mfbrandi

Wouldn’t we normally contrast possession with ideas like avatar and incarnation? In possession, someone else’s body gets used like a meat puppet. In incarnation, the body is the god’s own body (even if “fully” human, and even if the god has had more than one), not one hijacked from some other person, no? Christians say that Jesus is their god (identity: Jesus = God), not that their god stole Mary’s child’s body — because that would be creepy, right? If Pavis healed Waha — rather than the body of some disposable khan — does that argue in favour of incarnation over possession? I am sure Delecti has a perspective on this. Presumably, so do those Gloranthan theologians/lawyers hired to litigate over the Great Compromise. If there is no scary faction who argues that this is a distinction without a difference, I will be disappointed. Others will maintain that possession is OK if the victim volunteer signs the right papers before the possession. And … We didn’t steal your child’s body for our demonic ritual and cast her soul into Hell. She simply woke up to the fact that she is the Lord of the Nether Pits — has been, all along. Nothing to see here. Ah, but Subsection 13 strictly forbids bodily manifestation of Demon Lords on the Material Plane. Possession would have been legal. Disgusting and immoral … but legal. There must be propaganda wars over just what went on in the 7M ritual. When a theistic magician casts a rune spell, I guess everyone thinks that the power of the god is manifest, but whose will is manifest, the magician’s or their god’s?

In RQ3, Become [Other Shape] was a Trickster spell (Gods of Glorantha: Cults Book, p. 71) — or rather a set of Trickster spells, one per shape. I don’t know whether this is carried over into RQ:G.

I don’t know why people get so hung up on Mallia and non-chaotic worship having to be propitiatory. Mallia has a place in the world. Consider: Under the terms of the Great Compromise, Mallia is the necessary bane of the mortal races, and at last will lead them to the halls of Hell even if they avoid every other fate … This means that not even her greatest worshipper is safe from her embrace if he outlasts the span of years allotted to his species. Mallia is also the janitor of the gods, providing the corruption which turns flesh and bone back to dust. — Cults of Terror (Classic PDF, p. 26) [emphasis mine] She has a regulatory function, taking those who have outlived their time, and she recycles their remains. She is a provider of ecosystem services and to be respected for that. She takes away. She gives. These are related. When Gloranthans worship the sometimes destructive Storm, Sea, Fire, and Earth, is that only propitiation? Even that “nice” White Lady might steal your immune system and leave you to die (Cults of Prax — Classic PDF, p. 71) — now that is a protection racket. At least you know where you are with the Mother of Microbes: ashes to ashes, dust to dust; She will embrace you in the end. Is it any worse than worshipping violent death in the guise of Humakt? War isn’t the “new enzyme detergent demise of Ali MacGraw”, after all — nothing is.

Nah, I am strictly WYSIWYG — all shallow seas, no ocean depths. Read once (if you are feeling generous), then toss away and have your own better idea. Apologies for the excessive rune usage.

Are Humakt and his cultists perhaps figures of fun … for players and designers with a dark sense of humour? In Cults of Prax (Classic PDF), we have: He is the god of mercenaries and soldiers, and can be found on all sides in any conflict. — p. 32 Included in the dislikes is the Darkness god, Zorak Zoran … The two cults do not actively war upon one another, but their members are usually found on opposite sides of a struggle. — p. 33 So do the cultists have scruples that their god does not, or are they kidding themselves? Thinking pictorially, one clear meaning of is crutch, and honour codes are crutches: we kill people for money, but it is OK because we do it by the book — we are not ZZ! In Glorantha, all the bitterest fights are with oneself, and just as and are really no different, so and are inseparable — Humakt and Eurmal were in it together from the first murder. Humakt cannot win the fight against lies.

Diese Stadt hat mich belehrt, Paradies und Hölle können eine Stadt sein. Für die Mittellosen ist das Paradies die Hölle. — Bertolt Brecht, Hollywood Elegy #4 Luck and Fate can be one goddess — (Atrox) Fortuna, Automatia — and thesethe spokes of her wheel.

Water birds are a fine symbol of the unity of and .

Could be, or it is another attempt to render motion blur in static form: Fate is the Truth as it rolls over us leaving only bonemeal and meat paste — Rota Fortunae — because Fate and Luck are the same. Fate is capricious. Truth is arbitrary. What is is accidental.

