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not a proof at all 🙂 just what some gloranthan mortals conclude based on the facts they experiment (no more wind, no more plant, no more magic, etc...) Or maybe even not a mortals conclusion, just a dramatic name describing the desperate period what "really" (really from glorantha perspective of course) happend is not known. Maybe it was just the use of some magic reinforcing the power of the net, blocking even more what the gods (these gods) can normaly interact Maybe it was another effect, a power "miroring" the compromise : now not only the gods cannot interact by themselves with the mundane world but the mundane world (the worshippers and the physical domain - earth and air -) was unable to interact with the other world. Maybe something focusing their attention elsewhere, so strongly that they forgot the dragon pass for seasons, some magical drugs (same with sleeping more than dead) etc I know at least 4 "states" of dead gods : those who were lost in oblivion (are they totally ... "off ?" or just in another dimension ? who knows ?) those who are "dead" like Genert. What it means for them, except mortals cannot join them.. I don't know. Maybe what is called "Death" is just "We remember but we can't interact" those who are "dead" like Umath. What it means for them I don't know. Maybe what is called "Death" is just "We remember, we can't interact, but we can interact with what is clearly part of them" those who were "dead" like Yelm, and a lot of others gods. Probably not dead like Genert or Umath, as they were able to come back. In all cases, I would not say that gods can like mortas can It is probably different. Orlanth did not kill Yelm with a sword but with the death itself. What does it mean ? Don't know. Is it possible to understand what it means ? Godlearners don't seem to have totally understood anything Is their a irl canon explanation ? I don't think so. So answers are just what each of us understand and interpret the texts. Now answering about a god death without answering about the time and its impact, the pre-time and its rules, the differences between runes and gods etc.... seems a bottom less pit where you can only find questions and distractions. And maybe... if you are lucky enough to survive and continue your travel... In other words if your powerful and fool enough to follow Eurmal path you may find at the end a formless thing, bring back to us and ... just push the "end world" button

There has been; just not a big all-social-media push. Basically: "Shipping problems. We're not sure how long before they clear up, so we are not announcing a new ETA." I think it's that "not sure how long... so not announcing" element, that makes Chaosium not feel like a big all-social-media push is the thing to do. (honestly, I disagree with that final element -- I think they should have made a big a-s-m push; we are seeing this sort of sentiment in pretty much every social media venue)

Welcome! And great having a chance to talk with Chandler about layout on Thursday evening at Chaosium Con.

I like the idea of outsiders being helpful as the person in charge of the area and castle is is currently acting odd and the locals should be concerned. I'm thinking that the character left behind might end up heading to the gallows though.

I am still disappointed that my schedule left me absolutely no time to fit in a RQG game anywhere. Thursday night I was meeting the Tribe, Friday morning I was shopping (and snatched up the very first copy of The Lunar Way on display, which I’m quite happy with), Friday afternoon I had to leave open for dinner with friends, Saturday was just the Jonstown Compendium booth and Home of the Bold, and then I had to scramble out of there Sunday morning. So getting to hear these reports does let me experience that side of the con vicariously, at least. So that this isn’t completely off-topic (and speaking of which, I’m surprised there was no Con Thread over in the Skull Inn for those of us who don’t use Facebook), I’ll add that Home of the Bold was a blast. It went by in a delightful blur of tense conversations, screaming matches in the street, observed attempts to break down Geo’s door, sacred Earth dances, and attempted seductions. Everyone who plays it this year is going to have a phenomenal time, and if you haven’t picked up the Rough Guide yet, run-don’t-walk to DTRPG. Anyway, here, have a bonus picture of what my shopping ended up procuring. Frankly, I’m itching for 2025 already.

[Removed double post.]

If I'm not mistaken, several other books were scheduled for release in April, including Pendragon Core Rulebook, The Grey Knight, and—last but not least—The Order of the Stone. Any updates on these releases would be appreciated.

It is disappointing that there's been no official communication from Chaosium about the delay.

