mfbrandi

3 hours ago, Noirfatale said:

is there a explanation why? considering that Orlanth and the other lightbringers had to resurrect the sun god to save the world.

This is genius. Please ignore everything I say: you have already grasped the situation perfectly.

But … I like to think of it these ways:

   [a] we wanted a story about why the sun sets and rises (other cycles, too);

   [b] because Orlanth is as oedipal as (as they would say on Fags, Mags, & Bags);

   [c] if Orlanth didn’t break anything, he wouldn’t be able to claim the glory for fixing it.

Look, I didn’t say ‘toxic masculinity’ once, OK? … Oh, bum!

9 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Maybe the father proved harder to kill than hoped and he lives in the back of their heads now. Maybe the sign of all of this is what we call the Y rune, the fork.

The oedipal son/sun wants to replace the father and ‘marry’ his mother the earth, so of course the father lives on in the back of the usurper’s head. It is the point, right? Cannibalism = introjection — no fork required: use your bloody hands and eat your rôle-model raw. Eat up all your greens brains or you won’t grow up to be just like Daddy. The poverty of the rebels’ ambition!

This is why there are so many earth goddesses: otherwise family meals would be just too arse-clenchingly embarrassing, even for Orlanth (who cleaned his plate but didn’t quite understand the ‘your’ in ‘eat up all your brains’).

I thought the was a torch. But a torch is useless until lit, and we know what a bum rap light gets in Glorantha. Is it just that no one wants to see what is on the end of their fork? Oh, Burroughs, where art thou?

To their credit, the Uz are quite happy with their repast and find the truth even in the dark. Notably, they are not patriarchal.

There was a troll psychoanalyst, once, but she went out of business. She was philosophical about it: “We’re just too well-adjusted, I guess. I hear that in Orlanthi lands, the headshrinkers get lynched as chaos cultists. Go figure!” She started treating humans, instead, and that is where the giant centipedes come from.

I wasn’t trying to make an anti-religious point. (Think how tired atheists would be if we spent all our time railing against religion!) I was just trying to draw out a potential difference between swearing an oath (i.e. making a promise) and signing an enforceable contract (i.e. putting remedies in place) — and then point out how an oath spell threatens to erode the difference.

My idea was that swearing an oath by [insert appropriate religious content here] showed the seriousness of the commitment being made — someone who swore by that wouldn’t be fooling, they would be fully committed to doing what they promised — and that that had nothing to do with calling on one’s god to enforce a contract. I mean, how arrogant to think that one could command the supreme being to enforce one’s contracts!

I am not trying to say that God couldn’t strike me down if She wished to — let us say that She could (because I broke my promise, for another reason, or just because She chose to), that She is no one’s “imaginary friend” but a real force in the world — I still think that when we say “I will do it or God strike me down” we are showing our seriousness by invoking something sacred, not commanding God to get involved in our petty matters. Not everything is about the existence of God.

But I have been wrong before, will be again, and may be now.

Peace?

4 hours ago, davecake said:

a weirdly large number of heroes who died and returned were killed by Harrek … he could make it difficult for at least the lesser heroes to return, and generally just doesn’t care to? 

It could be that — after @Eff — his heart is not really in his murderous project. (He dreams of a new career in a new town. Ikebana?)

Or it could be that if they don’t come back he will eventually run out of people to kill. Which may turn out not to be such a different suggestion, after all: either way, the guy is lost.

10 hours ago, radmonger said:

it is generally safe to assume that people in the past believed their own religion

Isn’t it safe to assume that people in the present believe their own religion? I didn’t mean to question it, nor to assume they are wrong to do so — although I am not a believer myself — but I don’t think that IRL religion needs the world to be like Glorantha-per-RPG-mechanics. I appreciate that in this forum that may put me in a minority.

2 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

How can we be sure these aren't Jethro Tull lyrics?

I could swear an oath on my signed paperback of The Black Corridor that I might sink to Hawkwind but never Jethro Tull, if that would help. (Of course, it is not signed by the true author, so this is a very slippery proposition.)

