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The Trauma of the Dragonkill War


Joerg

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2 hours ago, jajagappa said:

It's Thrunhin Da, and she's off in the Sea of Fog.  

Kralorela should have a whole set independently from Dragon Pass. Maybe not all the elements, but a full set of important concepts.

2 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Of course, the future Great Flood may in fact be a ritual to raise the Blue Dragon by connecting the Creek-Stream River with the Oslir. 

The future Great Flood is another case where the event doesn't quite resemble the Godtime event with its standing waves. It will be the first time since Earth rose up from the bottom of the universe that parts of Kerofinela will be covered by the sea. While I don't doubt that there will be "tidal waves" running in on the land, they are no comparison to the mountains of water that covered the Rockwoods east and west of the Pass valley.

 

 

 

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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On 5/24/2018 at 2:10 PM, Iskallor said:

But Glorantha is magic and thus the fear carries on...for centuries and centuries...

 

The magical aspect is certainly a way of justifying the notion that the fear Dragons comes from the DragonKill. The Dragonrise then reinforces it. Awakens old fears, as it were. So in fact both are correct.

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On 5/30/2018 at 12:46 AM, Joerg said:

I might agree with that if reforming Orlanthi kingship rites had been on the top of Alakoring's agenda, but I think that his primary goal was to crush the stranglehold of the EWF on the cult of Orlanth and the Orlanthi.

The Orlanth Rex cult specifically teaches the magic that lets the King overrule the priests. By identifying the king with Orlanth himself, he naturally over rules those who serve Orlanth. It  teaches the Command Priests runespell in RQ3, for example This is not a coincidence. The spread of the Orlanth Rex cult is specifically a means to crush the stranglehold of the (priest dominated) EWF on the cult of Orlanth, by letting traditionist chiefs overrule them. 

So Alakoringd primary goal is to crush the EWF, but spreading the Orlanth Rex cult is his primary method for doing so. 

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3 hours ago, davecake said:

The Orlanth Rex cult specifically teaches the magic that lets the King overrule the priests. By identifying the king with Orlanth himself, he naturally over rules those who serve Orlanth. It  teaches the Command Priests runespell in RQ3, for example This is not a coincidence. The spread of the Orlanth Rex cult is specifically a means to crush the stranglehold of the (priest dominated) EWF on the cult of Orlanth, by letting traditionist chiefs overrule them. 

So Alakoring's primary goal is to crush the EWF, but spreading the Orlanth Rex cult is his primary method for doing so. 

This is what we had to work with before "History of the Heortling Peoples", and you could have produced a post like this just quoting me from old digests.

But those old digests would also find my somewhat disparaging "Subcult of Orlanth Regulus" "correction" to this. We found the Rex cult applied to the tribal kings of Sartar. That definition of "king" always reminded me of the "duodec princes" of the Holy Roman Empire prior to 1815, named that way because they would have about 12 subjects, or of the Norwegian/Viking ship kings whose kingdom was their ship and crew and whatever place they might claim for themselves by conquest.

This may actually be unfair, since the Kingdom of Talastar appears to work under this kind of kingship. (The kingdom of Aggar exists under this kind of kingship, but I wouldn't exactly say that it works as a stable tribal confederation.) Arim's dynasty may have been a variant of this, but I don't see any "command priests" working on their Sorana Tors, or the subsequent Illaro dynasty. Neither for the Colymar kings and their Orane priestesses.

 

In order to make this policy work, Alakoring needed tribal structures in the Orlanthi communities he converted. I am not sure whether the draconized Orlanthi of Kerofinela had such structures while their own leaders were part of the dragon dream. I don't think that clans were disbanded, but tribes probably became meaningless inside the deepest parts of the dream.

Hendriki kingship had gone through all these Orlanthland changes rather unchanged, which is sort of ironic if you recall that many of these kings were elected from among the Larnsti, Masters of Change. I cannot quite tell how this affected tribal kingship in Heortland, and I am hesitant to extrapolate from Quivini tribal kingship. The only Heortland-elected migration king I can name is Mad-Blood Malan, who may or may not have been a Rex king. When Yanasdros of Tarsh took on Vingkotling kingship and spread his influence all the way to the Praxian border, the northern Alakoringite concept of tribal Rex kingship may have inflitrated the Quivini tribes, and possibly spread south afterwards.

 

The "reign of priests" starts with the Taxslaughter, when Hardros Hardslaughter was named a Great Living Hero (receiving cross-tribal worship) rather than the successor of his fallen king. The Kingdom of Orlanthland continued without anybody taking the position of the King of Orlanthland. This concept of a ring of equals rather than a single person ruling the land didn't change any king rites, it just continued without any king rites. And still this was a period of great prosperity and growth, enough so that Domanand (Mirin's Cross) was established to stem Orlanthi expansion.

