mfbrandi

How many covers did the Players Handbook from our old friends at The Smoking Ruins actually inspire? Gods of Glorantha, Advanced Lovers & Lesbians, No Country for Old Kobolds. There must be more.

That was rather the point. People — and gods — believe they have been dealing with true dragons, but they have just been dealing with the dreams of dreams of … dreams of … They have gotten the scale of the universe — which is just chopped dragon bits, from one true dragon — quite, quite wrong. “You think you have beheaded a dragon? Oh, Orlanth, you foolish little manchild!” As for pin-dancing dream dragons, there are some “exquisitely specialised” clubs in Soho, but I would think very carefully before trying to talk your way past the bouncer. It’ll make you go blind. And that’s if you are lucky.

Excited Aeolean Magician: That’s exactly it! I need twelve ounces of powdered Black Arkati to trace a pentacle. You can get me some? Argan Argar Trader: It’ll cost you. Excited Aeolean Magician: No problem. And four candles. Argan Argar Trader: Not this, again. Out of my shop, now. Out!

Dream dragons — we are assured — are the dreams of true dragons. But suppose dream dragons dream dragons, too. And their dreams. And their dreams’ dreams. And … All strung out on a tree with its root in and its finest twigs in the most tenuous . Whether its dreamer is a dream dragon or a true dragon, we can rightly call it a dream dragon — we define them recursively: a dream dragon is a dragon dreamed by a true dragon or another dream dragon. Has anyone met a true dragon? Tearing apart the moon? A job for flimsy things only a couple of steps away from not existing at all. Is every dragon dream another dragon? Is the cosmos made from the body parts of a dead primal dragon, or is it the dream of the dying cosmic dragon? Can its dying be held on some kind of event horizon indefinitely, or will the universe blink out when its utuma is complete? Wakboth sometimes seems more serpent than goat. Some secretive Chaos sects claim that Kajabor dreamed Wakboth, then Wakboth ate Kajabor to prevent Kajabor from waking. Hyde slew Jekyll and then went about his business. One group of draconic mystics seems to believe that there was only ever one true dragon. The inner cult is said to hold that the one true dragon was dreamed by the least real, the most tenuously oneiric of all dream dragons — barely a half-imagined skink. Have the draconic mystics been infiltrated by the Kajabor swallowers, or is it the other way about? All we can be sure of is that somewhere Trickster is laughing. He cannot clap his hands, but he can laugh, and bang his head against soft, soft walls.

While this may be right — canonical even, despite your bill matter — @EricW’s suggestion that the causes of dragon behaviour might not be what “everybody knows” them to be sounds like it could be more fun. Dragons rising to the defence of their kin? That sounds like an explanation a human would come up with. Dull, duller, dullest. Perhaps in the Dragonkill, the dragons detected traces of a massive assisted utuma drifting toward them from the future and “mistook” the objects of that utuma when they helped the little people out with their plan. (I say “mistook”, but the auguries proved self-fulfilling, so nothing to see here … no mistake … move along.) Or something. I am sure Eric has a better take on it — one which should shortly be apotheosized into a glorious Dumb Theory. (As we know, only mine are truly dumb.) Dragons need a bit of their awe and mystery restored. Whole pantheons should quake before a dragon. A dragon shouldn’t have its head summarily removed by a petty wind thing. Wannabe heroes shouldn’t command packs of dragons as if they were attack dogs. Harrumph!

In case anyone was wondering, see “Zombies” by Robert Kirk in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is not bad, but more on Aunty Ludwig’s private language argument might have helped — see, for example, Budd’s Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology (but he was my supervisor, so I would say that). Also I seem to remember that Shoemaker was very good on “qualia”, “inverted spectra”, and the like — see Identity, Cause and Mind: Philosophical Essays. “’Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood …”

Philosophy of mind — hooray! So I don’t for a minute want to defend an argument from philosophical zombies to “further facts” or — Arachne Solara preserve us! — dualism of substance, but exactly what is the Buddhist slant on the thing?

And then there is Arioch done in pop-Tantra style by Bob Haberfield for Moorcock’s The Knight of the Swords:

Listings and orderings of various philosophical schools intersected with a binary division into astika and nastika. The ambiguity of the distinction lies in the literal meaning of the two words themselves — astika is asti+ka (one who says ‘it is’) and nastika is na+asti+ka (one who says ‘it is not’). What is being affirmed or denied (the ‘it’ in question) is unspecified, so the terms could be and were given varying content … The fourth century Buddhist text Bodhisattvabhumi criticizes various types of Buddhists but reserves its strongest condemnation for those who hold a position of universal negation and say that nothing exists. Later texts identify them with Buddhists of the Madhyamika school … While there were different views on what exactly made someone or a philosophical school or a religious group nastika, in all cases, the term had negative connotations. Nastikas were not only criticized; their views were condemned, and they were supposed to be shunned. — Upinder Singh, Ancient India: Culture of Contradictions, pp. 200–201 —————————————————————————————————— Wherever I go, the Bodhisattvas boo me. Must be because I drive a nasty car. Or I would if cars — like everything else — had not signally failed to exist. Calling someone chaotic is calling them nastika. It is a badge we should wear with what passes for pride — or is it humility? so hard to tell them apart! — out here on the nihilistic fringe.

