in terms of real-world physical anthropology. Humans can't eat grass, tapirs can't survive in a full desert, humans aren't a viable food species. That leaves a _lot_ of heavy lifting for magic to do. And Prax and the Wastes is, for Glorantha, notably a low-magic environment, with at least one area where magic doesn't work at all.

 

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2 hours ago, Darius West said:

You say it isn't part of the present canon, but look at the character Egajia Chewer of Flesh.  The implication of this character being that morokanth don't eat meat, and she is an oddity who does so for religious reasons.

Or it's one of those things that's common enough, but still gets commented on as if it's special.

I've taken to thinking of those things as "Yelmalian Theocracies," due to that reoccurring description.

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1 hour ago, Tindalos said:

Or it's one of those things that's common enough, but still gets commented on as if it's special.

 

Yes, if there was a Humakti called Aijage Smiter of Foes, that would hardly imply that all other Humakti were pacifists, and he was the one wierdo religious nutter who thought fighting enemies was a good idea.

The Humakti clearly regard foe-smiting as heroic and praiseworthy. It's a thing they culturally aspire to do. How often they succeed will vary, both between individuals in a group, and between different groups. In the Household of Death, no doubt the average member has smitten an impressive number of Lunar foes. But some other Humakti could easily go a season without killing anyone.

 

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7 hours ago, Darius West said:

I could plausibly make the argument that Glorantha is a perfectly ordinary planet,

Not without ditching all of the celestial mechanics of Glorantha.

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Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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On 11/8/2021 at 11:56 PM, radmonger said:

I see herd men as similar to the Haitian 'zombies', those unfortunate individuals who have lost their personalities, memories and volition to drugs and ritual torture. But such a zombie is still smarter than a smart animal, a raven or pig. So they understand, and may speak, simple language.

I a studied the works of Wade Davis who first discovered the truth behind zombies and documented it in his book "The Serpent and the Rainbow" as part of my anthropology courses, and even wrote a paper about the phenomenon back in 1992.  I even bamboozled a professor of philosophy by raising the point about the reality of zombies.  Herdmen are not up to the intelligence of zombies, who, even though rendered brain damaged by oxygen deprivation, and rendered suggestible by the scopolamine in the datura variant known as the cocombre zombi, are generally still capable of speech and some capacity for rational action, however impaired.  I can see why you raise the point, but zombies of the irl Haitian variety still have far higher intellect than herdmen.

On 11/8/2021 at 11:56 PM, radmonger said:

They would need minimal training, and maybe a  Command Rune spell or two, to do any straightforward task

I can't agree.  It takes about 6 months to properly train a dog to herd cattle, and they are trained to want to learn.  That is about what I expect training a herdman to properly forage for a morokanth would take.  Now multiply that by the thousands of herd men the morokanth keep.  It iwouldn't be viable if it only took 4 weeks (224 hrs) to train each of them, so unless the number of herd men the morokanths actually keep is tiny, the model isn't viable.  

Now consider how much worse it fails when you consider that each morokanth, if vegetarian, can simply graze and meet their needs in about 2-3 hours per day, without any need for herdmen involvement in their lives at all.  No time wasted on guarding herds.  No time wasted on perpetual training on beasts you can't even eat.  It is a far easier option to simply not train or herd herdmen, if you as a morokanth can subsist on the grasses and roots of the chaparral.

On 11/8/2021 at 11:56 PM, radmonger said:

Some herd men are even adequate crafters and fighters, when a Morokanth does the thinking part of the job.

Fighters we have some small precedent for in Borderlands, but herdmen cannot craft.

On 11/8/2021 at 11:56 PM, radmonger said:

If you prefer a model of herd men where they are vertical cattle, then so be it. But I don't think you can justify that in terms of real-world physical anthropology. Humans can't eat grass, tapirs can't survive in a full desert, humans aren't a viable food species. That leaves a _lot_ of heavy lifting for magic to do. And Prax and the Wastes is, for Glorantha, notably a low-magic environment, with at least one area where magic doesn't work at all.