Chaosium welcomes Atlanta-based layout designer Chandler Kennedy to the team. Chandler studied Graphic Design at Kennesaw University, with a focus on print and book design, and has worked with Monty Python on their Monty Python's Cocurricular Mediaeval Reenactment Programme RPG and with Weta Workshop on their Dr. Grordbort's Scientific Adventure Violence RPG. At Chaosium her focus is on the Call of Cthulhu line, including the forthcoming Cthulhu by Gaslight series. In her spare time Chandler enjoys hiking, rock climbing, vulture culture, LARPing, candle making and, of course, role-playing games with friends. Company bio: Chandler Kennedy

In the beginning, there was everything-and-nothing, which the navel-gazers call the Void. The god-groupies call it the Silence, and the chalk-and-candle types call it the Prime Mover, and I'll call it the Primal Plasma. This stuff was everywhere indistinguishable from itself, and so was infinite and took up no space at all at the same time. Perfection in the strict ruler-edge sense. But maybe it never really existed, because it somehow differentiated. Different sections of this raw stuff of vitality and existence took some of its properties for themselves, and they began to interact with each other. One of those properties was "allness", and another was "thoughtfulness". These were left over, and they coalesced into the Great Organizer. Now this being saw the raw stuff that was swirling about and disintegrating and took their allness and broke it in half, and then took their thoughtfulness and broke that in half, and they put both of them into the mix, and the allness bonded everything together, and the thoughtfulness made it take on shapes and forms. And then they had allness and thoughtfulness. They were made of everything and could interact with everything, and they had thoughts, and they set about enacting those thoughts. But there were thoughts that were not part of the world, and there was allness that was not part of the world, and so those thoughts could enter into the world too. The first of these thoughts was "deidentification", and it broke the bliss of that time, for under its influence people began to deidentify the parts of the world that were not them. Fearing this diabolic thought, the people selected leaders from among themselves who seemed like they could rebuild the bliss of unity, and then overthrew them when they proved otherwise. So the Aether gave way to Arraz-the-Servant, who gave way to the Sun Queen, who gave way to the Emperor Brightface. And once they had decided that someone was above them, the people made others who were below them, to do the work they didn't want to do. But then another thought came into the mix, and this thought was "discernment". And this thought made people react in different ways to the same events, and meant that when the Emperor sat in judgement, one or both would go away unsatisfied, and the Emperor accepted it too, and so he said that some people were exiles and some people were favorites and some people were doing important work staying where nobody else had to listen to them. And then these people were confronted with another thought- "surprise". They realized that the world was not simply the Empire of Brightness and Splendor, but that there was also a Family of Darkness and Depth, a Community of Eaters and Eaten, and others besides, and that many of the monsters that the Emperor had overcome were, surprisingly, people of those other gatherings. And some people began to move between these gatherings and others began to make their own small ones and still others rejected all gatherings, having found the new thought of "solitude". But with these new thoughts came ideas that were born from the thoughts. And one of them was "multiplicity". Nobody acknowledged this presence at first, but when the Turner, the Burner, the Blow-Hard, the Puller, and the Topsy-Turvey came together and summoned the Eyes of Justice to judge between them and Brightface, all had their own desires for what would happen after and all had their own grievances, and multiplicity was among them. And when they slew Brightface, none of them heeded the Eyes of Justice at first, but the first two relented and admitted that, although annoying, he had a point. And so this was the age when anyone and everyone did what was right in their own eyes, and all the orders that had been ordained before were broken and replaced with ad hoc patches, spaghetti code poorly documented if at all, and where kings and emperors and prime ministers and consuls and chief executive officers and chairmen of the board and first speakers existed, they all had to acknowledge they were not alone. Some resisted this, and strove to be the new Brightface, and in doing so, they knew they would fail. And they made new exiles. And these exiles went out to the edges of the world, for now everyone had to acknowledge the full size of the world. And there they met three thoughts, coming into the world. The first was "inexplicability", which rejected that allness could ever be all, that there were things which were eternal cleavages between people. The second was "irrationality", which said that people could be thoughtless and still be people. The third was "irrecoverability", which said that thoughtfulness and allness didn't overlap, that there were parts of the allness which could never be found by thought and thoughts which could never correspond to something that existed. Before, new thoughts had entered, and they had been ignored at first, or feared, or despised, but people had gotten used to having them around eventually and even found joy in them. Where they had been exiled before, they had eventually come in from the cold/heat/rain/dry/slood. These three thoughts came into the world and nobody could accommodate them who hadn't been born from them at first, and then people made new thoughts which pretended to accommodate them while not actually doing so, and this thought of "deception" turned on them as well. The paradoxes were thorny. To fight against the thoughts, it seemed, was to admit they were right, and so made them stronger than you. To try and speak to the thoughts was to run up against the denial of communication that flowed from their existence. Before, when someone had forgotten something, they had known they could always recover it, but now they were confronted with the possibility of losing it forever, of not being able to know it when they found it again, and so many thoughts and people that had been part of the world began to be seen as not part of it anymore. But the thoughts couldn't accommodate each other, either. Irrationality was an explanation of the inexplicable. Irrecoverability greedily obscured the meaning of the other two. And inexplicability and irrecoverability fought for the love of the game. And so they were forced to split apart and take different paths. And apart, they could be integrated separately. Irrationality was integrated in this way- people confronted it head-on and fought it heedlessly and heedfully, and accepted that they were both irrational and rational, and that the one could pin down the other. Inexplicability was integrated in another way- the people accepted that they were much smaller than the world, that individually there was a great open range for inexplicability to wander, but by putting many people to think about a thing, each could place their fences in such a way as to corral the inexplicable and keep it in bounds. But irrecoverability was difficult indeed. It came down to the instructions of a spider, who said this: "You who I have devoured and hold within myself, hear me! You have brought irreversibility into the world, and those who bound you think this a power which can only destroy them. But by doing so, you have brought meaning into the world! You have made it so that choices matter! Liberty exists now, because of you. And because of this irreversibility, you have made it possible to know more things, for your bones are the skeleton of an order that places all actions in relation to one another. So you have done good as well as ill. Therefore, I shall remake you and disgorge you, and I shall put the world under your liberating authority. But I shall split you into two, and one of you shall wear a crown, and one of you shall hold a ledger, and the first shall witness all things which are going to happen from now on, and the second shall remember everything which has happened, so that all pasts will always be here." And there is the time which passes forward, which we live in, and there is the time which moves in all directions, which we remember. And because we have accepted we are small, we only remember some things, and because we have accepted that we are both irrational and rational, even the time which has already happened can surprise us. And the spider whispered into the ear of her older daughter a secret, which I have had from that older daughter in turn, and it is this: "the clock always runs forward, but you can reset it and start again, and the hands will point to any number you want, so long as you take responsibility for what you are making." And because of what we all agreed to, what we compromised on, there are some thoughts who were rejected as part of the world, for no one would remember them as part of it, and we insisted on this. But we also agreed to the demands from the other side of the table. We accept that thoughts can become part of the world as well. And that is the world we live in.

