mfbrandi

1 hour ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

In Glorantha, do most cultures use base 10 for their counting and math?  … Or something else?

Ooh, I like this!

Do they have a positional system? With zero? With a “decimal” (adjust to suit base) point?

Does it make any real sense to talk about base with Roman numerals? (I am just asking: it is clear fives and tens are important, but …)

If we say “three-score years and ten”, are we breaking out of our base ten system, or is it just a colourful way of saying “3 × 20 + 10”? (See also “soixante-dix.”)

Shepherds count sheep like this: yan (1), tan (2), tether (3), mether (4), pip (5), …, jigget (20). But they count “goats” like this: yan, tan, teher — run!

I am going to guess that counting systems vary to suit the tasks and sophistication of the users. If no computers, no need to bother with low bases, right? But the Morokanth might have a binary thumb–no thumb system for magic.

Argrath is dead. Argrath remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent?

10 hours ago, soltakss said:

So, I don't see why humans joining Aldrya need to undergo a rebirth ceremony to become an Elf.

I am not demanding it, it is just that when David said:

On 12/19/2022 at 9:58 AM, David Scott said:

Initiation into the cult of Aldrya is not a casual event for a non-elf, just follow this 16 step plan detailed in the upcoming cults book

… and went on to give the 16-point plan which included being reborn as an elf, I took it he was speaking from advance knowledge of forthcoming official material. He did not state it there, but I assumed that the successful initiate would lose their beast rune and gain a plant rune. If I have any of that wrong, my apologies to all concerned.

10 hours ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

you are substituting your own understanding of the distinction when I speak of it

Thanks for your comments, and I am more than happy to concede that:

• I may have gotten people’s attitudes to FRP magic wrong;
• I don’t understand real-life shamanism.

However, it would seem crazy to apologise for saying that IRL shamans can tell the difference between:

• on the one hand, (what I would recognise as) murder and mutilation;
• and on the other, their own rituals (however ill-equipped I am to understand them).

At this point, I should definitely shut up.

1 hour ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

With these initiations, the flesh, the inert matter, is not what is being spoken of.

Which was my point — although made from the POV of an outsider/unbeliever.

It sometimes seems to me that some people’s attitude to Glorantha goes a bit like this:

1. In the real world, magic and religion are bad science (and so they don’t work);
2. In Glorantha, the natural laws are different and — abracadabra! — bad science becomes good, magic works, and religion is true.

Even as a lifelong infidel, this seems to me rather hard on real-world religion — as if it were “broken” and could be “fixed” by importing some natural laws and grimoires from the Lozenge. Surely, that is not right. Surely, the real world is exactly as “magical” as it needs to be, already. And if I don’t see the world in the same way religious people do, that is not because we disagree about physics and chemistry, is it?

Dragging this back to the Aldrya initiation: I have no problem with it being hard for an animal to initiate to Aldrya; no problem with it requiring the animal to be transformed into a vegetable (even literally); if I am a little uncomfortable with the use of elements of real-world shamanism in the transformation, it is because the Gloranthan transformation looks to be very much about “the flesh, the inert matter” and so looks (to me) to be mocking real-world shamanism as bad science.

I am not here to attack or defend real-world shamanism, religion, or magic(k), but I think treating it as bad science or pseudoscience is boring and lazy.

“But in my elf game, I want to powertrip. I want to point my finger and call down the fire of the gods.” That is fine: go ahead. But the needs of our FRPs shouldn’t be allowed to distort how we see the nominally similar subject matter in the real world, should it?

1 hour ago, g33k said:

"but you have no Plant Rune, and no way to get a plant Rune, so you're stuck!  Har-har-har!  And neener-neener for good measure!"

But I take it that on the official “be more hardcore: get reborn as an elf” version of initiation to Aldrya, the character does end up with a plant rune … if they are alive at the end.

1 hour ago, Jeff said:

There has been a metaplot as to what is going to happen in Dragon Pass since before RuneQuest was a game.

And that’s fine. All I was trying to say — ineptly, I guess — is that maybe when people rail against Argrath they are really reacting to a feeling of being railroaded and that is why they are quite so vehement about him. I have no interest in telling you what to write or other people how to play — that would be both rude and pointless.

