mfbrandi

Are they wrong to do so? Are Hunter’s “sons” distinct from Hunter any more than Orlanth’s “daughter” is distinct from Orlanth? Applying the razor — as any good Lunar should — aren’t the names of Hunter’s sons just names for Hunter, as “Vinga” is (even if we don’t like it) just another name for the Big O? I mean, it is not as if we believe every land has its own distinct goddess, is it? 😉

Ah, but we all know the young princess is really a vampire — “Red as Blood” — but in Glorantha is this a tale told by or against the Lunars? If Christ is Nysalor, it could go either way.

And deny the player the joy of the internecine war for tenure?

Yeah, but these are the Hero Wars, baby, and rune lords are like WW2 air crew. The newbie may seem like a spare, today, but by next Windsday … 😉

The men and animals of Prax agreed to choose lots to see who would eat, and who would be eaten. — Elizabeth A. Wolcott, Men and Morokanth (Wyrm’s Footnotes #9, p. 10) Isn’t the point of the Survival Covenant that it was supposed to amount to the toss of a fair coin? Something an impartial third party could do on your behalf. No skill, no reckoning of odds, and no bluffing required — not really a contest. So the humans cannot fall back on “we were just better at the game than the four-legs”, and the morokanth cannot say “the humans have more of the skills required to win this game, so the selection of which game to play was unfair”. The humans didn’t cheat at a game of skill (and/or bluff), they rigged a lottery — or Waha did it for them — and either the morokanth cheated right back or were allowed to be the one four-legs victor to remind the humans of the favour their god had done them. On the other hand, having the players cheat at a game within a game sounds like an excellent idea. 😉

Here is a non-canon, unhelpful, and utterly splintered answer, which I hope is at least fun. When considering whether dwarfs can be made into undead, according to one school of thought, it doesn’t really matter what a dwarf body is made of — it might be flesh and bone, metal and clockwork, clay, or Plasticine — what matters is whether it has a “soul”: some non-physical bit of stuff which animates it. If resurrection is re-joining soul and body — reversing the severing work of Humakt — then it doesn’t really matter whether the body is first sent to a healer or to the machine shop. According to this school, even if dwarfs are steam engines with souls, they can be resurrected and made into undead. Undead robots are no madder than undead skeletons. Undead robots — yay! According to another school, dwarfs don’t have souls (in this sense: a component of a complete creature needing to be fixed to the body), so they cannot be resurrected and they cannot be undead — unless normal, “living” dwarfs count as undead — but that is not to say they cannot be fixed and sent back to work even if they have been very, very broken. The real headbangers of dwarf philosophy insist that this talk of non-physical components of work units is stuff and nonsense: a dwarf doesn’t have a soul, but neither does anyone else. It is all flummery, ideology, and con-trickery put about by the double act of Chalana Arroy and Humakt trying to make a place for itself in the world. Where does the big H get off claiming iron as the “death metal”? Everyone knows that it is Mostal’s symbol of the essential unity of the world — if it divides, it is only into the real and the imaginary. Well, you get the idea, and can now spin off dwarf schismatics at will. 😉

Although Liebig was Lutheran and Jettchen Catholic, their differences in religion appear to have been resolved amicably by bringing their sons up in the Lutheran religion and their daughters as Catholics. — Wikipedia

Illuminated Yelm has no time for curiosity? Nysalor’s is the cult of asking questions, and on one way of looking at it, Nysalor is the sun (or a fragment or aspect of the sun). Perhaps before finding himself on the sharp end of Death, Yelm lacked curiosity, but now? (And perhaps Orlanth is more changer than changed or changing — a catalyst, rather than a subject of chemical change. Locked outside of Time, indeed.) As for whether Yelm is interested in shamans: I find the incorporation of shamanism into the Yelm cult (the Golden Bow) particularly fascinating. We have a great celestial entity (the Sun God) who has several sons and messengers who are charged with watching and helping mortal beings. The shaman is an initiate who specializes in dealing with the spirit world … The Golden Bow is a path for a Yelm initiate who becomes a shaman. — Jeff Richard, Notes on Shamans Maybe we can consider the Golden Bow to be a son of the sun in the same way as we (in these dark days) consider Vinga to be a daughter of the wind. And I concede that this says nothing about independent or “Horned God” shamans and the sun/Yelm. Another way of looking at it is to see a god as a collection of short tape loops of musical clichés which can be mixed and amplified — edited if you are an experimental heroquester (otherwise read only) — to produce magical effects, with more sacrificed POW getting you a bigger PA. To that way of thinking, the gods have no interests — no mental states of any kind — and shamanism is just one approach to working in the studio.

Is this the new Lutheran face of Mostal? Ennobled by Mad King Ludwig seems about right for our technological but sometimes impractical friends. The production of all organic substances no longer belongs just to living organisms. It must be seen as not only probable, but as certain, that we shall be able to produce them in our laboratories … Of course, we do not yet know how to do this — Liebig & Woehler (1838)

I don’t claim to have originated the idea — I am sure it is in the original texts somewhere. (I was just too lazy to go dig out the source. Shocking!)

“I didn’t throw you off the cliff, I just let go of your hand” kind of thing?

You made me skip ahead from Sheila Jordan singing Robert Creeley, but that is OK because: And I spin, come down through time Oh, watch them say you’re too high And I swim through … Hey Sheba, hey Salome, hey Venus eclipsing my way, ah Her vessel, every woman is a vessel, is evasive, is aquatic Everyone, silver ecstatic, platinum disk spinning

So we have the RG–Rimbaud–Peron sung by Patti Smith dragged up as Elaine Paige? It might just work. I will call the toad-faced one now.

