mfbrandi

https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/home/gloranthan-documents/greg-sez/doggods/

Sure, it is theirs — they have every right. I am not proposing an equally monolithic anti-canon: “this is how it would be, if only they had done it right.” Not that! Did Harrison worry about whether his next Viriconium story would cohere with his last to form an intelligible timeline? He had every right to make them consistent, but he was not motivated to do it. Is there a single “true” version of I Got Rhythm? Do we need to splice a metric ton of jazz into a single plunderphonic megaversion?

Well, Harold Bloom’s been dead a while, and I wonder whether the very notion of canon will soon follow him. Ralph Waldo Nysalor whispers in my ear, “A foolish consistency is the walktapus of little minds, adored by little GMs and rules lawyers and divines.”

Or you roll the dice enough times and the middling results seem emphasized — even without one die affecting another — and the middling results are those we know from Every Child’s Book of Myth, Condensed God Learner Edition?

If the essence of heroquesting is I touched eternity, and I hit it with a stick, perhaps IFWW is instructive: [W]hen everything was dead or dying, the last individual being confronted … Chaos and fought it … That individual then taught others, who remembered doing this themselves … How a single entity, alone, was simultaneously every other living being as well, each of which was alone, is the mystery which is resolved by participating in their initiation. — Prosopaedia (CHA4042), p. 61 I Fought … Was the Last Person one person? Who can tell? Many have seen the vision and many have participated in it. Each participant, now or in myth, knows this as a crisis which they must face alone, regardless of opposition. With no other hope than themselves, each must face the deepest monsters of the Pit and overcome his own foes. Each one fights alone. We Won … There is a meeting between what Was and what Might Be in the now of Time. The world of Was is called Godtime. The what Might Be is the future. The Godtime houses the immortal deities who sit and wait in a timeless stasis. The future belongs to mortals, in the realm where change and death and hope all break the stasis of myth. — Uz Lore, Trollpak (4016-X), p. 8 [Look, Ma, no smartarse commentary.]

Or … and it is an inclusive or (not a contradiction of the above): many heroquesters ascend the Hill of Gold, call them the hoggers in as much as the myth has a temporal location, every hogger ascends the Hill at the same time (whenever they individually set out from the mundane world) each hogger “is” Yelmalio one Yelmalio ascends the Hill, no hogger meets another coming the other way (and in a myth where the god meets themself, the quester also meets themself, not another quester) As for the “identity” of quester and god, you could play it so one of these is true: Quester 1 = God A, Quester 2 = God A, but Quester 1 != Quester 2. How this can be so is a Great Religious Mystery™. (Dull. Unsatisfactory.) Quester 1 = God A, Quester 2 = God A, so Quester 1 = Quester 2. It all skews Tim Hardin, and we are one, one, all in one. Questers are odd coves and after doing time in the universal mind, is it any wonder that they all go a bit Gbarkysalor? (These people are dangerous hippies. Avoid them.) Each quester has the “I am the god” experience and rarely if ever stops to think “I am also a mortal playing the rôle of the god,” but there is always the possibility that each quester comes fully to themself, becomes aware of all the other questers, and then they all become aware that they are jointly steering the deity — suddenly, they are not doing such a good job of it. (Less Tim H and more Wolfbane.)

The White Moon = The Moon Under Water. (Tiamat told me this, not Eric.)

Ah, Ghost Dance! Anyone else remember Robbie Coltrane drumming on the roof to the shipping forecast? Clearly, he was listening for clues to the return of the Storm. But where was Jacques Derrida when the Praxians needed him? [Yes, yes, I know. But it has a great soundtrack.]

Call it a dig or not, but the Malkioni Ompalam heresy is clearly associated with Islam in the Guide to Glorantha (p. 47). Well, it is not as if I wasn’t offering a Christian mystical alternative.

Well, I don’t know about that. The Humakti leader is no stategos looking for advantage, rather they seek the fight they cannot win — “Forward, the Light Brigade! Charge for the guns!” Humakt is a tricky god to make sense of. In the Cults of Prax “classic” edition, we have this (pp. 32 and following): Humakt … is the god of mercenaries and soldiers, and can be found on all sides in any conflict. He encourages honour and courage, and disdains pointless slaughter. He keeps the road to Hell well-populated by honourable warriors … Zorak Zoran considers Humakt to be effeminate and squeamish … A cult member will never be called back from the dead in any way … Humakt Rune Lords are sought out as leaders of doomed ventures and defenders of indefensible positions … Rune Lords are rarely known for subtlety, for their way is that of straightforward confrontation. Their style is not that of the general, but of the hero … He must personify honour and fair combat in his every deed, upholding the meek and protecting the oppressed. He must never turn his back on a fair fight in a good cause and never break a sworn vow. Tricky, but perhaps not impossible. Perhaps Humakt’s plan is this: encourage an honour code in soldiers and mercenaries which will get as many of them killed as possible. How does this fit with disdaining pointless slaughter? There are possibilities: killing honourable warriors is not pointless: he is gathering them to himself as part of a creepy plan — the dishonourable ones he doesn’t need, so they may live a bit longer (or if “killed,” return to life); mercenaries and soldiers are the chief perpetrators of pointless slaughter, so hamstring them with honour and point them at ludicrously dangerous situations — well-armed windmills — to take them out of the game; if the honourable are dead, the field of battle is left to practically minded cowards, liars, and cheats who will do anything to avoid a fight — all fights are pointless slaughter. Note that Humakt is found on all sides of any conflict — we are all killed by Death — but that is not to say that the members of his Monty Pythonish suicide cult — the Humakti — are found on all sides. But what of the rune for such a devious god? Again, possibilities: honour isn’t Truth, it is a crutch: just look at it; Humakt is True Death (real, genuine, authentic death), and the Humakti don’t come back in any way — “the valiant never taste of death but once, the chumps!” — so Hell is filling with honourable warriors, while cowards and cheats are reincarnated; his followers are committed, faithful, staunch, unshakeable, and unwavering thanks to his promotion of those virtues — that is enough to secure the runic association without His Illuminated Gloominess himself being quite so moronically guileless. (Arkat–Gbaji wasn’t named “Humaktsson” for nothing.) [The sword broos may disagree with much of this, but they are always fun to debate.]

Although the IG = Ompalam thing was surely an unwarranted dig at Islam, here is a report on the Catholic-leaning Simone Weil: There is no denying that The Need for Roots is quite strange … The tone is dogmatic, and the last third of the text offers a theological metaphysics of matter which would surely have baffled the officials of the Free French, had they ever received it. Weil attempts to show that there is no conflict between religion and science, since science explains the behaviour of matter, and matter is, for Weil, ultimately explainable as obedience to God: ‘The universe is nothing but perfect obedience,’ she concludes. — Toril Moi, I came with a sword

Less refined and dumberer — as good empiricists, sorcerers have razored away all otherworlds. [I am more than usually haunted by the Godlearners as the R&D department of the British Empire, today, and it seems to have bled over the West in general.]

Perhaps their function is to utter the 9 billion names of the Invisible God — after which, the IG folds up the cosmos till it is needed again. If they were meant to play at 16 RPM, you can bet the Eurmali had them at 78, so you can see why the little pseudo-gods would want to put a stop to that: they weren’t yet done with their pocket universe.

Hmm, heroquests … I always imagine the 7M “quest” as a seedy ritual carried out in a mildewed room — smelling of boiled cabbage, naturally — over a dodgy pub in Deptford. This is all to the good: desperate times, desperate measures; no good ever came of puffed-up questers in burnished armour whistling as they set off to do something “heroic”. So, elite Lunar repetition? Not in public, I think. Whatever is done for show is not the real deal.

