mfbrandi

Herding? Sure. Hunting? To a limited degree, caracals and (the slightly doggy) cheetahs have been used for coursing, I believe. Think about “alynx” — clearly not a lynx (anomalous, atheistic, amoral, atonal, and other good things), but maybe a caracal, which looks a bit like a lynx with a tail. Leaping 3m into the air to catch birds ( creatures) can be seen as a symbol of Orlanth’s murdering the sun, something of which the Orlanthi are not a bit ashamed. But a drop in dog replacement? I cannot see the point. (I won’t object that it is silly, because then we would have nothing left.) Clearly, I am neither a “cat person” nor a “dog person”.

I have no problem with this — the more views the merrier — but I wonder how it fits with the modern orthodoxy (which I can be imagined to regard with a degree of [complete to taste]). If an encounter is contact, consider: Now remember there is no cult of Wakboth. You can’t contact him as he is dead (killed by Storm Bull) and buried beneath that Block of Truestone. Now I tend to subscribe to the belief that Wakboth was part of the reconstituted mundane world and the source of moral evil in mundane life. But as long as he is imprisoned beneath the Block, that’s all he can do. — Jeff Richard, The Moral Evil of Glorantha If I read that right — and perhaps I don’t — it seems to be saying that Wakboth has no otherworld presence, or at least that you cannot get to him in an otherworld if you are coming from a time when his body is pinned under the Block.° It is tempting to think that if a Gloranthan can tell a story, they can visit that story made solid in an otherworld theme park — that all the stories ever told are there and accessible in an interactive visitor attraction — but that doesn’t seem to be what we are supposed to conclude. What do you think? Would you even meet a Wakboth cosplayer on an otherworld quest? If Wakboth has no cult and heroquesting is not time travel (another orthodoxy, IIRC), then that person is unlikely to be a Wakboth cultist. Could be a trickster trying to pull a fast one on the theologically naïve, perhaps, but then one could call them on it. A sorcerer might regard this supposed unavailability of with a degree of skepticism, “No problem working with or , so it is just a matter of devising the right experiment, determining the appropriate reactions.” Perhaps an atheist would have more luck raising the Devil than a theist lacking a lot of quarrying equipment ever would. Sometimes there are other difficulties with visiting stories. We can tell the story “Kajabor eats some gods”, but part of the story is supposed to be that they are then gone as if they never existed and no one can even name them — perfectly retconned away. But then Voidmouth K doesn’t get to eat them, because they were never there, so what event exactly are we going to visit? And what do we — can we — say when we get back? Of course, if it were only ever just a metaphor … ————————————————————— ° Think of all those fans who have said that Gloranthans know that the gods are real because they have visited them in some otherworld. They cannot say that about the Devil. Suits the Devil just fine. The weight of all that Truestone is kinda comforting … and in time even mountains will move.

I get through a lot of housekeepers that way, but my tiger is thriving on her new diet.

A bit of non-canon but sympathetic text: At the heart of this world were the Runes, the building blocks of Gloranthan reality. Darkness, Storm, Sky. Fertility, Harmony, Death. The two-dozen or so Great Runes defined the pantheons and powers of the gods, explained the nature of spirits, and contained the transcendent essences of existence … “Magic” in Glorantha was how you related to these Runes, and this in turn shaped how you saw the world. A Shaman would see the Runes as great primordial spirits to be bargained with, a Theist would see them as gods to be sacrificed to, and an atheistic Sorcerer would see them as impersonal essences to be studied and controlled. — Andrew Logan Montgomery, Review of HeroQuest Glorantha So maybe: Rune “compound”, spirit, and god are not distinct entities, but those using the different terms view the same reality in different ways. Don’t ask whether Orlanth is a god, merely a spirit, or simply a compound of , , and , as none of these excludes any other. Don’t worry about scale. Don your Western sorcerer’s pointy hat — or your alchemist’s safety glasses — and think that whether you are dealing with a mountain of gunpowder or just a few grains, you are dealing with the same chemicals — the same “impersonal runic essences” and so the same gods or spirits. There is a lot of gunpowder in the world, but you don’t encounter it all at once; it is safe to set light to a small amount of it, and that doesn’t ignite all the other samples, but you are still dealing with gunpowder, the real thing, the whole essence. So a shaman can “encounter” Orlanth, or the Bad Man, or whoever “as a spirit” and beat it in spirit combat or successfully bargain with it — i.e. come to understand its essence — but that is not to say that anyone could stand against the strongest storm or all the winds in the world at once. To learn the magic of something is to grasp its quality, not to overcome everything instantiating that quality. And the whole god is present in the smallest sample, as carbon dioxide is present in a single molecule. Saying that the gods are locked out of time is a Platonic move: you can “bump into” atoms of carbon, but the “form” of carbon is not any of those atoms, nor is it all of them taken together — the Platonic form of carbon is not part of the furniture of the mundane world of time and the senses — and yet, so the story goes, each atom of carbon partakes of the form of carbon. So it is with any gust of Gloranthan wind and . Understanding of the natural world is mystified and confusion ensues as Gloranthan philosophers want the forms/runes/gods to be like and simultaneously unlike middle-sized dry goods, the ordinary clutter of the mundane world. The gods are like people. The gods are nothing like people.

Non-canon alert! (I mean it might still be, but I wouldn’t bet on it.) Hyenas are the dominant carnivores of the wastes … Hyenas have been semi-domesticated by the morokanth, who use them as guard animals in place of dogs. — Anaxial’s Roster, p. 86 Although a hyena is no dog at all, perhaps it is a dog-and-a-half. Unlike the morokanth, the agimori can actually thumb their noses at the animal nomads, and I am sure spotted hyenas would have no trouble keeping up with the people-and-a-half on hunting trips. Just a thought.

Expedition to the Nargan Desert to fetch some immortal giant dogs — steal/trade them from the Agitori? — then a magical ritual to make them mortal enough to be fertile? Sure, the pups will be a little smaller, but …

Bit harsh. Perhaps the image of six Lightbringers with a gap where the seventh “should” be is the truest representation. It is the holes in the world that hold it together. Six is the number of the lozenge, but making it seven by adding an absence points us in the direction of Sedenya and Nysalor … and the very hungry caterpillar. Hail Krarshtax! 😉

But we are always two or three civilizational collapses away from the beginning of time. At least, I seem to remember saying that nine or ten civilizational collapses ago. We Young Glorantha Creationists wave our banner with gusto and irony.

Ginna Jar … may be represented as a ghostly queen wearing rags or as an iconic symbol such as a floating jar, footsteps, or an empty place between other Lightbringers. — Prosopaedia (PDF, p. 46) The ghost of who now? If we are going with @scott-martin’s six-sided mirror — and why not? I imagine a cube of half-silvered panes (or something equally exotic), rather than a hexagon broken into triangular shards — then let us say the image of Ginna Jar is a blank space on the back of the seventh pane. The seventh pane doesn’t exist, and anyway there is no way to fit it into the jigsaw. No mirror will ever reflect the preening Green One back to herself as Ginna Jar (who is so unassuming that she has no reflection). See this as pushing against the Ernalda power grab in which the Big Green E claims to be Ginna Jar = Arachne Solara = the ghost of Glorantha. “And look, I am not a ghost, I am alive. I am Glorantha. I am Cosmos!” The really “big” gods are modest and invisible and/or without cult.

Are they wrong to do so? Are Hunter’s “sons” distinct from Hunter any more than Orlanth’s “daughter” is distinct from Orlanth? Applying the razor — as any good Lunar should — aren’t the names of Hunter’s sons just names for Hunter, as “Vinga” is (even if we don’t like it) just another name for the Big O? I mean, it is not as if we believe every land has its own distinct goddess, is it? 😉

Ah, but we all know the young princess is really a vampire — “Red as Blood” — but in Glorantha is this a tale told by or against the Lunars? If Christ is Nysalor, it could go either way.

And deny the player the joy of the internecine war for tenure?

Yeah, but these are the Hero Wars, baby, and rune lords are like WW2 air crew. The newbie may seem like a spare, today, but by next Windsday … 😉

The men and animals of Prax agreed to choose lots to see who would eat, and who would be eaten. — Elizabeth A. Wolcott, Men and Morokanth (Wyrm’s Footnotes #9, p. 10) Isn’t the point of the Survival Covenant that it was supposed to amount to the toss of a fair coin? Something an impartial third party could do on your behalf. No skill, no reckoning of odds, and no bluffing required — not really a contest. So the humans cannot fall back on “we were just better at the game than the four-legs”, and the morokanth cannot say “the humans have more of the skills required to win this game, so the selection of which game to play was unfair”. The humans didn’t cheat at a game of skill (and/or bluff), they rigged a lottery — or Waha did it for them — and either the morokanth cheated right back or were allowed to be the one four-legs victor to remind the humans of the favour their god had done them. On the other hand, having the players cheat at a game within a game sounds like an excellent idea. 😉

Here is a non-canon, unhelpful, and utterly splintered answer, which I hope is at least fun. When considering whether dwarfs can be made into undead, according to one school of thought, it doesn’t really matter what a dwarf body is made of — it might be flesh and bone, metal and clockwork, clay, or Plasticine — what matters is whether it has a “soul”: some non-physical bit of stuff which animates it. If resurrection is re-joining soul and body — reversing the severing work of Humakt — then it doesn’t really matter whether the body is first sent to a healer or to the machine shop. According to this school, even if dwarfs are steam engines with souls, they can be resurrected and made into undead. Undead robots are no madder than undead skeletons. Undead robots — yay! According to another school, dwarfs don’t have souls (in this sense: a component of a complete creature needing to be fixed to the body), so they cannot be resurrected and they cannot be undead — unless normal, “living” dwarfs count as undead — but that is not to say they cannot be fixed and sent back to work even if they have been very, very broken. The real headbangers of dwarf philosophy insist that this talk of non-physical components of work units is stuff and nonsense: a dwarf doesn’t have a soul, but neither does anyone else. It is all flummery, ideology, and con-trickery put about by the double act of Chalana Arroy and Humakt trying to make a place for itself in the world. Where does the big H get off claiming iron as the “death metal”? Everyone knows that it is Mostal’s symbol of the essential unity of the world — if it divides, it is only into the real and the imaginary. Well, you get the idea, and can now spin off dwarf schismatics at will. 😉

Although Liebig was Lutheran and Jettchen Catholic, their differences in religion appear to have been resolved amicably by bringing their sons up in the Lutheran religion and their daughters as Catholics. — Wikipedia

Illuminated Yelm has no time for curiosity? Nysalor’s is the cult of asking questions, and on one way of looking at it, Nysalor is the sun (or a fragment or aspect of the sun). Perhaps before finding himself on the sharp end of Death, Yelm lacked curiosity, but now? (And perhaps Orlanth is more changer than changed or changing — a catalyst, rather than a subject of chemical change. Locked outside of Time, indeed.) As for whether Yelm is interested in shamans: I find the incorporation of shamanism into the Yelm cult (the Golden Bow) particularly fascinating. We have a great celestial entity (the Sun God) who has several sons and messengers who are charged with watching and helping mortal beings. The shaman is an initiate who specializes in dealing with the spirit world … The Golden Bow is a path for a Yelm initiate who becomes a shaman. — Jeff Richard, Notes on Shamans Maybe we can consider the Golden Bow to be a son of the sun in the same way as we (in these dark days) consider Vinga to be a daughter of the wind. And I concede that this says nothing about independent or “Horned God” shamans and the sun/Yelm. Another way of looking at it is to see a god as a collection of short tape loops of musical clichés which can be mixed and amplified — edited if you are an experimental heroquester (otherwise read only) — to produce magical effects, with more sacrificed POW getting you a bigger PA. To that way of thinking, the gods have no interests — no mental states of any kind — and shamanism is just one approach to working in the studio.

Is this the new Lutheran face of Mostal? Ennobled by Mad King Ludwig seems about right for our technological but sometimes impractical friends. The production of all organic substances no longer belongs just to living organisms. It must be seen as not only probable, but as certain, that we shall be able to produce them in our laboratories … Of course, we do not yet know how to do this — Liebig & Woehler (1838)

I don’t claim to have originated the idea — I am sure it is in the original texts somewhere. (I was just too lazy to go dig out the source. Shocking!)

“I didn’t throw you off the cliff, I just let go of your hand” kind of thing?

You made me skip ahead from Sheila Jordan singing Robert Creeley, but that is OK because: And I spin, come down through time Oh, watch them say you’re too high And I swim through … Hey Sheba, hey Salome, hey Venus eclipsing my way, ah Her vessel, every woman is a vessel, is evasive, is aquatic Everyone, silver ecstatic, platinum disk spinning

So we have the RG–Rimbaud–Peron sung by Patti Smith dragged up as Elaine Paige? It might just work. I will call the toad-faced one now.

Although it pains us, we may feel we have to concede that in the end Sedenya is the empire and the empire is Sedenya. Perhaps she is also Rimbaud: a wannabe seer and a poet — a producer of Illuminations — become “a successful profiteer and a conniver in slaving” whose end will be “metastasised cancer and paralysis”. [T]he oddball trader, surrounded by the knick-knacks in his compound, pottering like a dangerous crone in an African fable, still toying with the dark arts of self-transformation, long after the magical make-over of the world through language has been junked. This is Rimbaud’s not quite human side. — Jeremy Harding, Fleeing the Mother Tongue

Although Cults of Prax (ClassicPDF, p. 71) seems to set this up as rank hypocrisy: Enemies of the cult who defy the pacifistic and healing ways of the cult will find themselves unable to resist infection with disease … and never recover from it without the appropriate Cure Disease spell from the cult. If your cult’s spirit of reprisal is called “Infection”, just how opposed to death, disease, and suffering are you? She is all sweetness and light until you oppose her and then the gloves are off. “Now I am become Chalana Arroy, the destroyer of immune systems.” CA is a dangerous lunatic. I can think of two ways to end death, disease, and suffering: retcon the universe, so the World Machine was never set in motion; chuck everything into the memory hole that is Kajabor. The truly pious CA cultist is always working on some mad scheme or other. Don’t let them catch you looking at them funny or you may find yourself with a nasty cough that just won’t shift and … 😉

To propitiate seems a simple — and perhaps a rational — decision to make, but in this brave new world in which worship is a skill, maybe it is not so simple actually to do it. There is a trick to it one may fail to grasp. The village wants to propitiate Mallia and avoid the plague, but it hasn’t got the knack and she cannot hear. When she turns a deaf ear, a particularly piercing and intricate prayer is required? 😉