mfbrandi

Well … we are familiar with the disintegration of Yelm and Yelm’s re-integration/illumination — the shining one is now at peace with himself, reconciling opposites — but what about the disintegration of Storm/Umath? The “family” of Umath as unreconciled Storm fragments. Now Storm is at war with itself (disguised as the war on drugs terrorism Chaos) and dragging the rest of us to Hell in its wake. Storm must re-integrate its dark, cold, deadly, and chaotic fragments if we are to know peace? But maybe the climate is just not right for that, and winter will always be Hell. Who knows? Not I. 😉

Doesn’t have one — it is just a trick of the light.

Indeed. Anything stronger would seem to give the lie to: People have loyalties to nations, cities, religions, and tribes … [but i]t is also possible for people within the game to survive quite well with no allegiances whatsoever, except to themselves. — RQG Starter Set: The World of Glorantha, p. 4 (emphasis in original; [] interpolated) I have assumed that all cult initiates have some loyalty/allegiance to their cult — yes, illuminati may be a special case — and that these Gloranthans surviving quite well are not freaks and apostates … but that shouldn’t be taken as gospel. If the rights of an adult required cult initiate status, it might be tricky to thrive as a non-initiate, no?

Origins of Bird–Mammal Confusion Bird-mammal confusion is inscribed — rolled onto? — the Gods Wall. At IV-25, one of the components of Jokbazi is a duck–rabbit: a rabbit head picture stands for the bird fragment of the deity. With ears apart, this icon recurs at IV-4 as the head of the trickster god, Rakenveg. (Like Bugs, he is a rabbit who is really a hare, and from his name you can extract “raven” to leave the “keg” of intoxication.) I think we can add aspect perception — geometry doesn’t determine how something looks (well, not always and in all ways) — to Eurmal’s bag of tricks. Trickster = Eurmal brings us to the question of Plentonius versus Iverlanthus in Gods Wall interpretation. I believe Plentonius has IV-19 as Annilha — Annilla as bat demon — whereas Iverlanthus has the same image depicting the Night Eagle — Vrimak as owl god.° Gloranthans unable to agree on whether something is a bird or a mammal, again. But with bats being about a fifth of mammal species, this is not some weird corner case, so what is going on? Is this a manifestation of the battle for the middle air? If the thing we want to disown is flapping about the place, assign it to the enemy’s class?°° The CB The Lunars might flip between “it is a bird” when they are in a sky-identifying, celestial mood (or when it seems like a good thing) and “it is a mammal” when they are in the middle air belongs to the Goddess mode (or when it seems like a bad thing). That makes a kind of sense (though I don’t like the parenthetical options). But what of the Orlanthi, do they consistently see it as a mammal because they are determined to see it as a perversion, one of their own turned against them? That way, it is more horrific than if it is simply externalised as a sky thing. When something is really horrific, the Orlanthi see it as one of theirs — the broo–Thed–Ragnaglar–goat complex — but at the same time treat it as an external threat to be squished. Don’t reconcile, transform, or integrate, just squish. There is something very wrong with Big O psychology: “We are the monsters we let into the world. No, we are not. Kill them/us.” Of course, an alternative to both/and and inclusive or exclusive or is neither. What may have a beak like a bird but skin wings like a bat — and pycnofibres, rather than mammalian fur or avian feathers? But we have flapped that space before. —————————————————————— ° Oops! This is actually a misreading by me of GTG p. 679. Better to let it stand than to fix it in a vain attempt to seem smart. °° Not phylum, pace RQ2.

Because this doesn’t really belong with rules quibbling about critical hits: is standing against a mirror to seem more impressive. There is not really anything more there, and the opposition is a lie. In the , there is only .

Hard to detect because indistinguishable from its “opposite”? Where on that line one is none can say. Call no one lucky till they have met their fate.

