mfbrandi

When one recapitulates one’s god’s deeds in heroquest, those deeds are ones she performed before her own apotheosis. This is one way to grapple with “when was the time of myth” — it could be anytime, but the events have been “promoted sideways” into the realm of story. (Would this break canon? Which thread are we in, again?)

Not necessarily canon alert! Things that a person does before their apotheosis don’t necessarily happen in time. I might be born, perform a bunch of otherworld heroquests to “timeless” realms, then die and become a god. If something I do has as-above-so-below magical ripples, it may be deemed to have taken place at least partly in some otherworld, even if no one can say quite when and to what degree I crossed over. Arkat’s final dust-up with Nysalor might be like that. So doing an otherworld heroquest to that fight might be possible … but extremely dangerous — no one knows who won. If the Seven Mothers rite to recreate the Goddess was a heroquest, surely one can revisit that in a heroquest of one’s own, and it is something they did “before” their own apotheoses, right? Even if they had to “step outside of time” to do it. However, Irrippi Ontor does some shopping and returns his library books (pre-apotheosis, no weird shenanigans) doesn’t sound — to me — like something one could recapitulate in a heroquest, as it lacks the requisite importance. I may be wrong. I wouldn’t mind being wrong. I kinda want to be wrong about this one. (Sometimes heroquest is a state of mind: someone might heroquest without leaving this world, so far as anyone around them can tell. But that is for a different question, right?)

Do cultists seek to do the will of their god? The Crimson Bat cult exists to have the BatGodDemon do the will of the cult. Is it anomalous or just more honest than other cults? If I seek by magico-religious means to take control of a god, do I thereby partake of its runes? If harmony seeks to control disorder, does it thereby partake of disorder?

And this agrees with the Prosopaedia and with the old (non-canon ILH #2) HeroQuest glyphs linking Deezola with Lesilla (crescent-go) and Jakaleel with Gerra (dying). Maybe it is some kind of spindle/knitting mix-up. Perhaps it is a new heresy — a new goddess swap!

With a tip of the hat to Eff for making me think of Fred Dretske.

Digits + (Y|J)elm. Now, there is a portmanteau for you. The children of the Dark are the fingers of the Sun. Of course they are.

It takes a heart like Norri’s these days When your moon gets weak Don’t interrupt the moonflow. With apologies to Joni.

And the one time Trickster let go the net and Wakboth swallowed the gods, Argrath — the perfect Orlanthi hero/follower of Seth? — had to cut the snake’s belly open, but all the gods were dead. Still, the cosmos may have been saved, anyway. Who was it who said that these days Yelm is more sun and less god? (It wasn’t me, I promise.) The world is saved by naturalising it, burning off all the fairy dust. Orlanth killed the sun/god and so trashed the proto-universe (the bad trip of the Gods War); the trick was to bring back the sun but not the god, yielding the real world (when we have all come down); that is the LBQ. Or that is the grumpy nihilist’s view.

The price of change — of anything happening, at all — is mortality. The world comes from the Void and to the Void it will return. If it loops exactly, who can tell? If a new and different world arises, that is the gift of Chaos. At least, that is what the bald levitator with the tail told me. 😉

[B]oth Law and Chaos create in different ways, and all creativity rests upon co-operation between elements of existence. He who operates solely from personal desire will not cooperate … Without co-operation and creativity, the being is a parasite … Nothing he can do or make can add to the sum of his species or culture. In this sense, fully Lawful beings can be as much agents of the dark side as was the worst Gbaji prophet. — Cults of Terror: Nysalor (Classic PDF, p. 87) According to this, Chaos can create — and isn’t that change worthy of the name? The selfish, childish, and uncooperative are called out as lacking the capacity to create — and that lack, we are told, doesn’t require a dash of Chaos. I don’t say you have to buy into the CoT view of how the world works, but creative Chaos hasn’t always been alien to the party line.

Kinda-sorta. The Lightbringers’s quest is the just-so story for the year as well as the day (and the grand cosmic cycle — great year?), so: The Earth Queen followed Orlanth and Yelm to Rebirth in Time with the Dawn. Even before she appeared, her daughter Voria went about the world with the promise of life, leaving a trail of flowers behind her. — Prosopaedia: Ernalda (PDF, p. 35) Voria/Spring/young Ernalda precedes bounteous matron Ernalda and is the earth returning to life after the death of the Darkness/Gods War/Winter. Possibly this has become a little obscured with all the cruft the LBQ has accumulated over the decades.

