From: RuneQuest-Request@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RQ Digest Maintainer) To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (Daily automated RQ-Digest) Reply-To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RuneQuest Daily) Subject: RuneQuest Daily, Wed, 02 Mar 1994, part 3 Sender: Henk.Langeveld@Holland.Sun.COM Content-Return: Prohibited Precedence: junk --------------------- From: joe@sartar.toppoint.de (Joerg Baumgartner) Subject: Some answers Message-ID:Date: 1 Mar 94 16:32:04 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3210 Mike Dickison in X-RQ-ID: 3196 > I notice some interest in elves on the Daily. Here's a piece I've been > working on, an only half-serious gonzo retake on the Aldryami by a lapsed biologist. > It's really more of a reaction against Tolkien than anything else. I haven't > seen the Elf Psychology piece, so I don't know how it fits. Good stuff, although the bland elves you fight aren't Tolkien's, but generic fantasy. Life would be easier if we used Aldryami, Mreli etc. more consistently, and dropthe term Elves. Jean Durupt in X-RQ-ID: 3198 > I have a question concerning the unicorn riders of Prax. > Are they the cult of Yelorna and their unicorns are intelligent > Or,are they a standard tribe,since prehistoric Prax was > a great forest,the then intelligent unicorns would have lost > to the humans during the survival covenant. > Or there is a weirder explanation. From what I remember from RQ Companion, the unicorns are not really their herd animals, but their steeds only. They certainly don't eat them any time. Jean again in X-RQ-ID: 3200 > About the discussion of solar societies and storm societies. > Orlanthi mythology tells us some interesting things of the past: > -All the storm gods were outlawed by Yelm and exiled to the corner > of the world. Umath changed that. > -A known outlaw (ie Orlanth) could go to the emperor's palace and > challenge him to a personnal contest. He most probably sneaked in. Think of Robin Hood's achievements. > -This outlaw lost all the contest,yes even the combat contest since > he did NOT demonstrate a better skill in wordmanship than Yelm in archery. > It is nonetheless true that he won the dispute. The Orlanthi say that he won, but the jury cheated. In this lat contest, they couldn't any more... > -When Thed was raped, she obtained compensation but Ragnaglar was > not punished. He wasn't executed, which is contrary to the Orlanthi way, but he was exiled. > My theory is that in fact some storm gods were not outlawed but that Yelm > gave them a mission in the frontier of the empire. > This mission did not please them so they revolted,and they did so not because > their lord was unfair but because they wanted all the power without > first proving themselves fit to rule. What kind of mission would that be? Clean the sewers? > About the birthright problem. > I think that in the prosopedia of CoG, it is said that Lokarnos was > born a peasant in the golden empire and that he acheived godhood thanks > to his merits. > For a people as fond as precedent as the Solars (ref Sandy), it is > my opinion that your achievement count in a typical solar society, > wether you are born a peasant or a noble. Which is: if you're a good peasant, that's what I make of you. Lokarnos became the God of a menial task: carting. > For the Sartar succession. > Only a descendent of Sartar can be prince. > The only difference with the solar way is that this person is not > always the eldest son. Only a descendant of Sartar (I think adoption is valid, look at Argrath) has the power to summon the founder's help via high power ancestor worship. -- -- Joerg Baumgartner joe@sartar.toppoint.de --------------------- From: sandyp@idcube.idsoftware.com (Sandy Petersen) Subject: re: RQ Daily Message-ID: <9403011638.AA02444@idcube.idsoftware.com> Date: 1 Mar 94 04:39:14 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3211 Durupt Jean asks re: the Unicorn riders >Are they the cult of Yelorna and their unicorns are intelligent? This is what I've assumed. They can't be a "standard" tribe, because to ride a unicorn you gotta be a virgin. Since they can't reproduce themselves, all tribal members must be adoptees, probably mostly refugees from other tribes. I imagine they also purchase or steal promising female children from other tribes. They can't herd or milk their unicorns since all unicorns are male, IMO. And no, I don't think they do anything nasty with their steeds -- after all, then they wouldn't be virgins any more. Note that the cult of Yelorna possesses a useful spell which restores one to virgin status, if necessary. The unicorns may be a prehistoric remnant of when Prax was a great forest. This implies that the Yelorna cult itself and the unicorn riders are actually