If you had asked them what was depicted on the coin, what would they have said? (And perhaps the bird–bat coin image is a Gloranthan duck–rabbit.) The giant hummingbird has a red breast and a voracious appetite — hovering eats calories/souls at a frightening rate — and like the Lunar spud, it lives in the Andes. Andean entities are notoriously unstable in Glorantha: if it morphed into another pollinator, the hummingbird was lucky it didn’t wink out of existence altogether.° Or perhaps there are potatoes and a giant hummingbird, but those crazy non-Lunars cannot perceive them.°° Hence the use of the humble tuber by the 7M missionaries: the mark who can taste the potato bread can taste their own salvation, the body of the Goddess.°°° ————————————————————————————————————————— ° “Morokanth exist,” you say. Yes, but the woolly tapir — exiled from its mountain home — is caught between the designations of “person” and “beast,” its status ever contested: “You are not, or at least you ought not … look, you are just wrong, alright!” °° Possibly also the origin of the Gloranthans’ idea that something “eaten by Chaos” disappears from reality. Like Vance’s Ampridatvir or Mieville’s interwoven cities, things are there but denied. The hidden side of the Moon. °°° And perhaps for the believing tick, the blood of the “Bat” turns to nectar as it drinks.

And mites (harmless, as far as I know). And jumping maggots that can — it says here, anyway — survive in your intestines and cause havoc. I suppose flystrike was one inspiration for broo reproduction, and is firstborn of . Never accept a cheese sandwich from Ralzakark or Nietzsche — perhaps you survive in the Darkness but maybe the Darkness survives in you.

These are two magical steeds owned by Mastakos, and may or may not be actual sky creature horses. I suggested goats. Our lord and master denied it. But here — deep in the paranoiac’s hall of mirrors reflecting all the might-have-been Gloranthas — we can present the alternative facts. Orlanth’s chariot is pulled by two of his kin (one by marriage), their horns poking through their anonymizing gimp masks. Careful not to call them by their true names, as he cracks his whip, the Big O cries, “On Grindr! On Tinder!” It was being eaten every night — hence their motto: “If I Die Before I Wake” — that drove at least one of them mad, and we all know how that story climaxed.

As long as we can touch the God Time, the Gods War is not over, creation is ongoing, and true history is a mere glint in our collective eye. Consequently, the Hero Wars are never that far from primordial Chaos, all runes conspire to the condition of taijitu, and Mostali culture has oh-so-heretical visions of Harrek, the primordial giant who creates by destroying: Umath → Uthma → Utμma → Utuma. I have seen him as a shaggy, dwarfish Hercules, developing from a bear rather than an ape, and wielding an immense hammer and chisel with which he is breaking the chaotic rocks. — James Legge — The Religions of China: Confucianism and Tâoism Described and Compared with Christianity (p. 168)

Don’t play every tune straight, then they will go further? Is fellow aloof, coded masculine, literate Truth cult so much of a stretch, anyway? (See Cults of Prax Classic (p. 55) for Lhankor Mhy as the Yelmalians’ favourite Lightbringer.)

We know that Solar nomads favour the horse and despise agriculture, so perhaps — and only perhaps (discard any/all to taste): those who “favour” the horse consider it beneath the horse’s dignity to work the fields: man > horse > (mother) earth — where the horse plough is seen as subjecting the horse to the earth mother (identified with growing food in vegetable form), an impious reversal of the patriarchal order; the horse nomads actively work against allowing the use of horses in agriculture, as that might tip the balance of power in favour of the despised sedentaries by making them more efficient at producing food; contra-canon: if potatoes need deep furrows (lest the light of father sun make them toxic) and the Lunars at least start as resistance to patriarchal Yelm, this further motivates the struggle between the people of the Goddess and Sheng Seleris — it is inter alia a struggle over agricultural technology (means of production); the Pentland Javelin is considered not just a threat but an insult.

I have zero inside information, and I am saying neither that that is the cover nor — much as I might wish it — that all the art is in greyscale.

