mfbrandi

Hmmm … I had a longer answer, but I found myself remounting old hobby-horses, so I will try to boil it down to a short(er) — but equally jaded — note. Ernalda is the bountiful mother of the world. In some places she is called Ralia, Frona, Seshna, or Pelia, but her attributes are the same … Sometimes she has particular attributes which go along with local personalities. In the Dragon Pass and other Ernalda regions, she is called Barley Mother, and in Esrolia there is the yellow-haired Wheat Mother. In Peloria there is the Maize Mother too, whose cult was spread by Hon-eel — WF9 (1980), pp. 6–7 At this stage, it seems clear that Ernalda was just another land/grain goddess, so a daughter of Gata & Genert (but also of Asrelia because Asrelia is her older self). Maran Gor is the sister of Ernalda and Esrola (etc.) in the sense of being their dark side. There is just one goddess in play, here. Similarly Asrelia–TKT are the light/dark grandmother–crone phase of that same goddess (Esrola–Ernalda) and — presumably — Voria–Babs are the light/dark daughter-and-younger-self pair (making Ernalda her own bloody avenger, though she wouldn’t admit it). As far as I can see, only the light mother version gets the extreme geographical multiplication — although identity is transitive — and that may be one reason for separating them from the earth mother goddess (as aspects of an aspect?), but it seems a bit thin to me. There is still only one goddess in play. 1 goddess × 3 age phases × 2 shades + n geographical areas = 1 earth, without considering Gata and company, but you know così fan tutte — men in the ’70s, eh? I guess what we all suspect is that the designers drank the Dragon Pass Orlanthi Kool-Aid and wanted to promote Mrs. Orlanth out of the rabble of land/grain goddesses (who are all one really). Or at least, they want us to think they like wearing that hat. But Kool-Aid leads to Jonestown and being drummed out of the Spare Rib collective, so reject the Devil Ernalda and all her works and embrace a more wholesome Mother … like Mallia or Krarsht. Krarsht with a “husband–protector” is unthinkable, I am very happy to say. Arachne might have a “husband”–lunch, I suppose. [Oh, dear — this is not a very helpful answer, is it? And not much shorter than the old one. It has fewer quotes, at least.]

Let us suppose this is right important but that it is a myth about attitudes to death (not a chapter of The True History of Magic in Glorantha™) — what then? We are used to the idea of the creators of the setting seeming to sneer at folk like the dwarfs and the Brithini for clinging to indefinitely extended life at the cost of being uptight and hidebound and failing to embrace the hippy butterfly lifestyle. But perhaps we malign them: death is easy; life is hard. It is a work ethic. Ordinary humans seem to be totally down with Death, either because they are delusional about afterlives and/or metempsychosis (“fake death”) or because they really have grasped that all good things come to an end — Humakt as the Lord of Terror who is no terror, at all (of course he is an illuminated deity, and let’s forget the misstep that had all gods having something like illumination). Mortals are redeemable because they can “adapt” to the “post-Spike reality” (i.e. reality, pure and simple). So where does that leave most of the gods, who are terrified of extinction? Do they represent a psychological tendency far worse than the most hard-bitten and mean-spirited Brithini? Is a charitable reading of Argrath’s godwhacking that it is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees? I don’t know.

I know it is only a typo, but that is one way the truth leaks through to us. Now, who wants to cut up all their vintage RQ books and rearrange the sentence fragments into something illuminating? What, no one?

Ah, well, that one had to be ugly to serve its purpose. 😉 As a left-hander, I can confirm what the accursed righties have long suspected — that is exactly what we are like: our consciousness is merely apparent (our heads are filled with kapok), and yet we are permanently bombed on powerful hallucinogens (we fell into Getafix’s cauldron soon after manufacture). We don’t have to reach out and touch the Void — we are the Void.

That one is fine (on its own terms), isn’t it? Taking the enemy’s toys. Putting Lodril to work.

