mfbrandi

But surely the book was not Hamlet. There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. That is possibly — only possibly — the most unGloranthan thing ever said: it has not been dreamed, told, seen, or inscribed, but nonetheless it is. Be careful on your heroquest: you know all the story variations, but the unknown unknowns are lurking out there and keen to impale you on spikes of objective reality. Another team is lost, harsh words are spoken, and the GLs conclude that it is not just someone “dreaming harder” than them, nor the return of the repressed: there is something out there in no mind, no dream, no story — the “dark matter” of their playground is hostile … and it has teeth. They review their textbooks looking for clues: The Dream Master The Interpretation of Dreams The Lathe of Heaven If on a winter’s night a traveller “Solid Objects” Roadside Picnic Lost Futures “Dead in Irons” “How in all the hells did this stuff get on our shelves?” ———————————————————————————————————————— The above is just a little riff that is probably going nowhere. We have gotten used to: prayer-powered gods (the tail wagging the dog) stories conformable to our wills for fun and bloody profit (consensus reality) But aren’t there powerful things no one is feeding POW to out there in the deep end of what was supposed to be subjective reality — nightmares that are no one’s dreams, whose untold stories would stubbornly refuse to be re-written — things so inimical and alien that not even the most self-tortured “chaos fiend” could dream them up or even see them clearly? Kicking against the solipsistic pricks and the pop-culture take on George Berkeley.

And apparently some jungle Aldryami did not form any such myth. This does not surprise them: If the sun had gone out, the jungles would be dead. The jungles are not dead. Therefore the sun did not go out.

When I first thought about the murder and return of the sun, I thought of it as purely a myth of the daily cycle, but of course in some parts of the world, it is also a myth of the yearly cycle — sun, deciduous trees, the whole nine yards — and that is what gives it its apocalyptic flavour. If there are parts of Glorantha sufficiently like our tropics … … with no dark, cold season, then we can expect them not to have a myth of a period of extended darkness where the world seemed likely to end — i.e. not to have an aetiological myth of winter, not to have a “memory” of the Gods War, or to have a Gods War recast as waiting for the break of the monsoon. But in a jungle where it is warm and wet all the time … nada! So jungle Aldryami (JAs) who say “gods war, you say — whassat then?” are unsurprising. We only tie ourselves in knots when we try to come up with the in-world explanation of why they are ignorant of the Gods War. (Although it is tempting just to have the JAs describe a year in the wet, wet jungle and then say, “See, no Gods War.” That is the stuff on which religious conversions turn, right? But it is not theoretical.) But note that it is not especially a problem in their case, because we have the same problem explaining how the Genertelans do remember the Gods War: it is not an objective fact of history — at least, according to GtG holy writ, it is not — but we have trouble saying they just made it up to “explain” the since-Time objective facts. We want it to be real but not objectively real, but that is a hard to — which is not to say you guys don’t have a dozen good ways to do it. What will we do when a real philosopher of religion turns up? I think I will just run and hide, and if found deny all knowledge and responsibility.

But if we lean into the subjectivity of the Gods War, isn’t it smart not to notice these things? If the sun only goes out — with all that means to plant life — if one perceives it as going out, then best to have a firm conviction that it is shining as brightly as ever and to continue to feel its warmth on one’s leaves and bark, no? The Gods War is a crisis of faith — don’t have one and you’ll be fine.

The Gods War is surely capital “M” myth, so what is wrong with Yellow Elves taking a “didn’t see it, mate; didn’t happen, or at least, not round here” stance, even from the orthodox POV? All myths are true, even the ones that say “nothing happened” — right? If you want to go over to the dark side and deny the subjectivity of the Gods War, all heresies are welcome here. [Any suggestion that I am just teasing in an attempt to draw out people’s notions of what it means to say “myth is subjective” is, of course …]

Does that mean your idea of the worshippers’ share of Pamalt’s duties/responsibilities/work is all of it? I like it! Of course, Zzabur might claim to be a human and not a god — then the issue is not gods vs. the people but one snooty wizard vs. the working class. Like, worship, recognise, respect, or … ?

I’ll give you Jho if we can do the Goddess Switch on Orlanth and Panash.

