mfbrandi

On 5/4/2024 at 6:33 PM, Memestream said:

Wait a second, this game is almost entirely concerned with where ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ reality meet!

• Navigation through the Hero Planes uses Myths to get to events, not maps to get to locations. However, the Myths are not objective reality, but subjective by their very nature.
  — Guide to Glorantha (PDF, p. 154)

So if we take it that the mundane world is supposed to be objective reality, then that would seem to be the party line, at least circa 2014. You know, on the face of it, but …

Does reality come in two flavours? To the extent that “otherworld” items are real, are they not mundane? Sure, we can talk about appearance and reality — as in “it looked round to me, but really it was square” (nothing metaphysical) — but “how things seemed” is not another realm of reality. And no one ever got sunspeared by a mere appearance or misperception. The subjective ends up getting flattened into “more-of-the-same reality” by most people most of the time, I reckon — even if they wiggle their fingers and go “ooh, mystical!”

It is a bit like possible worlds semantics: some clown wants to cash out “it might have been the case that” as “it is the case that … but somewhere else.” It is reductive (after a fashion, I guess) but unproductive. But possible worlds — in this usage — are presumably causally inert, else they are merely more actuality and not doing their job.

So appearance vs. reality, story vs. history — I think you are right on the money (and the meeting is a metaphor).

But I fear that some people hear “the Gods War is subjective” and think “subjective reality is a kind of reality, so the Gods War is real, and one reality can punch holes in another.” Then all the delicious slipperiness and uncertainty is lost, but you do get to park god–tanks on your neighbour’s lawn.

But none of this touches the content of Gloranthan myths — what they say — and I wouldn’t presume to say which bits of the setting are real. Where would be the fun in that? But if for Gloranthans the otherworlds are just extra-dimensional sources of WMD, although they talk of myths, which stories truly function for them as myths do for us? The more we reduce their myths to reportage, the more we deprive them of pure story — and that is just mean. Which TV soaps do characters in TV soaps watch?

[That last cup of cocoa was clearly far too strong.]

They say there is an enlo “Moses” with her own Underground Railroad; that after being struck on the head as a child by a lead weight thrown by a Vaneekaran, she began to experience visions and to sleepwalk through tunnels no one else knew about; that as an adult, she leads trollkin in fives and sevens to freedom from enslavement by their fellow uz.

Some say that there are those in the XU “deep cult” who aid these escapes. Some say that this cannot be, as Moses has been known to commune with krarshtkids and has formed an alarmingly close bond with a scuttler she calls “Juān”. Others have it that mystics who would befriend the sun can hardly be expected to have the sense to shun chaosfriends. No one has any evidence.

It is said that “ZZ” graffiti acid-burned into the walls of long-neglected tunnels lead the way to a vertical well, a stream of pure light that will translate Moses’ followers instantly to freedom. It is said …

9 hours ago, EricW said:

Ah but it isn’t absolute

Sure, but was I not painting the gods as idiots?

When I play at thinking of the gods as people, I see them as pulled in two directions: on the one hand, they want to think of their prison as inviolable, themselves safe from the depredations of time, the Devil, and their own poor impulse control; on the other hand, they want to think that the mundane world cannot get along without them, that they can and do have influence there. I’d say they should go see Dr. Freud, but we are assured that they are stuck in their loops and cannot change, so it wouldn’t be money well spent.

But that is just what amuses me, and I don’t want to bully everyone else into agreement. (I couldn’t, anyway.)

[Sparked by renewed interest in this from Erol.]

Is it mad to think that the “curse” on Korasting — introject the sun, suffer terribly — was a precondition for Arkat’s “rebirth” as a troll and his “invention” of Zorak Zoran? Given that Arkat = Gbaji = Nysalor, this might seem a mean trick on the trolls, but …

If uzko = enlo = human, is this really so?° Arkat is a troll. The people of Darkness can live under the sun. Arkat has broken its power over them by “killing” the Bright One — And in one gulp he was gone, leaving only a broken halo, which soon guttered out. And in the person of Zorak Zoran, he has inscribed this into the early universe. What is the Darktongue for “palimpsest”?