Rurik has become a Rune Lord of the Sun Dome Temple. — RQ2 Classic (PDF, p. 61) But the RuneQuest ur-character wasn’t averse to a broadsword (ibid, p. 143), right? And if they never used swords, anyway, “never use a sword of any kind” (Cults of Prax Classic (PDF, p. 57)) wouldn’t be much of a geas, would it? Rhett Butler, Rhett Davies, … it’ll come to me in a minute. 😉

Corresponds to splitting the white light of pure DN consciousness into a spectrum and messing up the rune. As suits a diffident pseudo-mystic with the soul of a sorcerer manqué, I often wonder what a geometrically perfected set of runes would look like. I don’t think the line through the triangle has to be thought of as negation — a slashed zero is still a zero, and the undisturbed ray passing through the prism of Law leaves both “intact.” As the mystic grasps that Law and Chaos, Cosmos and the Void, and Ø are the same, perhaps we can add to the pile of not-really-opposites both –Ø and –, expressive of Nysalorean and draconic illumination, respectively (which can be the same or different to taste: I am not the fantasy nirvana police). Anyway, back to your iceberg. With a slight tweak, we get: That should suit the Lizard King: “Three to one, baby; one in four / No one here negates the Law.” The ray is the dividing knife, but Cosmos is fractal, a Sierpiński triangle. “You walk across the floor, utuma knife in your hand / Trying to tell me no one understands.”

There is some discussion of Cortex in the Glorantha in Fate Core thread, so you might find people there who can help. To get their attention, you might try tagging them in this thread using their @ handles — e.g. @TrvShane. Good luck.

That is one take, certainly. I see them as the anti-Pink Floyd: pure dragonewt consciousness is nonrefractive — “white light” passes straight through without splitting. Iconographically, this is surely a very good thing.

I don’t know, but I suspect — going meta — that it is just a result of some designer assigning insects to long ago (because they went “creepy-crawlies — ugh!”). If you want to keep that, but your campaign still needs the Wasp Riders to seek allies against trolls who wish to attempt genocide-by-picnic against them and their trusty steeds, you can call on Xiola Umbar as someone who can — canonically — bridge the – gap through friendship. (AA attempts domination; ZZ introjection — thereby “birthing” Shargash?)

He told Lavretsky how Glafira Petrovna before her death had bitten her own hand — and, after a short silence, said with a sigh: “Ev’ry man, master, sir, is destined to eat ’isself.” — Turgenev, Home of the Gentry° “Plants and animals, both wild and domestic, are her children.” But her children (even mice) have to eat — and they have to eat each other, except for the plants who mostly eat . (If light looks a lot like zero to you, welcome to Nysalor, the Golden Void.) If her children/gifts are her body, then not just cannibalism but divine autocannibalism, and at harvest time autumnal cannibalism? If you are the earth and everything that’s in it, how else can it play out? We are all us. We are all lunch. Autosarcophagy. Self-cannibalism. Listen to them. Words of the night. What music they make! — Vivamort To the extent that the circle of munching is not 100% efficient, then yes, chaos mice. The demand for perpetual seems unreasonable, though. So the averse are to take shelter in cults? But is a world in which nothing happens an improvement on one in which nothing is? From the inside, at least, they are indistinguishable. Do chaos mice have six legs? Do they know their own mother? In the end, can we tell the Devouring Mother from the Devoured Mother, the feaster from the feast? There is always another way. The Void is generous: it has room for everyone. It is fruitful, too, for what is the Void but the womb of Cosmos (and its grave, too)? So is Ernalda an imposter or just a mask to be cast aside? This is the frontier, this is where I change, and wait between two worlds to take refreshment. — C. Day Lewis, From Feathers to Iron° ——————————————————————————————————————— ° Turgenev and Lewis quotes shamefully nicked from MJH’s Viriconium Nights (Gollancz, 1985)

I am not knocking this idea — I like it! — but doesn’t it position the Earth Goddess as a servant of farmers, rather than the other way about? A way to make players — and possibly PCs — confront the narcissism of much of what passes for reverence? The temple snakes probably thought of it as Summons of Food.

I am now imagining RuPaul judging Jack Webb in a skin. Pantomime dragnewts to make up the numbers. Now we know where Stan Freberg got the idea. The Dragonewts’ Dream always makes me think of Brackett’s “The Last Days of Shandakor .” Perhaps — rather than the Martian case of covering a retreat into extinction — it masks the solidification of past dragonewts into “today’s” Glorantha. We have wyverns and dream dragons, and I wonder whether we have a dragonewt equivalent.

Perhaps — unlikely as it must seem — alcohol acts to preserve giant wasp growth hormone.

Yes: Orlanth.

Which may be tricky if your muggers are still on the heroplane? In which case, perhaps the best revenge is to lock them out of the mundane world and to turn the otherworlds into a sort of Gloranthan Phantom Zone, with Arkat, Orlanth, and company as the General Zods of the setting. One reading of what happens in the Fourth Age. Finish the job which the “creation of time” was supposed to have accomplished. YGWV.

