mfbrandi

“I brought them fire and death. What more do they want, the ungrateful curs? Not play the next trick on them, my arse!”

So the Great Compromise — what that old thing? We are all “Thesis vs. Antithesis — grrr!” But that means we all die today (most of us are dead already), so we resign ourselves to entropy in order that we can die tomorrow, or a week next Windsday, or in a billion years time. But die we will. That is our deal with the Devil — she won’t stomp around the place like an angry toddler if we stitch her into every bit of the universe — and it beats the hell out of having stabby gods running riot (and running the show). And so the elder races fade, the world thins, the gods die — “The only good god is a dead god; I mean, look at ours.” Isn’t that the Nysalorean motto? —, the black hole at the centre of things keeps “sucking” at reality, and we get on with our wonderful lives, stopping frequently to smell the flowers. But our slide to oblivion is not straight, there are humps and dips, many spirals — but with every synthesis reached, the energy available to achieve new syntheses drops. One day, there will be none left. But it is OK: finitude is a beautiful thing. Or that is what Rashorana told me, anyway. (I think. The music was quite loud.)

In RQ3 Gods of Glorantha, the Trickster organisation was almost completely flat: everyone was an initiate–acolyte, but (a) there might be a nominal “priest” who led worship (and scooped the annual POW gain), and (b) the local priest (i.e. “priest”) would think up something humiliating to put a wannabe initiate through in lieu of a formalised initiation. Informal co-operation between shrines. It was stressed that all Trickster cults were different, but I got the feeling — perhaps I generate such feelings spontaneously — that one could say that every Trickster shrine, every little cluster of acolytes, was different, even when the trickster-god name was the same. No rules for how things are done. That seems right, doesn’t it? For whose benefit? So the respectable folk can see an image of Trickster in a gimp suit and chains? Surely any self-(dis)respecting follower of the disorderly fellow would piss on such a mannequin instead of praying at it. Better to make one’s devotions before a cobweb, a fallen raven feather, or a coyote turd, no? But I ramble. Good luck.

Well, it is that. Maybe it won’t come today, but it will come. Let us make peace with it. And after the world has returned to Chaos, perhaps a new Cosmos will form spontaneously from that non-state — just like last time. ‘We’ won’t be there to see it, of course. Or we can rage, rage, rage against the dying of the Wind [or insert preferred element here]. I would prefer not to. I agree that illumination — not necessarily via the Riddler — as a key to superherodom or godhood (collect the whole set of magical power Top Trumps) is extremely tedious. Climb your pole and meditate long enough and you can take on the world thanks to your austerities — whack, whack, whack! It has its non-Gloranthan sources, but it is dull even so — possibly worse in a game than in a story, I don’t know. If it were my world to retcon — oops! — I would bin that, but I doubt anyone would thank me for it: some people like the One Man Army Corps thing, and it has always been part of the setting, AFAICT. I guess it comes down to how one feels about dragonslaying: if you think the way to kill a dragon is to be more powerful than the dragon, then you are probably OK with the blue tights/red cape thing. I prefer that if you succeed, it is because you are lucky, or there is a quibble or trick you exploit, or the dragon wants/is fated to die, or … well, you get the idea. Even if you are a god. But mostly, the dragon eats you. Don’t do that. But to me — and maybe it is only me — the God Who Would be King (and one need not pick the obvious candidate) is an intrinsically ridiculous fellow, and the way to get fun out of the vainglorious ninny is to guy him mercilessly. You don’t have to, and I promise not to come round to your house and shove tofu through your letterbox till you agree to join in with me. Pax?

Well, the original RQ3 Deluxe set looked OK, didn’t it? It didn’t have Lisa Free’s pretty dragonewts on the box front, but you can’t have everything. I will grant you there were some shocking things in later AH items.

Quite likely, but I am not privy to the art direction given Ms. Dirim. The dragonflies or seahorses thing is from the Avalon Hill Gods of Glorantha Prosopædia. The AH/RQ3 Mastakos cult write-up has a Drive [vehicle] skill, which is — I guess — one of the earliest manifestations of RQ chariot “rules” (about five sentences). Mastakos is a “planet” with a watery origin story. Orlanth gets him out of the well by drinking the Well of Daliath dry. Presumably, the big O then pisses or vomits all the wisdom back into the Well. Clearly, he didn’t keep much. I suppose one could read the mini-myth as Orlanth’s doing a LibraryQuest to gain knowledge of teleportation — Mastakos is neither a god nor a mask of Orlanth, “he” is just something Orlanth knows how to do, the one technique kept from the vast riches of the Well. But this is not Call of Cthulhu, and a tale of heroic drinking was what played with the Hillfolk. By the time of Sartar, Kingdom of Heroes (p. 126), O’s chariot is drawn by two horses, called Crisis and Rage. (Not Parricide and Remorse. Not even Donner und Blitzen.) Sounds more Orlanth, it is true, but we’d all prefer dragonflies, right? We also learn that Heortlings are not big on chariots, but they do use them for: [a] ceremonial shit; [b] carrying storm wielding magicians into battle. A lot of the above may be no longer in force — I am experimenting with avoiding the ‘r’ word, as I fear it is becoming a curse rather than a description — and that is fine … but you know, dragonflies, baby, DRAGONFLIES!

Of course, we only want rules for chariots drawn by dragonflies or seahorses.

That is OK. No apology required, IMHO.

I always imagine an Earth goddess standing before me now saying “I am Ernalda, not Dendara”, then covering her face with her hands, revealing it again, then saying “I am Dendara, not Ernalda” — she repeats this performance until I am entranced and muttering along, then I stagger off robot-stiff and stop passers by to assure them “both goddesses deny it.” Soon, I am committed, of course. But I do have lovely soft walls, now. Is Charai with her gymkhana rosette glyph not just the young girl aspect of La-Ungariant? But isn’t she horsey girl Redalda, too? And so the amazing collapsing Earth goddess seems to re-appear. I suspect men just cannot tell women apart and so fetish imaginary differences … but because they cannot tell them apart, imaginary differences between the same woman/Earth goddess. Salient links (which is not to say that they agree with me): https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/notes-on-redaylda-dendara-ernalda/ https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/notes-on-dendara/

That looks like a rabbit hole if ever I saw one. I am tempted to say all the horse goddesses are one, and that they are all the daughter of the Earth. However, we all know how the different generations — maiden, wife, crone (or sub other unflattering types, and maybe four rather than three) — can be phases of one goddess (IIRC, that goes all the way back to the original run of Wyrms Footnotes), so maybe, for example, Redalda (or Charai or …) is Ernalda’s daughter only in the sense that Vinga is Orlanth’s daughter. Although some say, “Only if you squint.” Sooo … that would have the horse goddess as the Earth in her aspect of wife of the Sun. This makes a kind of sense: the personal glyph of La-Ungariant (Feathered Horse Queen) — per HQ1, p. 143 — is the same as that of Hippoi. La-Ungariant = daughter of Orest = Orest = Ernalda, which fits our modern notions of the FHQ and the wife of the Sun, right? (And when Elmal was the rise-in-the-morning Sun — bad Elmal! — Earth daughter Redalda was married to him, according to the Orlanthi. One suspects Orlanth is easily convinced of paternity … and non-identity.) But this is not from the horse’s mouth, this is just me tracing some connections, and if — whisper it — the “r” thing has happened at some point, then tracing connections through works of different vintages may well fail to yield canon.

Of course: given that they don’t speak, how else are they to be heard, man?

Yeah, that caused no trouble, at all, so let us go off-piste again. It is not mine, but I rather like the Dumb Theory that Genert was the OG Sun. Yelm is just grow lights on a stick: that is the true origin of the rune. Why did the big O bring us “back” such a feeble fake, a replacement Sun? Well, just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, even Orlanth makes a wise decision once in a while … Consider that the Sky Dome was improvised — is the sheltering sky, if the truth be told — to protect what was left of Glorantha after the destruction of its original Sun and things start to make sense … and get scary. Bringing back the Sun — an honest-to-god star, not LEDs on a pole — under a much-too-close rock dome sounds to me like setting off an H bomb in a polytunnel. Call me old-fashioned. Call me overly cautious. But I think it is too soon to bring back Genert. We need open skies. We need distance. When Argrath does the double and offs most of the gods and the Devil, that potentially nets him an awful lot of magical energy. Enough to ditch the dome (much less claustrophobic to be able to see into the Void at night), re-spherize Glorantha, and restore the Sun at an appropriate 93 million miles or so? Maybe Argrath is the perfect Orlanthi hero, after all, embodying the Orlanthi virtue of responsibility. Only in the Fourth Age — after he is gone, wyrm food — will the big O have completed his restorative justice project, his community service. But wait, a responsible, self-sacrificing Orlanth? No, that really is a Dumb Theory. (Or maybe getting splashed with dragonblood can be eye-opening.)

There is bat-pollinated skullbush — yielding oilseeds, which are edible but hardly a complete vegetable protein (I am guessing). See the RQ Companion, p. 32.

That is two, surely. Ask me another, O Illuminated One, for I would learn.

Are you sure? See for example the Orlanth write-up in RQ2 (p. 73 in the Classic Edition PDF; p. 68 in 1970s’ paper copy).

Oops! My fault: I put the wrong link in. Fixed now, but here it is freestanding: https://www.britannica.com/topic/phratry

Can herdhumans be taught to carry a palanquin? I am not cheerleading for herdhuman musicians — or “musicians” … music boxes? — but there is the question of anatomy as well as “intelligence” or variety of “soul”. Even an “awakened” cow would have trouble playing a drum, one imagines. And an ukulele is out of the question, surely. And “animal” intelligence is not a simple matter: orcas, sea lions, parrots, & crows. (Doubtless there are more examples.) Herdhumans as “animals in the shape of people” and Morokanth as “people in the shape of animals” should make us stop and think, even if the conclusion we come to is that it is as OK to eat a herdhuman as a cow … or a monkey … or a chimpanzee … or a jay.

Being sordidly practical — this is not at all scholarly, I’m afraid — one could just take a couple of snippets and run with them: So you could divide your 41 clans into 11 groups of 3 and 2 groups of 4 — or something approximating that — according to what made sense politically and bind each cluster of 3 or 4 clans via mythical ancestors without worrying about whether there was an actual blood tie to establish each phratry — i.e. they can be mythical mythical ancestors! “Phratry” does rather whiff of testosterone. I wonder how old the groupings of 3 or 4 clans are — maybe in the “good old days” each present-day clan was bigger (or part of a bigger parent clan) and none needed to cluster. In a post-FHQ world, perhaps the mythical ancestors are women and the imaginary lines of descent matrilineal? Emphasis has changed (let us not use the “r” word, for once) between 2013 and 2023. Presumably, the Dendara —> Ernalda shift — “the Grazeland Pony Breeders of Dragon Pass … have changed their society dramatically since they left Pent in the Second Age, and now revere Ernalda” — is supposed to licence a turn away from the excesses of “Yelmic” patriarchy (which was presumably only ever enforced by men and not by the Sun itself). The sound politics of not splitting the Earth vote. (I hear that without sufficient exogamy — ironically enough — your clans are likely to turn into broos. This may be Lunar propaganda.)

Taking up the Nile comparison:

With the usual caveat — should go without saying by now — about this being kite-flying rather than careful argument or tablets brought down from the mountain, isn’t this one tendency in the description of what’s going on? a powerful god has little if any free will — they are just a stereotype on a loop repeating mythic actions, not in the past but off sideways somewhere; that is, they are more a resource than a person (in which respect, theistic magic resembles sorcery); in casting a rune spell, the god’s power is manifest through the caster; in casting a rune spell, the magician/worshipper in effect performs an action from the god’s myths (though perhaps to a different end, with a different target); in summary: god’s power, caster’s will — this is good for player agency (and PC autonomy). In contrast with this, but — IMHO — also present: gods have personalities, agendas, and free will; they can plan, decide, and change their minds — gods are people; gods fight proxy wars through mortals; initiates and above have some kind of buy-in to their god’s agenda: either they really believe in the god’s mission, or they have done a deal with the “devil” for power; gods seen this way have an interest in promoting certain attitudes and beliefs about right conduct in their worshippers — it makes the mortals better tools, more tractable. If there is anything in this second way of looking at the matter, what happens when a rune spell is cast? We can still say the god’s power is present, but whose will is manifest, the god’s or the caster’s? We could go either way, but how is the game set up? For example, does the GM take over whenever a rune spell is cast and direct the divine power according to the god’s will — not the player’s or the PC’s? If we don’t do it that way, do we have an explanation of how the player’s will is nonetheless the god’s, not the PC’s? Of course, we could say that the god would direct the divine power if it could, but the deal it did with its worshipper makes that impossible — the power has already been lent, the caster’s will must direct it: the tail is wagging the god; it is the god who made a devil’s bargain, not the PC — but that will colour how we understand “identification/impersonation”, and if the gods were limited to proxy action (about which I express no opinion), perhaps that might threaten to collapse the second perspective into the first? To use a quaint old idiom, who wears the trousers, worshipper or deity? Of course, if the players can be persuaded to make their characters assume the aims, values, and personalities of those characters’ gods, then the question is less pressing (but we have less Elric/Arioch/Stormbringer argy-bargy). But then mightn’t the story end up telling the players, rather than the other way about?

I guess it depends what proportion of the population is children — assuming they are included in the 170,000. If a big chunk is the kids, then the % of adults who are initiates shoots right up: half the population is initiated adults, not half the adults are initiates, right? (As always, I may be completely wrong.) ——————————— EDIT: As a general rule about 66% of any listed Gloranthan population are adults and about 33% are children. Compare that to the modern US where only about 18% are under 15. I am really not interested in going more granular than that. — WoD

Ah well, we are all in favour of freedom and democracy over there — but at home, not so much.

Nothing to do with embarrassment or taboo concerning what actually pulls a thunder god’s chariot? Unclean! Unclean!

What are Donald’s nephews doing under the dome of Glorantha’s sky? What is the true relationship between Grower and Maker? Are there other worlds, or is Glorantha the only bubble in the Void? Why can I never tell Mostali from Mallard?

Ithaca … … because no one would be foolish enough to finish the job.