mfbrandi

So how did it go?

If we take the runic opposition too seriously, we will become like the narrator of The Island of Dr. Moreau.

I am not interested in rules lawyering or promoting one version of RQ over another, and if I were, this wouldn’t be the right forum, anyway. However, David’s comment does illustrate what I was trying to call attention to — not to tell you what you must think about it once noticed — for domestic animals may be gentle, mild, tamed, docile, trained, broken, unthreatening, and bridled. (Gosh, someone’s been picking from a list of antonyms!) But does that make them “men”? “Oh, but it is just a metaphor, imagery …” Indeed. If people didn’t laugh, it is my fault for not being funny enough. I make no comment on the ethics of eating people, animals, or animals shaped like people men.

If you are into wordplay, a trilith — indicating luck as the mystical absolute within the cosmos, the highest high god. Possibly not the Yelmite answer to the question why is there something rather than nothing?

With its head on backwards. I had the same thought.

We think of the gods as expressions of the runes, as having essences defined by their runes. But maybe this is wrong: perhaps runes belong to religion, not divinity: we approach the divine via the runes — the runes are our path to god, not the destination. That is why the warm Elmali see where the chilly Yelmalians see only . That is why the broos see where others see only and others might walk the path of — Mallia as life-giving “Yelm” seen by the dark of the Moon. But then the monotheists will say that all runic paths — that lead anywhere — lead to the one god. And if the gods cannot be distinguished by their runes, who can argue? The more pragmatic Jrusteli will say that any runic path can be assembled and all lead to fireworks of various colours. The mystics say that yes, you can walk the runes as you would a path but you are on a road to nowhere, as you should be. For an encore, they will tell you that all superheroes are fools because they cannot even get nowhere, that like the sage Möbius, they tread the same somewheres over and over . In seeking the pleroma, they manacle themselves; in seeking to pierce the cloud of unknowing, they end up back where they started. No wonder they are tearing the world apart in their frustration.

The anthropophagous elf caught red-handed protests her vegetarianism:

Health warning: I don’t know either, but … Myths can have that delightful/distressing (your personality may vary) quality of “explaining” what we already know. We know the the sun rises and sets every day, but why? Because the wind stabbed the sun in a hissy fit and then did a deal to bring it back part time. So now we have a story to tell the little ones and a theme for that play we promised to perform every ten years after the plague passed us by. On the face of it, the Prax survival lottery is an aetiological myth in the same vein: we know the herd beasts graze and or browse and that we exploit that ability we lack by eating them. The lottery gives us a pretty picture to go with that. If the herd men were part of the familiar, natural given to be explained by the myth, they would be the Gloranthan equivalent of gorillas or geladas. (For five minutes it might be tempting to have Gloranthan geladas herded by Gloranthan baboons, but I suspect the temptation would fade.) But the vegetarian Morokanth seem to be a spanner in the works — if the myth is supposed to tie everything up in a nice pink bow, why don’t the Morokanth eat the herd men? If they “cheated on the lottery”, they didn’t do a very good job of it: they are saddled with “looking after” herds they cannot even eat. If you are a Morokanth who needs a pair of clever monkey hands, just hire a baboon — they are smart and you can talk to them. Maybe the myth used to work — the human herders herded and the Morokanth minded their own business — but someone broke it. But who would do that? A philosophically inclined Godlearner or Dragonewt who wanted to get the Praxians to reflect on the real difference between human and person and the illusory difference between human and beast? But I cannot see the Godlearners as being that thoughtful or the Dragonewts as being that interested in humans. Perhaps the real function of the myth is why we hate the Morokanth but think it is OK to eat our cousins. The Praxians “always” ate their hoofed beasts but in tough times got a taste for manflesh, a taste they never lost and felt a need to explain: they are just beasts and anyway it is the fault of the cheating tapirfolk. Perhaps the human demand for herd man meat is greater than previously suspected (by outsiders): the herd men are a cash crop for the Morokanth, that is what makes their manherding worthwhile. The herd men are 100% man because represents the humanoid shape (e.g. RQ2 p. 57). One suspects that all are , that all animals are descended from Hykim–Mikyh (Waha khans are, they claim), even the intelligent ones, even the intelligent ones who are not human-shaped. Perhaps what makes a beast an Eiritha beast is that it is [a] herded on Prax and [b] eaten by Praxian humans. But perhaps not. Will Praxian humans eat horseflesh? Perhaps it is just a matter of whatever the Waha cult says goes and best not argue with the Butcher.

I confess that the creation section of GRoY confuses me — as intended, I suppose — but page 6 has me thinking that Yelm was the first emperor and that there were “Aetherial Gods” before Yelm got promoted. Shall we say the job of emperor was created then though the first holder had been around for a bit — as some kind of offshoot or devolution of Aether??? A green age is going to need a source of light even if there is not “intense light … above the Spike”. Good to know that there is a Theyalan word for prokaryote. Take that deniers of Gloranthan microbes!

I thought that CA Resurrection was itself a perversion — that is what Humakt, Mallia, & Mee Vorala told me, anyway — as it denies the natural processes of decay and recycling. Zombie cults seem cherubic in comparison. Giving the heavenly bodies personalities and casting their cycles as death and resurrection was a CA public relations stunt, so blame her for the Sun Tyrant and the Malicious Moon — before CA’s jiggery-pokery, they were just fusion fire and rock respectively. The White Lady twists the world into ugly shapes. Never trust a ‘pacifist’ with a psychopathic bodyguard. Did Arroin truly greet his mother at the Dawn, as the stories tell? Or did the sight of her son’s torn and rotting corpse drive her mad? That was when the world was remade into its current terrifying form. Arroin has no magic because he is mere matter, a soulless shambling corpse. Would you dare tell CA this — and find yourself suddenly sans immune system, bone marrow transmuted to iron? If there is a secret to sane ‘resurrection’, it is Gorakiki’s child Scarabaeus Sacer who keeps it. Darkness holds all the secrets of Aether.

This is important. … or left-handed? I am beginning to suspect one enters the Green Age through the looking glass.

Well … if evil entered the world anyway, perhaps we should each of us visit the Green Age once to assume our share of the responsibility, rather than letting some other poor schmuck take all the blame. It is our sacred duty, really.

Well if we take @scott-martin's “a community comes together to recreate their sense of how they're all united and how they all fit together to make a larger world,” it looks like we have at least two things in play: what each community member has in common with the others (shared experience): love , death , & the changing of the seasons how the elements of the community complement each other (individual gifts): some bringing balance others bringing necessary agitation You could play it so that the cycle of the year is not raw change but balanced change — one tempering the other, everything in its right place: light/dark, heat/cold, storm/calm — or you could emphasize what the cyclic rotation of the wheel has in common with balanced spinning of the moon. These are members of the same community, not sides in a civil war, right? So they don’t necessarily see themselves as at war just because their gods are: wouldn’t that show that they didn’t understand their own myths? And what is the nature of the gods’ war? The Godswar was a linear highway to oblivion, a war of final extermination. But the way out was to loop the conflict: not Yelm dies and the world ends, but Yelm is slain every evening and reborn every morning (which is better than 24-hour sunshine, too) — with weekly loops of lunar influence and annual rises and falls of solar and storm power (other elements, too, of course). It is only the crazies who want to have their deities in sole charge of the universe all the time. Rival sports teams need each other, else the leagues will collapse for lack of games/gate revenue. Cosmologically, these people — 7M & 7LB — have a lot in common. Do they really belong to different religions or do they all worship in the church of the IPL while favouring different teams and star players? Now some will say that the GC was a stitch-up to keep Sedenya out, but one can easily play it that time (and chaos) were necessary for the return of the moon, that the 7 Lightbringers were the 7 Grandmothers. And you could play it that Arachne’s innovation was not to replace simultaneity with linear time but to introduce cyclical time (balanced rotation). So you tell the tales of the turning of the year and of how the spider’s cycles of time saved the world. And then after sacred time, everyone can start playing up their differences and squabbling again. That’s off the top of my head as proof of concept. You will come up with something better than I ever could.