1 minute ago, Akhôrahil said:

I mean though, it's literally the name of the spell and it says it's an oath... 🙂

Absolutely. It is one of those weird distortions that come with Gloranthan religion. Glorantha seems to be the RPG world for people who take religion — and other “anthropological” stuff — seriously, but the way it makes things “literal” or “real” twists everything to no longer have its real-world meaning. Fun, huh?

28 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Argrath's actions, for good or evil, cannot be justified by "Lunars killed his parents, boo hoo".  There's a far deeper reason, whether mystical (e.g., he's the Shadow) or psychological (e.g. he's a psycho David Bowie).

Well, I hear that vampires stole his lunch money, too.

The deeper reason — not a justification for personality dysfunction, I grant you — is that he is an agent of thinning or of demystification: just as Glorantha’s creation was not done before the Great Compromise, it is still not done as the Hero Wars rage. It’ll be done when all the gods and monsters have vanished and we wake up disenchanted next to Jerry and half-a-dozen used needles in some decaying squat off the Portobello Road. All RPG worlds conspire to the condition of Muzak … of mundanity.

It is a young man’s person’s journey to Viriconium/London, no? Not only have the trolls and dragons vanished, but they were never there. The trip is over and maybe we — kinda? sorta? — still wish we could catch a glimpse of an elf in a mirror, but the smell of cabbage soon puts an end to that daydream. And Jerry seems to have stopped breathing. Soon he will stink worse than the cabbage.

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

There are many different ways to take an oath, and one we know about is the oath to Humakt, backed by the Oath-spell. This "merely" kills you if you break it

There are oaths and there are contracts.

OATHS
IRL, if I ask some god to strike me down if I break my word, part of the point is that no deity will in fact strike me down — that kind of thing doesn’t happen around here and it never has — but it is a way of asking to be taken seriously. This is a game for trustworthy people, or at least it is a game of trust. (Honour? I’ll leave that well alone. Sounds like The Godfather.)

CONTRACTS
At least one of us is a rogue, so we put a mechanism in place to ensure that god or no god, if I break my word I will be struck down (or you will get the other agreed remedy for me being such a rat). This is a game for people who — perhaps for very good reason — cannot trust each other (though they need to trust the enforcement mechanism).

Doesn’t the oath spell reduce making promises to signing a contract? Seems a shame.

However, I do quite like the idea of those who take oaths to Humakt being so trustworthy that no one really knows whether the spell has any power. Is anyone’s Glorantha like that?

2 hours ago, Eff said:

Argrath is a bastard … for many people … because his function … is to blow up the setting … smash it into pieces and then let the pieces reconstitute themselves.

I don’t care about Argrath as a person and I don’t care for his little Oregon militia human-triumphalist speech after the  great god munching, but blow it up and see what happens next, you gotta love that, right? I guess I spent too much time with revolutionary socialists who liked to say “it is not for us to know what life after the revolution will be like.”

2 hours ago, Eff said:

This fantasy is something Muzak Jerry believes is cool, supercool, ultracool, especially as opposed to the rather deadbeat teen Muzak Jerry … Now, Muzak Harrek doesn't seem to like The Berserk or think The Berserk is cool.

Fair enough. And we can all nod along with Muzak Harrek as he tells us about his woeful alter ego.

3 hours ago, Eff said:

I can certainly think of many people … that had a similar understanding of themselves … as needing to put on a mask of hypermasculinity … But as far as voicing how they got out of it, well... it's pretty radical. 

Sounds like Trouble on Triton.

As a little kid, my idea of a man was Roddy McDowall, Kenneth Williams, Hugh Paddick, or John Inman. I’d have killed to have been any of them. But even with that early suspicion of hypermasculinity (and even the common-or-garden sort of masculinity), I found there was still plenty of scope for dysfunctional behaviour. 😉

We seem to have lapsed into even one-note Harrek is more interesting than Argrath. What is going on?

34 minutes ago, Eff said:

Jerry the eternal teddyboy is unreservedly cool, the kind of cool entropy monster you can admire, and Harrek's Condition of Muzak-self doesn't seem to think Harrek's all that cool. But at least there's an Una, though said slightly differently.

