The Lore Of Glorantha

downwithpeople:

thank you for being the first one out of a dozen people to ask this question on my main blog instead of just trying to hit up the glorantha blog despite the multiple posts at the top explaining that it’s no longer updating.

this is a complicated question and it’s one of those things where you gotta take a step back and look at the meta narrative of glorantha, which much like real world mythology is full of inconsistencies and translation errors (maybe???). there was something like death in the universe before Death was discovered (key point there: discovered, not invented), because death isn’t chaotic and people and things died all the time. what we know from the book of heortling mythology is that jagekriand the red god smashed umath’s body into dust with an ‘unknown weapon’. maybe jagekriand independently discovered Death? the other thing that’s suggested is that umath was torn apart but never actually killed and that his body became the middle air that holds the sky above the earth.

the other interesting thing in the book of heortling mythology is the description of yelm’s death. orlanth slays him with Death and it says that he dies and goes to hell instead of immediately springing back to life - which suggests that that was the anticipated outcome, which means that maybe the gods were dying all the time but they could just come back.

regardless, i think the main takeaway here should be that there’s a difference between death and Death, and whatever death was it may have been a very different state of being to the thing that eurmal brought out of hell.

oh wow that’s crazy. i appreciate the interest but i’m afraid i can’t do that. this blog was ultimately a personal project for me and i’d like to keep it as it is. of course just because i managed to snag the glorantha url before anyone else doesn’t mean you can’t also start up a glorantha blog and hell, if you want to do the same shit i used to do then tell me when you’ve set up your blog and i’ll promote it here. i keep getting followers on this blog for some fucking reason so there’s definitely people out there who want this shit.

glorantha:

hey thanks glad you like it

i didn’t stop updating it for any particular reason, there was just a stretch where i got behind on questions and then i think something else caught my interest. this blog was a product of when my passion for the glorantha setting was at its peak and even if i started updating the blog again i would never be able to devote myself like i did before.

my opinion about the game these days has dramatically cooled down. i was very interested at the time in getting more people into the game but i think it’s hard to do that when there’s such a ballachingly long development cycle for every product, to the extent that we’re probably never going to get any kind of updated information on places like fonrit that first drew me into the setting. i love orlanthi, i love dragon pass and i never ever wanna fucking hear about them again. there are so many books about fucking orlanth it drives me up the wall.

i also just feel like none of the systems that have glorantha material ready for them appeal to me. the game that gets closest to what i want out of glorantha is heroquest and i don’t like that one either. this is definitely more of a personal preference thing.

i could probably sit here and keep running down a list of things that irritate me about the setting but don’t get me wrong, i love it. glorantha is such a fascinating universe that i regularly look at shit in other settings and think ‘glorantha did this better’. like i’m about to run WFRP and the big four chaos gods? fucking terrible. tzeentch wants what sedenya has.

i also had a lot of fun writing this blog and kind of playing around with people as the law/lorespeaker, which as you might have gathered from the rest of this post is a character entirely distinct from my actual personality. if i got anyone interested in the setting from my posting than that’s mission accomplished. otherwise i’m happy to hear that this is a resource that people are still using, which was the other thing i wanted to do with this. my only regrets are the 52 unanswered questions in my inbox and all the uncredited art, which was a real cunt move from me however you look at it.

i’m probably not gonna fire up this blog again unless something happens that makes glorantha a special interest for me again. consider this the last post. this blog isn’t dead; much like the gods themselves it is outside of time, always there when you need it most or until something happens to this website.

if you wanna talk about glorantha or other rpgs with me i post about that on my main blog. also i have a twitter. feel free to come shoot the shit with me.

also read this

We Are All Us

hey thanks glad you like it

i didn’t stop updating it for any particular reason, there was just a stretch where i got behind on questions and then i think something else caught my interest. this blog was a product of when my passion for the glorantha setting was at its peak and even if i started updating the blog again i would never be able to devote myself like i did before.

my opinion about the game these days has dramatically cooled down. i was very interested at the time in getting more people into the game but i think it’s hard to do that when there’s such a ballachingly long development cycle for every product, to the extent that we’re probably never going to get any kind of updated information on places like fonrit that first drew me into the setting. i love orlanthi, i love dragon pass and i never ever wanna fucking hear about them again. there are so many books about fucking orlanth it drives me up the wall.

i also just feel like none of the systems that have glorantha material ready for them appeal to me. the game that gets closest to what i want out of glorantha is heroquest and i don’t like that one either. this is definitely more of a personal preference thing.

i could probably sit here and keep running down a list of things that irritate me about the setting but don’t get me wrong, i love it. glorantha is such a fascinating universe that i regularly look at shit in other settings and think ‘glorantha did this better’. like i’m about to run WFRP and the big four chaos gods? fucking terrible. tzeentch wants what sedenya has.

i also had a lot of fun writing this blog and kind of playing around with people as the law/lorespeaker, which as you might have gathered from the rest of this post is a character entirely distinct from my actual personality. if i got anyone interested in the setting from my posting than that’s mission accomplished. otherwise i’m happy to hear that this is a resource that people are still using, which was the other thing i wanted to do with this. my only regrets are the 52 unanswered questions in my inbox and all the uncredited art, which was a real cunt move from me however you look at it.

i’m probably not gonna fire up this blog again unless something happens that makes glorantha a special interest for me again. consider this the last post. this blog isn’t dead; much like the gods themselves it is outside of time, always there when you need it most or until something happens to this website.

if you wanna talk about glorantha or other rpgs with me i post about that on my main blog. also i have a twitter. feel free to come shoot the shit with me.

also read this

We Are All Us

Umath was the Storm King, the Beater and the Shaker, the Destroyer, the Primal Air, the woe of the world and the saviour of the cosmos. He was the last of the Elder Gods, the child of Aether and Gata. He embodied all the strength and violence of the Storm, and his birth preceded the end of the Golden Age.

Umath’s first thought was that Violence Is Always An Option. His first act was to cut his way out of the womb of the Earth. His arrival in the Emperor’s court was totally unexpected. When he came before the Emperor, he made his demand for a realm of his own, as had been given to his parents and to all the gods before him. But he was denied, since every place in the universe now belonged to someone else. So Umath tore the Sky from the Earth to create the Middle World, which would be his realm.

The world eventually healed from this act of violence, and the universe slowly began to grind into Stasis under the Emperor’s rule. But Umath and his hundreds of children were rebellious. They seized their own realms and ruled in their own way. The Emperor answered with force, sending an army led by Jagrekriand the Red God to slay Umath. Umath was slain, and the Celestial Court rejoiced, believing that order would now rule without the Storm King.

Of course, that’s not what happened at all.

There are a wide range of Malkioni texts describing elementals and similar spirits. The best and most powerful ones were written by the God Learners during the Second Age, but many of those have been totally lost. An example of a popular recent text describing elementals are the Xeotam Dialogues, a series of dialogues between the wizard Xeotam and his apprentice Aanor. In one of the Dialogues, Xeotam describes the Elements and the various srvuali they spawned. Of course, barbarians would see the Dialogues as wrong or even blasphemous, and have their own understanding of the world that they don’t necessarily commit to paper.

Here are some common elementals, organised by elemental affinity:

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