mfbrandi

This is perfect. The elves stole Yelmalio’s heat — sending it where? — and used his light to survive in Yelm’s absence. He was rescued by ZZ who had warmth to spare. Then the tale of Nysalor and Arkat — clearly misunderstood, but the question has always been just how — recapitulates or extends the love story of the OG odd couple. ———————— EDIT: Of course, this makes one wonder whether the Aldryami were the source of all the trouble. Orlanth says it was him that slew Yelm (that drunken old ham playing the sun) — and perhaps he did for all it mattered, the real action was elsewhere — but then he always liked to be the centre of attention, and Aldrya is happy to hide many secrets in the wild wild wood. Death as separation: light from heat.

Still trying not to derail poor old Elmal. Well, Yelmalio doesn’t need a quest to bring back the light, because there is a light that never goes out, and it is him … although he aches to go out. For he is more than half in love with easeful Death — the little death, the grave, and the cosmic death of the Void. But he endures and he “wrestles” with my uncle, my uncle who promises it all. And the hill of gold is a darkened underpass, and it is the problem, though the solution is clearly indicated. Ahem! The quest, yes, the quest: surely Yelmalio’s quest is to bring back warmth to the world. There again, Zorak Zoran is his man: between them they contain the full power of Aether. (They are the perfect couple. We really need to make YO–ZZ shipping a thing. I sneer at your K/S fanfic.) Maybe this is why some people insist that Yelmalio is not horsey: they don’t want to frighten the horses.

Elf diets and wood-fired stars (escaped from Elmal construction site): I thought the cold little sun was the elf friend, but that aside aren’t all elves vegetarians, so hardly squeamish? I don’t know whether vegetarian elves are a joke or whether the Aldryami are determined not to rely on non-vegetable life for their existence. That is why they kid themselves that Mee Vorala is descended from Flamal: they really cannot do without her. Meanwhile, the “black elves”, Venus fly-traps, sundews, and pitcher plants are chuckling at Aldryami memes on their social networks.

I guess I would look at the motivation for having an Elmal Redux. As I see it, Fire/Sky deities come at four levels/heights, cold at the top, hot at the bottom: Celestial/Sky: Dayzatar and company (remote) Middle Air: Yelm (rivals) Surface/Grounded: Lowfires (potential allies) Underground: Lodril and company (disorderly, untrustworthy) If I have it right, the old HW conception of Elmal was to be the honest-to-god sun (not a nightlight) but subordinate to Orlanth. Rigsdal then plays the Yelmalio rôle, and Rigsdal is to Elmal as Elmal is to Orlanth (in terms of loyalty and chain of command). However, if Elmal is the sun, what is going on with the Lightbringer quest? If the Evil Emperor is not the sun, why does Orlanth have to bring him back? Good riddance, right? And clearly Orlanth didn’t kill Elmal and then leave Elmal in charge while he went off to bring back Elmal. All a bit of a mess. (Yes, I know, “Yelm disintegrates,” but still …) In other words, Yelm is part of the Orlanth mythos and pantheon: the Orlanthi already have a sun god, it is just that they hate him. [EDIT: Probably because they are ginger and don’t handle UV well.] So we have Yelmalio as a little cold sun/star/planet who endures and shines while “daddy sun” Yelm is dead. But in character Yelmalio is more like Dayzatar, a bit chilly and standoffish, a bit too foreign and not-like-us for the Storm Tribe. So if Elmal != the sun, still Elmal = Yelmalio doesn’t work for some people. We should respect that, although personally I worship at the altar of Yelmalio and often visit the antique shop in Brighton that he runs with my uncle (Julian/Hugh Paddick to ZZ’s Sandy/Kenneth Williams — you say Polaris, I say Polari). I am guessing that a Lodrilish Elmal wouldn’t scratch the itch, either — according to the stereotype, lazy & lustful; intimately mixed with the Earth, which might make the Orlanthi squirm a little; possibly volcanic and not to be relied upon. But at ground level we find deities partaking of but who serve the tribe, and in some cases are a bit more human and/or domesticated. Not chilly and ascetic like the gods, not rivals for the middle air like Yelm, and not overheated and getting up to unspeakable things “down there” like Lodril. But just right — in the Goldilocks zone. We might even think that unlike stars and volcanoes, their fire relies on to burn, tying them more tightly to the Storm Tribe. If I am right — and who is to say I am? it hasn’t happened before — there is no point in making Elmal a Rigsdal or a Yelmalio-who-knows-his-place, as we already have Rigsdal for that, weird chilly old Rigsdal. Don’t people yearn for someone warmer, more approachable? (Not me, obviously: I like a god to be untrustworthy and unfathomable; GSOH; must like children … as a snack.) All this a prelude to: Spirit magic, indefinite duration, 2 points: keep fire burning — cast on a “domestic” fire (hearth fire, camp fire, funeral pyre, etc. but not a wild fire — not Oakfed), the fire will continue to burn come-what-may as long as the caster is fighting to defend it; if the caster is taken out of the fight or the fight ends, the fire becomes a normal fire once more. (Rationale: as long as Elmal is fighting to defend it, there will be something to defend.) Rune magic, single use, permanent, 1 point: eternal flame of the fallen — cast on a fire on which keep fire burning has been cast and which is still burning though the kfb caster has been killed defending it (not sacrificed by the eternal flame caster), the fire will keep burning till the universe is extinguished by the Devil; the fire burns in place and at its current size, it is not portable or expandable — although you can stack fuel around it for a temporarily larger fire — and you cannot resurrect (or make undead or spirit of disease) the dead defender. (Rationale: that which a life was given to defend shall endure, along with the good name of its defender. A good place to put a shrine.)