fossils of the Golden Age. Though all the riders are Praxians, nowadays (hmmm -- I guess many of them could also be women escapees from the oasis folk). >For a people as fond as precedent as the Solars (ref Sandy), it is >my opinion that your achievement counts in a typical solar society, >whether you are born a peasant or a noble. This, too, is my belief. At least in a properly-run solar society. --------------------- From: SYS_RSH%AFDS@HOBBES.CCA.CR.ROCKWELL.COM (Scott Haney, AFDS770 Functional Test X2069) Subject: Happy Little Elves Message-ID: <01H9GGONZHFK8XE10B@HOBBES.CCA.CR.ROCKWELL.COM> Date: 1 Mar 94 16:58:00 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3212 >Trollpak transformed trolls from slavering orcs >into a brutal but in its own way sophisticated alien race, and one that was >great fun to role-play. And thank the gods it did! >An elf is a walking plant crammed into a human suit. To aldryami, it's them >vs the animals. We might talk of a mindless person as a vegetable; elves >call an overly independent and mobile aldryami an animal. The ecological >terms producer and consumer are useful here. Plants are producers, the only >things able to convert sunlight and raw materials into organic life. This is good. I think this is an excellent way of stating an elf's POV...and, in fact, if you take local entropy into account, you would even have a good case for extremely long lifespans, should you want them in your campaign. >humans, trolls, dwarves and other animals are both destructive and dependent on >the largesse of a plant kingdom that could do pretty well without them. Don't know that entirely buy into that one, though. Seems that life (as we know it, we're really talking about Glorantha) is interdependent...the animals give back to the plants eventually, either by producing carbon dioxide, or even by dying and providing fertilizer. Some plant life could survive without animal life, but the plant kingdom would be different without animals. I think elves would realize this, too, albeit grudgingly. >For more details of aldryami cuisine, see the section on compost preparation >in any good gardening guide. hee hee hee! >Because their bodies are >made of wood and leaves, they are treated as flammable objects, and don't >require MP vs MP rolls to be set alight with an Ignite spell. Ooops! This seems wrong. The Ignite spell has roughly the same effect as a disposable butane lighter. Ever try to ignite a healthy tree or shrub with one of those? Unless there is a decent amount of tinder available (or the tree is very dry and has dead branches on it, or you've doused it with some flammable substance), the best you could hope for is to burn up some leafy hair. I doubt that an elf would ever be dry enough to ignite that easily, as a dry elf wouldn't be able to move much...he'd be much too stiff. Perhaps this happens to Brown elves in the winter, but an active elf? hmmm. >Sadly during the preparation of this >manuscript Bryanthemos passed away in a freak accident in which she was >struck 27 times by a falling tree. No way. Obviously suicide. :) Scotty --------------------- From: ANDERSJC@howdy.Princeton.EDU Subject: Numismatics and other elements Message-ID: <8A74B260F89@howdy.princeton.edu> Date: 1 Mar 94 17:26:41 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3213 This is being posted for Paul Anderson, on Janet Anderson's account: On Coins: The current published Gloranthan data are, I believe, as follows [for gold and silver coinage]: Bar gold, unenchanted, is worth 600 L./ENC = 600 L./kg Bar silver, " " , is worth 50 L./ENC = 50 L./kg Coining doubles the value of raw metal. Hence the Lunar is 10 g., and the Wheel is 16.67 g; gold:silver::12:1. There are remarks which imply that this scale of values is only local; even that there might be an earth-cult region of Glorantha where copper would be most valued, with silver and gold second and third. This would permit Goldentongues to make fantastic profits, but then Goldentongues _should_ be able to make such profits, if they survive to do so. I agree that 50% seignorage is high; I suspect there is mediaeval precedent for 25% or so. After all, coins _are_ more useful than an ingot of the same weight, for several reasons: Coins will (normally) be accepted by the authority that minted them, and therefore by anyone who expects to be dealing with that authority. Coins come in small amounts, whereas bar silver, much less bar gold, is only useful for very large transactions. Coins are relatively easy to make change for. You can spend them without a balance, an assayer, and an allowance for the assay sample. It may be possible to justify the rate of seignorage along these lines: Magic produces better coins, of divinely guaranteed fineness, and which will never interfere with spirit