So recently I read up on why exactly are the Elder Races at war with one another for a thousand years and a half, and... I'm just not entirely sure why. But beyond that, I'm not sure what that adds to the setting. Why can't the Uz just be another kind of "people" who live around, for instance? I feel like it's meant to be taken as a sort of justification for something but idk, fantasy racism never jived well with me.
But maybe I'm misunderstanding something, so here's what I understood from reading a bit on why each of these hate one another.
Trolls x the rest - From what I got, folks in-world generally hate the trolls because a) they sometimes eat them, and b) their arrival in the world during the Great Darkness was pretty traumatic. The Glorantha Sourcebook says that a lot of stuff that folks thought was the trolls doing, was actually Chaos.
This strikes me as odd because I haven't seen anything to indicate that the trolls are stupid or amoral. Like, humans lived with them under the Only Old One, they can literally eat anything, I don't get why they would choose to make the people they're living with angry just to have a nice meal.
And besides, they're not particularly long lived so at least between them, humans, and dragonewts, whatever beef they had 1600 years ago must have surely died down, right?
Aldryami x Mostali - This one I kinda get, but it seems to me like it should be more one-sided. Elves don't live forever, but the Mostali do, so there are many Mostali alive today who probably were there to see the hijinks of the Elf King and Stone. Still, in Dragon Pass the Mostali are generally chiller, and I don't really see them interacting in any meaningful way. It's not like there's resources for them to compete over, is it just religion at this point? It must not be in the Aldryami's best interests to have the Mostali as enemies.
Aldryami x Humans and Trolls - It says that "elves don't like humans because they tear down the trees to make shelter, and the Uz eat the trees and also the elves." And like, I get that the elves would strongly dislike people chopping down trees, but these guys are vegetarians. Surely they understand the meaning of basic necessities, and that humans and Uz need that wood to survive just like they need to eat those leaves for them to survive.
This also calls back to "the trolls are dumb stupid monsters who will just eat other folks and antagonize them for no better reason than to fill their bellies when they could very well just eat literally anything else in the world, including the enemies of the elves."
Dragonewts x Others - I didn't find much on the dragonewts' relationship to the others. Humans are scared of them because dragons are spooky, I can't say it doesn't make sense after the whole EWF debacle.
All in all, I'm not entirely sure why it's still a status quo that they hate one another a thousand years later.
Another thing that I'm not entirely in love with, but I understand why it's the case, is why are the humans separated into cultures but the Elder Races aren't. Like, humans are divided into Praxians, Heortlings, Tarshites, etc. And then you have Trolls who are just... Trolls. Am I meant to believe that the trolls in the Shadow Plateau, with a long and proud history of serving a demigod for a thousand years, have more in common with the trolls on the other side of Genertela than with the Heortling clans who fought and bled at their side during their exile from Dragon Pass? Don't they speak different languages and have different cultural practices? Why are the trolls who live in the southern continent called "Jungle Trolls" while the humans who do the same aren't called "Jungle Fellas"?
I wouldn't normally have an issue with this. Like, Tolkien's orcs are just evil baddie magical creatures who are that way because they're magically evil and created by one guy for that purpose. But Glorantha does so much to make everything else feel alive that it just strikes me as strange when entire races are treated as being kinda monolithical, at least in culture.
But I get why that's the case, there's only so much you can write about a setting after all, and maybe Greg Stafford and other folks wanted to expand on this but just had more pressing books to write. That's totally understandable, but still, it's a part of the setting.
I hope I haven't come across as combative, I'm genuinely not sure if I have the full picture here, and a lot of this is just a matter of taste. If having the Elder Races hate one another is cool to you, that's great. I feel the need to highlight that because I'm not here in bad faith or to yuck someone's yum.