“I test the sharpness of my swords on slaves, but as they tend to bleed, they cannot be used as help indefinitely.” And you still get the same salamander with every summoning? Back in the day (RQ2), elementals had 1d6 INT and that put one in six elementals in the low average IQ range (80, according to the back of my envelope), but even if smart elementals are no longer as bright as one in eleven humans, I bet they can still build up quite some resentment. They tried to unionise, but on the picket line, their strike placards soon turned to ash. Is this really how we want to treat the staff at Gustbran Incorporated? Say instead that salamander working hours are limited by the fatigue of focusing their heat, the EU Working Time Directive, or common decency? Or that only hissable villains would use salamanders in a forge, it being so bad for their health?

Seeing this die made me think again about your comment. You played on as the Futhark “T” — for Tiwaz and Týr. Experimentally, let us try: Pamalt = Týr. Playfully: Fenrir = Fonrit = Ompalam. Fenrir bound by the gods; Ompalam held immobile by the slave chains he cannot — or will not — release. But was Chubby O tricked into it by a gesture of trust from Pamalt? Is what allowed Ompalam to get the world moving again a meal of Pamalt’s spear hand? [Chronology surely jumbled by me here.] But the upward pointing spear/arrow is still a symbol of bondage. The world moves, but Ompalam does not. Slave god as unmoved mover slides without sliding into its rôle as heretic Malkioni fetish. If was Pamalt’s spear hand, he is likely well rid of it — distanced from the neo-Nazis in their power rune T shirts. Ompalam introjects Pamalt-as-Power and truncated Pamalt is freed — personal liberation as irresponsibility; I am sure that is a theme around here. Perhaps we should really write Pamalt as a more tree-huggy — I mean, if you squint and in a poor light … Is this roughly the kind of thing you had in mind? I appreciate that as I have presented it here, it does not rise to the heights of theory.

But it will return, possibly in 1972 ST: I saw it written and I saw it say A pink moon is on its way And none of you stand so tall Pink moon gonna get you all

Maybe, but “millet” is used for a diversity of plants. Sorghum bicolor is also known as “great millet” — and one of its uses is to make ethanol: the Prosopaedia’s millet wine? Of course, we could blame the IRL situation and the word millet’s utter failure to respect modern cladistics on the Goddess Switch. The heretic in me says that all the Godlearners really did was tidy up some messy taxonomy, but come the next famine, guess who gets the blame? Grumpy Peasant: “You took our old crop away.” Haughty Academic: “No, we just gave it a sensible name.” Grumpy Peasant: “Names have power: if you rename a grass, you change the gods.” Haughty Academic: “Guards, crush this person beneath your shields.”

This is why the phantom limb can be your friend — keep reaching for stuff with that hand that isn’t there, people. Maybe Trickster has a spell for it. But not for everything, I hope: I don’t want the inside of my body repaired according to my own self-image. If I have a tattoo on my back I have never seen, does heal body restore it? If I suffer from a delusional form of BDD (dysmorphia), what happens? If Charles VI is subjected to Heal Body, does some or all of him turn to glass? Your adoring public demands answers! ————————————— EDIT: Isn’t the tediously meta reason that tattoos come back that they might be magically significant/powerful, and players would be upset if they didn’t?

