mfbrandi

That's an automatic loss of identification for the opposing quester. The quester may retain their magic but will fail their quest. So, abstracting from particular/detailed game system mechanics, what happens when questers identifying with gods with different, clashing myths meet? For example: Cult of A says god A met god B and they fought over item C (which A had a firm hold of) and god B made off with item C Cult of B says that god A and god B never met, that god B had always possessed item C, and that cult of A are dirty stinking liars Cult of A heroquester is performing the loss of item C heroquest and meets cult of B heroquester performing some unrelated quest Cult of A heroquester challenges cult of B quester to fight over item C Cult of B heroquester says, “Go away, I never met you, and besides I have item C in my backpack already.” In this situation, “cult of B heroquester automatically loses identification” seems harsh Myths — and so heroquests — will conflict like this. In a game where contradictions are not allowed, you just hand someone the shitty end of the stick: it turns out their cult was lying to them/had smoked too much hazia/imbibed too much reindeer urine — shit happens, and people (players and PCs) know this going in. But in Gloranthan games, where otherworlds/myths can contain contradictions, how does one handle it? Play the scene twice, with cult of A heroquester reporting that cult of B quester failed, and with cult of B getting a re-run with identification kept and maybe going on to succeed in their quite different quest, and definitely not reporting acquisition of item C from cult of A heroquester? (If cult of B heroquesters will never take up the challenge — in their playbook, the encounter never happened — how will cult of A questers ever get to succeed in their quest to get beaten up and robbed by cult of B questers, even if cult of B is represented by an NPC?) Keep an eye on the myths in play and ensure that awkward PC-on-PC encounters never get started? Of course, there are non-canon ways around this, but they will be unpalatable to many: just play heroquests like any “normal” encounter, with usual consistency requirements play heroquests as — albeit magical — drug dreams: you might obtain something real from your dream/quest/twitching fit on the mats of your hut, but in it you are fighting phantoms/delusions/your own unconscious, not any real third party (mortal or divine)

The answer to the “sins” of the industrial revolution is to bomb us back into the late bronze age/early iron age? (Although the dwarfs/remnant Mostali will keep their tech, and knowing their antipathy toward Grower, they are presumably no eco-saints.) I will grant you that I am not worried about whether Zistor signed any pre-Dawn treaty — presumably Rashoran/Nysalor/Sedenya was in no position to sign any such treaty, either (though it may be that Arachne Solara was humming “Old Devil Moon” to herself while gestating her “child”). There are at least two ways to look at the Compromise: LEGALISTICALLY: Yelm, Orlanth, and company shake hands and agree to behave in the future — a concept to which they have just been introduced? — and agree on the retribution to be taken against those who break the rules they (i.e. Yelm, Orlanth, & company) have agreed to follow, with the retribution to be applied to non-signatories, too, (including the yet unborn/unmanufactured) even though the unborn swore no “mighty oaths” pre-natally. This can spare us all the headscratching of temporal order before time. (One suspects that there has always been an equivocation on “bound”: are the big, powerful gods who signed simply more morally obliged to obey the Compromise, or are they less able to break it than lesser gods/non-signatories?) ONTOLOGICALLY: Time was one of the [ahem!] later elements in the creation of the universe by Arachne Solara. The best sense our poor time-bound minds can make of a world without time is that the creation of the world from Chaos, the descent of creation back into Chaos, and the happy and unhappy bits “in between” all happen at the same time, forever — we call this the Gods’ War. Time trades this for a line with Chaos at either end and a Goldilocks Zone in the middle to accommodate history. Except the line may be a circle. With epicycles. But it beats the hell out of the alternative. It is sort of Kant crash lands in India. The Gods’ War cannot hurt us anymore, because (a) it is in the past; (b) it is “before” time; (c) it is sealed behind an impermeable barrier; (d) it has been banished to the Phantom/Negative/Twilight Zone; (e) or something even more mind-boggling … For some casts of mind, this way of looking at things leads to increasing skepticism about the “literal truth” of received mythology. I can well imagine a Yelm–Orlanth treaty that says that if any third party does something that neither of them likes, they are fully entitled to blow them up. But that sort of breach of the Compromise, legalistically conceived, is not very interesting. (Neither is “anything deemed destructive may be blown up”. Nor “those mocking the gods shall be blown up”.) It seems to be generally agreed that, when looked at legalistically, gods manifesting within time is one of the things forbidden by the Compromise … BUT clearly this needs amplification: What counts as a god? When is a machine just a machine — however enchanted — and when does it tip over into godhood? Presumably (and I am just guessing), Zistor didn’t perform a Sedenya-type “godquest” to gain a fully stamped deity card. Anyway, AFAICT some kinds of ascension are allowed — or at least winked at — to permit hero/ancestor/dead monarch cults. Where do we draw the lines? What counts as manifestation? Runequest had divine intervention from early on, and that looks like flat-out meddling with the world of time. All rune magic? Do the gods send the rain, enable the crops to grow, bless marriages? Glorantha on the face of it has divine presence in the mundane world throughout time. Of course, one could take a hard line about manifestation and say that it is a delusion of the theists: if there are gods, they are not entities with wills — if there ever were any gods-as-persons, they ceased to exist in that form with the onset of time; there is magic and reservoirs of magical energy, but these depend not upon divine whim but the natural laws of magic. But then we are deep into the ontological interpretation, and probably over the question of what counts as a god, too. On the ontological interpretation, what would count as a breach of the Compromise? Off the top of my head: Destroying time: that is, recreating the Gods’ War. Does the creation of the machine “god” do that? In some way other than making the gods so angry that they are thinking about undoing what Arachne Solara has done? (“You made me so angry that I hit you, so that bruise on your face is your fault.” We are not going to fall for that one, are we?) Accelerating history: that is, “using up” energy too fast, bringing on the heat death of the universe ahead of schedule — but what is the schedule? What is the right length for the universal cycle back to Chaos? IMHO, tapping the gods down to zero POW seems like an excellent plan. Like throwing them into the maw of the Devil ahead of schedule to spare us an Age of their meddling. Or possibly, it just amounts to the same thing, and rather than breaking the Compromise, it is just a way to implement it in full. Offing the gods is just (enforced) nuclear disarmament. Sure, we’d like responsible industrialization, but we would like it, no? Is the above incoherent? It surely is. Is that OK? Hell, no! But I am trying to grope towards how the Compromise was broken by the Zistorites, and I keep coming up empty.

