mfbrandi

GLORANTHAN KARAOKE They say Danaë is in tonight, but I don’t think this one is directed at her: Some people say my words cannot be true Have faith in me, my child, and I’ll show you I will give you those things you thought unreal The sun, the moon, Arkat all bear my seal Follow me now and you will not regret Leaving the life you led before we met You must surrender to this light of mine Forever shining till the end of time Your trust in me has just got to be real Before you’ll know the way you’re going to feel Now that you’re bathing in my golden shower Our light grows stronger now with every hour Look into my eyes, you’ll see who I am My name is Nysalor, please take my hand If Uncle ZeeZee’s here, there could be fight … or is that him singing? Gosh!

I think so, too, but aren’t we supposed to think that Ragnaglar and Wakboth are not currently possible objects of cult? If so, then on the equivalence theory, they wouldn’t be available to shamans just now either. And presumably, the Invisible God has long been out of touch with everyone. BUT I usually have things exactly wrong. 😉 ———————————————————— On the unavailability of Wakboth: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/the-moral-evil-of-glorantha/

Does Dr. Jekyll encounter Mr. Hyde? Does Arkat have a mirror?

I dare say that is right, but some things are suggestive: Nysalor -> The Bright One -> The Shining One -> Lucifer -> The Devil Gbaji -> The Deceiver -> The Prince of Lies -> Satan -> The Devil We could see Rashoran/a as an angel ministering to the distressed in the Dark till s/he met the notorious Trio. Perhaps their ritual of chaos birth was persuading or forcing Rashoran/a to glug down Dr. Jekyll’s formula. So angels fall, even the brightest. If Lucifer is the light-bringer, the dawn-bringer, we might imagine that that is the Gloranthan Devil’s rôle, too: stitch the Devil into the dying world to create the mundane world of time and the first sunrise. The power of chaos birth. As long as chaos has its “right” place in the world, the Gods War is held at bay, and it is possible to birth gods into time, providing they have the right relationship with time — chaos births. And destroying the “lighter” aspects of Rashoran/a come again perhaps brings us closer to the lifting of the Block, chaos rebirth, and Mr. Hyde redux. Perhaps I see these alternations everywhere. Perhaps they are an illusion, and both aspects are ever present — or neither is and the death of the Devil is the death of the gods, as it represents the demystification/disenchantment of the mundane world. Perhaps not. 😉 [Don’t worry, this isn’t a credo. I am just letting the wheels spin.] And as to what Arkat gets to call anyone: Arkat -> Zorak Zoran -> Lord Demon of the Legions of Death -> pot calling the kettle black?

Well … “Roll d100 under POW for divine intervention” as an overt mechanic has the characters as the pigeons. “Roll d100 under POW for divine intervention” as a covert mechanic has the players as the pigeons. To the experimental heroquester, the gods are the pigeons — and the otherworlds are labs full of Skinner boxes? — and the trick is to nudge the pigeon–gods into new stereotyped behaviours, conditioned reflexes, or superstitions. There is this caged lion, and one of its little acquired behavioural tics is to eat a zoo keeper given the chance. Opening the cage door at the right moment — that is casting a bit of offensive rune magic.

Ompalam: The gods’ actions are fully determined and at every point freely chosen: freedom is slavery. Aldrya: Are we unfree because we grow toward the light? Mostal: A fully repaired World Machine has no moving parts. Eurmal: Free will is an illusion brought about by an insufficiency of peyote. Nysalor: Nothing happens for a reason.

