In my campaign, they got along well. The region I played in was sufficiently urbanized that the Aeolian religion dominated even the temples of rural marketplaces. Aeolian temples were indistishingable from traditional Orlanthi temples in respect to associate and subcult shrines, which worked exactly as for traditional Orlanthi. So did the divine magic of the main deity.
The difference was in the distribution of spirit magic. Aeolian temples were not places where you could access spirit magic spell teaching easily - you would need a traditionalist priest who would be allowed to use the temple resources, since the Aeolian priesthood regards fighting spirits to steal their magic as primitive and uneffective.
(Note that the campaign used the last RQ4-AiG draft I'm aware of - as a
playtest game - which had slightly better starting chances for sorcery
spells even for non-apprentices. I allowed the use of Intensity to up to
spell skill divided by 10, as the draft did, for initiate Aeolians. The
draft made a difference between low sorcery and high sorcery spells
(mainly difficulty ranking and accessibility) which allowed me to make
certain spells unavailable to initiates as they were ranked high sorcery
- - among the limited access was damage boosting, but not Bless Weapon
(increases weapon attack by 5% per MP). A couple of useful house rules
made the game go smoothly but makes application for standard RQ3
somewhat hard, like a limit to healing magic.)
The Aeolians regarded the traditionalists as rustics who lacked some sophistication, but were co-religionists in most of the ways which mattered. Their dimly expounded views on Solace through Orlanth's Hall regarded use of spirit magic as somewhat tainting, delaying Solace for another cycle of Rebirth.
The traditionalists were tolerated, and had unrestricted access to all the divine magic of their cults. There was little other restriction to access to spirit magic other than that most urban temples wouldn't teach any - find a rural shrine, wisewoman or kolating and learn what spell you like.
Rural aeolianized temples would teach some spirit magic at shrines, though not at the main temple. Given all the Orlanth subcults, big deal for overall availability, although more services to obscure shrines had to be held in order to refresh the spell-teaching spells. (RQ4-AiG had some well-thought out ideas about the amount of worship - not just head count of initiates, but also frequency and intensity of worship - neccessary to maintain a shrine, and thereby a priest or godi.) Or they would have a shrine to Orlanth Aeolus, Orlanth the wizard, in (or rather on) an otherwise normal Orlanth temple (hilltop).
For a rule of thumb, the farther you got from the royal highways connecting Jansholm with Mt. Passant and the coastal cities with the mainland, the less common were the Aeolians. Half a day walking away from the road, and chances were you might find a shrine to Orlanth Aeolus rather than an Aeolian temple, and anything further, there would be no Aeolian presence at all.
Orlanth the Wizard would be little more than a parallel to the Four Weapons subcult, with no divine magic but a set of personal magic stolen from the knights and wizards of the west. I'm afraid I never wrote the fairly simple myth for this, involving claims of kinship Orlanth used in the Malkioni lands to the descendants of his nephew Aerlit and his son, Malkion.
About Aeolian church history:
I'm fairly sure that Aeol - the founding saint/hero of this subcult, according to David Hall (in How the West Was One) the knowing companion of Harmast Barefoot on his first Lightbringers' Quest - did use some genuine memory of storm worship found in the west, on or shortly after the Lightbringers' Quest which produced Arkat, and claimed ties to the sorcery from there. It is known that Harmast combined various previously unconnected myths and mythlets into one coherent LBQ, and also that he discarded a couple of uncomfortable or unfamiliar ones. IMO the bit about wizardry might have been a part of the myths - both times he produced Malkioni heroes - but faced with Arkat's betrayals, this part was struck from the commonly accepted gospel, except where Aeol himself taught a different version of the LBQ, the core myths of which survived as just another magic weapon subcult which lay dormant for quite some time.