Although it pains us, we may feel we have to concede that in the end Sedenya is the empire and the empire is Sedenya. Perhaps she is also Rimbaud: a wannabe seer and a poet — a producer of Illuminations — become “a successful profiteer and a conniver in slaving” whose end will be “metastasised cancer and paralysis”. [T]he oddball trader, surrounded by the knick-knacks in his compound, pottering like a dangerous crone in an African fable, still toying with the dark arts of self-transformation, long after the magical make-over of the world through language has been junked. This is Rimbaud’s not quite human side. — Jeremy Harding, Fleeing the Mother Tongue

Although Cults of Prax (ClassicPDF, p. 71) seems to set this up as rank hypocrisy: Enemies of the cult who defy the pacifistic and healing ways of the cult will find themselves unable to resist infection with disease … and never recover from it without the appropriate Cure Disease spell from the cult. If your cult’s spirit of reprisal is called “Infection”, just how opposed to death, disease, and suffering are you? She is all sweetness and light until you oppose her and then the gloves are off. “Now I am become Chalana Arroy, the destroyer of immune systems.” CA is a dangerous lunatic. I can think of two ways to end death, disease, and suffering: retcon the universe, so the World Machine was never set in motion; chuck everything into the memory hole that is Kajabor. The truly pious CA cultist is always working on some mad scheme or other. Don’t let them catch you looking at them funny or you may find yourself with a nasty cough that just won’t shift and … 😉

To propitiate seems a simple — and perhaps a rational — decision to make, but in this brave new world in which worship is a skill, maybe it is not so simple actually to do it. There is a trick to it one may fail to grasp. The village wants to propitiate Mallia and avoid the plague, but it hasn’t got the knack and she cannot hear. When she turns a deaf ear, a particularly piercing and intricate prayer is required? 😉

There is a notion that the gods are big and we are small, that a humble shaman couldn’t take Orlanth down, but I wonder if that is right. On a bad day and with the wrong approach, surely they will fail, but there is also a Gloranthan strain — not necessarily attractive — of human supremacism: let go of a single thread at the right moment and I can be done with the lot of them. There is a nasty whiff of power tripping, certainly, and yet it may be that casual mass deicide is a metaphor for spiritual liberation. And so the superpowers and the rank odour hang around illumination. I fought, we won. Each of us faces the end of the world alone, but then what? The power tripper faces it down — temporarily? — or so they think. But the trick is to let it come. And that is the difference between grim-faced Sheng and a laughing not-so-failed mystic? (The theist refuses to choose, splits the gods into good and bad, crushes one lot, and makes mock obeisance to the other?) Arachne Solara is the powerless ghost of the tiniest spider you ever saw, and that is wonder enough. [Yes, this is tugging at the thread of the doubleness of illumination — again — but also an expression of discontent about the POW economy: bigger is better and crushes all opposition. Yuck!]

Ah, but whisper it: Daka Fal is no god; Daka Fal is us. The story of Daka Fal/Grandparent Mortal (and possibly Malkion, too) is the finger pointing at the villainous gods/wanton boys and calling them out for their murderous sport, isn’t it? And the gods, too, will have to look into that unrevealing mirror and face judgement, won’t they?

I wonder whether we need the qualifier “greater”. Cannot an “insignificant spider spirit” and “the greatest of the great gods” be the same entity? Power and range of magic available to practitioners may be a function more of the size of cult, its R&D department, and its knack of parting worshippers from their POW than the nature and power of the god/spirit. If a shamanic one-person band cannot access sunspear that may be less about some supposed inability to contact Yelm and more about their status as sole trader (and not grand mucky-muck of the solar religion). Maybe … but this is not meant as a heresy.

LC getting ready to spend time with the Nysaloreans on Mount Baldy?

A middle way is possible, I suppose: viruses/bacteria/parasites and disease spirits are not identical, but it is hard to get rid of something in the first category if you are under attack by its associated disease spirit. Then ditching the disease spirit in the Dead Place would enable “normal medicine” — Arroin? — to take over, improving your chances without being an insta-cure.

Or — to take the sorcerer’s view? — all tools have their limitations. Your problem isn’t much like a nail, but unfortunately the god/magic/tool you have hold of is very much a hammer; watch where you put your thumb. Experimental heroquests as attempts to reforge the tools.

I love this question. Is it asking something like — please, do not mistake me for a theologian — whether Gloranthan reality is “catholic” (for some or all gods, a priestly class is required to interact with them) or “protestant” (with the right techniques, anyone can interact with any god — whether or not that is wise, whether or not the god welcomes the interaction)? Malkioni might be a special case, taking neither the protestant nor the catholic line. According to them: the Invisible God is unreachable no matter who you are; anyone can contact the other so-called gods … but they are not really gods, as there can be only one. Presumably, stroppy shamans — and I like to think they all have attitude — think that self-proclaimed gods are just spirits with pretensions and could be contacted. As for worship, surely there is a lost Godlearner document detailing experiments to track the energy flow in worship — does it ever flow through the priest, and if it does, must it?

But forewarned is forearmed — or in Orlanth’s case … well, you can make the punning adjustment, yourself — and the theist schmuck on the Clapham omnibus meets the gods “blind” (or at least “blinkered”)?

We think we want “psychology” in our games — motivation, character, and all that jive — but … It may be that, when late capitalist civilisation is replaced by this violently mutagenic landscape, we should expect our familiar configuration of ‘human drives’ to warp into a commensurately novel form. But then again, because we’ve seen … that a chronic smallness of mind can persist in even the most extreme circumstances, perhaps we should expect that office politics would pass almost unchanged … Or … perhaps we should expect a radical simplification, so that people would only be vengeful, protective, greedy and so forth, with any subtler shades of feeling blasted away — Ned Beauman, Surrealist Circus Animals Actually from a review of Jeff VanderMeer, but it made something ping.