mfbrandi

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.

This reminded me of the discussion of Lodril in Sartar: Please, let no one heroquest for Orlanth’s tool belt.

You are right. My apologies to all.

Well, one might distinguish between means and ends or pay-offs. Meditation or self-mortification are examples of means. Experiencing union with god, the infinite, or the void — “union with god” for short — is one kind of pay-off. Gaining the ability to walk through fire or to strike an elephant dead with one finger is another kind of pay-off (and possibly valued only as means to further ends). I read a book about Sufism a long time ago — title and author now forgotten — which said that the mystic pursues union with god in this world because they wouldn’t bet on there being another one. (Necessarily, I paraphrase. Helplessly, I ironise.) Combined with an experiential definition of union with god, this allowed for a mystical faith without ontological commitment. In game terms, this sits nicely with Nysalor being a dead god and mysticism not being an otherworld magic. So by all means call those who seek or experience union with god “mystics”, and perhaps the experience of illumination comes in significantly different flavours — I am not the theology police: I am not qualified. And sure, there will be those who seek mystical experience as a means to an end (misguidedly or not, depending on the game world), but then there will be those who join the cult of Humakt because they want to learn Sever Spirit. But just as the route to union with god needn’t take us through austerities (e.g. we were instead spontaneously illuminated by answering a riddle asked by a passing stranger), isn’t it the case that austerities (e.g. some forms of meditation, perhaps; self-mortification, certainly) need not lead to union with god (i.e. the mystical experience) but in a fantasy game, that is not to say they won’t lead to “yogic superpowers”. So if my practice of austerities: [a] is aimed at achieving superpowers; [b] is not supposed by me to lead to union with god; [c] does not in fact lead to union with god, am I a mystic? I might be a superpowered pain-in-the-arse nonetheless. If I start aimed squarely at god, but I turn away in pursuit of superpowers, am I a failed mystic? Is a failed mystic a mystic? Is a forged banknote a banknote?

In the UK, that is the hoariest, most groanworthy of jokes. Or if you like, it is part of the venerable British corpus of Nysalor riddles. Don’t listen to people who claim that cricket or association soccerball is our national sport: everybody knows it is talking nonsense that we hold most dear.

Well, if Dendara is a replacement — in true Stepford fashion — maybe, but if Dendara was a Mostali project from the get-go (I mean, let’s keep it light, people), then maybe Gorgorma is theirs, too. If you are going to lean into the misogynistic tropes, then call in Giger and fill your biomechanoid boots. Indeed, maybe Gorgorma was the main project and Dendara just cover or a bit of a sick joke on the side. The chess playing is the Mostali tipping us the wink that we are dealing with machines — or “machines”. Next up: the Mostali Shaper–Mechanist civil war. With the Mechanists insisting that true Mostali are robots — all the while refusing to look at the poor saps calling themselves “elves” while bleeding all-too-human blood. Remember what who was inside Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Are the “elder races” eradicated in the Fourth Age, or is there nothing like an apocalypse to make people cease larping and face facts? Not species but barriers — of costume and ideology — are eliminated. Forget Argrath’s Lord of the Swastika posturing (covering badly for having been had), it is people, rather than humankind who own the future. Thinning as coming down, and it was quite a trip. “I saw their starved lips in the gloam, with horrid warning gapèd wide, and I awoke and found me here, on the cold hill’s side.” — JK

Dendara is the patron deity of Stepford wives. Clearly, “she” is a Mostali construct. What are they up to?

Well, I don’t know about better … What really is the function of multiple manuals of monsters in the games that do have them? I cannot see that there is a mechanical need for them, and if a GM wants to spring a surprise, they′ll homebrew something. But people like to look at the hideous pictures and glance over the stat blocks irrespective of whether they are ever going to use or encounter the beasties. And game publishers like to sell books; who can blame them? So — to an extent — they are coffee-table books for gamers. And that is fine. Where other games have monsters, the RuneQuest–Glorantha complex has deities and their associated religions. And [cough!] soon, we will have ten more books dedicated to those. So we needn’t feel we’re missing out, but we probably shouldn’t feel superior, either.

