Ormi Phengaria

4 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

so depending on the version of the rules the runes don't mean the same things. Note that I prefer rqg 😛

It does represent the humanoid shape. That's not everything that it means, but that's what the rune itself, the symbol, shows. Just like the beast rune representing the armour plate over the eye of a dragon, or the death rune representing a sword. The same description of the man rune this is being pulled from goes into the different meanings ascribed to it.

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

But how does that "I fight" cross the gap to "we win" in Hill of Gold? Or does it? Does it need to? Maybe this is not the way cold sun people recreate the world and reweave the compromise. 

IFWW is a misleading phrase, eliding the middle, which is "I lost utterly". In the course of "I Fought", your personal power proves to be useless, your being is stripped away, you dissolve into Chaos. But something eternal still remains, and it's that thing which carries onto "We Won". For Heortling/Orlanthi masculine initiations, this is the Star Heart, which I think is particularly notable for connecting these two events together.

Yelmalio fights, bleeds out his heat and light, and becomes indistinct, yet something remains: the imperishable truth of light, still there beyond the darkness. "We" is really the whole world, which depends on the light for its continued existence and life. Even Uz.

Or, if you're still given worship as an ancestor while also reincarnating into others, you are mighty enough to be in multiple places at once, like the gods can. Possibly the case with most heroes. Might even meet and interact with yourself. I don't think that's so unimaginable.

I think the division which assigns Kajabor to natural evil and Wakboth to moral evil aligns with expectations all across Glorantha. Despite this, there is no formal (i.e. runic) evil in our received Gloranthan metaphysics, just a circular approximation, which sort of kills this twice-theodicy off in the cradle. We may now follow the dead to Arachne Solara. Kajabor in the Cosmic Compromise is intuitive: we can make peace with natural evil, accepting its existence if not its necessity. But moral evil is an empty mask. Wakboth is defined by his excess, his evil is cosmic redundancy. How could this ever be compromised with?

I suggest: by prying off the mask, picking the scab, and seeing that it is the same wound underneath. Wakboth is natural in the world.

Quote

"The Devil is one of the Bad Guys. He is a personification of abstract principles as observed and feared by the Theistic Praxians. Their gods depend upon their Being for existence and, at the Godtime Compromise, sold out their freedom in exchange for Being. They MUST view anything threatening their static Being as evil since it is a danger to their very fiber of existence. The Devil, a personification of entropy (or cosmic death) takes on a personality in their myths because it is how they think."
— Cults of Prax, Designer's Notes

Kajabor is the Devil you know, and Wakboth the Devil you don't.

If one's imagined solution to interpersonal violence is to just mark up some violence as impersonally necessary, no matter its horror or existential meaninglessness, I don't think you can coherently call resistance to that idea a "perpetual pogrom." And that is the nicest thing I can say about that choice of words.

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

But we all want that, don’t we?

No. However, many do desire a cure to their existential sickness, and Illumination can provide that. Illumination is calming. It calms instinctive revulsion towards chaos, and the terror felt by its encroachment into the world, and provides the same calm to chaotic beings in the hatred and pain they feel towards existence and life.

But this condition is not universal, just familiar.

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

But did illumination make them do it, or did it just put a tool in their hand?

The latter, as follows from Illumination being neither Chaotic nor selfish inherently. However, giving a desperate and anxious person the unshakable knowledge that there is no fundamental difference between chaos and cosmos has a predictable, typical outcome. In the most benign case, they come to the belief that there is no difference between their personal existence or nonexistence, and lie down to rot. Rashoran calmed the gods as well, and most of them who received his teachings faced the Darkness and their demise in peace. Mortals seem to have a greater persistence for a time, but not usually for the better.

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Rhetorical questions both, so put you foot on the path to illumination — we may never get there, but what other path is there?

