mfbrandi

This set me thinking (the wise have stopped reading already): Here are some pictures of Glorantha: Each is a picture — the sort of thing one might be in the grip of — not a formal diagram. There is no real model, no empirical theory. If I suggested otherwise, I would make cosmologists sad, and that would be wrong. The first picture is the one I had when I was twelve, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever: history sprang fully armoured from the brow of Zeus — it had that whole in medias res thing going on — and yet, somehow, before that there had been a war among the gods which had taken no time at all and had no sequence. It is still cool, right? Or maybe I am still twelve … or even younger. The second picture is indescribably dull: we say time began 1,600 years ago, but it is not really true; something important may have happened then, but we have people and cultures who rightly say they go back much further than 1,600 years; they remember the Gods War — it happened to them, and they wrote it down as it happened. Now where, I ask you, is the fun in that? Nowhere. There is none. Dull, dull, dull! Finally, we have something that may be a bit like the current official view, if there is one. History — the real deal, all the objective shit — happens along the x axis, at y = 0. Is your x coordinate your location in time? Not quite: if you have a non-zero y coordinate, you have wandered out of history, out of time, as such. Like I said, it wouldn’t do to lean too hard on any of this. “However, the Myths are not objective reality, but subjective by their very nature” (GtG, p. 154), so our y axis is something like subjectivity, and the further you travel away from the objectivity of life on the x axis — the bigger your y value — the deeper into story you get. And way up the weird end of story, we find the Gods War. The Gods War doesn’t occupy a line but a fuzzy cloud, and perhaps that »cough« explains »cough« the “contradictions”: different versions of a Gods War event may occur at different y values. Yada, yada, yada … Perhaps there is a wrinkle in that as you try to reduce your x value, your y value goes up: you cannot time travel/heroquest back into history — i.e. y = 0 — if you try, you are pushed away from the x axis and into the high y hell of the Gods War, and maybe there is a steep change in y as you try to push past 0 ST or thereabouts, the nominal beginning of time. (You try to change your x coordinate, but does it shift, at all? Perhaps you go straight up. Perhaps.) Presumably, every point in the Grey/Silver Age has a positive y coordinate, and in this picture, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t end exactly on 0 ST, nor if people argue about exactly when the Dawn was — the Grey/Silver Age comes before “normal” time’s reliable cycle of sunrise and sunset. It is before “time”, as well as “above” objective reality. But it is getting there. A variant on this would be that it is not just that one cannot reach the objective past, but that there isn’t one: the “past” is subjective, and it is more subjective the further back you look: there is no creation, only creation myth. Do I buy the idea of subjective reality or subjectivity as a dimension of reality, even as a bit of fun? No, not really, but the point is to get to grips with something like a metaphor — “OK, he’s a witch; now what?” — not an empirical theory, not real cosmology: with this vague picture before the mind, which way will my imagination run? Which way will yours? Even with that said — ambition set woefully low — the above is likely as full of holes as a shotgun-blasted sieve. So it goes.

Yes but maybe — only maybe, this is not a prescription — XU and company are depicted as looking like trolls because Uz (or those who think of them as Uz-ish deities) are doing the drawing. Is ZZ in fact troll-ish (in shape, for example)? Possibly, these early Darkness beings are not humanoid, at all, and resemble Uz much less than you and I do. XU = tough love in the dark. ZZ = burning terror in the dark. To try to pin them down any more than that — although we all do it, all the time — is asking for trouble. I prefer that to “all Darkness beings look a bit like trolls if you squint” … but your whatever will and should thingamajig and all that.

