mfbrandi

29 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

[G]amify it if you like, and make the Storm Bull roll each time they want to communicate something when in the presence of Chaos, and if they fail it comes out all jumbled … Not sure what to roll against though.

Hmm … if they succeeded in talking sense, we shouldn’t believe them — it is their babbling that enables us to use them as “Geiger counters” (and maybe that is what they sound like).

So given that the SB gains nothing (in the way of credibility) by being intelligible in the presence of Chaos, make them roll against their Chaos rune — only a Chaotic SB can talk sense in the presence of Chaos. (Like that old Marvel strip where the shape-changed amnesiac alien spy catches himself by being the only person able to read his own notebook/invasion plan.)

13 hours ago, 1d8+DB said:

the Chaos-tainted … kill them, and if they have anything that won't give me a disease or poison my soul with Chaos, take it.

[emphasis mine]

That is the nub of it, though — can you loot anything from Chaos creatures you have murdered without exposing yourself to the threat of Chaos taint? Wouldn’t it amount to living off immoral earnings, “nurturing oneself on chaos”? If one subscribes to the superstition of the Chaos taint, then Chaotics are the last people one should kill to take their stuff. It is not that there is anything wrong with the stuff in itself, it is the provenance of the stuff that is the problem.

And if you are making lists of people it is OK to kill to take their stuff, your soul may already be poisoned — not necessarily with Chaos, but poisoned all the same.

2 hours ago, Malin said:

I suppose if I was a bandit, I wouldn't keep anything that made me worry that whoever I had caught would be coming after me to get it back.

On the other hand, people who won’t be stolen from like good little boys and girls and who insist on raising posses to get all their shiny stuff back will get themselves a reputation — bandits will no longer be prepared to ransom them or let them go. Of course, sometimes PCs will hunt down the people who ransomed them back — to recover toys or dignity — and that is fine, but it might have consequences.

Perhaps sometimes tip off players as to whether the bandits are eyeing up their goodies (robbers) or just trying to calculate their personal ransoms (kidnappers). And ransom from bandits plays out differently from ransom in war or after a diplomatic incident … maybe???

53 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

I think a [non priest but with about the same “runic abilities”] occupation may be defined for players who want to play the “actual priest” but free from any/a lot of the actual priest’s duties.

But then won’t all the players pick the non-priest priest option — not because they don’t want to serve their community, but because they’ll want the escape route … just in case?

Back in RQ2, it seems this was anticipated. The trick was to climb the greasy pole (to potential high priest) and then pick one of these:

• found your own temple, presumably small (be your own boss/tithe collector/religious entrepreneur);
• become a rune lord in training (and wander the earth smiting broo for the baby Jesus).

You paid your dues, and then you had options granting more freedom if you desired them. Or you could become a podgy high priest, boss your underlings about, and pronounce fatwas.

Have these routes to regained freedom of action been shut down in RQ:G?

52 minutes ago, Axel said:

Generally players hate losing gear, often more than losing the PC entirely, in which case the default would be that ransomees keep their gear.

Made me think of musical chairs at Nancy Astor’s.

I am with @Squaredeal Sten on this one: if the bandits have attacked you precisely to relieve you of your valuable gear, they are not going to ransom it back for your paltry price, and if in war the enemy capture you to get hold of the part you were transporting for your side’s new superweapon, they are not going to give it back. The world has robbers as well as kidnappers, and nothing should be ransomed at less than its value (unless the captors don’t know its value). If the sorts of NPCs who won’t let you leave with Mournblade are the sorts who don’t respect ransoms at all, then we may slide back toward PCs fighting to the death, no?

This is not to say that PCs shouldn’t in the normal course of things be ransomed with:

• their ordinary gear and pocket change;
• ordinary/weakly magical weapons and armour, if the PCs seem trustworthy.

In addition:

• you can maybe have some of your cash back — “We keep a quarter and you don’t come after us”;
• special items can have their own ransoms — “The temple will pay a thousand lunars for this chalice”;
• some things the captors will insist you take with you — “The red eye of the little trollish god? I wouldn’t keep it for all the tea in Kralorela!”

40 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

like Pavlov’s experiment. Sense chaos is like the bell.

Yes, perfect! The bowl of food is the presence of slime, tentacles, broo, or gorp, which certainly could make the SB drool. After conditioning, the “bell” makes the SB drool. Conditioned reflex — the bell can ring any time, Chaos/food or no Chaos/food.