But the body parts of Nysalor are just dead flesh with no special powers, right? Old canon leads us to think that, so it must be true … Umm, is there somewhere I can hide?

That is the trouble with “illumination” being required to cover a lot of ground. The extreme ascetic practicing austerities in search of “yogic superpowers” — more Kraft than Macht? — doesn’t necessarily have a lot in common with the person spontaneously achieving insight through accidental exposure to riddles/koans, no? “I have undergone unimaginable torture; now I am a terrifying living weapon” — boring. “So that is the difference between a Durulz; now maybe I can start to purge hatred and fear from my life” — shows promise.

https://wellofdaliath.chaosium.com/home/catalogue/publishers/d101-games/gloranthan-adventures/gloranthan-adventures-1-new-beginnings/

I guess some people just have a profoundly depressing view of the world.

You just declared the trolls of Glorantha as a chaotic species. Standard Gloranthan hypocrisy: “I am blameless, you are transgressive, but they … they are chaotic.” Ah, yes, wrong mythical context — that is why I shouldn’t kill and eat you. 😉

Well, he may have set out to destroy the world, but accidentally, he saved it. We have to believe it was an accident, because he grates on us so.

But it got retconned, no?

This! (Apologies for the brutal edit.) When I see people complaining that their favourite publisher hasn’t provided x (even when they really should have), I think that although FRP can seem a bit prog, it is just as much punk. DIY is (almost always) more fun than complaining, right?

Revenge? I wouldn’t recommend it. The SBs are hardly going to find an angry relative undermining or frightening. And they probably love a bit of vendetta. Before you know it you are them, and they have won — even in the unlikely event that you kill them. Especially in that event. Cost of doing business? Well, there are likely a few random misfires, but more worrying is that the pattern of wrongful killings is unlikely to be all that random. Reflective individuals who call into question a life of fear, hatred, and killing are — I imagine — mostly not illuminates, but likely disproportionately victimised. And minor personal grudges will generate claims of cosmic threat, some of them even sincere. It is said that the illuminated are hated because they may turn into supervillains, but I doubt it is the dark side people are truly worried about. It is the thought that all the bloodshed, hatred, and paranoia is unnecessary and can stop — that’s what scares people. Ever try explaining the sunk cost fallacy to an SB and a broo shaman as they were squaring off? How did it go? Before you know it, the peaceniks start to despair of getting their fellows to see sense, and they start doing the mathematics: how many — and how few — people can we feed to the Bat and still see a worthwhile reduction in bigotry and bloodshed? Where on that curve do we want to sit? And that one tortured child in an Omelas basement — that is starting to look like a really good deal. Is this another manifestation of the dark side? Well, it doesn’t require illumination, self-deception, and bad arguments, but one suspects that these soured idealists would find it easy to talk to the Arkati. Although, some of them looking at the Arkati plan of perpetual pogrom might turn green and turn back. Now to have these problems in a setting might be seen as a good thing — a very good thing. But to insist that reveling in a sempiternal bloodbath is the only choice that makes any sense, and that characters who think otherwise are to be slain out of hand, what does that say about us as players?

I always read the immunity to spirits of retribution as showing that those spirits were just the cop in the head. The unilluminated — the benighted, if we must — inflict “the god’s” vengeance on themselves. Understandably, the illuminated stop doing this. But why do the benighted not see violence as violence? So they think a big god did it and ran away — violence is violence, and it doesn’t matter who the perpetrator is, does it? I am — as usual — missing something important. I have never really understood forgiveness, and I wouldn’t attempt it. That is not all bad, however: the flip side is that an action which harms me is just that — it is not a scandalous injustice or a blow against the cosmic order — without the fuel of self-righteous indignation, vendettas are impossible to take seriously and grudges tricky to keep going. 😉

The anthropomorphic crowd think that the Spider–Cosmos and the Moon–Chaos are chasing each other around the Möbius loop of the infinity rune, each thinking to herself “my quarry is on the other side.” The sage shakes her head, sees only the loop, and laughs at the folly of trying to distinguish Cosmos from Chaos. Or, you know, something …

But we all want that, don’t we? Not necessarily at all costs, but certainly at high cost: if there are truths to be discovered, we want them to be discovered — and by preference, we would grasp them ourselves (although none of us will ever know everything). If as a bonus, we are freed from our obsessions to destroy, or lose the hate which had ruled our lives, all the better. Now illumination — or just plain ordinary knowledge — will sometimes allow us to do things we couldn’t do before. Some mean, destructive people will take their immunity to spirits of reprisal, or their knowledge of how to work iron, or how to build nuclear weapons and use them to do wicked things. Gosh, who knew? But did illumination make them do it, or did it just put a tool in their hand? So do we leave the fruit on the tree and never step out of the Garden of Eden? Do we accuse Socrates of impiety and of corrupting the youth of Athens? Rhetorical questions both, so put you foot on the path to illumination — we may never get there, but what other path is there? That sort of Me Generation claptrap is probably exactly the target of the dark side stuff. I probably hate it as much as anyone. It didn’t fade away with the 1970s. It is surely as bad now as at any time — “my truth” indeed! However, these two things are not the same: illumination doesn’t come with a moral lecture, a set of values, it is neutral; whatever you want, whatever you believe, it is right for you, and I approve.

Well, I would say that my dumb theory was that Mostal was not the Maker but the World Machine — and that the World Machine was not made but there from the beginning. All talk of making is unwarranted anthropomorphism. In this way of looking at things, the key Mostali concept is not the design or the blueprint but efficient causation or (differently) the world as mathematically describable. This calls the concept of repair into serious question. I would say this was my dumb theory, but wasn’t it an RQ3 orthodoxy? (Gods as people was just a fable for the dim and the ignorant. There are no gods. There are no people. There is only the World Machine.)

Sure: we only have nuclear weapons to prevent nuclear war. And we can agree that those Nysalor prophets succumbed to — what we are told is — the all-too-human temptation of the dark side. But it is explicit that Chaos and the dark side are not the same thing. The collapse of the difference between Chaos and Law is said not to legitimize the collapse of personal ethics and personal desire (i.e. if I want it, it is right for me to have it) — it is a false parallel. As far as I can see, the sin of the Dark Siders (very Jack Kirby) is non-cooperation, which is said to imply non-creativity. But it is allowed that Chaos can create — else no Glorantha — so Chaos does not imply the dark side … and we are told Law does not exclude it. (Because it is a false parallel — a bad argument — it is utterly unclear what Chaos, Law, and illumination have to do with the dark side. One might just as well say that because there is no final difference between Lemons and Oranges, I can do whatever I like and it is OK. Cue demented cultists setting fire to all the lemon trees to prevent my lousy behaviour.) Anyway, now we feel fully justified in our war on the dark side — on the non-cooperative, non-creative free riders. Yay us! Go team! But: Am I alone in wondering how we get there from objecting to spreading diseases to spread the Good News? This is why I asked earlier in the thread whether illumination was a form of Chaos magic (and it does seem to be magic). If it is, then illumination is not the only route to the dark side (because “fully Lawful beings” can get there) — and anyway, Chaos doesn’t imply illumination. And if it is not, then even if we have to stamp out illumination lest it lead — in some mysterious fashion — to the dark side, that is not really a war on Chaos. Although, if “there is no final difference between Chaos and Law” (presumably the stance of the Arkati illuminates), what would a war on Chaos even look like? I cannot shake the feeling that I have been making a schoolboy error for the last 40-odd years, but as is the way of such things, I cannot think what that error might be.

Fair enough, and not from “epitome” alone; we also have “exemplars” and “taking great pains to perform good deeds in the world and protect the good name of their hero” [emphases mine]. It all seems to me to tend in the direction of showing virtue and setting an example — public things. But maybe that is just me. And anyway, maybe things have changed — been retconned — since CoT. “Epitome” can be slippery: we might say of a fictional character that they are the epitome of the secret agent (George Smiley, maybe — I dunno), and in the fiction they may be completely anonymous, but to us up here in Metaland, the character functions as an example, is well known. But the Arkati see themselves as examples, as models to be emulated. What is it all the cool kids say these days, “you can’t be what you can’t see”?