mfbrandi

No manual labour for profit (unless the boss says so), shave your head and grow a cool moustache (maybe stroke them both for the feel of it), be armed at all times, wear red, and join a war society — which (if you are into ancestor worship) gives you a beast ancestor? [GtG, pages 49 and 51]

Maybe, but caste and occupation are not the same thing are they, else “the four caste occupations” (GtG, p. 51, left sidebar) would be tautologous, right? Occupations are supposedly appropriate to “castes” — really Varna, hence (albeit different) colour-coding and only four — not identical with them. The GtG culture write-up for Loskalm — IIRC (or read carefully enough in the first place) — seems to eschew terms like “dronars” and “horali”. Whether it is easy or hard, surely the point is to leave caste or at the very least caste restrictions behind (and achieve Nirvana or Moksha), no? You can do anything, and when you have done everything (or achieved morality and wisdom), then … Doesn’t sound like thinking castes are the basis of civilization to me — without caste restrictions, what work are castes doing to structure society? — but I usually have things upside down and inside out, so maybe you are right. Why must all Malkioni sects hold with caste? Not all Christians hold with the trinity. Some Malkioni may hold that other Malkioni are not “real” Malkioni, but we don’t have to. We are resplendent in diversity.

I just assumed (with no evidence): rightness schmightness — no castes (just pro tempore occupations); no caste special abilities; no problem. Worrying about “rightness” is for the old Hrestoli. Squares! Following your link, doesn’t this sound a lot like illumination? “Your stupid rules don’t matter to me, but I won’t detect ‘wrong’ to your enforcers.” But — as far as I know — there is not a Gloranthaphile moral panic about the Men of All.

Page 130 has: When Vashanti was ready to leave for the Summer Land Heaven, he returned the Viceroys of the Day and the New Sun from the Underworld and he then departed to rule the Celestial Realm. Maybe that was intended, but it doesn’t seem to read right. I would expect one of these: When Vashanti was ready to leave for the Summer Land Heaven, he returned from the Underworld with the Viceroys of the Day and the New Sun, and he then departed to rule the Celestial Realm. When Vashanti was ready to leave for the Summer Land Heaven, he returned the Viceroys of the Day and the New Sun to the Underworld, and he then departed to rule the Celestial Realm. … but of course, they don’t mean the same thing as each other, the last seems unlikely, and I don’t know what the original means. A wiser head than mine is required. I just don’t know. EDIT: Or of course — if it is what is meant — just: he fetched the Viceroys of the Day and the New Sun from the Underworld

So if I do an experimental heroquest to retcon something in the Gods War, it’ll all be wiped out in time for next year? Argrath’s feeding the gods to the Devil achieved nothing? Maybe there are wheels within wheels and the annual cycle isn’t the biggest one — not everything gets completely reset annually (though possibly everything gets reset eventually — after Void has eaten Cosmos). Or maybe take what the priests say with a pinch of salt — as big a pinch as your heart can stand. Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do (an octave higher: the same note (Do), but not the same Do) Sun, Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun (a week later: the same day (Sunday), but not the same Sunday) And Peggy Lee asks, ‘Is that all there is to cyclic time?’ But that is not a specifically Gloranthan take, of course.

One for our onlie begetter: Syncretism, ever increasing in popularity, in fact worked against any trend toward monotheism that henotheism might have aroused. True unity of two gods occurs only with the daily fusion of Re and Osiris in the underworld. This coalescing of the solar and chthonic is a principle of extreme importance for the understanding of Egyptian religion. — Edward Wente, Review of Erik Hornung’s Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt It seems to me — though perhaps my vision is distorted in all kinds of ways, and I’m no expert in anything — that maybe Egyptian myth doesn’t get the love it might in Gloranthaville. Especially given the suspicion that Orlanth and Eurmal are inseparable — ‘only Orlanth can (sometimes) control him’ —> ‘only Orlanth can (sometimes) control his own worst impulses’ — isn’t it tempting to see Orlanth as a Seth/Sutekh figure? Click for Egyptian Chaos theory:

History in the sense of what we write down about what happened — ought always to be logically consistent but it seldom is. History in the sense of what happened — is always logically consistent but that is often denied. Right, that’s my sub–La Rochefoucauld vein tapped out for today.

