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The Lore of Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind


Leingod

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Stelfor and Zenangar get mentioned a lot together, to compare/contrast two ways of dealing with a problem. But we hardly ever find out what Basikan's strategy was. I'd say it was to try to avoid endorsing either... but the advisors pretty strongly prefer Zenangar, so. 

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20 minutes ago, Sheliak said:

Yeah, there's surprisingly little about Basikan. And at one point one of your leaders claims to be descended from Zenangar. (Mind, by definition one has more than one ancestor, and Basikan and Zenangar's families could've intermarried. But it's still weird.)

I mean, there must have been intermarriage, both when there was only the One Clan and then when there were Four who were still close enough together to be warring and allying and whatnot, so someone bragging of being descended from Zenangar isn't out of the question.

18 minutes ago, metcalph said:

Judging by Yatelo's appearance and powers, it seems that he's another name for Daga, the son of Yelm and Molanni, and the God of Famine.

Isn't Daga the god of drought, though?

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IIRC there's a bit about the west clans taking slaves,  but "we as descendants of Zenangar do not". If Stelfor's descendants are the only slaving clans, then the descendants of all three are pretty intermingled even now. 

37 minutes ago, Leingod said:
57 minutes ago, metcalph said:

Judging by Yatelo's appearance and powers, it seems that he's another name for Daga, the son of Yelm and Molanni, and the God of Famine.

Isn't Daga the god of drought, though?

I remembered Daga as the god of drought also, but this link says he's both: 

https://www.glorantha.com/docs/daga/

Drought does tend to cause famine, so I can see how they'd share a god. 

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5 minutes ago, Sheliak said:

I remembered Daga as the god of drought also, but this link says he's both: 

https://www.glorantha.com/docs/daga/

Drought does tend to cause famine, so I can see how they'd share a god. 

Point. Then again, it's not like there can only be one god for one thing, even within a pantheon; I think Uldak the Thirsty Earth might also be a god of drought, given his name and what his domain of Boulderwood looks like.

Actually, Boulderwood kind of looks like the site of an impact. Maybe he was thrown down from the Sky into Boulderwood? He's described as an "outlaw" son of Oria, after all.

Uldak.PNG.png

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2 minutes ago, Leingod said:

Point. Then again, it's not like there can only be one god for one thing, even within a pantheon; I think Uldak the Thirsty Earth might also be a god of drought, given his name and what his domain of Boulderwood looks like.

 Actually, Boulderwood kind of looks like the site of an impact. Maybe he was thrown down from the Sky into Boulderwood? He's described as an "outlaw" son of Oria, after all.

Uldak does have a lot of drought imagery! There's also "I am parched, and must drink the life of a human to revive myself."  (Emphasis mine.) 

 

(Uldak does seem to be different from both Yatelo and Daga--he's got chaos associations that I don't think either of them do. Plus being associated with the earth instead of sky.) 

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15 hours ago, Sheliak said:

(Are there multiple scorpion queens or just one? I'd assumed the former, but in this game people talk like there's only one and her name is Bahoka. Although they also sometimes mention scorpion princesses...)

Bahoka may be a local form of their goddess, called Bagog in modern times and known as Bakoka to the Dara Happans. Certainly there's some similarity between the last two.

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2 hours ago, Tindalos said:

Bahoka may be a local form of their goddess, called Bagog in modern times and known as Bakoka to the Dara Happans. Certainly there's some similarity between the last two.

Bahoka does have an (evil) constellation and fight gods a lot! That's probably what's going on. (Alternately, if human heroes can become humans' gods, maybe powerful scorpion queens can become Chaos goddesses...)

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I made it back to the Hippogriff & Yamsur vs. sand monster god event! 

https://sixages.fandom.com/wiki/Obsidian_Plain

Helping Hippogriff makes a lot more sense theologically speaking (though maybe there's extra stuff if you know that Yamsur is Hyalor's father--still haven't checked that out). But Yamsur's version is fun: 

Quote

Our explorers struck fiery blows against the sand god, helping Yamsur turn him into the black glass plain. Yamsur’s flickering flame encircled Ayvtu, increasing her abilities to fight and work magic. Afterward people would say that Ayvtu had changed, making decisions with a passionate caprice.

