mfbrandi

39 minutes ago, Joerg said:

The Age of Innocence still is out there. The sad thing about it is while you can visit it inside Godtime, you will inevitably end it by your visit.

New
Improved
Spray-on Weltschmerz
It’s portable!
It’s contagious!

5 hours ago, EricW said:

Or to put it another way, you cannot defeat evil by ignoring it.

No, you can’t … although evil does get really wound up if you ignore it. narcissistic personality disorder?

My point — pitiful thing that it was! — was that any evil of the world (of the kind that comes stitched in at the most fundamental level) was always there. It is just that we woke up to it one day. There are ways to cope — speak to Nysalor on the way out, they have leaflets — but there is no age of innocence to be recaptured: if the world is Wakboth’s, it always was. You cannot go home again, because you were never there.

Biting the “apple” is the fall, the perception switch. Any angel with a fiery sword (or whatever) barring the way “back” is just deceptive set dressing.

I am just an incurable optimist, I guess. 😉

5 hours ago, scott-martin said:

but earlier up the evolutionary tree … at one stage there was a vegetable component.

Shades of Aldiss … run backwards?

2 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

Therefore they utilised the power of something to hand, Primal Chaos, within the world.  The cracks allowed Chaos to attempt to swamp the world, not to enter it.

The ritual of Chaos Birth comes after the encounter with Rashoran/a (with the knowledge of the lability of perspective), right? Dare I suggest that the “destruction” of the Spike was just an aspect switch? Something a bit like this, perhaps:

• The Spike = the universe seen as divine gift: good, full, and sustainable
• Wakboth   = the universe seen as evil
• Jotimam   = the universe seen as empty
• Kajabor   = the universe seen as ending

The universe, or perhaps its nature. And all with a big charge of awe. To see Kajabor is to regard thermodynamics with alarm, but the underlying physics didn’t change at the moment of one’s horrified realisation (and one may realise that and still be horrified).

Nothing changed. Everything changed. A bit like Nietzsche’s death of God?

The real crime in “birthing the Devil” was to cause us to see the world as abhorrent? Mallia was Mother of Microbes — sometimes beneficial, sometimes not — but now we can only see her as Mother of Maladies and recoil in revulsion?

As always, this comes with a big dose of maybe.

2 hours ago, theconfusingeel said:

And on the other it's a group of people bringing a chaos god into the world

… like the Lightbringers stitching the Devil into the fabric of the world, the mundane world … the temporal world. The Devil is to the world of time as the Spike is to the God Time. I am sure that was the answer to a GRE question.

2 hours ago, theconfusingeel said:

And on the other it's a group of people bringing a chaos god into the world, like the unholy trio.

YT’s “ram” relates him to Ragnaglar? Jakaleel has , like Mallia? But that is just my rusty wheels creaking. Say more!

3 minutes ago, davecake said:

Yara Aranis … has the Spiderlimbs spell … The spare legs (and the association with spiders) both seem rather unexpected!

Perhaps the spell is unexpected, but surely not the association with spiders. The clue is in the name, no? Yara Aranis.

5 minutes ago, Nevermet said:

Here’s a new … theory … Malkion is Daka Fal.

I like it, but is it new? Haven’t we had Grandmother Baboon = Malkion = Lanbril = Daka Fal, before? Perhaps it is wishful thinking on my part, or that my poor void-addled brain has come loose in time … again. And if you-know-what is a mirror, too, the Spindle Hag may have more identities to leak to us.

Strange devices of the sun and moon …

… IS ONE OF THE NAMES FOR THE SPIKE // THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD // THE WAY NATURE WORKS // ITS IMMUTABLE BODY AND LAWS // CRUMBLED INTO SAND AND PEARLS // ALLOWED THE DEVIL TO ENTER // THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD // AND CREATED // THE VOID // JOTIMAM // HELD THE UNIVERSE TOGETHER // IT’S STILL HERE // AND NOW IT’S INVISIBLE // UTRIAM …

— A Gloranthan pseudo-cutup for Chip Delany, recycling text from King of Sartar and the recent Prosopaedia

54 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

possibly Re-Life Sickness into Humakt/CA (haven't decided yet, it hasn't come up)

This is perfect! So:

• Humakt if you have a death wish — “End me now. Can’t you see what I am?”
• The White Lady if you want to persuade yourself everything is tickety-boo (when it is not).

I guess Gark the SSRI is another option.

16 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

one form of the epic

• Yellow brick = maize ear
• Orlanth = tornado

The Hero Wars started because the Big O really doesn’t like dogs: Toto is the target; “Dorothy” is just collateral damage.

1 hour ago, Ali the Helering said:

If we create our deities, Dubya would appear.

Maybe, but this was all in the context of straight Jeffism — I provided a link and everything. I would never claim to be a Jeffist, of course, although I do like a dead god who won’t come when I call (else just get a dog). 😉

14 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Conventional genii loci tend to coalesce around a persistent natural or built feature of the landscape. They don’t travel.

That was my first thought, too, but then I began to be charmed by @Squaredeal Sten’s conception of roads — and road networks — as places. On the one hand, we have things apart () and motion () between them, but on the other hand, we have the ansible () eliminating the gap. The network is here and it is there — but to the spirit of the network all nodes are here. The “lawful” alternative to reconciling and via ?