magic; therefore, at least for precious metals, Coining spells are the standard technique, and stamped coins are quite simply counterfeits. Coin Wheel does not produce one coin, but one coin/MP stacked with the spell. Thus one application will produce at most 20 Wheels. Of these, 10 are the value of the bullion, and seven are fair value for a day of rest regaining the spell plus all the priest's MPs, leaving three or so for profit to be haggled over. For comparison's sake, the basic Classical coins are the Athenian drachma (at 4.25 g. of silver) and the Roman denarius (just under 4 g. at the time of Augustus). These are at least as valuable as the RQ3 "penny"/Lunar - 1 drachma was a _good_ day's wage, 1/3 to 1/2 drachma a day's unskilled labor. No Greek coined gold (except for state emergencies) until Philip and Alexander; and the Romans did not until Sulla. The Romans coined bronze from the start; the Greeks did not. The Lydians coined electrum. It is my impression that these mints would not, in general, coin bullion for passing citizens. These were offices of the State, or the Emperor, whose purpose was to produce the coins to pay the soldiers and expenses. The mints were run by junior magistrates, who bought ore and had the tribute and taxes melted down, and made coins, some of which paid their own salaries and paid - or paid for - the workmen. Purity: Each Greek city coined its own money, each using its own weight for the drachma, which might or might not agree with somebody else's. Xenophon says that these coins were not useful at a distance from their own states (except for those of the Athenians; but Athens was a naval power, and had a silver mine of its own). Roman bronze coinage was, from very early, worth much more than the value of the metal. Roman silver and gold coins were 95% fine under the Republic and Augustus (and again under Constantine); but starting with Nero the coins became progressively smaller and baser. In 210 A.D the denarius weighed 3 g., and 40% of that was copper. In 260, the denarii were silver- washed copper bits. Nevertheless, people spent and hoarded them - we have the hoards. On Elements: I always thought the days of the week were in _geographical_ order, reading upwards. Darkness under the world, on which the seas rest, then the depths of ocean, then the floating earth, then air, then high heaven. This is one reason I like the Lunar link with Wildday: "the Element ye knew not, which links Heaven to the high gods" etc.,etc,. The anti-Lunars will reply that what is beyond the defenses of heaven is outer Chaos, and this just proves that the Lunars are another Chaos-mask. On Monasteries Sandy says: >I know that abbeys were real important in [Anglo-Saxon] England but have no >data on France or Spain... It is my impression that monasteries were more important in Anglo-Saxon England than in contemporary France or Germany [Spain being occupied by Islam]. The Continent had more bishops, and the bishops were more powerful. Also, the great abbeys in the North of England (Jarrow, Lindisfarne...) were founded by Irishmen, who had a different tradition, in which the monastery thrived as a new version of the clan. --------------------- From: paul@phyast.pitt.edu (Paul Reilly) Subject: Re: RuneQuest Daily, Tue, 01 Mar 1994, part 1 Message-ID: <9403012047.AA05894@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu> Date: 1 Mar 94 20:47:10 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3214 Paul Reilly here. I will try to say something coherent about Earth analogues, and the uses and dangers thereof, this weekend. This is in response to an ongoing discussiong on the RQ4 mailing list (which I may have started.) The main point is that it is dangerous to assign a single 'closest Earth analog' to a Gloranthan society; the RQ:AiG draft does this, assigning the Orlanthi as Celt-analogs, etc. More later. alex@dcs.gla.ac.uk writes: > Sandy: > > > The Hrestoli wizards are unlikely to be so > > > stern, since all of them had to be farmers first, so still have wives I'm not sure this follows; they might have to give up wives or might not progress to Wizard if they do have them. Possible either way. Note that celibacy (as I believe the Rokari require) might be a late development, as it was in the Catholic Church. Also amazing to me is the way in which a relatively new ( < 1000 years old) doctrine like requiring celibacy for priests can become a 'law of nature' to people like John Paul II. >> Certainly not all, since caste membership is hereditary. >Not amonst the Hrestoli, it isn't, though if they're immune to nepotism >they'll be the only such society on either Glorantha or Earth. It may the >case that in the less robustly Idealist communities children of non-Farmers >are whisked through the lower classes rather