Eff

I think that, taking it as given and running with it, what is suggested by that ability is that there are a significant number of uz women who would be interested in a dashing, witty, and accomplished enlo once they're out from the big leaden doors and in Dragon Pass. Of course, this suggests trolls might not be monolithically behind the eugenics-obsessed society described in Trollpak, so thank goodness it's non-canon.

I think an interesting question about this book for me would be- what is the organizing principle? Why are these cults put together, and what do they say about the power of water in Glorantha?

Is there a meaningful difference from an empirical perspective?

Por qué no los dos? But I would go further beyond. What does this say about the spider? Oh, you know. You just have to ask her yourself.

These paragraphs do not describe a difference in kind, but a difference in degree.

I have a deeply heretical answer here, but there is a simpler, only lightly heretical one- the Yelmalio people are the only people who would care about putting Yelmalio in order, and they're within the structure of abusive myths that render them passive rather than active. Maybe Monrogh Lantern's real contribution to the Hero Wars will be to inject Elmal into the Yelmalio world. As for the overall topic of this thread... I think an overly psychological interpretation runs the problem of collapsing the hopes of any objective world, ironically enough. Dr. Samuel Johnson refuting Berkeley with the stone is formally a fallacy, but informally, kicking a rock can save you from kicking yourself in the axioms. But what we often have is Fantasieshreck. That objective world has a duck with a cigar in his beak in it, who tells you you don't know the meaning of the word absurdity. Repugnant enough, and then there's those distasteful glowing energy beams and neon-red véves, the Steel General in a temporal fugue, four arms spread wide, Woody Guthrie's guitar dangling from one, as his horse prances in the background and shatters mountains with each hoof. Cu Chúlainn turns his muscles inside out. The real Saint-Germain manifests before the pendulum. One of the heads of St. John the Baptist was real- when it mattered. Wally Sage confronts his creation, who stubbornly refuses to conform to good semiotics. In the face of such madness, what meaning can be had?

Yes, this seems very reasonable to me- although Xiombalg would know he was a Leader of Bloody Tusk, tuskriders aren't psychic, so showing that off with a big flashy ceremony of thanks to the Bloody Tusk makes sense. They sure are! It's a shame that the only thing Worship can ever do by the rules-as-intended is restore Rune Points, because the wide array of bonuses available make it so that achieving gigantic upfront numbers that could then be used to counter more modestly sized maluses is quite doable with effort and thought. To me, that suggests that there ought to be ways to use this worship-roll system to achieve other effects on the world. Granted, when it comes to what we might call broad-scope social/geographical effects, there's just not that much for these big numbers to even conceivably hook onto- a harvest roll which is similarly limited in scope, and that's about it. But perhaps you could set up a conversion chart where the benefits of attribute training, Rune magic, or the like can be converted into a malus applied to the roll, along with extending it outwards in scope. Xiombalg's ceremony might bless his gang's tuskers with greater strength, ferocity (increased attack %s), or bless his gang themselves in similar ways, or make their personal belongings stronger (more HP on weapons, eg).

Well, indulging in texts from the verboten period between 1999 and 2007, for Greg Stafford at that point, magic was something you got from the Otherworld. The Lunars have their own magic because they have their own Otherworld, and they have their own Otherworld for reasons not directly articulated but which are pretty easy to pull out of the subtext- one is that the Lunars for Greg were postmodernist, and so were aware of the fact that magic is socially constructed through rituals, and so a shaman and a sorcerer aren't working with fundamentally different things. So they have an Otherworld that provides a unique magic that appears to be the other kinds of magic to outsiders at different times and with different perspectives. Another is that for Greg the Lunars were feminists, and so they have a separate Otherworld for the same reason that feminist retellings of mythology exist- the project of creating a new world requires a new, critical Otherworld. Yet another is that the Lunars for Greg were a universalist religion, believing that the Lunar Way is for everyone, and that is new to Glorantha, so Glorantha physically expands with a new part of the material world and a new Otherworld to accommodate this, and the magic that comes from that universalist place is universalizing- it can interact with other forms of particularist magic. Some of this thinking probably dates back to the mid-1980s, because RQ3 Lunar Magic consists of RQ3 sorcery rules being applied to RQ3 spirit magic, which you called Battle Magic when used in Glorantha, like in RQ2. That is to say, RQ3 Lunar Magic allows you to mix different types of magic together by applying procedures from one to procedures for another.