= fluid, so it encompasses the which can flow under your door and drag you down like a hungry demon or a whirlpool, the searing plasma of Yelmic , and the — chaotic/disorderly — turbulent flow of . people find excruciatingly dull and dead ( is just the bulging lozenge seen side on, rather than in ’s plan, they say); they only like it when earthquake makes it dance like Sir Sea and tsunami sweeps it clean to leave glorious, sloppy mud. Perhaps sorcerers use “–” to indicate wave–particle duality. (It is not only the Orlanth–Ernalda complex that can bid to swallow Glorantha whole.) So I would totally have cultists who maintain that all of the interesting elemental gods are only so because of their forgotten nature. If you cannot let go of the other idea, that’s fine: everybody likes a schism. (OK: I like a schism.) You don’t have to decide which is true, now … or ever. is stability, anathema to — you cannot step in the same river twice, and myth is an ever-changing sea of story. = blood. Sedenya — — is Goddess of all cycles including menstruation and the blood tides of the rise-and-fall of empires.° In her quieter moments, goddess of the mirror, of the still pool. She must have worshippers who acknowledge the connection between things celestial and oceanic. Sedenya’s is the wine-dark sea. White Moonies may claim that the red rock hovering over us is a blood clot — partaking of — and that something must happen to disperse it and restore the properly y flow of the Goddess, the lifeblood of Cosmos. History must flow, everything must change, and even a empire must fall. 〉〉〉 improv-cum-brain dump ends 〈〈〈 —————————————————————————— ° Yes, I appreciate that a goddess of life, madness, and the moon could lapse into an appalling sexist cliché — I didn’t invent her — so just refuse any orthodoxy that would let her down and learn to deal off the bottom of the deck. I assume that the menstrual cycle for Gloranthan humans is not a positively frantic one week. There must be a myth about that — has anyone written it? Something to do with hijacking of functions by the too too solid flesh of ? Melt it. Thaw it. Resolve it to dew, and restore the balance in the Age to come.

Diseased minds think alike, it seems, @scott-martin. 😉 And a callback for good measure.

is your tripod in plan view. Painful to sit on, however. is a three-legged stool destabilised by removal of one leg. Look at all the runic goodness here:

So — being in the thread that we are — let us say that the Goddess (a high-class broad) is married to the Sun (Vivasvant/Yelm — poe-tay-toe/poe-tah-toe) but she considers him beneath her because he is mutilated and mortal or black (having, perhaps, burned himself). She leaves him but leaves behind a double: The double is still [in the Harivamsha] called the savarna (the female of-the-same-kind), as in the earlier versions, but she is also the chaya (shadow or reflection) and sadrisha (the look-alike). More important, there is real ambiguity now about the person whom the Shadow looks like: Samjna [the fleeing Goddess] or the Sun? Samjna … perceives herself as literally of a different class from that of her husband. We have noted that varna [colour] may mean ‘kind’ in the sense of mortal vs. immortal and might, therefore, be translated as ‘class’. — Wendy Doniger, — Saranyu/Samjna: The Sun and the Shadow (On Hinduism, pp. 275–276) Although the Goddess initially flees, there is a later sexual encounter between the Sun-as-stallion and the Goddess-as-mare — after the Sun has been smartened-up by being trimmed on the lathe to remove “excessive fiery energy” (he was a hairy Sun). Texts differ as to whether the Shadow (Yaska and the Brihaddevata) or the pre-flight Goddess (the Harivamsha) was the mother of Manu. Or should we say Murharzarm? Or even Daka Fal/Malkion? The murders of Sun and son are seemingly interchangeable. Sex = death, so — Storm having “proven” the mortality of the Sun — no wonder the Sun is the ancestor of mortal humanity (in this mash-up). Is all this the key to the La-ungariant Ernalda/Dendara confusion? If so which is the Goddess and which her Shadow? Who is Orlanth really shacked up with, the original or the clone tailored to suit a low-class husband? Even if this were resolved to the satisfaction of disinterested scholars, presumably Dragon Pass and Peloria would continue to disagree (Prosopædia, CHA4042, p. 74). Perhaps any Sun worshippers who still favour blondes and sneer at dark-skinned, working-class Lodril should think again.