I always wondered whether the writers of RQ knew cockney rhyming slang. Give him a boa and Ironhoof could be the Feathered Horse Queen.

Because the victors write the history, surely. What exactly did they do wrong in the Clanking City? From the Well of Daliath: So the dwarfs and the gods don’t like competition — they should suck it up, not blast the competition to rubble. “But they broke the compromise!” Is this true? What makes the machine a god, if that is the breach? Presumably, worship of heroes born within time is allowed, so it is not the worship of the machine that makes it a god. What does? Perhaps the gods just feel that worship of a machine mocks them, but mocking the gods isn’t forbidden, is it? It is a long time ago, but my memory is that Tom Baker did not commit genocide on the daleks, tempted though he might have been.

All magic? I thought that mysticism was explicitly not an otherworld magic. (Which fits well enough with IRL non-magical mysticism: find union with god in this world, because there is no other.) Of course, one could maintain that the mystics effects are not magical at all, but … (I am probably decades behind on my Gloranthan meta/physics.) The mystics: there is Cosmos and the Void — i.e. something and nothing — i.e. something. They end up looking more “modern” than the atheistic, scientistic sorcerers. In defence of the sorcerers, I don’t buy the party line that the west is spiritually stunted because it figures out its own magical effects, rather than getting them readymade from the “gods” — as if buying rather than making or ignorance rather than knowledge were in themselves spiritual advances. The theists are not spiritually advanced because they get their magic pret-a-porter — religion is not conjuring tricks with bones (although Delecti may disagree).

And is it too much to see the male devotee of Maran Gor’s castration as a symbolic menarche? That my spellchecker just wanted to “correct” menarche to archenemy tells us what? Are the Gors indicating menstrual taboo? This seems depressingly plausible when we consider the many aspects, one earth goddess line of attack interpretation. 〉〉Sigh!〈〈

