mfbrandi

“Gbaji” missionaries: [1] spread new and interesting diseases; [2] cure the same new and interesting diseases while passing on the “good news”; [3] look for new lands who haven’t seen the light — rinse and repeat (till caught). Orlanth: [1] murder the sun; [2] resurrect the sun; [3] repeat [1] and [2] till the clockwork runs down. Doubtless there are interesting differences between the cases, but: infect the people -> illuminate the people; murder the sun -> illuminate the sun. What the Orlanth model is not: repent and sin no more. In fact, one might say that murdering the sun is such a jolly jape, that we should repeat it not only annually but daily, too. Of course, one might downplay Orlanth’s agency: he did not at any point understand the consequences of his actions and did not give informed consent to the disintegration loops of time. One might say that. Then again, one might say that the first story is a piece of propaganda or purported reportage — ethics of the missionaries very much of interest (and — going meta — the tale is surely a comment on IRL missionaries and empire) — but that despite the structural parallels, the Orlanth story has a different function: it is a just so story, an aetiological myth; the ethics of Orlanth and the rights and wrongs of the quarrel with Yelm are beside the point.

The cult promises nothing about life after death, except that loyal and lucky cultists will be spared the eternal agony of being eaten by the Bat. — Cults of Terror (Classic PDF, p. 70) Well, neither eternal agony nor eternal bliss correspond to my idea of being chucked down the memory hole — pfft! gone. However, in your defence: Seven Mothers Red Goddess Crimson Bat That is, the Bat does seem to supply the “missing” death component — the bat is the flipside of the RG, as Arkat is the flipside of Nysalor. In each case, it is the same entity, but seen from a different angle. One thing, not two (and not four). So saying being eaten by the Bat is eternal agony is the flipside of saying that union with the RG is eternal bliss, but we know it is the same thing — pick which side of the press release to read (or look at it edge on) — even if we don’t necessarily feel the same way about it. 😉

Well, the uz have been known to partake of a bit of spiritual darkness … in a kingdom of ignorance, no less. I don’t know whether the parallels are nudge-nudge ironic or whether they indicate something … else. I will leave that for others to worry about. There is this: At Winter Win, atop Valind’s Glacier, the Black Sun joined Himile-worshipping ice trolls and Boztakang’s Blue Moon army to defeat another Chaos army. — Prosopaedia (PDF, p. 16) “Himile” might be thought to sound a bit like someone else with a Black Sun connection, but I will not speak his name, lest I summon his followers — yuck!

But what kind of category is trollkin, anyway? Is it shorthand for low birth weight and/or litter born? Are trollkin made (“put this one on stunting diet B”)? Is it a social class? Is it a conferred status (“I dub you Sir Winalot”)? There may be no deep fact to discover, just a bigoted decision to be made.

Trollkin are basically small trolls … with small pelvises. Do they want bigger babies?

“If it works, it works — right, schmight! — and if it stops working, there are other things to try.” After all, Glorantha is already full of people who think that they are right (with nothing like justification). Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have a faction (even if dead and gone) who weren’t hung up on being right — and through sophistication rather than naïveté? Supposedly, Hitchcock said, “I didn’t say actors were cattle. I said actors should be treated like cattle.” One might think of God Learner identifications in the same way, but of course nobody has to. The idea charms me, but probably only me.

Perhaps the deterministic clockwork universe is just what post-God Learner Gloranthans take to be the God Learner Weltanschauung. But perhaps that is a bastardised take on them and their research programme — that was all the benighted barbarians could make of GL subtlety, but they put the crude caricature to their own use and it kinda works for them. It is not that “we are all God Learners, now”, more that we are all parody God Learners, now, taking what we think they learned (output) and neglecting their methodology. So what were they like? Experimentalists and empiricists, surely. I like to think of them as operationalists who were not seduced by their own operationalizations — they knew they were sidling up to reality, not meeting it head on — their definitions might be wrong, there might be other operationalizations as good, there might be things they don’t know how to measure or model, but still there is a virtue in working with what can be measured and modelled, now. But did they think they had a hotline to the truth, or did they just think they had useful tools which they might make yet more useful? Since the lab blew up long ago, we can afford a bit of charity to the enablers of empire. 😉

Sorry, @JonL, I didn’t mean to re-open old wounds, and I had somehow previously entirely missed the comments you link above. It just seemed a bit mad to me that people could JC using an OOP version of the rules but not the “new, improved, shinier” version (which is freely available). Ho hum — onwards and upwards!

The PDF is the Devil’s invention, making the load ever lighter as dead trees slip from shelf to landfill or incinerator.

