More Gypsies

From: Nick Fortune <nxf_at_uniplex.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 19:21:12 GMT


My thanks to Michael Raaterova and Peter Metcalfe for their thoughts on gyspies. I don't know a thing about the Third Blue Eye, I'm afraid, but I do have a some notes on gypsies and where they might arise from in Glorantha. A shame to let them go to waste really...

Rather than use the wandering smith approach though, I'd like to consider them from the way they appear in folk tales.

So, what sort of roles do gypsies fill? Well, according to tradition, they have their origins in a distant land, they have weak but strange magics. They have glamour. They are often casts as seducers, as thieves - - in point of fact as Tricksters. They have wagons and horses and they like gold for decoration so there could be a solar influence here.

I thought of two possibilities. The first was that the gypsy people of Fronela and Ralios were Praxian Horsemen who fled from the devil and kept on westward for a long time. Some probably say the fled from I Fought We Won, but that is impossible by definition. They may have been trying to flee it though. It gives us another reason why Eritha is so down on Horses nowadays. We also get gypsies who worship Raven - though in a slighty different aspect to most of his other worshippers. There's something about Raven and gypisies that Just Seems Right to me.

The other possibility is that they represent one of the last vestiges of worship for the solar trickster Orlantio. That lets us bring in Lokarnos for the wagons. It's possible that gypsy worship is a mixture of the two - or that the praxians picked up some solars en route.

For magic, most of their gods would be roughly at the level or spirit cults with magic only obtainable at festival where many troupes gather together. They probably have some shamans among them, the old gypsy curse being a, time honoured litterary cliche, and possibly a little sorcery, though this should be rare.

Any comments?


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