Where did Babs Gor find death, and Sages and what they do from Erik Sieurin on 1995-03-13 (Glorantha Digest Vol 01)

From: Erik Sieurin <ERISIE_at_bhs.hb.se>
Date: Mon, 13 Mar 1995 15:21:11 +0100

I have some (pretty) straightforward questions:

In KoS and the various writeups of HUmakt, we are told the story of how Humakt gets Death from Eurmal, and then Eurmal steals it, and because of that Death is let loose in the world. As far as I remember, it goes soemthing like this: a, Humakt has death b, Eurmal steals it (Anyone knows how?) c, Eurmal gives Death to Orlanth, who kills Yelm d, Eurmal for some reason has Death again (Orlanth got a copy?) e, Eurmal gives Death to High King Elf (looses it as a part of a guessing game?) who uses it to kill dwarves (transformed to a bow?). f, Eurmal trips HKE for fun, and Iron Man (not tradework Marvel Comics, but a Mostali entity) gets Death and makes it into an axe which he uses to chop some elves. g, Eurmal tricks the "greedy" Iron Man into giving him the sword/axe so Eurmal can make copies of it, and sets off again with Death. h, Eurmal gives the sword to Zorak Zoran in exchange for a bag of sweets. ZZ kills Flamal.

Then I think Raglagnar used Death to kill Acos and let Chaos into the world as a part of the ritual.

Any theory of how Earth (Maran Gor and Babs Gor) got Death?

I have a very concrete reason to ask. This weekend I expect to play The Game, and one of our resident humakti is very attached to his sword, since it holds that nasty blessing "double damage". I like to bring up "old enemies" and they have a rather nasty Trickster on their death list.
Now, I got the idea of this Trickster wishing to engage in a semi- heroquest. For some reason (learning some secrets etc) he will pull of a heist that duplicate Eurmal's Death theft as much as possible. Point A is to steal the PC's sword (the PC being "Humakt"). Since another all campaign fact is that the PC has a younger brother, Trickster will then give the sword to the brother and trick him into killing Someone Important with it. The idea is that the PC's will realize what the Trickster is trying to do and try to forestall him. Any ideas on what could happen? If you think the comments are too trivial for the list, send them to me personally.

2) My second question, or paraquestion, concerns the habits of Lankor Mhy's Sages. According to what I have heard, full initiates are
"Masters" of a subject, which in rulespeak is made synonymous with a
Knowledge skill.
Now, from this rises a couple of questions. First a rulesy one, but since it is Gloranthan I think it fits the list. It ties in to the earlier Lore discussion. Personally I like knowledge skills, but I also like skills that sort of ties in with a real-world area.
Example: RQ3 has farmers and healers know Plant Lore and farmers and hunters know Animal Lore. Harnmaster has farmers and healers know Agriculture/Farming and Herbalism respectively and farmers and hunters know Animalcraft/Animal Husbandry and Hunting respectively. Plant Lore and Animal Lore are abstract categories, Farming and Herbalism are concrete categories.
I feel that abstract knowledge is very rare in pre-industrial societies and usually divided in a different way from our divisions of today. Cf the "seven liberal arts" and the subjects of modern university courses.
So the question is: Since the only source of "Knowledge for knowledge's sake" in Sartar culture is city-dwelling Sages, I would like to have "theoretic" skills divided according to how they are taught at, say, Jonstown University. Any ideas?

Another follow-up question, far more abstract: Does LM Sages think that Knowledge is unlimited? Ie, do they think it is theoretically possible to know everything? Do they think that the various areas of mastery are god-given? ("A Master of Fossile Lore? Impossible! That is a subject of the department of Mineral Lore!") Note that new departments still can be created this way, it just means that the old version was not the True Version As The Light Of Knowledge would have it. Or do they see them as mere conveniences? An example is the
"detective" Zero from Alan LaVergne's stories: is he a "Master of
Criminology/Criminal Lore, or only a Human Lore who wrote his thesis on the subject of "The Thoughts and Customs of Outlaws"? (Earthly paralell: I am a student of information and library science, and we recently read about the Indian library scientist/philosopher Ranganathan. One of his ideas was, if I did not misunderstand the lecture, that there are God-given - Ranganathan was a pious Hindu - areas of knowledge. The US Library of Congress is, on the other hand, organized according to the "literary warrant" principle, and creates categories as needed).

By this we reaches the final(?) question: What about the relations to Irippi Ontor in these areas? What are IO Sages' ideas about the matter? I know that there is no "classification system" for LM libraries; what about IO libraries?

And yes, I know that there are factions within the LM community who holds different views. But what are then the views on these topics of the various factions? Which factions are there, by the way? Being one of those who (as some of you may know) discovered Glorantha during the RQ3 era I have very little access to old material, and I have found no information about the various factions in new material except for notes like "and he is a member of the Knowledgist faction" in NPC descriptions.

Erik (sometimes known as Sven) Sieurin

End of Glorantha Digest V1 #212