From: David Cake (davidc@cs.uwa.edu.au)
Date: Mon 29 Jul 1996 - 20:48:16 EEST
Why do the Orlanthi support Sun rituals? Or Dark Season rituals?
Partly they do it because it fits their own mythic pattern. If they
didn't do the midwinter rituals of Orlanth killing Yelm, thus bringing on
the winter, then their Sacred Time rituals of rescueing Yelm wouldn't work
properly, and then they probably wouldn't rescue Ernalda properly either,
and the world would go to hell in a handbasket, or something like that.
Similarly, they have to support the return of the Sun, because its what
Orlanth did.
On the more practical reasons - they support the sun because they
want to be warm, and because (lack of SunRipen notwithstanding) sun helps
plants grow. They support winter because they want it to be wet.
The Lunar winter rituals according to Nick
>Most of them participate in the usual Dara Happan or Pelorian midwinter
>rites, of course, while a small select band of heroes embark on the Kalikos
>Icebreaker mission to beat back the gods of Storm and Ice and help make the
>winter less severe.
Probably many of the rituals are effectively support rituals for
the heroquest parties. Note that the Kalikos cult, while originally
Pelandan, has probably spread due to being state supported.
Nick on recent Gloranthan sources
>My advice would be to avoid the recent, non-RuneQuest publications "King of
>Sartar", "The Glorious ReAscent of Yelm" and "The Entekosiad" first time out:
>these books contain a fair amount of obscure mythical stuff which would be hard
I'll agree with Nick on the last two (not only are they very hard
to relate to games directly, they are pretty difficult to make sense of -
I've been compiling my notes onto my web pages, and in the process
discovering how much of it still is unclear to me, after thorough reading
and discussion).
But King of Sartar, while including lots of obscure mythical stuff,
also contains a reasonable amount of very practical stuff about Orlanthi
society. And I think the heroic saga style stuff, while not directly useful
in play, is certainly one of Glorantha's big attractions.
Cheers
David
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