Re: Gamura; Pentans

From: Nick Brooke <Nick_Brooke_at_compuserve.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 1997 13:56:47 -0400


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Pam writes:

> ...this is NOT Gamura, the giant, rocket powered flying turtle of =

> the Japananese monster movie genre. We will have to fit Gamura into
> Glorantha somewhere, however, because he would make such a great
> foe for Trantalor...

Well, the Sofali Turtle People of Fethlon live near enough to the (hypothetical) Island of the Unworthy Dragonewt Exiles (home to giant fire-breathing mutant dinosaurs, etc.) that they might well feel the need to "soup up" (pun intended) one of their totemic spirits with some Solar/Volcanic weaponry obtained from nearby Teshnos, purely in a spirit of self-defence...

And that's "Tarantulor", BTW, unless yours is the original Japanese name for the Beast of the Spider Mountains. Sadly, the Sofali are a long way from Cragspider's lands, but what can you do, eh?



All this "orthodoxy" about Pent prompts me to remind everyone that Pentan customs and manners have been horrendously warped since the Nights of Horror. Some tribes worship spirits their ancestors never dreamed of following: the Storm Tribes are only the best-known example of this. Social roles have been similarly thrown into turmoil, as one would expect in the wake of the catastrophic near-genocide wreaked on the Pentans by Lunar chaos magics at that battle. Thus, while we know where Pentans came from (Yu-Kargzant/Arandayla/La-Ungariant), the gods of any particular clan or tribe these days cannot and should not solely be extrapolated from this ancient and, perhaps, irrelevant history.

Note too that this means typical gender roles may well have been reassessed  by many Pentan peoples: after all, for a generation after the Nights of Horror there *were* almost no Pentan men of military age in any of the horse nomad nations which participated in that conflict -- and histories suggest this was most if not all of the tribes of Pent.

I'd strongly advise against being straitjacketed by the published sources on Pentan religion and culture. Deviations from the ancient norm can be explained in terms of "What Happened in the Year of Many Tears", "What Happened When Women Ruled the Clan", "What Happened When The Strange Spirits Came", etc. Adaptation often meant survival: sticking to the Old Ways is admirable, sometimes, but can also wipe out the unfortunate.

Let's develop a properly patchworked and confusing Pent!

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Nick
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