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

a wild and crazy future nobody in the official prophetic timeline knows about

That — that is what we want!

I think the problem with Argrath is that he stands for the metaplot, for the future already written. For some people, that will chafe. Some will want to skip ahead to the “open” bit of the future post-Argrath. Doesn’t matter how brilliantly the metaplot and Argrath’s characterization are done, for some it will be a bore. Others not so much, and they will enjoy weaving around the story as it trickles down from above.

Maybe sometimes that frustration gets expressed as attacks on Argrath’s character or effectiveness. It is not as if an Argrath who is more of a strongman is what we need, a Putin on steroids. Expressing a happiness with the metaplot (or the existence of a metaplot) as approval of Argrath as a person or as a hero would — IMVHO — equally miss the point.

10 hours ago, Lordabdul said:

I blame the 1970s human-centrism of fantasy world-building, which we still have to wrestle with.

So on the one hand anthropocentrism is a problem …

10 hours ago, Lordabdul said:

I don't like this write-up of Aldrya that forces you to become a biological elf in order to become an initiate, as opposed to, you know, a cultural elf.

… but on the other if the humans want to play the elf game, the vegetable people and their tree mother are jolly unsporting to make them go through such a demanding rebirth ritual. Why is that? It sounds like you are saying that humans must be allowed to take what they like from Aldryami culture and magic and that the Aldryami are not allowed to set the terms. 😉

Is it just that the proposed ritual makes a lot of us go “ick”? Is it that it seems to resonate uncomfortably with intrahuman matters IRL in which some of us would like to ditch biological determinism or essentialism? (I am not going to be prescriptive about real world attitudes, but matters can be complicated, surely.)

6 hours ago, g33k said:

But, you say, the magical transformations of the Shaman must remain mundane, and be purely symbolic/hallucinatory/metaphorical.  Not real.

Thanks for your comments. My “something has gone terribly wrong” was about what would happen if a rogue real-life shaman took their rituals too literally and actually eviscerated the wannabe initiate (which is not something I am accusing IRL shamans of doing). Sorry if I didn’t make that clear.

You are right, though, that I do wonder — nothing stronger than that — about how our attitudes to IRL magic should or just might affect our attitudes to FRP magic. Fantasy magic can seem like a branch of physics or engineering, getting a new spell like shopping for a smart bit of tech or visiting Q. If we are not on our guard, rationalized magic can be a bit dull. But on the other hand, gee-whiz sensawunda can be a crashing bore, too. It is tricky.

But I am not arguing for making shamans less powerful or more mundane than other fantasy spellcasters … and anyway, no one should take too much notice of me.

14 minutes ago, Eff said:

but you're right that it would be deeply unsatisfactory if the matter was as simple as "people in Glorantha define their world through the free choice of myths"

Free choice isn’t the issue. If people’s choices are determined by the ironclad laws of historical materialism (or whatever), that is no reason to believe naïve theists will be less dangerous than reflective godlearners or illuminates, is it? However, it seems clear that I will remain in a minority of one, so I had better let it go.

19 hours ago, Brian Duguid said:

I find it odd that we consider it unremarkable in Glorantha that limbs can be regrown, people resurrected, wounds instantaneously closed

I am for keeping it remarkable.

18 hours ago, Brian Duguid said:

As already noted, there are plenty of accounts like this one. I imagine that "their own people" believed that this is exactly what was done, and that they considered it to be magical, not lunatic.

I am not attacking the IRL ritual or shamanic initiates’ right to say that they died and were brought back by their initiator. I don’t say that they are insincere, but I think the thing needs to be approached with a little subtlety.

But this is the thought experiment: a member of the shaman’s community — not a dissident or “unbelieving” member — who is not currently in an altered state finds a shaman actually eviscerating a would-be initiate and stuffing the cavity with stones; do they think (1) “business as usual”, (2) “something has gone terribly wrong”, (3) something else entirely, or (4) it depends?

