mfbrandi

Although … Holmes and Moriarty take their tumble at the Reichenbach Falls straight into the Underworld and have to find their way/s out of Hell has its appeal. Which of them is Ethilrist? Both?

I think it was Maus that gave us the expression “my father bleeds history”. Jörg has a little crimson vampire bat handy for when he needs to post.

Some people might be imagining something like this: Great God Major God Bog-standard God Minor God Great Spirit Demigod Superhero Hero Schmuck Top Trumps! Some might respond by quibbling about the categories and the orderings — the stamp collectors and train spotters — but not question the idea that the “right” set of categories (to be determined) would occur in an ideal “physics” of Glorantha. In their ontology, these are natural kinds … if you like. But that is what I am skeptical about, although it is all but irresistible when the game has special rules for everything: the game “engine” becomes the physics of the world — “if you sacrifice x points (Joules) of POW (energy) to god y, then …” kind of thing. Gods aren’t like gold, or water, or even stoats or gravity. In the grand account of how the world works, god as a category doesn’t show up at all. Something, nothing, anything could be mentioned as a god in a myth or religious rite. That is not to say there are no gods, but maybe they don’t have enough in common for there to be natural laws about how mortals and middle-sized dry goods interact with them. Of course, there might be a myth about the gods arguing about who is objectively top god, who is a real god, who is a demigod, and who is just regular Jo Schmuck. Gods and mortals might even go to war over it — oh, wait … — but that doesn’t mean the whole thing isn’t misconceived.

I am inclined to agree — sorry, don’t mean to dent your credibility (but my stopped clock and so on) — but I suspect that all RPGs conspire to the condition of Top Trumps and all fandoms to the condition of stamp collectors and train spotters. Now, I must go and polish my dice …

Punter: What kind of god was Nysalor? Was he kind and loving? Riddler: Nysalor is a dead god. How many kind and loving corpses do you know? We busy Nysaloreans are not going to waste time doing PR for a dead god when there are questions to be asked and stick-in-the-muds to be baited, now, are we? Life runs out. Kajabor eats you. (Possibly even in that order.)

Simpler still: they are one and it would be foolish to try to cut them into distinct beings. 😉

To everyone else, what follows may be blindingly obvious but I can never keep it straight in my head — although somewhat British, I am very bad at it: class structures always elude me (and then kick me in the arse). Indo-European Varnas Priest-Kings Warriors Workers (producers) Rig Veda Priests (Brahmins) Warrior-Kings (Kshatriyas) Workers (Vaishyas) —————————————— Servants (Shudras) — the outsiders, the conquered people (including those in India before the Indo-Europeans) Malkioni Wizards (Priests) Nobles (Kings) Soldiers (Warriors) Workers Roughly correct? So the Malkioni four — rather than adding Doniger’s “transcendent fourth”° — is a splitting out of the Indo-European three/Vedic top three into four to eliminate the shifting hyphenates? I wonder why, exactly. Keeps it all in the family, anyway. ——————————————————— ° “Three (or more) forms of the three (or more)-fold path in Hinduism” in Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism

May as well reproduce it here for easy reference:

If Malkion is air + water (storm), wouldn’t this just underline the Oedipal — or yet more intimate — nature of Orlanth’s rebellion? And isn’t there an Orlanthi motif of dragonslaying as utuma? And so we trudge on — through debatable (or at least dubious) lands — pushing toward Orlanth’s slaying himself to create the temporal world. And if we equivocate on father/self/son, we get something like God’s sacrificing his son to “save” the world. If Orlanth is always striving to be Top God, we expect IG–Blowhard mash-ups to emerge now and again. (I am sure there is a term for them.) Is Daka Fal a “holy ghost” aspect? Not being an insider, I never knew the function of the HG. At least we don’t have to have two ur-murders — god and man, the sun and the son — and can consolidate them into one easy-to-manage sacrifice. On the assumption that on the Web one can find a random eccentric peddling anything, I searched and I found: THE MORNING STAR: It is only three times that we find this appellation given to our Lord in scripture — once in 2 Peter 1, once in Revelation 2, and again in Revelation 22. In Peter it is rendered in our translation “day star”; and indeed the word is not the same as that found in Revelation. But the word used by Peter is the proper name of the morning star, and means the “light-bringer”, while that used by John, equally applying to the morning star, indicates rather the time of its appearance in the early morning. — Edward Dennett, Christ as the Morning Star and the Sun of Righteousness So we can weave in the solar stuff, too, and of course: Morning Star -> Lucifer -> Devil Morning Star -> Venus -> Aphrodite (risen from the foam or not) Phosphorus = Hesperus (famously standing for all dualities which are really identities) So we can have our cake and eat it — a must with gods who want to swallow all the others. ————————————————————————————————— In retrospect, a pole vault over my usual comfortable swamp of Dumber and into the twittering abyss of Dumbest. Never mind. Let it stand.

You know all this and are merely teasing: If you think the world of Solar Time is merely entropic, you are a Kajabor fangirl. If you think the Great Compromise was to stitch evil into nature of the new world, you are a Wakboth enabler. If you think entropy = evil, I have the number of a good therapist. Other partial and dubitable précis are available.

