mfbrandi

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?

What is the cultural attitude to (being found to have indulged in) cattle theft: “it’s a fair cop, guv” or “possession is nine tenths of the law”? Who teaches the “rebrand herd” permanent battle magic spell? How many cows per point? If nobody teaches it, does that push us in the direction of “I don’t care — steal them back or shut up”? Is widespread and respected branding some kind of mark of “civilisation” or respect for law, or is it a quaint non-starter in a magic-rich world? Is there a magical arms race for a harder-to-defeat brand? I guess we would have heard about it, so I am doubtless lost in the mire of variant Glorantha. 😉

Off the top of my head — this may be more than a bit wonky — and trying to preserve the appearances: Let us say that rune levels (RLs) “teach” spirit magic by summoning spell-teaching spirits (STSs) to do the heavy lifting. If an RL has access to an STS for spell x, the RL will learn spell x right away; if an RL doesn’t know spell x, then the RL doesn’t have access to the spell x STS. Those climbing the cult’s greasy pole are power and/or magic hungry, so why wouldn’t they learn a spell if they could — and certainly before they grant it to hoi polloi? The way things are done is not always the only possible way to do things: it may be possible for initiates to command or entice an STS to do its thing, but still that may be forbidden. It is a way of artificially increasing the power, status, and utility of the rune levels. If you think that mortals — not the gods they worship — run the cults, maybe demarcation violations (initiates acting above their pay grade) are punished by the cult hierarchy by disfellowshipping and setting the cult spirits of reprisal on any initiate showing a bit of initiative (and maybe making a few bucks on the side). If you think the gods run the show, likely the RLs are their favourites, and the gods are enabling their power grab. This suggests a couple of simple and obvious story hooks: The RLs at a temple know a bunch of spirit spells but they can or will no longer teach them — what went wrong? Have the RLs lost power or divine favour? Are they asserting power by withholding magic from their flock? Have the STSs gone missing? What happens when mere initiates attempt to summon the STSs? Rogue initiates have started teaching spells, violating the rules. Do the PCs participate in the witch hunt, or do they back this protestant or dissenting move by the rogue initiates? Do the gods or STSs care, or are they leaving it to the cultists to sort out among themselves? How does dissenting religion relate to illumination?

“Goats? Goats? They are furry wasps, I tell you. Those aren’t horns, they are antennae. Nurse, my medication!”

I am sure it was a scribal error. They meant camel spiders (which are neither camels nor spiders, but could certainly be giant “bugs”). There was a Mongoose era RQ write-up, but I haven’t seen it. They are desert creatures, but they like the shadows, hence their name. (No, not that name, the other one.) Your search for camels also inspired this woefully non-canonical farrago. 🎼 Run for the shadows in these golden years 🎶

“Or worse” … but certain heretical factions maintain that Voids are necessary to complete the conversion to computronium, so some stone must be tapped down beyond dust to Nothing. Scary? If anyone can build coping mechanisms, surely the dwarfs can. But perhaps for the dwarfs complete sublimation is nowhere near as scary as being recycled via a bag of squishy organs — ech! Thus unlikely allies are at least possible for the dwarfs. But also … wind scorpions! Soon the “Great Compromise” will be revealed as mere Potemkin cosmology.

Too Many Limbs, or ‘The Dark Side of Arachne Solara’ Erol’s quest for camels led me to this: The name Solifugae derives from Latin, and means “those that flee from the sun” … common names include camel spider, wind scorpion, scorpion carrier, jerrymunglum, sun scorpion, and sun spider. In southern Africa, they are known by a host of names, including red romans … and baardskeerders (“beard cutters”) — Wikipedia, Solifugae [emphasis mine] This plays nicely with the Lunar claim that the Goddess has a special relationship with AS and her child Time, for what are the Lunars but Red Romans, and has the Goddess not trimmed the beard of the Sun by installing Moonson as the Sun-on-earth? And if the large slit-faced bat is the natural predator of the solifuge, all the more delight in enslaving it and painting it red (which drove it mad). And if Arachne Solara sometimes seems to have ten limbs, rather than indicating centaurism, mightn’t that be the natural condition of a solifuge? Although the Solifugae appear to have five pairs of legs, only the hind four pairs are true legs. — ibid Of course, if AS is the imposter she is beginning to seem — sun spiders are arachnids but they are not spiders — this has consequences: no venom no silk no web Maybe this explains why she is so pally with Trickster and why goddess of the loom Ernalda “helped her weave the Great Compromise” (Glorantha Sourcebook, p. 90) — she could hardly have done it on her own. We had long suspected the Compromise was a con trick and a stitch-up, right? The solifuge theory fits nicely with Argrath’s “failed” Ritual of the Net in Argrath and the Devil: They are aggressive hunters and voracious opportunistic feeders, and have been recorded as feeding on snakes … Prey is located with the pedipalps and killed and cut into pieces — ibid The “big man” takes the credit, but that is business as usual: And he killed the serpent which had wrapped itself about him and wounded him. And then with the Unbreakable Sword he cut the corpse into pieces — King of Sartar, (p. 199 — 2nd edition web PDF) So if “Arachne Solara” is a non-spider stooge of the Compromise’s true architects and those who enthusiastically amend it — and not Glorantha come again to save us — whose web binds the universe together? The smug acolytes of the Loom Goddess and the Mistress of Time will have their ideas, there being many ways to spin this (sorry!), but we all suspect the truth, don’t we? Nothing holds the universe together, the Voids in the world, the lozenge’s ansible — . Although, some ask us to note that (10+6)÷2=8. Ignore them. They are likely in the pay of Buserian.

Of course, JRRT was no Kafka.

Didn’t see either (I don’t know whether they ever ran over here), but fair point — I will fix the song credit above.

Well, I guess it has all been said before: plonk America (or some part of it) between Britain in the West and Asia in the East and away you go. Empiricist naval empire of the West, now fallen — do they mean us? They surely do.

Obviously, superstition, stupidity, and consequent false belief are found IRL. But is this what religion is and/or was? Frazer’s account of the magical and religious notions of men is unsatisfactory: it makes these notions appear as mistakes. (p. 1e) Every explanation is an hypothesis. But for someone broken up by love an explanatory hypothesis won’t help much. — It will not bring peace. (p. 3e) A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. (p. 3e) — Aunty Ludwig, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough In trying to think what it is like to be a 7M initiate, perhaps we should be more Wittgenstein and less JGF. I say this as the staunchest of atheists.

This keeps coming back to me: Engrion → Negroni. If only the Brithini had been the Campari, maybe people would have warmed to them a bit more.

Happily, stories require zero SFX budget, so we have had tales of universal floods, parted seas, and the shooting down of multiple suns for thousands of years. I am fully confident that I wouldn’t stand a chance against a single jaguar. We don’t need Gojira to put the protagonist in a very sticky position. It is all relative. I wasn’t trying to suggest that stories of the first kind were (always) a matter of incompetence on the part of the storyteller, and I did suggest a motivation: making the scary thing less scary. Of course, humans of limited intelligence (me, not you) do find it difficult to portray a Devil who is smarter than us and then a protagonist who is smarter still. Often perhaps, the best we can manage is quicker — “I would have thought of that, eventually, but not at speed and with my soul at stake.” My main worry was the temptation to make the protagonist tougher than the villain they beat, but possibly I was too oblique.

You don’t actually say that the Devil is lacking in cunning, but the juxtaposition suggests it, so let’s run with it. Two kinds of stories/fantasies: The Devil is made out to be stupid and Everywoman can trick him (no Mensa membership required). The giant ain’t all that and any Tom, Dick, or Jack can take it down. — The story’s version of the threat is smaller, so we can feel bigger and safer. The Devil is very tricky indeed, but with a bit of luck and a following wind is fooled. The dragon is as dangerous as feared and then some, but the dice are kind, the heroine’s high-risk strategy comes off, and it is slain; the best models still say that 99 times out of 100 the dragon eats. — The little person wins, but the story is more exciting because she should have failed. (There are, of course, other kinds of stories.) Perhaps the second story is always in danger of collapsing into the first.° Probably Goliath never stood a chance against David. But games are a safe space to fail: the players aren’t going to get eaten by the dragon, so the characters can be allowed a big chance of getting toasted and eaten. When we are playing “my god is bigger than your god,” we should take care not to judge a god’s power by its achievements — the gods that make it to the altar are the gods that got lucky: 100 other gods of the same power and with the exact same play book/character sheet went straight down the throat of Kajabor, but no one remembers them. ————————————————————————— ° For good reason? We don’t want it to be dumb luck that the heroine wins, so the temptation is to make it plausible that she wins. The way to fix it? Show that intelligence went into improving the odds: this is the best strategy — idiots lose 9,999 times out of 10,000 — but it is still a losing strategy more than half the time, maybe a lot more than half the time. “It is a slim chance, but it is the only real chance we’ve got.” Maybe.