Or there is enough Orlanthi stuff to last us till doomsday the next visit from Wakboth without begging for more of it. If you love the Thunder Brothers so much, publish a JC supplement about them and “prove @Jeff wrong”. @svensson doesn’t like the deprecation of the Elmal cult, so he will write his own. I am no Elmali, but — like everyone else, I think — I applaud the DIY spirit. YGWV but only if you make it. One doesn’t have to agree with other people’s decisions to think it better that they make their own rather than doing what you or I tell them to do, no? I mean no one should do what I tell them to do … ever! 😉

To me, all these suggest that Mahome has dressed herself in armour and risen from the grate to smite the foe. I don’t say that this is necessarily the way you should go, but it does fit with the interpretation of Gustbran as a manifestation of Mahome rather than a bloke who hides in her petticoats. (Because I cannot leave well enough alone, I might make all the Lowfires manifestations of Mahome: you think I am a mere hearthfire, but Oakfed is just one of my guises — I am all the fires that burn upon the surface of the earth.) Elmal as Lowfire gives us “esteemed by primitives, valued by barbarians, despised by sun and sky worshippers, and revered as companions by commoners.” (WoD) You don’t put a star on top of a mountain but a beacon fire. It makes a kind of sense (a twisted dream logic): when the Sun has been slain, you get light and heat by burning stuff — if you relied on cold lights in the sky, you’d freeze to death. One way of looking at this would be that Orlanth left the daughter of Ernalda and Lodril in charge when he went off questing — the mature thing to do. Perhaps also this would be some kind of reply to making Vinga into Orlanth in a dress, but I wouldn’t lean into the disguise/deceit aspect of it: from Mahome’s point of view, she has just donned the garb for the job, and if others see a man, that is their foolishness. The Truth rune is just a Man rune doing a handstand, seeing a man in Elmal is the truth stood on its head, and the True Fire is the Hearth not the Sun.

So who is Elmal according to your take? The Sun that rises in the morning and descends into the Underworld every evening (per the Elmal cultists of Hero Wars/Storm Tribe, presumably making Yelm an imposter of some kind from their POV), Lightfore (cold as the dead, only comes out at night, and therefore hangs out with zombies like ZZ), or another member of the Fire/Sky lot, not necessarily with their own ‘planet’? Or … ?

Dichotomy — isn’t that dangerously close to Lunar talk? On the one hand, a loyal, honourable, and useful god — who definitely isn’t going to eat the children from the inside — could be a bit dull. On the other, I am bound to praise all dissident cult building — so good luck with this — and let’s hope that the firm grip of the fiery truth sometimes gives Orlanth pause for thought. Elmal as the conscience of the Storm Tribe: “Stop raging and puffing for a moment and think of your duty … sir.” The grizzled NCO to Orlanth’s anti-heroic junior officer?

i don't know this retcon Yeah, you do. Just in case, here it is.

Well, it is no surprise. Think of the Blue Moon Assassins as the pretty ladies who cut the thread. When potatoes were retconned, what happened to the rest of the Solanaceae? We wouldn’t want to be done out of chillis, aubergines, and tomatoes, would we?

They save the eyes for their even more secret weapon.

Blue Moon Assassins — as every schoolgirl knows — pelt their victims to death with potatoes. Why? They double as field rations and because they don’t exist in Glorantha, they take up no ENC, are invisible, undetectable, and untraceable. In short, they are the perfect assassin’s weapon.

The joy of heroquesting as time travel/retcon/change war: only the hardcore Elmali heroquesters who have chopped themselves out of the timeline even “remember” Elmal, and their “erstwhile co-religionists” cannot recognise them or their odd little sun god. But there is a delegation from Ingsoc outside come to assure me that neither I nor anyone else ever thought of heroquesting that way, nor that the Pharaoh had fallen backward through time.

