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scott-martin

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    That sugar cane that tasted good
    That cinnamon, that's Hollywood
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    jeux sans frontières
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    Maine
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    the catacombs appear

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  1. Rolling back all the way to that particular opening crawl reveals something: "broo reproduction" doesn't appear in print until Borderlands decides to reveal or invent that narrative. Before that, broos are, like Iggy Pop says about the "philistines" in the movie Dead Man, mostly just real dirty people . . . "given to atrocities and foul practices" but mostly spreading diseases. This becomes their "Mallia" aspect that supports their role as mercenary muscle in Nomad Gods, RQ1-2 and so on. Or another way to say it is that Mallia is the entity who shamans can summon within the rules of the Jaldon Games. Thed comes later and I encourage people to read the COT version closely. If you find anything sexualized in this era, shout it out. To me, these broos come off more like S. Clay Wilson bikers than anything else, maybe with a Kenneth Anger scorpio rising vibe. There's no parasitic pregnancy motif, which tells us that while Alien has come and gone theatrically and home video exists, it doesn't seem to make much of an impression on Greg or Sandy until 1982. They wouldn't hold a revelation like that back, especially when the Thed layout ends with significant page space to fill and they were already throwing everything Sandy could think of to stretch as far as they could. After Borderlands, the "broo as sexual violence" and "Thed as rape goddess" narratives get rolling with Noyeep in the Big Rubble (1983) and forty years later here we are. But Borderlands functions as the literal crossroads at which we meet the devil, as it were. You still have the "Mallia" broos, who are basically all the females (closing a loophole in COT) as well as the males who "dislike all-male associations." That's a strange thread. Does it mean all Thedists are gay? Or is each of them the only male that matters in their perspective, so that everything else is potentially a "wife" and a "mother" to your children? The one unspoken rule here seems to be that they can't or won't or don't like to impregnate each other, or else only the strongest broo would survive beyond two seasons +1d8 weeks and we know that they can coexist in relatively stable gangs for a lot longer than that. Another thing that's interesting is the reference to "varied maternity." I know we've talked about Wire Mother and Soft Mother before but every male broo has a choice of which mommy to follow in terms of how they relate to the larval host. RQ3 Thed obliterates any surrogates. Her broo might not identify with her or emulate her so much as she (as a ghost and not a conventional goddess) yearns to emulate them. She gets them to do things to recapitulate her trauma. In the RQ3 accounts, that trauma is all she has left. In that ecology, there are no other women, just an appetite for new victims. I feel like many of the more deliberately occult NPCs in LOT and DOLAD reflect these complicated and polymorphous family and gender identities, where a son can be a daughter and a brother and also a wife. But Mallia is simpler. By definition she's the other woman and that's really it. When you emulate her, you are not the cruel absent mother. You're your own woman. The boys become carriers of your complex, spreading her sign. And this is the broo mother you can contact in the Jaldon Games. The stepmother can be approachable in ways the mother never is. Where is this going? First, IMG Thed is a perversion of the Covenant because her cult deliberately blurs the taboo relationship between herd and harem. Her broos don't have wives and their children don't have mothers. They have plenty of meat but they don't get milk as a baby. She's one of the things that happen when something goes very wrong with the meat. Nobody who observes the Peaceful Cut will countenance any of this. Prax can't afford to tolerate chaos. Life is already too rough in their broken world to intentionally make things worse. Second, Thed's association with the Crack spell is poignant in light of both Dorasta's ruined cleft and the "breaking of the vessels" that seeds creation in the zohar or wherever. She knows how to break everything. Maybe in a demiurgic context she has wisdom to provide but it's hard to say . . . sooner or later, people who have delved her mysteries end up functionally equivalent to broos. On the way from here to there you find the mysterious Cacodemon character in the courts of chaos, son of the devil (looking at you Argin Terror, we've barely touched on the West) and grandson of Thed. He's fond of ogres, who start to look a lot like broos when you breed out the obvious goat strains.
  2. "Arkat blows a horn, Atyar has a horn. What's the difference? Your angle on " - Jaccius Lacanicus I was thinking about that head trip in the recent return to Drastic . . . the resemblance is striking The angel rises, the head ignites, the skeleton drops.
  3. ATYAR is really just ARK(Y)AT spelled sideways. I'm as skeptical as you are but it ultimately resolves more problems than it creates.
