Tabor

As someone who's only played RQG, I'd say Erithea is not being brought up enough. She's just Ernalda but worse. However, the real answer is the worst cult is the one I'm currently playing and the best one is the one the person in my group I hate is playing (just kidding I like you all).

Polestar need not be foreign. He saved a lot of people during the great darkness, maybe one of them was your grazelander clan. Besides, any solar enough culture is going to have a name and great respect for one of the most important stars.

On 5/19/2022 at 1:09 PM, JRE said:

I fully agree on Siglat. It is a bad sign when the literal Kingdom of War seems potentially better. At least more honest.

As for the chronology, you need to have the Westerners set up to have Arkat. Who would be Nysalor's shadow?

Death is more honest than life, but that doesn't make it preferable.

Snodal recognized Siglat as his son with Damosel of the Black Veil. If Siglat's Gbaji then something is seriously up with the Altinelans, they would have had to let him in and bring him to Snodal. Perhaps the Red Goddess is right and chaos is a necessary part of the world, hmm? But some of you aren't ready for that conversation, you storm people are barely literate in New Pelorian.

I would assume the Kargzant gets the bird, though a particularly tricky Other could use a summoning to worm their way back into the material plane.

Finally back home, pretty tired tonight but I will say that my own opinion is that the God Learners probably did pretty good in exterminating Arkati sects in Frontem. I'd think that if any Arkat worship remains in the country, it would probably be very secret and underground. However, they'd probably be rather quick in reviving it as soon as they encounter any remaining cults in Fronela - a likely candidate is Zemstown. They need anything they can get to fight the Kingdom of War, after all.

Thanks for the responses, everyone. I only get one post a day at the moment and I'm hitting the road tomorrow so I'm gonna try to make this one count.

On 5/17/2022 at 4:55 AM, metcalph said:

Depends on which Wiki you refer.  If it's my own writing then much of it was composed before the guide in order to make sense of the contradictory sources then proliferating about.

Pretty sure it's yours, yeah. Thanks fo

On 5/17/2022 at 7:10 AM, JRE said:

For me Solace is akin to Nirvana, breaking from the material world to join the creator. The main objective effect of achieving Solace is that you cannot be contacted, either through your descendants or any magic. To reach Solace you have to follow Malkion's rules to the end. Ascended Masters are those few individuals that are claimed to have reached Solace while still alive. As once you are in Solace you cannot give any magical benefit, it is not possible in a practical way to confirm if you really ascended while alive, so the list is not universally accepted, as it reflects the preferences of each sect. Many are not Hrestoli, so there is no connection between Men of all and ascension, except that many consider Hrestol himself ascended. They offer examples of good behaviour, and some sects may well offer magical benefits by living that way that they claim come from the Masters, but it cannot be confirmed as the masters are unreachable. Some sects even reject the Ascended Master idea, such as the Rokari, so I expect  nobody considers Rokar an ascended master. 

Joy, which is the core Hrestoli concept, for me is what you feel when you break the rules because it is the right action. It is a personal experience, and the right reasons vary from one sect to another. Joy breaks also the material world chains on your soul, and take you closer to Solace. Breaking caste law is probably the easiest way to experience Joy, and it has become the basis of Loskalm's New Hrestolism, but Old Hrestoli will claim that just breaking the laws is not the point, it has to be at the right time and for the right reasons. 

Interesting. The way I see Solace is that it's a logical understanding of one's place in the world that brings relief from suffering. It might be highly complex, but once one is walked through the syllogisms or equations and comprehends it, one has it. I also think it has a lot of overlap with the Mostali and their conception of the world-machine, following your caste duties to heal the world, etc. What's interesting to is that Solace was revealed by Zzabur, and we know that the people that still live in Zzabur's society don't believe in an afterlife (which may or may not be canon, can't find a source but it certainly seems to be a popular belief, as @Nick Brooke mentions it in his post), so I think the idea of Solace being a place of refuge in the afterlife is a later addition that came about once enough people had experienced Solace that it became a more prominent place in the Otherworld. Does it function that way now? Maybe, but I don't think it did when Zzabur first revealed it. Plus, it was first experienced before the dawn. Though it all follows logically, many of the original concepts, runes, and lemmas have now been fundamentally changed or destroyed by time and chaos. It's probably a lot more work to reach Solace in the third age, having to be like "OK so before the sunstop light used to have a speed of x and hue of y so when you plug those in instead of their modern values then you z."

On the other hand Joy is a far more emotional experience of the Invisible God, and once you've touched it and felt its awareness (and, inversely, it has also touched you and been made aware of you), you are certain that the IG has a plan for you. No need to logic it all out, your god knows about you and you've felt it in your bones.