But that is why we love them. They might be jaded and cynical like Peggy Lee (apologies to Leiber & Stoller … and Thomas Mann): I remember when I was a very little GL Our lab caught on fire I’ll never forget the look on my tutor’s face As he gathered me up in his arms And raced through the burning building onto the pavement And I stood there shivering in my pyjamas And watched the whole world go up in flames And when it was all over I said to myself “Is that all there is to a fire?” A fire, or even a god. But on the other hand, they may be very serious monotheists making a point about what is god and what is not: “That is not God, it is just something I knocked up in my shed; it would be idolatry to show it the respect due God; Orlanth, Ernalda, and the rest are of the same kind — cobbled-together magical junk — and are owed no more respect.” We love them, but we don’t want to be them … even if we are them.

We could just say that the Godlearners were hissable villains who served a heartless empire and didn’t really “get it” — they got squished and good riddance. Or we could acknowledge their villainy and yet view them more sympathetically. They are like Oedipus: their own investigations will bring their doom upon them. To understand the world, you have to poke it with a stick; eventually, you poke a big enough monster and it eats you; you don’t see the tipping point till you are past it. That story at least should run like a machine: effect follows inevitably from cause, and there is no escape for them. They are tragic heroes. One aspect of the Gloranthan vision is rather pessimistic, and if we were to say that the GLs were fundamentally right, but that that could not save them and in fact sealed their doom, wouldn’t that play nicely into that pessimism? Ompalam as the Invisible God is likely another expression of a dark and despairing view of the world: natural law as the chains of slavery. But what would it mean to say the world is not mechanistic? There are surely options (and surely more than I will list): it doesn’t behave like the machines we build, which are stiff limited things sometimes, things may happen for no reason (have no efficient cause) I don’t suppose the GLs would deny either of those, but I dare say they would think: but we can build better, more “organic” machines, and we can find reasons where previously we found none. After all, the GLs are us. What are we missing?

Like being a Nysalor riddler. I do like a mystic whose deity is not (not now, not ever). If you are not powertripping on divine magic, you are not giving any hostages to the Gods War. Middle-sized dry goods — deities as commodities — come and they go. It is of no consequence to the White Moonie. The Red Moon is torn from the sky, and we say, “The White Moon is here, but it is invisible.” The kōan expresses a certain indifference to configurations of matter and mana in the cosmos. As sure as 1 – 1 = 0, the White Moon is here. It could not be otherwise. “Keep this one truth in mind, that a good Moon cannot be harmed.” [Now, if you will excuse me, there’s an abyss needs staring into.]

In my permanent rôle as Devil’s advocate, I will give the minority report on the simple group contest: And (from the last time this came up): So: success and victory are not the same thing degree of victory may be calculated from successes and other stuff for a group contest, the other stuff does not include who had the high roll in any component sub-contest° there is no need to determine a degree of victory per PC in a group contest, just count their successes tie-break at most once, for the group a tie-break does not confer an extra success to break the tie, and the victory is zero degree (post-HQG terminology) In Harald’s take on the example — if I read him rightly — the PCs have one degree of victory, but: QuestWorlds allows distinctions between a zero degree victory and a one degree victory.°° In QuestWorlds, if Player C’s opposition had had the higher roll and a tie-break had been required, the PCs would still have won (whereas I guess Harald would have given a one degree victory to the opposition in the group contest). What if Players A, B, and C all had the same number of successes as their respective oppositions but each player had the high roll in their individual sub-contest? Would they each get an extra success, making a three degree victory for the players? That doesn’t seem right (nor does it seem RAW). We don’t want a tie-break snowball effect — where a victory on a tie-break can be higher degree than some “clean” wins — do we? Of course, one could do zero degree group tie-breaks on which side had the most high rolls in tied sub-contests, but that is both fiddly and not guaranteed to deliver a result, so the “if you must have a result, the PCs win” rule is better, IMHO — but so is “if you must have a result, the opposition wins.” 😉 Don’t ask me how you break a tie in a PvP group contest! Toss a coin? (Actually, I think that is what I would do.) AFAICT, a group contest has one prize. If the individual sub-contests have meaningful outcomes — narrative “prizes” — requiring individual tie-breaks, perhaps a group contest is not what is called for. Just run individual contests in parallel. I don’t think anyone would complain if the GM said off the cuff, “Because you won most of the individual contests, the opposition breaks and runs,” even if the opposition’s morale wasn’t formally evaluated (e.g. via a group contest): you contest for certain bits of the narrative, and other bits of narrative emerge. Or am I just too loosey-goosey? As ever, I don’t claim to be a prophet fresh from the desert and a long fast — I may have this totally wrong. —————————————————————————————————————— ° I am sure “sub-contest” is not the approved jargon, but you know what I mean. °° See SRD v0.97, Section 2.3.7.2 Narrating Outcomes.