I don’t know whether this is true — we may be romanticising our pasts and imagining our younger, snottier selves to have been more sophisticated than we were — but I do think it puts a finger on an important point: if we are interested in myth and we want Gloranthan myth to function for Gloranthans like RW myth does for RW believers, the “the gods are real” should mean that Gloranthan believers stand in relation their gods as RW believers do to theirs, not that Gloranthans stand in relation to their gods as we do to actual oil fields, middle-sized dry goods, tanks, and warlords. The RW Bronze Age was not for its inhabitants the age of myth: “once upon a time” is always a before that isn’t history, and “Faerie” is not reliably located on any map. A Gloranthan might say, “I saw Orlanth once across a crowded room, and I swear he winked at me.” But the same Gloranthan might also say, “Of course, it might have been some stranger in woad.” Plausible deniability is important. Similarly, “I was in the presence of the Devouring Mother … but I had taken a shitload of mescaline.” “Divine” magic works in Glorantha. Sure, but so do mysticism and sorcery. If you were in a Sherlock Holmes story, he would just be a know-it-all coke head. The charm comes from his being in the story while we are not. Do we want the player characters to be like Xanthippe and Socrates, or do we want them to be like Medea and Jason, or even — perish the thought — Hera and Zeus? Can we really have it every way, or will that inevitably take the shine off of some element? I am not sure we can have gods as part of the ordinary furniture of the world and have the made-up religion feel like religion. If we want to tell realistic tales of the believers (and maybe we don’t), then keep their gods offstage. That — certainly — was easy at the end of the 1970s. As always, don’t read too much confidence into my waffle. I may have everything completely wrong … again.

The Meaning of Living Stone: Three Tales In the past, all rock was molten and mobile and plants and animals were impossible. Now, the surface rock is cool and solid; it breaks into dust and steam becomes water. Plants grow everywhere, rats and bugs scurry, and fish gape stupidly. In the past, machines could replicate themselves, but the world was broken and the knack lost. The Mostali have to resort to Growerish tricks to replenish the workforce. It is not the foulness of their food that causes the dwarfs’ disgust, it is the indignity of having to eat. In the past, rock was alive as today a weed or a worm is alive, but murder put an end to this exotic biology. Wholesome matter can only be made to live by infusing it with tenuous soul or spirit. This preposterous story was doubtless dreamed up by some grandchild of Ernalda.

Illuminist Graffiti written in sand or chalked on the pavement: Nothing is true Everything is permitted Theist Dogma incised on the temple portico and inked with the blood of apostates: E V E R Y T H I N G I S T R U E N O T H I N G I S P E R M I T T E D Voidist Propaganda scratched lightly in miniscule on the wall of the deepest, darkest cave: nothing is hidden

One of the lowfires — Gustbran or Mahome, but not Oakfed — could be the patron of those who work kiln-dried wood. The bodgers, who work green wood, having a different deity. Perhaps, a suitable patron for those who work with seasoned wood could be found among Entekos , Molanni , or Daga . Or more than one — there are plenty of gods of killing and mayhem (some without the rune), so why not woodwork? The cabinet maker and lumber gods can be gods of other things, too. We don’t need to create a load of new gods — look at the versatility of Apollo.

No, because spud talk is light-hearted and fun, not bitter and bonkers. It is not the stuff of Trotskyite infighting … right?

Or maybe — it is always only maybe — trying to reinscribe potatoes into the reality of Glorantha is the ultimate magical struggle. Potatoes are the moon underground and the secret to the 4th Age “the moon still exists, but she’s invisible.” The wars and the feeding of gods to the devil — all side shows. Up in the mountains, lonely smallholders are chanting their chants and earthing up their spuds. The real action is offstage … way, way offstage. 😉

Spoken like a true Gloranthaphile: empty & tripped out → malicious & violent. Now where did I put those plague vials? I have some “faith healing” to do.

Secret Urox Lore Once upon a time a mighty storm khan heroquested back to whisper a “foolproof” plan into Ragnaglar’s ear. Thus the future of the cult was secured.

… as ovipositor — now that is a bit of sex reassignment I didn’t see coming, but I like it.