Episode 24: Villains and Heroes of the Gbaji War

Art by Dan Barker, from the Broken Council Guidebook

We start this episode with a minor existential crisis on Ludo’s identity, followed by Ludo being protective of our usual guests by volunteering to take the brunt of Jörg’s incoming obscurantism and pedantry. Ludo accuses rather than praises Jörg of being a bright guy…

Main Topic

The Second Council and its God Project

Jörg wants to go to the beginning of that God Project, which was in his opinion the discovery of the Pseudocosmic Egg in the ruins of Dorastor. He mentions the Dawn Age appendix in the Guide, p.712 if you want to take a deeper read into this. (If you own the old RQ3 Dorastor Book, it has this text, too.)

Ludo asks whether the Pseudocosmic egg, that rare artifact which was instrumental in creating the perfect god, was just lying around in those ruins, and Jörg name-drops the Feldichi builders of those ruins, suggesting that the artifact would have been sitting in a Feldichi laboratory.

The ruins were first discovered by the early settlers, in the 120ies. Ludo paints this time (prior to hostile contact with the Horse Warlords in Dara Happa) as a time of peace and plenty.

We talk about the nature of the Pseudocosmic Egg, an artifact which Jörg describes as something that spoke to its investigators, awakening creative urges that ultimately led to the decision to breed a perfect deity.

Its origin isn’t clear, although Jörg wouldn’t be Jörg if he did not have a theory about that.

A rather weird theory, describing the Egg as an unborn child of Mostal, the World Machine, which would be a von Neumann probe in this theory – a self-replicating mechanism establishing a universe and then spawning daughter universes, more places like Glorantha. Only Mostal was damaged by the birth of Umath, and the hatching of the egg (in Jörg’s theory one of eight) was interrupted.

This gives the entire Dorastor civilization (both the Feldichi and the Second Council) a certain science-fantasy vibe, which is fine with Jörg.

Anyway, the people investigating the egg start the God Project.

Ludo expounds on their possible motivations: having the gods around again. (An effect which is called “Proximate Holy Realm” by Jeff Richard, describing the vicinity of deities in Belintar’s City of Wonders, but which also seems to have been the goal of the EWF Third Council.)

People of the God Project

Jörg briefly introduces Lokamayadon as the new Orlanthi member of the Second Council, a Pelorian, non-Heortling Orlanthi, and his personal feud against the family of the Vanak Spear heroes in the Berennethtelli tribe (who were Heortlings), foreshadowing Harmast Barefoot who was one of their descendants.

Being forced back onto the God Project, Jörg drops another name of the participants, Holy Estorex, a Dara Happan mystic who becomes one of the chief contributors to the new deity.

Ludo mishears the name as Asterix, the cartoon hero by Goscinni and Uderzo whose adventures in and from Roman occupied Gaul are a great inspiration for the Sartarites despite being very non-Sartarite.

Leaving that aside, we talk about what the Dara Happans want from this.

For context: up to 221, since before the Dawn, the Dara Happans and other Pelorian lowlanders were ruled by horse warlords who immigrated from the Arcos Valley and established a semblance of order in the Gray Age while remaining quite barbaric themselves. These horse-warlords slaughtered any Lightbringer Missionaries entering their territory, which earned them the enmity of the Council in Dorastor, and led to its first war, culminating in the Battle of Argentium Thri’ile in 221 (a name wisely – or cowardly – not pronounced by Jörg).

Jörg talks about the effect of having Holy Estorex on the God Project, which led to new advances, and a grwoing unease of the trolls, the Heortlings and the Dragonewts, all of whom ultimately break off from the project and their participation in the Second Council, which is called the Broken Council afterwards.

Ludo desc