Not manufactured there, but possibly modified.

Obvious, boring answer: graveyards. But there is a certain poetry to growing weapons in graveyards, no?

Maker’s little helpers are building a workaround. If I could only remember where the factory was. Not Backford, not Dangerford, …

A little bit of Chaos philosophy:

Are “monsters” people, too? Sure, I am a paid-up member of that club. I wasn’t fretting at whether monsters had minds but at what was — in some sense to be discussed by the group (tea and biscuits in the interval) — merely a creature of the mind (something with only subjective reality) and what had independent existence (objective reality). There must be at least these balls in the air: The universe is sustained by the mind of god: god — the subject of experience — is objectively real, but anything else you might care to mention is just an idea in the mind of god, has mere subjective reality. Only through union with the mind of god can one become truly (objectively) real — say some of this crowd, others say that to presume one can ever become objectively real is heresy. Lewis Carroll was a fan of the IG, and there must be some Malkioni heretics who’ll go for something like this (not to mention some of the more esoteric Krarshtites). The Gods War and its denizens are sustained by the minds of mortals: we flip the script on the previous position and what was the “higher reality” — the divine — is now our creature, and the reality of the Gods War, of myth, is subjective. As of the Guide, this may have been canon, but @radmonger’s comment above suggests (nothing stronger) that this may be softened — I guess the Mythology book is the one to watch for. Argrath as the little terror — if he doesn’t like something, he’ll make it go away. The cosmos might have existed without minds, and the stuff that might have made up that world is what makes up ours. My thinking of something adds no furniture to the universe. Perhaps we can put this as all reality is objective, and perhaps some Maker factions will go for it — they like a good schism. Cue endless and convoluted exegesis of the esoteric meaning of “Mostal is dead.” (See also — off at a tangent — Picnic on Paradise.) Luckily for you, I exist only as an idea in my own mind, and if I perfect my austerities or answer the right riddles, I will forget myself and so cease to be. (To the tune of “Nothing ever was, anyway”.) All reality is subjective. One for the Illusion jockeys among the Void cultists. If we were to treat these constructs as piñatas, I don’t suppose any of them would survive many blows, but perhaps they might motivate Gloranthan theological disputes (i.e. release some sweeties). I can see various Gloranthan mystics taking at least three of the positions above — no prizes for guessing which — or possibly one mystic flitting between them depending on the quality of their last cup of coffee.

I think the usual trick is to think up some impossible criterion and then say that the animal couldn’t possibly meet it — never mind that we couldn’t ourselves. But what was it Auntie L said? — “I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.” (PI, p. 178) — The mistake may be embarking on the quest to find the right height to set the bar.

It is funny, I was going to give a couple of examples of what the scary things might be — an inkwell, a cigar box with one hinge missing — but in the end I thought it best not. Gloranthans are very much capable of dreaming up Lovecraftian horrors and have already done it, no? Tentacles, ooze, and chaotic features for chaotic creatures. For pop-culture Berkeley, I had in mind a story a clearly eccentric primary school teacher read to us back in the day. Turns out it was this (by Murray Leinster — Swanwick gives the TL;DR here). As for queer HPL, I enjoyed La Farge’s The Night Ocean, but mostly for its hilarious turn from Bill Burroughs.