Movements from the Bowels...

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From: Nick Brooke (100270.337@CompuServe.COM)
Date: Sat 30 Apr 1994 - 00:56:53 EEST


It was me wot sent MOB the farting quote he was so reluctant to attribute. Nikolai Tolstoy's book "The Coming of the King" is a wonderful thing, IMHO, if you can stand heaps of Celtic and Germanic obscurity. The man needed an editor; but an editor would probably have cut all the best things...

The "Copronymous" story (about the font, the nappy, the nasty accident and the uncouth priest at the christening) is from the chronicle of Theophanes, an icon-loving (i.e. highly impartial) monastic author. You can find more Byzantine weirdness in any account of the reign of Justinian II, the "Man with the Golden Nose". (Sounds like a James Bond villain). Tell them about the robot birds, MOB!

Truth is usually stranger (and sillier) than fiction.

Alex, I'm working on the history of Carmania for eventual publication by Chaosium (we hope). There have been a few leaks and spin-offs so far; there will be more at Convulsion, I expect. "Evil", "nasty", "oppressive", etc. are fair enough as descriptions of the ruling Carmanians (or of any other "nobility") at their worse times. There were bright patches in between (pre-Lunar Carmanian history spans some five centuries, not monotonously), and they did develop a unique hybrid culture from which the Lunar Way grew. In fact, Carmanian culture is (and remains) one of two major links between Malkionism and the Lunar Empire (the other being the Arrolian city-states, of course). Which answers someone else's question about the Lunar Way and how/why the Malkioni might perceive it:

i) On their doorstep (figuratively / literally) in Junora/Loskalm;

ii) Historically, as a heresy that grew out of a heresy.

More grist to the mill: Carmanians were certainly polygamous (by which I mean the Shahs and the richest Satraps at their more decadent periods; certainly less than the 3% mooted here). They also originated the customs followed by some Lunars of maintaining harems (and bath-houses, too!). I'm worried that real-world polygamy crops up only in hot countries, but this has always been a problem with Gloranthan climate (hairy Nordic barbarians in the south, with Mediterranean/Middle Eastern empires to the north), so I'm just going with the flow and ignoring the resulting "implausability". Besides, the summers were hotter before the Moon... and you've got to have something to do in the long, cold winters...


Nick
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