mfbrandi

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

There are a number of phenomena that defy our world's observations

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 … 😉

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

My outside hope is that we finally get a cult of Iffinbix write-up.

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

3 hours ago, g33k said:

This shaman strikes me as being very Eurmali, tbh...

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.

3 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

With spirits and spirit cults I favor differentiation - it's one of the reasons that most spirit cults remain minor.

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.

59 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

something more like a god … WOAH, sorry, big peregrine just sailed close to the window

You summoned one of Horus’s undocumented sisters.

3 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

We all know of the chess-playing “automaton”, the Turk. According to Adam Gopnik on the radio this morning, the showman didn’t tour with a chess player but picked up a different one in each town — at the local chess café. Sitting crouched in the box, the chess player would beat stronger opponents than sat across from them in the normal way. I immediately thought of this thread.

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.

4 hours ago, DrGoth said:

That would give an interesting political dynamic to those clans and tribes.

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

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I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban, who reports that in some clans half join the government and half join the resistance, so that whoever wins the clan will be fed.

THAT is a passion for family.

2 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

if you add them, people think it's a weirdly out-of-place decision

Because they never read the Argonautika?

26 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

it might be difficult to tell whether you are … talking to "the same" cult spirit, or one of a closely related class … that can all be worshipped as one spirit cult.

We all know of the chess-playing “automaton”, the Turk. According to Adam Gopnik on the radio this morning, the showman didn’t tour with a chess player but picked up a different one in each town — at the local chess café. Sitting crouched in the box, the chess player would beat stronger opponents than sat across from them in the normal way. I immediately thought of this thread.

5 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Given that the Earth Rune is not noted as being greedy or hungry (that's Darkness), nor is there any gravity myth at all … it's clear to me that the whole "No Physics in Glorantha" argument is baseless

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Ah, but the Underworld is dark and the land of the dead. Below the Earth’s sickly green surface, Death and Darkness are ever pulling us down to our ultimate fate; if it weren’t for the decay brought by Mallia and Mee Vorala, the dead would in time sink whole into the ground, but as it is, the humans bury them before they are touched by corruption or our teeth — thence Swems conveys them piecemeal to the hungrier mouths below. Even the swift, the Light gone from its eyes, is plucked from the Air by Death and falls down, as everything must. That, my little enlo — my delicious snackling — is the tale of gravity, for Death is a weighty matter indeed. Tomorrow, I shall tell you of how the womb is a grave, a tale our people know better than any other. — Auntie Umbar’s Bedtime Stories

That said, of course Glorantha has physics, chemistry, and all the other subject matter of the natural sciences. That won’t stop the Gloranthans telling stories, nor should it. But when their stories usurp the place of science, we get game designers Godlearnerism, and Arachne whispers to me that even the gods — grumpily trapped in their 148-page splatbooks storybooks — think that that is taking myth too literally.

4 hours ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

They MUST view anything threatening their static Being as evil since it is a danger to their very fiber of existence.

This is why the king of the gods is a puffed-up windbag: “I am big. I exist. I only look like a void.”

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Other interpretations of evil will be revealed and explored where appropriate. Some will be mentioned here. There is an Empty Void, which is a pre-everything conception and bears some resemblance to a Buddhist Nivanna — CoT, p. 106

Stafford as Trickster — so he is putting us on: Nirvana doesn’t really top his list of evils. Stafford as Arkati Trickster — hell, maybe he does mean it.

3 hours ago, Agentorange said:

I've … tended to think of spirit cults as … only contactable in [a] single location.

Do you mean the spirit which is the object of the spirit cult or the religious group which is devoted to the spirit?

3 hours ago, Agentorange said:

if their worship is too widespread they start to drift across the line into minor deity status

If the worry is the power level of an entity worshipped in many places, I wouldn’t let my Glorantha be a slave to the fantasy cliché that deities are worship-powered (god/desses fading from lack of worship even makes it into the Tough Guide to Fantasyland) — after all, the greatest of the great gods, Arachne Solara, is ostensibly little worshipped and who wants a theory as to why she is nonetheless immensely powerful, or a book-keeping phase in which deities’ powers are calculated based on last season’s worship? There is a POW economy, doubtless, but possibly best to handwave the divine end of it — the gods’ main earnings and outgoings are beyond our ken and nothing to do with cult.

Your Glorantha may productively vary from my idiot ramblings — do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

KAJABOTH’S TALE

How many Devils? Well, my little cabbage, before the Block, you never saw any round here.