In an act of Hesiodic grumpiness, Genertelan uz still insist in seeing successively degenerate “races” of troll (and lauding maladaptive traits), but the numbers tell a different story. The enlo are a more successful “build” than the soon-to-be-gone “mistress race”. (But they are grumpy, so never tell them that XU is the midwife of the sun.)

Oh, and there is this:

• Muri, also known as jungle trolls or hot trolls, are the descendants of Moorgarki, a troll goddess who healed herself from a chaos wound with the aid of fire. As a result, jungle trolls are comfortable in climes which would be unbearably hot for other trolls
  — Elder Races of Pamaltela

Isn’t this just a more positive spin on the same event? It is not that the muri “escaped the curse”, they just leaned into it, embracing the necessary change. “Mutation? Loss of old strengths (most useful in a lost Eden)? In return we get the ability to live in present conditions? Sure, we’ll take that deal.” (And if the lost Eden was never really real, if nostalgia is always for what one has never known?)

See it as the necessary complement of the Lightbringer Quest: if the sun must be born every day, it must also be swallowed every day — if either one, then the other. The Devil is swallowed, but is an essential ingredient of the remade world — is “reborn” at the Dawn, Lucifer Morningstar. And for traditionalist uz, the sun = the Devil? I am not saying it isn’t a double-edged thing, but that’s the plus with Gbaji — for every plague, also a cure. Or at least, a vaccine, which often looks a lot like the plague.

Please, make this rambling st …

———————————————
° There are phenotypical differences and there is genetic range, but that is not to say they are not the same species. Glorantha may have its Black Sun, but let us banish eugenics and “race science”.

7 hours ago, EricW said:

The possibility of Wakboth’s release is surely part of the compromise. No night without day, no day without night, no trap is absolute — even for Wakboth

I like this!

Many of the gods will disagree. According to them, the trap they are in is absolute, and they have agreed to it because they cannot face the thought of ever being thrown down the memory hole. Some will have doubts: some will think that a prison break is desirable; some will think that is possible (however undesirable) to break into or out of the prison. But the gods are a pretty dim lot (save for Krarsht — who probably doesn’t count: she is more of an interdimensional tourist — who offloads all stupidity onto her cultists).

However, the Compromise is the Spider’s stratagem — the gods only got the press release, which was deliberately obfuscatory, and many of them cannot read — and She knows that the end of all extant worlds will eventually manifest (with many petites morts before the big one), but that is OK, for the earth doth like a snake renew.

Throwing the mundane world (and all mortals) down the one-way tunnel to nowhere was “agreed to” by the gods — as the price for their being spared the same fate. But …

23 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

Oh, you can’t see the Z-axis?

Although this T-shirt is very popular with players and fans. Possibly they are trying to keep the tourists quiet.

On 4/29/2024 at 11:47 AM, Ynneadwraith said:

The myths and stories of Godtime are all post-hoc rationalisations of real-world events (back when the real world and the spirit world weren’t really separated).

In the Gloranthan university town of Euhemerus — no one seems to agree quite where it is; near Castrovalva or Castalia, perhaps? — the Void-touched scholars play their Clay Token Game.° They place coloured and marked chips representing various myths on the nodes of an eight-by-eight grid. It is unknown whether the point is to obtain insight into the world, the gods, or the players themselves. When asked, the Mistress of the Game smiles and says merely, “It is quite the riddle, isn’t it?”

° I say “Void-touched”, but others say it is the mountain poppy, the thin air, or the game itself that accounts for their strangeness.

22 hours ago, theconfusingeel said:

Is the blood sun really Sedenya?

I don’t know — someone else will — but if a “secret part of the sun” were intimately connected with elusive Nysalor and/or rebel against and daughter of the sun, Sedenya, it wouldn’t be that shocking a revelation.

