mfbrandi

Although, who is to say that slitting one’s own throat is not a good way to start a heroquest? [Don’t try this at home, kids!]

Unless Yelm ruined it? Unless you can’t go Wonderhome again? Unless it was always broken and we just blame Yelm’s sojourn there? Depends how optimistic a Darkness heroquester you are? (Darkness = hunger, dissatisfaction. Light = illumination, rest. To be played with, twisted, and subverted … of course.)

That was KL slapping him down for his impudence.

Sure. I was just being sympathetic to Mr. Duguid. I am not now and have never been a member of the Boy Scouts of America someone who thinks Chaosium has a duty to publish/refrain from publishing according to my whims. They should follow their own vision. I don’t get the whole GRR Martin fandom thing of ranting at the “content provider” to dance like a monkey on a chain. Why would one do that?

No, you are not the only one: Not every important thing needs its own set of game mechanics. Heroquests should be able to get acid-trip strange, not just by-the-book odd. Heroquests should sometimes sneak up on the characters (and their players) — “When did the heroquest start?” “I don’t know, but we must have been in it a while.” — but if there is an obvious mechanical shift that could give the game away. If Chaosium makes a conceptual breakthrough and comes up with some genius new mechanic, will it suitable for all and only heroquests? Gloranthans speak of heroquests, but I suspect the things they speak of bear a family resemblance to each other rather than sharing some clearly defined essence. “Here are the rules of creative heroquesting — if your players think of something ‘outside the box’, it doesn’t work and it doesn’t count.” But those are — of course — just worries, and I wouldn’t dignify them by calling them arguments against HQ rules. I may be wrong on every count. However, it must be said that in general, I hope that each publication will open up readers’ imaginations by making them think of things not on the page, rather than shutting them down by providing yet more detail to be observed. I suspect that that gets harder and harder as publications pile up seemingly trying to define Glorantha. Better to be allusive and/or contradict the last thing said than try to present something consistent and complete? Presumably, the notion of a heroquest is contested in-world, so do we want it nailed down at the meta, rules level? I don’t know.

Well, that is my normal hang-out!

IIRC, in RQ3, Westerners had days of two 16 “hour” periods — i.e. 32-hour days if we say 1 Western “hour” = 1 Earth/IRL hour. (Even if that wasn’t the original intention, and I have no idea whether it was.) EARTH (actual): 365.25 days/year × 24 hours/day = 8,766 hours/year GLORANTHA (proposed): 294 days/year × 32 hours/day = 9,408 hours/year 1 Gloranthan year = 1.07 Earth years Starting “21” Pregen is 22.54 Earth years old A 30-hour day would get you closer, but doesn’t have any textual support that I know of, and 32 — being a power of 2 — subdivides quite nicely (if not as well as 24). This, it seems to me, is minimally disruptive, and if you are worried about daily travel times, fatigue is as much a factor as number of hours in the day, so you can — if you want — play it that there are about as many usable hours in the day, but with some hours in hand for “heroic efforts”. (Gloranthan animals are adapted to their longer day, but that doesn’t mean they have to be active for the same proportion of it as we are of ours.) More time for telling stories round the campfire. Longer crepuscular periods giving humans and Uz more chance to avoid each other? Just a thought.

Maybe that is because — whatever its true, wonderful content — the title makes it sound a bit like this: … or you know, an otherworld mission to deliver tissues to the therapist’s office. Don’t get me wrong: done as a parody of Campbell, that would have me hooked, but Ragnaglar’s Breath sounds more on-brand.

I am not going to disagree about the squishiness of Dwarves — I like the robots making their fleshy drones — but I am not sure about the reasoning. I quite like the idea of Daka Fal judging dead humanoid robots, especially if either [a] he is confused by them, or [b] there is a chrome-plated clicking & whirring avatar of DF to do the job.

Are we though? ElvenQuest had a comedy dwarf with a Scottish accent — but I didn’t know that it was because it was a cliché till I came across the trope that it’s a trope — where are all these Scottish dwarves hiding? I guess I lead a very sheltered life: it is me in hiding, not the dwarves. Is it really all Poul Anderson’s fault?

It is all done with time travel and matter transporters. The National Film Board of Canada had a cartoon about it, probably this one. See also Budrys’ Rogue Moon (The Death Machine) — now there’s a heroquest — and Derek Parfit’s classic Reasons and Persons. (And, you know, a million other things, including the madder bits of Heinlein and Gerrold.)

There has to be some punning going on here, right? Ostensibly bow as in archery, but in the context of a sky ship, the pointy end — from there hop from Golden Bow to Golden Bough: I tried to read The Golden Bough (abridged version) in my 20s, but I got bored and gave up. I blame Auntie Ludwig. —————————— PS: Pure Horse shamanistic path in HQ Glorantha p. 139 — all of two sentences, I think.

Is this — inter alia — a John M. Ford reference (IASFM, July 1979)? Sneaky!