I was watching Storm Bull chase his … tail (let’s call it that: this is a family show) — round he’d go, but since he’d bitten the end off, he could never catch it — when a dirty great lump of rock came crashing down at a rate of knots. Crunch! Our ears were ringing for days. When the dust started to clear, a huge horned figure — with screaming faces boiling out of its skin; all over, but densest on its forearms; funny how you remember the details — coalesced in the air in front of us. Then a hole so black it looked like it had been painted on the desert floor with Acme pitch opened up under it, and whoosh, it was gone. The hole closed, or evaporated, or … anyway, wasn’t there any more.

We were left with this lump of Truestone, known and loathed everywhere. But you know what? I don’t think it was Truestone in flight — it was just your bog-standard pyroclastic crap — but it hit so hard that all the chaos in it and the patch of ground it hit boiled out and condensed into the ‘Devil’ we’d seen. It takes a lot of energy to knock the natural chaos out of things, and then you are left with lumps of utterly inert, unworkable ‘rock’. Cut off from all the natural cycles, they just sit there waiting for the end of time. What a waste.

What happened to that big angry mother when it reached Hell? I don’t know: I had a hot date with Yelmalio that night. I asked him whether he wanted to go to the party, but he said, “No, all those guys are dead down there.” Laugh? I nearly broke a tusk. But when all the bigshots came up out of the ground the next morning looking embarrassed — I mean really shifty — they were preceded by the cutest baby goat you ever saw, and I have kept it as a pet ever since. You know what? In 1600-odd years, it hasn’t grown an inch or aged a day, adorable as ever. Just don’t look into its eyes unless you’ve had a very stiff drink. The things I have seen there. And worse, not seen — “the unearthly dark of fathomless absence,” you know?

Your round, I think. The usual for me and a bowl of soya milk for Fluffy.

 Spun off from the lovely Diseases and Decay thread.

6 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

7 hours ago, scott-martin said:

One of two things I love about this is the ways it reopens questions of who exactly is trapped under the Block.

One interpretation would be that Wakboth is trapped under the Block. But because he was killed, he went to the Underworld next, because that's what you do

In the before times, we saw it like this:

• Kajabor is Chaos-as-the-Void, that into which everything vanishes, even gods and information
• Wakboth kills Kajabor
• Dead Kajabor wrestles Arachne Solara in Hell
• Arachne wins and synthesizes Time from Cosmos and Chaos

But in retrospect, we should have been more cautious, for as early as Cults of Terror we were warned not to take things at face value.

So when Wakboth began to show up in the net getting up to unspeakable hi-jinks with our beloved Spider, it wasn’t exactly a retcon. And Kajabor as the father of Time is only “right” in the sense a psychoanalytic dream interpretation is “right”: the patient accepts it; evidence doesn’t get a look-in.

To find out what happened, I took my uncle out for an evening of absinthe chugging and tale telling. He is neither quite alive nor even slightly sane, so he was bound to have the real low-down. (He provided Rita Hayworth’s singing voice in Gilda.)

KAJABOR’S TALE, V. 1

The explosion of the Spike was our Big Bang: from then, we were on the clock. The clock is running down, and the Mostali are deluded in thinking they can fix it. It ain’t really broke. It just is what it is … till it isn’t. They will get their precious stasis — they just gotta wait.

“Err … that’s a bit terse and abstract, ZeeZee.”

KAJABOR’S TALE, V. 2

The — I am trying to keep a straight face, really — mighty chaos fighter Storm Bull was facing off against Kajabor when shrapnel from the exploding Spike took out the Voidster — ker-splat! — smearing Old Chaosface thinly across all creation. Urox was a helpless bystander — or by this stage, just a bypanter and bybleeder. Instead of having one consolidated easy-to-manage giant non-hole in creation, we now had nano-non-particles of nothing embedded in everything. However fine you chopped the world, there it wasn’t: Chaos. Since then, the world’s been going to the Hyenas. What’s under the Block? Nothing, kiddo, nothing. And that, my little enlo, is how time began.

“Yeah, I think we can sell that one. Thanks, ZeeZee.”

WAKBOTH’S TALE

I mean who was Wakboth, anyway? Just a kid, right? In the wrong place at the wrong time.

So the gods — Orlanth, Yelm, and all those tossers — stuff our baby goat in a sack and take him off to the Spider as a snack-cum-sacrifice-cum-fee. They have a PR problem, and they figure she’s the one to spin them a suitable tale. She makes a show of playing with the food, then bundles it up in silk and maybe gives it a good suck. (It is dark down there, hard to see.) The gods have had a pointless war and pretty much trashed the planet; now they want to make up publicly, but no one wants to own up to being the bad guy.

“Look,” says Arachne, obviously bored, “I have waved my magic wand and put all your sins in the goat — anything really bad, just say the goat did it — and if anyone asks why everything is falling apart, say … the Spider ate the goat and shat out time: it’s a compromise. Some crap like that. You’ll busk the details.”

“But, Arachne, filling the goat with evil — that’s just symbolic, right?”

“Yeah, sure, whatever. You are as depraved now as you ever were, aren’t you, you old scrote?” Did she have her back pair of legs crossed? The Spider is a trickster, after all.

Everyone marches topside, and soft-hearted Arachne releases the goatling enjoining it to gambol forth and make mischief. She chuckles to herself thinking of what the cult scribes will write about this in years to come — for of course, she knows.

————————————————————————————————————————

This is the kind of farrago one types after drinking strong cocoa too close to bedtime.

Don’t agree — impossible, anyway — or disagree, but write your own True Tales of the Devils and post them here, for it is only by repeatedly abusing Godtime that we can reshape reality.

So we grope toward a neo-godlearnerish revisionist (non-canon!) Gloranthan tree of life …

Mallia can have the titchy things — conceived of as physical or spiritual, to taste — the Prokaryotes (bacteria & archaea), Plasmids, Viruses, Viroids, and even the Prions.

Let’s play to the gallery and give Uleria all the Eukaryotes, and let some scholar somewhere be scratching “Uleria Euleria.” Within the Eukaryotes:

• We could lazily assign all the Bikonts (Diphoda) to Flamal — green plants and a bunch of other stuff.
• Within the Unikonts (Amorphea), we have the Opisthokonta covered: Mee Vorala gets the Holomycota (inc. fungi) and Hykim–Mikyh gets the Holozoa (inc. animals).
• Who gets the Amoebozoa? Surely they were queueing up for the job of parent of gorps and the dog vomit slime mold.
• The Apusomonadida? I have no idea. (And I am guessing we don’t care.)

The lichens are joint enterprises: Mee Vorala + Flamal or Mallia (it varies case by case).

The glamourpuss macrobiota — over in Hykim-Mikyh & Flamal Land — lean heavily on the children of Mee Vorala and Mallia to get anything done and to keep the place tidy, but that is OK because it is an interdependence.

35 minutes ago, Brian Duguid said:

And I do wonder about the role of Entropy within Time — we know that Time was quite literally made from what remained of the dead god of Entropy.

Do we know that? We thought we did, but do we?

Recent canon would seem to be that Wakboth is the father of Time. The Glorantha Sourcebook has Arachne Solara devouring Wakboth alive (p. 131). It also has it that the vows of the “beings responsible for the creation of the world … are the source and cause of Time” (p. 133). One could almost imagine that the birth of the child Time was really just a matter of the gods agreeing that Arachne should vomit up the still living Wakboth and let it loose — a Great Compromise, indeed. (Yes, I know, that is not really how spiders eat.) After all, chaos, entropy, and evil are all loose in Glorantha.

That still leaves Kajabor = Wakboth vs. Kajabor != Wakboth. Don’t ask me, I don’t know. But perhaps the uncertainty over whether entropy is evil and whether decay is entropy explains all the unnecessary shilly-shallying over the agents of decay. Maybe even why Mallia is sometimes associated with Chaos and sometimes not. Vagueness and uncertainty are fine if they are productive. Are they in this case? Someone else can answer that, perhaps.

15 minutes ago, Brian Duguid said:

What about "decay"? As David points out, fungi feed upon decaying matter but may not be the source of decay. It's worth noting that Time has its origin in the the devouring of the Chaos god of entropy, Kajabor, by Arachne Solara. Entropy — the tendency towards annihilation is built into Time, but is constantly counteracted by the cycle of life, the birth and rebirth of souls, and the growth of new living matter.

I still don’t get why we would want to squirm away from the thought that decay is a positive — facilitating recycling — with that ecosystem service provided by Darkness entities.

It wouldn’t do to equate decay with Kajabor–Time as the “agent of entropy” bringing about the heat death of the universe (when it will no longer be possible for anything to happen). Sure, any event may bring the end of all things that bit closer, but decay isn’t special in that respect, and it fends off the other apocalypse of converting all matter into corpses and other waste. [NB: This is just supposed to be a good-enough-for-RPG-metaphor account. Of course, even judged that way, you may find it defective.]

We used to grant Mallia an ambivalent position: on the one hand craving destruction, but on the other being an important part of the cycle of life — corruption … [w]ithout her work in this regard, there soon would be no room for the living. Isn’t a little bit of nuance a good thing? And having the same service provided by the -coded Mallia and the -coded Mee Vorala is better yet. Maybe it is a Darkness thing — as you seem to suggest — and not a Life vs. Death thing, never mind a Chaos-as-evil or Chaos-as-the-end-of-everything thing.

49 minutes ago, Brian Duguid said:

fungi feed upon decaying matter but may not be the source of decay

This seems to be saying that Mee Vorala needs someone to chew her food for her. As has been noted before, Mee Vorala doesn’t even need to wait for you to die to get her teeth into you — see, for example, this book review.

1 hour ago, Richard S. said:

I'd guess it was removed from the Sun Dome largely because most Yelmalian PCs will be from there.

That was the thinking behind my original sarcastic comment. White Hats vs. Black Hats.

I understand the thought that slavery is too icky — or too real-world sensitive — to include in a setting. I really do. It is not as if any of us here are fans of real-world slavery, chattel or otherwise. But then no one in Glorantha would do it.

But I am not a huge fan of “we are good guys, we would never; they are villains, they do it all the time — and to their own mothers!” I guess that being British, I am used to thinking that we are not good guys.

14 minutes ago, Richard S. said:

Sartar Sun Dome no longer relies on slave labor.

Done setting wide — not even the most depraved broo could imagine taking a slave — that could be quite refreshing.

19 hours ago, Richard S. said:

Our own physics have never applied to anything in Glorantha

17 hours ago, Agentorange said:

Our own physics apply all the time

I love this.

However, given that an RPG has a “thicker” world than a wargame or chess — where the game rules practically exhaust the world — I would cast my vote for real-world physics (RWP) applying as much as possible. Where there is not some bit of game machinery which contradicts RWP — in which case lean into the game mechanics — let real-world reasoning apply. Isn’t that better for player agency than citing bits of “lore” without easily calculated implications?

That said, I also have a soft spot for “whatever the table can be convinced of before the dice are rolled, that is how it is (but it might be different next time, if someone talks us round).” Some might want to reserve that kind of thing for heroquests and similar psychonautics. YGWV.

2 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

And I’ll mention in passing that Jeff thinks he got some stuff badly wrong in WF#15, most notably the size of the helot “ergeshi” population (of former Kitori).

Stab in the dark (i.e. without looking at the number in WF#15): turns out the helot population is smaller?

Back in the day — croaked the old man — Mallia’s diseases could exist apart from spells and spirits of disease, and she had a rôle in the necessary process of decay. In the Cults of Terror write-up:

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[Mallia] found nourishment and life amid the fallen foes, the wreckage and destruction, and the blood of everything that died in that age … Mallia is also the janitor of the gods, providing the corruption which turns flesh and bone back to dust. Without her work in this regard, there soon would be no room for the living. — p.26

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SPREAD DISEASE
With this skill, a small district can be infected with a sickness without resorting to a spirit of disease. This non-magical attack is recognizable only by a Healer of Arroin … Quantities of the appropriate potion are implanted in often-trafficked areas such as wells, pantries, silos, cribs, etc. Inhabitants and visitors to the district will have to make their resistance roll or contract the disease. — p. 28

The obvious way to read this would be that Mallia’s bacteria had their expected rôle in decay and disease. There were spirits of disease which spread — but don’t seem to have been identical with — diseases. Chaosium is free to retcon this — and seemingly has — but I cannot help as to the reason why.

14 minutes ago, David Scott said:

They [i.e. fungi] aren't the source of decay.

Canon is what it is, but what is the point of denying the children of Mee Vorala the real-life rôle of fungi in decay?

12 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

fig wine … might be even easier to make than palm wine

Maybe, but 2 hours from freshly tapped sap to 4% alcohol is pretty easy and quick.

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Typically the sap is collected from the cut flower of the palm tree. A container is fastened to the flower stump to collect the sap … An alternative method is the felling of the entire tree. Where this is practised, a fire is sometimes lit at the cut end to facilitate the collection of sap. — Wikipedia

There has to be a Trickster tale of Eurmal torching an entire oasis in search of a quick fix.

1 hour ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

date wine  is something to think about as … IMG the oasis people grow dates.

This is great, and palm wine suggests plot hooks:

• in a bizarre bid to improve cult relations, the Crimson Bat and Mallia cults collaborate to use megabats to spread Nipah virus;
• palm wine addicts — drinkards — may develop the ability to deal with the dead and gods, as per Amos Tutuola. (“By the glaze in his eyes I knew he was on a Heroquest” — Cults of Prax, p. 94)