14 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Issaries cult spirits have access to Spell Trading and so can accumulate truly bizarre effect inventories to rival any storied ancestral lineage.

A magical Amazon. A hell of a personal shopper.

14 hours ago, scott-martin said:

its own flavor of shamanism, hrestol idealistic adventurism

Those successfully tuned in to the spirits of the road are on the bus. The inevitable casualties are under it (per Alan Moore writing for Sounds). An Issaries shaman is addressed as “Neal”?

17 minutes ago, Eff said:

What does “functioning” mean for these purposes?

For these purposes, one that can get magic from the object of devotion. I can dress in funny robes and chant the name of Dubya today, but it won’t get me anywhere (but the funny farm).

6 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

Ralzakark is Argrath.

Well both of these things have been said before:

• Argrath = Arkat
• Arkat = Ralzakark

The transitivity of identity does the rest.

9 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Returning Kajabor might be weird — his substance is part of Creation now

Of course, this has been said of Dubya, too. Duck–rabbit?

Unpicking whichever version of the Devil from the world undoes time and returns us to the hell of the Gods War? Or, you know, refusal to accept Chaos as “part of the world” is what returns us to the hell of the war of all against all? (Metaphors, eh? Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em.)

Of course, it is all academic until you work out how to create functioning cults for these “missing” and/or “dead” chaos “gods”. How do you resurrect the Devil? Do you have a lever big enough to shift the Block? Perhaps all you have to do is nuke the moon.

5 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

To return a little closer to the original question, I’d posit that Kajabor cultists should have some form of memory altering magic. Something to make someone forget something ever existed, as the first stage of total and utter annihilation.

Kajabor as memory hole.

Could be the first stage — forgetting what is, making it impossible for anyone to attribute any effect to that cause. You slap someone about the face, but they still cannot see you: “must have been a bit of wood carried on the wind.”

Could be the last stage — forgetting what is gone: e.g. “Whose funeral is this? What are we doing here?” Adding insult to injury. And you will never rescue from Hell the person you have forgotten ever existed.

2 hours ago, theconfusingeel said:

If that were to happen, what kind of spells could they provide to their followers?

TAKE ONE: Is magic shaped by the god or by the followers, by the cult? Maybe the key question is “what would the followers of these gods be like?” As below, so we zap.

TAKE TWO: If there are chaos gods which are entities (as opposed to ideas) and which are truly from the outside, do they work like run-of-the-mill cosmic gods? Are they worship powered? Do they function as magic pumps, enabling us to spray our foes with all kinds of nastiness? Are they just power sinks, taking what we offer them permanently out of play? If you worship a truly alien thing and expect it to behave like a deified monarch or ancestor, are you making a terrible mistake — not morally (everyone has an opinion about that) but purely practically?

2 hours ago, theconfusingeel said:

Jotimam … what kind of spells could they provide to their followers?

I am torn:

• Anything — On the one hand, anything (and any spell) might come from the Void. Everything did.
• Nothing — But on the other hand, Jotimam seems pretty abstract
  — an absence that can never truly be filled
  — so maybe it provides no magic. It is just where we all end up.

Obviously, I am not really torn.
Nothing.
No spells.
Magic comes from misapprehension.

7 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

The Ragnaglar you bring back isn't quite the Ragnaglar you killed before.

You can’t step in the same chaos god twice?

7 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

I don't know, as a direct son/fragment of Umath I’d expect at least a little Storm in him.

Definitely. Anything else would be coyness and self-deceit, no?

What is Storm but the opener of Voids and the bringer of Death? Storm is intimately connected with Chaos and the end of things. If you want to be Marduk, you have to be Tiamat, too, right?

But sometimes we just want to stick our fingers in our ears and go ‘la la la, not listening!’

The Genertelan Riviera … where language goes on holiday.

1 hour ago, Ali the Helering said:

the vast majority of us on this forum view the supernatural through a lens conditioned by ‘popular’ Judaeo-Christianity, simply by virtue of our countries of origin.

Or through the lens of British empiricism, we cannot see — or even conceive — the supernatural, at all?

8 hours ago, JayLay said:

Based off the Prosopaedia entry, I take it that you think of Daruda as a dragonewt?

Well, Daruda () does have the dragonewt rune, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t put too much store by this:

• He is usually depicted as a human with the head, tail, and wings of a dragon, carrying the imperial regalia.
  — Prosopaedia: Daruda (PDF, p. 28)

That’s just the iconography of the emperor, not their (supposed) actual appearance.

8 hours ago, JayLay said:

I think it has something to do with cycles. Also Sedenya has many arms, and plants have many branches. And is not the Red Moon like a juicy fruit up in the sky, now ripened from blue into red.

I was ready — in my tiresomely cynical way — to dismiss this, but then I thought of what comes next: red berry is plucked and eaten, as Flamal was eaten by ZZ. If Argrath = Arkat = Kindly Old Uncle ZeeZee, well …

Of course, I am always prone to seeing a centripetal monotheism in Glorantha, although the official line is probably that Gloranthans are always copying each other and echoes don’t add up to identity. But we cannot worry about the official line here.

Of course, Orlanth is blue, cyclical (storm has its season), and many-armed, and he “ripens” into the redhead, Vinga. You are what you fight, or merely the narcissism of small differences? (Perhaps one function of the late, unlamented Elmal was to be Orlanth’s subaltern sun, as Sedenya has made a pet of Yelm.)