It has confused me on a few points, though.
The Impression the Third Age book gives (to me at least) is that pretty much the entire West uses the Abiding Book as its core text. The Abiding Book is the core text of Malkionism as it is known in the Third Age. I think the Stygian heresy might be the only one specifically mentioned as predating the Book.
Anyway. The point is that the impression I get from the Fronela book is that this isn't the case at all. Hrestolism gets declared a heresy by the God Learners, suppressed, and then when the Jrusteli are overthrown, it gets re-instated. So while I believe that they are all drawing from similar early sources and so are similar, it seems here that there is no reason Fronela would have the Abiding Book as any kind of base text. Whatever main text they had before would still be what they should be using, barring some later revelation I don't know about. I've never been under the impression they followed Rokar, who had his stripped down Abiding Book. So what's the deal here?
Honestly, I prefer the implication here - the Glorantha: Introduction to the Hero Wars description of Malkioni is irritatingly monolithic, so I am very happy to have the Abiding Book me more limited.
Then there's Caste. Again, I'm not sure how this works. G:IttHW says something about being born into caste and that's it, but I thought that was merely a Rokari interpretation. One thing I found odd in the Fronela book is that the Jrusteli seem to enforce traditional caste roles, but the Jrusteli described in the Jrustela book believe in caste mobility for the most part.
As for Caste among the the Malkioni in general, it is always described differently, but we never here what they are basing this on. It seems to come from Malkion, which means regardless of book, there should be something about it in all the Malkioni texts.
The names keep shifting around, and it isn't clear whether there is a "Sorcerer" or a "Priest" caste - a "soldier" or a "knight" caste. It seems some interpretations are that you are born into a caste and cannot change, which means magic is basically inherited.
I personally like the idea that Malkion described something true - people were in one of these 4 categories - but didn't necessarily insist on caste travelling by inheritance and being unchangeable.
I think a situation where the caste laws actually from Malkion are vague and open to interpretation the most interesting story wise. I'd include women there, with it unclear whether they are supposed to be treated as the caste of their father or brother or husband, or whether they outside the caste system entirely in a way.
LC
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