This has me picturing the Cosmic Dragon/Ouroboros as a clockwork-powered Meccano mechanism wrapped around Orxili/the Cosmic egg. Then the Grand Ancestral dragon hatched from the Cosmic Egg — Chaos acted upon by the Cosmic Dragon (with CD already knowing to prune like a gardener but using steel shears) — would be the blending of Mechanist/Makerish early dragon–technology with Shaper/Growerish Chaos–nature. Compromise before the creation of the universe-as-we-know-it. The wedding of all essential parts. The halves of its egg are [insidedead Mechanism] and [outsideliving Chaos] ( … I am making this up, it may not be true …), flipping the positions — but not, it seems, the functions — of Cosmic Dragon and Orxili. Note though their essential sameness as two halves of an eggshell. Trickster jokes to Windbag, “It is not breath that makes dead matter live. Nothing makes dead matter live.” How now do we feel about Sun Spider = Cosmos and Wakboth = Dragon? You could go for a flip-flop of rôles once the universe is created, or instead go for Wakboth as Cosmos freaking out about Chaos and sprouting “chaotic features,” but then what does Spider eats Devil tell you? Symbolically, that great undecidable — Kajabor/Void vs. Wakboth/Corruption on the Net — seems to matter. But perhaps it is a mistake to think of anything manifesting in the world and not embodying and both. Do we say straightforwardly that Krarsht = Orxili? Do we say that Krarsht is one of the bits of Orxili pruned off by the Cosmic Dragon: Krarsht is to Orxili as krarshtkid is to Krarsht? Is it that Orxili/Krarsht splits like a hologram — the prunings resemble the trunk — so that we shouldn’t be detained by such philosophical niceties? (Parfit’s people splitting like amoebas — and Chaos gods are people, too.) It would be just like our Beloved Mother to survive her own death and transformation and to be fully present in each of her “children”. (Or leaving the genders per another mythos: Orxili = the father, the Grand Ancestral Dragon = the son, and Krarsht = the holy ghost. Perhaps.) As before, so again? As above, so below? So we would expect dragons to be both responsible for Krarsht outbreaks and to be involved in wrestling with some of the results (and guarding others) … perhaps. Do the dragons view Chaos as an adversary but essential, or are they beyond viewing Chaos as enemy — though gods and mortals attempting to relate draconic myth have difficulty grasping this? Or is it that the dragons who remain are those who haven’t fully appreciated the rôle of Chaos — the length of the Cosmic cycle is determined by the dimness of the dimmest dragon? Or perhaps we should bin the notion of the great clockwork dragon … but not yet, not yet.° ——————————————————————————————————————————— ° In which scenario, the organic appearance of Krarsht is an illusion: the tentacles are bits of Cosmos “reacting” to the Void, and cutting them away (to create “krarshtkids”) leaves Krarsht untouched. Krarsht as the great computer network made of tubes of nothing, as imponderable a bit of cold outside “tech” as you’ll find in the lozenge. Nothing gibbering about in the tunnels is of Krarsht — only the voids in the rock are Her — but there is no percentage in it for the Waiting Mouth to let this be known (especially not to that degenerate freemasonry of crazy cultists who often don’t even know the name She doesn’t even have). The combined and of Krarsht are the secret of instantaneous communication: motion without motion; actionless action; nothing … happened. This draws the dwarves who struggle to reconcile their worship of Stasis with their organic selves and their development over time of new things. But if they get too close to the secrets of the Void Mother, they turn inside-out (I blame Suzette Haden Elgin) and become mad tentacled mouths. Thus — in true Gloranthan fashion — the war of dwarf on krarshtkid is an internal struggle, a most uncivil civil war. But that is not something to tell outsiders, and whether and how to seek Change without Change is a powerful driver of embarrassing faction formation. Did anyone tell them that a step sideways would take them to realms where the local symbol of Chaos points in eight directions at once? [Apologies for the even more than usually rambling improv, but I fear that attempting to polish this turd would just result in an ugly smear.]

To be fair, in modern uses, the scapegoat is one who suffers in another’s place, but not in the bible. I guess if we called it the escape goat, the doubleness would be clear.

… or the paper? —————————————— EDIT: Perhaps it is a matter of perspectives, of persons: “I — as bearer of the word — am paper, but you are blade (scissors) or stone (rock).”

So are universes — like tribbles — born pregnant? What is “pseudo” about a pseudocosmic egg? Tell us more! I think we can at least take a stab at the identity of the soul of the current universe.

It is better to be the scapegoat than the other goat — who gets sacrificed:

I wouldn’t worry about what Chaosium may or may not publish in the future — currently, yours may be more real than theirs, and I suspect heroquesting rules will be very much a matter of taste: people will want a menu to choose from.

