As far as I can see, the idea of Orlanth being an exclusively male cult is an invention of Greg's to make Glorantha less accessible to female players and wreck the game for established campaigns, without adding anything. It contradicts plenty of early scenario material, and some quite important bits of King of Sartar. If he'd said "female membership of Orlanth is unusual: here are the paths available to unusual people", then fair enough: but he isn't. If he'd said "aspects of Orlanth that involve male fertility are inaccessible to women" then I'd have agreed. But he didn't.
Examples? I can't point you at page numbers off-hand, but there are NPC female Wind Lords in, frex, Balazar. There's at least one magical item around that can only be used by a female Orlanth initiate. The account of the exploration of Skyfall Lake involves a female Wind Lord: the narrator is surprised that the storms on the lake are so bad that even with her Storm powers, she can't control them.
KoS makes it clear that a tribal king (and, I think, a clan chief?) must be initiates of Orlanth, probably Rex. There are plenty of references to female chiefs and kings, quite apart from Kallyr.
Kallyr, incidentally, is an initiate (or higher) of Vinga. Also, obviously, of Orlanth Rex, and Sartar. I doubt if it stops there: she's got a link of some sort to Polaris, and wanders round chatting to stars on firstname terms. Using Kallyr as an example of what your average Sartarite woman can do is probably a bad move.
Vinga: I know of no writeup that has been acknowledged as "official": but then any such writeup would be done according to HW rules, and since these don't exist yet it wouldn't be of enormous help.
Vinga was, I gather, originally intended to be a game equivalent to Orlanth Adventurous (but not Thunderous or Rex). It's been developed a lot further since then, but that's the general idea.
There is a Vinga write-up on my web page, which has also been printed in Tradetalk. Attached to it is a list of links to every other Vinga writeup I've been able to find, and a collection of quotes from sources that mention Vinga, from which you could build your own cult from scratch if you didn't like any of the interpretations on offer.
If you can find any of John Hughes' stories about Cradledaughter, I'd suggest reading them as well, but as far as I know they're not on the Web (yet).
Jane Williams jane_at_williams.nildram.co.uk http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~janewill/gloranth/
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