All those first-level thieves ignominiously done to death by The Small Giant Class Liberation Army — kobolds to you, sunshine. 😉

Depends what you mean by a demon, I guess. Doesn’t Death qualify? (ZeeZee is Death, too, and if you called him The Little Death, he’d chuckle and put off eating you till later.) But this isn’t just any demon, this is Mara, right? Mara who may be Death, but is also “the personification of the forces antagonistic to enlightenment” and the “One Who Delights in Destruction”. Mara comes round to Buddhism in the end, of course.

The Strugatskis’ Roadside Picnic? Ballard? Mike Harrison? Heroquesting without rose-tinted spectacles?

Or adapt Melville: All visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. If man will strike, strike through the mask. How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the Red Moon is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. She tasks me; She heaps me; I see in Her outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the Red Moon agent, or be the Red Moon principal, I will wreak that hate upon Her. Talk not to me of blasphemy; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. Argrath —> Arkat —> Ahab?

Or intraspecific kamikaze brood parasitism? Is this a sound reproductive strategy? (I am not saying it isn’t.) Is it the war of meme against gene? Someone’s been lying to us about troll biology? Or a designer fancied a bit of Diana of Ephesus in the game? [Ech!]

How do you convert quick death to slow death? Eat the handle so that anyone making a grab for it will cut their fingers admitting a few spores (or the children of Mallia)?

Be afraid, be very afraid!

First: go buy @Brian Duguid’s new book on the black elves here. Severing is splitting from the group mind and is presented as a matter of indifference or sometimes a problem for the “parent” group mind, but it occurs to me that the group mind may sometimes encourage severing in one of its voralans, when what is needed is an agent who can think the unthinkable without contaminating the group mind. Although … continued communion with Mee Vorala may prove to be a network security issue. And there is always the possibility of reassimilating the severed voralan if/when its mind is again in a safe state, no? [Any suggestion that this quick and dirty post is just a plug for Brian’s book is entirely …]

Perhaps, but perhaps not. The locus classicus of Gloranthan illumination: Between the death of Nysalor and the rise of the Red Goddess, were there no new illuminates riddled into being? If the riddles worked by god-sustained magic, the riddlers wouldn’t have had to try to forget them, as they would have been “harmless”, right? And then we sub “Nysalor” (for “Buddha” and “God”) into a passage from Nietzsche: So do we take it that on Sedenya’s quest she literally beat up a dead god, or did she just meditate and reflect, concluding that it was OK to use the weapon of mass destruction in bat form — because Chaos/Schmaos: it is all one? The cult of illumination has outlasted its god — Rashorana is dead, Rashorana remains dead, and we have killed her — and if it ever was, it is not a theistic cult (sacrificing to a superbeing for magic) but a very loosely connected bunch of people with (allegedly) some insight. It seems it may well survive the deaths of all the gods. And the fading of their shadows, too? I would like to think that the sophisticated, modern riddler is not grovelling before their dead god but overcoming their shadow. A charitable reading of Argrath’s human-supremacist rant: “The gods are dead, and we have killed them (by feeding them to their own shadow), and we have overcome that shadow (Wakboth), too.” Charitable, all too charitable? As to whether Arkat — arhat, arihant — liberated anyone but himself, I couldn’t comment, but perhaps “the liberator” was a bitterly ironic title whose original import was lost over the centuries. He was certainly involved in a self-overcoming which spilled out of his troubled psyche into the mundane world. He needs to drop a letter before he can try to rearrange himself into Tara (and Taraltara seems to have retconned into the Great Omega). But given his tendency to rebirth — although we could say Argrath != Arkat, even if Argrath is an arhat —, perhaps he is not even as enlightened as his arhat-like name would suggest. But that is OK, isn’t it: our putative teachers of illumination need not themselves be illuminated, right? — Well, OK, that is definitely non-canon. — Or perhaps they have shown over and over that they cannot teach it, but only “yogic superpowers”? The true sages you never heard of, because they know better than to cause world-shaking trouble. As usual, I really don’t know. Beware shiny new gods: they are sources of light only in the most literal sense. True illumination involves the snuffing out of one’s own light, and that is the secret of an old, old deity, present at the births of Styx and Zaramaka.

I am sure Krarsht can reconnect it to the network if that suits her inscrutable purpose. Blessed be Our Lady of the Waiting Mouth.

