[Hero Wars] Liturgy, spirits, dragon magic, money god, death god

[Eero Tuovinen]

Has this campaign been proceeding, Ron? I'm interested in hearing about it if you discover the essence of what the Black Horse Troop means. What you write above about perseverance and brothers in arms seems like it might prove that the BHT only has a place in a war-torn world; it'd be interesting to see where you took this in practice.

Regarding your short history of HQ publications right above, I find that we've been liking the same books; Under the Red Moon is probably the best HQ book that I've seen after we discount the two main Orlanthi books for HW. It's a bit timid about really biting into what the Red Goddess really stands for, and what the implications of that are, but there's plenty of interesting detail in there to build on. It was certainly central in our own Glorantha campaign two years back.

In general I find it funny that your list of "essential reading" for Glorantha is almost 1:1 the exact same list as my own list of actually owned Glorantha books. Good to know that I'm really not missing out on anything major despite only having gotten into Glorantha through King of Dragon Pass and subsequent works. I don't maintain a large personal library in this digital age, but books like King of Sartar are certainly an exception I'm willing to make.

[ndpaoletta]

We had our third session yesterday. I'm playing a Black Horse Troop character, and I would say the the prospect of imminent violence certainly focused my agenda (on the player level) in a productive way.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Eero,

Yes, we've played a couple of sessions beyond what I wrote about already. Not as often as any of us would like, but two in a month is about what our combined schedules seem to permit.

I hit upon a fun way to organize my ideas and the sequence of play: I think about what rituals the characters would be participating in, whether routine or due to some unusual event in the previous session. So I frame scenes with those actions. It's fun to make up ritual activities or to use those implied in the books, and it allows me to dwell as well on the immediate physical surroundings. I think I'm doing better at that compared to my older games with this setting, so our combined word-pictures or the way that people use what someone else said seem to me to indicate we're using our imaginations vividly at the table.

Let's see ... events have progressed enough in our little corner of Glorantha that I think I can summarize some our story without sounding too breathless.

(pause while I typed and typed for a while, then cursed and deleted the mess.)

And I lied. My attempt to explain it looks like my five-year-old son explaining the plot of Ponyo. So, the short version: A Black Horse liturgist and a Grazer shaman inadvertently teamed up to kill a dragon-monster and managed to put an end to the otherwise-certainly disastrous War Over Cabbage, while in related news, a Hiia swordswoman upgraded from bodyguard to executioner for the Feathered Horse Queen while finding out that Lunars are anything but absent from the area, and a Black Horse merchantwoman made a huge profit out of everyone else's problems, although she had to get a lot of sins shrived along the way. If you want to understand any of that better, ask me something specific.

A lot of my favorite things that I've never been able to see in play before are in there: a Jakaleel shamaness, diokos demon steeds, mostly naked Grazer ladies, satyrs, coordination and overlap among different sorts of magic --

As with the previous game, what looks like a relatively climactic moment only opens the door to new relationships and revelations about underlying problems. My only concern at present is that I'm having a little trouble finding the voices of a number of NPCs, in terms of very personal interactions, ordinary human needs, and expectations or general treatment of the player-characters. I get a little better at it each time, but I'm hoping to focus on that sort of content better in prep and play next time.

I am not grasping your issues with the Black Horse County, or maybe our general ways to analyze Glorantha cultures differ too much. Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems to me as if you're asking if I think their culture is justified in some way. I simply don't experience any questions like the ones (I think) you're raising when considering them as a culture; they make perfect sense to me given where and who they are, and I rather like them in a kind of fucked-up way.

Best, Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

It's not a problem at all, I'm just curious about what your campaign reveals about the Black Horse Troop. Carry on!

[Ron Edwards]

The above posts were split and renamed from [Hero Wars] Black Horse Troop and Grazer preparation. I'll be posting material relevant to the title soon.

Best, Ron

[Bret Gillan]

I hit upon a fun way to organize my ideas and the sequence of play: I think about what rituals the characters would be participating in, whether routine or due to some unusual event in the previous session. So I frame scenes with those actions. It's fun to make up ritual activities or to use those implied in the books, and it allows me to dwell as well on the immediate physical surroundings. I think I'm doing better at that compared to my older games with this setting, so our combined word-pictures or the way that people use what someone else said seem to me to indicate we're using our imaginations vividly at the table.

This is such an excellent way of doing it. I attempted to run a Hero Wars game over the summer as my first Glorantha game ever and was totally overwhelmed by all the information and also how to make the ritual and religious aspects of the characters' lives significant. There was an excellent calendar of religious celebrations in the book. Organizing play around that would have helped me to narrow it down and keep from getting driven mad by information volume.

[Ron Edwards]

A list of thoughts which occurred to me as I prepared for the latest session and found their way into my notes, and sometimes into the dialogue of play.

Vendref gods include Kanestal, described as one-handed, the "counting" trader and money god. As I see it, the pure or elite Grazers don't like to deal with quibbly exchange rates and counting stuff (unless it's coup or scalps or horses), so they have their vendref take of things like how many bags of grain are going to get taken from the fields for the goldeneyes to eat for any given clan, et cetera. One of the rituals we started a scene with in our latest session was a Kanestal "make a market" feat, which I informally adapted from the old, old RuneQuest Issaries rune spell, Market. Our Black Horse merchant character benefited from this, as the whole point of this ritual would be to put aside all other magic/agenda concerns for the purposes of trade.

Most of the vendref gods look like reduced/specialized versions, almost Hero cults of traditional Orlanthi gods, or even are explicitly so, as with Hiia the Swordsman. Kanestal might have originated as a Hero cult of Harst, for instance (I still don't have that trader/gold supplement Paolo was talking about, so this becomes a "my Glorantha" topic). There's no mention in the texts I have about the women of the vendref, but I'm sure that ordinary, functional Ernalda worship is going on there, definitely without any subcults or affinities concerning her community-organizing or queenly aspects.

Speaking of Hiia, another scene we did began with nearly all the Hiia of the Grazers convening upon the site where the Feathered Horse Queen (Single Matron Woman) had been blasted and burned by the treacherous Golden Bow sabotage of her ritual with a Lunar trader in the previous session. Those rituals were fun as hell to make up - anything Humakti is great, little animals die when they wander too close, and the whole thing looks like the hallucinatory sequences with the Black Riders in The Fellowship of the Ring. One of the most powerful individuals did nothing but stabilize the ritual by standing motionless on a rock, holding his sword at arm's length, horizontally at chest height, and when we started he'd been doing this for six hours.

But here's the thing: Hiia is one-armed. What is up with all these one-handed or one-armed vendref gods? I got a very queasy, unpleasant notion as I prepped ... might this have anything to do with preventing the use of the Grazer elite's favorite weapon, the bow? I'm afraid in my Glorantha, the answer has to be "yes."

Best, Ron