Whose perspective is this? It sounds more like Yelm or Yelm’s clergy than Lokarnos himself — the clever are not known for believing they have betters. If the Lokarnos clergy speak like this, are they being sarcastic or slyly self-protective? If not, are they imposed from above by the Yelmites, rather than being recruited from the teamster flock? What would that do for intra-cult relations? (Of course, my father was a bus driver and his brother a lorry driver, so my more patrician readers should feel free to dismiss me as a chippy oik.) They sell goods, but they are not traders; how does that work? I am not saying this cannot be explained away, but it does cry out for amplification, no?

I had someone else — likely hiding behind a mask or shell company — down as the deity of fintech, cryptocurrency, internet banking, and suchlike shenanigans. All trades are verified via straightforward human sacrifice. Simpler mathematics than the blockchain and — She assures me — more sustainable from an ecological perspective.

Yeah, didn’t mean to have a go at you — it was just a question about the thread in general. And obviously, discussing both is fine.

There seems to be an equivocation here between: translating ‘god learner’; finding a better — more appropriate — name for the Godlearners. Is that fair?

Hmm, I don’t think English works like that: horse whisperer dog trainer pigeon fancier Likely many horses, dogs, and pigeons involved. A pigeon fancier doesn’t have to start with only one bird. Which is not to say that they didn’t start with one god and move on from there — you just cannot read that off the name. But perhaps you are pulling our legs. It seems likely.

Fine, but as a matter of practicality, what do you do when you hit something that is not covered by the game rules? One approach is to minimise GM fiat by treating Glorantha as the real world + miracles: if it is not a designated miracle and it doesn’t have game rules, think about it as a real-world problem and try to go with players’ “real-world sensible” suggestions. There are other ways to do it — other good ways, IMHO — but this seems a reasonable “simulationist” approach. If the world gets mad enough, I can imagine it breaking down, but then you probably don’t want a crunchy system. Probably … 😉

God of packed lunches and breakfast cereals? Oh, wait, that’s Tiffinbix.

Tricksterish, certainly, but how many raven, fox, coyote, … and spider spirits and/or shamans are there out there? And the trickster shaman ought to be a familiar figure to Gloranthaphiles. Presumably, Gloranthan spirit cultism/shamanism is a pretty capacious concept and extends beyond stereotypes of Siberians. Where do we put the ‘faith healers’ who will produce a tumour/chicken liver from your arm with a penknife? Where do we put all the Aleister Crowleys who may pretend to be devotees of Uleria or Wakboth (or some such big-deal deity) but are strictly small-potatoes show people with a deadpan delivery and poetry as bad as Orlanth’s? Give them a strong connection to and a way to leverage the power of equally minor-league spirits? Maybe. Sometimes. The trouble with Eurmal as such is that he is a giant gob on a matching knob always about to tip over into threatening to destroy the world. One wouldn’t want the omnipotent phallic psychopath to be the only trickster template.

I think I am being misunderstood, but I think what I have in mind wouldn’t suit you, anyway, so it likely doesn’t matter. FWIW, here’s what I had in mind, stolen from Gopnik: The showman is the shaman, travelling from town to town. The Mechanical Turk is the ‘cultic framework’ — the mask (with name) that any anonymous local chess player/minor ‘nameless’ local spirit can put on. When they are being the Turk, the chess player beats stronger players than they normally would/the minor spirit can do Turkish things they otherwise couldn’t — they are by no means grand masters, but their effective performance is upped. The shaman or spirit cult gets portability without needing a mobile or omnipresent spirit — just hire the local talent and lend them a costume. The idea is not to make all spirit cults the same or to fit known named spirits into a Procrustean bed of monocult, but to have a shaman who is a touring Colonel Tom with no Elvis, just a spangly jumpsuit to lend to the local no-hoper. Equally, it could be done with franchises and no touring at all. The Gopnik thing just struck me as one way to have seemingly the same low-powered entity popping up everywhere: “If this thing is everywhere, why isn’t it of minor deity power?” “Because it is an illusion: it is a Mechanical Turk.” It is just how it struck me. Not for every spirit cult, and probably for most people, not for any. Beats chickens dancing on a hotplate, though.

You summoned one of Horus’s undocumented sisters.

I know it led to drift (sorry), but I would protest that this itself is not off topic — it is not about automata. The point was: different spirit, same spirit cult wrapper, and that that might empower the spirits as well as serving the cultists. I thought it obvious enough that it didn’t need unpacking.

Do you mean intra-clan dynamic? There is this from Greg — owed to @Eff: