Here are a few more notes for Discord. Now from time to time, we get folk wanting to proclaim how much of a brutal extremist Argrath is, but to me those threads fall flat for the same reason as threads saying why the Lunar Empire is just an evil empire falls flat – they lack nuance and only provide a narrow glimpse of these complex characters.
Argrath is about as much of a brutal extremist as Jar-eel or the Red Emperor, arguably less (although he certainly doesn’t worry overmuch about how many eggs he needs to break to make his omelettes). As a ruler, he is consistently described as someone able to hold together “a motley conglomeration of many causes, defying neat and easy organization,” and as someone meld “diverse and often hostile individuals” into compact and fighting units.
Now Greg and I figured he’s an Alexander-figure, incredibly charismatic, and very skilled at getting people to work together (even from mutually hostile cults) and fight for him. He’s no mere traditionalist – in fact it is really absurd to call him that at all. But he can get nomad traditionalists to fight alongside Lightbringer heroquesters, Humakti mercenaries, and Wolf Pirates, alongside trolls and dragonewts and even giants; in short Argrath is able to get his diverse followers to put aside feuds and ancient rivalries to fight against the Lunar Empire. They might all have their own different reasons for wanting to do that, but Argrath is able to hold them together.
His conquests have an ad hoc nature to them, which is pretty Orlanthi after all. Once he becomes King of Dragon Pass he focuses on taking Furthest, succeeding sometime after 1630. He doesn’t raze the place down or destroy the temples, but installs a trusted deputy (probably Mularik or someone else). Mularik turned out to be counterproductive (Greg once joked to me that Mularik must have ruled Furthest like player characters actually often do in games) and Argrath managed to get rid of him without breaking his own oaths, and even found a way to reward the killers while still following Orlanthi law. Argrath’s certainly tricksy that way, and he’s not exactly a systems guy – then again, he probably couldn’t hold his coalition of allies and supporters together if he was. He’s an improviser.
On the other side, unlike the Persian emperor Darius, whose empire Alexander overthrows, the Lunar Empire has deep hooks into Glorantha’s magical existence. Each time it is defeated, it comes back more dangerous than before. There are also movements in the Lunar Provinces after the Dragonrise to overthrow Lunar rule, which naturally Argrath gets drawn into – or dives into willingly and intentionally. But the Lunar Empire returns in 1636-1638, there is a counterattack from Dragon Pass in 1639, and another Lunar invasion in 1644. You get the picture. There’s a lot of back and forth, and the magical stakes and tactics escalate.
Ultimately, it is not within Argrath’s power to destroy the Red Emperor – that requires Sheng Seleris, the shadow of the Red Emperor. Some of Greg’s notes as he was developing Argrath’s story suggests that needing Sheng Seleris was an insight Argrath learned from the trolls during his Lightbringers Quest. Remember in the Lightbringers Quest the questers end up making a full romp through Glorantha’s backsides, and the questers experience a lot of things outside of their own understanding – that’s a key part of the story.
And again, if I am someone happy with the Lunar Empire (see my previous post), I’m going to really hate Argrath. But the Lunar Empire has made a LOT of enemies, recently even with groups previously happy with it. Which gives Argrath a lot to work with.
As long as the opposition to the empire was traditionalists like Kallyr or the Castle of Lead or Storm Bull nomads, the Lunar Empire could play them against each other and defeat them piecemeal. Argrath was a different kind of foe and one who understood the Lunar playbook, especially after traveling the world.
The key is that Argrath is able to hold together a very broad and diverse coalition and (say unlike the allies in WW2) get them to fight alongside each other in tight and compact units, especially in the Sartar Magical Union. He’s got everything from philosophers to Storm Bull berserks, dragonewts, clowns, ducks, hedge shamans, and you name it. Now I think that liberator/trickster side is a key part of the glue that holds them together, but at the very least that is a complex act of juggling!
Argrath is hardly a psychopath. Like Arkat, he’s someone who at some point recognises their powerlessness over what threatens them (or “their world”) and crosses far outside the threshold of what is safe and expected, in order to transform themselves into something that can confront the challenges of their life. That means confronting and reconciling with powerful forces normally rejected in order to defeat the demons that threaten their world. And like Arkat, his journey ends up being a lot longer, a lot deeper, and a lot more transformational than he ever expected when he began it. And like Arkat, there were plenty of times he thought he had completed his journey, only to realise that he had barely begun it.
In that regard, Argrath and Arkat are an awful lot like the Red Goddess. Or more precisely, as they predate her, the Red Goddess is an awful lot like Arkat and Argrath.
Our main speech from Argrath is still that from the Cradle scenario. There’s more than a little empathy in that speech, as I just gave it twice in the last month.
Greg created the story of the conflict between Argat and Gbaji in the late 1960s/early 1970s – it is also when Chaos first truly entered Glorantha. That story got lifted into White Bear & Red Moon as Argrath and the Red Moon/Jar-eel. A few years later it got remade into Arkat and Gbaji, but the stories are the really the same. The Lightbringers Quest has its genesis in these stories as well. Then Greg gave it another twist with the Seven Steps of the Red Goddess which created a radically new version of the same original tale.
All heroes [have some monstrous properties]. They are liminal beings, part in our world, and part in the world of spirits and gods.
I’m not an Argrath fanboy, but I know where he comes from and that’s an important place in Greg’s mythology. He and his twin are at the very core of how Greg transformed Glorantha from a fairly standard fantasy setting of the 1960s into something far more personal and far more universal in the 1970s and beyond. Riffing off Argrath/Arkat to create the Red Goddess just bumped it up a few more levels.
Is the Solar/Chaotic side always going to win unless the Storm side ”cheats” like Orlanth (with death), Arkat (with resurrections and turning into a troll) or Argrath? One might say that the “trick” is inherent in Storm. There is that deep association between Orlanth and the Trickster, sometime it is understood as two separate entities – Orlanth AND Eurmal – and sometimes it is just in the Air god itself going back to Umath.
I wouldn’t say “cheat” unless I am only speaking from the Solar perspective.