On 5/17/2022 at 10:11 AM, Eff said:

And this is where the MoA/knight comes from- you have had the subjective experience of having your caste identity erased and you have become the maker of the laws of Malkion for a moment. You have authority over the laws to interpret them and even change them, make rulings and exceptions. (And Hrestol judges the Vadeli.) Lots of profound things fall out of this. 

I've always been interested in Hrestol's time in the Vadeli Isles and thought it would make a fun myth. Something like he tries to be fair and moral but the Vadeli twist all his judgments to suit themselves and do evil with them. Fun little narrative.

On 5/17/2022 at 10:11 AM, Eff said:

But Joy doesn't have to be a grand experience- I think Hrestol experienced it for the first time accidentally and then had to rediscover the pathways to it that can be approached intentionally. So you can achieve Joy without necessarily having a clear understanding of what Joy is and what it means. 

And that's why New Hrestol Idealism can go peasant/dronar -> soldier/horal -> man-of-all/hrestol -> wizard/zzabur -> noble/talar, because while you can achieve Joy through a process of weakening the ego's attachment to caste as an existential definition, you can also achieve it through other means. And Irensavalism separates out the demiurge Makan and the true Creator Irensaval, and presumably places the authority of zzaburi and talars on the latter- Joy in their understanding is the ability to get past Makan of the Third Action and move into the truer world beyond, where true authority is from. 

And an Ascended Master would be someone who has transformed the Laws in some fashion, who has achieved sufficient identification with Malkion to "write a grimoire", as older materials might put it. But this is separate from Joy or being a man-of-all, because you can also achieve it through the process of creating additions or supplements to the Laws alongside altering them or making exceptions. And so Rokar can be revered by a school of thought that objects to Joy as meaningful or authoritative and is deeply suspicious of men-of-all (while appropriating titles like watcher and high watcher from the Hrestolist man-of-all). 

In other words, an Ascended Master really is like a Christian saint, in that they can be someone who has practiced esoteric or contemplative or monastic life, or they could be someone like St. Thekla. There are also parallels with Zen concepts of kenshou and satori here. 

Also interesting is how it parallels Dragonewts and their philosophy. They slowly become dragons through reincarnating through their own set of castes, having many different emotional experiences. While mystic truth is never a guarantee, it certainly seems that having a lot of experience in different areas of life is a big help in receiving it. A lesson for us all.

On 5/17/2022 at 11:33 AM, Jeff said:

During the Ban it was easy. Through training and experience, we are able to mimic in reverse the mistakes of the demiurge and achieve Joy. Indeed even peasants could do it. But now, even some of our most noble leaders are without Joy, a sign of our degenerate times no doubt.

This would seem to line up with my impressions of the frequency of Joy among the different castes. I'd say the "big names" all have experienced it regularly- Meriatan, Penthea, Gundreken, the Council of the Wise. Many Nobles too, some Wizards, but as you get to the Loskalmi Men-of-All, Guardians, and Dronars it becomes a vanishingly small percentage of people.

18 hours ago, scott-martin said:

For the people of post-Siglat Loskalm I think there is a terrifying shadow between theory and practice. In theory, joy might come at any moment . . . often, as you suggest, completely unexpected. Joy is a Surprise and a Surprise can be its own Joy. You can experience it as a child digging in the yard, sudden moments of being, sun and smell and the work that is its own reward, the butter melting on the hot bread fresh from the oven. You can experience it at the end, looking backward at the whole carnival of being human. Joy, the riddle goes, is what goes on four legs in the morning, three legs at night, changing shape with you along the way.

In practice, they don't make much time for it until near the very end, when they've absorbed multiple perspectives and lived multiple lives. It's in the contrasts that they discover the universal experience that unites us all. We could even argue that this is a form of native "experimental heroquesting" across incarnations, but that's heavy stuff. Just follow the tension between theory and practice and you'll discover some great memories.

 

While Joy can come at any time, I do think it's more likely to come at some times than others and that the Loskalmi ordering of society and progression through caste is meant to make it far easier for it to come. I'm sure they also have some meditative practices and texts to contemplate for it as well, else Meriatan wouldn't be shutting himself away in a monastery before the coming of the Kingdom of War.

7 hours ago, Joerg said:

There is no Guardian caste. Guardians are members of the Commoner caste who have taken on voluntary duties for their communities, which include military service, peacekeeping and mediatory involvement in disputes. Probably tax collection and similar functions, too.

One might say that in Siglat's Loskalm, the Guardians were those who had mastered the Commoner Caste and became (possible) trainees for the Man-of-All path. There should be plenty Guardians who have no ambition or hope of achieving the Man-of-All status but who are content to serve their communities in the slightly elevated form of the community volunteer.

A Guardian is not a Horali warrior. In practice, the rank and file of the Loskalmi army is made up by Guardians, yes. Those who serve permanently are trainee men-of-all. The Loskalmi man-of-all replaces the Horali caste as having mastered all of the warriors requirements.