Isn’t it Una who is harlequin-cool and Jerry just a washed-up sad clown failing every audition (the Deep Fix shambolic and out of tune)? The admirable monster — isn’t that Jerry’s mum?

Can we see Harrek in his Pierrot outfit sobbing his heart out at the end of Brighton’s West Pier (post-ruin, I think)? Maybe we can get Liz Williams to do a tarot reading for him (although, presumably, she was on the Palace Pier).

If we see Harrek as the self-pitying hero, doesn’t that go all the way back to Achilles, Odysseus, and Gilgamesh? The “hero script” has always been able to absorb that, hasn’t it? Achilles has his little moment of humanity when he gives back Hector’s body, but then he re-dons his polished bronze — which was only ever for show/plot shenanigans, not practical at all — and gets back on with Plan A: live fast and die young. He cannot deviate; no more can he peel off his own skin/psychological armour: it is just too tough.

Gosh, I am a miserable bastard, today!

Do you have a vision of the authentic Harrek trying to get out, or is the point that he wishes he had some authentic desires he could use as levers to prise open his carapace of rote violence but keeps coming up empty?

12 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

I recently enjoyed Our Flag Means Death, and now have a very different Harrek-and-Argrath relationship in mind … I also think there could be mileage in a Dread Pirate Harrek take.

I was toying with Julian and Sandy, but I feared that in the end Harrek — the great butch omi — would be more like Robert de Niro in Stardust, and Allah preserve us from that!

18 minutes ago, Eff said:

That's not the redemptive reading though, the redemptive reading asks if we should understand Harrek as someone trapped in this inverse Elric shell and struggling to break out, to articulate authentic desires rather than passing performative enactment of whims.

Harrek as Jerry Cornelius?

If he wants some authentic desires, I think I have a few left in stock. Only slightly shop-soiled. Almost certainly not stitched together in a sweat shop in the East End last week. Definitely not 3D-printed and artfully patinated.

If he turns out to be all shell and no flesh, do we stuff him with masticated crabsticks and then peel back the armour?

1 hour ago, Martin Dick said:

Whether he's authoritarian or not, he's fundamentally an ugly piece of work.

Zorak Zoran without the good looks, boyish charm, and spiritual insight.

It goes against the grain, of course, but I have to agree with Jeff: Harrek doesn’t have to build and operate a(n authoritarian) political machine, because he is a one-man one-monster reign of terror. IRL leaders are just ordinary humans: without the powers of bear gods, they need systems to hold power.

13 hours ago, John Biles said:

Satyrs are more or less a nature spirit in mythology, exist in Glorantha, and are male.

Anaxial’s Roster (a non-canon source, I guess, but a little exercise in dubious nostalgia) concurs:

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Satyrs are the masculine powers of fertility in the wild. They originate in the Spirit World and are similar to nymphs, but have permanent bodies. — p. 76

… and even attempts a definition of nature spirits (albeit a bit game-mechanically?):

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Nature spirits … exist throughout the Inner World. They include all of the spirits of the land and its features … They cannot leave their area or natural feature, for doing so disincarnates them and returns them to the Spirit World. The God Learners classified nature spirits into three types: elemental …, animal …, and plant [including fungus and “primitive plants”] … Although each nature spirit has one or more abilities, they do not so much use these abilities as they are these abilities. Thus, a gold spirit is gold, and can only inhabit gold. — p. 212

So one wonders whether satyrs can — atypically — roam freely. Presumably, they don’t go “pop!” when you kick them out of their specified grove. Bounce off an invisible barrier? I don’t know.

(Basically, nature spirits seem to be spirits from the animist point of view — sorcerers get their own disjoint set of elementals, for example.)

If animal spirits count (and they seem to), it helpfully lists some mostly male examples:

• Gorthak (p. 80) — male spirit bear
• Hrognar (p. 98) — male spirit wolf (pup of Telmor)
• Sakkareka (p. 93) — sabretooth cat spirits: both sexes? (Sakkar himself is male)
• Zerapralor (p. 62) — male spirit deer

As we all know marriage is simple but sex is complicated (and gender I won’t address). Presumably, sexes of plant and fungal spirits track their bodies, so we can at least say that those spirits are not all simply female.