“H” is for hyena. The deprecation of the Issaries rune — — is part of a long and shockingly successful plot by the cult of the blue boy to pervert the original cult of Issaries Hyenafriend: speaker of truth to power and laugher at despots. Orlanth does this because: kings don’t like anarchists or equal/fair exchange lightbringer deities need to be domesticated into vassals/housecats all feliforms must be alynxes: hyenas and especially mongooses cannot be tolerated the spotted hyena alpha female provides an alternative to the prescribed dilemma of psycho or earth mother hyenas eat alynxes for breakfast The reason the hyena doesn’t eat you if your tent flap is closed is that this is an agreed signal between Issaries and Grandmother Hyena. If you sleep in the open without hyena friends, you are fair game. It is because Issaries “owns” that they have contempt for greed and politicking — like the hyena, they sometimes have to laugh at humanity and seek the solace of the wastes. Goldentongue, Middleman, and Spare Grain are the progressively more degraded “child” cults. But the Age is ending, and in the wastes the parent cult may be reassembling itself as well as the OG sun. And if a liberated Issaries begins to look like the original to the funhouse mirror distortion of poor enslaved Eurmal …

Awakening into the player made me think: “Platonic solids with numbered faces. A white moon. No spirits anywhere. What am I wearing? Where am I?”

I won’t do the whole boringly vanilla Vinga but interesting Vinga cultists thing again, but maybe put in a word for Maran Gor (at least until the Cults books come out and try to ruin it): who wouldn’t want to join a cult of dangerous eunuchs and strange women (Storm Tribe, pp. 220–221)? Of course, it may be a failure of editing and they may have meant strange men (eunuchs) and dangerous women (fighters) — but I am going to give them the benefit of the doubt. I imagine Maran Gor temples as (having) underground chambers with huge magically enhanced bronze gongs making some very post-Stockhausen music.

Back in RQ2 days, my friends and I took the first clause seriously, and our knowledge of genetics didn’t go beyond a cursory account of Mendel’s peas, so: l = lycanthropy; L = no lycanthropy; werewolf couples were ll + ll, with all ll children. As for the second clause, non-lycantropes sometimes having lycanthropic children seemed a natural enough reading of “only … lycanthropes will breed true.” Dirty stinking normies couldn’t be counted on to breed true — what could be more “MGF” than that? And if there were wolves with a recessive lycanthropy gene, there was your explanation of your Mowglis. For the sake of she wolves, I hope that werewolves are born in puppy form and size. Grey Brother was not an honorary status, and “returning” to the humans was a very dangerous mistake. Of course, what we really want are Garzeen werehyenas — they are called “middlemen” because of their position on the human–hyena spectrum — to point to some real sibling rivalry issues in the Issaries family. Team one up with a morokanth wereherdperson and we’d have a real dynamic duo of cursed “hsunchen” for the Wastes. ——————————————————— Edit: I am now dreaming of a variant Glorantha in which every Goldentongue cultist is a superintelligent alpha female hyena (no human form). They can be counted on to deliver messages across impossible terrain and to conduct the subtlest of negotiations, but sometimes they just have to laugh in the “wrong” place (or at the “wrong” person) or to bite the face off that annoying child who keeps saying, “Bad doggy!” (Spare Grain is boringly, permanently human … whatever George Orwell may have thought.)

Has all that nonsense about sorcery being an otherworld magic with its own ‘sorcery plane’ been dropped, then? I hope so, but if not sorcery = mundane science rings a little oddly — although it wouldn’t invalidate its being an approach to magic [a] concerned with laws and formulae inclusive or [b] highly experimental/empirical. Or the sorcerers could maintain that all the planes are ‘mundane’, which I quite like, too.

… and I was thinking of all three as weapons (“fantasy nukes”). I should probably see my psychiatrist about that.

It depends what you bring back, though: if it is a year’s supply of top quality basmati, then sure, but if you return with Arkat, Sheng Seleris, or Stormbringer, it may well be a case of “Go! Take that with you. And never darken my towels again.”

The Heler cult says not (dryness --> impotence) but as to the truth of the matter …

Well, if we have given up on hearts and minds, it may not matter whether we arrest the “right” person. Revenge and justice might require you to find the guilty party, but one is a barbarian concern and the other is for when we are in friendly territory.

To avoid further thread hi-jacking — mea culpa — people can get it out of their systems with this simple one-question poll. If anybody cares, maybe an RQ thread, but enough of this here, I think. Sorry again.

