mfbrandi

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.

Well, if the Seven Mothers can combine and , and if Krarsht can combine and , I don’t see why you cannot have chaos sorcerers. Having one rune of an opposed pair is not to deny the reality of the opposing rune. Of course, mastering both is some trick, but and might help. Lunar College of Magic includes sorcerers, right? I was just leaning into = Cosmos (being) and = Void (nothingness). I know that’s not to all tastes.

It is probably meant to be a Lunar thing, but … I say they do. We all know that humans are just Light-adapted Uz — and that this is somehow connected to the Enlo “curse”. Redheads are not so well-adapted to the light of the sun as other humans, and Uz — consciously or unconsciously — feel them to be closer kin, more like “normal” people. (And of course, Uz see, black, white, shades of grey, and red only.)

In a there was an old woman who swallowed a fly fashion, with each entity returned to the landscape creating a fresh ecological problem which “requires” another entity to be quested for? (Trickster is betting that the last in the chain will make the first go extinct again. They’ve put serious money on it.)

(As ever, what follows is not based on close reading of lore, but on what seems fun. Caveat emptor.) Well, one could play it as an ecological disaster — all the migrating animals are lost forever. This might be a bit grim. The Age-ending events are likely ecological catastrophes, anyway, without adding more. For a lighter tone, play it that beast migrations carry on as usual despite the Syndics’ Ban — as presumably marine migrations do despite the Closing — and only people are affected. Of course, one would add that animals are unable to carry messages (or any other cultural item, like money, or trade goods) through the mists: the carrier pigeon arrives, but the message attached to its leg is lost in the mists. Then one has to decide what to do with the Hsunchen: seems OK to let them pass through in animal form, but either (a) when they arrive at the next non-misted place, they are without cultural items and unable to speak about where they have come from, or (b) they alone can bypass the Syndics Ban completely, but they have kept this a closely guarded secret.

I bet the heavy duty lore nerds here could play any Gloranthan scenario as a matrix game (i.e. here’s why it happens; here’s why it doesn’t; assign a probability on the fly; roll). They would get to wear their subject matter expert hats and everything. Boring aside: Right, that is quite enough of that. Let’s get back to the irreducible .

For comparison, the Cults of Prax text: If the Issaries rune, , is just shorthand for + , why would anyone need to acquire the rune (assuming they had the other two)? Banish the thought of sloppy writing or thinking from your minds — consider your wrists to have been slapped if you found it there — and ask yourself what this says about not merely combining two runes, but expressing them in a third. Is there some strong synergy, something strongly emergent, something not captured by the idea of a single glyph for two runes? After all, harmonious movement would seem to apply to things that don’t involve exchange in any obvious way: dance, gymnastics, and athletics, perhaps. Is there more than one way to express two runes in a third? Whatever the game mechanics and the text of the Cults Book (about which I have no opinion), it might be a shame if — which I like to think of as the ‘other minds’ or ‘non-solipsism’ rune — were to be thought of as adding nothing more to Glorantha than what is given by and .

A variation on the old joke: Q: What is this ? A: A dead one of these Hence in Pamaltela, no-till agriculture.

Or equivalently, - = , which suggests + = and isn’t that more thought provoking? Harmony is broken exchange. How does one say which rune is the more fundamental? Perhaps one cannot.