mfbrandi

7 minutes ago, Rob Darvall said:

I've been Gregged often enough to know that I find retconning a pain.

I hate to speak for someone else, but I think he knows he is swimming against the stream. (I definitely could be wrong.)

9 minutes ago, Rob Darvall said:

I even wrote in-world stuff defending the traditional Elaml cult.

The one where Elmal rises in the morning?

6 minutes ago, Darius West said:

We need to commit these exceptions to paper in the RQG Gods of Glorantha books and insure their posterity, when the danger is they will be forgotten and ignored

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.

12 hours ago, SDLeary said:

Also, let's face it, humans have long memories. Look at our own world and some of the ancient differences which cause trouble today. Even WITH Mythical/Heroquesting support, the timeframe involved is much too short for the type of wholesale replacement that is being proposed.

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.

7 hours ago, svensson said:

My idea here isn't to 'make Yelmalio with serial numbers filed off'. My intention is to make a cult that firmly believes that Yelmalio and Elmal are separate deities

3 hours ago, Rob Darvall said:

It is possible … to have YGV in this respect. However, … this is going to be a pretty big divergence from where Glorantha goes, making it harder to sustain over the long term.

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):

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Now do the triolini

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.

11 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Now do the triolini: 
it's too bad that our friends can't be with us today
the machine that we built would never save us.

“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!

51 minutes ago, radmonger said:

But the Mostali look deeper and say, it was the Grower who, in growing, made things bigger.

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.

32 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

How convenient it would be to engineer and promote a new sun with access to the heat stripped out. How lucky to participate in a grand project to swap out an old sun for a new one …

Obviously they would have wanted to train the raw material along friendly lines, taking a hot little sun that won the mountaintop fight and pruning the dangerous heat from it across a few generations. When it could no longer reliably produce anything but light they were satisfied.

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.

10 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Opening up the notion of a Sun Dome LBQ with this association makes me wonder what independent non-Orlanth Sun Domes do at Sacred Time. I don't know if it's possible for them to reinvigorate the world in quite the Orlanth way . … their version might preserve or recover ritual elements that otherwise didn't really survive the Bright Empire. This is probably not quite an annual Hill of Gold, which IMG remains a more personal spiritual adventure. Do they integrate into the Orlanth LBQ with some form of Protects the Stead?

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):

8 hours ago, scott-martin said:

at least one of the little suns was a friend to the elves in the dark. Did they warm their hands at his heat, even though the fuel was unspeakable?

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.

4 hours ago, svensson said:

if some of you could suggest Rune and Spirit magic spells … along with your logic as to why the cult would include such a spell … My goal is to offer the one-page summary of what I think Elmal might look like as a Storm oriented hearth-guard deity.

2 hours ago, radmonger said:

The cult of Elmal the night watchman

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:

1. Celestial/Sky: Dayzatar and company (remote)
2. Middle Air: Yelm (rivals)
3. Surface/Grounded: Lowfires (potential allies)
4. 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.)

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

When it comes to writing up hero quests in the future RQG publications, the Thunder Brothers are going to become indispensable for the detail they can potentially provide for Orlanth cult background info.

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! 😉

10 hours ago, svensson said:

perhaps as a banked hearthfire that doesn't produce much light but warms all those near.

10 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

goodness, protect the innocents, possibly even celibacy … teased by Stormbull and even Humakti … but still cool compared to the misogynistic xenophobics that are the Yelmalians.

9 hours ago, radmonger said:

It seems Yelmalio is what you get when you worship Lightfore as the male gender role model

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.

On 4/8/2023 at 2:39 PM, svensson said:

I know it will have some access to Fire magics, though probably not a great deal … they won't be getting access to Sunspear

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 … ?

7 hours ago, svensson said:

But as I think of the Storm Pantheon, I really like the dichotomy of the Loyal Thane, the dutiful sworn man who sees Honor in keeping home and hearth safe.

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?

15 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

When potatoes were retconned

i don't know this retcon

Yeah, you do. Just in case, here it is.

4 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

potatos can kill

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?

4 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

potatos can kill: you just use the "eyes", which contain glycoalkaloids.

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.

On 4/6/2023 at 11:44 AM, DrGoth said:

"Elmal? Elmal? Never heard of that guy. We worship Yelmalio. Always have. That's what Monrogh said, anyway."

4 hours ago, Darius West said:

Nope.  Hinterland Tovtaros Elmali never converted.  Monrogh was a Lunar agent as far as they are concerned.

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.

14 hours ago, Jeff said:

Lokarnos is the god of the wheel, a magical token he created to honor Yelm. Through cleverness, he made carts and wagons and loaded them with goods to help his betters.

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.)

14 hours ago, Jeff said:

when a Lokarnos wagoner wants to sell goods

14 hours ago, Jeff said:

Lokarnos' cult are the Teamsters of Genertela. Not merchants, not traders

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?

47 minutes ago, radmonger said:

a divination will confirm the transfer took place, even if it was hundreds of miles away. This has yet to develop into a full-scale distributed banking system

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.

5 hours ago, Minlister said:

Yes, you are right, my post is misleading

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:

1. translating ‘god learner’;
2. finding a better — more appropriate — name for the Godlearners.

Is that fair?

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

At first, the Jrusteli religious movement learned about their own … God, which is why it is God in the singular.

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.