mfbrandi

This elf — played by Guy Pearce — burned down their own forest?

Welcome to the hive mind, @Ynneadwraith. Once you have learned to float above the pointless arguments — and I am sure you’ll pick it up much quicker than I did: I am a construct of very little RAM — it can be a fun place. Because it is good to have gaps left for us to make forays into ourselves, rather than turning the already dense palimpsest into a black page? Not that I think that is the reason, of course: I suspect that somewhere along the line, some of the creators drank too deeply of the Orlanth–Ernalda Kool-Aid. There is probably some tension between passionately filling in the detail of an “invented world” and providing just enough detail to prompt us to exercise our own imaginations, no? So relish the bits Chaosium cannot be bothered with — they are yours. Sure, you can vary your Glorantha, anyway, but it is probably easier to recompose and improvise on I Got Rhythm than to attempt that with some bit of late Webern, no?

… I don't think that Illumination has such an effect. The sang froid of the illuminate, perhaps: “If you can meet with and / And treat those two impostors just the same.” Mostly, I just shrug at any “because illumination” explanations, excuses, or whatever. I am sure I will never grasp exactly what the designers mean.

Or more generally *nucleic acid, and Krarsht’s “twin sister” gives us the other metaphor. The Devouring Mother has an interest in viruses, too. Plausibly, both are interested in dematerialisation — do more with less! Perhaps, as the Buserian–Lhankor Mhy thread suggests, counting gods is a fool’s game. No entity without identity?

Don’t these two go naturally together? No innovation without novelty, and if you keep experimenting, sooner or later something will blow up in your face. Leaning into this gives them some of the charm of the Godlearners and the Lunars. Beats the hell out of yet another cattle raid and the conviction that 15% = none. Does this mean that the Orlanthi are “code” for the people of the good old US of A? Combine conservatism and innovation, chin up, and push on to the far shore. The Lunars play to an Old World pessimism: we are not to be trusted, our leaders are not to be trusted, our gods deal with the Devil, and even if we are on the up now, it will all come crashing down again — inconstant ! If we cannot argue with ourselves, we are lost. Of course, things are never simple, and as the enemies engage, it becomes harder and harder to separate them. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps … for it may be that when we try to look at the enemy, we just see ourselves in the mirror. 😉

Normal science ends, and a paradigm shift is required — is this what happened to the Godlearners?

No pardon required. Why does Godtime contain ‘contradictions’? Because it is a version control system. Rune magic is software as a service, and heroquesters are all about getting their chosen (or newly written) magic-cum-code hosted on as many servers as possible. All those sacrificed POW points are being used to run data centres. We are used to thinking of (or , because we used to be rune poor) opposing , but really the balance is between the bit bucket — Kajabor as the black hole — and this somewhat esoteric entity: Under normal circumstances, ‘code’ (myth-as-magic) is not overwritten, but it may be all-but-forgotten in the branches and never compiled and run. But Chaos is not shy about sending stuff to /dev/null. This makes some Gloranthan admins antsy — they don’t like their cheese to , and they suffer from anxiety. They need to get over it — resources are finite. The Devouring Mother grasps the whole picture — although her cultists are as clueless (wittering on about the A Series and the B Series) as they are vicious as they are expendable, she assures me — and doesn’t our mystery rune look just like her work?

Ten planets (GtG, p. 672): Zaytenara(s)° Buserian Reladivus Shargash (Tolat) Derdurnus Deumalos Falsoretus Verithurus(a) Ghevengus Ghelotralas° This being Glorantha, there is likely a conflicting story, too. —————————————————— ° These two are the odd ones out, I think — the ones you don’t want? — not being “celestial sons of Yelm”.

“Gloranthans are not ideological,” but … Glorantha is created through processes of mastication, regurgitation, and refection. Likely all traces of the original meal have long since escaped the messy process of transmission — as if they were never there. If the meal sometimes tastes a bit funny, those who have chewed before you may have been conservative, authoritarian, and against logic. Yeats could write, “Democracy is dead and force claims its ancient right.”° With that health warning about peddlers of “philosophies” out of the way, enjoy this: The poet tended to explain these grim facts with his politico-historical system which traced a cyclical pattern of zenith and nadir and according to which an indeterminate period of violence and anarchy occurred when civilization trembled at the end of one era and on the brink of another … Yeats’s letters to Olivia Shakespeare of 24 July 1934 and 7 August 1934 concerning the phases of civilization are interesting: • The Earth — Every early nature dominated civilization. • The Water — An armed sexual age, Chivalry, Froissart’s Chronicle. • The Air — From the Renaissance to the end of the nineteenth century. • The Fire — The Purging away of our civilization by our hatred … • First age, earth, vegetative functions. • Second age, water, blood, sex. • Third age, air, breath, intellect. • Fourth age, fire, soul, etc … He retired from politics and proceeded to wait for the end of the ‘period of plasticity’, and the dawn of an age of strength and force which his philosophy of history promised as imminent. The poetry of these years is full of ‘hatred’ and ‘blood’. — Mary Carden, — The Few and the Many: An Examination of W. B. Yeats’s Politics — (Studies, Spring 1969) If you have access to JSTOR, the paper is a fun read, bringing in Swift, Vico, and (blink and you will miss him) Spengler — and even tackles the “F” word, which I won’t. Storm is about to blow itself out, and the Fourth Age’s harsh axe will be — from some points of view — a necessary purgative? ———————————————————— ° The Letters of W. B. Yeats. Alan Wade. p. 682.

