Hard-to-find material and food

From: Jane Williams <janewill_at_mail.nildram.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 1997 21:19:00 +0000


There seem to be a lot of people commenting on Harmast's Saga these days. The last I heard, it was unpublished (David Hall kindly sent me two lines relevant to my Vingan researches: I've never seen any more.) If it's now become obtainable, would someone like to explain how? And of course if it hasn't, would anyone quoting it or refering to it like to do so in considerably more depth, please....?

V.S. Greene asked about my comment:
>> I hate to break this to you, but KoS was what got me hooked on
>> Glorantha.
>Interesting; what possessed you to read it in the first place? I did
>actually find KoS interesting, and I've gotten some ideas out of it, but I
>was already interested in Glorantha and liked the narrative bits in CoP
>and CoT. How does it succeed for you were GRoY and FS failed?
Well, I met Glorantha through gaming. I liked it. The GM wasn't producing any background material, so I went out and bought some. The Glorantha boxed set, and the Gods box, as far as I remember. I liked it, but it all seemed a bit, well, "bitty". Lots of facts, few connections, and most of it set so far away my PC will never see that places even if she wanted to. The next publication I found was KoS, and to start with I just liked the stories. But I'd just spent a few months reading up the historical King Arthur and absorbing all the contradictions involved in that, and KoS seemed remarkably similar. After finding the first few contradictions, I started looking at it as a puzzle to be solved, and had a lot of fun trying to solve it. I'm still trying, but I now know that Greg cheated: unless you've been buying Glorantha stuff since the year dot, and preferably playing in the right house games as well, it's a puzzle with most of the important pieces missing. Just as an example, you  can't understand why Harrek left Hendrikiland and hit Boldhome instead unless you know who Jarang is. And he's only mentioned in RQ2 material.

Why did GRoY and FS fail? Well to start with, they don't have any good stories. And to make matters worse, they're about Solar cultures. Solar cultures are male-dominated and bureaucracy-ridden and bound by convention and prudery. I already live in a world like that, and have no desire to have a clone of it creep into my roleplaying. Sartarites are fun, interesting, and sympathetic. Trolls are fun and interesting. Yelmites are not. Purely a matter of taste, I'm sure.

Since it seems to be turning into a poll, I'd just like to point out that every cheese toastie I've ever had has involved two slices of bread with cheese between them, toasted, too. Sometimes with added onion, pickle, or even pesto, tomato puree and chopped salami, but always with cheese. But we do have a major disagreement on fried bread - you don't fry it in butter. The whole point is to fry it in the same fat that has just done the bacon and eggs, so as to absorb the bacon flavour into the bread. Black pudding and mushrooms are optional, but recommended.

Now, back to Gloranthan food (though I'm sure they eat cheese toasties there somewhere). I was looking up what's documented about Gloranthan food the other day, expecting to find that I could duplicate what I know about medieval cookery and drop it into Glorantha. And I found the potato. For those of you who don't study these things, one of the main differences between medieval and modern cookery is that the potato wasn't discovered until Walter Raleigh brought it back from America, and it didn't become popular until considerably later. So the place on the plate that has potatoes on it these days was always filled by something else.

Where in Glorantha do they have potatoes? I've found nowhere that grows them, only a prohibition on Light Sons in Sun County eating them. I'd guess this is because of their Earth connection, but that's just a guess. They are not mentioned as being grown in Sun County, Pavis County, or Sartar as far as I'm aware. And if it is the earth connection that prohibits them, what about barley and other grains, usually taken as being the standard Earth symbol in Glorantha?

Jane Williams                     jane_at_williams.nildram.co.uk
http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~janewill/gloranth/index.shtml

Powered by hypermail