What is and what is not. Cosmos and Chaos. And to be quite unfair to poor syphilitic Freddy (and who among us can say we have never indulged in that cruel hobby?) some of us when we stare into Chaos — into the Abyss, into what is not — see only monsters, sprout tentacles, claws, or fangs, and become the monsters we fancied were there, for human nature abhors a vacuum and longs to fill it with the abhorrent. And then we go to war with ourselves, because we hate and fear all monsters. If HPL scared himself by staring too long into the dark, he seems to have realised that he was the monster he feared — or at least, that is how I choose to spin The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Monsters are born at the “interface” of what is and what is not, but it is senseless to blame what is not for this teratogenesis — if there is a cause, it is always something that is, part of Cosmos. There is nothing on the dark side of the mirror. So of course Arkat is the slayer of Gbaji and also Gbaji himself, but never Nysalor. Arkat is the endlessly replicated Gerroldian “folded man” — it turns out that Arkat is Cosmos, and Cosmos is the demon who swallowed Cosmic Fire and ever after howled in fear and pain. We are all Arkat, the bootstrapped Cosmos, the A–Z, the Alpha and the Omega, and we are terrified. After this realization of pantheistic solipsism, is it any wonder we’ve taken to covering, smashing, or turning to the wall any mirrors we find? The thing I have always liked about Nysalor is that Nysalor is dead — or perhaps I should say “cannot exist”. On the one hand: But on the other: There is no coming back from Kajabor, so whatever was loosed in Dorastor, it wasn’t Rashoran/a. Nysalor is not a part of the furniture of the world, cannot be. But Gbaji is — Gbaji is Cosmos when it knows that it has only itself to blame but nonetheless cannot accept it. Gbaji is us, and we deceive ourselves. The thing about Kajabor is that it doesn’t seem credible as a monster stomping the lozenge: who are the Kajabor-swallowed entities such that “their names, and memories of them, have been lost” (CoR Prosopaedia, p. 68)? If it is impossible to say, then is anyone able to say that there were any such? Rather Kajabor is fear of the Void and Rashoran/a is the comfort of the Void; these are not gods, they are just attitudes we can take, poses we can strike; saying that the latter was fed to the former is merely a fairy tale expression of pessimism. So we can hope for peace in the Fourth Age — where the Moon is invisible because it is not there — but Chaos won’t come to the treaty table, only elements of Cosmos can. But some of them will be Chaos-haunted — “Void-touched”, “gripped by the Great Fear” — and like Rashoran/a we must comfort them; after all, they are us. Then we go looking for Ferric Jaggar, but what must we do with him when we have found him? Certainly, we must not allow that one man to become a god. The trouble with this is that it all seems completely orthodox.

Yuck! I’d feel like I was living in a JF Lange sex fantasy. Tap me. Tap me now. Tap me down to dust.

To my surprise, there seems to be an answer — probably means there is a contradictory one lurking somewhere else: When Garangordos quested to liberate Ompalam from Jraktal the Tap, he returned with ancient Vadeli magical insights … When the Opening came, the Vadeli returned to Pamaltela and conquered much of Fonrit posing as the returned Glorious Ones. The Vadeli revealed secrets of the Glorious Ones that had been known only to their initiates. As a result, the Vadeli were worshipped — The Vadeli Legacy, GtG, p. 46 So immortal sorcerers had to impersonate demigods who traded in Vadeli techniques in the first place — sounds doable. As for truth, this seems to be a flexible thing in Glorantha: there are lie spells as well as truth magics and I doubt that we would consider Gloranthan “proofs” of divine identity as anything of the sort. If x says that they are the reincarnation of y, who is to say they are not? What does it even mean? Cue magical arm wrestling and some fireworks for the rubes — job done! And if there is no truth, or it is not a settled thing, or it is unknowable, can there be even an intention to deceive? And for the general case, if I say “I am a god” am I making a claim of fact or saying something more like “worship me”? Drawing up an empirical checklist for godhood seems like a foolish task, but if you put a gun to my head, I would say that the received opinion of the Vadeli personality is just right for a god: Vadeli reject Malkion’s laws utterly and their culture deliberately and knowingly transgresses against the laws of the universe. All Vadeli are notable for their lack of empathy, cold-heartedness, egocentricity, superficial charm, manipulativeness, irresponsibility, impulsivity, criminality, lack of remorse, and a complete disregard for morality. — Vadeli Isles, Culture, GtG, p. 527 Who could fail to love a people of whom that was said? I can feel my heart warming toward them as I type.

Or go the full ouroboros and make each neotenic dragon her own parent (and hence her own descendant): each hatches from the very same dragonewt egg she herself laid — after who knows how many goes around as a ’newt. You can have the dragons of the Dragonkill retentive of somatic, psychological, and spiritual features of immature dragons. And so we understand why magic which makes you sprout dragon features is called real dragon magic, fake dragon magic, and spiritually regressive — it is all about turning into a neotenic dragon (the kind that dreams dream dragons while pretending to be a mountain range and sometimes gets it head chopped off by Orlanth). Dragon as power tripper, as scary monster from the edgelands, as Wakboth eating “his” own tail having run out of gods to munch on. The dragon who appears from her own cloaca is as likely to disappear up it? Now if you want to see a real grown-up dragon, I am afraid you will be disappointed. Everyone expects bigger and scarier, but that misses the point — we have already written off wings, claws, vastness, and fiery breath as spiritual missteps. Some say the Void is vast and frightening, the source of all nightmares, but I say that it is quiet and empty … and nothing … nothing, at all.

Per RQ3 Introduction to Glorantha Book (p. 25, but this is not a direct quote): Non-dragon magic is incompatible with spiritual development, fit only for scouts Dragon magic hinders spiritual development — use sparingly; death & reincarnation may be preferable Warrior dragonewt magical effects amount to “be more dragonish” in a crass Path of Immanent Mastery way (wings, fire, claws, …) — whether this is to ram the point home or just a failure of imagination, I cannot say So magic is always a trap, whether written down — codified — in a spell book (inclusive) or true dragon magic employed by an illiterate dragonewt as a non-spell effect. Or that is the dragonewts’ point of view, anyway, and it would allow PIM & EWF magic to be true dragon magic and actually using it still to be folly. Just how one views the EWF and PIM may depend on whether you see the dragonewt resorting to magic as Kwai Chang Caine getting into yet another fight or as Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk. Is it the dragonewt path that is the problem, or were they dealt a shitty hand by biology? (Don’t worry: that is a question, not an answer.) “descendants of neotenic dragons from before the Dawn of Time” (Ibid, p. 23) “All dragonewts hatch from eggs laid by immature dragons” (Ibid, p. 24) Now one might suppose that these two formulations are not equivalent, but let us be relaxed about it — either their parents were “broken” by some possibly unreasonable draconic standard or they were not yet ready to mate, consequently the offspring had “developmental difficulties” and without the path of reincarnation and renunciation (e.g. of dragon magic) would never become “properly mature” dragons. So the path was provided for them by some snotty “true” dragon or by Sidney Arthur, the first hippy dragonewt. So where does that leave us? One way or another, dragonewt numbers are going down — “slowly dying through evolution” (RQ2 Classic, p. 83), whatever that means A path may be hard and slow without being ineffective — mean number of reincarnations to escape saṃsāra? The remaining dragonewts may be the ones dealt the cruellest hand at conception — and so we must patronise them, rather than mocking their affliction Some dragonewts say “screw this” and become magisaurs Some dragonewts are happy being dragonewts — they view the path to dragonhood as a “solution” without a problem — and so fake it and hope not to make it A truly enlightened dragonewt does not reincarnate but steps off the wheel and becomes one with the Void — dragonhood is for power trippers Obviously, I favour the last two, but then — as a sickeningly romantic member of the bande sinistre — I have always seen the dragonewts as us.

