The Good Scorpionwoman

Sleep Tight- Mother is Busy.

This beautiful drawing has been posted on Google+ by Sandy Jacobs-Tolle with the following comment:

The scorpions I'm most familiar with are called "hairy scorpions", and they live in the Sonora desert, including the places I used to visit as a kid.  They are big (5 inches), light yellow, and, unless you're a cricket, pretty harmless. So I got to thinking about scorpions without the baggage that people put on them for being evil and aggressive and venomous. When I found that this variety of scorpion gives live birth and carries its babies on its back, the idea just formed.

She's dressed and her hair is cut like an O'odham woman, of the tribes that live in the Arizona desert. She's got a basket full of de-spined cactus fruit (I figure once you get to a person-sized brain and its caloric needs, being an omnivore has its uses), and she, like her human neighbors, carries her baby on her back. 

Now, this is really fascinating. Scorpionfolk, especially in RuneQuest/Glorantha, being chaos creatures, have definitely always carried a 'baggage' of being 'evil and aggressive and venomous'.

Let us remember that Chaos is not so strong in Second Age Glorantha as it is in the Third Age.So why not imagine a lost tribe of non-Chaotic scorpionfolk somewhere in the Tarmo Mountains. It would be interesting to see how the PCs react to non-Chaotic 'monsters'.