During the God Learner presence in southern Kethaela, the subcult of Orlanth the Wizard was hostile to the Machine Project, but did steal knowledge and doctrine from the God Learners. The region Heortland per se was hostile to the God Learners, and the two nearby God Learner cities in Lylket (below Shadow Plateau) and Locsil aka Clanking City were colonies which housed mainly Malkioni immigrants and refugees from the EWF.
The subcult gained some more importance when the neo-Stygian (i.e. God Learner-influenced reconstructions of Arkati cults, with some of the God Learner "we take from all magics" approach) Trader Princes from Ralios entered Kethaela overland. In addition, the traditionalist Orlanthi of Heortland were suffering from the unresolved schism between the Alakoring Rex cult of Orlanth which clashed with the Heortling/Vingkotling tradition of kingship in large tribes in Heortland. This schism was resolved in favour of the Heort/Vingkot method of kingship and other aspects of worship during the civil wars of 1313-1350, and caused most of the Alakoringite worshippers to shut up in the highlands, or emigrate to Dragon Pass.
During these civil wars, the subcult of Orlanth Aeolus, the Wizard,
first appeared as the Aeolian Church of Heortland. It happened to
support the ancient ways of kingship, and also a slightly western system
of providing the king with chivalry, so it was promoted to a
state-supporting role against the rebellious elements, and collected a
number of favours which it called in during the subsequent years.
Supported by crafters guilds who found some of the sorcery more useful
for their trade than traditional spirit magic ever was, kings and nobles
who appreciated the regular support of the cnihts (knights) of Heortland
whose fealty went to the king as well as to their clan lairds
(chieftains), and by the sizeable portion of pan-Kethaelan urban
population in the cities of Heortland, the church managed to take the
tithing in the city temples from the traditionalist priests, and managed
to suppress the teaching of spirit magic in the main temples.
Of course this helped to piss off the traditionalist Orlanthi of the Alakoring faction, and may have troubled those of the Heort/Vingkot faction as well. However, the period between 1313 and 1350 was one of confrontation, not conciliation, and extreme viewpoints were "discussed" just like here on the digest, only with swords as arguments. Fact is that a lot of the settlers of Dragon Pass had religious reasons for settling there, and that adherents of the victorious directions found space to expand where the traditionalist extremists who had headed for the pass had left. (I don't know if David Dunham's page still holds Pam Carlson's story of Theya Twomother, which tells the sad tale of this time from the emigrant POV. If so, somewhere among the Taming of Dragon Pass pages...)
Those Orlanthi who remained behind learned to arrange with the status quo very much like the Orlanthi in Peloria learned to live with Hwarin Dalthippa's conquest of their lands - after all it is remarkable that the Provinces remained part of the Lunar Empire even during the Sheng Seleris century when there was hardly any imperial Lunar power to enforce the Red Goddess and the teachings which had reached them barely 30 years before the nomad invasions, i.e. about the same time-frame as the Heortland conversions, and about as complete since the backwater regions remained little touched by any changes while the main trade routes displayed the strongest changes. Of course it helped that the Aeolians did nothing to diminish the status of Orlanth - they even added another opponent overcome and robbed to the myths. All they did was to change the access to the lesser magics, replacing one method by a different one.
IMO the church became less arrogant during the consolidation conquests of 1350 to 1370 during which southern Heortland was taken from God Forgot control, including the "liberation of Mt. Passant" and the conquest of Refuge, especially when the foes were God Forgot sorcerers and their knight mercenaries which could be overcome only with the support of the foothills clans which had remained thoroughly traditionalist. Some of the knights switched sides when their holdings had been taken over by the king, and took them as fief from the King of Heortland. Others remained aloof from the Orlanthi - Aeolian or otherwise - and gathered in the Praxian Marches. (Quite generally, I regard the southern plateau of Heortland as the most westernized part of the land, and the region north of Jansholm and east of the royal highways as the least westernized. I even think that the higher valleys of the Storm Mountains are the home to even more aboriginal Orlanthi using shamans rather than priests, with clans only temporal and hearths the main social unit.)