Apologies if that rather brutal summary is also a distortion. I wonder whether it really is an inversion or perversion of the LBQ — perhaps the LBQ is just as depressing if we look at it from the POV of Orlanth and company. To take the Big O as the exemplary figure (although with blame, there is always an inexhaustible supply — plenty left for others): he knows he is guilty, a murderer; he knows he broke the world and started a potentially world-ending war; he knows he cannot trust himself or any of the other gods — given half a chance, they would start another war and do it all again. The Great Compromise is that the gods come back but in chains, and to exemplify this, the “new improved sun” runs on rails. If we buy the idea that at least some of the gods signed up for the GC — as if anyone ever signed the social contract —, we can imagine they did so in despair: “God is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Here’s one who thinks he is the master of others, yet he is more enslaved than they are.” (Apologies to Rousseau.) It is a grim solution for them, but they cannot think of a better one, so they submit to the manacles. If — and I do not say we should — we allow that all in manacles are slaves, then from this point of view slavery is worse than natural, it is justified. DX as Orlanth and all that. But the Godtime loop gets the O out of displaying any penitence: it came too late°, so it didn’t make it into the greatest hits tape. I remain unconvinced that having the social contract as slavery metaphor running in parallel with Ompalam as the deity or notion of actual slavery is a smart move. (There are other viewpoints from which to observe the GC, of course. One needn’t hold that what is good for the gods is good for mortals, nor that Orlanth and fellow Compromisers were right about the gods. Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend.) ——————————————— ° Perhaps time — entropy redux — was set running early, as an incentive for the gods to sign on the line. (A thought contrary to the above, of course.)

Fool that I am, I thought that the split tongue was just a symbol — an outward sign — to mark that the real surgery had been done: cutting through the corpus callosum.

Or we may kid other people we have it, but we don’t really think we have it ourselves — even I am not that stupid!

But … maybe … on a good day … with a following wind: A GM can have a cult/culture/deity as the PCs’ enemy, even if the Prosopaedia write-up is from the point of view of the prospective enemy (and so positive). The PCs’ enemy doesn’t need to be Chaotic. (And Chaos doesn’t have to be the enemy — but that’s just me.) If the PCs were to be anti-slavery, anti-Ompalam, and anti-Fonrit, wouldn’t they be anti-Garangordos, too? According to Jeff, the point is to be “pro-Garangordos when describing the myths and gods of Fonrit.” The tone taken toward the deity in their Prosopaedia entry isn’t supposed to dictate the PCs’ attitude, as far as I can tell.° As far as Chaos goes, I guess Garangordos is to Ompalam as The Seven Mothers is to The Red Goddess. To my eye, the entry for the Red Goddess looks pretty neutral — to the point of being from our perspective, rather than a Gloranthan’s, perhaps — even though the announced point was to be “pro-Lunar when describing the Lunars” and she has the Chaos rune. Extremes cancel out? So sure, have the Ompalam cult as the enemy, but the need or desire to do that doesn’t seem to explain what look like odd inconsistencies of tone in the entries. ——————————————————————————————— ° Well, the ostensible tone: there may be real-world author ironies of which the imagined Gloranthan author is innocent.

Well, looking at “anything that is held by anything uses the power of Tentacule”, that is what I thought at first: it is an awkward sentence and what they really mean is that if a holds b, then a uses the power of Tentacule (on b). But then we have “Even the living who hold onto life are subject to it” — here a is the living (the holder) and b is life (the held) and it is clear that the holder is subject to the power of Tentacule. So as you say, we have generalised, but it is quite clear that the cephalopod god has got the holder — including the slaveholder — in his suckery grip. One might even think that that is a good point — patriarchy binds men, slavery constrains the slaveholder, we suffer from doing evil, owning stuff traps the owners. All standard hippy stuff. I don’t suppose it is really that simple or generalises that well, but it is a point of view. (Of course, maybe Tentacule has his suckers into b, too — holds both parties to the ownership relation.) I don’t know, but I suspect that we are then to see even Ompalam himself as the biter bit: all those chains he holds deliver Ompalam himself into the arms of Tentacule. Serves him right, you might think. So Tentacule is how we are entrapped if we hold onto things. And we can say, “If you have possessions, you are not free.” In the light of that, “anything that is held by anything uses the power of Tentacule” looks less like a mistake and more like a take on “your possessions take away your freedom” (which — taken literally — is not the same as “you take away your own freedom by holding possessions”). Where your possessions are inanimate (without agency), this can look harmless: clearly it is a metaphor and it is not true (or as you might say, not literally true), but it might be used to make a point which is at least arguable. But isn’t Glorantha the champion of literalising metaphors? So maybe the house you cherish really has taken away your freedom, because the spirit of the building has invoked the power of Tentacule. Or I hold tightly my sack of gold, but when I am thrown in the sea and try to let go to swim to safety, I find that my gold has used the power of Tentacule on me, and I am dragged under and drowned. But then we turn to the case of slavery and it all turns to shit.