Plenty of people get by without the Secret Knowledge. The persistence of chaos in any given worldview is not a failure, morally, intellectually, or otherwise. In fact, they too recognize that chaos is an inseparable part of the world in which they live, just in a different way, and one which is easy to malign as hypocritical, irrational, or malicious from a supposedly elevated vantage. But they haven't seen what we've seen.

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

However, these two things are not the same:

• illumination doesn’t come with a moral lecture, a set of values, it is neutral;
• whatever you want, whatever you believe, it is right for you, and I approve.

True. But the practical distinction between these, for Nysalor, is simply not there. It's not there for the god, who wasn't and isn't a god, whose meaning is Illumination and the Riddle. It's not there for the cult in whatever form it takes, because such organs are constituted by purpose. And it most certainly is not there for any given Illuminate by the mere fact of their Illumination.

Illuminates have nothing intrinsically stopping them from using their power to take from the world and give absolutely nothing back. They also have nothing intrinsically stopping them from using Chaos to this end. Demonstrably, when Illumination is widespread and unrestricted in the world, people who think and act like this amass great power. And Nysalor doesn't care.

All he wants, if he could be said to want anything, is for you to ask questions about the universe and find their answers, a process which naturally leads to Illumination. If wrestling with those tough questions just makes you a better immortal cannibal tyrant? You know what, that's great for you, it's great to see someone working through their issues and really growing. We're all just here to find own meaning, man.

That chain of causality is what makes Nysalor Chaotic, even though Illumination is not Chaotic in itself, and even though simply being selfish and destructive isn't Chaotic in itself. It is why the Gbaji Wars occurred, and why the Arkati view and appoint themselves as monitors of Illumination and the Other Side.

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

We might take refuge in their trickster complex if we get any time to prepare, speaking of sophisticated lightbringer contexts.

Quote

If the ritual setting is missing, trickster is missing. If his companions–all the other spiritual forces within whose fixed domains he carries on his mischief–are no longer with us, then he is no longer with us. Hermes cannot be rightly imagined without the more serious Apollo whose cattle he steals, or the grieving Demeter whose daughter he retrieves from the underworld. The god of the roads needs the more settled territories before his traveling means very much. If everyone travels, the result is not the apotheosis of trickster but another form of his demise.

Here we have come back in a roundabout way to the earlier point: trickster belongs to polytheism or, lacking that, he needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people and institutions and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that their boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly disturbed. Most of the travelers, liars, thieves, and shameless personalities of the twentieth century are not tricksters at all, then. Their disruptions are not subtle enough, or pitched at a high enough level. Trickster isn't a run-of-the-mill liar and thief.

—Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

And to keep this from seeming too tangential, I'll give the thought that "Arkati Trickster Shaman" is, in many ways, an apparent triple redundancy. Any such transplants would likely just find themselves dissolving away into the whole by one means or another. Yet "Arkat" passed through these context-shifts while remaining "Arkat", even if that appears self-evidently contradicted to those who didn't follow him to the very end. His pledge is what protected him, and the pledge was set upon Mystery, though perhaps he did not at first comprehend this himself.

Seems like the story of Water and Chaos is murkier than it's made out to be! We might need to wade into the mud and work out the truth of this sticky situation ourselves. Really get our heads dirty. We may find ourselves mired, but w—[gurling noises as she is drowned in gorp by a Krjalki]

Arachne Solara is also more often 6 + 2 (two arms, six legs, or six arms, two legs) when interacted with. She's still eight--particularly when sideways--, but two Powers are distinguished from the rest, and my further guess is that their union produces . Consider Asrelia's association.

(And when presented as both spider and woman in iconography, she has 10, 8+2. Lists of ten Powers have previously been made with no agreement as to what fills them. Sometimes it's Law and Chaos, sometimes Luck and Fate, sometimes it's other even less common runes. Whatever the choice, though, it probably represents the highest polarity in itself, the Twins.)