  4. As Mr Phipp notes, Drastic doesn't have a lot of Thed content beyond a mechanical amendment that makes it easier for Spirits of Thed to take good people over and a belated credit to Sandy for the original COT version of the cult. But the idea sheds interesting light on aspects of Orlanth as lonely goatherd [sic] so I'd love to explore the details myself. Reverting to the COT chassis completely desexualizes her role, leaving an impression like the take on Kali that might show up in a matinee screening of Gunga Din. This is probably close to Sandy's original vision. We can ask him! But by the time you get to the short GOG writeup in 1985 her role is already changing. Maybe there are two or more Theds knotted together here . . . if modern "Orlanth" is a consolidation of multiple regional precursors then why not her too? A Praxian Thed who interferes with local shamans but is worth an occasional bit of worship, a Heortling Thed, maybe some other entity venerated closer to ancient Tanisor. A couple of details drop out. The LOT catechism blames her initial wound and her grudge on Urox. I would not want to slander the Storm Bull in front of his fans but he is not the sort of figure that leads an error-free life . . . as the Ragnaglar entry says, "there are secrets of the Mad God which I will tell you when your soul is strong enough to face the terrible truth." I would not be surprised to discover that Urox and the other one were mutually exclusive figures in archaic theyalan religion: a community might know one or the other but never both at once. A little like how someone's dad and evil "stepdad" are rarely in the room at the same time. In the logic of parables, when the good father surfaces, it's because he's defeated the evil father. But when the bad dad rises, the effect is as though he's murdered the good one. All the children of Umath may be like that, wearing each other's clothes when their followers find real identities inconvenient. Greg definitely wrote about this kind of dad business. I love the sunken Thedela hypothesis but the fact that the Heortlings remember the Trio setting up in the distant "north" leaves me open to the possibility that the first broos were Lokamayadon's people. But maybe brooism is an emergent property, the identity of the real "patient zero" is deliberately ambiguous. The important thing is that a broo or a broomother can erupt at any time. Keep your heart open and your hands steady.
  5. Love it throughout. Sad to have been away when this was going on the first time. This is obviously one of the edible amaranths, possibly with an unfortunate / opportunistic passenger like claviceps purpurea . . . the witch grain, the trick in the food that makes the body sick and the mind swoon. No wonder she's so intimate with Malia!
  6. I will climb the steps down to the basement on Saturday and unearth my copy of Drastic Chaos, which is so rare I had to source it "o'er frae France" as they say and largely unspeakable in the official fandom at this point. I don't even really remember what exactly is going on in there. In the meantime, three or four things I know about her that undoubtedly repeat what everybody knows. First and foremost, a fresh encounter with the full lyrics of the English song cycle commonly known as "Tom Bedlam / Mad Maudlin" reveals to me at least that Thed's real function is as a witch cult, maybe the primary witch cult on both sides of the Praxian frontier. Let's look at some of those verses. Across the spectrum of madness and badness and sadness the silver thread that unifies them is a fierce grievance nursed to the point where it defies all libidinal standards, logic and the other gods as well. What separates the protagonist from the rest of us is that she broods on her grudge and disappointment down in "satan's kitchen" to the exclusion of just about everything else. This is a witch anthem. IMG I suspect Thed is like that: the Bad Woman who is not satisfied with the victim or villain narrative that the Ernalda establishment works so hard to perpetuate. As such, the Lords of Terror extended cult writeup gives us a sense of how a Bad One tradition plays out from something like the inside . . . but filtered through a fairly obvious lens of conventional theyalan scholarship ("among the Orlanthi . . . "). One of the worst crimes a witch can commit is probably a lack of solidarity with other women. Thed's grudge is such that she will take sour delight in cooperating with broos to perpetuate her primary trauma / myth. This is not necessarily sexual. As long as you are ruining some aspect of someone else's life, your actions are holy and delightful in her jealous gaze. By the way, the "male only" restriction on her cult has been removed from the RQG drafts last time I checked. (So is a lot of the easy talk about her "willing" complicity and "own choice." She's more ambivalent now.) You do need to become a broo though and I think this is part of the enigma of where female broos come from. Like the girl interrupted says, they are very rare and they are mostly men. But not completely. Her nature as a bright and leaping nymph is only of theoretical interest to me because like I said, she's had some crimes done to her but she's also made some choices around that. No matter how we judge her choices, I think we can all agree her own case could have been handled a lot better. She was failed. Some rehabilitations fail. They can't get over it or haven't been able to get over it yet. Some people perpetuate abuse. We mourn the nymph and maybe we can contact the nymph under the right circumstances but when you meet her as the skinless goat mother she only brings trouble. The world is fallen. The relationship with Kyger Litor in particular is very interesting . . . how would troll mother in particular be interacting with this person? They have womb trouble in common. And among the goddesses her suffering and defiance remind me of a red woman we all know about. And then there's Malia. No Kate Bush references here. Nina Simone. Anyway, Saturday. Appropriate.