So the pro-Garangordos line is that Ompalam is “the corruption of the powers of the Center, where all should be balanced and harmonious” even though Garangordos is the preacher of the teachings of Ompalam? I don’t get it. As I said, I am slow-witted.

I would be interested to hear the completion of the thought. If Chaosium must have Pamaltela as “Fantasy Africa,” perhaps they should hand it over to actual Africans to retcon it into something unrecognisable. The tendency to present everything as in-world documentation by unreliable narrators confers “plausible deniability,” but some of the stuff in the recent Prosopaedia reads as ill-considered metaphor: After the Greater Darkness, Pamalt called Noruma to rekindle the ancient fires. Kendamalar was reborn and was called Varama. He is now a slave, a bright orb of fire chained to an unyielding path, trapped by duty to his task. — p. 129 [Tenoarpesas] returned from the Underworld as both the power of Ompalam and as Varama, the now shackled sun. He reclaimed the power of slavery. — p. 119 Duty or slavery? I am tempted to say pick at most one. “Reclaimed”? [Ompalam] is the corruption of the powers of the Center, where all should be balanced and harmonious, but instead are used by Ompalam for self-gain and tyrannical exploitation. — p. 91 So slaveholding seems to be some kind of metaphor for corrupt government and bondage more generally — everyone is a slave, possibly even Ompalam … especially Ompalam! — but he is also the literal god of slavery of a slave state. Is that a sensible choice? And of course he is obese, because what could be more corrupt than a fat person? Tentacule is the power of possession. Anything that is held by anything uses the power of Tentacule. Even the living who hold onto life are subject to it. — p. 119–120 That is the one that particularly gets my goat: note that it is the thing held (e.g. the slave) that uses the power of Tentacule and the thing doing the holding (e.g. the slaveholder) that is subject to it. That looks a lot like victim-blaming. “But, of course, we at Chaosium don’t think that — that is just an unreliable, ironic, or evil Gloranthan writer.” But the thing is one can easily imagine this starting with thoughts like “the lover is a slave to the beloved”, “the addict is a slave to their drug”, and “employers have become addicted to cheap labour.” The thing about metaphors is that they are usually false, so in a world where they are literalised left, right, and centre, one has to take some real care. And if the free were banned from using slavery as a metaphor for — I don’t know — the next 400 years, would the world be any the poorer for it? (Yes the exploiter may indeed be in turn exploited, and they may be trapped by their very act of exploiting others — but it is unlikely to be those at the bottom who are the agents of the whole sorry mess.) Finally, Garangordos: Garangordos brought the benefits of civilization, chief among them the ability for some individuals to treat other human beings as property to be bought, sold, and forced to work … Garangordos became the divine guardian of the temples of Ompalam … Garangordos is depicted as a black-skinned nobleman carrying shackles and a noose. — p. 44 I don’t really know what to make of that. It is not straightforwardly condemnatory like the description of Ompalam, and plausibly the IRL author is being sarcastic while the fictional Gloranthan author is writing from a pro-Garangordos POV. Slow-witted as I am, I cannot figure out what Chaosium is trying to do with all the Pamaltelan slavery stuff, but I do wish they would stop.

