The Olympic Opening, sort of Sacred Time in sequins. Now *thats* how to build a ceremony, encapsulating all of your people's history and myths in a dramatic and colourful way. Though what the furrners watching made of the tin sheet and lawnmower jokes or the kinder-Kelly I'd hate to guess. :)
TAN: GLORANTHA THE OPERA Guy:
The Pan Book of Opera is by Arthur Jacobs and Stanley Sadie, and my copy was published in... oh heck, 1964 :(.
I'm not totally surprised by this: it was crumbly and torn even when I first picked it up in a second hand bookstore. However, its a generic *category* of book: there may be later editions, and there certainly will be lots of similar books around (or even websites) that sum up all the comings and goings of the three acts in a couple of pages. (Any more than a couple of pages and they're taking the opera much too seriously for our purposes :)).
The nice thing about using opera as a source for plot ideas is their OTT love of the bizarre, their concentration on sexual and political liberation, the mandatory one or more stark raving loons (HW seems to have a parallel stock type: the NPC personality's sidekick who has unusual personal characteristics or odious personal habits :)), oodles and oodles of UST* (difficult to build and maintain in a campaign, but *WELL* worth the investment) and the three act structure itself. Not quite the same as the three-act structure taught in script writing, but close enough to be useful. For you thoroughly-modern types who are using nine-act structure in your scenarios, well, there's always Wagner. (good luck!)
HEORTLING CATTLE OWNERSHIP
> Peter Mcaveney challenged us:
>
> > ... while cattle ownership and rights are reckoned
> > along the female line.
>
> > Cattle are odal property, but perhaps most clans delegate herd
> management to
> > the Uralda temple, putting women in charge of the nitty-gritty details
> of all
> > those cattle loans ...
>
I appreciate the approach, but this would create lots of problems in even a
mildly-exogamous clan. (Like Alex, I'm tending towards a variable model:
clan exogamy is normative and 'the Way', bloodline exogamy is also common in
certain tribes.)
The vexed issue is how odal is odal property. Ian Cooper has pointed out how the term has been mutated by Greg from its original meaning, and seems from KOS to mean essentially communal property. Obviously not *all* property is communal: it entails severe mental gymnastics to make your HW Wealth rating meaningful if anything else. If we understand a dowry to be essentially a woman's share of her inheritance given out upon marriage (a common enough understanding in the tribal world), then her own herds would go with her to her husband's clan in the 'default' marriage model. And they would have to remain *hers* for the system to make any sense at all. This would also provide her with a measure of economic security and social power among her new family.
I believe that a certain proportion of *all* herds and indeed plantings will be personal rather than odal. I suggested this to Greg in TR: we will have to wait and see if it is accepted.
Cheers
John
Powered by hypermail