mfbrandi

I probably have this wrong — as per usual — but I always took it that after the Dawn, Yelm spent half his time in the Underworld and half floating above the Hurtplace. So the Wonderhome of eternal night is gone. Uz have been kicked out of the Garden of Eden Mee Vorala and cannot go back — it is just a burned-out wreck, these days. (You can’t go home, again … same river twice … yada yada.) The Uz really feel the bite burn of the Compromise. Sure, the priestess may tell you that after you are dead if you behave, you will go somewhere dark and cold where there is plenty to eat, but then your parent told you that if you didn’t do your homework, the human under your bed would gobble you up … and you never did do your homework. Also: unfinished business. Coming back from the dead/reincarnation is just haunting in solid form. Still, lest this all sound too depressing for words, you may eventually learn the secret of the light within, chill out in your final life, and step off the wheel for good. Or just come back as a trollkin who doesn’t need shades and sunscreen. Or something. Doubtless, someone will have a diagram showing clearly defined Underworld areas of permanent darkness and safety with all the dangerous exits clearly marked in Braille, but where is the fun in that? (There are still dark areas down there, but they are very much not safe — not for Uz, not for anybody.)

The way you tell it — or maybe this cup of tea is just too strong — it sounds like a set-up for Orlanthi exceptionalism and the recolonization of Dragon Pass as manifest destiny. If I shake my head, maybe it will go away. (I may still be stuck with Columbia as wyter of the USA, though, however wrong that is.)

It still is. It is all a capitalist plot: divide and rule sell microwave ovens. I have tried screaming this at passersby in Hyde Park, but will they listen? Still, come the revolution [mutter mutter] … Must dash: those nice men with the loooong-sleeved jacket are coming.

Who wouldn’t love a game with that name? I shall choose to believe that “they fought against Chaos and overthrew Chaos with humankind” means that humankind was the tool used to overthrow chaos.

Exactly! And it doesn’t just apply to cultural differences. It is the same mindset that thinks that a tyrannosaurus rex is more interesting than a jackdaw. Taller mountains! Bigger explosions! And where does that get us? Nowhere. (I am not saying, of course, that invented strange things are less interesting than real familiar things just in virtue of being different, but they do tend to be thinner.)

Nah! And a rain dance must be danced just before the rainy season starts. Any fool know that. My mad uncle Ludwig told me, so it must be right.

Hmm … My first thought was Arkatian self-multiplication. Dull, dull, dull. My second thought was that trollkin are the returned “heroic” dead trolls (and kin) who want to give it another go around. This has a nice mythic resonance: the curse of the kin is a recapitulation of the flight from Yelm, but they are returning as ever more light-adapted (or day–night cycle-adapted, really) creatures. I mean, it is by now a cliché that humans are just enlo changelings, right? But does a single “spirit” return as one or as many, as a litter? We cannot break the curse? We do not want to: it is how we take over. I draw a veil over what “climbing out of Hell” looks like on this model. XU knows. XU always knows. [It is late. I babble.]

Well, your mention of Olav Dickin's Son almost tempted me to tambourines and Guys and Dolls, but I resisted. And my first thought was of Sikhs, not the Sally Army, anyway.

Or — speaking on behalf of the (admittedly tiny) “creeping fourth age” faction — if all the magicians were to drop dead tomorrow, the world would continue to function much as it did before, and only ego says otherwise. Spending magic points while breaking bread is just showing off, and the true function of ritual is moral, educative, social, or political. But of course, this is just crazy talk.

Surely your local Seven Mothers temple has a kitchen that feeds all comers with tasty vegetarian food for free. Hearts, minds, and bellies. (Besides, the Bat likes a bit of meat on its snacks.)

So that was Greg’s vision in 1988, but no one would have been able to read that off of the RQ2 battle magic rules: Ignite would be fine, and there is an appeal to small household magics that make permanent changes (and to spells with multiple uses/manifestations), but that vision of bladesharp as a knife-grinding magic and glue as a pot-fixing spell didn’t make it to the “first generation” rules. Was that just for wargame reasons, a change of mind, or … ? [Apologies that this is a bit (old) rulesy, but it would have been mad to move it to another forum — and I think it does bear on the “is crafting spellcasting?” theme.]

Ah, yes, Eeyore’s Glorantha would vary. From Tigger’s. But it exhibits great self-similarity: it is fractally dull. We had an expression “cheer up, it may never happen”; unfortunately, it became weaponised, and we had to melt it down and bury it.

Didn’t “alchemy” (after a fashion) become a mundane skill, with your Isaac Newtons as transitional figures? And if we cannot find rôles for all the gods after the transition, don’t even some — all? — IRL polytheisms have their monotheistic tendencies? The Fourth Age creeps up on you, and looking back you are not quite sure when it began. You cannot find that neat, hard cut-off, but you make up the story of Argrath and the Devil, anyway.

Now if only we had a universal mechanic that made every task look alike …

Hmm … a fascicle, a fasces? I can see the Sartar “resistance” marketing department saying, “Shall we stick an axe through the middle of that to keep the Ernaldans happy?” As for the BUF emblem, it does look suspiciously like an O for Orlanth with a lightning bolt through it. BUF Orlanthi. BUFO. Bufo bufo. Mr. Toad. [I think you will agree we’re better off not actually illustrating these painfully obvious points.]

Cross that with a psychopathic Mr. Toad and you have Orlanth for beginners.

Now here is a chaos cult sales pitch for you: Although the Jarmanian apocalypse will reduce everything to a field of blue. Is that rain you can hear as the world ends? Well, it is the sound of Heler and Yves Klein laughing.

Not so much a dumb theory as the orthodoxy that dare not speak its name: yes it is wrapped around the handle of the three-tined fork of recreation, but look what is being (re)created. The question is not whether there are runes hiding in there but how many. (They could have used an inverted (not tapping but giving back), or half of a , … , but they didn’t. And is the ouroboros (Wakboth) that missed its own mouth, just asking to be superimposed on .) This underscores the theory that every time the big dumb O breaks something and tries to fix it, he advances the RG’s grand plan by a step. Who ever saw Sedenya pulling on a strand of the Net? Even the colour symbolism plays ball: clearly storm orange is just an intermediate step between solar yellow and lunar red. Orlanth as king is clearly an unstable intermediate state, as is a “lunar” empire that hasn’t shed its solar components: the Orlanthi vs. Dara Happa is an orange-on-orange Gloranthan mirror fight. And in some parts of this world, orange stands for prison, right? None of this is news to anyone. The puzzle is why we would want to inhabit the Orlanthi POV without a big dose of irony (detachment, gleeful aspect-flipping, … play). To me, a Brechtian RPG sounds kinda fun; to others, not so much, I suspect.

Ah, the gall bladder “which certainly ranks as one of the more important technological advances since the invention of the joy buzzer and the dribble glass.”

Undead beavers! We want undead beavers!

You now have me thinking of an uphill river slain in Godtime (before the 180° memo) and brought back as a zombie to keep the marsh filled. Or just a spring bubbling up from a particularly nasty bit of the underworld.

And you know what always makes a lovely gift …

So … It is a losing — or at least risky — proposition to rely on gods for important stuff like food, baskets, and roofs that don’t leak, so we improved the mundane solutions. So far, so good. But then we pushed the gods off to the whiny fluff area of “who am I and what does it all mean?” — I suspect the demotion narked the always thin-skinned deities somewhat, so they worked on changing the answers into excuses for major bloodshed. At least, after too much mead and hazia last night, that is what I “explained” to the local cult leaders. When I woke up this morning, I had been dipped in pitch and staked in the middle of this pyre. How about you, what did you do wrong? (Or after Banks, in a post-scarcity economy — it is all relative — we go to war over ideology. But we don’t have any of that in Glorantha, so all is sweetness and light.)

Some Gloranthan sage, wag, or trickster has a set of Grime dice.

Hmm … They did send a disruptive type on a journey to the west, but unlike their earthly counterparts, they decided that on balance there was nothing they wanted to bring back.