And the one time Trickster let go the net and Wakboth swallowed the gods, Argrath — the perfect Orlanthi hero/follower of Seth? — had to cut the snake’s belly open, but all the gods were dead. Still, the cosmos may have been saved, anyway. Who was it who said that these days Yelm is more sun and less god? (It wasn’t me, I promise.) The world is saved by naturalising it, burning off all the fairy dust. Orlanth killed the sun/god and so trashed the proto-universe (the bad trip of the Gods War); the trick was to bring back the sun but not the god, yielding the real world (when we have all come down); that is the LBQ. Or that is the grumpy nihilist’s view.

This seems preferable, agree.

It’s quite possible that not only is there one, but that it actually preceded Harmast’s progressive revelation of the grand Lightbringer’s Quest. Call it the Lifebringer’s Quest, perhaps. Set is a loyalist; it’s just that he’s Ra’s man through and through. Osiris’s wife, Isis, manipulates her husband onto the throne in the place of radiant solar Ra, and Set (tumultuous, violent, the god of the wilderness and the foreigner) overthrows the usurper by force. But he is still necessary to defend Ra’s sun barque as it travels through the underworld, and the one time he took a day off was the day that the monstrous serpent Apep managed to devour the barque, and so Set had to cut the snake’s belly open at the eleventh hour to save the cosmos. Elsewhere on these forums I have likened Orlanth to Set, and it’s very apt, but Shargash similarly shares many interesting traits with the god of the Red Land. Before heaven, Before earth, Before the waters, Before the dark, Nothing moved on nothing, Nothing entered into nothing. Before the gods, Before the runes, Before me, Before you, Nothing moved on nothing, Nothing entered into nothing. Look into my hand. What, do you not know that Death is in Life?

Does that also apply to a QW clean-sheet genre-pack for Glorantha? Or specifically to the idea of a "HQG retrofit"?

I think there's a bit of nuance missing from that last bit... The whole "HQW" product line never really seemed to gain all that much traction, even when it was the only Gloranthan game in print. Maybe that was "the market" telling us; but maybe it was (the perennial accusation) just not supported/marketed as it deserved. Issaries was never but a very-tiny company, after all, though Greg licensed to Moon Design (and others) in an effort to get more resources for the line(s). Maybe "the market" has spoken... but maybe the market was never adequately engaged... I'd love to ask the question in relative terms: what percent of all RQ titles on the JC go to Electrum or better? And what percent of QW titles do so? Perhaps the singular datum that is Valley of Plenty renders such a query statistically invalid. But we're deep into the Black Arts of market-analysis here.