More Gloranthan karaoke. Dusky, blonde Yelmalio likes to sing Moorcock’s “Veteran of the Psychic Wars”. He knows how it looks (and that he has lousy pipes), but he has that glint in his brown eyes, and is perhaps thinking of his next step — the step that can only be taken when all weapons and armour have been laid aside. (Sedenya whispers, “Clothes, too.” ZZ, “And skin? Did I say that out loud? Sorry!”) Zorak Zoran has the great white soul voice, of course, and knows the complete Hi Records repertoire of Al Green. Maybe it’s empathy over that pan of boiling grits. Maybe it’s just that he is full of fire. Some people are surprised to hear him sing “L–O–V–E (Love)” to his Only Yellowhair, but they should know better by now. Do they have karaoke machines in Third-Age Genertela? Good question. I like to think the bar YO and ZZ frequent hires a newtling band, the Swampers. They are always on at ZZ to do “Take Me to the River”.

Don’t let that stop you making it your Glorantha. (We wouldn’t want to view Lovecraft’s world through Lovecraft’s eyes for very long.) Let us hope it stays that way — the “future” as a permanent blank land.

Weird misinformation is good — “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and rôleplayers and divines.” Mention of Tweet and OtE makes me think that The Dragon’s Eye is the book I am waiting for and that OtE inspiration the sainted Bill may have all the heroquest rules we need:

Sounds like a pitch for an RPG — what shall we call it? Oh, wait …

The Orlanthi tell a tale of a dog who ran away from home to fawn on some windbag and hump his wife’s leg. It is funny because they seem to love him, and I thought the Orlanthi hated dogs. Oh, it is not a dog, you say, but a god. Who wants a god with all the unattractive features of a dog? I don’t need to worship the top god, but I want one with some independence and self-respect. Loyalty, schmoyalty — give me a god who is complicated and has stories about Trade back in the day. So what is it with Orlanthi and cats, then? Cats hate you. Cats shred the spines of your LPs. Cats piss on your friends’ trousers. Cats don’t understand loyalty. What is acceptable in a psychopathic ball of fur is unacceptable in a foreign god. Maybe they like cats because they remind them of their own family. So it is just xenophobia, then — they like foreign gods to know their place? That cannot be it, because they seem actually to like him, not just the fact that he knows his place. So are we getting anywhere? Nowhere fast. Maybe it is just that little e stands to Big O as they see themselves standing to Orlanth: they wouldn’t want to be O with all the stress of trashing/fixing the universe, all that guilt/responsibility — maybe the Orlanthi just want to sniff a few bottoms, get a pat on the head from the King of the gods, and maybe have a sly go on his wife’s leg. And if the miserable curs have to sleep in a kennel, they don’t see that as much of a price to pay. (Remind me again why they don’t like dogs. Because they remind them of themselves, and they hate themselves? You couldn’t have mentioned this before?) Meanwhile, chilly Y — like Bartleby — would prefer not to. Unlike Bartleby, this extends to dying, so he doesn’t. He is a cross-grained genius of perversity, and he probably plays the joanna like Cecil Taylor.

Is it canon that it happens, or is it canon that Gloranthans will in the future tell the story of Argrath and the Devil? I will put my neck on the line and say that it is canon that Fourth Agers tell the story. It works as an aetiological myth of how Glorantha got thinned into Earth or at any rate a more Earth-like world. My take is creation won’t be finished till the magic goes away. So I would say the myth tells a truth about the world — if only a “poetic” truth — but would you want to go on a fact-checking heroquest to see just how things went down? Someone will post to disagree with everything I have said. Listen to them, not me.

And every Gloranthan war since? Have these people no imagination?

So the rebels kill the OG sun — probably in assassination of Julius Caesar or Murder on the Orient Express fashion — and probably for no better reason than that each of them wants to be in charge. (In time, the resulting world shows promise: cyclical ebb and flow; rotation with neat little epicycles. The only catch is the amount of noise the wind makes. But I am getting ahead of myself, and consequences are often unintended.) Older beef than this? Bitter struggle among the Trotskyites — or if you were never there, all the factions in Life of Brian — such that every knife plunged into the sun was imagined to be ending a comrade? With the sun in the underworld, their internecine fury is given full rein — hot red-on-red action as each struggles to occupy the same niche: chair of the party, then Emperor of Everything (bow down gods and mortals, you are not worthy). Lots of small-c chaos. In the short run, is in the ascendant, but perhaps is playing a long game by getting stitched into the Compromise. But by reaching so far into Balance and the Void, perhaps Sedenya — the er — has guaranteed that in the long run, no one can be Emperor. All to the good, but was that Her divine plan? The White Moonies may think so, but maybe it is just — which is what you get when you tear away some of the Spider’s web. Clearly, there is a Lunar faction we can call “Continuity Yelm” (well, we can call it that) who want the grandson of the sun to sprinkle the rest of us with His celestial golden shower in perpetuity — but we all hate those guys: that leaky dick-waving isn’t the feminist revolution we signed up for, is it? But which is the true route through? There is the Argrath way: But that just repeats the primal scene, and if you tear it down, you’ll only have to bring it back, over and over (and that is quite another song). If the red of the moon is just the blood of our own eyelid superimposed on Her face, maybe it is time to open it away from the bullskin crazies, the Arkati thought police, and the shaven-headed life coaches muttering “occlusion” like a pack of demented dentists: Don’t make the (textually) corrupt choice.