Nymphs, including dryads — not simple tree spirits: “Individual tree spirits have no innate intelligence and no conscious interaction.” (p. 216) — seem to be a bit of an odd case. On the one hand:

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Nymphs are different from other nature spirits in that they can form bodies at will, and take the form of whatever creature they are communicating with …

The appearance of a nymph reflects a deep mythic desire within their nature, and so most nymphs appear sexually attractive to sentient beings … The beauty or ugliness of a nymph is magical, and causes similar reactions in all humanoid races. Thus, even Uz find dryads alluring and suberiads terrifyingly ugly. — pp. 218–219

So one would expect a nymph talking to a satyr to take the form of a satyr — and thus to be in a male body — and for satyrs not normally attracted to other satyrs to find the nymph alluring in that form. What happens when a nymph speaks to a mixed-species group? I couldn’t hazard a guess.

It is open to interpretation, I suppose, but I take it that this means that even if a suberiad took on a shape, texture, odour, and colour that the troll to which it is appearing would find attractive (in another troll), the overall impression would be of terrifying ugliness. It is all about  glamour, not cosmetic surgery and fright masks, right?

But on the other hand, of dryads (there are equivalents for other nymph types):

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Their physical bodies resemble beautiful human women with pale skin and brown or greenish hair. — p. 220

Anthropocentric? Androcentric? “Tits out for the lads”? [Sighs. Shakes head. Weeps.]

3 minutes ago, M Helsdon said:

For agriculture, perhaps these are the sons of the Grain Goddesses

     They took a plough and plough'd him down,
     Put clods upon his head,
     And they hae sworn a solemn oath
     John Barleycorn was dead.

Of course, both the Kouretes and (domesticated) grain gods make me want to ask: what is a nature spirit, anyway?

20 minutes ago, David Scott said:

Without getting into details, the Greeks did have male nature spirits

Interesting. Following the link behind the link:

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The Kouretes were gods of the wild mountainside, inventors of the rustic arts of metalworking, shepherding, hunting and beekeeping.

So gods/spirits in the wild, but acting on the wild with their invented bits of culture, not representing nature innocent of culture (or acting in reaction to culture)?

 Spun off from Lodri Great Temple to avoid threadjacking. It is all just playing with the pieces, not the word from on high.

On 1/8/2023 at 4:27 AM, Joerg said:

That would make the Darkness trio [Zorak Zoran, Xiola Umbar, and Argan Argar] something like the midwives or perhaps even mothers of the three brothers [Dayzatar, Yelm, and Lodril]?

Specifically, ZZ is the mother of Fire–Sky, XU the midwife, and AA maybe the “father” who looks away from the carnage in the birthing suite. The Natural Childbirth Trust had nothing to do with this one.

ZZ we can suppose gave birth through his forehead/third eye — doubtless, some kind of drill was involved. This echoes the fatal trepanning of Chaos (Huntun) and the birth of virginal daddy’s girl Athena (Yelmalio) from the head of Zeus (storm god — see also Orlanth and good old “let there be light” Adonai). Thus the passion of Yelmalio and ZZ dare not speak its name not because it is homosexual but because it is a parent–child thing (Yelmalio as sun fragment). Arguably, it is also necrophilia, as ZZ surely did not survive giving birth to the sun/cosmos through a hole in his head (see also draconic utuma as the origin of all) — still for a(n un)dead guy, ZZ is pretty spry, and he assures me that he is absolutely fine (and I am not going to argue).

In Glorantha, we sometimes have trouble keeping generations and siblings apart, even when they are concepts. We have a progression of Chaos —> Disorder —> Storm, but simultaneously a wish to collapse these. There is also the question of the relationship between Chaos and Darkness: they are both hungry, early, filled with potential, and an absence which we are tempted to characterize as a presence.