briskly, until they reach >their `proper' station, but that's just the cynic in me talking. This is exactly the way we ran it in our Junoran campaign, although the reformed Hrestoli Church in Loskalm was much stricter. It was assumed that a Baron's son would succeed him, but that he had to go back and do a couple of years in the various castes, rather like having the son of the owner of a department store go and work in each department before being allowed to become Chairman of the Board. One of the features of the campaign was the conflict between the traditional Junoran culture and the Loskalmi who wanted to 'reform' things, often against the will of the people as well as the Barons... >And didn't someone suggest >that Rokari Wizards (may) take vows of chastity and celibacy? I certainly have said so at some point, and it's strongly implied in the cultural writeup (What my Father Told Me) in the Seshnela section of the Player's Book: Genertela. Will try to respond to excellent Aldryami posting later on. - Paul --------------------- From: paul@phyast.pitt.edu (Paul Reilly) Subject: Re: RQ:AiG Runes: The vital few questions Message-ID: <9403012100.AA06490@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu> Date: 1 Mar 94 21:00:13 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3215 Paul Reilly here. SOrry to repost on the same subject, but I see no responses to my previous post and I think this is an important subject. I will also copy to the Daily. RQ:AiG says that shamans and spirits are tied to various Runes, that spirit Magic comes in Runic Categories, and that Cults have Runes. All over the world. If this is so, if spirits of cold in the frozen Valind Wastes are tied to the Cold Rune, and spirits of Cold in the high Palakri Mountains (in Pamaltela) are tied to the Cold Rune, and primitive broo shamans of the Wastes are tied to the Chaos Rune, and the cult of Annilla among the Veldang of Zamokil is an expression of the Moon Rune, then, in my opinion, the Runes are universal and cultural relativism is wrong. I had thought that the current of thought was running in the other direction, that the Runes were ONE WAY of breaking down Ultimate Reality into its component parts and analyzing it. Note that the one magic system that does NOT use Runes as its basis seems to be Sorcery - the only system that has a unified cultural history behind it which would make Runic affiliations plausible as a cultural bias rather than a universal truth. (Here I am rejecting the idea that Kralorelans and other Easterners use the same sorcery system as the Wizards of the West - I prefer Cults of Terror's eastern mystics to RQ3's Eastern Mishmash.) I find this bizarre and puzzling. If cultural relativism holds, then I could easily accept Runic Wizardry, since all Wizardry ultimately stems from the Kingdom of Logic and they could have invented the Runes. However, if shamans of Prax who believe that the sun rises in Kralorela and sets in Dragon Pass categorize spirits in the same Runic Categories as Uz shamans and northern Uncoling shamans (who have never even heard of Prax) and Pamaltelan Veldt shamans (who think the edge of the world is the mountains and jungles of the north and probably never HEARD of the God Learners) then Runes ARE a universal constant of Glorantha, and the sorcerers should use them too. So, any comments? - Paul --------------------- From: ANDERSJC@howdy.Princeton.EDU Subject: Esrolian myth? Message-ID: <8AB2FCE23C8@howdy.princeton.edu> Date: 1 Mar 94 21:20:18 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3217 This is being posted for Paul Anderson, on Janet Anderson's account: On Esrolian myth The following assumes that the human gestation period on Glorantha is about 280 days which I have not seen expressly stated (although implied in _Glorantha_ II on Trowjang. Btw, how many _Gloranthan_ years does it take till aging sets in? I devised this prot-Esrolian myth-schema, explaining the year: The great Lady Ernalda/Esrola ("What do _ names_ matter in the True Place?") is fertile and swelling at the beginning of the year, burgeons during Earth season. Storm season is her labor, and the Young King is born at the start of Sacred Time. He marries her at the age of 14 and impregnates her, dying (according to most versions) after harvest. The *boo*hiss* God Learners would have suppressed this - It doesn't fit the monomyth, and is female chauvinist, and therefore this all is now esoteric. The various tribes clans and queendoms of Esrolia and so forth would have no trouble recognizing Orlanth, Yelmalio, Yelm, etc. as the Young King, and this is the source of the GL version of Ernalda's myth. I suspect a variant of the myth was used during certain not-too-recent events in Dragon Pass. Is it true that the Lunars plan to lengthen the year?