Stephen Lucek:
>There seems to be confusion over Bronze age and Classical. The bronze age is
>the age of heroes, the age of Greek mythology, Hercules, Perseus, the
>Argonauts, the birth of cities, the Trojan war etc.. Gilgamesh even, [...]
Maybe true. Still, when I first read about the Sartarite Orlanthi, I thought "Danubian Celts!", and that means early iron age - Hallstadt culture rather than La Tene. (Sorry for the island-centric Celt fans, but the continentals - - plenty of us had the dubious pleasure to read about in Latin lessons, from Caesar - fit the bill a lot better than either Britons or Irish IMO.)
If I had to place these people into one of your periods above, I couldn't really decide. Still, I feel that the Orlanti are described with way too many mediterranean concepts, which don't apply well to these mountain-dwellers far from the next olive trees.
(BTW olive trees: where do they grow in Genertela? The border between olive tree farming and grain farming tended to coincide the border between philosophical civilisations and primarily military ones (before their migrations southwards). Of course, this border shifted along with the climate shifts, and these caused at least some of the migrations...)
The high period of Middle European Bronze Age IMO was from about 2000 BC to about 1300 BC, when Middle European climate was almost mediterranean, though population density wasn't (ever, for reasons to be sought in physical geography). If I had to assign a comparable Gloranthan Age, I'd take the Golden Age...
>Glorantha does seem very much inspired the heroic age. A lot of the stories,
>people and cultures of Glorantha have that 'being at the very birth of
>civilisation' feel, when the world is still young and myths, heroes and
>monsters still abound. Not at all the feel of Malory's Arthurian legends, or a
>medieval setting.
That is the Glorantha that was published by Chaosium. Greg's original conceptions of Western Glorantha were quite close to Mallory's Athurian romance, turned into heroic stuff. Warring city states (though the divine founders were only a few generations away), feudal-sounding nobility, but a caste system. Ok, maybe Vedic India fits the bill, too...
The "problem" with the old conceptions of players of RQ1 or RQ2 is that the information that was published on Glorantha was from the farthest backwater of western and central Genertela, i.e. Pavis and Prax. There were chivalrous units already in White Bear and Red Moon, the first "official" Glorantha publication ever, or how would you interpret units like "Sir Ethilrist" or "Sir Narib's Company"? Greg knew about these all the time, but they never saw print during the time RQ2 was published by Chaosium. Some were announced, though...
There was some quite explicit stuff in the description of Arkat's crusade in Cults of Terror, but somehow this failed to impress the imagination of the "Sartar vs. Lunar Empire" or "Praxians in Pavis" players.
If you are one of those people with a "Know Too Much About Glorantha" skill in Rune Lord levels (thanks for that quote, MOB), you might even have considered to bid for one of Greg's early Malkioni writings on some conventions. They are revealing. By now the Reaching Moon Megacorp has made a lot of the factual information from these files from around 1970 available in How the West was One and Tales 13, so people cannot really claim all the information is unpublished or unavailable. But it was at the core of Glorantha most of the time.
Sorry for this rant. The following might explain my agitation:
When I was fresh in my office as editor of the German RQ magazine Free INT, about five years ago, I received a "reader's letter" of a RQ-player of the first hour (at least in Germany) in which he complained bitterly about how sorcery destroyed his Glorantha. I printed it, partly as a flame bait, and lo - there was plenty of reaction, mostly by people who had encountered RQ only with the publication of RQ3 (by Games Workshop, around 1987 if my memory serves well). A lot of this was outrage...
>Armour
>Bronze age armour is very, very different from classical age armour.
For the first, it's close to non-existant. The first nation to field fully-armoured armies was also the first nation to produce iron in a mass-scale - the Hittites. The Philistines (Goliath's people, fought by David) were from the same region and had taken up the technology, the Israelites hadn't by that time.
Whoever wore any kind of metal armour was a champion, or an elite guard.
>It also
>looks very, very silly. Basically a imagine a cylinder for the chest, with big
>horizontal rings attached below, looking very much like a skirt. You would not
>get one of my characters in one of those!
A lot of the (pre-Trojan, though only by one or two generations) heroic Hellene heroes were famed for going unarmed, or in (magical) beast hides. Apparently the siege of Troy marked a considerable advance in bronze weapon technology (comparable to the advance in aircraft development during the First World War?), only to be superseded maybe fifty years later by the general availability of iron...
>I prefer to use armour that is more classical (Greek). It looks so much
better!
It also fits with my conception of the Orlanthi as contemporaries (in less civilized lands) of the Greek and Phoenician merchant citizens.
Note, however, that Gloranthan Western chivalry may be quite different from Mallory's or European High Middle Age chivalry. One of my rants on the digest was reprinted in Codex 3.
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