Unsurprisingly — godless ne’er-do-well that I am — I come down on the (2) “something has gone terribly wrong” side. The initiation has not gone to plan, to put it mildly. They wouldn’t need to wait to see whether the victim was brought back: the situation would be plain to them. Similarly, I believe that if a Christian who believed in transubstantiation — but not currently in an altered state — found what seemed to be blood in the chalice, they would freak out; that is not to say they would not sincerely maintain that in their ritual wine really turns to blood.

(There is the further question of whether a believer “lost in the moment” would accept the real thing as a substitute for the ritual/symbolic thing, but you know … baby steps.)

Is this really a controversial take?

On shamanism and becoming an elf:

Quote

The old man then cut out all of his insides, intestines, liver, heart, lungs – everything in fact … Then he sang over him until his body was all swollen up. When this was so he provided him with a complete set of new inside parts, placed a lot more atnongara stones in him, and patted him on the head

Clearly, if the Unmatjera shamans really did this, their own people would have them incarcerated as dangerous lunatics. When Glorantha takes something which IRL is hallucinated/metaphorical/symbolic/whatever and literalizes it, it can seem to me a bit … broken. It takes the magic out of the world in the guise of putting it back in.

I guess it is unrecorded what Australian Aboriginal peoples think of RQG and its jam-tomorrow cults books.

9 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Not belief, practice. Gloranthan gods don’t care about belief.

Point taken. I don’t care about the belief–practice divide. (You have to shout that you believe in fairies — it is not enough to “believe it in your heart”.)

The point was that the tail wags the dog: if the myths gain or lose power depending on how many people replicate/visit them in heroquest, then people determine the available magic, not the nature or deeds of the gods — everything is true of the gods, but some stories have power, and the worshippers determine which those are.

And what is to stop this reinforcing “bad” myths as much as “good” ones?

(And no, I am not pushing the idea that Glorantha would be a “better” — more humane — place if the gods/available magic were worshipper-independent.)

14 minutes ago, Orlanthatemyhamster said:

Do we really need another Orlanth subcult?

No, of course not. When I asked in the original post “wouldn’t we expect to see a cult of Orlanth Penitent, worshipping an Orlanth in sackcloth and ashes who is very very sorry?” it was just a dig at the tedious old windbag, not in hope that people would go for the idea. (Although, if you could replace all your existing big O. cults with one easy-to-manage monthly payment …)

It wasn’t just your hamster: he ate all the hamsters. Now he is eyeing-up the guinea pigs.

10 hours ago, John Biles said:

1.  All stories are true in the Godtime.  This allows every worship group to have its own versions of the myths, though there will be overlap in adjacent areas and those more visited myths will have more power …

2.  …  Normal worshippers *believe* the stories they tell and [their] belief empowers the appropriate mythic patterns.  This is worship.

This is the Tinkerbell theory of religion, right? Fairies/gods exist and have power if and to the extent that people believe in them. We say “all stories are true in Godtime” but we none of us knows what that means. However, we think we can trade in our battered notion of truth for one of the power of story: if we ship hard for a Godtime plotline, we can tap that story to produce “appropriate” effects in the mundane world of ordinary time — that looks … usable. (Don’t ask whether a story is true or false (illuminating or benighted, beautiful or ugly), ask whether it is powerful or weak. Belief is power. Might makes right. Fight! Fight! Fight!)

I take it that the idea is that:

1. illuminates and Godlearners understand that this is what is going on — gods are not people and don’t have ideas of their own;
2. ordinary theists do not — they have some crazy theory about gods being independent entities and moral exemplars.

Is that right? Does that really sound like a world that is safer in the hands of the theists than of the illuminates? Think of Donald Trump Orlanth as the id of the people and the nastiest bits of the unconscious with their hands on both the defence budget and the nuclear button. Give me a mystic prone to bouts of detachment, any day. (But on the other hand, perhaps, Zelazny’s The Dream Master and Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. Possibly more Godlearnery.)

11 hours ago, John Biles said:

the Great Compromise raises up forces to enforce itself

Which sounds like giving agency/personhood to the Compromise itself. Is that your idea? Sometimes — I think — this agency is given to Arachne Solara (the face of the Compromise), “the greatest of the great gods.” Presumably, the great gods which receive little or no worship (from memory (so could well be wrong), there has been some to and fro over the years as to whether Arachne Solara is the object of active worship) and/or the Compromise itself are either powerless — doesn’t seem to be the case for AS — or not powered on the Tinkerbell model??? Only Godlearners and illuminates would know to keep enough worship tied to the myths of Comprise to keep it powered up; ordinary theists would be blindly pouring their POW into stories in which they/their gods win, right?

