mfbrandi

Sure, that is why I phrased my original comment the way I did: my death squad killed w, x, and y — they were all terrible people, and you were all glad to see the last of them — but now they have killed z, and none of you can see what was wrong with z; everybody loved z and their turnips. So either you are all too trusting and my death squad can get away with unjustified killings so long as we bring in enough broo scalps, or we are going to have to come up with something a bit better than “z just smelled wrong”, no?

Not so much a dumb theory as a dumb question. Given: How does one motivate anti-Chaos fanaticism in an illuminate? Rummage in your bag of possible stronger beliefs. Chaos is neither evil nor inimical but I will root it out and destroy it because … Answers on a post card, please. 25 words or fewer. If your answer is chosen, you win a holiday to sunny Dorastor — spending money included, but travel insurance is extra. The judges’ decision is final.

And presumably even if they weren’t persecuted, the Arkati would be temperamentally unsuited to operating in the open, anyway. And, yes, I was running together the two cases of brazen Storm Bulls (still standing over granny at the allotment when the rest of the community turns up) and furtive Arkati (long gone). What they have in common is a claim to special knowledge about bad stuff the rest of us cannot see. Should we trust either of them? Even if we should, would we be able to? If I strike you down preemptively because my Spidey sense is tingling, I had better be able to turn up some proof after the fact or I am just some lunatic who has murdered the beloved custodian of Glorantha, no?

“All the world is queer chaotic save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer chaotic.” — Report of the Arkati Conference on Illumination and Chaos (1617) I wonder whether it is a matter of ends (supposedly) justifying means or just the utter paranoia brought about by the belief in their own lethality and corruption: “If we’re this awful and we are the good guys, what must everybody else be like?” What if — with the best of intentions — one tells illuminates that they have a dangerous superpower and that turns them into homicidal conspiracy theorists? With great power comes great responsibility membership of a death squad.

“Look, I was right about that baby-eating broo with three heads that dribbled a trail of radioactive slime, wasn’t I? So you must trust me when you catch me decapitating harmless old people just trying to grow a few turnips — I’m only doing it to save the world. Evidence? Schmevidence!”

Presumably, it is thought that there is not really a lot of choice. More interesting to know how many are gung-ho, party-line Orlanthi and how many are dissident Orlanthi or Orlanthi with doubts/consciences, no? And then there is the question of ironic distance between player and character: playing a rocks-for-brains Storm Bully to send up the “must … KILL … chaos!” attitude.

Just because self-appointed chaos hunters cannot detect it, one shouldn’t conclude that it is hidden. Maybe their ability to detect chaos isn’t all it is cracked up to be.

But it would be crazy to continue to venerate straw effigies after the ritual, of course. (I think — but others will have a better grasp of this — that the Zhuangzi has a pop at Confucius by having a foolish fellow do just that.) And if the sage treats “the people” as straw dogs, to Heaven and Earth, the 10,000 things are as straw dogs. What does it all mean? I have no idea.

If you want to know why the dwarfs are shorter than the Brithini, then malnutrition: The more you eat, the more you say “look at me — I am malfunctioning.” The Brithini are much bigger, but still small: Why in-world? I have no idea. Going meta: they are physically stunted to reflect their supposed psychological/spiritual stuntedness — how absolutely charming. (Next thing we’ll have beastmen who rub shit in their hair and indulge in “unnatural” sexual practices to indicate the depths of their depravity — oh, wait …) (Why does the setting have dwarves and Brithini? I have a paranoid “theory”, but I don’t want rocks thrown at me, so I am keeping it to myself.)

Although in this case it is Hey Zeus Herbert who may be misbehaving and his followers who would find that objectionable. We do sometimes tell tales of old JC getting up to no good, as in the folk song/carol The Bitter Withy.

Although Nysalor-as-Rashoran might say that a bunch of other gods got killed in Godtime and came back at the Dawn — he was just a little late to the resurrection party, so exceptional means were necessary.

Currently working, So an animal is malfunctioning — because if you don’t shovel food into its mouth, it will eventually stop moving — but if we sew up its mouth to prevent refueling (and maybe stamp it “amended design approved” in green ink), we will have upgraded it to working? I don’t know whether I am failing to think like a Mostali or thinking all-too-like a Mostali.

So how does our sun fit into this categorization? It is shining now — without requiring energy inputs — but it will degrade over time, and it is not clear to me that anything can be done about that. So is something that has a finite useful life and cannot be refueled working (if limited) or broken? It doesn’t seem to be malfunctioning. (You can see why the growers would shake their heads — fronds? — at this way of looking at making.) Perhaps for the Mostali only a perpetual motion machine is truly working. If so, no wonder the repairs are not going well.

It is weird, though: clearly, we are supposed to despise the dwarves and the Brithini for their fight against mortality/death, but the theistic peoples seem to be guilty of worse — “after death, we will dwell in Orlanth’s stead” and the like. “Proper” death is being chucked down the throat of Kajabor (or functional equivalent) — you were here; now you are gone; perhaps you never were — everything else is just upping sticks and moving underground. Moving house is stressful. It is not dying. Death — not separation, but extinction — is still waiting for you. So perhaps Zzabur and the Mostali have it right, after all: after death — true death — one just won’t get any work done, and there are still things to do. True and final death comes for everyone, eventually — “mortals” and “gods” alike — and if some people cling a little too hard to life after having peeked over into the void, we should have some compassion for them. They know that they will have to go sometime and that their lifestyle means that they may not go easily. When is the optimal time to be touched by Rashoran?

Yeah, sorry if I came off a bit jaded. It is a London thing (or that’s my story and I’m sticking to it). And I always wonder where and why one draws lines between languages: Scots vs. English (perhaps we should just call them both “broken German”); one seldom says “Serbo-Croat” these days, which seems a shame. Draw the lines differently for different occasions and purposes is the sensible answer, I guess — but we don’t seem to be living in a time of sensible answers. Now we must frantically claim that communication is a very Argan Argar topic and not radically OT, at all! 😉

Always. In this case — as often? — pretty straight German (according to my dimly remembered high school Deutsch) with variant spelling. Another job had me above a Hasidic study group … because the immanence of the Lord follows me around, I guess.

@scott-martin’s image set me up to read that as “the creation of the Orlanth Rex cat” — something as plausible as it is sickening.

I used to work with a guy whose hobby was writing scripts — Python? PERL? I can’t remember — to translate the bible into Polari.

Well, the self-satisfied — Solar and Orlanthi? — upper and middle classes with nary a calloused finger might not. The working classes might disagree — and not just working class intellectuals (who might, it is true, be a bit thin on the ground in Glorantha).

It is funny, I never read: … as being about Arkat’s physical shape. I certainly took it that two trolls might look at Arkat after the battle and have three opinions about whether he was still a troll — “you know, really still a troll”. (See also: “yes, but where are you really from?”) Eric had two questions: Surely, the answer to [1] is “no, there were no limits”, but it hardly follows that the tool he needed to put his hand to at any time was “chaotic magic”. But what is chaotic magic, anyway? Is the insight that there really is no difference between Chaos and non-Chaos itself chaotic magic? His illumination pre-dated his anti-Nysalor fanaticism rather than being a tool sought to aid the fight, right? Perhaps the illumination even caused the fanaticism. I imagine his illumination was incomplete (or at any rate unsatisfactory) and that the fight against Nysalor was his inner struggle to eliminate the bright side of his illumination — leaving only the Stygian purity of black light — splurged bloodily across everyone else’s reality. The turn to ZZ wasn’t a pragmatic resort, it was just who he was — with Nysalor as his Yelmalio. Where are all the quiet Gloranthan illuminates? Carrying out a secret Bene Gesseritesque breeding program to produce the enlo Kwisatz Haderach, one suspects. (You have to watch the quiet ones, too: for every “there really is no difference between Uz and human”, there is a “there really is no difference between Galton and sanity.”)

Larry Marder knows something he’s not telling us.

At the time, I wondered whether Americans — the presumed primary readership — even knew who Danny La Rue was? Do any of you know whether they did?

Well, they would like you to think that they knew but aren’t telling (and maybe no longer can, having expunged so diligently), but perhaps the truth is slightly stranger: Braznofstel was sufficiently chaotic that localising it was a fool’s game; despite its spatiotemporal slipperiness, Argan Argar destroyed it. Morbode may manifest any time at any place. Spotting Morbode is an AA cult secret; the Holy Country Religious Police haven’t been able to stamp it out — they haven’t even been able to understand it. AA deep cultists argue over whether Spotting Morbode is detection of a manifestation of the holy place, or whether successful use of the ritual makes it manifest.

But in rehabilitate the cuddly goat people mode — remember the thread we are in — we can take this from Nomad Gods: … as indicating that if the diplomatic mission didn’t work out, they would consider themselves remiss in their duties as hosts not to at least offer sex so that the visit wasn’t a complete washout. Imagine them as characters out of Chip Delany’s The Mad Man. Arguably, any sexual contact between broo and human would count as sodomy. Even taking an as intended look at the broos, this: … suggests that they may be a degree more morally sophisticated than Orlanth. 😉

Putting aside the question of game mechanics, is Gloranthan alchemy not itself magic?