Think of Chaos as a primal zero state that kicks out positive numbers and their corresponding negatives simultaneously. For the sake of argument (polarity surely doesn’t matter, though some may think it does), let us say that the positive numbers correspond to matter/cosmos and the negative to the anti-matter which threatens to destroy it (or be destroyed by it). Some may identify the “destructive force” with Darkness, others with Chaos; we put these labels on everything that is not Cosmos/positive, but that — say the illuminated, who have seen the beginning of things — is just a matter of perspective: positive schmositive. Say instead that in the beginning, Darkness and Chaos were indistinguishable and that Darkness only gained definition when the yawning absence of the Void gave birth to Cosmic Fire — one day, all will meet and cancel back down to Zero. If ZZ now presents as Darkness and Disorder, that is because he has released some of his Fire to create the universe, but one day he will swallow it/us all again and regain his balance as primal Chaos, utter Zero. (Then, we may suppose, by random fluctuation, the whole mistake will begin again.) In the meantime, remember that he is become Death, the destroyer of self, and thereby given Life to us all. Or some such psychedelic fever dream.

Where does that leave windbag Orlanth? The charitable view is that Orlanth/Storm is ZZ/Chaos in disguise: in self-trepanning, he released Yelm/created the universe and the idea of him as an usurper of Yelm rather than his necessary complement and mother is a mistake. The legit Orlanth is Invisible Orlanth, who is everywhere and nowhere, baby. Or of course, he is just a Johnny-come-lately who has hi-jacked the regalia of the Ur-gods. As you will.

And what of the relationship between ZZ the Zombie and Arachne Solara the Ghost? Surely, Cragspider the Firewitch must know … and that sounds like a cue for some prog rock.

17 minutes ago, Agentorange said:

Who is or are the mother (mothers) of the lowfires ?

Well of Daliath:

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Lodril made many many gifts for Asrelia, and together they awakened the earth with their children.

Which seems a good enough bet. Of course, it is questionable whether the different “generations” of earth goddesses are really distinct entities. When Orlanth usurps the kingdom, he takes on the earth’s/Ernalda’s fiery children, too — Orlanatus the wicked step-father?

Storm Tribe (p. 217) has Gustbran hiding in Mahome’s cloak, rather than inside Mahome, but perhaps that is a euphemism and his sister is his mother, too. Or perhaps the cloak in question is the cloak that Vinga wrapped around Mahome (Storm Tribe, p. 168) — in tough times, when the forge fire is out, the hearth fire still burns and the forge can be re-lit from it?

On 1/7/2023 at 10:20 PM, Ironwall said:

i feel like argan aggar is the middle and XU is the ignorant one

It is true that XU was furthest from the light of Aether and ZZ closest, but “Argan Argar turned his back from the view” and XU “blinked rapidly but remembered what she saw” (both Trollpak: Uz Lore, p. 5 sidebar), so physical distance isn’t the only factor — and we know that XU is the secret keeper and friend of Yelm, the middle brother.

I am not trying to diss AA by saying he is ignorant: he makes it work for him.

But you know, this is just the sound of my caffeinated brain freewheeling, so don’t pay it too much mind.

17 hours ago, Joerg said:

That would make the Darkness trio something like the midwives or perhaps even mothers of the three brothers?

Yes, just so.

11 hours ago, soltakss said:

Maybe Lodril the Slave is also a subcult of Argan Argar, in any case some trolls worship Lodril directly. After all, he is Heat or Fire without Light, so the trolls don't mind him that much.

Or — maybe, just maybe — Dayzatar, Yelm, and Lodril are as little three deities as [insert triple of earth goddesses here] (as you can do it vertically or horizontally) and Argan Argar’s “superpower” is to overwhelm “heaven” by just not seeing the light. AA’s is the magical power of ignorance (or at least of turning away, which solars might say of Lodril, too); ZZ’s is the magical power of knowing too much (and his overheated acid-and-meth-fried brain is drawn to the deities of “cold light”); XU strikes a happy balance and is the friend of the middle brother/aspect.

11 minutes ago, soltakss said:

Lunars, however, might use Base 7 for ritual counting. In My Glorantha, 7 soldiers make a Squad, 7 Squads make a Company (49), 7 Companies make a Cohort, and 7 Cohorts make a Legion (2,401).

Interesting: so officers come from within the basic count? So if each squad is six soldiers plus a squad leader, then a company is led by a “first among equals” from the squad leaders, not an extra “senior” officer (for a total of 50)?