And the Compromise tries to lay off the “risk” of its agents being illuminates by also making them crazed fanatics. I can’t see that being a problem, at all.

If worshipers beliefs drive which Godtime stories have power, what ensures that worshipers have beliefs that preserve the world, not those which destroy it? “Morality” seems like a non-answer: if they have the “right” beliefs, world-preserving stories will be empowered — sure, but what makes the people “moral” in this sense? (Contrast with some rationalist view of religion: we know a priori that god is good, and (perhaps) god’s revelation leads the people to goodness. In Glorantha, if the people are wicked and tell stories of wickedness and destruction, the gods will follow suit, and world-destroying magics will become more available to the people, right?)

It sometimes seems that the official Chaosium “voice” is Godlearner metaphysics with theist attitude. The first bit is OK, I guess, as it facilitates explaining/understanding the game, but I never saw why we — as players or as characters — should buy into the second.

Of course, I have likely misunderstood you completely. In which case, my apologies.

Quote

When the leaders had this new ally they called their unruly companions together to boast and plot. All of the rebels were there, including … Sedenya the Changer, Lanatum the Thunderer and the rest.
— GRoY, p. 14

They’re young.
They’re in love.
And they kill people.

Pale Sedenya and the radiant Sun were daughters of the Empress. Sedenya was envious of the Sun — her mother’s favourite, she thought — and dreamt of taking her sister’s place in her mother’s affections and shining with the joy of it.

Lanatum–Orlanth was a shepherd boy, but he dreamt that he was the rightful Emperor. Surely, his dream was true. After all, his friend Eurmal — the village idiot, who had a wickedly sharp new toy — assured him that it was.

Sedenya and Orlanth met. Each encouraged the other’s delusion. They married. How could they not? Eurmal was maid of honour, but the dress — which was much finer than Orlanth’s — didn’t fit.

Encouraged by Orlanth and Eurmal, Sedenya took Death and murdered the Sun. Immediately, she repented of it and dropped Eurmal’s plaything, but she was ever after stained crimson with her sister’s blood. While Sedenya was weeping, Orlanth carefully lifted Death — still hot from being plunged into his sister-in-law — and stole away in the dark to kill the Empress; that done, he was not at all repentant.

Returning to herself, Sedenya bound Eurmal and Orlanth, assembled her team, and set out on the original Lightbringers’ Quest. Her plan was that she and Orlanth would take the places of the Sun and the Empress in Hell, and that her mother and sister would be returned to life.

She should not have taken the trickster with her: slipping the bonds which should have been secure, Eurmal diced Sedenya and scattered the many pieces throughout the Underworld. Orlanth and Eurmal found a dead ham to play the combined rôle of Sun and Emperor-in-name-only and, trading him for a Sedenya jigsaw puzzle, left the Imperial family in Hell — out of sight and out of mind.

This is why the seventh Lightbringer is mysterious and the Orlanthi do not speak her true name.

The Seven Mothers were attempting to put things right, but they weren’t all singing from the same hymnbook: some thought they were sending Orlanth to Hell as a swap for the Empress and the true Sun, but others that additionally Eurmal could be sent to Hell and a purified White Moon retrieved.

What they got was a very angry, very compromised, red-faced not-quite-goddess, who — to add insult to incompetence — had been retconned into the daughter of the fake Sun. Orlanth and Eurmal’s deception had been baked all-the-more-securely into reality.

When it is said that the Seven Mothers’ LBQ was “partially successful” that is a measure of the quality of PRs hired in the Empire. It was a disaster.

Sedenya doesn’t know whether she will ever be able to write her mother and sister back into Godtime, never mind retrieve them from Hell if she does. At the moment, even she cannot recall their names.

One thing is for sure, once she has finished toying with them, her husband/widower, his sickly green so-called wife, and all their suck-up vassal gods are being sent somewhere that makes Sheng’s custom Hell look like the Ritz: Wakboth’s gullet. And Eurmal and an Orlanthi “superhero” are going to send them there.