[Insert obligatory non-canon warning here.] Look inside. What do you find? The self? No, you find nothing — that is Jotimam, the Void. If you react to this realization with fear and revulsion, you breed monsters — like Wakboth.° From nothing we came and to nothing we return — that which returns us to the Void, we call Kajabor. And possibly Krarsht is the Void regarded as monstrous, depending on how you feel about the Cosmic Egg/Orxili. I guess that from the draconic point of view, it was unacceptable for there to be nothing rather than something (entanglement with the world to be, duty, blah blah blah), so the Grand Ancestral Dragon “hatches” from nothing. (I lose track of all the dragons, but I am sure we don’t need more than one.) [And if I have equated the personal and the cosmological, that is all part of the fun in an Id Monster-ridden game world, right?] —————————————————————————————————————— ° The spanner in the works may be that the world was broken by envy and megalomania (Orlanth’s), and the Devil — who was only the icing on a poisoned cake, the insult and not the injury — was created in reaction to injustice (against Thed). That is, the world was doomed and the doom given its grisly decoration by very wordly things — all-too-human failings of the gods (i.e. us) — not by some crisis set off by contemplation of the Void. Or if you like, kings and rapists broke the world (that one, anyway), not dangerous philosophers or frightened mystics. The old Nietzsche saw about fighting monsters and becoming a monster and staring into the void and having the void stare back shouldn’t lead us to “Aha! Monster = Void.” In my humble opinion, but I may be a monster … or a void and was utterly unimpressed by the death of God.

The in-world author of the Prosopaedia (p. 68) begs to differ: Jraktal the Tap … Leader of the Chaos invasion of Pamaltela … Jraktal survives, as the use of Tapping among the Men of the West proves. Each time they call on him, all unknowingly, they hasten the end of the world. That is not to say that author is right, of course. Or is it like benefiting from immoral earnings — yea, even at 7 generations removed! — or visiting a museum named after a dodgy benefactor: the Chaos taint is transitive and cannot be buffered? If there is Chaos in the stream, then everything downstream is Chaos-tainted, no matter what fancy dams, weirs, and purification plants we build? That would seem to suit the spirit of our age. Of course, it is all cant and hypocrisy: the universe came from Chaos, and the world of time runs on it. Everything one does hastens the end of the world. If you don’t like it, salve your conscience by casting yourself into the Void today — there is always a friendly Chaos mouth waiting — and reduce your carbon footprint to zero. 😉

If a chaos taint is about acts, choices, and the soul (my takeaway from this), then in what sense is the book chaos-tainted? I am not saying it isn’t chaos-tainted, but your understanding of what that comes to may answer the question for you. If the book is chaos-tainted in the sense that it contains spells which when learned confer a positive chance of becoming chaos-tainted on the learner, what of any “non-chaotic” spells in the book (i.e. ones it would be safe to learn from another — non-tainted — source)? My guess from the Greg Sez article is that even learning the usually safe spells from a tainted source would be risky — like eating the non-slimy venison from a chaos deer — according to Greg. But there is no reason you have to agree with Greg. I don’t even know whether he agreed with himself. All hail the waiting mouth!

WAITING MOUTH INDUCTION, session one They gave you your blotter on the way in? Good. You’ve signed the release? Really, it is just a formality. Here is your futon. Now, close your eyes — slow breaths — and picture Escher’s Möbius Strip II … The strip is a mesh, a net, a web. Twisted into the familiar figure 8 of the infinity rune. Don’t let the shape fool you: attend to the odd number of half-twists which enable the serpent, the Devil, the dragon to swallow its own tail. And the red ants. Are they ants? Do they have six legs? How are their bodies shaped? Spiders? No? How fast are they moving? Is it perhaps one creature trailing afterimages, chasing itself? The monster is on the other side. The other side. The other … Chaos outside. Cosmos inside. Chaos inside. Cosmos outside. There is only one side. Faster, faster! Is the “ant” moving or the strip? Can we separate them? Three. Two. One. None. Listen! Julius Henry’s friend is speaking: At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance … Descend lower, descend only Into the world of perpetual solitude, World not world, but that which is not world, Internal darkness, deprivation And destitution of all property, Desiccation of the world of sense, Evacuation of the world of fancy, Inoperancy of the world of spirit; This is the one way, and the other Is the same, not in movement But abstention from movement; while the world moves In appetency, on its metalled ways Of time past and time future. Spider/web. Devil/dragon. Chaos/law. Wanting/wantless. Catch/release. Empty/full. They are just trying to confuse you. Don’t worry: She is patient. Hungry? Fancy a bite? There are steamed wontons next door. Just through there. On the other side.

