mfbrandi

29 minutes ago, Eff said:

the Hellenistic thunderbolt is irregular in shape, a bunch of sticks tied together

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.]

1 hour ago, Nick Brooke said:

starveling tribes begging for a place in the cosmos

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

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Derek Jarman once made the observation …

Now here is a chaos cult sales pitch for you:

Quote

I want to share this emptiness with you. Not fill the silence with false notes or put tracks through the void. I want to share this wilderness of failure. The others have built you a highway—fast lanes in both directions. I offer you a journey without direction, uncertainty and no sweet conclusion. When the light faded, I went in search of myself. There were many paths and many destinations. — DJ, The Garden

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.

10 minutes ago, svensson said:

More gall....

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.”

1 minute ago, jajagappa said:

Unless there are beavers.

Undead beavers! We want undead beavers!

17 hours ago, radmonger said:

Now an upland marsh is a rare thing; the water would normally drain out.

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.

5 hours ago, svensson said:

I see the … Sartarite economy as being more of Celtic/Gaulish one, where gift giving fuels the creation and dissemination of high quality/high prestige goods.

And you know what always makes a lovely gift …

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Within modern Sartar, the role of the "cult" shifts from facilitating the material basics that sustain human existence to providing answers to bigger questions: who are we, where do we go when we die, how do we perpetuate the work of creation or not.

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.)

1 hour ago, Eff said:

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

51 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Maybe they just don't think they need one.

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.

Who invented the runes, at least in their written form?

Evidence begins to emerge.

And we all remember the form the man rune took for a while.

1 hour ago, radmonger said:

I agree with the consensus that the is no widespread 'rune cult' of crafters that is a peer of Issaries and Lhankhor Mhy.

We like to go on about Lodril as an agricultural deity, but I suspect that his remit is wider. For the farmers, he is responsible for canal irrigation, right? One suspects also agricultural tools. But he built the Gods Wall and invented the cylinder seal, IIRC. So Lodril and family should do for crafting and engineering when no other cult seems right.

If he is not mentioned much, it is because he is disdained by Orlanthi as an embarrassing “foreigner” and rival whose innovations were “not invented here.”

1 hour ago, radmonger said:

So not all crafters _need_ magic do do their work.

Spot on, I think — even when your god is the patron/inventor of your trade, don’t suppose you always need spells to conduct that trade.

Trees have spirits.
Rocks have spirits.
Rivers have spirits.
But we don’t say that in Glorantha, there are no trees, rocks, or rivers.

Diseases have spirits.
But we do tend to say that in Glorantha, diseases are caused by spirits, not microbes.

Let us just bite the bullet: Gloranthans don’t have germ theory — @Joerg can jump in and correct me about that! 😉 — but Glorantha has viruses, bacteria, and microscopic parasites; it is just that like every other damned thing, those entities have spirits.

9 hours ago, John Biles said:

It is well known that Godunya is not a dragon, he is a giant chicken.

Dragon —> Dinosaur —> Chicken

Phylogenetically, one suspects pretty much everything in Glorantha is a dragon. (OK, maybe I exaggerate.)

When Godunya says “I am a chicken but not a dragon” you should be afraid, very afraid.

On my bad days, I think “imperial Kralorela” is a collective illusion, maintained in a Berkeleyan act of will by scholarly exertion.
— (with apologies to) Prof. Dennis Grafflin of Bates College

Does a hidden question deserve a hidden answer?

Well, that is an ouroboros that doesn’t soft-pedal the sexual reading of the symbol. Do you think that is why no one has picked this one up?

The wikipedia page suggests ideas:

1. used in the synthesis of benzene (or other alchemy);
2. a Mostali religious/cosmological symbol (pantheism: “all is one”; cycles of destruction);
3. possibly a calculating device — big numbers at the head, small at the tail, but how does one operate it?

One reading of the snake swallowing its own tail is Wakboth in the net, so maybe some magic to do with time and/or binding chaos.

In its sexual reading, the arm-ring symbolizes posting on web forums.

1 hour ago, EricW said:

What I don’t understand is why wasn’t Thanatar a significant force amongst the God Learners? Consume mind seems a quick path to mastering all sorts of foreign skills and magics.

I think perhaps you malign the godlearners. If you are a scientist–sorcerer, which of these sounds like Maximum Godlearner Fun:

1. do a bunch of experiments — bypassing the ethics committee, if necessary — and grope towards something that at least seems to work, or
2. download the answer and avoid years of late nights in the lab?

The answer has got to be the first option, right? They don’t want a hotline to the “truth”; they are all about the process, baby.

20 hours ago, Joerg said:

formed from the web of Arachne Solara (which is regurgitated, somewhat digested Devil, as we know well)

To me, this suggested a variation on the familiar creation myth in which a monster/giant/dragon is killed and dismembered to create the world: Arachne Solara/Glorantha uses all of her body to create her web/the cosmos, that is why Glorantha is dead and Arachne Solara is only a ghost. The act of creation is looped, echoing, and/or eternal.

This primal act of creation is sometimes seen as the utuma of the cosmic dragon, sometimes as the devil causing the Spike to explode killing Glorantha, sometimes as the ritual of the net. Finally, we get to lean on the non-sequential nature of Godtime. It is all the same event.

The world is the flesh of the devil.

And if the world, the flesh, and the devil are the “implacable enemies of the soul” then it is just a matter of the remnants of Glorantha fighting it out: dead lizard bits versus ghostly arthropod. A Gloranthan only ever fights herself. But if you are cosmos and void, a little solipsism is forgivable.

But what kind of people would tell the story this way? Are they a gloomy lot, or the cheeriest inhabitants of the lozenge?

Or more directly: https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/. You can sign up for updates about the case there.

Matthew Butterick is one of the good guys and a skilled communicator, his Practical Typography should be required reading for anyone untrained and thinking of self-publishing (on JC or otherwise).

19 hours ago, Jeff said:

In short she's a mystery element in the ceremony. If WE mortals are Flesh Man, Gina Jar is our lost dreams, love and hopes.

So the ghost of the Cosmos cannot hope to be more than the bits of ourselves that we have lost down the back of the sofa? That is some anthropocentric universe.

(Alternatively, maybe, she has stored our lost dreams, love, and hopes in her void, but who knows what if anything she will do with them? Perhaps she will eat them. Perhaps she will use them to decorate her web — as lures? Perhaps she will return them to us when we most need them … or most need to avoid them. Perhaps she has forgotten them, already.)

16 hours ago, Agentorange said:

" Memento suus iustus ludem "

Posting esoterica is itself just a game, you are right. But I long ago fed all my slaves to the Bat; it’s the abolitionist in me.

And — whisper it — I am not the only one to simply make it up as they go along.

If I ever claim to be the canon police and to have had hadith dictated to me by the shade of someone who once sat next to Greg Stafford, just take me out and shoot me.

In those parts of Glorantha that have no winter to speak of, does she die at all? Have the people who live there even heard of her?

11 hours ago, Eff said:

"Every six hundred years you have come"

Sounds like the marketing slogan for an ambitious Tibetan cult.