According to the write-up in Borderlands, herdmen are physiologically altered to be able to graze. When affected by alter creature, herd men change intellectually and even visibly change their teeth, and quickly develop a thicker skin than normal humans, if I recall correctly, so they can tolerate living in the fields.  And morokanths aren't tapirs, they just look like them. Also, humans can and have been farmed as a viable food animal.  I draw your attention to the Mori Ori of the Chatham islands who were farmed as slaves and food animals by the Maori of New Zealand during 1835-1870.  If a society seriously wanted to farm humans as food animals, it could be done and in fact the gulags of North Korea are an uncomfortable case in point during a famine if declassified human rights reports are any indication.

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Thinking about it some, I realized that I functionally ignore the racial categories of "Wareran", "Kralori", etc. that are described in the Guide, in large part because they don't seem to add anything and if I take "Teshnans are of Kralori appearance" at face value my right eye starts twitching unaccountably. 

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Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

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While personally, I think having the Morokanth be reluctant omnivores is more interesting (though darker than the alternative), I think Rick's point about this being a magical world stands. If you want your Morokanth to be vegetarian and still have them with herds of herdmen (what is the collective noun for a group of herdmen - crowd? mob? bunch? - mob sounds good to me 😈 ), and you want to avoid Darius' training issue, then herdmen are magically born with the instincts to search and gather for roots etc along with their different teeth, skin, digestive system, lack of intelligence etc. They are natural born gatherers supreme! No training needed, show them a root and they head off into the plains and find some of them with their inbuilt Detect Root magic. For MGF, they could retain that even if Alter Creature is used and gain a passion for hunting root vegetables 🙂

 

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On 10/29/2021 at 8:11 PM, 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.

Maybe you just need better players? I play a Babeester Gor PC at the moment. She is not beautiful, men-hating, overly-sexualised, perpetually under-dressed or kinky. She is deadly, but that’s pretty core to the cult. She hates oath-breakers and tusk riders, mostly dresses like a professional warrior, and is somewhat aromantic, unsurprising for someone with an 89% Death rune. 
I’m more sick of every tough as nails PC fighter being a Humakti, tbh. 

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9 hours ago, Martin Dick said:

While personally, I think having the Morokanth be reluctant omnivores is more interesting (though darker than the alternative), I think Rick's point about this being a magical world stands. If you want your Morokanth to be vegetarian [...]

This may just be a category/terminology niggle, but for the sake of what little clarity I can manage in my own mind, surely the "new canon" Morokanth are precisely "reluctant omnivores" -- a diet of mostly (presumably mostly root) vegetables, plus some amount of herdman meat variable between minimal ritual obligation, and ostentatious consumption to display social and ritual status.  Whereas "old canon" Morokanth were hypercarnivores, give or take whatever lacto element there might be in their herdmen-protein consumption if we insist on splitting that out separately.  I don't see where "they're strict vegetarian and simply can't and don't eat meat" is coming from as a proposition, other than as one to be knocked right back down.

 

17 hours ago, Martin Dick said:

you want to avoid Darius' training issue, then herdmen are magically born with the instincts to search and gather for roots etc along with their different teeth, skin, digestive system, lack of intelligence etc.

I'm not seeing much (if anything) of a training issue, though I'd stop short of having herd-peeps able to fend for themselves right out of the womb, as ruminant neonates do.  So they learn to dig and forage in much the same way as chimps or hunter-gatherer children do, for my money.  Alter Creature is mostly just a reconfig of their existing cognitive faculties.  (Maybe helped to an extent by it apparently only working on Praxians, however that's defined.)

 

On 11/9/2021 at 7:52 PM, Darius West said:

No time wasted on perpetual training on beasts you can't even eat. 

*taps microphone*  Is this thing on?  Old canon is that Morokanth ate (lots and lots) of herdmen.  New canon is that they're ritually obliged to eat herdmen.  Where are we getting "can't eat" from, and why do we keep circling back to it?  As a side note, digestively and metabolically speaking pretty much any animal can eat meat.  As the BSE scandal and youtube videos serve to illustrate (horrifically or hilariously, depending on which side one is inclined to sympathise with).

 

On 11/8/2021 at 12:56 PM, radmonger said:

I see herd men as similar to the Haitian 'zombies', those unfortunate individuals who have lost their personalities, memories and volition to drugs and ritual torture.

I think that's a pretty reasonable comparison, in the scheme of things.  Clearly the mental transformation is more permanent and deeper, and there may be some degree of physical transformation too.  (Note to self, actually get the new Bestiary at some point.)