So an internal squabble among the illuminates, then? Perhaps we should view the negative take on illumination as being a comment on the nuclear stand-off between the USA and the USSR (rather than a dig at kōan-loving Buddhists): those who believe in the deterrence provided by mutually assured destruction are those who have been seduced by the sweet rationality of their illumination, but — according to the PseudoGreg I am dumping this on — they are wrong, and there will be inevitable escalation toward apocalypse. Perhaps. Perhaps not.

I get that, but suppose the Lunars had all sprouted third eyes and wormlike prehensile tails, and that they levitated for three hours every evening. What then? In my book, that still wouldn’t justify genocide. So in contention we have: If they were like us, we wouldn’t be allowed to kill them, but they are not like us, so we will exterminate the brutes. If they were like us, we wouldn’t be allowed to kill them, and they are like us, so we’re not allowed to kill them. They are not like us, but that is no reason to kill them, and we will learn to live with them. Isn’t the danger of “we are all brothers and sisters under the skin” that it cedes too much to the genocidal bad guys? That they might respond, “But if they weren’t human, we could kill them, right?” Suppose the Lunars were both different and in some way “worse” than their enemies, wouldn’t we still be a long way from justifying genocide? Capital punishment for litterbugs? Of course, they are really people, even the ones with the extra eyes and uncanny tails.

Well, I totally buy that illumination is not the gift of any god. It is something we can learn to do on our own, and as long as people ask questions … However, shilling for the Bright Empire with plagues: does that necessarily create more illuminates, or does it just make people more willing to accept Nysalor’s empire? (As an aside, given the nature of Glorantha’s “in-world” documentation, do we know that it is canon that the Nysalor shills did spread the plagues, or is it just canon that everybody says they did and believes it because they anyway think they were a rum lot? I am not saying missionaries and imperial scouts are not dodgy, it is just unlikely that every villain committed every crime attributed to them. Everybody says so? Truth isn’t a democracy.)

Well, in some — possibly not very interesting — sense, everything arose from Chaos. In looking for an explanation of what makes the Lord of Absolute Rule different from other Chaos gods and other “lords of terror”, maybe we should look at Ompalam’s other runes. (Of course, it may turn out that that doesn’t help, either.) As well as our old friend , in the past, Ompalam had (the Devil’s crown) and (the prison bars of failure to ) ; now these two are replaced by (the rune for slave or food) and (the rune of nothing doing). Maybe — just maybe — the change is supposed to capture better the idea of slavery. Compare Gark the Calm: , (the defunct hourglass, the butterfly of unlife), and that rascal , again. Stasis seems to be the rune of perversion: it is a segment snapped off of . If the Moon says keep moving — changing — to remain balanced, points to the trouble you get into if you stop. I suspect that in the past, was supposed to convey some of this lassitude in contrast to the dynamism and dissonance of . Maybe the (longstanding) use of for cheerier things led to pulling back on this aspect. When you think about it, the power runes don’t cover very much, splitting easily (in my twisted imagination, anyway) into two groups: (full stop), (all dissonance resolved), (eternal reality), and (absolute zero) (to live is to change), (however it is, it should be different), (temporary reality), and (‘I Was Born Under a Wandering Star’) A cynic might have said we could have done with simply and or a mixer tap rune. (Not I, though — no, no, no.) [Attempts to jerk self back to the point — I feel sure I had one somewhere.] Anyway, my idea is that these perverted Stasis cults are versions of things that seem to offer some last hope to the oppressed whose lives are tending toward the nasty, brutish, and short. Gark the Calm is religion as Marx saw it: Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people — Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right Gark’s priests travel the world in many guises, promising the seemingly-impossible to the impoverished people of all civilizations: peace and solace from the miserable world. Gark’s worshipers call him by many names, but every crowd of hopeful pilgrims disappears into ancient ruins or forbidden places. — Well of Daliath So some may read Gark as a satire on religion, others as a satire of religion gone wrong — of cult in the sense of ‘a religion you are not allowed to leave’ (I think that was Deborah Frances-White). So if Gark is the oppressed mistakenly seeking escape in religion (or the wrong religion), what is Ompalam? Is Ompalam where a political response to the same problem goes wrong? If Gark is misplaced trust in religion, is Ompalam misplaced trust in Hobbes’ Leviathan? Again, you could take it that the mistake is to have an absolute sovereign at all or that Ompalam is what happens when Hobbes’ social contract goes horribly wrong. So watch out for those cults … like Mostal, which I guess we are supposed to see as having a hopelessly impoverished view of how the world actually works. But rather than sad ‘men’ who want to be ‘machines’, I think fandom has voted for crazy time-travelling robots (Skynet), and that sounds like a lot of fun to me. But if you want satire of scientism and the perils of tradition — and think you can evade the booby traps of stereotype; do I hear the Ring Cycle lumbering into gear? — that’s there for you, … us, whoever. [As usual: or something like that, or not like that, at all; anyway, dilute to taste.]

On that last still, you mean? If so: I hope labelled correctly — I am no Gloranthan astronomer.