When Zzabur is watching with the Red Sands of Time nearby, magic lasts for exactly two and fifteen minutes each, for spirit and rune spells respectively, as he has defined it. When he's not, though, magic lasts exactly long enough to constitute a short or long scene in narrative terms. ☺️

8 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

her definition is lord of the universe, though. that title exists but it seems quite different in meaning from what people mean by "Nature". she maintains the entire world.

she's the distant god, much like Olorun in Orisha, responsible for the world but not directly worshipped.

Yes; I wasn't presenting a counterexample. It's nature as physis, particularly physis as opposed to the nomos of Time. All within the Web is Nature following its Fate.

1 hour ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

I continue to suggest "Nature" is the wrong way to understand Gloranthan deities. Many of the deities described herein are Plant ones, not "Nature".

Definitely. There is, however, a Goddess of Nature in the setting, and I should hope that colours how people think of it!

Rather than base-7, I suspect if the Lunars have made their own count, it might be base-27, since that could at least see calendrical use, and can go by the ancient "Twenty-Seven Carvers". Maybe some Carmanian numerology, too. Base-12 might be found in Pamaltela with the Hoolars offering a folkloric explanation.

To comment on the topic at large, I'm not entirely sure I like the straightforward shamanic analogy for humans-in-Aldrya. On the one hand, there are elements in this which are assuredly appropriate, as "forest consciousness" may naturally have its most direct route for creatures of flesh through the vastness of pixie pharmacopoeia. But on the other, the forest is precisely the place where the harder borders of ingrained human perspectives ought to be dissolving away into soft, gradual, and interpenetrating boundaries. The wood girds itself in ecotones, and intersperses groves and meadows, bare rock, streams, snags and fallen trees. Fauna give shape to canopy, understory, shrub, and herb layers, and are fed upon in turn by the dark life in the soil, which itself weaves between and around the roots of the trees, forming the medium of our wood wide web.

Ought not elf-change be something similar? I think it's possible to reduce a principle from the form runes along the lines of "you are what you imbibe." Granted, it normally may manifest only on transgenerational timescales, but it makes a distinct sort of sense to me that the Aldryami could accelerate the process to somewhere between your distant descendants and your quite immediate and calamitous rebirth. Maybe some form of death is still a necessity; humans do usually only become green in advanced stages of decomposition! But the inclusion of "Maker modalities" (as @scott-martinphrased it) in this ritual initiation is certainly strange, even if it does make me start giggling about "machine elves."

19 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Which was my point — although made from the POV of an outsider/unbeliever.

It sometimes seems to me that some people’s attitude to Glorantha goes a bit like this:

1. In the real world, magic and religion are bad science (and so they don’t work);
2. In Glorantha, the natural laws are different and — abracadabra! — bad science becomes good, magic works, and religion is true.

Even as a lifelong infidel, this seems to me rather hard on real-world religion — as if it were “broken” and could be “fixed” by importing some natural laws and grimoires from the Lozenge. Surely, that is not right. Surely, the real world is exactly as “magical” as it needs to be, already. And if I don’t see the world in the same way religious people do, that is not because we disagree about physics and chemistry, is it?

Sometimes it can be. I worried about including the singular line you quoted for all of the reasons I outlined in the rest of the post; you are substituting your own understanding of the distinction when I speak of it. Your read of magic in Glorantha is suffering from the same problem. It is not taking the magic out and putting it back in. It does not share the necessity of a divide where people "really did this" and were declared "lunatics" on the one side, and the Great Hallucination/Metaphor/Symbolism/Whatever on the other side. It is always exactly as literal, actual, and real as it needs to be for its participants to experience it and wield it. The wonderful opportunity Glorantha gifts to us is instead the opportunity to see and experience these other perspectives with far greater ease. If you'd like, you could imagine roleplaying to be its own kind of altered state.

On 12/28/2022 at 3:04 AM, mfbrandi said:

I am not attacking the IRL ritual or shamanic initiates’ right to say that they died and were brought back by their initiator. I don’t say that they are insincere, but I think the thing needs to be approached with a little subtlety.

But this is the thought experiment: a member of the shaman’s community — not a dissident or “unbelieving” member — who is not currently in an altered state finds a shaman actually eviscerating a would-be initiate and stuffing the cavity with stones; do they think (1) “business as usual”, (2) “something has gone terribly wrong”, (3) something else entirely, or (4) it depends?

Is this really a controversial take?

Disclaimer: I've only skimmed through the third page of this thread, and my own spirituality is predominantly "shamanic" (as katulunan or wuyu/very red daojiao).

Speaking of belief in these terms, where you state what it is you see as an outsider as the reality or actuality, and the received explanation being a layer of meaning-making laid atop the reality as something less essential, is the point where you will run into problems and potential controversy. To the practitioners, they are often just as literal and actual-- with outside eyes and a willingness to accept that your senses may not be absolute, it would be as though you are standing in another world where you do not and cannot witness these things occurring. And, yes, I would agree that you are, do not, and cannot. We assign different meanings to the same concepts, even if we share the words, to the point where what I am describing may be ineffable to you without one of us taking the effort to translate what is untranslatable and mix our worlds together.

With these initiations, the flesh, the inert matter, is not what is being spoken of. What is being spoken of is the living substance, the thing which is the deeper or higher reality, which is more true. This is absolutely not to say that these two categories are unrelated-- things are done to and with bodies which even you may perceive, and which may frighten, shock and/or disgust you. And it would not surprise you to learn that there have been many misunderstandings in this, to be grossly charitable, over the past several centuries.

10 hours ago, Mugen said:

Clearly, this was an attempt to make CHA more... appealing... which has unexpected impact on some species.

I don't know if it's unexpected. Their Rune Lords are literally called Leaders, and rather than a CHA requirement, get the status by demonstrating any leadership in raids and battle at all (alongside the skill requirements.)

Worth noting that CHA in RQG is neither appearance nor "personal allure", but strength of personality. CHA matters to magic not as potential for connection (really, that would be POW), but as the ability to continue to distinguish yourself from the abstract or immaterial forces of personality, that is the gods and spirits, which you are interacting with. For this reason it also applies to distinguishing yourself from other mortal people, i.e. through leadership.

9 minutes ago, svensson said:

'Change' will happen with or without Chaos. It is the very nature of life that change happens. Beings are born, live to effect the world and die, the quintessential changes of existence. The seasons pass and the land changes. The only constant is change. Sorry to upset all the Mostali out there, but there it is.

Chaos is not like that. Chaos is nihilistic destruction solely and only for destruction's sake. Chaos destroys NOT to make way for the new, but because its only impulse is to destroy, infect, subvert, demean, and befoul.

You know. You're right. The Bat really isn't chaotic!

Sometimes, destruction is good! Sometimes, you just have to make yourself a little breathing room between heaven and earth.

On 12/4/2022 at 10:46 AM, mfbrandi said:

So I do think that Gloranthan Chaos and mysticism/illumination make a natural package and that this was likely a result of the designers’ take on IRL “eastern” mysticism, which on the face of it, at least, they seem not to have been huge fans of. So why not Kralorela, too? Whether this all amounts to an irredeemable Orientalist nightmare, I am not going to venture an opinion on.

As a "religious Daoist" in my beliefs first and foremost, much of the more accessible material on illumination, Vithelan enlightenment, draconic consciousness, etc. did come across that way to me– initially. Equating the Void with Chaos maps pretty well to equating weiwuwei with acceptance of evil. But the presented conflicts and perspectives relating to those things are not what they might first seem, and now I can't help but read them as being exceedingly mischievous.

1 hour ago, Lordabdul said:

Where did you get this quote from? The Guide only says that it's mostly underwater, and populated by schools of fish and Ludoch.

Well, he is half-fish!

2 minutes ago, Eff said:

It fails to incorporate the "primordial"/"formless potential" motif, but it also runs into problems when we take a look at how the concept of the Other is used in the existing texts, so that we must say that there are Others and Others, that the identical proper noun refers to two different things without clarification.

