>>>Newtlings
>>Never seen that one done - have you got any Occupation Experience charts
>>for them?
>Elder Secrets.
There's also a table in the River of Cradles book. One of the most successful characters in my RQ2 campaign was a newtling. In another campaign I was playing a Xiola Umbar healer who decided to D.I> for a dead trollkin and managed to lose all but one point of power. She had to put up with "A trollkin lives a charmed life" for the rest of the campaign.
>Joerg Baumgartner:
>[midget cattle]
>>>Why? As far as I'm concerned, they are ordinary sized cattle (and they
>>>are ridden by the Lendarshi for example). How else is the avearge
>>>gloranthan farmer going to get decent oxen to do the heavy work if the
>>>only cattle he has are midgets?
>>Ever wondered why it takes eight oxen to make up a plow team? If the
beasts
>>were Scottish Highland bull size, two would be enough, maybe four, but
>>eight? There is no kind of light plow eight modern-sized oxen would not
>>break in no time short.
Peter Metcalfe
>Amazing. One obscure phrase in the Report of the Orlanthi and Joerg
>transforms all the cattle to stunted midgets. As if the proposal
>to have Elves as hive minds weren't alien enough. If the cattle
>were really all that small then why aren't the Orlanthi hooking up
>ordinary sized *horses* which could do the job better (even without
>a horse collar)? Methinks the team implies rotation of the oxen
>on the plow rather than a full component of oxen.
Au contraire. Without a horse collar you cannot get any decent amount of work out of a horse. A yoke or a rope around the neck strangles horses. (This is due to the fact that they have much narrower shoulders than an ox does). Oddly enough they find it hard to do any work when they're slowly being strangled.
The reason they might need eight ox teams to plow would be that they're plowing heavy or virgin soil. My understanding is that Orlanthi territory is for the most part former woodland ala Northern Europe. That tends to mean fairly heavy soils. Europe wasn't successfully opened to wide scale agriculture until the horse collar was invented in the Middle Ages. (It might very well be the case in Glorantha that only the Malkioni have the horse collar and everyone else has to rely on oxen or other animals for plowing. The horseshoe also has a role to play as it enables the horse to get better traction). You need a lot of oxen to pull a heavy plow because the yoke is an inefficient way to harness an animal. You need the heavy plow because the soil is so hard to turn.
For example in Mesopotamia and Egypt they used donkeys, onagers or camels to plow. The soils there were so light partially due to the annual floods and to the fact that the areas had been under cultivation for centuries. And of course because the soil there is different. This allowed them to use a very simple and light plow that quite different than the kind used in Europe. I imagine that in Peloria they can get away with a lighter plow because the area has been under cultivation much longer and the soil would be lighter. There are some interesting articles on yokes and plows in the Grolier's encyclopedia and this website has an account of how heavy horses helped to open up America:
http://www.horseworld.com/imh/draft/dr1.html
It also explains why horses are better than oxen as draft animals and how important they are for pulling heavy plows.
Continuing in this vein I find it unlikely that Lunar farmers would be able to till the soil in Prax. Prairie soil is just about the hardest to cultivate. The Canadian and American prairies weren't really opened up until steel plows with moldboards were invented and they're a fairly late invention in the west (11th century for the moldboard (which turns the soil rather than just scratching it) though they were known in China a millennium before that). The colter, a sharp blade that cuts the soil in front of the plowshare is also a Medieval innovation. Lunar farmers would be unaccustomed to working with heavy soils and would need to use Sartarite type plows if they were going to get anywhere. Needing a team of oxen is an expensive proposition. Any basic encyclopedia will provide a good overview of the subject, just look up the articles on plows, yokes and the history of agriculture.
On a different topic the whole business of needing to use Peaceful Cut for slaughtering animals is an interesting topic. IMO you'd need a whole range of these sorts of prayers/spells for day to day life in Glorantha. Bakers would need a little prayer to make their bread rise. Farmers would say a little prayer before harvesting, woodsmen would have prayers they'd use before cutting trees down, etc. My feeling is that you'd need these prayers if you wanted to a) do these things, b) avoid adverse consequences. If the baker didn't say his or her yeast spell the bread wouldn't rise, if a farmer didn't say his or her harvest or sowing prayer he or she won't get as good a harvest the next season, etc. One of the most important prayers would be funeral services. I'm betting that the spirits of the dead won't rest easy if they didn't receive the proper prayers. Sites of mass slaughter would be appalling places due to the numbers of ghosts around. There may well be rituals that the winners could use to placate the enemy slain (or at least send them on to the spirit plane where they wouldn't be able to bother anyone). I've always thought it'd be neat if your slain enemies came after you because you hadn't said the proper words over their corpses. They are plenty of examples of this from mythology and folklore.
To raise a contentious issue again I think this issue IMO serves to differentiate Glorantha from our world. In our world people believe things will happen if they perform the right ceremonies. In Glorantha whether you believe it or not things WILL happen. If I murder someone in Glorantha their ghost will come after me (whether I believe in ghosts or not) if I fail to appease the ghost or perform some sort of ceremony that binds the ghost in place. If the baker fails to say the proper words the bread won't rise. IMO I think magical and divine things happen in Glorantha without people having to believe in them. It's just a different mechanism.
Oliver D. Bernuetz
bernuetz.oliver_at_cbsc.ic.gc.ca
End of Glorantha Digest V4 #316
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