mfbrandi

11 hours ago, Darius West said:

If Elmal is like Yelmalio, but with his fire powers intact because they didn't bleed out on the Hill of Gold, then Yelmalio is inferior to Elmal in most situations.   Plus Elmali don't have weird cult hang ups

Although if Elmal = Yelmalio, then there is no question of one god having fire powers and the other not. The one is the other. That is not to deny that some worshippers of the god do fire magic while other worshippers do not.

I guess what the Elmal diehards miss is that the Yelmalio cult harnesses the power of refusal, of denial. When the Yelmalians realize that they have long been ascetics in the Sheng style — able to amass immense power through the suffering of the failed mystic — they will be terrifying, indeed. When I hear that the Light Sons have traded Firespeech for silence, I am going to find a deep, dark hole to hide in.

Every geas is a gift.

10 minutes ago, EricW said:

They are forbidden from travelling by mundane means beyond the bounds of Glamour, if they try there comes a point where they cannot take another step away from the city.

Maybe this is unnecessary. If you are in Glamour, then you are already in “Faerie” — albeit a heavily policed and controlled bit — and walking away from the town (which you are free to do) just takes you deep into uncontrolled weirdness and danger. To exit into the normal normal surroundings of Glamour takes Lunar magic.

Or this is the story that is told, but truly people who have moved to the city stay because it is more agreeable and less dangerous than their home villages.

It all comes to the same thing: you can leave, but you don’t want to. How you react to that realization determines the stories you tell yourself and others about your captivity/liberation.

13 hours ago, radmonger said:

Worst case is it works, and you realize you were wrong as to which out of Nysalor and Arkat was Gbaji

Although I suspect that if Arkat and Nysalor are not in fact one person, they are so similar that feeding Arkat to the Void would be similarly ineffective.

15 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Why weren't the parts of Nysalor thrown into the void?

What would this have achieved? If what freaks people out about Nysalor is illumination, would people have ceased to ask and answer the dangerous questions if Nysalor had been more thoroughly destroyed? The genie of illumination is out of the bottle, and it is too late to do anything about that now, no?

Even if we think illumination is dangerous and undesirable, perhaps we need to keep asking questions in a free and unpoliced manner. If we don’t, maybe we will all end up as Gark zombies.

I imagine illumination and the Void (and so Chaos) to be intimately connected — as I am the one imagining it, it is probably stupid, wrong, and far from canon — and I doubt that throwing stuff into the Big Nothing is an effective anti-illumination method. Being extinguished by the Void is illumination, isn’t it?

I wonder also whether the beardy guy hatched from the egg wasn’t a piece of very effective misdirection — not so much the deceiver as the decoy — while we are watching him and wrestling with him, the real work/mischief of illumination is happening elsewhere. Chop him into bits. Chuck him in the memory hole. It makes no difference.

14 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Maybe the Dwarves actually built Nysalor.

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Whatever occurred was quickly healed when Osentalka stepped forth from the glowing area which hung where the miraculous Egg had been. The shell lay about the ground like bits of dwarf stuff and vines. — GtG, p. 717

“And vines” — who project managed that collaboration?

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I thought Dendara was just a face of Ernalda … But both Ernalda and Dendara stubbornly rejected that. — WoD

“I thought Nysalor was just a face of Gbaji, but both Nysalor and Gbaji stubbornly rejected that.”

“I thought Batman was just a face of Bruce Wayne, but both Batman and Bruce Wayne stubbornly rejected that.”

One person denies wearing many hats, but what evidential weight should we give that? “But it is not one person, it is two!” — If that were already conceded, we wouldn’t need to ask.

15 minutes ago, Joerg said:

I would like to know Kargzant's Hill of Gold myth. Apparently he is Lightfore, so he should have it.

Well, it depends what you mean.

If we take the divine identities seriously — Kargzant = Lightfore = Yelmalio = Elmal = [a whole bunch of other small and/or cold suns] — then you already know it, possibly in several variants. One starts “once upon a time, Yelmalio …” Any Hill of Gold myth about a little sun is in that sense a Kargzant Hill of Gold myth. If you like, these are the stories with the god name replaced by a variable (story as complex predicate?): if true of Lightfore, also true of Kargzant.

Another sense is the events that happened to the god in Godtime. We know them in outline, but bits may be disputed, even changeable. We may come to know the events better — or worse — in time.

Finally(?), there is the question of whether we find Hill of Gold-type stories in which the name “Kargzant” appears — especially interesting if told by people who don’t know the salient divine identities. Well, we might find such, but it would be too strong to say we should find them. Worshippers can — and will — have incomplete knowledge of their deities, no?

10 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

one that was not beautiful (for him) but could cook well? … What was his wife's name? 

Zorak Zoran. Yelmalio cannot cook — no fire powers — but Uncle ZZ doesn’t have that problem and is quite the whizz in the kitchen.

10 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

I suppose the gods could make themselves appear as they wished so why wouldn't they all not be beautiful in their own mind's eye.

Surely, ZZ — from his own POV — is always ugly from his burn scars. He can hide them from us, but not from himself.

14 hours ago, Joerg said:

Krarsht may be the most "Eaten" of all these examples. And possibly the most "recoverable" of demises. I would not be astonished if Belintar underwent this once or twice in his career.

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

35 minutes ago, Darius West said:

Elmal has no Hill of Gold Myth.

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)?

7 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

But yet the unicorn headed guy in Dorastor has a troop of CA healers even they are all chaotic, what happened to the Lightbringers any chaos is all chaos?

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

7 hours ago, metcalph said:

If the ultimate fate of those eaten by the Bat is the highest form of enlightenment then surely the Bat has no need of healing?

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The cult promises nothing about life after death, except that loyal and lucky cultists will be spared the eternal agony of being eaten by the Bat. — CoT, p. 70

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?

5 hours ago, Eff said:

The reason Chalana Arroy is Neutral towards the Crimson Bat, it is said, is because the Bat is capable of being healed.

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.”

9 hours ago, Eff said:

mischievous entries like Humakt being neutral to Primal Chaos

TL;DR: Eff is right.

Over-literal verbiage now optional:

14 minutes ago, Joerg said:

IMG spirits have ecologies of their own.

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):

1. Capital “D” Death, the real deal — you have been thrown into the memory hole that is Kajabor [acceptance?];
2. Lowercase death — you are in Hell [depression?];
3. Bureaucratic death — if you are not in Hell, some or all parts of you are supposed to be: I have the paperwork [bargaining?];
4. 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.

4 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Can Shu in the Kingdom of Ignorance?

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.

12 hours ago, Joerg said:

Things may have a temporary existence only. This form of non-permanent reality is called "illusion"

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The Puppeteer Troupe, the major cult of the Father of Illusion, always claimed that this was the First Rune, for without Illusion, there would be none of us to think we ever were. They refuse to explain further. — RQ2, p. 58

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.

1 hour ago, Jeff said:

Even Thed, the Bat, and Nysalor could be healed.

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

2 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

if he is Kargzant, who is his Darkness and who is the second actor?

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.

On 3/1/2023 at 10:17 PM, Erol of Backford said:

I like the [Your Dumbest Theory] thread but am interested in what GMs do to make their Glorantha suit them that may not be canon.

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.

3 hours ago, radmonger said:

no one should be writing 'initiate of  thunder brother #43' on their character sheet.

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.

1 hour ago, hipsterinspace said:

She doesn’t bring life, she brings death and suffering.

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.

4 minutes ago, Eff said:

Back in 1980, it was still possible to believe that Thed and the Crimson Bat were wounded beings in need of treatment. Of course, nowadays that's unthinkable in a literal sense- even writing that sentence caused a rain of frogs to patter down outside just now.

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.

16 minutes ago, Eff said:

But that questioning has no answer when I ask it, it's aimed at thinking about how to play with these bits of textual statements in the context of a game.

Sure, and nothing I say should or would be adopted by anyone else.

25 minutes ago, Eff said:

You can get some interesting questions out of carrying forward the 1980 text

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.)

1 hour ago, Eff said:

One of the more interesting implications here is that Yelmalio is/was N towards Nysalor but is H towards Red Goddess.

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.