mfbrandi

On 5/7/2023 at 2:57 PM, Erol of Backford said:

Also what vegetables are there in Prax that grow wild? I assume a larger variety along the Zol Fel banks, etc. but are there earthlike equivalents? The same questions go for fruits as well...

Taking up the Nile comparison:

Quote

A large variety of vegetables were grown, including onions, garlic, leeks, beans, lentils, peas, radishes, cabbage, cucumbers and lettuce. There were also fruits, such as dates, figs, pomegranates, melons and grapes — Canadian Museum of History

9 hours ago, Joerg said:

I would have thought that sympathy is too weak to describe the identification/impersonation of the deity when casting rune magic … allowing the deity to manifest in the initiate when casting the Rune Magic. At the very least, it is not “I cast Lightning” but “we cast Lightning”, with the caster and Orlanth making up the we.

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?

21 minutes ago, svensson said:

It was always my impression that initiation into an approved cult was a requirement for adulthood in Orlanthi tribes.

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

24 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

It’s always amusing that demons are as much an enemy of Chaos as anyone else

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

5 hours ago, SDLeary said:

Glorantha of the time, and Sartar/Tarsh in particular, was not represented as having any sort of major use of chariot

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?

6 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Curious where anyone has located the secret cave where the hyena skins are being stitched together?

Ithaca …

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

2 hours ago, dumuzid said:

Perhaps he returns to a world where all humans have been reduced to herd-men, and a different class of primates walks upright...

He is Charlton Heston, either way.

1 hour ago, dumuzid said:

The dawning of the Fourth Age could herald the rise of the New Ape Empire in central Genertela, more glorious than ever before.

I know Argrath has his little rant about “humankind”, but I quite often wonder which people it is really that survive the Wakbothpocalypse.

Are they feathered?
Are they furry?
Are they scaly?
Does the returned Argrath match them, or is he a Robert Neville in their brave new world?

“Apotheosis” is just another word for being moved off the board, right?

My last word on this:

1. I am awed by the majesty of the storm
   — I am a romantic;
2. I achieve oneness with the storm
   — I am a mystic;
3. I draw power from the storm
   — I am a magician (or a miller);
4. I pray to the storm not to demolish my house
   — I am a propitiatory worshipper;
5. I fetch some dynamite to “help” the storm demolish my neighbour’s house
   — because it told me to
   — I am a nutter.

If opposing forces are held in balance for the good of the world, when does a wise person pick one of those opposing forces and attempt to help it to victory?

A better harvest tomorrow. Apocalypse a week next Tuesday.

 Spun off from the Religion and Satire thread — which idiot started that?

17 hours ago, scott-martin said:

[I]t strikes me that one of the best bits of unclaimed treasure from the HeroQuest era was … “the hero wars are between [X] and [Y],” where the specific poles around the conflict would shuffle every time you loaded …

[L]ooking backward like some kind of angel of history the real war is between Klee and Millet, a kind of immediate broadway boogie-woogie relationship with these once-fake gods versus the sentimental nostalgia that sees only a disenchanted world in sore need of restoration, “if only” things worked that way.

If it had been between Klee and Millett, I’d have backed Sexual Politics all the way, but as it is, it is an easy win for the Swiss, right? And I think PK has Aldrya on his side.

Any suggestion that I was swayed by my teenaged self’s Penguin editions of Steppenwolf and The Glass Bead Game is entirely …

Although I may think we are all about taking a line for a walk here in Trollgameland, the aesthetics of RPG art often suggest something more backward-looking … and Klee died in 1940.

16 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

The only difference is that in Glorantha, other gods are just as real as yours. IRL, that's not true (mostly).

No, real life is very even-handed in this: everybody’s gods are equally real.

9 minutes ago, radmonger said:

All express a morality; it is hard to see how any even partially coherent set of visually-presented stories could not do so. Text can hide the the things it doesn't want to show, even be ambiguous over whether an encounter is consensual.

Interesting.

I guess we are all familiar with the idea that we may betray our (moral) viewpoint on the world by the pictures we choose to show — at least if we show enough of them. Is it true? I don’t know. It is an empirical matter, I guess. But wouldn’t it sound just as plausible said of words: say enough and you will betray your morality? So I guess that is not what you have in mind.

And if you had no morality to express, would your picture story be incoherent? Why? (Or the pictures have their own morality to barf forth, independently of the teller?)