If someone wants to sequence events before the beginning of time, either they are having you on or they are struggling and failing to to talk sense. Of course, it may be that time didn’t begin 1600 years ago, in which case their memory of what happened 1700 years ago may be honest and true. GRoY reads — to me, anyway — like the author didn’t believe that time began 1600 years ago, but I am afraid I cannot help you out with Kralorela.

Ah, but Arkat fragments are like magnetic monopoles all with the same “charge” — they resist being squished together. But they want to unite, they want it so badly. It is thought that that is why they are always so angry. They can fission, but they cannot fuse, and only falling into the Black Hole — the Great Fear — will give them peace. Any suggestion that this is behind “the Ralzakark project” is entirely …

Sure, but one suspects that an illusory sword with enough “reality” to kill is unlikely to have the internal structure of a “permanently real” sword (which is not permanent and in some sense no more real) — perhaps it has none at all.° That is not to say that one cannot “fake” less obvious levels of perceptible reality, but I cleave to a principle of minimum reality: you want more, it’ll cost you extra. In contrast, “perfectly ordinary reality” goes all the way down. Let illusion have some distinction, some magic beyond simply being — watch the victim bleed out around an invisible, silent, odourless, massless, soon-to-be-gone sword. If you like, normal reality is built from the inside out, but illusion is built from the outside in — and it goes in only barely far enough for the purpose at hand. But that is just me (and me, this morning, at that). The viewpoint is mandated neither by canon nor by common sense. ——————————————————————————————— ° Tricksters with enough stability to take up philosophy and grey sages with enough patience to listen to tricksters will debate this stuff relentlessly. They may come to the conclusion that if they stop debating it, the world will end. If the LMs win the debate, the universe is retconned into Stasis (nothing ever happened), but if the tricksters win, then … ?

Given what one has to go through to become an elf and what Arkat had to go through to become a troll, my vote would be to treat it like illusion magic — extra points spent to fool more senses — and no stat changes or altered senses/digestion. More plot hooks and less bookkeeping that way? If for a PC, just use human stats with maybe the possibility to trade in some CHA for more STR and SIZ (one for one)? I mean, if it is not a teeny mouse or a seven-mile dragon, why make life difficult?

If the point is to roll fewer dice — but to roll dice, rather than write an app to keep the current odds — and I appreciate that for some people it will not be, then isn’t the way to go to be more like a wargamer and embrace the CRT? The resistance table suggestion is good, but to make combats quicker/bloodier, consider dividing the defence/parry value by 2–4, so evenly matched foes (with equal attack and parry values) hit each other more than 50% of the time. You can roll once for player and NPC: PC needs to roll ≤ target number, m; NPC needs to roll ≥ target number, n; quite likely m+1 != n. (For mooks, maybe allow them to add their attack values together but only have one hit the PC on a success. More mooks connect on a special?) I attach an example, but it is just that — it is not a recommendation. If you like special effects beyond extra damage, roll a special effect die (of appropriate size) with the d20 and look up on a supplementary table. For example, and YGWV: d6 1 A does double damage to D, ignoring D’s armour 2–4 A does double damage to D 5 A’s weapon stuck in D’s shield, else D drops weapon, else A does double damage to D 6: D’s weapon breaks, else D’s shield breaks, else A does double damage to D In my CRT, I have somewhat Fibonacci-wise made it harder and harder to get that next 5% advantage, but you don’t have to. You could make it linear. You could have linear steps in A – (D/2) but roll 3d20 and pick the middle one. Or use % dice. Or whatever. Note that the special ranges for PC and NPC do not overlap, so you don’t need separate critical and fumble tables (the one who gets the special is A). It is symmetrical, so it will work for PvP duels, too — the player rolling the dice wants to roll low? Take turns? Smart tactics would get you a small bump to your attack or defence value. In use it might be more practical to put the die roll values down the left and have the results in the cells, but this is more compact — and better when deciding on values. This is just an example: I have given no thought to how this rebalances combat in RQ2, RQ3, or RQG. Clearly, high values are still better. Finally, this is just a thinking out loud forum post, not a candidate drop-in combat system! 😉 Resistance Table Redux 5.pdf