The context was @JRE’s admirably positive vision of the Fourth Age (although the interpretation is mine, so don’t blame them): That gives a concrete example of mystics stepping into the Void and leaving the rest of us behind to recover, rather than to rot — though sure as eggs is Krarsht, we will all rot in the end. How does the story go: a man — or possibly a white person — asks what they can do for the revolution, and they are told ‘just step out of the way’? If you are in a hole, stop digging. If you are part of the problem, stop doing what you are doing. Sometimes the right thing to do is to do nothing or to remove oneself from the situation — this doesn’t always have to be called ‘selfishness’. As you note yourself, those who always think that something must be done — and of course, they are always the perfect ones to do it — often get a lot of people killed. So we have the notion that the world thins — the gods die and the magic goes away — and Glorantha becomes Earth or at least more Earthlike. That is hardly a radical position in ‘Glorantha studies’, so if it crops up in a thread dedicated to Gloranthan heterodoxy and gets subjected to a bit of variation, isn’t that at the milder end of what one might expect? I am not claiming to be the way, the truth, and the light — that the only way to Glorantha is through me. This is the place to be cheerfully wrong — in my case, often more wrong than I intend. JRE had the gods stop being characters out of E. R. Eddison. I had the people stop enabling them. (But they are just different perspectives on the Boulez solution to the problem of opera, I guess.) What is the right way to thin Glorantha? It is surely going to get thinned. And it needs it, right?

Tearing away the veil, or just looking at it from the other side?

It is, but it didn’t occur to me that we weren’t supposed to spot it. If I sometimes turn a sympathetic eye on the creations (even if I look at them askew) and try to redeem them, I hope it doesn’t come across as making excuses for their creators. I am not here to beat them up, but I am not here to defend them either. So that’s Aldrya one, Mostal nil?

She is symbolized as a clay pot inscribed with a healing charm on the exterior, and a mouthless face on the inside bottom. — Prosopaedia, p. 136 “I have no mouth, and I must scream” — so one could (but need not) argue that she is portrayed as one of her voiceless worshippers, although those who care for the helpless need not themselves be helpless. How trollish a face with no mouth can look, I cannot say. Maybe the idea is “I won’t eat you” rather than “I cannot speak” — I don’t know. I think there is an IRL tradition of god pots, but I couldn’t tell you its significance.

No: right here, right now, surely. The mystic needs no afterlife. Something like: everything that ever was or ever will be is God’s will; you cannot fight God and win; if you submit to God’s will, you will meet no resistance, but those who struggle are frustrated again and again; who then is free? (There is probably a more sophisticated version dragging in God’s perfect knowledge of future contingents, but I won’t attempt it.) Viewed timelessly, those who submit to God’s will accept what is, those who struggle against it deny reality. This self-conscious denial has its appeal, too, but do we call it freedom? [For the avoidance of doubt: I am not now and have never been. And I can make no sense of free will. A believer may have made a better fist of it.]

There is always chaos in a sword, and H is the greatest of the lords of terror. As in its rôle as agent of thinning, Chaos brings Order to the world: assuming Life was already Life (and not Glue), we had two power runes flapping around unpaired. And Life as Fertility must encompass Separation, just as Death returns us to the One (or the None).

Or ride three horses at once and join the circus, but even in Glorantha, some people will shun the path of the Trumpian superhero and just go with the flow. I find myself in sympathy with the Malkioni Ompalam Sufis: If I were doing their PR, I might give that a trim/rewrite: The school of the Wool Cloaks seeks complete submission and the annihilation of the self. Our adepts are the only truly liberated mortals in all of Glorantha. Pick up a leaflet at the door. As it stands, it reads like the submission is only a means to the end of esoteric knowledge (which will then be used in the usual sledgehammer fashion). When it comes to the writers’ attitude to mysticism (by which I don’t mean unlocking one’s hidden superpowers), I am never sure whether: it is hostile, but they like to give the Devil the best lines it is hostile, but I sometimes think it is ambivalent because I am sympathetic it is ambivalent it is sympathetic, but it is wrapped up in the monstrous as a tease (this seems a stretch, even for me) The cynic in me says one of the low numbers has it. So couldn’t we get the advantages of thinning — “Peace between Chaos and what is not Chaos” — by just cutting off the Sacred Time POW supply, without the need for the melodramatic feeding of the gods to Wakboth? Or maybe that is what happened: tired out by the holy wars, people fell away from religion, and there was a slow, creeping secularisation; some wag later wrote the fairy story of Argrath and the Devil to jazz it up (or to lay the groundwork for a religious revival). My pet theory is that as the world begins to make sense and the gods fade into traumatic memory, Gloranthan imaginations flourish and their poetry improves immeasurably.