But isn’t “passing” what makes ogres fun? If they couldn’t, what would be the point of them? And who among us can say in her heart that she is not an ogre? 😉

As I write this, Sense Chaos? is the fresh hotness. It seems to present game-mechanical difficulties, but perhaps we can cut the knot: If a Storm Bully rolls ≤ her sense chaos percentage, her Spidey-sense tingles. There are no false positives because Chaos is always and everywhere “present”. And anyway, every Storm Bully carries Chaos around with her at all times, clutched in a death grip. Without Chaos, she would be Nothing — and that is just what she fears.

To put the other side of it — because I am a contrary soul — if Sense Chaos is about the “Chaos taint” (something intangible, not really a part of the world, a hole which is not really a hole, a glimpse into the Void) and not smelling broos or having a “litmus paper” that changes colour in the presence of dragonsnail slime, I would have it follow the Chaos arithmetic of zero: + = – = × = 1,000,000× = ÷1,000,000 = I am sure the SBs themselves go for this “no such thing as slightly Chaotic”/“any Chaos is all Chaos” way of thinking. Division by is undefined; this frightens some sorcerers, but the SBs just shrug it off — or have another beer in the hope that’ll stop their heads hurting. The physical and magical consequences of (or reactions to) Chaos — the scabs over the (non-)hole(s) in reality (like the Devil) — are easier to detect if they occur in bulk, but should the spooky absence which requires Storm Bull woo-woo to detect (pure Chaos if you like) be something we can make piles of for more reliable testing? I am not suggesting for a minute that the SBs are not good at finding physical and otherwise concrete manifestations of Chaos, but their Spidey-sense isn’t for that, is it? I also wonder whether False Form hides the Chaos taint itself, rather than simply the pointy teeth, Chaos features, and Cacodemon cult marks. SB Spidey-sense shouldn’t be overpowered, but it should be special, right? Whether nutso special or damn-that’s-cool special is a matter of taste.

Devouring chaos is a deliberate partaking of chaos. It is using chaos to nurture oneself. Nurturing oneself on chaos is a way to become chaotic. — Greg Sez The Many-legged One consumed the Devil and spat out the world of time. Chaos is the invisible web that holds Cosmos together and it is the force that will destroy it — that is the Great Compromise. We are all Chaotic, but only some of us are awake. Tune in. Turn on. Tunnel. — Party Political Broadcast on Behalf of the Children of the Void

I agree that making a “fumble” SC roll faced with an innocent shouldn’t get you a “definitely Chaos” result when faced with a non-Chaotic. So how to handle SB initiates’ SC skill? Improvising again, try: [a] success+Chaos = vague sense of unease; [b] everything else = nothing. You can have a vague sense of unease for reasons other than Spidey-sense triggering — and the GM can feed these to PCs from time to time (with or without a “luck” roll) — so rather than building false positives into the SC skill rolls, you make clear the limited power of the initiates’ SC “skill” by making its positive results indistinguishable from unease otherwise caused. Obviously, it wouldn’t be sporting for the GM to throw too many of these “false positives” at the players, but it might give them pause over treating being spooked as a scientific test. Storm Bull rune lords’ once a day “make ’em glow so the other SB rune levels can see ’em” ability (gained when SC = 95%) can be treated differently — as a tip off from the god, rather than the jumpiness of a keen Chaos fighter. Whether that means no false positives will depend on how you feel about the reliability of the god, and I don’t propose to legislate on that (though Cults of Prax doesn’t mention fumbles or false positives, just false negatives (given Chaos is present) on 96–00).