Well, the people who died in the Dragonkill without descendants are no worry, but those whose children left Dragon Pass before the Dragonkill — maybe generations before — may well be ancestors of modern Gloranthan wannabe graverobbers. The old saw about everyone in Europe being a descendant of Charlemagne. We are not looking for a planet/lozenge-wide MRCA, we just need a non-ridiculous chance of finding an ancestor across a fairly limited area. Maybe 600 years is not long enough, but how old are the oldest tombs in Dragon Pass worth robbing? Their inhabitants may be “our” ancestors, no? I also worry about whether an “ancestor” has to be an ancestor in the strict sense. My uncle is not my father — as far as I know! — so does that make it OK for me to rob his grave as far as this one rule goes? My uncle and I have common ancestors: is that enough to put his tomb off limits? Don’t get me wrong — I am not looking for reasons to say tomb raiding is morally OK: the more inclusive the thou shalt not disturb the ancestors’ resting places rule, the better. Then we get to enjoy all the bad-faith excuses PCs offer … ’cos they are going to do it, anyway.

We have become oh-so-used to the idea of Gloranthans marking themselves with meaningful signs for magical purposes. We see another runic tattoo or mehndi, sigh, and roll our eyes. But here on Earth, talismanic writing may be illegible — “meaningless” — (in religion/magic ancient and modern and in modern art), and this is embraced by hardcore Gloranthan Void cultists. The greatest power lies in empty signs … or so they claim. This really annoys fusty old sorcerers — survivors of the age-ending purge of the experimentalist “whatever works” faction° — and to add to their irritation, young sorcery-curious types are beginning to wonder whether a soupçon of mystical Dada mightn’t make a little knowledge go a lot Furthur. What could possibly go wrong? Those making free with and are just trying to scandalise the “respectable” classes — don’t worry about them. Even Ø itself is not a magical sign. When you find scrolls filled with illegible “runes” or hear ritual incantations sounding for all the world like Hugo Ball — gadjama tuffm i zimzalla binban gligla wowolimai bin beri ban — then you know that Nothing is afoot. ————————————————————————— ° The logicians, of course, said nowt. Martin Niemöller? They never heard of the guy.

Well, it is certainly a matter of taste, so take anything I say with as much salt as you require, but … IRL: no “mummy’s curse” — but we are not looking for reasons to be tomb raiders; Game with victory conditions (1st to 100,000L wins): you do a risk vs. reward calculation; Open-ended adventure game: just go for it! Games with “levelling up” (or any kind of slippery slope or greasy pole one is expected to scrabble up) will likely fall between (2) and (3), and if there is high character “investment” (emotionally or in time/effort to create a new “playing piece”), I guess that pushes us toward (2). Doubtless there are many more dimensions and ways of looking at it, and doubtless there are games and campaign set-ups where even a small amount of cash is “life changing” (or prevents an adverse life change) — you need a few clacks for that scrap of mouldy bread, to pay off the loan shark for another week, or to make rent. (Electric Bastionland or Trophy Gold? OG Traveller.) But perhaps no incentive for high-risk play is needed. What kind of game are we playing? Live fast, die young, and leave a zombie-nibbled corpse? Risk the wrath of the ancestors to get one’s hands on a magic sword only to find it has rusted right through and disintegrates on first touch? Or perhaps a game of optimal crop rotation and quibbling tax efficiency, as it can sometimes seem.

Which is what we want, right? The characters fear such complications, but the players would feel cheated if there was no “mummy’s curse.”

Indeed, and I wouldn’t take the recapitulation of Waha’s way as a given. Perhaps the ridden are also eaters of flesh. Perhaps riders and ridden have a “difficult” relationship — maybe the ridden lay their eggs in the riders, but the advantages of riding make it a fair trade. (See Octavia Butler on “paying the rent“ — it makes the riders something other than free riders.) “Being mounted” cuts both ways. At the opposite pole from lying Wahaism, isn’t it canon that the “ridden” of the Black Horse Troop ride their riders?