 

On 11/8/2021 at 12:56 PM, radmonger said:

If you prefer a model of herd men where they are vertical cattle, then so be it. But I don't think you can justify that in terms of real-world physical anthropology. Humans can't eat grass, tapirs can't survive in a full desert, humans aren't a viable food species. That leaves a _lot_ of heavy lifting for magic to do. And Prax and the Wastes is, for Glorantha, notably a low-magic environment, with at least one area where magic doesn't work at all.

The turning humans into grass-eaters certainly seems like a lot magical heavy-lifting to me to, as I've mentioned.  Though I suppose there are models other than the "cattle" one, some of would be be their own category of body-horror.  It also skips right past the "different beast with different ecological niches" aspect, which seems needless.  And it definitely (unless Glorantha has an entirely different biomass pyramid, Always An Option!) needs more 'head' of slave/cattle.  The combination for me certainly seems to stretch plausibility and even story-logic, as either we have lots of heavily physically transformed humanoids competing for the same resource as other major tribes, or lots subsisting on a 'niche' resource.  But justifiable as "possible", sure.

I guess it'd had thirty or forty years of bedding in as a concept, so for some it's going to be heavily grandfathered in by now, which is fair enough.  There's been long-rumbling forum-gripes than this one over less.  It shouldn't need to be said, but we can't say often enough that I'm (moderately!) confident David and Rick aren't going to turn up to people's houses in mid-session and instruct them to cease-and-desist any post-canonical interpretations of Prax.  Or indeed, to tell then to stop even thinking about it in a heterodox manner.

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On 11/8/2021 at 8:31 PM, Joerg said:

Not without ditching all of the celestial mechanics of Glorantha.

I suppose it might at a push, if you squint at some of the 'minor' details, be a 'rogue' planet with a very colourful collection of moons, one of which happens to be exceptionally bright and orbits daily.

If Glorantha even gets its "Bending of Arda" moment, and ends up with a physically sun-sized sun, it'll need one heck of a handbreak turn by either the Sky Dome or Yelm...

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On 11/9/2021 at 10:57 PM, Eff said:

Thinking about it some, I realized that I functionally ignore the racial categories of "Wareran", "Kralori", etc. that are described in the Guide, in large part because they don't seem to add anything and if I take "Teshnans are of Kralori appearance" at face value my right eye starts twitching unaccountably. 

The 'kralori' one is admittedly a tad unconformable, given that on the one hand the Gloranthan East has been critiqued as heavy-handed orientalism, and on the other, it's equating a polity and a "race".  As if we might end up playing the 'CJK' game (KVV?) to physically identify different nations by their features alone.

'Wareran' is a more muddled case, and maybe seems more benign as a result.  It covers quite a variety of appearances, especially now that the Rokari are Brithini-colour-coded.  (I suspect they're faking that with makeup, mind you.  Such wannabes!)

All the 'races' also straddle multiple different origin myths (again, especially the Wareans).  There's the Malkioni one, the Yelmic one, and the Orlanthi one, and the Hsunchen one, which itself extends across all the outward appearances.  So arguably they're not really 'categories; at all, just broad ranges of appearance.

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10 hours ago, Alex said:

I suppose it might at a push, if you squint at some of the 'minor' details, be a 'rogue' planet with a very colourful collection of moons, one of which happens to be exceptionally bright and orbits daily.

Only if the planet has a sun orbiting it across the pole, or if it has a firmament whose rotation axis remains in place relative to the surface while the planet rotates towards and away from the sun.

A planet inside a mega-structure carrying that firmament and possibly a huge rotating reflector for an outside sun might do the trick, but an ordinary planet does not.

 

10 hours ago, Alex said:

If Glorantha even gets its "Bending of Arda" moment, and ends up with a physically sun-sized sun, it'll need one heck of a handbreak turn by either the Sky Dome or Yelm...

The firmament of Glorantha is polar, the sunpath is equatorial, day/night cycle lengths are for about 50° latitude on our planet. And there are ga-stationary celestial objects in the firmament - Storm Gate, Zenith, and for an astronomically very short time, the Red Moon.

It is impossible to place Glorantha as is on one of those Ringworld planetary maps, too, without adding a megastructure above it simulating the celestial mechanisms. And a huge pump to simulate the whirlpool. Building the Skyfall is an interesting design challenge, too.

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Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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