When is one supposed to roll? If it is whenever an SB sniffs the air and asks whether they get a funny feeling, then a fumble cannot always be a false positive, because sometimes there really will be Chaos about. I am more than a bit confused about the possible states of the sniffing SB. Is it just “you get a funny feeling” (Chaos+success & ???) vs. “you don’t get a funny feeling” (no Chaos+success & ???), or is it “you get a funny feeling” (Chaos+success & no Chaos+fumble), “you don’t get a funny feeling” (no Chaos+success & Chaos+fumble), and “you don’t know whether your Spidey-sense has been triggered or not — it’s really confusing” (Chaos+normal failure & no Chaos+normal failure)? Or …? It is easy to imagine baby SBs with their newly acquired 5% SC (and 5% fumble, if we’re doing that) running around in a state of constant panic over whether all the people they’ve known all their lives are ogres or not. Maybe that is intended — maybe that is how they got to be so crazy and dangerous. I’d be tempted to rein it in a bit — not that I necessarily like all of the suggestions to follow: it is all off the top of my head and probably complete crap: Except in the case of rune lords and spells, don’t treat it as an “active skill” — the GM keeps track of an SB’s SC% and rolls against it when a new chaos entity comes within 15 m (for the first time). If the roll is successful, the GM gives a “you feel a bit spooked; maybe take care” type tip-off, not a concrete “definitely Chaos about”. If the SB fails to detect the Chaos “threat” the first time, they will never detect it with that ability — for their Spidey-sense, it is stealth Chaos. Don’t worry about fumbles. At GM whim, when there is no Chaos about, make a luck roll for the SB — unrelated to their SC% — and if it goes badly, give the “you feel a bit spooked …” warning. The above is tentative and incomplete (I have not even addressed what happens when a previously detected Chaos thing returns), not wisdom from on high. Surely what we don’t want is for PC SBs to repeatedly sniff at people till they get a positive result — true positive or false positive — and use that as an excuse to off them. If the player wants their SB to act paranoid and lash out at (probably) innocent civilians, they can just have them do it; no need for a bunch of SC rolls. Or you know, maybe not. Maybe there is some brilliant, clear, and foolproof bit of design-cum-worldbuilding we are missing (although it is there for us to see).

Is this why some Infidels claim that is not an element? If necessarily + ≤ 100%, then the world really has gone mad. Is your hack that the SB’s DC ability goes up against the highest elemental rune of an actually Chaotic entity in an opposed roll? If so, what is the hack for modelling use of an SB’s DC against someone with = 0%? How is the possibility of a false positive modelled?

This sounds like a sensible way to cut down false positives — if false positives really are random. What if they are not? What if the test subject’s having had garlic for breakfast makes pretty much every SB’s Spideysense misfire in the same way? (Like soap residue testing as an explosive back in the day — IIRC.) Repeating tests may give false reassurance. We use dice to represent everything — even when what they are representing might not be random and independent — and that may mislead us (about our nonsensical made-up world). I am also thinking that the SBs will probably respond badly to being treated as only slightly trustworthy test equipment and take against the data nerds trying to organise them. Also maybe fighting among the SBs — “I say they are Chaotic.” “Well, I say they are not!” “Well, your mum …”

Detect Chaos reeks of Minimum Game Fun, but given that we have it, perhaps there are a few ways to make it a bit more bearable: Chaos Window: Chaff to confuse the SBs. This might take the form of lots of very small mobile holes in reality making it hard for the SBs to find the Chaos they are looking for. What form would it take? Small things with their own Chaos taints: Chaos invertebrates (flies, worms, centipedes, and so on), Chaos pollen and weeds, Chaos bacteria and viruses, Chaos parasites living in innocent people — Chaos tapeworm or liver fluke, anyone? — and (naturally) Chaos bats. As well as constant background distraction, release a box of Chaos flies like cuttlefish ink to make a quick getaway. Does Chaos dung carry its own taint? Is it on everyone’s shoes and bar snacks? False Positives: Make SBs — or just NPC SBs (depending on your level of cruelty) — prone to “identifying” many non-Chaotics as Chaotic. One way would be to have the standard % apply when faced with a genuine Chaotic but have another, possibly unrelated (maybe not everyone’s DC works the same way) number give their chance of identifying a non-Chaotic as Chaotic. For example: Jo has a 95% chance faced with a genuine Chaotic of identifying them as Chaotic, but unfortunately she also has a 33% chance when faced with a non-Chaotic of identifying them as Chaotic, so she catches nearly all the ogres, but in a big town with only a few ogres, a lot of Lawful bystanders are collateral damage. You only call the SBs in when you really need to catch that “passing” ogre, because innocents will get lynched. The false positive % doesn’t have to be large for it to be a problem in a large population with few genuine cases to find. 10,000 innocent people and even a 1% chance of identifying each one of them falsely as Chaotic — it doesn’t bear thinking about. Impossible to Trust a Storm Bull: Players know that SBs can sniff out Chaos, but how can NPC populations be sure? Anyone can spot a broo, but in the case of “undercover” Chaos, how do they know the SBs have it right? They only need them for the difficult cases, but in the difficult cases, there is no way of checking the SBs’ work. They are brutal, barely human, probably wrong without knowing it, and surely inclined to say “that one’s Chaotic, I can smell it on them” just out of spite. If you want a pogrom, they will give you one, but despite all the big anti-Chaos talk, probably most Gloranthans are quite sensible and want neither the friendly neighbourhood ogre nor their Orlanth-fearing grandmother to be thrown to the mob. Any use? Probably not!