Interesting. Was Grandfather Mortal murdered, or was he just fed up of Yelm's unchanging world and just wanted something interesting to happen for a change? Nah, I think destruction is a good way to describe it. We're just wannabe Nysaloreans 😄 You could claim that 'destruction' just means 'change', but that doesn't mean you're suddenly happy that someone has stamped on your sandcastle. Whether the new thing is better or worse than the old thing is a valid consideration (that I'm sure many riddlers dismiss as a prosaic practicality unworthy of serious consideration by enlightened minds). This, again, is a point I see Orlanthi and Lunars (the fanatical ones) disagreeing on. Lunars claiming that change is inevitable and thus a good thing, and Orlanthi saying 'but what you're changing things into is worse'. I quite like the idea of a Lunar who doesn't ascribe to the idea that Chaos is an innate part of the world to be welcomed. Perhaps, in conversation with the Orlanthi, they acknowledge that it's a purely destructive force, but argue that as it's here anyway we might as well use it. Sounds like a Tarshite way of thinking to me, intermediate between the two camps. I also quite like the idea that the Lunars are absolutely right about Chaos simply being the force of creation...but not really considering that what it's creating might be not be in their own best interests. A real 'Finally we've done it!........Oh god, what have we done' moment. Or even that the Lunars think they're right, but in reality they've colossaly misjudged things and Chaos does mean the destruction of everything without the creation of anything new. The whole Lunar conflict really thrives when no-one really knows quite what they're doing or how things actually work.

I think that those are great adventures, and there is no reason that they can't work in the Borderlands. You can add more desolate little villages (like Weis) to the Raus domain without causing any problems. My only note is that they are relatively 'low-level" adventures for purposes of RQG.

The price of change — of anything happening, at all — is mortality. The world comes from the Void and to the Void it will return. If it loops exactly, who can tell? If a new and different world arises, that is the gift of Chaos. At least, that is what the bald levitator with the tail told me. 😉

I should have really used a term other than destruction 😅 I guess my idea was that chaos is a force that wants to turn glorantha into itself, and so it wants to destroy it.

Here is the correct table - note that it does not contain the duration (see the appropriate section)

[B]oth Law and Chaos create in different ways, and all creativity rests upon co-operation between elements of existence. He who operates solely from personal desire will not cooperate … Without co-operation and creativity, the being is a parasite … Nothing he can do or make can add to the sum of his species or culture. In this sense, fully Lawful beings can be as much agents of the dark side as was the worst Gbaji prophet. — Cults of Terror: Nysalor (Classic PDF, p. 87) According to this, Chaos can create — and isn’t that change worthy of the name? The selfish, childish, and uncooperative are called out as lacking the capacity to create — and that lack, we are told, doesn’t require a dash of Chaos. I don’t say you have to buy into the CoT view of how the world works, but creative Chaos hasn’t always been alien to the party line.

Everything in Glorantha comes from the Void. See? And yet one of the hallmarks of Chaos is mutation, which is a form of change. In fact, all change is both destruction and creation- one must destroy what existed before to make what will exist now. (Source and Creative Commons license.) Now, Umath had to destroy the connection between Sky and Earth in order to have his own realm of Air. Magasta had to destroy the perfect Earth Cube for rivers and seas and bays and harbors to exist. Xentha destroyed the golden color of the night sky, and Yelorna broke the Sky Dome to lead out the stars. One of Kyger Litor's large adult sons destroyed the inviolability of Aldrya's beloved trees with the Tree Chopping Song to make axes. All that destruction... but now we can feel the breeze as we sit on the dock of the bay and lean back and look up at the night sky and count the stars. Destruction, for lack of a better word, is good. Destruction is right. Destruction works. Destruction clarifies, cuts through, and if you listen to the Malkioni, it captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit, though they'd say "devolutionary", because they're all Devo over there. But... destruction is generally best accompanied by creation. The destruction of ignorance clarifies by creating knowledge. The destruction of a barrier creates a doorway, a window, a path. So there is destruction which is unaccompanied by creation, and creation which is unaccompanied by destruction, and the two are hard to distinguish from another when they start up.

It's funny you say that because I'm more of a lunar person too 😄I just have a diferent view on these things

Kinda-sorta. The Lightbringers’s quest is the just-so story for the year as well as the day (and the grand cosmic cycle — great year?), so: The Earth Queen followed Orlanth and Yelm to Rebirth in Time with the Dawn. Even before she appeared, her daughter Voria went about the world with the promise of life, leaving a trail of flowers behind her. — Prosopaedia: Ernalda (PDF, p. 35) Voria/Spring/young Ernalda precedes bounteous matron Ernalda and is the earth returning to life after the death of the Darkness/Gods War/Winter. Possibly this has become a little obscured with all the cruft the LBQ has accumulated over the decades.