I disagree pretty strongly with this. The Guide seems to use the word Guardian pretty interchangeably with Soldier in the sections on Loskalm, measuring battalions in terms of Guardians, Men-of-All, etc. Which would lead me to believe that in addition to being a town militia, a guardian is a standing occupation for someone, more akin to an Orlanthi thane than just a Dronar with a pitchfork. Besides, we know that under the original Malkioni law it was forbidden for Dronar to fight or be harmed in war. While Loskalm is casting off a lot of old beliefs, I would still think there's a pretty sharp divide between someone who is a trained soldier and someone who is any other Dronar job. Horali and Men-of-All coexisted alongside each other during Hrestol's era as well, so I don't think the two would be merged together.

I've been doing a fair bit of reading on the West, and as I've been studying the Guide, Revealed Mythologies, and the Middle Sea Empire book, I've run into a bit of a snag in my understanding of the central concepts of Joy and Men of All. In order to explain, let me first elaborate my own understanding, and then ask a couple of questions.

So, Hrestol is the first to experience Joy, and he creates the Man-of-All caste by teaching it to others. At this stage the two seem inextricably linked: having Joy is what makes one a Man-of-All. Being able to experience Joy also seems to come from having been a member of every caste first, though of course it was spontaneous for Hrestol himself. Presumably he either changed caste membership several times on his accidental Heroquest, or was just particularly primed for this mystic-ish enlightenment through luck, his own philosophizing, what have you. The Glorantha wiki entry on Joy seems to agree that Joy is what makes someone a Man-of-All, and though I can't find an exact citation in the Guide or Revealed Mythologies, my own reading of the passages on Hrestol and Arkat seems to line up with this idea.

So, question one: How exactly did Hrestol lay out how to achieve Joy, and am I correct in thinking that Joy was necessary to be a Man-of-All in his time?

Skipping over the second age and the God Learners, we wind up in Loskalm, who have their own Man-of-All caste. The Loskalmi promote someone to a Man-of-All straight from the Guardian caste, and before someone has been a Wizard or Noble. In fact, membership in the M-o-As is a necessary prerequisite for becoming a Wizard as well as a Noble. So, there's an issue here, because the concepts of Joy and Men-of-All are now decoupled a bit, leading me to believe that a Loskalmi Man-of-All is not the same thing as a first age M-o-A. Which would make sense to me, as a Loskalmi Wizard is different from a Zzaburi, etc. If it's necessary to experience every caste before achieving Joy (which is my understanding), then a Loskalmi Man-of-All is someone who is preparing themselves to achieve Joy, but has not actually experienced it yet. It may also be the case that my understanding of Joy is incorrect, and Joy is actually what allows you to change caste in the first place. In that case though, a Loskalmi M-o-A has already changed caste once before, from a Dronar/Worker to a Holiri/Guardian. In that case they would all have already achieved Joy a good time before becoming Men-of-All, which just seems absurd and also would mean that Loskalm has tens of thousands of enlightened mystics running around in it, which is Lunar Empire levels of crazy.

Question two: When exactly in the procession of castes do Loskalmi expect to experience Joy, if it can be expected at all?

Then, we have Ascended Masters. The Guide blurb on them simply defines them as people who have "achieved complete unity with the Invisible God." Now, Joy is defined as a union with the Invisible God, which would seem to imply that anyone who has received Joy is an Ascended Master, but that feels wrong to me. Ascended Masters seem rather rare, and more on the level of Gods or Heroes. The wiki even calls them the Malkioni equivalent of heroes, and though I can't find any support in the Guide for this it makes more sense to me. My own guess is that while Joy is a unity with the Invisible God, it's not a complete unity. We know that Solace is related to the 3rd action and Joy to the 2nd, so that would imply that there is an as-of-yet unknown mental state/revelation connected to the First Action (Illumination?). Maybe the Ascended Masters are people who have experienced that. 

Which brings me to my third question: what separates an Ascended Master from a Man-of-All from someone who has experienced Joy?

Laying it all out, I think my confusion is caused by the fact that we have two names for things: Man-of-All and Ascended Master, but three different things. There's someone who is seeking Joy, someone who has experienced Joy, and someone who is beyond the world. The term Man-of-All seems to overlap the first two, and Ascended Master the last two. It really makes me want to bring back the word Knight, which I understand was cut from the game line for having too many real world connotations, but it would make a lot more sense to me though if Knight was the Loskalmi word for their not-yet-Joyful mounted warrior/wizard caste and if Man-of-All was specifically a term for someone who had experienced Joy. It would fit with how the Loskalmi simplified the other caste names, presumably an effort by Siglat to modernize their language. Still that's based on a lot of assumptions that - as I've already outlined - may be wrong.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and hopefully you can help me clear this up.