(The debug code indicates that the event does something different for Beren and Yatakan, though that might just be to make sure it doesn't overwrite a plot-relevant personality trait.) 

 

Also in debugs: A bunch of the exploration events are named for the modern name of the location they take place in. If anyone's curious about that information I can dig it up--I haven't been putting it on the wiki because those names are pretty unintuitive for someone who isn't familiar with the setting outside of Six Ages and KODP (which would be me), but maybe it'd be useful for speculation? 

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5 hours ago, Sheliak said:

Also in debugs: A bunch of the exploration events are named for the modern name of the location they take place in. If anyone's curious about that information I can dig it up--I haven't been putting it on the wiki because those names are pretty unintuitive for someone who isn't familiar with the setting outside of Six Ages and KODP (which would be me), but maybe it'd be useful for speculation? 

I mean, I can't imagine it would hurt to know, so why not?

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Most of these are actually PlaceThere (some of the exploration events are in pairs with random events at home, like JordWarriorHere and JordWarriorThere for the burnt hero). 

First Yanadling encounter: Tunoraling. The Tunoralings apparently live in Vanch and worship a Raccoon God. There are other Yanadling groups besides Retva's, but I don't know if any of them are raccoon-focused. https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Vanch#Culture

Abandoned Temple: Cafol. https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Cafol

Abandoned Village: Little Cafol. https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Little_Cafol

Great lake: Elf Sea. (Which ended up being the name on the wiki too; it's actually just marked Inland Sea on the map.) https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Elf_Sea

Giant bear: Bear Mountain. https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Bear_Mountain

Great Wolf: Dog Hills. (This area has the same name in Six Ages as it will later on.) https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Dog_Hills

Northern Wheels: Garsting. (Which is similar to Gar-Astin.) https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Garsting

Lake Imaress: Invaress https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Lake_Invaress

Omaseg: Sylila https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Sylila

Zarlen: Look Hill

Ugarra: Bostok

Wolf people: The debug file calls them Telmori, but if you get them to talk they say they're the Eroe and worship a spirit named Eroeissa. 

And while the Blue Goat encounter is just named ErgeshitesThere, there's an associated variable foundZarkosites. 

Nothing terribly surprising, but still. 

(Oh, and just because I kept convincing myself that the central peak of the Imther Mountains was secretly Mount Kero Fin: It is not. It just has a similar shape and is also sacred to Orlanth.) 

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5 hours ago, Sheliak said:

First Yanadling encounter: Tunoraling. The Tunoralings apparently live in Vanch and worship a Raccoon God. There are other Yanadling groups besides Retva's, but I don't know if any of them are raccoon-focused. https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Vanch#Culture

They might have turned to the worship of Tunoral after Raven (who is apparently a guise/aspect of Eurmal) left to go on the Lightbringers Quest with Orlanth. After all, a thieving Raven spirit, a thieving Raccoon god, not a big jump for them to make, right?

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Another possibility would be that the Raccoon Yanadlings were the ones who survived to the Dawn. Things are going to get really bad in a while... 

Apparently the spirit Raven pops up even in modern Glorantha: https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Raven

Which is nice; I know fundamentally Raven and Eurmal are  the same being, but I really love Raven. 

In related news, I fully expect Osara and Zarlen to die during the Great Darkness and their cults to be subsumed into Vinga/Elmal/maybe Redalda, and I'm already in mourning. Those two really grew on me! Along with Raven, they've become my favorites. 

I love how the advisors' little comments about gods and such imply this whole mythology.  "Zarlen nearly died in the land of frost. Osara warmed his bones on the sunpath, restoring him to life." I want to know more about that story! 