A Hon-Eel–Octamo conjunction doesn’t sound mad, either: half-and-half; grain & sickle; John Maizeycorn must die!

38 minutes ago, theconfusingeel said:

If events in time don’t translate to myth …

Don’t sweat it. Turn it on its head. If you are GM and you think that an event has sufficient mythic resonance that your players ought to be able to recapitulate it in heroquest, just rule that the event occurred in whole or in part in the otherworld.

At its most sketchy the quest pattern goes: mundane world -> otherworld -> mundane world.

• The two balloon modellers square off for a duel in the mundane world, talking trash and stretching rubber.
• They stuff and weave, making crazy air-and-rubber shapes in the otherworld till one battler bursts her own models and admits defeat.
• The victrix returns to the mundane world with glory and the knack for twisting the perfect two-headed dragonsnail.

Now others can heroquest the Great Balloon Animal Battle if they learn the squaring off ritual and get some blessed rubber. Sure the original started and ended in 1605, but you can just stipulate that the middle bit of the original GBAB happened outside time — in the or a designated otherworld — if you feel you need to.

It is your Glorantha, so you get to say which events are heroquestable and burst the bounds of time. If you are a player rather than a GM, work on your patter for building up the magical and mythic significance of events you want to heroquest — persuade the rest of the table that the event was too fabulous to be contained wholly within the drab mundane world. (The event you are going to heroquest may itself be a recapitulation of an earlier heroquest, but it need not be.)

Is that any help at all?

When one recapitulates one’s god’s deeds in heroquest, those deeds are ones she performed before her own apotheosis.

This is one way to grapple with “when was the time of myth” — it could be anytime, but the events have been “promoted sideways” into the realm of story.

(Would this break canon? Which thread are we in, again?)

Not necessarily canon alert!

Things that a person does before their apotheosis don’t necessarily happen in time. I might be born, perform a bunch of otherworld heroquests to “timeless” realms, then die and become a god. If something I do has as-above-so-below magical ripples, it may be deemed to have taken place at least partly in some otherworld, even if no one can say quite when and to what degree I crossed over. Arkat’s final dust-up with Nysalor might be like that. So doing an otherworld heroquest to that fight might be possible … but extremely dangerous — no one knows who won.

If the Seven Mothers rite to recreate the Goddess was a heroquest, surely one can revisit that in a heroquest of one’s own, and it is something they did “before” their own apotheoses, right? Even if they had to “step outside of time” to do it. However, Irrippi Ontor does some shopping and returns his library books (pre-apotheosis, no weird shenanigans) doesn’t sound — to me — like something one could recapitulate in a heroquest, as it lacks the requisite importance. I may be wrong. I wouldn’t mind being wrong. I kinda want to be wrong about this one.

(Sometimes heroquest is a state of mind: someone might heroquest without leaving this world, so far as anyone around them can tell. But that is for a different question, right?)

Do cultists seek to do the will of their god? The Crimson Bat cult exists to have the BatGodDemon do the will of the cult. Is it anomalous or just more honest than other cults?

If I seek by magico-religious means to take control of a god, do I thereby partake of its runes? If harmony seeks to control disorder, does it thereby partake of disorder?

12 hours ago, metcalph said:

Jakaleel is the Dying Moon and Deezola is the Crescent Go Moon

And this agrees with the Prosopaedia and with the old (non-canon ILH #2) HeroQuest glyphs linking Deezola with Lesilla (crescent-go) and Jakaleel with Gerra (dying).

Maybe it is some kind of spindle/knitting mix-up. Perhaps it is a new heresy — a new goddess swap!

With a tip of the hat to Eff for making me think of Fred Dretske.

40 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

“digijelm”

Digits + (Y|J)elm. Now, there is a portmanteau for you.

The children of the Dark are the fingers of the Sun. Of course they are.