[Insert usual YG should V warning here.] magical protection doesn’t cover every hit location all the time — a small “shield” whirls about the protected person at some vast speed, so you cannot see any gaps and the odds are that it will intersect with the path of the weapon before it connects with flesh, but the holes are there all the same; those whose weapons often find the gaps have their hands guided by the gods of and should perhaps consider making the appropriate offerings if they want their luck to continue (although puritans may object on anti- grounds) … but they may just swagger about arrogantly if they think it (which seems oh-so-likely).

Now and always. In the words of Larry Hart: But don't change a hair for me Not if you care for me Stay, little Crimson Bat, stay Each day is Crimson Bat’s Day

I suppose disabling symptoms can be handled with passions — “Fear: Spiders (99%)” or whatever. Those who have “gone mad” are not necessarily catatonic. A “mad” cultist may be very good at running mass rituals to summon Monstrosities From Beyond™. I think of “sanity” as a measure of PCness: when it hits zero, you are a non-player character, but not necessarily an ineffective NPC. But perhaps having mechanics for that is best left to Cthulhu-adjacent games where the point is to send one’s character gibbering over the edge. For example, this from Trophy Dark: When … all 6 Ruin boxes are marked you lose yourself to the wilds that have been growing inside you. You choose whether you become a monster in service to the forces of nature (and the whims of the GM), or whether you simply die. — TD, p. 6 There is an old trope — I can’t remember where it started; it was used in Zot! for Dekko (IIRC) but surely wasn’t new then — of what is thought of as apotheosis by the person undergoing it looking a lot like catatonia to everyone else. “The mystery of Argrath: how one man became a god.”

Oops! Sorry. Too much looking at Roman standards. Like this? You should find the original Inkscape SVG below — so you can fold, spindle, and mutilate freely. Pavis_03.svg

Many heterodox Irrippi Ontor researchers — there is some other kind? — maintain that this is a scribal error. “The Red Emperor is the Red Goddess’ sun” was the original wording, they claim. (Suns are sufficiently important that everyone wants at least one in their pocket — witness the whole Elmal fiasco.) The claim that the Emperor reincarnates may be due to some similar confusion: is it the “many suns” hypothesis or were “many sons” conjectured? Scratching away the mould from poorly stored scrolls — however carefully done — reveals Nothing in alarmingly many cases. Mystery persists.

If one must have numbers — I am skeptical, but I present a bit of Xmas silliness, for the fun of it — approach things obliquely by giving everyone an opposed Cosmos–Chaos pair, summing to 100% for non-illuminati. Illuminates get a single number in the 0–100% range to represent both, because =. Opinions differ as to where sanity lies, and schools of illumination squabble about which is the right number to aim for and what it all means — e.g. some claim that =0%= indicates a desirable state of full detachment, others that =50%= indicates the same thing — but it is all Greek to the unenlightened. 😉

Some revere Our Lady as Krarsht Nataraja — if information wants to be expensive, it also wants to be free. The good news is that this sect is less likely to knife you in the ribs than bore you senseless with a lecture on logic or dance notation. Limbs? Tentacles? Dreadlocks? Ethernet cables.

Finally — I promise — Our Lady of the Waiting Mouth when exploded can look a lot like Mallia — encompassing and : As the empty set is present in every other, so Krarsht and Mallia are everywhere — stitching the universe together like the Spider’s web they are.