Sure, and I didn’t try to say that the Lie wouldn’t be believed. But pick the right lie, or you will hang a “dodgy” sign about your neck, even if you are believed. It is not, AFAIK a spell that makes you believe the thing said and every other thing one might need to believe to make the thing said seem plausible. You believe the thing, but you don’t necessarily believe it is reasonable to believe it. “The world will end tonight. I know that sounds mad. I don’t know how to persuade you. But it definitely will. Trickster told me so, and he cannot be wrong this time. He just can’t!” And, isn’t that more fun than a jedi mind trick? Than a subtle “clouding of men’s minds”? Cognitive dissonance, but absolute conviction, anyway. (Of course, a subtle Lie may play out differently, but because of what one is being asked to believe, not because the spell smooths over the cracks.) I don’t buy the “Ben Kenobi has the Lie spell” line. I think that he is inserting the belief directly into a stormtrooper’s mind, smoothly, and without the stormtrooper’s being able to recall that Ben has said anything. It has in common with Lie that he speaks the words and that the hearer believes what the words say, but surely the Lie spell works just like an ordinary lie: the person hears you say it, they remember that you have said it, but they think you are speaking the truth. The Lie victim will be able to say, “I know the world is going to end tonight, Trickster told me so.” “What, the Trickster who lies every time he opens his mouth? That guy?” “Yes, I know, but …” Whereas, I reckon the stormtrooper just knows to let them go, and couldn’t even say that Ben had spoken. But for dramatic reasons, we have to hear what Ben says (and maybe Luke does, too). But he hasn’t convinced the trooper, he has just ensorceled him. Maybe later there is a shaking of the head and a realization of what has happened — maybe — but at the time, it is his own idea that they are the wrong droids, not “Beardy tells me they are the wrong droids, and that is good enough for me.” But I haven’t seen the flick in 30 years, and I have never used Lie in a game, so no one should take too much notice of me.

Why? A believable lie or a misdirection would be fine. Hi, Bill. I meant the point of introducing the spell into the game (by the designers) was to enable Trickster pranks, not to break the game by handing the Eurmali a superpower. I may be wrong, of course. I agree that from the PCs’ POV a believable lie or a misdirection would be fine — indeed it would be much better. And it might not even need a lie spell … but you know, just to be on the safe side, why not give it some extra oomph? My thought was that having a spell that makes someone believe what a Trickster says — with AFAIK no indication that people don’t know that the trickster has just said it — is not the same as quietly inserting a belief into someone’s mind with maybe a bit of smoothing around the edges so it doesn’t jangle too badly and definitely not hanging a sign around someone that says “I just said what you now unaccountably believe.” Why assume the spell is even more powerful than it already is? I am sure it is already strong enough to have gotten plenty of people killed in “pranks.” But I may be wrong. I usually am.

Sure, I didn’t mean to question that. But if you are our hypothetical Lunar copper, you are drilled not to let them go just because they didn’t do it. And if you believe against all your instincts about civilians that they really didn’t do it, then you kill them out of hand (because they are annoying or just because it is a paranoid’s reflex in a land of liars) — and then you go looking for the people you were really after … only you don’t find them, because you have already “eliminated them from your enquiries” and all their tomorrows. But, of course, the exchange doesn’t really go like this: “You! Yes, you, scumbag. A word, please.” “I am not the assassin you are looking for.” The lie may be believed, but immediate cognitive dissonance — it is not as if the copper doesn’t have a memory of being told this extraordinary thing. Whereas the stormtrooper stopping Ben and company likely parrots the words put into their head without a clear idea of what Ben has said or even that he has spoken. Maybe more likely: “You look shifty. And strangely familiar. Where were you last night, turd?” “I cannot tell a lie, officer — much as I would like to — I was banged up in the cells for drunkenly pissing in a copper’s helmet. Perhaps I was taken to your station.” Then cringe like the copper is going to hit you; like you think maybe it was their helmet. But if you were in the cells, you weren’t playing stabby-stabby with the governor’s back (or whatever the crime was). You have to sidle up to the thing and tell a lie that might well have been true and which doesn’t hang a giant, dayglo “innocent but” sign around your neck. Yes, you did something, but you have already been caught and punished, but still have reason to want to go unnoticed, and that is why you look shifty. You don’t want to stand out like a fluorescent rhino in a disco — even if everyone is convinced that you are a rhino that absolutely, definitely didn’t assassinate anyone. I mean, especially not that. Whereas, when playing the “no sunrise tomorrow” practical joke on your friends, it doesn’t matter that their neurons are jangling with the wrongness of it — if they believe it, they will run around like headless chickens, anyway. Something like that might work for a street stop — “Oh, my goddess, that Lunar patrol, they are all on fire; they will surely die if not doused with much water immediately” screamed at the top of one’s lungs so that the patrol and all on the street hear it. Chaos ensues, and you run like hell. Short term, it works, but you have called attention to yourself, so make sure you get out of town double quick.

