> Does anyone have a theory about the "Starbrow" nickname?
> Does it mean Queen Kallyr had star-shaped freckles on her forehead or that
> she had twinkling eye-brows? Was she born with that or could it the result
> of some Yelornan HeroQuest? :)
I've always assumed that she had some sort of magical star on her forehead, as the result of a quest.
According to "Sartar High Council" in Wyrms Footprints: "She is known to have visited a star in her Heroquest, gaining a marvelous magic crystal in doing so which holds power and spells, and can lead her (or her soul) back to that star at any time."
James Carman wrote
> Okay, all I've got to say here can be summed up in one acronym:
> KoDP. It's what
> got me into Glorantha, and it got a fair few of my friends interested, too.
Wow, good to hear it -- and you're even braving the Digest!
Out of curiousity, I'd like to know *how* it led you to Glorantha. That is, how did you find out about this mailing list, Hero Wars, etc?
> Naturally, this is a somewhat more expensive option, and one not
> all of us can do.
For large values of "somewhat..."
Alex Ferguson
> > It's in the manual, p. 52: "Males can't attempt the Ernalda or Uralda
> > quests." That's statistics with no outliers.
>
> That'd be because I don't _have_ the "FM". OK then, I revert to my
> "that might be what KoDP says" stance: this is _clearly_ wrong
> about the Ernalda quest, surely, unless the 'many' aspects of HW
> that have such a restriction is growing to 'non-Orlanthi all'.
Several of the aspects of Ernalda in HW aren't Ernalda at all (Eninta, Esrola, Uralda). If there are aspects of Ernalda which allow men, chances are they aren't Ernalda either (e.g. Nandan the Birthing Man).
As you know, KoDP doesn't worry about aspects, so Uralda is simply a separate deity.
> Perhaps the crux of this is simply, what is Uralda the goddess _of_,
> precisely? The epithet 'animal mother' might imply that she's associated
> much more strongly with cows rather than bulls (or it might not
> -- beats me). If this is bordering on the exclusive, perhaps
> magical-specialist herders do indeed worship a _different_ specialist
> deity -- in the case of bulls or oxen kept for the plow, Barntar
> would be your man, but that's not really a pure herding role.
Cows. (Part of her powers are having dominion over bulls, of course.)
I think the crux of this really is what you mean by "worship." Undoubtedly magical-specialist (indeed, magical-generalist) herders worship Barntar. But this is not the same as being an initiate or devotee of Barntar. I'm told that Thunder Rebels will go into some detail on pantheon worship.
> This whole gender (a)symmetry thing in Orlanthi culture is a bit
> of a open-ended source of confusion, IMO. Greg has compared
> both Vinga and Barntar, and Vinga and Nandan, as being 'equivalents',
> as suits his rhetorical purpose that day of the week:
Vinga and Nandan are equivalents in that both let people experience aspects of the other gender. But the specific aspects are quite different IMO -- Vingans are still women and in particular haven't given up the ability to have children (though I'm sure many of them defer this, perhaps indefinitely).
> For me, herd-tending magic is a considerable distance
> from that core of women's secrets, so I find total gender-exclusivity
> unintuitive in the extreme.
Uralda is a subset of herd-tending, in particular the fertility side. Her feats don't have anything to do with gathering, defending, or moving the herd. Instead, she makes milk and calves.
David Dunham <mailto:dunham_at_pensee.com> Glorantha/HW/RQ page: <http://www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html> Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein
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