I suppose the question is whether we want to treat the Sisterhood of New Consciousness primarily as a roughly comprehensible religious apparatus around the experience of Illumination, as an entity that player characters can interact with, as an object that exists to be renderable in some form of the Runequest rules, or whatever Darius is going on about by invoking the Old Man of the Mountain and the explicitly countercultural Nizari Ismailis in this context. It also depends on whether we want to admit we understood the very obvious subtext of The Fortunate Succession on this topic. So my thoughts about the Sisterhood of New Consciousness point to the first objective as the primary one for their starting point. Illumination rules are fundamentally procedures to represent something, and not the thing itself. My thinking here is that a school of Illumination forms around a specific context in which someone achieves Illumination, multiple other people then achieve Illumination through that context, and a set of teachings and techniques develop which are taught to new members, including teachings around the order in which to introduce people. The Nysalor cult of Cults of Terror has fragmentary teachings, the Riddles, but no other techniques and few other teachings to put these fragments into a context. (Since it's derived from pop-Zen, this is of course exceptionally appropriate. Regular Zen involves a number of techniques and a prolonged period of studying Buddhist philosophy before a Zen practitioner is believed to be primed and ready for the moments of kenshō and satori that are encoded in koan stories, though koans are introduced as part of studying.) But an actual school would, to my mind, be significantly more than just riddles, even if it's fraudulent or straightforwardly incorrect. In this model I'm putting together as I type it, the Sisterhood of New Consciousness is directly tied with the older statements about Great Sister approving schools of Illumination- it's an organization which accepts representatives from any school of Illumination which can win Great Sister's approval, and thus has the authority to teach. I would assume the Sisterhood of New Consciousness also maintains facilities across the Lunar Empire which approved schools can use (and maybe must use, depending- I suspect the Dolathi would be required to teach where Great Sister can have eyes on them!) And similarly, the Sisterhood would also approve Lunar Examiners, and licenses you to perform the Sevening Rites, and whatever other factors of Lunar mystical practice demand some kind of regulation. Would Great Sister have some personal school of Illumination? I don't know. I doubt it's one with a large public presence, because that would be contrary to my understanding of the Lunar religion as pluralistic- her personal school would likely be seen as the school of Illumination, and so would weaken any others. And I think unapproved schools certainly exist, some out in the open because they were rejected due to their methods being seen as unreliable or frivolous, and others in various degrees of secrecy because they were seen as a scam, actively dangerous to the practitioner, or incompatible with the Lunar Way. I think the Church of Immortality would likely be in that latter category, although they promise profane immortality only in most Gloranthas- I suspect they make use of mystical techniques for their Ponzi schemes, though I haven't had a chance to interrogate any senior members. What do I think these schools of Illumination would teach and practice? This thread's about Great Sister, isn't it?

One answer: people look up in the sky, see a big red ball, and they know the Blood Sun so they assume a connection. This assigns agency to Gloranthans and the capacity to think about the world to them, so it's automatically suspicious. It's also possible that they can read old Glorantha Digest posts that asserted that Sedenya was the Blood Sun across the barrier between fiction and reality and take them as sacred truth from a higher plane. Who can say?

Well, here's a primer on how the physical notation for mass movements works: https://www.indstate.edu/cas/sycamorebands/ensembles/athletic-bands/marching-sycamores/drill-primer If you reenact under Hardee's manual, the step, quick, double-quick, and run are all shared, and the evolutions of the line are also relevant for thinking about these kinds of maneuvers. (Along with basics like forming and breaking line, wheeling left and right, etc.) And then there's Labannotation and Benesh Movement Notation to describe the movements of individual dancers, which is helpful because large-scale choreography is, in the contemporary world, typically reliant on a significant degree of improvisation within boundaries. You can also look at examples designed to teach people how to perform ballroom or folk dances.

I would look at American-style marching bands, which are at about that size for large universities with an emphasis on the program, but which carry out complicated maneuvers on the field and in parade, frequently with colorful, even outlandish uniforms. https://youtu.be/6O7916boCa8

There, of course, has never been a released Gloranthan game in which Lunar Rune magic was more powerful during the Full Moon, only increasing in duration if the spell has a duration without any additional effects on the spell. And in the games where Lunar magic was boosted in some fashion by 50% under the Full Moon, there was no Rune magic and that benefit only existed within the Glowline for dedicated Lunar magicians who pursued some deeper insight. Otherwise it was always at "normal". (Furthermore, increasing or decreasing a target number within those games doesn't alter the effect of an ability, but does affect its reliability, and doing the same to APs only increases its power via second-order effects. It's probably more accurate to say it increases the endurance of the ability as a median statement, if anything.) But it is, of course, strange. Much could be spun from that effect... but I go back to the table from White Bear and Red Moon and the description of the Major and Minor Class chits, where they learn the magic of "the different phases", which has never been represented in roleplaying, and I conclude that the Lunar Cycle is complicated and ripe for expansion and investigation through play.

It takes a General Jinjur to, ah, put some ginger into those sparklingly pretty and perfectly choreographed Berkeleyan types.