mfbrandi

I had in mind the fate of Krarsht worshippers after death.

Maybe (some) Elmal worshippers say this, but given that Elmal = Yelmalio, isn’t this like saying that you can’t see the Evening Star in the morning (although Hesperus = Phosphorus = Venus)?

Or, you know, people run the cult entry exams, and if the examiner is an illuminate, they can write their own recruitment policy.

Are all forms of being eaten by Chaos the same? Kajabor: snuffed out, so arguably the highest form of enlightenment Crimson Bat: eternal agony, so sounds more like Hell (and not distinctively Chaotic) Krarsht: who knows? maybe mystical union or snuffing out; maybe uploaded and filed for future reference But if the status of Bat food got retconned into send to /dev/null in pursuit of “all Chaos is the same and it is all bad”, what does that tell us?

On the face of it, this is a very odd reason: at some time in the future, the Bat god may be healed, so right here, right now the CA cultists should be neutral to the Bat cultists. Huh? And arguably the Bat cult is the enemy of the Bat, anyway. Surely, it exists to control it and deploy it as a weapon, not to be its BFF. “I am going to take a neutral attitude toward your abuser today, because in the future you may be healed.”

TL;DR: Eff is right. Over-literal verbiage now optional:

I think that is the way to go (for many Gloranthas). What are gods? They are just spirits with ideas above their station. But we know that gods are sometimes alive, don’t we? So it seems reasonable to say that spirits are alive … until you kill them! But what of death? From here and elsewhere, here are several ideas in play, and they can all play happily together (I am trying to include some practical content): Capital “D” Death, the real deal — you have been thrown into the memory hole that is Kajabor [acceptance?]; Lowercase death — you are in Hell [depression?]; Bureaucratic death — if you are not in Hell, some or all parts of you are supposed to be: I have the paperwork [bargaining?]; Trial separation — you seem to have been disassembled: take action soon, or there are forms to be filled [denial & anger?]. Someone might start at grade 4 death and ascend through the more serious forms, perhaps hoping to be recycled into life some time after “achieving” grade 2 death. Or you might get thrown straight into a more serious form of death.

Hmm … maybe, but if Can Shu is the Black Sun, the shadow of Yelm, and Sheng is not in fact Yelm, maybe that is why … … although the Black Sun runes — — are perfect for an anti-Yelmalio, so maybe everyone is barking up the wrong Yggdrasil, and “Yelm” is just that resting actor found loitering in Hell, after all.

All existence is temporary, and if there were no temporary things, there would be no things, at all. This granted, the Puppeteer Troupe’s claim seems to call for no further explanation. But this is a reassuring lie. While agreeing that all is illusion, another tradition holds that illusions have no reality at all: there are none of us to think we ever were. Who wants to tell Yelmalio? Zorak Zoran has that look in all three of their eyes.

Do you mean the deities themselves could be healed, or something else?

I was prompted by the Elmal/Yelmalio thread, and in my mind (which is an odd place, sometimes) the only important wrestler with OY (although everyone likes to beat on him) is his forbidden love, Zorak Zoran. So that gives us Dark/Light, Hot/Cold, Illuminate/Failed Illuminate. But who would be a good Third-Age ZZ stand in? I dunno. Maybe someone whose fully achieved illumination didn’t exactly agree with them. Remember the thread we’re in and barf forth ideas.

That was Erol’s premise for this thread. Grossly unsubtle emphasis mine. I am interested in ways of looking at Glorantha that enable us to extend our sympathies beyond woad-covered humans with sharp swords and bad attitudes — and that might involve changing things or going against entrenched player attitudes, but sometimes it is just a matter of squinting at things differently. I am not the only one, but I won’t speak for any others: that would be rude. If someone’s reply — and I caricature — is along the lines of “it is canon (or indeed RQG rules-as-written) that they are not like us and that anything not like us must be smashed (and may be smashed without a stain on our collective conscience)” that seems to me not to the point. Ditto “that is just not how it is (and you are forbidden to change it)”. Now someone’s proposed change may not suit you — that is fine: say so and why if you want. You may see why someone’s proposed change might not suit even them and in a spirit of helpfulness explain why. And if someone’s proposed change is to work around an awkward bit of canon, you might even get to say the magic phrase “that’s not canon” (or propose a different workaround or perspective to make the apparent problem go away) and be helpful at the same time. I am going to get down off my soap box, now. It doesn’t suit me, and the dizzying altitude and dry air was making my nose bleed. ———————————————————————————————————————— PS: That is not to say that the discussion of what is alive in Glorantha isn’t interesting.

Sure, but if they want to have #43 — or #943, who no one else has ever heard of — as a personal god with a little shrine at home (or a tattoo, or an amulet) — no cult, no scary initiation ritual, no game mechanical effect — they should go ahead. Who is it hurting? It is an aspect of IRL religion that Glorantha could usefully take on: there is more to devotion than “public” religion (cult) and chasing the next “killer app” bit of magic. Players can be creative without stepping on anyone else’s toes, and characters can put the poly in their polytheism without having to worry about the steady accumulation of tithes and spirits of reprisal.

Life for one is death for another. Even Ernalda has “a basket overflowing with edible fruits and meats”. Some of her children must — or at any rate do — die to feed others. If we are playing with @g33k’s idea of as (at least in part) motherhood, then why should the mother of disease not get her share of the rune? Sure, some of Mallia’s children kill to live and reproduce, but the same can be said of Ernalda’s children, no? And Yinkin doesn’t have the death rune, but cats kill to eat — they kill even when they don’t need to kill to eat.

Yeah, but we all like frogs, right? They are a gift from heaven. Or from the chaos ooze, which is close enough. What is unthinkable is to toe the Orlanthi line and spout the Orlanthi poetry. We have a world to play with, not just one blinkered cartoon-hillbilly POV to sink into. Or, you know, we sometimes like to think that. Isn’t it human that if we’re told to hit something with a stick, the unfortunate piñata immediately becomes a more sympathetic figure than the idiot with the broom handle trying to beat it into fragments? Or, you know, we sometimes like to think so …

Sheng Seleris is a failed mystic because although he thinks he is Yu-Kargzant, actually he is only Kargzant. However, this seems to work just fine for him.

Sure, and nothing I say should or would be adopted by anyone else. There are some really fun things: Chalana Arroy is neutral to Thed, the Bat, and Nysalor, but draws the line at the relatively innocuous Primal Chaos, the untainted power of random change. I guess the demonization of Thed and Nysalor hadn’t reached its current level, yet. (Although some pretty harsh things had been said about chaos, already.)

So we can take it that the Yelmalio (or Lightfore) cult was neutral toward — and exploited by — the Nysalor cult back at some point in the First Age. Rolling back the IRL chronology — but advancing the Gloranthan one — in Cults of Terror, we have Yelmalio neutral to the non-chaotic Seven Mothers and toward the chaotic Nysalor and Crimson Bat cults. Obviously, no Red Goddess cult write-up back then, but suggestive of Yelmalio as a cult unfazed by Lunar cults, even chaotic ones. This suggests a little retconning to get old OY hostile to Sedenya, perhaps, but in principle that is harmless enough, and the idea of the Yelmalio cult as so old-school and die-hard (or not at all), that the cult will have no truck with newfangled nonsense like Time and balance has an appeal. I wouldn’t want to join it, but it is an amusing thing to have in the world. When a bunch of other gods were in the underworld being suckered into Arachne’s plan, was Yelmalio still alive and shining palely on the surface? Surely so. I like to imagine at least some Yelmalio cultists insisting that their guy never grabbed hold of any cobweb, no matter what anyone else might say, and that the Compromise is as alien to them as any other compromise. (I can even imagine Yelmalio surviving the carnage of Argrath and the Devil, because he never showed up for the showdown. In the Fourth Age, forgotten and fading like Tinkerbell, but never quite gone. “Do you believe in fairies, children?” And the remnant Yelmalians with one voice reply, “OG! OG! OG! — OY! OY! OY!” (It’s a Max Boyce thing.)) If the Yelmalio cult is still neutral toward Nysalor, perhaps it is because — per its original description, anyway — it is not an organised threat in the Third Age: on its own, nothing to worry about. I don’t usually like to ask Chaosium for anything — they should just get on with their plan at their pace — but an all-singing all-dancing online Cult Compatibility Chart with the myriad cults from the upcoming ten volumes would be an amusing resource for dorks everywhere.

So you can stick them safely on the wall and they will fall off when they change back to human form? 😉

Even as a vegetarian, I tend to agree. However, let us play devil’s advocate. Clearly, the Survival Lottery was rigged in favour of the humans. Traditional reading is that the losers were altered to be able to survive on the poor plant food available, and possibly also the winners were altered to be able to eat meat. But what if the Lottery was not about changing physiologies to enable survival, but about legitimation and entrenchment of pre-existing human hegemony — humans who already enjoyed their post-Lottery diet? What a magical coup then, if the Morokanth were able to win their instance of the Lottery and create herd men. But altered digestion was never on offer — as Waha meant the omnivorous humans to win every time — so the Morokanth were stuck with their pre-Lottery diet, but they had escaped their status as food for humans. So the Praxian humans grumble that the Morokanth cheated — true in the sense that they subverted Waha’s plan — but they cannot tell the whole story without revealing the rotten nature of the “covenant”. Maybe the humans have (conveniently and perhaps inevitably) forgotten what really happened. The Morokanth have not. Perhaps the “peaceful cut” is just a ritual to prevent righteously angry herd ghosts from taking entirely reasonable revenge on their butchers. This leaves the question of intelligence: did the herds have their wits stolen by the humans/Waha, or did the Morokanth manage their miracle of escapology without “human-level” intelligence, gaining it in the process? How? Did they have help? From Trickster? Zorak Zoran (with herd men in truth vegetarian zombies)? Or did the already bright Morokanth sacrifice the wits of the herds (man & beast) to pull off their coup? Had Waha’s plan been for men to continue to eat intelligent beasts? Does this tell us anything about the real reason Eiritha was buried alive? I think we can make the vegetarian Morokanth story at least as dark as the omnivorous Morokanth story. No namby-pambiness required. In fact, I may even be won over by my inner Mephistophelean lawyer.

But that is what one would expect, no? The sun dies daily. The moon dies weekly. They know letting go and so have the possibility of illumination and rebirth. But the light god who cannot let go — cannot let death, darkness, and chaos in — is reduced to a wan light-without-heat. So we see why to some Yelmalio is admirably tenacious and to others pitiable — always the little sun.

If I understand you correctly — apologies if I don’t: I am prone to grabbing the wrong end of a completely different stick — you are saying that the sensibility of the writers of the setting is that fertility is a female thing, even though you can cite Gloranthan and IRL instances that complicate the case. Is that it? You are probably right. Perhaps, we can even go further: fertility is associated with the right kind of motherhood — if you are the mother of the Devil or disease, you forgo any fertility rune you might have had. This seems a little unfair: is the mother of amoebic dysentery any less a fertility goddess than say … I don’t know … the mother of leopards? (Possibly, some earth/mother thinking leads to a book including the cult of the Bloody Tusk, Donandar, Flamal, Mostal, Pamalt, & Uleria being called “The Earth Goddesses”. Possibly not: “Earth, Fertility — but not necessarily both together — and Associates” doesn’t scream million seller.) We do get some conventionally male deities with : Yelm, Lodril, and Flamal spring to mind. But, of course, Uleria gets to own it — although one fondly imagines life (and so reproduction) pre-dates sex. Interestingly(?), Pamalt doesn’t get , but “he” does get . Should we reconsider what it is to own a rune (e.g. it is just a worshipper perspective … or geographically limited) — I confess, I thought of the owner (unique for a given time) — or is it that Pamalt = Ernalda? As this is a dissident thread — like Your Dumbest Theory — I was just beating the drum — lightly, I hope — for Gloranthans who scorn the gendering and sexing of the divine. Presumably, even canonical Mostali fall into this category (the World Machine is no Steely Dan). One would expect some Western monotheists would go for that, too, at least in variant Gloranthas.

Hmm … is this a clue to the uptightness of Yelmalio? Never blown out might be a bad thing, especially from a Lunar/Nysalorean POV?

If we don our heavy-duty monotheist hats for a minute, god isn’t one of a race of beings (not even potentially), so not sexed. So why gendered, even in a fluid or ambiguous way? Surely even some ostensibly polytheistic Gloranthans will say that all this talk of parents, children, and siblings — to which some might want to attach genders — is just a product of limited mortal minds attempting but inevitably failing to grasp the divine.

Absolutely. I seem dimly to remember that back in the neolithic days of RQ2, one would occasionally get “these cults stand in this relation here but this other relation elsewhere”, but maybe my mind is playing tricks.