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TwoQuestions posted:I know this may be weird, but are there any bee gods? Or is that too small of a portfolio to get space in any Glorantha guide? Gorakiki is the goddess of insects, mostly worshipped by trolls, and her worship consists of dozens of smaller subcults, each dedicated to a specific insect variant of Gorakiki: Gorakiki-Beetle, Gorakiki-Locust, etc. Gorakiki-Bee is the second-largest subcult (after Beetle) because trolls value honey and because large bees are ridden by trollkin warriors. In no-longer-canon material, the bee aspect of Gorakiki is called Jikibir Bee-Mother.
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Nov 3, 2018 00:33
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cheetah7071 posted:Does anyone have a map of Genertela with just the major regions marked? The Guide is so detailed that getting broad answers like "what is directly east of the lunar empire" is kind of tricky. It's a little hard to tell exactly where the borders are for some of the smaller areas, but the map down on this wiki page might help you: https://glorantha.fandom.com/wiki/Genertela
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Jan 27, 2019 21:00
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TheNamedSavior posted:Can someone explain why the setting went from "Argath can be anybody" to "Argath is this totally cool NPC who hogs all of the glory and the PCS are his erran boys (regardless of gender) oh and the only major Orianthi female hero gets undramatically murdered for no good reason"? Didn't we decide that the later was NOT the way to go in the 90's when literally EVERY setting tried doing that? Not to mention the entire thing totally misunderstands the purpose of King Of Sartar as AN UNRELIABLE narrator! 100% agreed about Argrath. Mechanics that I personally do not care for aside, the thing I most dislike about the new Runequest is moving the timeline forward (to a less interesting period, IMO) and subsequently defining Argrath as a specific NPC that no PC could ever hope to be as strong or cool as, so they just fetch magic items for him or whatever. As for Kallyr... she is killed off in King of Sartar, so it's not a new development, but Glorantha has never been good to women. Female warrior cults are uncommon and often portrayed as horrifying perversions (e.g. the Gors, Gorgorma), and when they did come up with an Orlanthi fighting goddess who wasn't a scary freak, Vinga, the next edition decided to downgrade her to a one-paragraph subcult of Orlanth, with the official line being that she isn't even a separate person with her own myths, just Orlanth who incarnated as a woman once. Where women have political power in the world, it generally is portrayed as monstrous (e.g. trolls) or only allows women to choose the men who lead them (e.g. Doraddi), and even in such areas it is still expected that men do the fighting and adventuring while women stay home to "rule" the home. The only major egalitarian society is the default bad guys. A large majority of all named goddesses are healer/mother/fertility stereotypes. And so on and so forth. It's what happens when the creator is a hippie shaman who, while being a good and kind person by all accounts, believes in universal active masculine/passive feminine energy, the setting's next steward is an American Republican, and virtually every person to ever officially contribute to the setting is a white dude.
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Sep 8, 2019 22:59
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TheNamedSavior posted:Wait, is jeff richard a republican? This is the first time that I've come across something to that knowledge. I do know that sandy peterson is probably a sexist piece of poo poo who somehow is avoiding the punishment that jonathan tweet rightfully got for being a eugenics supporting piece of poo poo. He is very private about his personal life, but yes, he is a GOP voter -- or at least was, since he moved abroad several years ago. I don't know what his feelings are about modern Republicans, but the subject was occasionally brought up years ago on the old Glorantha mailing lists. The archive of the Glorantha Digest died about a year ago, unfortunately, so it's hard to dig those messages up. TheNamedSavior posted:I hope that they recruit black people as writers when they get around to writing that Fonrit book. It's not out of the realm of possibility, but I'd be surprised if they did so. Any suggestion of this type would probably receive more pushback than support on the Chaosium forums. There was a recent post there suggesting that an Asian writer might be able to develop Kralorela into something better than the lame Chinese stereotype it is now, which was met with the usual: a white scholar would know more than any random Chinese person; all of Glorantha is cultural appropriation because we aren't proto-Indo-European tribesmen; why are you using race to validate a creative work, you racist?, etc. Jeff showed up to insist Kralorela is a fantasy world, not just a copy of China, the implication being that getting an Asian author involved would be pointless -- but then he enumerated the sources about China that he drew on for the Guide, and finished up by saying that Kralorela is an intentionally Orientalist approach to China. He specifically called it "the China of our myths - the Serica of Pliny and Ptolemy." Apparently, Asian people can't be "us." This also reminded me of a post from a few years back, when somebody posted a hope for a Native American sourcebook for Basic Roleplaying; nobody bothered to suggest a Native American author might be worthwhile for the project, and a few people even objected to the term "Native American," since "my ancestors have been here for hundreds of years, doesn't that make ME a native American?", along with an expressed preference for using the term "Indians" (which then led to a loving joke about "which kind of Indian would you want on your tech support call" and complaining about foreign accents).