Is there something special about pictures? Certainly, a sequence of pictures needn’t reveal whether an encounter — I assume you mean a sexual encounter — is consensual.

But even supposing we could see that — we see Orlanth stab Yelm, and let’s suppose we can see that Yelm (in this version) did not consent to be stabbed — what then? Is stabbing Yelm good, bad, right, or wrong? Seeing it happen doesn’t tell me, does it? And whose morality is being expressed: mine; Orlanth’s; Yelm’s; that of the person who said “sit here, watch from this angle”?

Even if we thought pictures (or visual experiences) were a magic route to the truth of things, that pictures always showed all the salient facts — and we don’t: surely, you can “lie” with pictures — then what? How do we get from the facts to the moral evaluation of the facts? (To an ought from an is.)

Rashomon/In a Bamboo Grove I guess we could say fails the coherency test — if we take out the frame of giving testimony to the magistrate. But now reshoot the film as a courtroom drama: you just see the witnesses giving their testimony. Now it is coherent, so does it express a morality now? If so, why is that imagined version different from the one we know? If not, then some movies express a morality and some don’t even when coherent. (Even then, there are likely to be background assumptions: these are the visual storytelling conventions; this is the assumed moral background of storyteller and spectators. Probably …)

And what if the various myths of Orlanth are like Kurosawa’s fragments and won’t cohere into a consistent morality (even for those with the secret decoder ring)?

But maybe I have misunderstood you completely.

13 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

It'd need to be on a huge scale to have Genert raised as Wakboth, could happen but how do you see it occuring? Sounds pretty interesting

Even now, I have a sweatshop staffed with trollkin painting spots on goatskins so we can pass them off as hyenaskins. Skins of illuminated broos are particularly valuable.

(Breeding spotty goats in appropriate shades, too, of course. But the other is more fun.)

12 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

Will he request to become the king of the earth pantheon?
How will the ernaldan and other priestesses react?

Raises questions of rune ownership and locality, perhaps?

But consider Pamalt, who is not dead. The Prosopædia that is almost upon us — blessed be the Prosopædia — purportedly has:

• Pamalt (p. 97)
• Ernalda (p. 35)

So maybe rune ownership — for whatever reason — is not so absolute. Non-canon idle thoughts:

• you can own a bit of a rune (geographically, perhaps)
• gods don’t really own runes: it is a worshipper perspective (and Pamalt worshippers don’t overlap Ernaldans)
• Pamalt = Ernalda (as Vinga = Orlanth)
• “It is all relative, man!”
• there is a typo on the Well of Daliath (I swear I saw Arachne with a water rune once, but …)

20 hours ago, Eff said:

I think that there's an entirely separate factor here, which is that Gloranthan religions as they are understood in the contemporary fandom's center are actually neither paleopagan nor Christian, they're (without much acknowledgement) primarily derived from contemporary occultism and para-occult beliefs

Although, with the benefit of hindsight, a bunch of hippies banging on about “eroto-comatose lucidity” back in the mid-eighties should have tipped us off — I imagine my eyes glazed over at that point (I don’t remember).

So maybe the key Gloranthan conflict isn’t that between Orlanth and Yelm, Winter and Summer, or … whatever, but between Aleister Crowley and … who? Alan Watts? The cosmic battle of the dodgy DWEMs.

7 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

I'm confused. What culture are you referring to here?

Because I see Orlanthi culture as quite dogmatic

I am referring to IRL Pre-Hellenistic Greek religion (according to Burkert). The reviewer (Jonathan Barnes) was highlighting the contrasts with Christianity, but as you say one might contrast it with Orlanthi religion. At first, I thought I was being beaten up for suggesting Orlanthism was dogmatic (etc.), but now people seem to be saying that it is, but they like it that way. 🤷‍♀️

7 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

While some players and GMs might approach RQ like that, that's not actually how the gods and people in Glorantha have been portrayed. Very specifically to your quote, kinslaying is evil (aka, chaotic).

I am obviously misremembering something: what happens to an Orlanthi whose Moon or Chaos rune is awakened in adulthood initiation? I thought that was Hamlet had his chips. If so, surely they don’t hire in strangers to do the deed and witness the clan’s shame.