But it is a spell to mislead on matters of fact, right? Not a command spell or a confuse spell (unlike Ben’s “jedi mind trick”). Although the spell description says “incontrovertible evidence” of falsehood is needed, it also suggests that a Yelm priest’s divination as to whether the sun is going to rise tomorrow will do when the trickster says it won’t — it is not as if Yelm knows when he is going to be murdered; if he did, he would be madder than he already is (which is madder than a crate of salamanders) — so the bar is set pretty low. So if serious criminals use lie a lot, we can expect policing to get a lot more Draconian and tricksters to get even less popular. “You are a copper. You think everyone is guilty. If someone tells you they are innocent and you believe them, execute them on the spot, as they are making you look soft. That is an order. Is that clear?” Lie is good, but its overuse may have undesirable consequences. What happens when trickster A tells person C that p and trickster B tells person C that ¬p? In the absence of evidence either way, what does C believe? Extra unnecessary waffle:

The point of the spell is to pass off the ludicrous as true, but you are right that it would work for a quick stop by a street patrol. Serious law enforcement would split the party and assign multiple interrogators. If the trickster used lie in that circumstance, one suspects they would soon be spotted … and summarily executed for wasting police time.

The dwarfs were created by an embittered Brithini philosopher as a parody of their own people. The godtime Mostali are a lie.

Yes, and basically, the dwarfs are the Brithini: short (Brithini average around 5 feet tall — GtG, p. 48) conditionally immortal: “Only bad dwarfs die. While you and I fulfill our appointed tasks, we shall live.” (GoG The Foreman’s Words) Mostal is not pictured (e.g. GoG Prosopaedia, p. 13) their magic is sorcery (e.g. GoG Cults Book, p. 57) Mostal not a “cult” but a philosophy/socio-economic complex (e.g. GoG Cults Book, p. 57) born into castes (e.g. GoG Cults Book, p. 57) Mostali: “impersonal processes … make up the world” (e.g. GoG Cults Book, p. 6); “Mostal is the World Machine, now dead.” (GoG The Foreman’s Words); Even the pious Malkioni: “The world is the result of interactions between impersonal natural powers … we collectively name these forces the Invisible God” (GoG What the Wizard Says) = stability, law; = unchanging, reliable (RQ3 Glorantha Book, p. 13) no afterlife for dwarfs; “The Brithini are … atheists who do not believe in an afterlife, … or even worship the Invisible God.” (GtG, p. 53) So the only ostensible differences are: (a) the dwarfs can be much shorter than the shortish Brithini; (b) the Brithini think that “god” was never alive and that the dwarfs are delusionally optimistic in their Nietzschean belief that god is merely dead (and so may be fixed/resurrected). Digression:

But when we think of Kralorela as a sort of “Cod China” (which we have been shuddering at since that illo in Gods of Glorantha, at least), it is hard not to link mysticism and Chaos. This from Arthur Waley’s Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi) section of Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (p. 56 in my edition): And this is Ray Turney saying what’s wrong with Chaos in Cults of Terror (p. 19, lower box-out): And in as much as the standard PC attitude (default = Orlanthi, right?) is to fight for what is right, this contrasts strongly with Waley’s Daoists (Waley, p.65) — presumably, Tai Chin Jên to the king of Wei: And Waley again (pp. 66–67): Now, I am in no position to say whether Waley’s take on Warring States philosophy is a sound one, but it does seem plausible that it is one that a bunch of hippies writing an RPG in the 1970s might have been familiar with. And with that voice in the back of one’s head crying “in the face of evil, something must be done”, it is easy to get frustrated with the Zhuangzi POV as presented in Waley. So I do think that Gloranthan Chaos and mysticism/illumination make a natural package and that this was likely a result of the designers’ take on IRL “eastern” mysticism, which on the face of it, at least, they seem not to have been huge fans of. So why not Kralorela, too? Whether this all amounts to an irredeemable Orientalist nightmare, I am not going to venture an opinion on. Neither am I going to scream hatred in the face of Chaos, as some here seem to enjoy doing. (I don’t mean you, @davecake.)

But if Issaries has pretensions to being the clever, smooth-tongued “god of language and speech, of communication in general” (CoP, p. 59), then presumably the skills necessary are his. It is just a matter of when it is wise to use them. If you need a political speech, jokes for a roast, or an advocate in court, who are you going to call? Sometimes, honey is better than vinegar, but not always.