various

From: Carlson, Pam (carlsonp@wdni.com)
Date: Mon 23 Jun 1997 - 20:58:00 EEST


 Paul Chapman:

>Pam Carlson cheekily suggested that the English Toasted Cheese Sandwich is in
fact Fried Bread. Well, Pam, by now I'm sure you know that's wrong.
How did you come by this delusion may I ask?

>From a culinary conversation with Martin Laurie, who personally admits
to having a cooking skill of 02%. In fact, his favorite culinary
endeavor appears to be opening a can of "mushey peas", a edible horror
that he has fondly described several times. This lead to the frying

bread discussion, with the bit about the absence of cheese on the fried
bread....

>I also don't think that the trollish matriarchy is equivalent to a reversed
RW patriarchy in the way a lot of people seem to think... sorry, gals.
This is not a TSR-style masturbation fantasy of cute women with loads of
Male characteristics and feeble men, instead it is a matriarchy whereby
the
males still have the male characteristics, but the women are strong and
the
_female_ characteristics are valued strongly in society.

Paul, if you'd read carefully, you'd realize that Dan and James are the
largest proponents of the dominating female troll schtick. I don't care

about trolls at all, really. When I do run them, I play them more like
killer whales or heyenas - without human sexual characteristics of any
kind. But IF one wants to have dimorphic words describing trollkind,
(the topic was brought up by a male, if you recall), I think the default
would be the female.

 (And I think the default gender words for a lot of earthly animals
would be female, too, if they hadn't been named by a bunch of
naturalists trained in earlier times. Even such as objective field as
science was still heavily influenced by male-oriented concepts. If you
don't think so, consider that it wasn't until 1971 that woman were no
longer barred from certain university science courses in the US.)

> I really don't think that Troll society is like a reversed Victorian
England, I really
don't.

I've never heard anyone describe it to that extent, and certainly never
thought of it that way. Have I missed something?

Mike:

>On the second, the reason i want some objectivity in the world is I guess
due to the canonical campaign that is played in Glorantha. Which I see
as
a bunch of adventurers from many different backgrounds in the city of
Pavis.
Here we straight away run into at least 5 common different worldviews:

>1) Traditional Sartarite Orlanthi
2) Praxian Nomad
3) Lunar Empire
4) Yelmalian
5) Pavisite city dwellers

>This doesn't count the troll, elves and chaos groups in the city who all have
different world views.

That does get to be a big problem. We found it almost untenable,
especially with the Lunar-Orlanthi tension of the 1600's. That's why we
started the Post-Dragon Kill campaign. We could play a band of highly
varied Gloranthans with different worldviews who had to learn to get
along. It was great fun.

We still ignored the objective truth, however. Basically, everyone
recognized the basic themes each other's behaviors and beliefs, they
just put it into thier own terms.

Thus, the Alkothi peasant soldier looked at an Orlanthi thane and
thought "A strongman - he controls the food and the women. I'll follow
him loyally and get on the gravy train.", while the thane looked at the
soldier and thought "huscarl - I'd better reward him to keep him loyal".
   We all recognized a "peaceful cut" ceremony, as well as ceremonies
for spring planting, first harvest, and weddings. Everyone added a bit
of their own customs to the rituals, and it worked pretty well. We
couldn't understand each other enough to argue whether Elmal could push
Yelmalio off the head of a pin...

Pam

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