Spun off from Gods and Death. Hmm … outside the Dome. On the “standard model”, Arachne Solara recreates the world using Chaos (pick your Devil), thus recapitulating the “original” creation of the world from Chaos (the Void). And the symbol of this is the sun rising — fiat lux. And “Arachne Solara” connotes both light and — in Glorantha-code — darkness, with darkness preceding light. Every beginning is the beginning. So the Dayzatar version is maybe just a switch of agent for (re-)creation conceived in the same way. “Going outside” is just another way of saying that the Void/Chaos is the source of the new world, as it always is and must be. Free jazz, baby! Clearly, the creation has no agent, so sub in anyone you like. But Yelmalio says, “Wasn’t me, governor.”

That’s fine. Never is fine, too. Thanks for the clarification.

Whatever we are supposed to believe, it is too good a story not to embrace it. One of the “good guys” but outside the Compromise. A light that never goes out because not bound to time, perhaps? Perhaps all the “events preceding time” — the sequence without sequence — only precipitate out at the beginning of time; the Gods War as a sort of Schrödinger’s prehistory, with the advent of time as the opening of the box? It is only at the first sunrise that we can say that Yelm had “previously” been murdered. And Yelmalio is the anomaly — an outsider without being a thing of the Void. Give the poor sucker a break and let him be special; it is just so delightfully … generative! Or is it just me? I can see him staggering through multiple ragnaröks, ever more alienated, losing all cult, forgotten, becoming a Watcher figure bearing witness to the truth and the light. I am just an embittered old romantic, I guess. Of course, it is just a fairy story, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Possibly — only possibly — there is a bit of a vicious circle. One story (dismal): Chaosium thinks the people aren’t interested, so it is not interested, the PDF doesn’t come out when expected, and shiny new QW — as opposed to HQG — gets pulled as a JC target; the people think Chaosium isn’t interested, so in the unlikely event they were thinking of publishing for QW on the JC, they abandon the idea; USW. “[T]he fancy is overrun with wild dismal ideas, and terrified with a thousand hideous monsters of its own framing.” — JA Another story (happier for some): QW is pulled as a JC target because the QW release is being held back to sync with an HQG retrofit genre pack; this makes sense of the HQG-only JC policy (as on the face of it limiting people to an OOP/unsupported version of the rules is perverse). “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” — J of N In all likelihood, both stories are completely wrong, but we have to have something to keep us amused while we wait to see how things turn out. Still, it is a shame people didn’t/couldn’t turn up when they said they would. EDIT: And of course, it was all nonsense — see Nick Brooke’s comment below.

Or viewing the same parts of the same thing differently?

Well, Jeff seems pretty clear: You can’t contact [Wakboth] as he is dead … and buried beneath that Block of Truestone … part of the reconstituted mundane world and the source of moral evil in mundane life. But as long as he is imprisoned beneath the Block, that’s all But I am just reporting that and playing with it. I am not endorsing it. You are right that we can do what we like with Wakboth and friends. And we should. Beats blaming our faults on a dead monster. I tend to view the Block and whatever is oozing out from under it as a symbol of the integration of chaos into the temporal world. Perhaps lifting the Block would have no effect — it is just a symbol. In a magical world, perhaps the alteration of a symbol would have a large effect, but what effect? Accelerating entropy? Unleashing evil? Unravelling time and returning us to the timeless hell of the Gods War? Undoing the Compromise, thus killing all the gods relying on it for survival? 🎶 And we’ll have fun fun fun now that [someone] took the Truestone away 🎶

GLORANTHAN KARAOKE They say Danaë is in tonight, but I don’t think this one is directed at her: Some people say my words cannot be true Have faith in me, my child, and I’ll show you I will give you those things you thought unreal The sun, the moon, Arkat all bear my seal Follow me now and you will not regret Leaving the life you led before we met You must surrender to this light of mine Forever shining till the end of time Your trust in me has just got to be real Before you’ll know the way you’re going to feel Now that you’re bathing in my golden shower Our light grows stronger now with every hour Look into my eyes, you’ll see who I am My name is Nysalor, please take my hand If Uncle ZeeZee’s here, there could be fight … or is that him singing? Gosh!

I think so, too, but aren’t we supposed to think that Ragnaglar and Wakboth are not currently possible objects of cult? If so, then on the equivalence theory, they wouldn’t be available to shamans just now either. And presumably, the Invisible God has long been out of touch with everyone. BUT I usually have things exactly wrong. 😉 ———————————————————— On the unavailability of Wakboth: https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/the-moral-evil-of-glorantha/

Does Dr. Jekyll encounter Mr. Hyde? Does Arkat have a mirror?

I dare say that is right, but some things are suggestive: Nysalor -> The Bright One -> The Shining One -> Lucifer -> The Devil Gbaji -> The Deceiver -> The Prince of Lies -> Satan -> The Devil We could see Rashoran/a as an angel ministering to the distressed in the Dark till s/he met the notorious Trio. Perhaps their ritual of chaos birth was persuading or forcing Rashoran/a to glug down Dr. Jekyll’s formula. So angels fall, even the brightest. If Lucifer is the light-bringer, the dawn-bringer, we might imagine that that is the Gloranthan Devil’s rôle, too: stitch the Devil into the dying world to create the mundane world of time and the first sunrise. The power of chaos birth. As long as chaos has its “right” place in the world, the Gods War is held at bay, and it is possible to birth gods into time, providing they have the right relationship with time — chaos births. And destroying the “lighter” aspects of Rashoran/a come again perhaps brings us closer to the lifting of the Block, chaos rebirth, and Mr. Hyde redux. Perhaps I see these alternations everywhere. Perhaps they are an illusion, and both aspects are ever present — or neither is and the death of the Devil is the death of the gods, as it represents the demystification/disenchantment of the mundane world. Perhaps not. 😉 [Don’t worry, this isn’t a credo. I am just letting the wheels spin.] And as to what Arkat gets to call anyone: Arkat -> Zorak Zoran -> Lord Demon of the Legions of Death -> pot calling the kettle black?

Well … “Roll d100 under POW for divine intervention” as an overt mechanic has the characters as the pigeons. “Roll d100 under POW for divine intervention” as a covert mechanic has the players as the pigeons. To the experimental heroquester, the gods are the pigeons — and the otherworlds are labs full of Skinner boxes? — and the trick is to nudge the pigeon–gods into new stereotyped behaviours, conditioned reflexes, or superstitions. There is this caged lion, and one of its little acquired behavioural tics is to eat a zoo keeper given the chance. Opening the cage door at the right moment — that is casting a bit of offensive rune magic.

Ompalam: The gods’ actions are fully determined and at every point freely chosen: freedom is slavery. Aldrya: Are we unfree because we grow toward the light? Mostal: A fully repaired World Machine has no moving parts. Eurmal: Free will is an illusion brought about by an insufficiency of peyote. Nysalor: Nothing happens for a reason.

So what is the approved manner of calling out a racist caricature for its inaccuracy if comparing picture and pictured is forbidden? Clearly, the Nysalor cult was supposed to be seen as some kind of commentary on Zen Buddhism (Alan Watts flavour?) — with the riddlers offering their koans — and that may well have been culturally insensitive, but I don’t see how making the Nysalor cult essentially and exaggeratedly monstrous is going to help, even if you tag on a “thou shalt not compare this to Buddhism”. As for the supposed nihilism of the riddlers, the slide into the dark side — the baleful influence of Star Wars? — was presented as an error, not an entailment of Chaos = Law, wasn’t it? Once a being has realized that there is no final difference between Chaos and Law, he may later make a similar but false parallel between his personal ethics and his personal desires, reasoning that since there is no ultimate division to the former, neither is there any final difference between the latter. — Cults of Terror (Classic PDF, p. 87) [emphasis mine] Not “similar and similarly false parallel”. The slide to the Dark Side is an optional extra and an error in reasoning, not the essence of the insight (illumination). If we are somewhere given a good reason to believe that if only the equivalence of Chaos and Law is true then what we want is what is right, I don’t know what it is (or where it is). I am sure there are people who think — of the real world, not the game world (as if any of us here can tell them apart!) — that unless we can read right and wrong from the physics of the universe we are lost; they are one step away from the dark side themselves, though they may rail against it. It seems pretty clear that Greg’s Gloranthan gods viewed the void as evil — presumably because in it they would not exist, though why their extinguishment should be evil I couldn’t say — but I am not qualified to say what Greg thought on his own account; there is this, but what is one to make of it? It certainly seems that for someone (possibly fictional), nirvana is evil (or an evil). Other interpretations of evil will be revealed and explored where appropriate. Some will be mentioned here. There is an Empty Void, which is a pre-everything conception and bears some resemblance to a Buddhist Nivanna — Greg Stafford, Cults of Prax: Designer Notes (Classic PDF, p. 106) Perhaps we can say that viewing the void as evil is itself an example of dark side “false parallel” thinking: “I do not want to be extinguished, therefore nirvana (the empty void/extinguishment/cosmic death) is evil.” The equation of desire and ethics.

Isn’t there always a third term in Arkat–Nysalor?