That has gotta be a help in questing to bring back “ancestral” forms, right? And that’s a solid 1/4 of the population potentially up for joining the cabal. What kind of Frankenparaceratherium are they going to come up with?

Also, no need to click Nick’s link AND follow the instructions, as it already points at the Explore option with the “newest first” sort: https://www.redbubble.com/people/Chaosium/explore?page=1&sortOrder=recent

If we look at the family tree, we see that the tapir people (problematic, liminal) are most closely related to rhinos (in thrall to a lesser tribe — the humiliation!) and horses/zebras (which is definitely a thing). So maybe all kinds of shenanigans went on to rid the proto-Morokanth of their nose horns — not a good look with a trunk, anyway — and to get the early equidae some stripy camouflage. Let us blame Waha — cult or god, to taste — for the Praxian attitudes that cause so much aggro. Or … it may be that stripelessness and nose horns were late add-ons — the rhinos saddled with horns (in the wrong place) as an insulting sign of beasthood. Here is Hyrachyus eximus (a common ancestor of horses, rhinos, and tapirs): There is a radical Morokanth secret society dedicated to creating a Paraceratherium army to liberate their horsey and rhino cousins. “We were never children of Eiritha,” they claim. Their graffiti? “None shall live near the hornless beast.”

So except when it is “just” a ritual — i.e. there aren’t millions of joules of magical energy crackling about the place; it is not meant as a put-down — I wonder whether we can see crop-blessing magic as like modern chemical-heavy intensive agriculture. Perhaps there are Gloranthan organic farming and biodynamic agriculture movements who point to the Wastes — as Genertela’s Dust Bowl — crying, “You fools, can’t you see what you are doing?” (The biodynamic types who dare to mention the phases of the Moon are taking their lives in their hands.) Another bunch of dissidents has it that the soil is just fine and all this agricultural magic is an Earth cults protection racket: “Do the ritual, give up the POW, or we will blast your herds and crops.”

DUMB THEORY: Arkat didn’t curse Dorastor he blessed it to make it a paradise for the Arkat fragment/s known as “Ralzakark”

Possibly, but if that ran the risk of breeding in Minotaur-level intelligence and belligerence, would you risk it? And would it be to the point? Wouldn’t we then be talking too of cross breeding Morokanth with [insert candidate here] to make them more human? I think the herd human hair gel thing is supposed to be performative: it is a cultural cringe to the human supremacists of Waha: if you let us play human, we too will pretend that: the lottery was fair the beasts were meant to lose “Look! Look! In our case the beasts did lose. Just like in your case. Let us be human, too, and we will sell out our beast cousins.” There has to be some cognitive dissonance, some Orwellian doublethink to it. If the Morokanth were made really human and the herd wo/men really (horned) beasts, then what is meant to be an expression of human chauvinism would become — via a weird route — a mere statement of fact. That wouldn’t do. Not at all. Although I would like to think that the Morokanth outsmarted Waha by winning his rigged lottery, I suspect that there was always supposed to be one anomalous result. If the beasts didn’t win in one tribe, what would the Wahist humans have to grumble about? If there were no “dirty stinking foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs,” the racists and xenophobes would be the first to complain — the in group needs the out group to be admitted at least partway, or they would be left alone with their own awfulness, with not even a fragile sense of superiority. Of course, the Morokanth’s “look, look: horns!” can be subversive, too. Push it too far, and you are clearly taking the piss out of the two-legs. Go one further and remove your bowler to reveal that you have spiked your own hair into horns, too: anarcho-punk Morokanth. What do the baboons make of all this? They are similarly caught between human and beast, but presumably outside of the weird survival lottery mindset. [The above should be considered tentative. It will likely collapse under the weight of its own pretension. But one has to spin the wheel.]