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

“Something’s lost but something's gained in living every day.”

• It takes a heart like Norri’s these days
  When your moon gets weak

Don’t interrupt the moonflow.

With apologies to Joni.

28 minutes ago, Tatterdemalion Fox said:

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.

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.

6 minutes ago, theconfusingeel said:

I guess my idea was that chaos is a force that wants to turn glorantha into itself, and so it wants to destroy it.

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. 😉

34 minutes ago, theconfusingeel said:

Chaos isn’t change, it's destruction.

• [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.

2 hours ago, Ynneadwraith said:

Is there already a seasonal fertility myth that involves Orlanth descending into the underworld to resurrect Ernalda … ?

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.

  Spun off from Gods and Death.

9 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Actually I remember there is at least one other, and he is the one who steps outside the Dome and at some point rescues Lightfore: Dayzatar.  So, let there be LIGHT! And the world reborn.

Hmm … outside the Dome.

On the “standard model”, Arachne Solara recreates the world using Chaos (pick your Devil), thus recapitulating the “original” creation of the world from Chaos (the Void). And the symbol of this is the sun rising — fiat lux. And “Arachne Solara” connotes both light and — in Glorantha-code — darkness, with darkness preceding light. Every beginning is the beginning.

So the Dayzatar version is maybe just a switch of agent for (re-)creation conceived in the same way. “Going outside” is just another way of saying that the Void/Chaos is the source of the new world, as it always is and must be. Free jazz, baby!

Clearly, the creation has no agent, so sub in anyone you like. But Yelmalio says, “Wasn’t me, governor.”

1 hour ago, Nick Brooke said:

I wouldn't expect a HQG retrofit genre pack any time soon.

That’s fine. Never is fine, too.

Thanks for the clarification.

12 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Unless we believe the tale that Yelmalio was the sole survivor.

Whatever we are supposed to believe, it is too good a story not to embrace it. One of the “good guys” but outside the Compromise. A light that never goes out because not bound to time, perhaps?

Perhaps all the “events preceding time” — the sequence without sequence — only precipitate out at the beginning of time; the Gods War as a sort of Schrödinger’s prehistory, with the advent of time as the opening of the box? It is only at the first sunrise that we can say that Yelm had “previously” been murdered.

And Yelmalio is the anomaly — an outsider without being a thing of the Void. Give the poor sucker a break and let him be special; it is just so delightfully … generative! Or is it just me? I can see him staggering through multiple ragnaröks, ever more alienated, losing all cult, forgotten, becoming a Watcher figure bearing witness to the truth and the light. I am just an embittered old romantic, I guess.

Of course, it is just a fairy story, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

17 hours ago, g33k said:

But tends a bit to reinforce @Chaosium's scant resource-allocation to the QW project.

Possibly — only possibly — there is a bit of a vicious circle. One story (dismal): Chaosium thinks the people aren’t interested, so it is not interested, the PDF doesn’t come out when expected, and shiny new QW — as opposed to HQG — gets pulled as a JC target; the people think Chaosium isn’t interested, so in the unlikely event they were thinking of publishing for QW on the JC, they abandon the idea; USW. “[T]he fancy is overrun with wild dismal ideas, and terrified with a thousand hideous monsters of its own framing.” — JA

Another story (happier for some): QW is pulled as a JC target because the QW release is being held back to sync with an HQG retrofit genre pack; this makes sense of the HQG-only JC policy (as on the face of it limiting people to an OOP/unsupported version of the rules is perverse). “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” — J of N

In all likelihood, both stories are completely wrong, but we have to have something to keep us amused while we wait to see how things turn out.

Still, it is a shame people didn’t/couldn’t turn up when they said they would.

EDIT: And of course, it was all nonsense — see Nick Brooke’s comment below.

2 hours ago, Ynneadwraith said:

I see it as a sort of ‘viewing different parts of the same elephant’ thing.

Or viewing the same parts of the same thing differently?