The minimalist says just drop the top bar — or raise the base — (hinting at and our Laconic friends): And luck to law rotation has inside and outside versions and doesn’t need three : And just for the hell of it:

Or to put it plainly: In Styx, we recognise the slipperiness of the distinction between darkness and water. The uneasy-with-themselves and devious storm cultures dump the “not really an element” thing solely onto moon (not mentioning Aldrya’s wood, at all) and try to put more steps between Umath and chaos (in some spin on that elusive notion), but clearly Umath’s innovation was to introduce a void between fire and earth and to pass off catastrophic change as change tout court. By equating metal with “death” — the sword, after all — are we shifting the meaning a little to political chaos (killing the “head of state”) and industrialised warfare (whether via mass production of cast bronze weapons or via iron-which-is-really-steel)? It would give poor old Kargan Tor something to do, after all ( can take care of conflict). Death can be seen as a necessary “evil,” but post-storm total war is something else? The hypothetical east is just the centre unspun? Is storm = death/metal, or did not-an-element storm just steal what was already there — as their own myths suggest — and put it to questionable use? Kolat must have kargyraa (now there is a name to conjure with) down pat, but can Orlanth do the death metal growl? If so, was that stolen, too? After all, “metal overcomes wood” elementalises the Mostali–Aldryami beef quite nicely … and suits Staffordian pessimism. However, the Malkion–storm–mortality complex might suggest that we humans are the “little people” unable to abandon our plan to chop down all the trees — a non-Krarsht spin on and , with as a petrol-driven steel saw. Or — as always — no, no, no, you fool: not that, at all!

It is well known that the Our Blessed Mother’s favourite snacks are segments of Toblerone (the West made far too much of the “one” there: logic is breakfast, but it always returns us to zero) and Terry’s Chocolate Orange (orange: the colour of storm — who broke the previously perfect change rune and must be consumed to fix it). Much to its annoyance, stasis allows the construction of so much: , , , and , certainly. The ghost of Euclid assures me that geometric construction is not change: all our results are contained in our starting point. (Best to ignore the ghost of Frege — you wouldn’t believe the filth he comes out with — but cancellation is what a logician deserves, right?) When that krarshtkid drops from the ceiling to bite your head clean off with its tripartite mouthparts, remember that it would much rather have had some citrus or honey-and-almond flavoured milk chocolate. It will be a great comfort in your final moments as you plunge toward the sacred data event horizon. Chaos dwarves — how could they not make sense?

Chaos is darkness putting out its first tentative pseudopods — Krarsht reaches out hungrily in all directions, naturally — or darkness is chaos retracting its feelers. Chaos reaching out. Darkness turning inward — to examine the light within? Darkness withdrawing — from the painful external stimulus of light?

Multiply chaos to get (or fake) order. Divide (or mutilate) order to get chaos. Or just play the tape backwards. Chaos as offcuts or Lego bricks. Prime. Irreducible. It might be objected that the connections between fate and law/order (on the one hand) and between luck/chance and chaos (on the other) are weak — tenuous to the point of being untenable: FATE A power that some people believe causes and controls all events, so that you cannot change or control the way things will happen° CHANCE (LUCK) The force that causes things to happen without any known cause or reason for doing so°° In the context of power runes, these seem the salient definitions. From the point of view of the wannabe actor, things are much the same: agency — control — is lost. (That agency may be incoherent and control a mirage slips from one’s mind as the universe squishes one between the rocks … again.) Luck and chance are just names we sometimes use for fate when it is inscrutable? Fate even under that name may be capricious and must make us wonder when we are going to see the Goat–Hedgehog Broo of Fate™. Ø purists, too, may insist that chance conceived of as a power (a force) does not immediately collapse into chaos: makes things happen and causation is a matter of (even if our spade may turn trying to dig back beyond ’s intervention); Ø/ “shows its hand” when things happen for no reason, are uncaused. (Occult causes merely create the impression of chaos.) When it wants to tease, the Ø whispers to us, “What use is a cause without a cause? If is just and a mirror, might not itself be merely a reflection without a mirror? Poof!” ——————————————————————— ° https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fate °° https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/chance

Reflect in one to go from randomness to primitive pattern, ? Build a kaleidoscope to transform into ? Whichever — but note that (and ) already had mirror symmetry. (The awkward squad are , , and — of course.) Once upon a time, (in LRT drag) vs. replaced vs. in the Ten Ancient Polarities — “Power runes in tapping joke shocker,” the papers scream — and our lightbulb/candlesnuff moment told us that these were distinctions without differences, didn’t it? Whither “honour your mistake as a hidden intention”? Panditji — my please-don’t-call-me-your-guru — says, “Intention is Brownian motion in a hall of mirrors.” But I am just looking for the exit.

Drawing on Pavic runes — — and the pelta, throwing action, and javelins of the trade. It is iconic, rather than artistic, but maybe that is right for a logo or vexillum?