We know that the bell has nothing to do with food/Chaos, but the more benighted of the Gloranthans say that if the bell is ringing although there are no monsters about, there must be secret Chaos — something Chaos tainted but showing no tentacle or reflective skin. Spurious categories are invented to cover the embarrassment of having been “Pavloved”.° “It cannot be that we were detecting the slime and stuff, because the bell rings when there is none, so in all cases we were really detecting something intangible no one can ever see. We’re magic, we are.” I mean, would I ever steer you wrong? 😇

All we have to worry about now is who has control of the bell. Whose experiment was this? Who has been ringing the SBs’ bells?

————————————————————————————————
° John Finnemore — text here and probably audio here .

8 hours ago, Joerg said:

But then could not a majority of Glorantha have fled to happier times, never quite facing the Greater Darkness?

49 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Or maybe they stayed in “Glorontha” or “Acos” or some other state of being before the apocalypse that created the modern world.

Or maybe we think of God Time as more like an apocalypse theme park: the stories (rides, attractions) are not separated by time but by space (or an analogue thereof) and are running concurrently, daily. If all the staff assigned to the more horrific rides sagged off work and drank beer in the more attractive bits of Gloronthaland (or Acos Acres), how many twentysomethings with Goofy/Orlanth heads tucked under their arms would we find chugging lager at any given God Time beauty spot? Every age of every character from every version of every story trying to squeeze into the same imagined most agreeable location in myth.

And that is just the staff. What about the punters? Heroquesters have paid good money to visit the various atrocities of the Gods War — whether to improve their souls or to gather power for misbehaviour back in the “real” fantasy world — and if they find them deserted, there will be letters to the management.

This is why — whenever possible — we get heroquesters to play all the parts: you just cannot hang on to the staff. Skeptics are starting to wonder whether there ever were any staff/gods and just how the punters are being convinced that they have “stepped out of time”. Always consider very carefully the wisdom of visiting your own god’s martyrdom.

17 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

That's what happens when I try to touch type on my phone.

Ah, well, maybe one day we’ll get to the Gloranthan LSH. 😉

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

The writings in Drastic:Chaos are the unreliable ravings of a madman (it says so in the publication).

Pretty much everything about Glorantha is presented as in-world raving, and there is no requirement that Dumb Theories be true ravings: “What convictions do YOU have that you recognize are ridiculous but love them anyway?”

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

Critters with chaotic features such as Walktapi or Dragonsnails and even the Left Hand of the Devil are made up of partially corrupted Creation. Gorp are completely corrupted Creation

Creation is one thing we would normally contrast with Chaos. I think we are agreed that “Chaos things” (gorp, etc.) are made of the same stuff as Cosmos, just differently ordered. Corruption — rot — of stuff (let us park the soul, for now) is a Darkness function.

Two notions of the Chaos–Cosmos contrast (neither of which requires a duality of substance):

• Cosmos is stuff and Chaos is nothing;
• Cosmos is well-ordered stuff and Chaos is the same stuff but lacking its proper structure.

Both notions are likely in play (see, for example, Cults of Prax Classic: Designer Notes, Part Two — PDF, p. 106), but the idea of nothing, non-being, nirvana as evil is the one that intrigues me. I have no sympathy for it, but it is fascinating to me that someone would think of it as evil. Why must the gods think of their ceasing to be as evil? “Because then they wouldn’t exist” adds nothing and so is a non-answer.

Horror at the thought of the Void produces monsters, not the Void itself for that is nothing and does nothing (which is why people don’t like “it”).

So my witterings are offered in the spirit of good non-canonical fun, but not fun with no contact with the text. We have and for the breaking down of structure, so if doesn’t connote total existence failure, which rune does? Even is said to connote temporary reality rather than no reality at all — though I suspect there is a “Gloranthan” tendency to view only permanent reality as “true” or “real” reality, but that is a step along the path of nothing substantial is real, isn’t it? I guess some people worry about whether the world is real enough and the soul immortal enough — my conceit is that these people are potential chaos fighters and potential monsters.