This is genius! The simple switch to a name for a Scottish girl — “Mòrag,” allegedly meaning “star of the sea” — and a lake monster (Loch Morar’s Nessie) “explains” so much: the storm tribe’s obsession with red hair why Orlanth is really a girl the “air” element’s undoubted Water connection Water’s invasion of the Sky Orlanth’s rivalry with the sun I am not worthy. [Backs slowly from throne room on knees.]

An Animal Liberation Front gesture of solidarity: four legs good; two legs bad; two horns good … One would like to think so, but maybe — like the revolutionary pigs — they have become harder and harder to tell from the humans as the Butcher’s rewrite remains unedited. [Edit: oops — kinda read it wrong first time: head/herd, but I think it gets to more or less the right place in the end. Ho hum.]

Equal rites edit: The demon took your torch and swallowed it … and other things “best” left for the marriage bed. Sometimes in the dead of night, you still see the glint of a fang, feel the scratch of a nail. You get the feeling he’s waiting for you. I figure the Lord Demon of the Legions of Death, dwelling in darkness, with third eye open and magical gestures is not all that mindless and has little need for melanin or muscle bulk. We can recast: Here are we, one magical movement from Kether to Malkhuth There are you, you drive like a demon from station to station

Didn’t RQ3 kill it back in 1985 with the broader stroke pantheon vs. pantheon chart? Although my inner nerd says to do the full thing electronically with bells and whistles and numbers up the wazoo, a calmer voice says: ditch all the numbers — just qualitative assessments for each pantheon/religion have a short paragraph on its attitude to each of the other pantheons/religions note dissonant cult–cult amities and enmities, but resist rote language that sniffs of numbers in drag let people draw their own conclusions from myths, scenarios, and sourcebooks In short, do everything to banish the “our cults are 0–0, we must fight now” nonsense. I appreciate that I may be the only person who thinks this, and I won’t be offended if you dismiss this as the rambling of an addled cockney (which it almost certainly is — I can feel poster’s remorse setting in even before I’ve clicked submit).

Yeah, but Delecti tells me that’s fine. In fact, he has a whole bunch of threads with different prime numbers of years between posts. When the great conjunction occurs and they all receive fresh posts on the same day, it will trigger the Zombie Cicada Apocalypse.

Unique? Whatever happened to Jeff’s “the Mythical Synthesis Movement has already done its work. In a sense, we are all God Learners now”? Don’t get me wrong, I think a gameworld in which only one person took to the monomyth sounds more interesting than “received Glorantha” but it also occurs to me that your player may have had something different in mind than I do. Just curious/nosy. 😉

Until that lightbulb moment, then they put their feet up, have a nice cup of tea, and start flicking through the “fancy goldfish” catalogue. Turns out ethics doesn’t have a firm foundation: our spade turns not on bedrock, but on the void: the dark side response: I can substitute my own will or desire for the divine or the ethically self-evident the chagoi breeder’s response: ethics needed no foundation, but neither the divine nor dodgy philosophy could ever have provided one, anyway Neither response comes bundled with ethics and behaviour — tied up with a nice pink bow — and the person with the flaky analysis may nonetheless fail to pursue an apocalyptic powergamer’s agenda. Turns out the trickster was by instinct or conviction prosocial and religion and society — keen to pigeonhole misfits — were holding them back, making them feel they had to break every law. But the only law to break was Eurmal’s — E surely saw the appropriateness of that and laughed. Weird isn’t it that beings are written off as compelled to defy all laws, although that is Eurmal’s path of ? We can — at least in discourse — siphon off the awkward bits of the Prince of the Power of the Air into Killer Boy and Deadeye, but we cannot quite say Orlanth = the Devil. Is that because then the Devil would not be or because then the big O would be? Don’t ask me — I don’t even work here.