The early fifteenth century was a period of comparable peace both in Dragon Pass (consolidated by the Kingdom of Tarsh) and Heortland. Trade began to increase through the pass. Long absent sophisticated craft items returned to the degenerate settlers in the pass, produced with the help of secret guild lore in Heortland. Then Tarsh dominance crumbled with the Tarshite civil wars after the deaths of Orios (around 1450) and Pyjeemsab (1490), and changes in the southern parts of the path led to the principality of Sartar in Quivini lands and the contest between Sartar and the FHQ.
Heortland still remained separated from the Dragon Pass Orlanthi by the Kitori tribe which controlled the entire Marzeel Valley above Smithstone, and probably well down to the Solthi River. Under the civilizing and pacifying influence of the Pharaonic reign, having lost two generations of the most rebellious leaders to the Pass, and ruled by strong kings above petty tribal squabbles, the Orlanthi of the Heortland lowlands had come to terms with their cohabitation of sorcery and older ways. The country became quite urbanized, too - probably 30 to 40% of the flat parts of the plateau are plowland or cleared pasture, compared to maybe 20% in still densely settled Tarsh or Sartar. Warriors could prove themselves against Kitori trolls and occasional chaos swarms in the north, against Praxians in the south, or as pharaonic mercenaries in western and northern Esrolia.
For a while, Sartar's new principality drew urban settlers northwards, through enemy (Kitori) territory - very much like the nascent cities of the Hanseatic League along the Baltic Sea imported skilled craftspeople from central and southern Germany.
The Kitori were overcome by Tarkalor and his Elmali and Volsaxi allies around 1545, and the Marzeel Valley became Volsaxi territory while Monrogh Lantern founded Sun Dome County.
Then the tides of war turned against Sartar (after 1555), and part of the population - including branches of the line of Sartar - returned south to Heortland. Later, more refugees followed, probably after Grizzley Peak in 1582 and Righteous Wind 1611, definitely after Boldhome 1602 and Larnste's Table 1613. This reflux of arch-traditionalist Orlanthi has been starting to return a certain tension between Traditionalist Orlanthi and Aeolians. In addition, an influx of thoroughly un-Orlanti mercenary knights from Wenelia and Ralios - culminating in the arrival of Richard the Tigerhearted and his Seshnegi - - started more aggressive (or as they called themselves, "progressive") tendencies within the Aeolian Church.
This way, my campaign had traditional Orlanthi (recently arrived after Starbrow's rebellion) and Aeolians from the same rural market near Jansholm, freely mixing sorcery-using Orlanthi and "standard" Sartarite-style Orlanthi, some with little, others with much animosity. The campaign set them first against various raiders (trolls, wolf pirates in 1616), then slowly against the Seshnegi mercenaries (I made Mularik Ironeye first sheriff, then Duke of Jansholm) and pro-Broyan. Getting the bad end from the Seshnegi, the Tarshite-commanded Lunars of 1620 were to be greeted as liberators (from Mularik's misrule and Rokari fanatical iconoclasts usurping the Aeolian temples under his protection), only to have the ascendancy of Tatius after Whitewall turn the Lunars into oppressors.
MOB has taken up the fates of some drifters from Heortland as his NPCs in Wyrm's Hold (Tales 13), and I have several campaign and scenario cameos in progress for my website which deal with the thorns of allegiances during this period.
P.S: In my role as regional expert for Dragon Pass, I'm afraid I might have to tell you that all of the above was IMG only, and that newly invented stuff has to supercede these ideas which have grown up between quite a couple of people lacking official material. I do hope to find a way to reconcile the new ideas and different history which are going to be published soon with the Aeolian ideas I've described above, and the way the Aeolians were pictured in other games - most notably in How the West Was One, and as a side issue in MOB's Wyrms Hold scenario in Tales 13.
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #65
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