So what is the approved manner of calling out a racist caricature for its inaccuracy if comparing picture and pictured is forbidden? Clearly, the Nysalor cult was supposed to be seen as some kind of commentary on Zen Buddhism (Alan Watts flavour?) — with the riddlers offering their koans — and that may well have been culturally insensitive, but I don’t see how making the Nysalor cult essentially and exaggeratedly monstrous is going to help, even if you tag on a “thou shalt not compare this to Buddhism”. As for the supposed nihilism of the riddlers, the slide into the dark side — the baleful influence of Star Wars? — was presented as an error, not an entailment of Chaos = Law, wasn’t it? Once a being has realized that there is no final difference between Chaos and Law, he may later make a similar but false parallel between his personal ethics and his personal desires, reasoning that since there is no ultimate division to the former, neither is there any final difference between the latter. — Cults of Terror (Classic PDF, p. 87) [emphasis mine] Not “similar and similarly false parallel”. The slide to the Dark Side is an optional extra and an error in reasoning, not the essence of the insight (illumination). If we are somewhere given a good reason to believe that if only the equivalence of Chaos and Law is true then what we want is what is right, I don’t know what it is (or where it is). I am sure there are people who think — of the real world, not the game world (as if any of us here can tell them apart!) — that unless we can read right and wrong from the physics of the universe we are lost; they are one step away from the dark side themselves, though they may rail against it. It seems pretty clear that Greg’s Gloranthan gods viewed the void as evil — presumably because in it they would not exist, though why their extinguishment should be evil I couldn’t say — but I am not qualified to say what Greg thought on his own account; there is this, but what is one to make of it? It certainly seems that for someone (possibly fictional), nirvana is evil (or an evil). Other interpretations of evil will be revealed and explored where appropriate. Some will be mentioned here. There is an Empty Void, which is a pre-everything conception and bears some resemblance to a Buddhist Nivanna — Greg Stafford, Cults of Prax: Designer Notes (Classic PDF, p. 106) Perhaps we can say that viewing the void as evil is itself an example of dark side “false parallel” thinking: “I do not want to be extinguished, therefore nirvana (the empty void/extinguishment/cosmic death) is evil.” The equation of desire and ethics.

Isn’t there always a third term in Arkat–Nysalor?

Although … Holmes and Moriarty take their tumble at the Reichenbach Falls straight into the Underworld and have to find their way/s out of Hell has its appeal. Which of them is Ethilrist? Both?

I think it was Maus that gave us the expression “my father bleeds history”. Jörg has a little crimson vampire bat handy for when he needs to post.

Some people might be imagining something like this: Great God Major God Bog-standard God Minor God Great Spirit Demigod Superhero Hero Schmuck Top Trumps! Some might respond by quibbling about the categories and the orderings — the stamp collectors and train spotters — but not question the idea that the “right” set of categories (to be determined) would occur in an ideal “physics” of Glorantha. In their ontology, these are natural kinds … if you like. But that is what I am skeptical about, although it is all but irresistible when the game has special rules for everything: the game “engine” becomes the physics of the world — “if you sacrifice x points (Joules) of POW (energy) to god y, then …” kind of thing. Gods aren’t like gold, or water, or even stoats or gravity. In the grand account of how the world works, god as a category doesn’t show up at all. Something, nothing, anything could be mentioned as a god in a myth or religious rite. That is not to say there are no gods, but maybe they don’t have enough in common for there to be natural laws about how mortals and middle-sized dry goods interact with them. Of course, there might be a myth about the gods arguing about who is objectively top god, who is a real god, who is a demigod, and who is just regular Jo Schmuck. Gods and mortals might even go to war over it — oh, wait … — but that doesn’t mean the whole thing isn’t misconceived.

I am inclined to agree — sorry, don’t mean to dent your credibility (but my stopped clock and so on) — but I suspect that all RPGs conspire to the condition of Top Trumps and all fandoms to the condition of stamp collectors and train spotters. Now, I must go and polish my dice …

Punter: What kind of god was Nysalor? Was he kind and loving? Riddler: Nysalor is a dead god. How many kind and loving corpses do you know? We busy Nysaloreans are not going to waste time doing PR for a dead god when there are questions to be asked and stick-in-the-muds to be baited, now, are we? Life runs out. Kajabor eats you. (Possibly even in that order.)

Simpler still: they are one and it would be foolish to try to cut them into distinct beings. 😉

To everyone else, what follows may be blindingly obvious but I can never keep it straight in my head — although somewhat British, I am very bad at it: class structures always elude me (and then kick me in the arse). Indo-European Varnas Priest-Kings Warriors Workers (producers) Rig Veda Priests (Brahmins) Warrior-Kings (Kshatriyas) Workers (Vaishyas) —————————————— Servants (Shudras) — the outsiders, the conquered people (including those in India before the Indo-Europeans) Malkioni Wizards (Priests) Nobles (Kings) Soldiers (Warriors) Workers Roughly correct? So the Malkioni four — rather than adding Doniger’s “transcendent fourth”° — is a splitting out of the Indo-European three/Vedic top three into four to eliminate the shifting hyphenates? I wonder why, exactly. Keeps it all in the family, anyway. ——————————————————— ° “Three (or more) forms of the three (or more)-fold path in Hinduism” in Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism

May as well reproduce it here for easy reference:

If Malkion is air + water (storm), wouldn’t this just underline the Oedipal — or yet more intimate — nature of Orlanth’s rebellion? And isn’t there an Orlanthi motif of dragonslaying as utuma? And so we trudge on — through debatable (or at least dubious) lands — pushing toward Orlanth’s slaying himself to create the temporal world. And if we equivocate on father/self/son, we get something like God’s sacrificing his son to “save” the world. If Orlanth is always striving to be Top God, we expect IG–Blowhard mash-ups to emerge now and again. (I am sure there is a term for them.) Is Daka Fal a “holy ghost” aspect? Not being an insider, I never knew the function of the HG. At least we don’t have to have two ur-murders — god and man, the sun and the son — and can consolidate them into one easy-to-manage sacrifice. On the assumption that on the Web one can find a random eccentric peddling anything, I searched and I found: THE MORNING STAR: It is only three times that we find this appellation given to our Lord in scripture — once in 2 Peter 1, once in Revelation 2, and again in Revelation 22. In Peter it is rendered in our translation “day star”; and indeed the word is not the same as that found in Revelation. But the word used by Peter is the proper name of the morning star, and means the “light-bringer”, while that used by John, equally applying to the morning star, indicates rather the time of its appearance in the early morning. — Edward Dennett, Christ as the Morning Star and the Sun of Righteousness So we can weave in the solar stuff, too, and of course: Morning Star -> Lucifer -> Devil Morning Star -> Venus -> Aphrodite (risen from the foam or not) Phosphorus = Hesperus (famously standing for all dualities which are really identities) So we can have our cake and eat it — a must with gods who want to swallow all the others. ————————————————————————————————— In retrospect, a pole vault over my usual comfortable swamp of Dumber and into the twittering abyss of Dumbest. Never mind. Let it stand.

You know all this and are merely teasing: If you think the world of Solar Time is merely entropic, you are a Kajabor fangirl. If you think the Great Compromise was to stitch evil into nature of the new world, you are a Wakboth enabler. If you think entropy = evil, I have the number of a good therapist. Other partial and dubitable précis are available.

If the names at this early stage are not deceptive — I know! I know! — then maybe: Aerlit Kolate = Air Warera Triolina = Sea Air + Sea = Foam -> Aphrodite Malkion = Aphrodite? (Even Malkion = Milky Foam, the patron of frothy coffee) Sorry, couldn’t resist. 😉

Surely a Nysalorean NPC if ever there was one. 😉 Solar living Emptiness & Brightness Don’t get him started on Disneyfication and the City of Wonders

Because Death his/her bad self would never countenance such a cowardly use of magical resources? “Are you afraid of Death — me! — my shiny new Sword?”

You know my slogan (and you are sick of it by now): in Glorantha, the worst fights are with oneself. So if after the mightiest of struggles AS swallows K, I did say that Kajabor had mastered self-swallowing. And if people are hung up these days on Wakboth’s being stitched into the fabric of the New Improved Spider-silk World™, let us blame it on the amnestic virtue of Kajabor. Or something. 😉

Oh, I don’t know … the ever-growing True Nysalorean Horde marches under its golden banner: » YOU CANNOT DERIVE AN OUGHT FROM AN IS! « no matter what arkat–gbaji says

Perhaps the Great Dorastor Armour Patch is Ralzakark’s “stamp collection” and/or he is the Third Age’s true Age-ending hero — just waiting for the critical mass that will enable a world-encompassing anti-magic wave when it is sprinkled with powdered unicorn horn (to remove all the carbon from the steel). Dorastor is Glorantha’s Zone: what happens when the great wave hits all that buried Feldichi tech?

Or we naturalise death and disease and we wipe away the attitude that they are intrusions from “outside” that no morally upstanding person could compromise with. There is a strain in Gloranthan religion that wants to turn every Kajabor into a Wakboth and won’t be happy with anything of the mundane world unless it can be painted with the brush of the gods. What needs to be cleansed, the world or the way we are determined to see it? The progressive disenchantment of the world from Age to Age would seem to be a given, the fight is over whether this is a good thing. (And as the same metaphor can be used to different ends, some of the fights will be pointless. 😉 )