For Orlanthi, five is lucky, because Orlanth is the fifth son of the fifth elemental god. Three is unlucky, because of the Unholy Trio. Seven is lucky: the number of the Lightbringers and the number of the winds.
A tree struck by lightning is holy and magical. Thus, seeing lightning strike a tree is lucky in a neutral sense: it may be bad or good. It attracts the attention of the otherworld, and this may bring good or bad fortune.
Sunrise is a lucky time. Praise Theya!
Animals or people born with deformities are unlucky and bad
omens.
Having a black cat cross your path is a good omen.
Do the steps of the sword dance correctly, and you will do
well in battle.
The winds and the clouds reveal much to the wise.
Windsday is a lucky day, Movement week is lucky, and the
Orlanth holy day is a lucky day to be born.
Red and black are unlucky colors.
Eating the last bit of solidified porridge out of the bottom
of the pot is bad luck.
Women shouldn't handle sharp things when they're pregnant
(this gets them out of a lot of chores, BTW).
I have used various omens and signs in gaming. I once played a character who used the rune stones as a divination tool. In my current game, I had the PCs witness a raven flying west with a bone in its mouth. There's also a blue heron who has shown up a couple times.
Re: Malkioni caste intermarriage
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in Galstar a man seeks a wife on the basis of her docility, virginity, and presumed fertility, not on anything else. (Yeah, I know the men there are pigs.) During the Ban, there was only one caste, so intermarriage wasn't an issue. Before the Ban, marrying up was fairly common, and surplus unmarriageable noblewomen became nuns. Widows often remarried rather than become nuns (the other option). Since the Ban lifted, and with the current mysterious shortage of eligible noblewomen, noblemen look for wives among the rising classes or even the noble barbarians who sit in the back of St. Galastar's Cathedral.
Re: Sven Sievrin's spell-learning stories
Way cool, and vitally needed because spirit combat as written is so dull, dull, dull, ghastly, boring, and awful. Agree with someone (forget who, sorry) who said the dreamlike process was more suited to spell teaching than to normal spirit combat. Other examples: an Ernalda initiate has to grow a plant and deal with its pests and diseases, Lhankor Mhytes have to take a quiz, Chalana Arroyans have to keep a patient from dying.
Simon Hibbs (discoverer of the eponymous boson) says:
>As Sandy has pointed out, all Gloranthan cultures belive that
>their world view is manifestly true. They believe their
>subjective view of the world is objectively correct.
But who has a concept of objectivity? As manifested in disciplines like history, objectivity is a relatively new notion in our world. History before Gibbon's time was pure propaganda. People who today read Biblical stories as history are ignorant of the fact that the people who first heard these stories had no concept of history as we do.
In Glorantha, most cultures are not developed enough to have a concept of objectivity, or have reacted against it (as it was manifested by the God Learners) and returned to a less sophisticated view. (Of course, no one can put the genie back into the bottle, so the areas where the GL's held sway may be more post-objective than pre-.) We'll hear more about this, I'm sure, when Greg Stafford has had a chance to digest _Reality Isn't What It Used to Be_.
Sandy said:
> I'm not sure that even the Mostali are familiar with this
>concept in Glorantha. The Malkioni might be the only ones.
> ...I don't think that such
>Malkioni believe that even they have the "truth", only that they
>have much more of it than anyone else.
You think they're more sophisticated than I do. Anybody with a revealed truth from God is unlikely to have the humility or courage to see that we cannot be sure of anything. It took centuries of faith-shaking social upheaval and scholarly advancement before we got William of Occam, and centuries more to get to where we are today: the pinnacle of all thought, obviously :-|.
>Certainly such a scholar
>would have nothing but contempt for the world-views professed by
>peasants, warriors, and village priests of even his own sect of
>Malkionism.
This part I agree with.
Re: female sun deity
That'd certainly mess with certain people's heads. That's enough by itself to make me all for it.
End of Glorantha Digest V1 #18
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