I also found a reference to "Stelfor's extirpation of the North Clan", which suggests that he's what happened to Nameforgot rather than a chaos monster. No wonder no one likes Stelfor very much...

Edited by Sheliak
Yep, I meant Osara there.
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28 minutes ago, Sheliak said:

In related news, I fully expect Vinga and Zarlen to die during the Great Darkness and their cults to be subsumed into Vinga/Elmal/maybe Redalda, and I'm already in mourning. Those two really grew on me! Along with Raven, they've become my favorites. 

I think you mean Osara and Zarlen. And yeah, most likely they either died or just faded out of relevance entirely when the Hyalorings became Orlanthi; when Elmal stopped being the head of his own pantheon and just became Orlanth's Loyal Thane, a lot of his supporting cast probably just kind of dropped off in favor of the Storm gods already present over time. At most, perhaps they crop up as minor subcults now and again among Elmali clans, like a clan where they call the Thunder Brother renowned as an explorer Zarlen instead of Destor.

But yeah, it really is unfortunate that a lot of the material in Ride Like the Wind isn't really very usable in campaigns set in Time unless you're willing to really overhaul your personal take on Glorantha for it and throw out a lot of the written material, likely up to and including the prevalence of Elmal worship in the first place in the Third Age, since as written the cult is basically on the outs in favor of Yelmalio anyway and you pretty much only have Runegate and a few scattered clans to play with if you want to have a place where these gods can have a place, since I can tell you right now that the Sun Domers have no place in their society for any red-haired warrior daughters and bright-tailed wandering sons. Any real Hyaloring revival is pretty much going to need to be entirely home-brewed, though it could certainly be a pretty epic series of experimental heroquests and adventures undertaken by, say, members of the Runegate Triaty looking for something to empower Elmal's flagging worship by diving deep into his past or something.

Edited by Leingod
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1 hour ago, Sheliak said:

the Raccoon Yanadlings were the ones who survived to the Dawn

The Tunoraling followers of the Raccoon God certainly do survive to the Dawn, and beyond. I doubt there's any other raccoon folk lurking around in this region.

1 hour ago, Sheliak said:

the spirit Raven pops up even in modern Glorantha

As my players know all too well. 😈

1 hour ago, Leingod said:

it really is unfortunate that a lot of the material in Ride Like the Wind isn't really very usable in campaigns set in Time unless you're willing to really overhaul your personal take on Glorantha for it and throw out a lot of the written material

Or have your players stumble into mythic places and quests that intrude or intersect with the ones they expect! There are a lot of broken and lost myths about to take advantage of.

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7 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

The Tunoraling followers of the Raccoon God certainly do survive to the Dawn, and beyond. I doubt there's any other raccoon folk lurking around in this region.

I think he meant that there might be other Yanadlings around who worship other gods than Raccoon, and those died out. 

7 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Or have your players stumble into mythic places and quests that intrude or intersect with the ones they expect! There are a lot of broken and lost myths about to take advantage of.

Well, Eleven Lights deal with the resurrection of deities that were thought gone, so it's certainly not impossible to see some fan favorites from Six Ages return with some intense heroquesting.
Hell, I'd even take it as an invitation.

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6 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

I think he meant that there might be other Yanadlings around who worship other gods than Raccoon, and those died out.

Yes, very likely. There are still a few odd cultures at the Dawn (GtG p.708-712) in the region. The Tunoralings have a habit of "borrowing" or "adopting" things from others, so small family groups may have been adopted or gathered up by them.

6 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Well, Eleven Lights deal with the resurrection of deities that were thought gone, so it's certainly not impossible to see some fan favorites from Six Ages return with some intense heroquesting.
Hell, I'd even take it as an invitation.

13th Age Glorantha has a lot of good ideas on these types of broken/lost/forgotten myths, and I'd certainly take advantage of them if I was playing in the Lunar Provinces.

Edited by jajagappa
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Well, there's the Three New Stars quest bringing back three dead gods. That could be a way to bring the cults of Osara and Zarlen, and maybe some Hyaloring ways along with them... Or Cenala. I can see her finding a niche as a goddess of survival through and regeneration after disaster, and with the Hero Wars coming up, I can see people being drawn to that sort of cult.

(It's possible other Nivorah descendants kept a version of the cult of Osara-the-daughter, but that version of her would lack most of what distinguishes her in Six Ages... although who's to say that someone couldn't rediscover her other aspect in a time of great stress and trouble?)

7 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:
24 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

The Tunoraling followers of the Raccoon God certainly do survive to the Dawn, and beyond. I doubt there's any other raccoon folk lurking around in this region.

I think he meant that there might be other Yanadlings around who worship other gods than Raccoon, and those died out. 

Yeah, that's what I meant! In Ride Like The Wind, there's Retva's Raven-focused group, and you can also find others who seem to focus on bear or tree spirits, as well as one whose leader wears a headdress striped like a bee. If there's a connection to the Tunoralings, it could be that their ancestors were raccoon-Yanadlings. Or some of them, anyway. 

 

 

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40 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Or have your players stumble into mythic places and quests that intrude or intersect with the ones they expect! There are a lot of broken and lost myths about to take advantage of.

I've actually had an idea kind of like that, where a woman among the Sun Domers searches for her own revelation in the Gods World and reaches the Hill of Gold, where she stumbles upon the stations of something similar to "Nyalda's Bride Price," where Nyalda/Ernalda spurns Little Yelm/Yelmalio for trying to chain her in his palace and tells him "A wife is not a slave." The results of that, whatever they were, would almost be guaranteed to at least cause a real stir.

22 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Well, Eleven Lights deal with the resurrection of deities that were thought gone, so it's certainly not impossible to see some fan favorites from Six Ages return with some intense heroquesting.

I mean, I've expressed the sneaking suspicion before that two of the potential Three New Stars, Siwend and Saren, are in fact the gods known to the Hyalorings as Dostal and Samnal, respectively (in which case Inilla would also be Siwend's wife, Indeg). If the Three New Stars Heroquest could resurrect those gods, there would almost have to be others that could do the job, too.

I bet if you resurrected Varnaval and Saren you could probably make some cool ritual where they compete in a chariot race with Mastakos to see who's the fastest (he said, because really he just wants an excuse to have huge Roman-style chariot races in Kethaelan cities).

7 minutes ago, Sheliak said:

Well, there's the Three New Stars quest bringing back three dead gods. That could be a way to bring the cults of Osara and Zarlen, and maybe some Hyaloring ways along with them... Or Cenala. I can see her finding a niche as a goddess of survival through and regeneration after disaster, and with the Hero Wars coming up, I can see people being drawn to that sort of cult. 

(It's possible other Nivorah descendants kept a version of the cult of Osara-the-daughter, but that version of her would lack most of what distinguishes her in Six Ages... although who's to say that someone couldn't rediscover her other aspect in a time of great stress and trouble?)

It'd be interesting if such a rediscovery of an old Hyaloring god coincided/bumped into an Elmali Heroquest currently ongoing, like if some Elmali is performing "Elmal Guards the Stead" and suddenly the red-haired daughter he didn't know he had is helping him fight the Chaos monsters with fiery arrows.

Edited by Leingod
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1 hour ago, Leingod said:

I bet if you resurrected Varnaval and Saren you could probably make some cool ritual where they compete in a chariot race with Mastakos to see who's the fastest (he said, because really he just wants an excuse to have huge Roman-style chariot races in Kethaelan cities).

Make it a public sporting event where the different teams represent their patron god and you get riots between the respective cult-hooligans after each race.
Which god wins is then used for divining purposes.


EDIT: Ressurection of old Hyaloring deities might be tied into some kind of "fundamentalist Elmali reactionarianism" in response to Yelmalio Sun Domers and ongoing syncretization of their respective cults. Granted, such reactionaries are probably more likely to emphasise Elmal's subservience and loyalty to Orlanth than to go about resurrecting dead gods - BUT there is always that weirdo group that takes things to the next level. Say, for example, they want to resurrect those gods to gain more Gods Plane "witnesses" to Elmal being a distinct entity from Yelmalio and to his fealty oath to Orlanth or something like that. Crazier things have happened.

Edited by Sir_Godspeed
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36 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Make it a public sporting event where the different teams represent their patron god and you get riots between the respective cult-hooligans after each race.
Which god wins is then used for divining purposes.


EDIT: Ressurection of old Hyaloring deities might be tied into some kind of "fundamentalist Elmali reactionarianism" in response to Yelmalio Sun Domers and ongoing syncretization of their respective cults. Granted, such reactionaries are probably more likely to emphasise Elmal's subservience and loyalty to Orlanth than to go about resurrecting dead gods - BUT there is always that weirdo group that takes things to the next level. Say, for example, they want to resurrect those gods to gain more Gods Plane "witnesses" to Elmal being a distinct entity from Yelmalio and to his fealty oath to Orlanth or something like that. Crazier things have happened.

Yeah, I was definitely thinking the justification would be something like that.

I would say one good way to handle it might be that an Elmali might want to find "the truth" and so would go on the Heroquest where Elmal joins the Storm Tribe after wandering around doing stuff, and when they go off the beaten path they find themselves not at the Hill of Gold, but on the Sunpath, where they face the other Small Suns in the wake of Yelm's death, including Little Yelm/Yelmalio. Then like Elmal did he goes south on the Sunpath, which ends up leading him where he was "supposed" to be, facing Orlanth over a river crossing, or perhaps right at the doors of Orlanth's stead, where he's ready to test Orlanth and be tested in turn to see if he has what it takes to lead the people through the Darkness and restore order.

Edited by Leingod
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11 hours ago, Leingod said:

But yeah, it really is unfortunate that a lot of the material in Ride Like the Wind isn't really very usable in campaigns set in Time unless you're willing to really overhaul your personal take on Glorantha for it and throw out a lot of the written material, likely up to and including the prevalence of Elmal worship in the first place in the Third Age, since as written the cult is basically on the outs in favor of Yelmalio anyway and you pretty much only have Runegate and a few scattered clans to play with if you want to have a place where these gods can have a place, since I can tell you right now that the Sun Domers have no place in their society for any red-haired warrior daughters and bright-tailed wandering sons. Any real Hyaloring revival is pretty much going to need to be entirely home-brewed, though it could certainly be a pretty epic series of experimental heroquests and adventures undertaken by, say, members of the Runegate Triaty looking for something to empower Elmal's flagging worship by diving deep into his past or something.

I can see these cults springing up in the Holy Country.

The guide notes one of Ernalda husbands in Esrolia is "a local version of Yelmalio," New Crystal City was built on the ruins of a place called Elmalvo, and of course Nochet has Elmal Town.

I could easily see Osara taking her place as one of the ten thousand goddesses.

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On 6/26/2019 at 11:31 PM, Sheliak said:

(Oh, and just because I kept convincing myself that the central peak of the Imther Mountains was secretly Mount Kero Fin: It is not. It just has a similar shape and is also sacred to Orlanth.) 

I can’t remember if you can see Kero Fin from your clan hall, but you might. I’m pretty sure all the Ram clans can. Could this be related to how far they’ve spread?

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27 minutes ago, alakoring said:

I can’t remember if you can see Kero Fin from your clan hall, but you might. I’m pretty sure all the Ram clans can. Could this be related to how far they’ve spread?

I don't think there's actually any mention of Kero Fin anywhere in the game. It certainly isn't anywhere on the map. As for whether it can be seen, I don't know, is Saird/Holay close enough to Dragon Pass to see Kero Fin? Because that's where you are on the map.

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