Yeah, but the DDR wasn’t all bad: it gave us the great Zentralquartett and provided a home for Brecht and Eisler. 😉 Yeah, but being pissed off is its own punishment. Their more relaxed neighbours should just chill in the confidence that their blood pressure isn’t going through the roof. If you let the bastards get to you, they’ll grind you down just as they are grinding themselves down. If you keep a file on the Stasi take care lest you yourself become the Stasi — as Nietzsche never quite said.

Or less windily, it is Apollo and Dionysus doing the dance. (If you don’t think boozy Dionysus is the demon ZZ, you haven’t seen the maenads in decapitation mode. Pop! Spurt! Squelch!)

Well, I think I agree with you about sacred time, but that is probably why it gives me the willies. We are all us is fine when it means they are not them and so we don’t have to genocide them, but when belonging is compulsory, it becomes oppressive. Sometimes the loners will feel sorry for themselves while everybody else is carousing, bonding, and otherwise sinking into the Bork Collective — OK, it was a typo, but Swedish Chef: the Next Generation, why not? It happens. It is boring. We don’t need a Morrissey cult. Let’s move on. Sometimes the loners will embrace being monsters and go bite someone’s face off. This can be fun. ZZ? Sundry Chaos cults. Maybe Mother Hyena. One way or another, we have this covered. Next. Join us — any us, but some us: they all have a place ready for the stray, the prodigal — or you will have to be a monster. There must be something else. When Yelmalio goes off the rails, he provides the possibility of a path for non-mopey, non-monstrous loners. He fights. He loses. He loses power. He gets up. He carries on. He continues to bring light to the world even though he is himself denied illumination — Yelmalio as failed mystic. He hasn’t won, yet. He is a Kwai Chang Caine who gets his arse handed to him every week, but he remains a ray of sunshine, not a Byronic storm cloud. This is the Yelmalio that never dies, so he is not Lightfore: there is a rod set to rotate about its midpoint; one end is stuck up Yelm’s butt, the other up Lightfore’s; round and round they go, antipodes; Lightfore was a constant in the Darkness because Yelm was dead, unmoving — if Yelm now dies every day, so does Lightfore. I think we have a diagram for it: . But Yelmalio is definitely unbalanced, or at least not balanced by Yelm. Outsider Yelmalio doesn’t have an equivalent of “the reweaving of the web of time in the compromise.” He hasn’t been taken apart and rewoven, he is the ever lit, the holdout, the holdover from the previous dispensation. He is also Gloriana, the unfulfill'd queen. From his point of view, he is surrounded by zombies and revenants. He is Robert Neville. He is yesterday’s man. He knows no compromise — it is his glory and his limitation. As time begins, the story is over for most of the gods: they have been sold out by Arachne Solara and are basically waiting in a kind of stasis — or perhaps a tight loop — to be eaten by Wakboth, although most of them don’t know it yet. There are some oddballs: Arachne herself, perhaps; I couldn’t say what truly binds Trickster; Sedenya has chapters still to play out; Belintar and sundry mortal gods-in-waiting. Probably there are more. I always like to think of ZZ as one of the wild cards: unmoored in time, more than likely the chaos he claims to fight, and slain by introjecting his ultimate enemy, Aether, even before Aether was born — doesn’t seem to have slowed him down any. When the superheated void/darkness met the supercooled cosmos/light, how could they not hit it off? They are both carrying their pain. In ZZ, Yelmalio finally has a zombie who is honest about it — and his Arturo Quire. The perfect deracinated odd couple. But crucially, Yelmalio’s ultimate lostness is something that plays out in Time, when most everyone else is remade and he is not: there is no myth of Yelmalio’s finding his place in the world, because it hasn’t happened, yet. Maybe ZZ can show Yelmalio the way to illumination (as his black mirror). Maybe Yelmalio can show ZZ how not to suffer from his (laving his burns in cold rays). But these are not Godtime stories, not stories to be told at sacred time. They are rough, tender, personal stories, as yet without ends. When the cold light people and the hot darkness people move their stories on sufficiently, will that recreate the world, reweave the compromise? I tend to think not. They will find their place in the world — although they had to do it in hard, slow ways — so you might want to say their worlds change in a no-change, aspect-flipping way. But no, the world about them — the worlds of others — will not have changed. No one else will be affected. That would be … crass. And yet, and yet … what would a world with a peaceful ZZ be like? So Lightfore can do manly man things with long pointy sticks and argue with Elmal about whether they should enter the gymkhana, but Yelmalio will be off in the corner playing out his queer outsider sex magick mystical romance soap opera. That sounds like more fun, right? No? Just me, then. 😉

I am not sure if this quite fits here, but an article about Mary Renault by Miranda Carter.

