>For those of you who are more familiar with the Sofali hsunchen, give
>me a hook or two. And for those of you who are simply more inspired
>than I am currently, feel free to throw me a bone.
There's Sofali in Pamaltela too; they get mentioned in Jeff Okamoto's writeup (now available on the web). Which suggests plots in its own right...
They're enemies of sea birds.
Nick Brooke once wrote
>Well, the Sofali Turtle People of Fethlon live near enough to the
>(hypothetical) Island of the Unworthy Dragonewt Exiles (home to
>giant fire-breathing mutant dinosaurs, etc.) that they might well
>feel the need to "soup up" (pun intended) one of their totemic
>spirits with some Solar/Volcanic weaponry obtained from nearby
>Teshnos, purely in a spirit of self-defence...
Sandy Petersen once wrote
> >Do Sofali turtle people mate
>>with turtles? If so, do their women lay eggs?
>
> I don't want to think TOO much about this particular
>principle, but I suspect it varies with the tribe. In my opinion,
>most tribes don't interbreed with their animals, and the Telmori and
>Rathori are exceptions to this general rule. Perhaps this explains
>why werewolves and bear-walkers exist relatively commonly in
>Glorantha, while were-deer and were-lions are unknown as a breed.
>
> Not interbreeding with their totem animals does not mean that
>the women don't occasionally give birth to an animal offspring and
>vice-versa.
>
> As I played the Sofali, they didn't even live with their
>totemic animals. The Sofali lived on islands, and worshiped the sea
>turtles, ate their eggs (always leaving 13 eggs in the stash, tho),
>and used them (with permission) to pull their coracles across the
>water. The sea turtles were regarded as sacred, and they weren't
>eaten as adults except in special yearly rituals, in which the chosen
>turtles clambered ashore to be slaughtered and devoured. The Sofali
>believed in a birth/rebirth cycle in which after death, if you were a
>good Sofali, you came back as a sea turtle. If you were bad, you had
>to be a human again.
>
> This is, of course, very different from the Telmori
>all-living-in-one-den culture, but I see no reason that different
>Hsunchen would share the same culture, especially between creatures
>as different as sea turtles and wolves. The fact that the Basmoli
>show a strong tendency towards becoming civilized and abandoning
>Hsunchen ways seems to indicate that their culture is different from
>the Telmori in basic ways as well.
-- David Dunham Glorantha/HQ/RQ page: http://www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein
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