From: gadbois@cs.utexas.edu (David Gadbois)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc
Subject: Re: RQ: Runelords and Heroes question (still LONG)
Date: 17 Dec 1992 22:53:50 -0600
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu

    Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1992 20:23 CST
    From: v124pz9t@ubvmsb.cc.buffalo.edu (David Cheng)

    [Bits and pieces of excellent discussion on heroquesting deleted for
     brevity. --DGG] 

    Heroquesting often involves tapping into the mythic history of the
    world.  By re-enacting certain mythic events, you gain the benefits
    that the original enactor did.  The more closely you come to the
    real thing, the better the benefit, but the higher the risk.

    Example:  Trolls hate Fire and Light.  But, in your Gods of
    Glorantha book, you will see that Zorak Zoran can grant worshippers
    Ignite, Firearrow, and Fireblade.  This is because back in the
    Godtime, ZZ ambushed Yelmalio, and stole his fire powers (Or so the
    current legend says).  This is also why Yelmalio _cannot_ grant his
    worshippers Fireblade and Firearrow.

    [...]

    Now, let's say you and your ZZ buddies want to emulate your god.
    You can do a little ritual to psych yourselves up, and go and ambush
    some Yelmalians.  This action is just barely touching the mythic
    history of ZZ's attack on Yelmalio at the Hill of Gold, so you'll
    probably get no noticeable result (but ZZ will be happy anyway).

    [...]

    Now, by doing this right (ie winning the fight), you might get a
    tiny reward, like a free Fireblade spell or something.

    You might want to start off small.  Perhaps you just watch your god
    Zorak Zorak beat up Yelmalio, and steal the Fire powers.  Just
    watching will give you benefits (you are a god, in the godtime now).

    Maybe you are bolder.  You do it again, but this time, you go up to
    Yelmalio's battered body, and drink some of his blood.  This will
    definitely get you more benefits.

    The best thing to do would be to actually take the place of Zorak
    Zoran, and fight Yelmalio yourself.  Then, IF you win, YOU get the
    fire powers yourself.  Of course, you'd better be pretty tough to be
    able to fight Yelmalio.  He is a god, after all...  ;-)

This example is particularly compelling in light of the recent
revelations about the cult of Yelmalio.  As I understand it, Yelmalio is
a fairly recent (insofar as "recent" means anything when you can fiddle
with History as explained below) mythological creation by heroquestors
of the Storm-oriented Sun cult of Elmalio (Yelmalio without the "Y," get
it?)  who wished, for more-or-less political reasons in Sartar, to sever
their ties to the Storm pantheon and turn towards the Solar pantheon of
the Pelorians Yelmites, who were busy with the Lunar armies over running
Sartar at the time.  The means by which they did this was to re-enact
the Hill of Gold heroquest in such a way as to lose the Storm
connections.

In the "original" Hill of Gold quest, Orlanth arms Elmalio, who avoids
being ambushed by Zorak Zoran and goes on to deny the advances of the
White Princess, who turns into a block of ice.

In the "new" Hill of Gold quest, Orlanth steals the weapons of Yelmalio,
who is then ambushed by Zorak Zoran and goes on to participate in a
fertility ritual (you know what that means) with the White Princess.

The revised quest set Yelmalio firmly in the camp of the Solar gods
(Why?  I'm still trying to figure that one out.), and even the memory of
Elmalio is gone except to Godlearners like us and a few who witnessed
the original quest in Godtime but were not effected by it.

My guess as to why the questers were able to pull off such a
mind-boggling alteration of the fabric of History was that,
mythologically speaking, they were following the path of least
resistance.  They simply avoided the hard work Elmalio went through to
associate himself with Storm.  In so doing they lost a lot in terms of
their power in the cosmos, but they gained a great deal in the mundane
plane.  One could even argue that they avoided having Sartar suffer the
fate of the Mad Sultanate by weakening the nation's resistance to the
Lunar conquest and thereby eliminating the need for such drastic
measures.

So, while the kind of heroquesting that Cheng talks about -- gaining
power for oneself or one's people by emulating the myths or slight
variations of them -- is probably the most common way that Gloranthan
folks go about it, there is another kind that involves big-time
alteration of the mythic structure of the universe.  This second kind
may just be an extreme version of the first, it which case it seems that
the general mechanism of heroquesting is the reweaving of the mythology
to a greater or a lesser extent so as to reshape the history that the
mythology generates.

There's a good example of the kind of History-munging I have been
talking about here in the writeup of the cult of Caladra and Aurelion in
TotRM number seven.  One starts to wonder if all of Gloranthan mythology
is in some sense artificial.  Perhaps that is the much talked about but
never divulged Secret of the God Learners.

--David Gadbois
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc