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Whatever Happened to the Cradle Baby?


Martin

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Anyone care to speculate what happened to  the infant gaint inside the cradle...after it goes down magasta's pool and through the Underworld does the cradle survive and reach the dawn gate?  what happens to the infant gaint? whose child is it...does it becomne an important gaint? 

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Greg has said in the past that it's Gonn Orta's daughter (all known babies before this having been males).  

It survived an attempted plundering by Harrek according to the Ur-Argrath Saga in the Guide.  I don't think the child makes a further appearance in the Hero Wars.  

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Well after it swirls down the drain it winds up in the Gloranthan sewer system where - as any good maintenance dwarf can tell you - baby alligators can grow to tremendous sizes.  The dwarvres calculated that a baby giant would therefore grow to such stupendous size it could clear out the alligator infestation.

True story.

Edited by Pentallion
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5 hours ago, Martin said:

Anyone care to speculate what happened to  the infant gaint inside the cradle...after it goes down magasta's pool and through the Underworld does the cradle survive and reach the dawn gate?  what happens to the infant gaint? whose child is it...does it becomne an important gaint? 

I would guess that the True Giants got them back in some way, maybe they just magically reappeared in their home in the next Sacred Season? The whole thing looks like a Heroquest from their perspective.

It's possible that they were still a child even in the later parts of the Hero Wars.

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6 minutes ago, Tarumath said:

I would guess that the True Giants got them back in some way, maybe they just magically reappeared in their home in the next Sacred Season? The whole thing looks like a Heroquest from their perspective.

Definitely agree that this is a Giant HeroQuest.  But I think it requires the Baby Giant learning enough to leave the Underworld on their own.  Whether that is riding upon the Boat Planet (I figure the Giant Helmswoman might be a prior Giant Baby born before the Dawn), climbing up the Stairs of the Hell Crack, raising her own new mountain, or even riding a Fireberg back to the World (Fire Giants anyone?), I don't think matters to any but the Baby Giant.  It is for them to find their way/fate and return with that back to the Inner World.  I do not believe that this happens in one season or one year though - this is an epic life quest for the child.

Edited by jajagappa
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I think that the time taken for a Giant baby to grow to maturity means that she comes out of Hell way after the end of the Hero Wars period. Unless, of course, she is magically aged.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I have a thought on the matter.  Why would you send a baby into Hell?  Well, it is more of a matter of sending the baby into the underworld where she can potentially grow into a new mountain.  She is also the first baby who will be given the full Green Age initiation of Giantkind.  If you look at most of the giants wandering the world in the 3rd Age, some are chaos tainted, while others are just wild and ferocious man eaters.  This is because they haven't had a proper initiation, and the Giant tribe has fallen on hard times.  The youngsters don't listen to Gonn Orta and their kin, and have grown up savage and stupid.  The new Cradle Baby will be the first girl in literal ages of the world, and will also be the first to be properly initiated in the Earth mysteries in a very long time.  In many ways she is the hope of Giantkind.

I would also point out that Labrygon of the EWF was on the side of the Giants.  Consider that Puzzle Canal opens onto the River Styx every Sacred Time.  This was used by Pavis as a means of supplying his people with food during sieges, but it would also mean that the fraught issue of sending the Cradle down Zola Fel, across the sea and into Magasta's Whirlpool, and thence to the River Styx (with all the attendant dangers) could have been circumvented.  Remember that the EWF had a vested interest in turning the mountains of Genertela into their cosmic super duper mega dragon, and that wasn't going to happen without the Giants being involved, seeing as how they are the mountains.  One wonders how much the Giants know about EWF mysteries, given that they would have been integral to that plan.  That then leads us to ask, were the Dragonewts involved in the planning and thus Giant allies too? Or not?

Edited by Darius West
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I'm not sure how relevant this is or not - but I've seen multiple places that not all giants are necessarily the same, or belong to the same kind of people - it's more of a descriptor than a designator of a true group. Additionally, not all mountains seem to be adult giants.

However, all of the above could certainly be true for the Cradle Giants and their kin, however one slices and classifies giantkind otherwise.

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2 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

I'm not sure how relevant this is or not - but I've seen multiple places that not all giants are necessarily the same, or belong to the same kind of people

Not all giants are the same, yes - the Cradle Baby, although still a baby, is already larger than many giants. And Gonn Orta and his people seem to lack the Disorderly nature of 'standard' giants. But there does seem to be some relationship (or at least, Gonn Orta acts as if there is), we just don't know what it is. 

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41 minutes ago, jeffjerwin said:

Gonn Orta = GenErt(a)??

This is a fascinating thought.  Maybe Genert didn't die, but was split into multiple portions... SOME of which died, while others continued as lesser beings.

This... feels very Gloranthan to me.  YGMV.

 

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4 hours ago, Darius West said:

I have a thought on the matter.  Why would you send a baby into Hell?  Well, it is more of a matter of sending the baby into the underworld ...