If there is no rune that points clearly and unambiguously at the Empty Void, is that a measure of anxiety — we daren’t even name it? If anyone dares to say that no real, solid, scabby Wakboth can be Chaos because Wakboth is, then they are breaking a taboo, so their fellow Gloranthans call them mad for saying it (and being a lone voice crying in the wilderness can in the end drive one mad). The point of giving us the Book of Drastic Resolutions is not for us to immediately discard it as worthless, but to provide us with an additional way of looking at the subject matter. Perhaps …

No Chaos creature — gorp, dragonsnail, Devil, ogre, und so weiter — is made of Chaos stuff. There is no Chaos stuff.

On 3/8/2024 at 4:56 PM, Joerg said:

Gorp don't contain any water or other recognizable element. They are made up of … Chaos plasma.

14 hours ago, AndrewTBP said:

[G]orp are much like Chaos elementals rather than living creatures.

Or we could take our cue from:

• The Book of Drastic Resolutions
  The Devil is the Howling Void — all chaos voids in Glorantha are The Devil … Wakboth is the Guise of the Devil — the insulation between the Devil and Glorantha. He was the ultimate scab formed by the world to protect itself from the invasion of chaos.
  — Lords of Terror, p. 87
   
• Sometimes the world, protesting the violation of its reality, bursts forth in a wild effort to fill that non-hole, and this is expressed as a chaos feature.
  — Greg Sez

Gorp and their “kin” can be likened to scabs, cysts, abcesses, or tumours, all of which are made of ordinary, this-world stuff. Further, the Void is not a real threat — it is not a real anything — capable of causing a reaction; “manifestations of Chaos” have mundane causes, may be psychosomatic, are to be likened to autoimmune diseases.

The awkward squad — having long ago dismissed “the substantial Void” — starts chipping away at the idea of the reality of this world.

52 minutes ago, Alexandre said:

I don’t know, it’s hard to believe that cutting off a lizard’s tail would lead to its death by blood loss.

Probably correct for lizards that can voluntarily discard that bit of tail. Maybe doesn’t generalise to all reptiles. Might be amusing to chop off a T. rex’s tail — presumably it would land on its face and be unable to get up again. Presumably …

23 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

For the context of my campaign now in 2939 ST

Wow! I am impressed.

19 hours ago, jajagappa said:

gorp don’t like high salt concentrations

Because of osmosis? We have marine amoebae, and surely a shoggoth laughs in the face of salt. It would be a pity if we didn’t have saltwater gorp, too. Of course, if people believe there are none … 😉

2 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I am sure that I can cite Real World examples of sociopaths rising to the top.

It was sarcasm. I have anarchist instincts.

3 hours ago, Malin said:

And now I am thinking how that is probably a reason why most Storm Bulls prefer the wilderness … No wonder they're annoyed if they're lowkey hurting half the time.

Maybe what really gets an SB’s goat is sensing that omnipresent low hum of Chaos in a large community that is clearly functioning perfectly well. That is not supposed to happen. When it is just a matter of dragonsnails eating the crops, life is a lot simpler — dangerous, but not challenging. Their headaches are mostly brought on by those old sods they meet in the agora who will insist on asking awkward questions. SBs in town always carry hemlock, hemp, tar, and feathers.

3 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

And, when they start to really power up, just who is going to support said wannabe hero when they want to go on a Heroquest?

Off the top of my head — I may be very wrong, and I am not recommending this as a way to run a community — my guess is that as PCs get better at killing monsters and taking their stuff, their community comes to see them as the people clearly best suited to leading the community (from the front). So we square the circle by having the murder hobos decide what the community needs — 90% of time dedicated to the community by the PC lord/shaman/priest, but 90% of what the community wants is what the PC lord/shaman/priest tells it it wants. So the PCs keep a lot of agency, but this is tempered by a sense of their responsibilities — because even in a fantasy world, no sociopath would become a leader of their community.

1 hour ago, Erol of Backford said:

Makes me think what sense is being used for chaos? Smell chaos seems the most obvious but what are chaos molecules and are they like a sort of Gloranthian cancer?

You might smell a Chaotic feature as a dog might smell a tumour or a giant pouched rat tuberculosis or explosives, but not the Chaos taint itself.

Of course, you might “seem” to smell the Chaos on someone, that might be what it is like for the SB — a bit like synaesthesia, perhaps? — but the Chaos taint doesn’t provide any molecules to sniff. Sometimes the SBs say that there is Chaos present when no scientific test or normal sense could detect it — it is their USP. As long as most of the time there is plausible corroboration, people are “happy” to trust them in the other cases. Mostly, the SBs are perfectly sincere in their denouncements of secret Chaos.