But without the politics, what would there be to keep our attention? We would all just drift off to sleep with the sheer tedium of it all. At least a bit of orange powder sprinkled or a bunch of people taking the knee livens it up a bit. 😉

Exactly. I’d rather just agree a chance — as opposed to imagining one can work it out or that one can model it — and roll dice once (in a QW-ish game).

Dwarves do not have a true religion. Instead, they follow the Way of Mostal. This path defines the universe for the majority of dwarves everywhere. It gives them personal immortality at the expense of illusory freedom. Dwarves that keep at their ancestral tasks, doing the things that dwarves are meant to do, live forever — a powerful incentive to maintain this way of life. — Guide to Glorantha, p. 87 —————————————————————— When Zzabur asked his father, “How do we stay immortal?” the Prophet answered simply. He said, “Do not change. Do what you have done. Act within the Laws and Ways you have been given, for they are immortal. Your actions embody the One, your bodies enact the One. Anything new from this moment forward is Death.” Thus we were never severed from Life, like the rest; from Magic, like the rest; from Divinity, like the rest; from Good, like the rest; from ourselves, like the rest. We are not mortal people, or gods, or good people, or our own people — we simply are. All else is a wan shadow of us. When we die, the world dies. — Brithini Immortality —————————————————————— The eternal gods themselves would have ceased to exist but for the Cosmic Compromise, whereby the gods that still were voluntarily abdicated their free will within the temporal world rather than lose their All into the maws of nonexistence. The gods remained eternal at the cost of being limited to their God Time actions; their actions in Time are fixed in place. If they were ever to transgress from their fixed portions of the universe, they would enter the temporal world where Death and entropy would rob and destroy them. — God Time, CoR Prosopaedia, p. 48 —————————————————————— I think it is fair to say that we are not supposed to think kindly of the Brithini or the dwarves for clinging to immortality in this way, so presumably we are supposed to despise the gods for taking the same line. They are fed to Wakboth by Argrath because he despises them for their rigidity and cowardice. It all plays to the familiar trope of short-lived, adaptable humans who are fated to replace their inflexible but long-lived elder “cousins”. But wait — if Argrath really is Ferric Jaggar, we might not want to agree too quickly that this is all right and proper. After all, perhaps the dwarves and Brithini were cruelly libelled, and if the Prosopaedia may have been written by “Bastakos Forkbeard, the Knowing Companion of Prince Argrath” …