Yes. The White Moonies say, “Yoking Lunar liberation to a Solar empire makes the Goddess toxic.”

Lingam and Yoni are one? Uncle ZZ, the erotic ascetic. ZZ is the womb in which Aether grew: Aether is the yogic heat of his austerities. (Probably, you didn’t mean anything like this, but it — and the unreformed sinners/social parasites saved by Shiva — were running through my head.)

Gloranthan potatoes are very high in solanine, which is both toxic and hallucinogenic. It is the toxicity that is the problem, not blight. Moonglow and/or sprinklings of moon dust during cultivation allow feasters to skip the unpleasant, possibly fatal effects while still experiencing the psychedelic effect that promotes religiosity — as IRL psilocybin does, I am told. Never forget that the Seven Mothers is a proselytising cult.

What did they ride? We have given the scarab some time in the spotlight, so maybe … With these underground–overground cycles, how do we know which was the initial phase? I asked Ethilrist about his “horses” but he was uncharacteristically unforthcoming when I pushed for a cladogram. I expected a multi-volume work and hard-to-prove claims about “latterly solarised” equines. He is hiding something.

Perhaps — like Argrath — Jeff is a helpless Lunar puppet/secretly pushing a Lunar agenda (season to taste). Consider the humble potato: contested status: it belongs/it doesn’t belong now you see it, now you don’t it is still there, but it is invisible it is a root vegetable, but it is not a root it is related to a pretty/pretty poisonous lady (spin as you will) comes in red, white, and blue varieties it is part of a balanced diet Clearly, the potato is a moon vegetable. If Jeff just accepted spuds into Glorantha, mightn’t that make them less Lunar? Who knows?

More fun if the nomads argue among themselves as to the correct status of Hon-eel’s kids? Surely, someone will disapprove. Today’s enemy gods, tomorrow’s domestic demons? Destroy icon. Restore icon. Rinse. Repeat. Dissent among the horse nomads and Hon-eel smiles.

Aunt Nancy Solara: Three is the Magic Number Trickster is sometimes a spider — Nanni, Ananse, Aunt Nancy — whose mother (of the same name) produced the silk from which God (pick one) made humans. Her rôle in creation underappreciated, she taught her child tricksterish ways. So we retell a retelling of a retelling of … When the Sky God — Wulbari — had to put some distance between himself and Mother Earth, he went to live with the animals. After managing to trade-up from a single corncob to one hundred slaves, Trickster claimed to be cleverer than Wulbari. The Sky God overheard and said that if Trickster could bring him “something,” he would concede the truth of the boast. Obviously, Wulbari would not be happy with just anything, but he didn’t say what Trickster was to fetch. Trickster went away, returned in disguise, and contrived a situation in which Wulbari would tell the other animals what he wanted. Having heard which three things would impress the Sky God, Trickster set out for real. Trickster was gone for a long time. Some say to fetch items from the belly of a great serpent. Eventually, Trickster returned to Wulbari — carrying a bag clearly bulging with something: Trickster opened the bag: Darkness was released, and no one could see; Trickster pulled out the Moon, and — by its weak light — people began to see again; Trickster extracted the final item from the bag: the Sun … At which point, we can straight-up quote from my source: Those who were looking directly at Ananse when he took the sun from his bag became blind. Some were not looking straight at the sun, and their sight was only partly harmed, and others were looking away. They were not harmed. So it is that blindness came into the world because Wulbari asked Ananse for something. —— Stephen Belcher, “Ananse and the Corncob” (A tale of the Krachi, neighbours of the Ashanti) African Myths of Origin, p. 116 Is this tale an ancestor of “Three Curious Spirits”? The Secret Origin™ of the Sun Spider? The reason Jakaleel has a spindle? Testimony that the daughter is mother to her father (as often seems to be the way with gods and fits Moonson’s status as Yelm-on-earth)? Another reason Trickster wasn’t holding the edge of the Net (as when you leave it to certain parties, the serpent’s belly contains only dead things)? I don’t know.