I'd say darkness is inherently frightening, period. Even older than ZZ or anyone else. Most of us seem to have forgotten what real darkness is. Come up here to the redwoods, a hundred miles from every city, to see.
Sure, trolls only see part of Zorak Zoran and he probably has other
> masks or aspects that are worshipped by other beings, but I think he
> is very primal indeed.
Absolutely.
> So, he makes the Dead walk again because he is a god of Hell and can
> manifest that power over the dead. That's scary in itself.
>
> Peter Metcalfe:
> > Zorak Zoran has many faces in glorantha. IMO in Peloria,
> > his two best known faces are Monster Man, Lodril's evil
> > shadow and Shargash. The people of those lands would deny
> > that those gods are Zorak Zoran and instead claim that trolls
> > worship a perverted form of Shargash or Monster Man.
>
> I can't see this, myself. Sure, they are both scary, both have
> Underworld/Hell powers and both command fire, all traits in common
> with Zorak Zoran, but that doesn't make them masks of Zorak Zoran, in
> my opinion. Shargash is a son of Yelm, or at least is counted as one,
> so that doesn't tie in with being Zorak Zoran. I don't really like
> the idea of every Scary Underworld Deity is a mask of another.
> Shargash has Hell Powers because of things he did in the Godtime - he
> is the Scary Hellfire of the Sky Pantheon (albeit I don't know a lot
> about Shargash). Monster Man is the manifestation of Lodril's powers
> over the Underworld - Aether granted Lodril power over the Underworld
> and one aspect of this is Monster Man. He is also the god of
> downtrodden peasants and the god of Righteous Rebellion, neither of
> which fit well with Zorak Zoran.
I'd just like to point out that this kind of theorizing and philosophizing is not common to most people at all. They have a hundred names for those things that go bump in the night, and sometimes they use the same name for different entities, and different names for one entity. I've tried to stress that in all my Gloranthan writings I have unnaturally used a single name in the texts where, in fact, the people using the names do not. Has that list of "100 names of Orlanth" appared in print anywhere yet?
> I don't believe that Zorak Zoran acquired his fire abilities at the
> > Hill of Gold.
> > To some extent, they were already part of him. But the Hill of
> Gold was
> > a convenient mythic battleground in which Zorak Zorani could amplify
> > their fiery abilities by beating up a solar deity.
>
ZZ is darkness, which is always conqured by light.
But he defined that rule. He conquered fire and conrols it. that makes him a
terror to trolls.
He breaks the rules.
When Argan Argar, Zorak Zoran and Xiola Umbar found Aether before he
> was born, Zorak Zoran became the first being to be burned. I think
> that gave him some power over fire that helped him at the Hill of
> Gold. After all, the fire that burned him was far more primal than
> Yelmalio's fire.
Maybe, but I think it just generated enough hatred and violence to ive him the poes to do the imposible.
--
Greg Stafford
Game Designer
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