Sure. I guess the thing is (and we are still at the level of story and fictional world, not game): on the one hand, the bad guys should show hubris — they are not as tough as they think on the other hand, the bad guys shouldn’t be a pushover — else the heroes’ victory isn’t worth applauding So I guess I would have it that spotting the weakness shifts the rebels’ chances from none to slim. (Although the clued in viewer thinks both (i) Luke’s chances are slim and (ii) Luke will succeed.) Alternatively, we cut from “you need to hit this vent” to the boffin who figured it out getting a medal and ditch all the bang! zap! nonsense with the farm boy. 😉 So I guess it could be one of two (or three or …) things people are trying to achieve: zoom in to get a detailed [fight|negotiation|whatever] scene roll a lot more dice before having to worry about plot again If you want the first, you maybe don’t need special rules, just a load of sub-objectives within the fight (each with its own simple contest). So the PC plans to take down the NPC in stages — presumably because “I ruin the guy’s shield” has a lower resistance than “I take their head off with my first blow” — and the fun bit for the GM is all the “if you fail this roll, [bad thing] will happen to you” improvisation, and for the player, having to rebuild their plan with every simple contest lost. You are building the boss fight flow chart on the fly as the fight proceeds. On the other hand, if you just want to roll many dice to settle one story question, you can just keep rolling them till the PC has accumulated n more victories than the NPC or the NPC has m more than the PC. If you find rolling dice exciting — and we all do sometimes — this saves you having to think up narratively interesting consequences for every roll. But probably that is not what people want and the suggestion is rubbish! Or if you want something like the ebb and flow without dragging it out over multiple die rolls, just have the player and GM haggle. For example: PC: I am going to x GM: Well OK, but only if y PC: I can accept y, but only if I get z, too GM: Fine, [no need to roll|roll >= n] All the drama goes into the proposals and counter-proposals till it all boils down to one roll with agreed corollaries of success and consequences of failure (or no roll and agreed corollaries of success). The basic idea is blatantly nicked from Ben Lehman’s Polaris — but his presentation/implementation of it may make your head spin. For “non-degenerate” (though to my taste fiddly) sequence rules that work for group sequences, too, see SCRUD. In thinking about this shit (i.e. narrative games that are not railroads), I always find my mind drifting to Tom Mouat’s presentation of matrix games. (The PDF below is freely downloadable from his website.) Matrix Games — Practical Advice.pdf

Worship is a tool of the Evil One, so use it only with special dispensation. ————————————————————————————————————— In that hidden place was formed Ganesatarus, the Evil God. Ganesatarus is everything Idovanus is not. Disobedience, evil, cruelty, hunger, worship, death, and impurity are his tools. CoR — Prosopaedia, p. 43 [line breaks and emphasis mine] ————————————————————————————————————— For extra theological fun, debate whether existence is a predicate and whether if Idovanus/Ganesatarus is, then Ganesatarus/Idovanus is not. (Up to 5 marks for this question.)

I don’t, but — and please don’t take this as pretended canon — I wonder whether the Uz need a psychopomp deity given that: their bodies have likely been eaten, so they won’t mope about trying to get back into them they all know where the underworld is if they do get lost, they have shamans to show them the way

But — and forgive me: it has been a long time since I saw Star Wars, so I may get details wrong — should we be looking to turn QW into a wargame (a conflict simulation) in which — with the right tactics — Skywalker can plausibly take down the Death Star? Some stories are stories of success against the odds. It would be a mistake to say “in the story, So-and-so kills the dragon, so it must have been likely that So-and-so would win.” If you want to re-tell such stories in a game and have them come out narratively right, you don’t want your game to be a good sim of the fictional world — that would have the dragon win nine times out of ten. (Don’t get me wrong: sometimes, that is exactly what I would want. Toast the insolent “hero”.) If the plucky rebels are powered up to the extent that they are likely to win, they are no longer the underdogs to be rooted for and it all dissolves into a horrible sticky mess. I don’t suppose there is a one-size-fits-all answer to this problem: different groups of players will prefer different approaches, and that is as it should be. Also in terms of the drama of the thing, Luke’s thrashing around in the trench is just make-work while we wait for the cavalry to come over the hill, right? Isn’t the point that Han’s love of friends (or hatred of injustice) overcomes the resistance of his own instinct for self-preservation? Once that is done, you don’t roll to see whether Alec Guinness pops up with post-mortem sage advice or to see whether Luke’s marksmanship roll succeeds — they are a done deal at that point. Similarly, in High Noon, you don’t care about Grace Kelly’s sixgun skill, just about whether her love of husband (or hatred of injustice) overcomes the resistance of her pacifism. OK, more than enough empty waffle from me.