As for the equation of Chaos and evil: “An Illuminate knows as truth that Chaos is, in and of itself, neither evil nor inimical.” (HQG, p. 204 but doubtless in various places all the way back to Cults of Terror.) And if it is known, it must be true. But equally, we have Greg saying, “Act chaotically (rape, cannibalism, etc.)” — and I am sure he didn’t mean to suggest that rape was neither evil nor inimical. This is the doubleness in presentation that I see (and which is not necessarily a problem, if acknowledged) but which — if I have him right (apologies if not) — @soltakss does not. Is the problem Chaos? Is the problem the self-torment chaotic creatures can experience? Is the real problem self-deception, failure to co-operate, and absence of creativity?

7 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

Now, this I sort of agree with... certainly with your other statement about PC's religions becoming more PC to fit 'modern' morals and standards. Runequest has become more woke... and that disappoints me.

I am not a member of the anti-woke brigade, and I have nothing against political correctness. If the default player character religion must come with a religious morality (which is what I was questioning), better a correct one than an incorrect one, no? It may sometimes be fun to play a knuckle-dragger, but there are other routes to it: buck your own religion’s morality; join ZZ or Urox. If — purely as an example: I am not having a dig at anyone in Glorantha or on Earth, nor am I making claims about history — we decided it would be “bronze age authentic” for all cultures to have “honour killings”, nonetheless we would choose to be inauthentic in that matter, no?

7 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

As mentioned before, the gods are real. Your character has seen this reality, multiple times … So, for the most part, yes - power is what gives you a sense of morality.

As you say, you are not the only one to make this point, but I confess to not understanding it. I don’t think I suggested anywhere in this thread that the Gloranthan gods weren’t real, nor that the Greeks thought their gods weren’t real (which is not to say there were not “atheists” in the ancient world, see for example Tim Whitmarsh’s Battling the Gods for a discussion).

How do we get from the gods are real and I have met them to religions must come with moralities? Jeff suggests something transactional: if you don’t knuckle under to the god’s will, it won’t lend you its power. So that is something of an in-world explanation, but it is not an answer to the game design/worldbuilding question: why design gods with that bargaining power? After all, we sometimes think of Gloranthan gods — especially the powerful ones — as stuck in a loop and lacking free will. And isn’t it also part of the setting that cunning or innovative magicians can tap/harness the power of the gods without a by-your-leave? It seems there were options.

On the other hand, Aunty Ludwig once said that there are two conceptions of religious morality:

• God commands it because it is right;
• it is right because God commands it.

LW was not a believer but called the second conception the deeper one.

31 minutes ago, g33k said:

I think you seem to be looking for a singular Gloranthan "this is the way it is" answer...?

I was just reading a book review and as a result wondered why Gloranthan religions seemed to be such that Gloranthans would:

• fret about life after death;
• take the lead from their gods about who to hit with a big stick and how generally to carry on;
• model themselves after their gods.

It seemed to me that these were not givens in IRL religion — though certainly common — so it seemed like a design decision. Possibly a good one, I don’t know, though I can see reasons why one wouldn’t want to do it (and possibly the force of Jeff’s answer is that it wasn’t done, anyway).

I was foolish enough to quote from an old source — because I had been looking at it and it was a particularly bold statement — but as of HQG (2015), the picture was much the same: Orlanth is still “the model for all men” (p. 154, emphasis mine). Never mind the “all” or the “men” or the content of what O is modelling, it was the idea of gods as models I was fretting over. Foolishly, as it may be.

2 hours ago, Jeff said:

As an aside, the Greeks routinely did the same thing - just check out Cleanthes' "Hymn to Zeus."

An interesting aside, but as a piece of Hellenistic Stoic philosophy, even harder to fathom? And never mind what idiot things I said, probably falling outside the scope of Burkert’s claims about Greek religion.

If people want to read it, there is a translation here. (There are others, of course.)

So @Jeff, the short answer is:

You’re imagining it Brandi, there is no religious morality or divine moral example, there is just:

• awe at divine power;
• a chance to tap that power.

Is that about right?

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Maybe you people would say "Jane Harrison" instead.

Thanks. Get well soon!

1 hour ago, DrGoth said:

Now, maybe I've totally misinterpreted your post.  But that's the message I took away.

That is OK. My fault for not being clear.

1 hour ago, DrGoth said:

Is Orlanthism a great way to live?  The only thing that matters there is: does it make sense in Glorantha?

But there’s a reason why it — and not say Thanatar — is the default PC religion, right? So “does it fit the setting?” is not the only consideration.