If the names at this early stage are not deceptive — I know! I know! — then maybe: Aerlit Kolate = Air Warera Triolina = Sea Air + Sea = Foam -> Aphrodite Malkion = Aphrodite? (Even Malkion = Milky Foam, the patron of frothy coffee) Sorry, couldn’t resist. 😉

Surely a Nysalorean NPC if ever there was one. 😉 Solar living Emptiness & Brightness Don’t get him started on Disneyfication and the City of Wonders

Because Death his/her bad self would never countenance such a cowardly use of magical resources? “Are you afraid of Death — me! — my shiny new Sword?”

You know my slogan (and you are sick of it by now): in Glorantha, the worst fights are with oneself. So if after the mightiest of struggles AS swallows K, I did say that Kajabor had mastered self-swallowing. And if people are hung up these days on Wakboth’s being stitched into the fabric of the New Improved Spider-silk World™, let us blame it on the amnestic virtue of Kajabor. Or something. 😉

Oh, I don’t know … the ever-growing True Nysalorean Horde marches under its golden banner: » YOU CANNOT DERIVE AN OUGHT FROM AN IS! « no matter what arkat–gbaji says

Perhaps the Great Dorastor Armour Patch is Ralzakark’s “stamp collection” and/or he is the Third Age’s true Age-ending hero — just waiting for the critical mass that will enable a world-encompassing anti-magic wave when it is sprinkled with powdered unicorn horn (to remove all the carbon from the steel). Dorastor is Glorantha’s Zone: what happens when the great wave hits all that buried Feldichi tech?

Or we naturalise death and disease and we wipe away the attitude that they are intrusions from “outside” that no morally upstanding person could compromise with. There is a strain in Gloranthan religion that wants to turn every Kajabor into a Wakboth and won’t be happy with anything of the mundane world unless it can be painted with the brush of the gods. What needs to be cleansed, the world or the way we are determined to see it? The progressive disenchantment of the world from Age to Age would seem to be a given, the fight is over whether this is a good thing. (And as the same metaphor can be used to different ends, some of the fights will be pointless. 😉 )

Perhaps it is so expensive because so few sets are sold. To wear the armour is to be marked for death, so demand is naturally low, but then the clients will insist on re-using the same set for generations. Charge the maximum possible price, as you may never get another sale. (Main qualification for being a rune lord is to be the same size as the last guy.) Perhaps iron armour needs a “security feature” — it will self-destruct on the death of the owner “to prevent it falling into enemy hands”. New ritual for becoming a rune lord: have your iron armour “imprinted” on you, so that it becomes a pile of rust on your death. It is good for economic growth.

And that is what makes it scary. The only fair lottery is the one where the humans always win. I had to bury the goddess in order to save her. The butcher shows concern for the butchered. They need to invent an unheimlich manoeuvre. BB assures me a little alienation is good for me. (And don’t worry: here in the interzone, we have plenty.)

Well, Argrath is a bit like the Devil: he comes in ≥ two versions giving ≥ three flavours. Is he Kajabor or Wakboth? How do we feel about Kajabor? (Wakboth is set up so as to prevent that question being asked in polite society.) What was it Bazarov said, “at the present time, negation is the most useful action”? Well, we can (I guess) introject Wakboth and carry him around with us, but you cannot swallow Kajabor, you can only let Kajabor swallow you. Kajabor cannot introject anything as the Hollow K is the perfect memory hole — poof! it is gone. Kajabor was in the end able to master self-swallowing, so now no one can talk about him/her/it. I miss the empty fellow. It is like I have this … void inside. 😉 Defining the Devil as evil is a cheap trick. Defining the Devil in non-moral terms and then asking your audience to accept that he is a wholly bad thing is a high-risk strategy and may get you laughed out of town. The Devil as pure destruction … has applications.

Argrath is not an attractive character, and we could certainly pitch him as some kind of anti-Nietzsche who refuses to say “yes” to the eternal recurrence. But on the other hand, we could see the gods as unmotivated, stereotyped, destructive behaviour — and our purported excuse for indulging in it: “a big god made me do it and ran away” — and Argrath as the one to break the loops and set “us” free. Remember that in Glorantha everyone is their own worst enemy. Arkat = Nysalor. The Red Moon = Argrath. The point is to cut one’s own head off, and each of us must be our own Argrath. It is OK, you are allowed to put a clothes peg on your nose. Sure, the world is worthy, but it remains worthy when it has been demystified — the gods fed to the Devil and the Devil diced — the mundane world does not need otherworlds and the promise of eternity to redeem it. It is fine as it is. You come down from the trip and find yourself in Leicester. The only dragons are small and feathery, and that is OK. Only kidding: he’s awful, just awful! 😉

So the ritual should be hanging a bell around their neck and riveting it in place, then: the “monsters” can hear them coming; they’ll feel more like brother Yinkin; we can hide when they come looking for “hospitality” and/or someone to bore to death. It is cheaper than a set of iron armour, right?

The flip-flop between Devil as entropy/extinction and Devil as evil. Some may try to square this by having “existence failure” — whether by rapid unscheduled disassembly in some Zen monastery or the slow unwinding of time — as the ultimate evil. As you know, that has never sat right with me.

This I like. The Devil is only found anywhere if you take him with you. I have always hated the Devil — Gloranthan or otherwise — as externalised “moral evil”. An idea as tedious as hell.

And there I was thinking that the Block was what prevented the mundane world being rid of “moral evil”. 😉