  7. OK sassy Where does Thed come from? Any effort to even ask that question is an effort to rehabilitate her story, what could go wrong there? She was somebody once. She made choices.
  8. THIS IS [HERESY/INDIVIDUALIST] CITIZEN. But let them try. To a properly broken dwarf or self-initiated shaman every can and pipe has its spirit. With the right access to the official population records you can probably achieve some kind of mental communication with vanished generations and ultimately come to an abstract understanding of the Ancestral Mostali. The structure of modern dwarf society suggests that this has been done in the past. Maybe it's the route forward. You take a step back in order to make a great leap into the future beyond the hole they're stuck in now.
  9. Art Garfunkel would have found a way to become a problem in multiple timelines. I will forgive Adams for giving the world the band Owsla, which in turn gave the world my favorite novel of the plague decade, Seek The Throat From Which We Sing. However I'm told we should roll the clip This is not really a goofy tangent. What I like about it in the context of this thread is the fact that Greg got super inflamed by it initially. A bear who was god! But then he wanders off to make his own bear god man, a more satisfying execution. All our gloranthas are like that. "Take only what you need from it."
  10. This is another good point. People who are still in the city simply KNOW that the train is running and when it doesn't (flooding, blackout, operator error, metal fatigue, pandemic, unannounced track work, wildcat strike, terror attack) it's time to seek alternate routes. When the alternate routes stack high enough the last route is back to the mainland. Those left behind will say you gave up. But maybe the day will come when the final train grinds to a halt . . . this is the doubt that drives us apostates from the city once and for all. Maybe the gods are like that. Or whatever the mostalites commune with when the machine stops. I believe London has something similar about ice ages, nuclear errors and other catastrophes being mitigable so long as you live by the river.
  11. Top quip! My spies just told me that "it's gotten really bad down there, like '70s bad, no wonder they called out the national guard" and I ponder how the nature of the subway gods can change . . . as above so below. And yet I still have fairly high confidence (truth rating) that the trains still run down there, years after even seeing a station entrance much less riding with the damn things. Not sure if it's what jorganos was talking about but I always liked the RQ3 mechanic for loading temple guardians with magic, as seen in Sun County and probably updated sources.
  12. Love it. Response will be endless and it's all accurate. Like they say, whatever you love has already worked its way into the roots of Glorantha. For some people, this means Orlanth is Thor or Zeus, someone from an Edith Hamilton paperback. For people who prefer Karoly Karenyi, Orlanth is actually Apollo or Hermes the Thief and it's complicated. He can be Indra. He can be Seth, the other brother. Same with everybody else. You go where it takes you and you either see Glorantha there or you don't. Ernalda is easy. There's a lot of Robert Graves in there from when Robert Graves was blowing a lot of dudes' minds. Then there was a lot of Marija Gimbutas. A lot of Mists of Avalon, even though that one has fallen far from favor. He really loved Hesiod. But then again he was really moved by the book Shardik and the work of Rogan P Taylor, which is perversely available in plain sight to anyone bold enough to get an account. Issaries is simultaneously a cheap gag ("Am Issaries = Emissaries") and a complicated footnote to Gurdjieff as suits the great god's nature.
  13. Their Glorantha(s) Varied. Or maybe they stayed in "Glorontha" or "Acos" or some other state of being before the apocalypse that created the modern world. From our point of view engaged with the text of Glorantha, they did not survive. Unless they come back or we go over ("er meint irgendein sagenhaftes Drüben") anything can be true. I think one constant is that once you are in Drastic territory your Glorantha is varying beyond the range where text can help you in a crisis.
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