We could say any of these things:

• in the difficult cases, the SBs have a hotline to the occult truth courtesy of their god;
• in the difficult cases, they don’t really know: sometimes they are right, sometimes wrong, but it is random — dumb luck — not detection;
• the difficult cases reveal that “Chaos tainted” is a BS category (there is no practice of justification — sometimes they “have a feeling” and that is all there is).

Clearly, the first of these is the party line, but it is surely also the case that the thing is deliberately set up for the skeptics and human rights lawyers to feel justified in their disgust at witch hunts, right? Are we being teased by the designers? I really couldn’t say. I hope so. 😉

9 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Since Jar-eel is the Red Goddess' avatar in the world, I agree that she's not shaman per se, but I think any Hero Cult will function very similar to a shamanic Spirit Cult. Jar-eel needs power and worship to do the things she does.

I confess to being a little confused. To my simple-minded way of seeing it:

• an avatar is a deity descended into the mundane (mortal) world — direction = down;
• a hero is a mortal trying to break into the big leagues, the divine world — intended direction = up.

So if we go for the whole prayer-powered gods thing, wouldn’t Jar-eel — considered as an avatar of the RG — have access to all the sacrificed power that had filtered up to the pinnacle of the Lunar religion even without her own cult? (And the RG have access to all power directed at Jar-eel, because they are the same entity?) Of course, as direct worship of the RG, any Jar-eel cult might have fewer overheads than, say, the 7M — fewer intermediaries to pay out in the divine MLM scheme.

Of course, if Jar-eel is just a mortal indulging in a bit of RG cosplay, things might be different.

The prayer-powered gods thing always makes me queasy. Here are two views of fantasy religion (there will be others and better, and no, I don’t mean these as digs at RW religion):

• our fantasy religionists are coming to terms with the powers in the world, the sublime — learning to live with the terrifying machinery of the world which will grind on in the same way, worship or no worship;
• without prayer (or sacrifice), the gods are zeroes — powerless — but the mortals empower a bunch of destructive idiots who have jettisoned any ability they might once have had to change and grow.

The latter is uncomfortably like worshipping the storms of global warming or the latest orange-skinned demagogue to have puffed itself up on the adulation of the public. Of course, it also dangles the promise of the American dream (or the dream of the magus): play your cards right and you can be god.

Romantics vs. narcissists?

33 minutes ago, EricW said:

Maybe she chaos gifted the bat intelligence for long enough so the bat could answer a bunch of riddles?

Although we can theorise about illumination, perhaps we don’t need much intellect just to be illuminated:

• Illumination conveys much the same information present in the fragment from Salonar Tamaskil’s book, but teaches by emotional experience rather than intellectual argument.
  — Cults of Terror (Classic PDF, p. 86)

So maybe the Bat didn’t need an INT boost to be illuminated (if it was). I don’t think we have any problem with “unintelligent” Chaos creatures being tormented by their (supposed) nature, so maybe no surprise if they can get some relief from that torment, too. Just how dumb is animal intelligence, anyway? Jay? Octopus? Orca? Sea lion? OK, the Bat can’t read Sanskrit, but neither can I.

As for the mind link, I am imagining Spock–Sedenya engaged in Bat-whispering and the Bat each unsure whether she is a goddess dreaming she is a Chaos monster dreaming she is a hummingbird, or a hummingbird dreaming she is a Chaos monster dreaming she is a goddess, or a lump of rock dreaming she is a pterosaur dreaming she is a bat dreaming she is a moth dreaming … Perhaps neither of them has been quite sure at any time since.

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Sounds to me like the Bat, while horrible to all external senses, might have experienced that flavor of illumination and so would befuddle the Bull.

Surely the point is neither the nature of the Bat nor the senses of the Bull (Urox is as befuddled or as sharp as ever), but the change in Oddi after his getting blown out. He is still coming to terms with his new perception of the world, and at this point nothing makes sense to him. We can worry in the other place about whether his perceptions were more reliable before or after his extinguishment (as clearly the mainstream view is that Chaos is “a thing” even if this was sometimes undercut in the past). Even if we are supposed to think that BAU will re-assert itself soon enough, there is a period of adjustment, right?