What do the short-arse wasp riders know that they are not partaking? Or perhaps they were once even smaller. What happens when you slip some into Gonn Orta’s sandwiches? All kinds of Lewis Carroll meets Terence McKenna shenanigans threaten …

GLORANTHAN KARAOKE Haven’t had one of these for a while, but they seem like the perfect expression of the maddest of the lozenge’s mad loves. (Think Ring of Swords.) Damn but the Swampers have gotten good — There’s a Riot Goin’ On period Sly with hints of Miles and Coldcut. Who knows what sorceries they’ve mastered and what pond weed they are smoking these days? YO and ZZ have taken a leaf out of Cat Power’s book and ditched the choruses as they trade Eurythmics tunes: [cracked and Cohenesque] The language of love slips from my lover’s tongue Cooler than ice cream and warmer than the sun Dumb hearts get broken just like China cups The language of love has left me broken on the rocks The language of love has left me stony grey Tongue tied and twisted at the price I’ve had to pay Your careless notions have silenced these emotions Look at all the foolishness your lover’s talk has done [sweet like stevia] It’s savage and it’s cruel; it shines like destruction Comes in like the flood and it seems like religion It’s noble and it’s brutal; it distorts and deranges And it wrenches you up, and you’re left like a zombie It’s guilt edged, glamorous, and sleek by design You know it’s jealous by nature, false and unkind It’s hard and restrained, and it’s totally cool It touches and it teases as you stumble in the debris The newtlings go into an extended jam on The Aubergine That Ate Rangoon before closing the set with Nefertiti.

If the trolls eat them and the Sun Domers do not, then I’d think the Wasp Rider diplomats and PR types would be working on a story whereby wasp honey is a gift of the sun — to be shared with their valued Yelmalian allies — and not energy stolen from the sun on behalf of darkness, whatever foolish preconceptions the SDs may have had about insects. After all, they will say, all life depends on the gifts of the sun. But if the Domers have done a deal with the giant woodpeckers, all bets are off.

The Mexican honey wasp would seems to tick all the boxes: it is a paper wasp it is considered a delicacy it makes honey it pollinates avocados it eats pests of citrus trees Is there a whole scaled-up “land of the giants” ecosystem to go with the giant insects? Giant fruit trees? Giant pollen? Giant insectivorous birds? Any suggestion that I am just hoping for kaiju woodpeckers ripping apart giant wasp nests while humans look helplessly on is of course entirely …

I have just read — rather late! — Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. You get at least two takes on a “premodern” attitude to the world and a heroquest to bring back someone a lot more agreeable than Arkat or Sheng Seleris.

Potato makes at least one present-day real-world ban list. It is not that potatoes themselves are unclean but seemingly that too much killing is involved in including them in your diet. Maybe in Glorantha spuds are an example of the moon stealing solar power (light → starch), and refusing to eat the little earth moons is a passive aggressive gesture. (Or there is a myth that I have forgotten/never knew.)

Zorak Zoran eats the sun (or “wrestles fire powers from Yelmalio” if that suits you better) and this positions him as the ur-phototroph? Either he taught Mallia or she taught him, but surely she gifted photosynthesis to the world at large.° Without darkness, the sun lacks all utility. Zorak Zoran eats Flamal. Is this the same myth recast? (FLAY-mul → Flame All?) Is it vegetable propaganda, a mendacious attempt to claim that not originated the trick of eating light? Did ZZ consider Flamal an usurper? The world tree — burning from the inside — named “ash” for its future state. ———————————————————————————— ° ZZ may have preceded all life, and that may be why animated skeletons come easy to him — life, no life: what’s the difference? As Styx comes between and , so viruses are liminal for , as is Uncle Zeezee. Just how intimate are Zorak Zed and the Mistress of Microbes? In the dark, everything is on the down low. Is Sister X the midwife of life itself?

Aha! This is how we square the circle of the god of machines — which need — and (short of feeding M. to the Devouring Mother): time is a series of static frames; Mostali quantum theory. “M” is for Mostal and Morph. And you have cracked the Scottish dwarf problem: outsiders heard “mumble mumble mumble Claymore mumble mumble” and jumped to the wrong conclusion.

Sunlight is to the spud as Yelmalio is to Zorak Zoran. As Julian is to Sandy?