(This was inspired by — but doesn’t map 1:1 to — the cut-and-shut myth of Inanna’s Descent as described by Dina Katz.)

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

… and the horrible ruptures of zzabur are repaired

That is why you never see him around these days: he is nursing his hernia and trying to invent the truss.

I think my new dumbest theory is that the best of the dumb theories (not mine, obviously) ought to get compiled into a Jonstown Compendium volume, as this thread seems to have become a safe space for good ideas. (Don’t worry, by tomorrow I will have humbugged away my seasonal good cheer and will be back to my usual grumpy self.)

So where do idiots like me put our really dumb ideas?

7 hours ago, JRE said:

That is in essence what the Reforesting is.

Sure. It was this and talk of getting Aldryan magic through Ernalda that set me off. They may be close in blood/sap/mud, but they cannot but be enemies.

5 hours ago, Eff said:

Elves are aware of what the succession of vegetation is and the need for continual death and regrowth, rather than aiming for a world of nothing but old-growth forests with dead canopies forever and ever.

But forests don’t need human or human-analogue farmers to manage them, else they never would have “evolved”.

The farm is the natural enemy of the forest, and Aldrya’s friendliness toward Ernalda is a sham.

The mother of forests intends to chop out a lot of dead wood — all flesh is dead wood — in the earth goddess family tree. When she is finished, it will be bye-bye to anthropomorphic depictions of Gata, and the blood-drenched clod will take on a different significance.

15 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Elves are just a different type of archaic person in thrall to the great tree consciousness. As much as it pains them to acknowledge, they bleed like us, breed like us and die like us. Wooden bones venerated in museums and libraries are mostly devotional forgeries or, very rarely, a bona fide relic

The recent gory — sappy? — stuff on how to initiate to Aldrya if born animal resonates well with this. It makes me think of human wannabe aldryami as indulging in the ultimately masochistic Imitatio Christi — it is not enough to be nailed to the tree, one must become the tree. One wonders whether the original elves were created from “beast” stock this way by some vegetable Mengele–Moreau: “Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. Are we not elves? Not to claw the Bark of Trees; that is the Law. Are we not elves?”

And if the stubborn beast flesh grows back, perhaps that is part of what makes them useful to the [and here I gag] “Wood Wide Web”. Like Arnie’s flesh on his steel armature.

(Apologies if this concedes too much to the orthodoxy.)

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Everything solid melts into "air."

A spectre is haunting Glorantha — the spectre of . All the Powers of old Genertela have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pharaoh and Emperor, Queen and Khan, Nysalor Radicals and Arkati police-spies.

Or something …

I was thinking more of teenage years scratching my head over Kropotkin and George Woodcock. Never did figure it out.

2 hours ago, svensson said:

And no, I'm not confusing him with Sir Galahad. Sir Percival, the least worldly and most innocent of the Ko/tRT, also swore to the Grail Quest.

Sure, my reference to the Rohmer flick wasn’t accidental. As an atheist with “godless bastard” written through my bones as if they were sticks of Brighton rock, I reckon the “vision” scene (or whatever you want to call it) in Perceval le Gallois is as close to understanding Christianity as I am ever likely to get. (Rohmer was a devout Catholic.)

As to whether all those on heroquests understand that they are — or understand what that means even if they know they are — I would think it is more fun if some don’t: sometimes, the “brother” gets spiked and wouldn’t know a psychedelic from a hole in the ground; they stumble into the quest and become “heroic” by learning on the job. But some people will have snagged a copy of the Haynes manual from the Godlearners (or some dodgy Arkati in an underground carpark) or cribbed the game rules via transdimensional timewarp from a future Chaosium publication — IMHO, these people have no soul and are trading in adventure for a tough day on the factory floor. I think it is a blessing that we don’t have a current set of approved heroquest rules.

Of course, I exaggerate a little for (mildly) comic effect, and I think that everyone should conceive of heroquests in a way that suits them, and that when there are official, comprehensive, rubber-stamped RQG heroquest rules, many people will love them. [Sits in the corner smugly polishing a stolen halo of tolerance and inclusivity.]