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Sep 9, 2019 21:15
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Even knowing its origins -- as a document to support a tongue-in-cheek LARP written decades ago -- it was sillier than I expected it to be. It has a weird vibe; it's partially information that would actually be useful for a campaign in Glamour (city map, some useful descriptions of places, Red Emperor and Glamour city cult write-ups), but every other paragraph is some goofy pop culture references or communist dictatorship parody. It leans heavily on an evil Empire disguised (barely) with illusions of beauty, and there's very few sections that don't resort to jokes. There's the Moon Rock Cafe, where Beat-Pot Aelwrin serves up walktapus pie; the Red Tapeworm deployed by the bureaucratic temple of Intriplicatos; a Newspeak/New Pelorian joke pamphlet; the lyrics for a "Pelorian Rhapsody" parody; the sketch of a scenario about a rogue icebreaker ship called The Hunt for Red Storm Season, complete with pseudo-Russian backwards-R font; the Emperor's seven consorts being nicknamed Baby, Sporty, Scary, Posh, Ginger, Bashful, and Doc; and so on. The rumor lists talk about (all true) the "just say no" campaign of Great Sister, the banned book The Seleric Verses, the wealthy senator who dresses up as the Bat Man, the Jakaleel asylum for the insane called Arkat Asylum, etc. There are also several pieces of short fiction that I find particularly bad. The Red Emperor is portrayed as an absent-minded, obese Elvis. The dialogue is very modern and British ("sod this" and "right mithering eejet"). The narrator of one story calls Great Sister a "cranky old bitch." And the whole book ends with a story about the Emperor's constipation. All that kind of stuff totally overshadows any otherwise useful descriptions of the city. I haven't counted pages out or anything, but *maybe* half the book would be usable in any kind of serious campaign.
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Apr 15, 2020 01:17
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Jeff actually kept expanding the manuscript through 2019. The current plan is to cover ~100 cults in depth, in a three-book slipcase; one of those books is a "prosopaedia" with one-paragraph overviews of 750 cults. The prosopaedia is entering layout soon -- possibly as early as next month -- but the rest is waiting on the massive amount of art coming in. Jeff has been posting previews of the art over on the Facebook Runequest group. Between art, layout, editing, and possibly making room for other publications coming out before or at the same time -- such as the Sartar homeland book and the large book of magic that is meant to be a companion to the cults book -- I wouldn't be surprised if the cults book got pushed to 2022. Sedenya only knows when the GM book, the decade-in-development Prax book, etc. will ever come out.
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Nov 22, 2020 10:08
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| # ¿ May 20, 2024 23:51 |
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reignonyourparade posted:Oh come the gently caress on, another one? Apparently, despite the fact that Greg and Jeff themselves wrote the last Sartar books only a decade ago, they somehow didn't turn out the way Jeff wanted. He has criticized them repeatedly in recent years and insists this new book will finally be the definitive work on the region. In other words, the war against Elmal will only be won once every mention of him is replaced with "a small, local variant of Yelmalio." Jeff continues to fight the good fight that he... started by writing up the Elmal cult ten years ago...
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Nov 23, 2020 00:15
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