The problem with has always been where to put it: how can Power be a power rune? But then again if it isn’t, what can be? Although power and force are different ideas, we all suspect that the Shargash Lambda is merely a degenerate or Laconic expression of Power, don’t we? “Truth” has connotations of security and via Proto-Indo-European — how speculatively? — firmness, solidity, and even tree. is firm, solid, planted — a tree. I like it. Now spin it and perhaps its straight arms merely seem to bend — . puts its arms down to provide itself with a spear point and we have . A haunting by MKG’s truth-force? As we have noted before, the three lines of are easily reconfigured into , and they are both expressions of what is rather than what is not — Ø or . is also Delta, which can stand for difference (connoting ) and the distance from epicentre to hypocentre — which brings us back to Force and the violence of the Earth gods.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. — Exodus 20 To avoid trouble with the old four-lettered one would it be enough that the god I “held before them” was not real (e.g. was a fictional character like Minnie Mouse)? I rather suspect it wouldn’t be. Holding a nothing before YHWH might be even cheekier. I am not sure that there is a serious ontological commitment in commandment #1. It is how Moses’ people carry on that is the issue, right? (I am not questioning polytheism in the old times Holy Land, however.)

Strictly back of the envelope stuff: If we say the RQ2 Classic map is 7.25" on a side, then at the declared 1,200 miles/inch, Glorantha is 8,700 miles on a side for a total surface area of 75.69 million square miles. The Earth’s surface area is 196.94 million square miles giving G/E = 0.384. Earth has 2.6 times the surface area of Glorantha. Major caveats: The Glorantha map is probably not exactly a square of side 7.25". If Glorantha bulges (z axis), its surface area will be bigger than calculated. How much of the surface of Glorantha (or Earth) is useable and by whom? Does the map contain all and only Glorantha? (Are there bits of the lozenge missing? Are some peripheral parts of the map empty of Glorantha?) What do we even mean by the surface area of Glorantha? The surface of the ocean, which seems to be circular? The surface of the block of land floating in the ocean, which has five submerged sides I have not considered at all?° What about the surface area of the sky dome or the whole world-containing sphere? All these make Glorantha to Earth comparisons very apples-to-oranges. But a bit of fun, right? 😉 ——————————————————————————————————————— ° If a rectangular cuboid has surface area of 2(ab + ac + bc), where a, b, and c are the lengths of its edges and the RQ2 map goes exactly to the edges of one face of the cuboid, then we get (in square miles): 2×(8,700×8,700 + 8,700×c + 8700×c) = 2×(75,690,000 + 17,400×c) = 151,380,000 + 34,800×c 196.94 million square miles - 151.38 million square miles = 45,560,000 square miles 45,560,000 ÷ 34,800 = 1,309.195 So the lozenge would have to be about 1,300 miles deep for its (largely submerged) surface area to equal the surface area of the Earth (oceans and all). Looking at the Gloranthan cosmology drawing on page 10 of the Guide to Glorantha (which is in some kind of perspective and probably not to scale, anyway), lozenge depth ÷ lozenge width looks to be about 5 ÷ 14, or 0.357. Plugging in those totally untrustworthy numbers, we get: a = b = 8,700, c = 0.357×a = 3,100 (rounded down) 2×(8,700×8,700 + 8,700×3,100 + 8,700×3,100) = 2×(75,690,000 + 26,970,000 + 26,970,000) = 2×(129,630,000) For a total lozenge surface area of 259.26 million square miles, or 1.3 times the surface area of Earth. So Glorantha is big or small to taste. DOUBTLESS MANY MISTAKES HERE! (Including mixing sources of data.)

Quite! If one mixes up religious conversion with science, one will get pseudoscience and may end up turning Glorantha into an Erich von Däniken theme park. No one wants that, right?