Umm … [shrugs]

I hate to speak for someone else, but I think he knows he is swimming against the stream. (I definitely could be wrong.) The one where Elmal rises in the morning?

I wouldn’t sweat it. Just as religions don’t reside in their holy books but in the play cultures practices of their adherents, so RPG cultures don’t reside in their splatbooks. Maybe think of the splatbooks as like icons: the pretty pictures are revered but there needs to be a whole lot going on in people’s lives for the pictures to make any sense.

Well, sometimes. Sometimes it is — that favourite BRP meme — Orwell’s we have always been at war with Peloria. Sometimes religious communities change quickly — but in the “new reality” they keep giving off the vibe that it has always been this way. Here — In Time of Schism — is a thing about the Wee Frees and Scottish nationalism. “Monrogh” is supposed to sound Scottish, right? (Plus he had a mountain to climb.) Maybe one day the Orlanthi clergy won’t decry Sedenya as the herald of Wakboth. Maybe one day soon and with no heroquesting support. Because we have always lived in a retcon world, as Orwell grasped — no spookiness required.

Your Glorantha may vary, but only a little bit? @svensson isn’t trying to force the rest of us to follow him, so if he wants to do a difficult thing, why not encourage him rather than reaching for the pail of cold water? He is not telling us to go out and kill puppies for Satan Wakboth, is he? You’d think the only way to end the Elmal–Yelmalio war in fandom was to elevate the Monrogh doctrine to the level of IRL article of faith. I can have my variant Yelmalio (who is not Lightfore; as for Elmal: never heard of her), he can have his Elmal (who is not Lightfore), and Chaosium can have its Yelmalio = Elmal = Lightfore. Everybody goes their own way and everybody is happy. War is over today if you want it — would that it were always that easy. For a fandom that follows a world with contradictory myths, we are too concerned with the one true way. Sure, one doesn’t want to pass off variant Gloranthas as canonical, but: [a] it was clear from word one that that wasn’t being done; [b] aren’t we assured that the only people who need to worry about canon are writers of official Chaosium products? These days it is YGWV rather than YGMV, so isn’t heterodoxy the new orthodoxy? I am not saying we shouldn’t argue about how best to vary Gloranthas, but can’t we do it in a light, fun, mutually encouraging way? Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend. We are not heroquesting to enforce the straight strait way of Brithos, we are gobbling the Mee Vorala and aiming for a technicolour palimpsest of glorious incompatibility, no? Computer says ‘no’. Word of Jeff is … Goes against all the known facts. Is that MGF? Is it boring gatekeeping? You have purchased your toy, now I am going to supervise your play in case you do something that’d make Jesus Malkion blush. On the subject of doing difficult things, I found this press release from the Seven Mothers (some claim it was adapted from something from the desk of Argrath that fell backwards through time along with a pair of Speedos):

The angry young Piscoi only listen to Drexciya these days — and there’s your undermining of the fish origin story. And the Pamaltofuturists among the Ouori are not happy about their GtG write up — blatant racism, they say. But you know what — the Triolini united will never be defeated! I have seen the marine Wakandas they are building out there. Rumours are they are making contacts ashore among the Rote Armee Fraktion trollkin — the ones with the Janis Joplin shades and the stories about drinking with Peter Brötzmann. Rock & roll politics.

“It's impossible for man to live and breathe underwater forever,” was their main complaint. I am listening to the Gil Evans version in your honour, although YO was pressing some Hawkwind gatefold into my hands — he has just discovered “The Golden Void” — pupils like saucers. Saucers, I tell you!

Don’t listen to anything the Mostali say. They deliberately obfuscate and misrepresent their cosmology so that no one will quite take on board that they think the big bang setting the world machine in motion was a mistake — a mistake they fully intend to rectify. The only good Mostal is a stationary Mostal — that is what they really think. They are onto me. They are at the door. Please remember to mention me in tapes you leave behind.