The primordialism is in the drive toward oblivion, and that also remains the source of its creative potential, which I have mentioned before in this thread. Without the Chaosium, all would be unchanging grey stasis, and yet generation from this state is still its destruction, starting from the separation of unity into duality.

With regard to the Other, that was my very conscious choice. Yelm is Absolute, and only at his nadir when the entire world has died and joined him in Hell—the Absolute again—does he confront his Other and integrate it. He does this by the means of Illumination. These concepts don't diverge.

12 minutes ago, Eff said:

Does this mean that broo are the consequence of Otherizing rapists and that if Orlanthi hated rapists less, this mutation wouldn't happen? How do we square this with the extent to which the broo exist as a consequence of injustice towards rape survivors, as from most versions of their origin story? 

I'm trying to be explicit in suggesting that it is not primarily about hatred, bigotry, or social marginalization. These are second-order phenomena. What matters is the extent to which the Orlanthi refuse to approach these things as anything other than individual, inexplicable, and utterly unrelated evil. The extent is total. Rape isn't to be understood as an enduring facet of the patriarchal violence of a warrior culture, but is first and foremost something to be blamed on women who stand outside of the honour-ethos. If that is untenable, then the motivations of the perpetrators of this violence are to be erased by rendering them simply insane. This is a pattern which should stand out as intimately familiar, in my opinion.

29 minutes ago, Eff said:

Are people born ogres, with unusually sharp teeth, because Gloranthans otherize cannibalism too much, with the exception of Praxians? Would a member of the Cannibal Cult turn into an ogre outside of Prax?

They manifest themselves as Ogres after initiation. Ogres are also much, much more than cannibals. The Red Cow Saga would seem to suggest that they are Ragnaglari, and hold to a rapine view of the entire world, including other Ogres, and most definitely the community and culture in which they are born and raised. This is, again, something latent and unexamined in the Orlanthi warrior culture. It's what happens when outwardly directed violent abuse and dispossession comes home. After cutting past all of the social ritual, when strength remains the ultimate justification, you will find the Ragnaglar impulse.

That is, to me, quite different from the way the Cannibal Cult seems to use the Survival Covenant for its way of life and magic. They are deeply disconcerting to other Praxians, who don't pretend to completely understand them, but like the Morokanth, they are integrated.

1 hour ago, Eff said:

On the metaphorical level, ogres are straightforwardly a representation of otherization run wild to the point of believing that anyone outside of yourself could be a secret devil-worshipping cannibal. But on a literal, diegetic level, the relationship being such that xenophobia literally warps reality until otherized individuals grow sharp teeth and get a hankering for long pork starts off asinine and quickly becomes offensive. 

And this is the same problem with your presentation of the Lunars- metaphorically, the basic answer is that the Lunars believe that the Lunar Way allows you to heal the wounds that Chaos represents through incorporating Chaos into the universe rather than rejecting it, thus metaphorically rejecting otherization. But within the diegesis, if Chaos is the wounds of otherization, then if the Lunars diegetically believe in making it part of the harmony of the universe, their solution to otherization is to keep otherizing, and if they diegetically believe in healing those wounds, then they're no longer philosophically pro-Chaos, they're philosophically anti-Chaos. Which involves redefining another textual aspect until it means the opposite of what it appears to say.

Ah. I feel it's important to mention here that the existence of the Other is not reducible to the process of Othering. The condition is usually co-constitutive; Chaos is not particularly suggestive of subaltern nativity. And that may ease some of this Lunar difficulty; the Way seeks to integrate the Other while also keeping it Other. Self and Other exist both as opposites and as a unity within the Ultimate. That, to me, is a nearly perfect encapsulation of Lunar mysticism. It would seem to me that to make the Way selective in the suggested manner, to turn We Are All Us into the conviction that the Other does not or should not exist, would be to flatten it into a worse caricature than even the one where it's straight-forwardly evil and antagonistic.