The Draconic emancipation and then take-over was spear-headed by Obduran. His proof of non-exclusivity of draconic thought and traditional Orlanth worship took the main complaint of the Old Day Traditionalist away and turned the majority of the people of Orlanthland into Complacentines (as per Heortling Mythology p.138), willing worshippers of the draconic leaders who weren't that different from the Great Living Heroes like Hardros (or later Renvald).

The Orlanth Rex cult description in Heortling Mythology sort of claims that with Rex magics, Obduran wouldn't have been able to seduce the Orlanthi into worshipping dragons. Apart from the fact that this text was written by frothing fanatics, I doubt that having the Rex cult (on a tribal level) in Orlanthland would have affected anything that happened on the supra-tribal level of the council of Orlanthland.

I don't see the problem in any weakness of Orlanthi kingship cults, but in the absence of practicing these on the Orlanthland level.

Hence I see little evidence that this magic would have been effective on the members of the Third Council.

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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On 5/28/2018 at 11:27 AM, Jeff said:

When I ran the Dragonrise occurring as a background event, I treated the appearance of the True Dragon more like something out of Call of Cthulhu. It caused temporary insanity - amnesia, hysterical fear, catatonia, etc., - among those who failed a POWx5 check. 

Pah, seen one True Dragon, seen them all.

 

I like the Father Ted analogy (These are small, those are far away), so a True Dragon lying across a range of hills a long way away looks like a Dream Dragon up close. It's when they fly, breathe a jet of flame that fills a valley and eat a regiment in one gulp that you should begin to worry.

Edited by soltakss

Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

Jonstown Compendium author. Find my contributions here

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The Storm pantheon killed a lot of Dragons - Vadrus killed one to liberate the Blue Woman, Orlanth killed Aroka to liberate Heler, others are there but don't immediately spring to mind.

What Alakoring did, I think, was to collect the various Storm Pantheon powers and, probably, use the Carmanian Demonizing ways to systematically break dragons. That was different, no longer do you go out to kill a Dragon and come back a celebrity, instead you go out to kill dragons.

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Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

Jonstown Compendium author. Find my contributions here

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Things we might compare the Dragonkill to IRL:

1) The detonation of the volcano at Thera and subsequent tsunami.  We still have legends about Atlantis and unanswered questions about "the Sea People".

2) The Great Flood.  There are a series of flood events that might qualify as Noah's flood , though none would have topped Mt. Ararat.  The most likely is the flooding of the Persian Gulf, which filled in much the same way that the Mediterranean and Black Sea did.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utnapishtim

3) The Black Death.

4) The First use of Atomic Weapons in anger.

Edited by Darius West
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30 minutes ago, Darius West said:

Things we might compare the Dragonkill to IRL:

Too many of your examples are too close to Atlantis.

 

30 minutes ago, Darius West said:

1) The detonation of the volcano at Thera and subsequent tsunami.  We still have legends about Atlantis and unanswered questions about "the Sea People".

Devastation of the Vent rather than Dragonkill.

The Toba eruption which depopulated the Indian subcontinent might be a better parallel, so far before history that the myths are distant.

Or the supposed asteroid impact in North America which might have caused the ice barrier to the Atlantic to break, killing the megafauna by a way too sudden change in temperatures.

30 minutes ago, Darius West said:

2) The Great Flood.  There are a series of flood events that might qualify as Noah's flood , though none would have topped Mt. Ararat.  The most likely is the flooding of the Persian Gulf, which filled in much the same way that the Mediterranean and Black Sea did.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utnapishtim

The Great Flood is universal because the melting of the glaciers drowned fertile coastal lowlands all over the world, like the coastal plains west of the Rockies and the Andes where most of the Amerind immigration happened, or the vast lands east of Florida and the East Coast of the USA (nowadays fish grounds). Doggerland in the middle of the North Sea, in all likelihood depopulated by a tsunami caused by a methane clathrate evaporation and underwater landslide off the shore of Norway..

 

For lesser floods with permanent loss of fertile land, the Mandrenke events around the North Sea are a good example within historical records.

 

30 minutes ago, Darius West said:

3) The Black Death.

A very different kind of horror, more personal. While entire settlements got depopulated and given up, there was no area non grata afterwards.

 

30 minutes ago, Darius West said:

4) The First use of Atomic Weapons in anger.

Actually, in cold blood.

 

The Bikini or Novaya Semlya nuclear testing evictions are way better parallels to the Inhuman Occupation.

 

For the actual Dragonkill, the Dresden bombing atrocity is what comes closest, only in case of the Dragonkill it was directed against military forces rather than fleeing civilians. Second closest are the first uses of chlorine and other chemical warfare agents in the trench wars.

For a less technological horror, the Hun and Mongol invasions come close. They happened too fast for what the True Golden Horde did to the heirs of the EWF, though.

The Reconquista of Spain combined with the inquisition, or the Huguenot pogroms of France might be closer to the pre-Dragonkill  invasion. Maybe the Herero uprising or the Boer uprising, too.

 

Had it actually happened, the Chiemgau Impact would be the perfect analogy for the Dragonkill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgau_impact_hypothesis

 

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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