Sure, there are plenty of real-world religions that want to tell you what to do and what to think in every part of your life, but don’t the Greeks provide a good example of a religion with a mythology we still enjoy but seemingly carrying no moral freight, and certainly not with top god as moral exemplar? Myths aren’t all moral fables and/or self-help manuals — or maybe I have been cursed to be blind to secret decoder rings.

So I was wondering: why not a metric ton of myth but not even a milligram of religious morality (at least for the default PC religion)? From the point of view of avoiding player alienation (and avoiding having to back-pedal or take the chisels to the stelae), it seems like the path of least resistance, no? That doesn’t mean no PC ethics: the players can bring or manufacture their own. So then: probably not a matter of chance, probably motivated — but what is the motivation? It would be rude of me to just guess or to blindly assert with zero evidence — though, of course, the temptation is always there, and sometimes … — but someone out there probably knows.

15 minutes ago, soltakss said:

Rather than fetching individual Hyenas they contacted Grandfather Hyena and so attracted all Hyenas, for example.

Grandmother Hyena, surely. Don’t let that clitoris fool you.

  Spun off from this in the Real-world Inspirations thread, as to take it further there would dilute that thread.

11 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

So where did it all go wrong for Gloranthan religion?

8 hours ago, svensson said:

It all 'went wrong' in the Godtime with the advent of competing gods of different Runic associations and pantheons.

Sorry, it is my fault for being sarcastic. (What, again?) I meant: where did it all go wrong in the minds of the Earthly creators of Gloranthan religion?

We had before us an example of a culture whose religion was not dogmatic, not priest-ridden, not obsessed with the life to come, not in charge of morality, and didn’t see gods as figures to emulate (so we could have them behaving very badly indeed) — but did we make the PCs’ religion like that? Nosirree, Bob! We had a bunch of jihadis/crusaders who’d cheerfully murder their own family members if they were square pegs — “Sorry, buddy, wrong rune. Say goodnight.”

Still, that needn’t be fatal to MGF: no one plays a Zorak Zorani (or in that other game, a Cthulhu cultist) under the impression that their character or their character’s religion is pleasant, admirable, or sane. We all like a bit of satire of religion, and in Psycho, Norman Bates was clearly the best part.

But there seems to be a tension in the presentation of Glorantha:

• on the one hand, the Nysalorean illuminates are right: the warring sides in Glorantha don’t really have a casus belli — “These people and their gods are all crazy. Why can’t we all just get along? Stop choking me!” — still, it looks like fun, I’m gonna hit something;
• on the other hand, there is an intolerable hole-which-is-not-a-hole in the world — Earth or Glorantha? In this person’s mind, probably both — and we must fill it with blood; Orlanth is a stand-up chap, and anyone who doesn’t think so can duke it out with Robert Bly.

I get the feeling — maybe wrongly — that some people want Orlanthism/the Lightbringer religion to be acceptable as an IRL religion of the religion-must-tell-you-how-to-lead-your-life stripe. But some presentations of Orlanth make one think that one of these must be true:

1. it was written by a crazy person;
2. it is satire and we are supposed to be in on the joke;
3. it is a joke at our expense.

If you don’t believe me, take a peek at this — it must be stressed — no-longer-canon description of the big O:

Charity would lead us to go for option [2]: it is a joke, and we are in on it. But (a) there has been so much effort over the years to try to get us to play this kind of awful person (i.e. an Orlanthi) and — I think — (b) some effort lately to make PC religion more PC, and that throws us back to our dilemma, right? Are Orlanthi virtues and religion a put-on or wishful thinking?

But the Greeks offer us a way out: offer the right sacrifices, don’t knock the penises off the herms, but whatever you do, don’t imitate Zeus — he is a thoroughly bad lot. If the player characters’ religion doesn’t come with any morality, then it doesn’t have to come with a morality acceptable to moderns. The characters — and the players — can be moral (if that’s their bag) without having Orlanth tell them what that looks like or modelling it for them.

————————————————————————

PS: I don’t know whether anyone this side of the Atlantic read Edith Hamilton. I must confess, I had never heard of her, but if there is one thing that I know, it is that I know nothing.

An old thing by Jonathan Barnes (LRB, 4 July 1985) on Walter Burkert on Greek religion and its contrasts with Christianity:

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So where did it all go wrong for Gloranthan religion? Pick a side that is supposed to be a phase in a cycle, then munchkin toward apocalypse.