Personally, I don’t mind the idea of illuminated animals who post-illumination don’t spook at imagined Chaos, but who knows?

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

Does Illumination cut the ties to the Storm Bull?

I didn’t say that it did.

If Paulis is right to say that the difference resides not in existence — a suggestion I claim is fun even if it is not canon — and this applies to the Chaos–not Chaos distinction, then even the the great god Urox himself cannot detect the taint of Chaos. (It is a non-hole in existence for a reason. There is nothing to detect. It is a trick of our minds, not a part of the furniture of the world.) A continued tight connection to the god won’t help — the SB worshipper couldn’t detect Chaos before illumination and still cannot after illumination. No change.

Of course any fool can detect pus, slime, tentacles, and a rampaging army of broo, but that is not the supposed USP of the Bullies, is it? And you can still kill broo (even fanatically), but there is no permission to do so granted by some Chaos–not Chaos distinction — as that turned out to be a delusion brought about by a lack of self-understanding.

But I would say that, at least since I fell into Getafix’s other cauldron as a small child. Strange doors never close again. 😉

10 hours ago, EricW said:

[H]ow can an illuminated Storm Bull … sense chaos?

I think this is an excellent question, and my answer is in the spirit of MGF (not the elucidation something profound or the articulation of canon … whatever that is).

• My King, it is said there is a dim and a bright side to all of existence, and that only those who are Illumined see that the difference resides not in existence but in the way we choose to see it.
  — Cults of Terror (Classic PDF, p. 85)

Paulis Longvale is not an illuminate, but he is right: there really is no difference between the glass half full and the glass half empty, the duck picture and the rabbit picture. “Aspect perception” is — we might say — a projection: now it seems to represent a duck, now a rabbit, but crucially we see that the picture has not changed (that no line has moved or shifted colour).

Of course, this has consequences: an illuminated Storm Bull cannot detect Chaos, but neither can a “benighted” Storm Bull. No one can check up on the “results” of a Storm Bull’s sense chaos: there is nothing for them to detect — they are just having one of their headaches. There are no facts about whether something is Chaotic or not. If I see you as Chaotic, that is just an attitude I take toward you. “It’s me, not you.” The illuminate is someone who has grasped this, and many can flip aspects at will.

Of course, some illuminates are psychotic and will happily persecute people for “imagined sins”, but they cannot detect the sinners — they just get angry for what they know in their moments of lucidity is no real reason, and they leave “a trail of cinders across the continent.” We are all Chaotic. We are none of us Chaotic. Duck. Rabbit. No difference.

The universe cannot argue us into evaluating it one way rather than another — pure reason will not motivate us — and those who cannot deal with this may build or summon devils, sprout tentacles, or start “anti-Chaos” pogroms. It is not enough to tear away the veil, one must be at peace with the world seen aright. The world cannot hand us morality on a plate, and there is no point taking it out on ourselves or others. Leave the tantrums to the terrible twos.

3 hours ago, radmonger said:

They might just be killed, if no-one present is their kin …
[but] there will almost always be some second cousin’s wife that would render this option chaotic.

I would hope that in the absence of the second cousin’s wife, the quiet person who lives at the edge of the village and tries to avoid clan politics (as the continuation of war by other means) would pipe up at this point. “Surely all men are are sisters and every mortal a cousin. Please, think again.” But maybe they were lynched years ago as a likely Chaotic/illuminate/closet White Moonie.

A judgement from the local Orlanthi jurist that an action is not Chaotic is not a “get out of sin free” card. There are other transgressions than Chaos.

5 hours ago, Darius West said:

It’s okay as a Vegan to eat humans if they consent.  Animals can’t talk so they can’t consent you see.

This is what the ogre’s lawyer said:

• My client cannot eat vegetables or beasts, because they cannot talk and so cannot consent.
  My client’s only resort was to eat people.
  Here are the consent forms. Certainly no duress was involved.
  Yes, my client ate Aldryami and Voralans, too. One must have a balanced diet.
  So, you see, My Lady, ogres are the only true vegans.
  Uzko don’t get all this grief and they eat rocks. When did a rock ever sign a consent form?

7 minutes ago, Darius West said:

Was this written by a Lunar Vegan?

I guess it is tricky being a lunar vegan. Keep well away from the maize tortillas.