This amused me: French sociologist … Marcel Mauss … set forth his conception of magic in a 1902 essay, “A General Theory of Magic”. Mauss used the term magic in reference to “any rite that is not part of an organized cult: a rite that is private, secret, mysterious, and ultimately tending towards one that is forbidden”. Conversely, he associated religion with organised cult. — Wikipedia: Magic (supernatural) Think what a boon that would be in game design terms! No faffing about running the annual crop blessing through the magic system, as magic is something done by sociopaths like Argrath and not nice religious people like us. Basically just for chaotic NPCs, hardly warranting player-facing rules, at all. 😉

@Joerg and @Eff: I have nothing against uz women having an active sexuality, it is just that “he seduces” always smells of James Bond and gives me the ick. Clearly, as a child I observed too many adults in the 1970s.

Having characters argue about such things might have some utility. Myths/stories about possible divine identities? Fine, surely. Having players argue about it — “like for real, man” — sounds like no fun at all. Here in the forums, there is a danger of offering something as a story/myth/in-world theory and having it taken as something meta and definitive. Thus we undermine and debunk ourselves, so as not to be taken too seriously. 😉

Humans think he seduces uzko women, but maybe that says more about their sexual fantasies than it does about him. Maybe as a and cultist he wouldn’t stoop to exploiting beer goggles () to get women into bed, especially if that might result in more . Still, every cult has its backsliders, I suppose.

Freedom may come in degrees — I am free to move about my cell, but I cannot leave it — but does free will? “A little bit pregnant.” Of course, I say that as a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic about “radical” or “metaphysical” notions of free will, but perhaps there is a middle way. To abuse Aunty L, to say that someone has free will is to have a certain attitude toward them — to hold that they are possible recipients of blame (as earthquakes are not). And that might come in degrees — culpable, but how culpable? — and float free of the “facts” about the ironclad laws of causation. This might work for many cases: Orlanth is the wind — senseless to blame “him” if your house is blown down, as the wind is not a person; the stealing of your pants was done by a mischievous imp — who needs to be held to account/taught a lesson, as that little spirit is a person, an agent. It even works for Kajabor, “who had to do it”, who swallowed gods and nations as the sea swallows luckless sailors. But Wakboth is — I guess — the test case for this sort of thing. Isn’t Wakboth supposed to be mightier than the gods but eminently blameworthy? What sort of people would we be to take that sort of attitude, to let the gods off the hook (“just in time”), but not the Devil? Not grown-ups, I would say, but the Devil probably has something to say on their own account: Promises create obligations, not fetters:  Empty words do not a Prison make,  Nor iron vows a Cage. That is why you had to pin me under this damned block. Oh, and my will is as free as it ever was. Besides, I never promised anything. Or if I did, I had my talons crossed, so it doesn’t count. But who in their right mind listens to the Devil? Although, if my “promise” magicked manacles about my wrists, could we truly call it a promise? Is it a contract if I cannot break it (although we will surely want to distinguish promises from contracts)? A vow is not a surrendering of power, it is but a surrendering of authority — in the sense that if I do the forbidden thing, I am no longer in the right. Is it productive to fudge over whether the Compromise is a yielding of power — “putting the weapons beyond use” — or something making it dishonourable to perform the dangerous acts in future? Making a divine vow a magical (contr)act in the Styx will literally-and-inevitably strangle the promise-breaker sense enables this fudge, but if the gods are as real as we are (an error no believer would make), should we embrace that fudge? Would it set a poor precedent for mortal givers of promises? The point of a promise is not to set a tariff for its breaking, neither to give the other party a hostage against my misbehaviour, nor even to make its breaking impossible. “But,” you say, “Brandi is of the Devil’s party and not without knowing it.”

Which may be part of the problem — if there is one — “I rolled a double six, so your piece is removed from the board.” How do we deliver blurred lines and adequate levels of FUD if the rules deliver clear and unambiguous results? (Giving the GM — and only the GM — the authority to say “I lied earlier: that is not really what happened” doesn’t sound like it would make for a satisfying game.)

WMD heroquesting is dull as ditchwater. I guess we all agree on that. But experimental heroquesting — telling new stories, bending the old ones way out of shape — is surely the only interesting kind. The repeatable experience is best saved for the weekly supermarket shop (where alienation is your friend). Think of Alyx’s frustration with Machine (who would happily have sex exactly the same way twice — ’cos if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it). To me, making WMD questing impossibly difficult for PCs but possible for NPCs like Argrath would be an unsatisfactory solution. “We” want to keep the tanks and the big bombs, but YOU are not allowed to play with them. But I don’t want to keep the WMD out of the myths — we all like a tale of Apocalypse. One approach is to make the border between dream/myth/story and reality less porous (<- metaphor alert) — no one ever brought an H-bomb back from dream to bedroom, but I cannot see many people going for that. Another would be to reset player expectations: you are not the heroes; heroes are dangerous lunatics — don’t fall for their pitch that they are breaking the rules for the community’s benefit, they are all just John Waynes out to murder their nieces; you are the little people and your job is to stop the heroes and their enablers. Again, I don’t see this as having mass appeal. Or — like Gully Foyle? — we can throw the explosives to the masses and show a bit of trust (or risk tolerance). Doubtless, there are many more and much better solutions to the “my toy, not yours” problem.

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 …

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”.

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 …

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

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.

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!

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?