The Underworld is the hiding place of all, well, all everything, including runes (e.g., Separation/Death rune), gods (e.g., the unborn Sun or even Aether Primolt, back when ZZ, Xiola Umber, and AA were exploring together), and other things not specifically named, yet.  To use a grander phrase, the source (or at least repository) of all wisdom.  Saying that the Mountain Giants send their children to the "Underworld" is much better than calling it "Hell", more like sending the children away to boarding school, if a somewhat more Nietzchean one than Eton or Hogwarts.  I imagine it was slightly less fraught back when the Spike was there, and the Celestial Court could do the teaching

Given that the first known Gods War was between the Dragons and the Giants, I would tend to doubt that the Dragonewts were _allies_ of the Giants.  I think that the EWF plan was going to use the buried and/or sleeping Giants like a powerplant uses a lump of coal, as a power source to be consumed and converted, regardless of whatever the giants (or more human population) might have wanted.

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3 minutes ago, David Weihe said:

The Underworld is the hiding place of all, well, all everything, including runes (e.g., Separation/Death rune), gods (e.g., the unborn Sun or even Aether Primolt, back when ZZ, Xiola Umber, and AA were exploring together), and other things not specifically named, yet.  To use a grander phrase, the source (or at least repository) of all wisdom.  Saying that the Mountain Giants send their children to the "Underworld" is much better than calling it "Hell", more like sending the children away to boarding school, if a somewhat more Nietzchean one than Eton or Hogwarts.  I imagine it was slightly less fraught back when the Spike was there, and the Celestial Court could do the teaching

Given that the first known Gods War was between the Dragons and the Giants, I would tend to doubt that the Dragonewts were _allies_ of the Giants.  I think that the EWF plan was going to use the buried and/or sleeping Giants like a powerplant uses a lump of coal, as a power source to be consumed and converted, regardless of whatever the giants (or more human population) might have wanted.

Keep in mind that 'giants' are 'mythic humans' - King Arthur is a giant in some Welsh folktales. 'People were bigger in those days'. Second Son became a giant. They aren't just Disorder, but also embody (literally) the Man rune; the towering people that we see when are small. The Youf wanted to transpose the Man rune with the Dragon rune. The Youf master plan involved the transformation of all of dead Genert. Maybe he / his soul fragments / had a problem with that. Argrath was Dragonfriend and Giantfriend, but he also embodied contradictions. 

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11 minutes ago, David Weihe said:

Alas for the coolness of that idea, the two were probably both around at the beginning of the Greater Darkness.

Of course, if you want Genert around, there are all those hyena skins somewhere in Vulture Country.

There are other avatars of Genert in the Universe. Jernotius/-ia, for example. One, of course could be the little brother of the other - in the way that giants are named in folklore with alliterative names.

This is what Sandy Peterson wrote in 1994:

"Gonn Orta = Genert

While Gonn Orta is obviously _not_ Genert himself (for one  thing, if Gonn Orta is Genert, who's the giant corpse in the middle of the Krjalki Bog?), I concur with the likelihood of his being a  Fragment of Genert. Maybe he's Genert's conscience or something. The similarities of names _can't_ be coincidence, knowing how Greg's mind works."

http://glorantha.temppeli.org/digest/ndaily/1994.06/4418.html

 

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4 minutes ago, jeffjerwin said:

Keep in mind that 'giants' are 'mythic humans'

Genert and Tada -style giants were the male Earth gods (like Pamalt).  Their human-like forms were only because that was how their worshipers saw them, when they weren't being the entire continent or the Garden.  An order of magnitude greater than mere Mountain (aka, Cradle) Giants, who were orders of magnitude greater than the kinds of giants that our adventurers kill.

> Second Son became a giant.

No, he just got a couple Chaos Features, each of +3d6 SIZ and rolled all 6s.  Or in non-gamist terms, he just grew really big, as his Chaos Taint, even for already being a god.

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1 hour ago, David Weihe said:

Genert and Tada -style giants were the male Earth gods (like Pamalt).  Their human-like forms were only because that was how their worshipers saw them, when they weren't being the entire continent or the Garden.  An order of magnitude greater than mere Mountain (aka, Cradle) Giants, who were orders of magnitude greater than the kinds of giants that our adventurers kill.

> Second Son became a giant.

No, he just got a couple Chaos Features, each of +3d6 SIZ and rolled all 6s.  Or in non-gamist terms, he just grew really big, as his Chaos Taint, even for already being a god.

I know you're being jocular, but there's no reason to think Hemgall's poison was a chaotic thing, at least as we understand it now.

The Earth is a body; the Earth goddess is both the shape and space of the ground and a Green Woman. Genert is like Adam Kadmon: the vast and perfect body of clay. Giants are material: dragons are mystical. Both are kinds of being in the world.

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In my Glorantha, one of the earlier Cradles that got down the river contained a Giant baby that grew up to be named Thog. His birth was a result of something that Lord Pavis has done, so he could claim to be a son of Pavis and had some sort of right to rule the City. I think of the baby on the Third Age Cradle as the new world - to be reborn after the destruction of the current world by the Hero Wars. Either a new mountain, or a new Earth Goddess for Genertela, or a symbol of the the 4th Age. 

 

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