mfbrandi

Oh, I don’t know, though: from the perspective of Yelm, one rebel looks much like another. Just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street.

The spotted hyena is indeed a wonderful beast.

If I had my quirky way (never going to happen), I would drive a wedge between: experimental heroquesting where we time-travel back — sideways? — to godtime to break reality/indulge in a spot of change war; ordinary religion where we take a load of psychedelics and ritually re-enact our gods’ myths. Gloranthans will — for the most part — not grasp the distinction. Experimental heroquesting is some heavy shit: “You want to go up against Zorak Zoran for real, rash mortal? Good luck with that. Don’t tell him I know you.” If players insist, consider having them time-travel into someone else’s past, so any effects of the quest are on another branch of history — see, for example, The Female Man for ways to do this without it being a totally futile exercise. I am not saying never indulge in proper change war, but do think about the power differential between the PCs and the gods in your Glorantha (I imagine this varies quite a bit). If you do pull off the edit, it will have always been that way, so don’t expect any thanks from a grateful community when you return — if your community is even there when you return: you may have edited your own parents out of history. Change warriors don’t make good community champions, but they are great deracinated depressives. On the other hand, I would have most or all of a cult’s magic depend on ordinary religion. Monrogh’s “proofs” are in effect a con trick on a bunch of heads, but that’s OK because their magic is essentially faith-powered, not god-powered. The faithful won’t see it that way, of course, but then they are usually several peyote buttons detached from reality.

I have nothing against the idea of women initiates of Mithras — and would definitely hope for them in Gloranthan Mithras-clone cults — but do cough up the reference rather than leaving us hanging.

In trying to chase down something for the Good Shepherd thread (Mithras is doing the rounds at the moment), I stumbled across this, which fits nicely with the White Bull theme: Although the astrology won’t work for Glorantha, this could plundered by the “IO is a weapon against the Lunars” crowd, clowns like me who like to see Gloranthan protagonists as fighting themselves, and the “Argrath is an agent/stooge of Lunar Utuma” mob. These may overlap, of course. ————————————————————————————— More from Griffith on Mithras and the lunar bull here.

So here is a fable from real life with the serial numbers lightly filed down (or perhaps it is a universal bed-time story): The enemy of your enemy is seldom your friend, and if you think they are just a tool to be tossed aside when the job is done, you may find you have another think coming. Sometimes the cure is just as bad as the disease … sometimes it is much worse. Me? I would be happy to throw the gods into the gobbling jaws of the Devil — especially if, contra current canon, it were Kajabor — but then I don’t see time as a cosmic horror, so clearly I have been staring into the void for too long, and chaos has taken my soul. Nietzsche warned us to take care when fighting monsters, and I assumed that when Glorantha was populated with roid-raging superheroes head-butting their budgie mirrors to rid the world of cosmic evil that we were being offered a similar warning, but Gloranthaphiles do seem to like to take sides. Perhaps it is all done in fun, but sometimes I wonder.

My apologies, Bill. No offence meant.

Wild pigs/boar — dangerous only if cornered?

And pretty soon, you cannot tell the wolves from the shepherds. In fairness to cops and soldiers, I think there are plenty of groups who consider themselves superior to the average run of humanity — pick your favourite geeky fandom or self-imagined pariah elite — but although they are wrong, too, they maybe don’t all have guns.

Surely, the reference must be to old JC (John 10). But whether the Good Shepherd’s worship’s being supplanted by Waha and the Storm Bull is a dig at Christianity or a comment on the sad state of Prax, I could not say.

Sorry, Bill. Management speak gets my goat. And this bit sounds positively Nysalorean/Gbajian: “Refulgent” is a dead giveaway, right? Bright Empire MLM — no plague too small or too large for our in-house experts.

Sooner or later — lamb or mutton — the flock is led to the abattoir.

I was thinking only that life is finite and that that is fine. Is life “meaningful” only if prolonged indefinitely or repeated on the hamster wheel of reincarnation?

Well, an eventual and permanent return to the Void is fine. It is a matter of whether they were ready to jump into the memory crater, or whether someone had to stamp on their fingers as they clung to the rim.

Imagining a little local difficulty to be a global apocalypse is an occupational hazard in pint-in-hand Gloranthan punditry. Never mind the quality, feel the width myth.

How Oedipal!

Were Lionel Bart and company trying to tell us something about the multiple Argraths theory?

Or taking a cue from real life (e.g. Sumer), people could have mini-shrines or effigies — “personal gods” — at home to deities that get no representation in places of public worship.

Well, I mean, … you would, wouldn’t you? After all, the only good god is an invisible (intangible, inaudible, …, impotent) god, right? DSIO Hail Harshax!

It is always a good time to ask. (Let us hope everyone says “no” if we are talking Atwood’s Gilead.) But maybe the place to ask is in the spin-off thread Treading on a future we may never get to see.

Here’s a link (legit/official mp3 download) to today’s BBC World Service documentary about you-know-what: The end of civilisation: Bronze Age collapse One of the participants is Eric Cline of 1177 B.C. fame, and he is threatening a sequel to that book (which is still sitting on my shelf saying ‘you cannot be bothered to read me’). Not the deepest or the last word on the topic, but if you like this kind of thing, they have loads more available on diverse topics.

Thanks, Brian, I didn’t know it was mentioned as late as that. But it certainly appears earlier: the idea is laid out in WF #11 (1981), but some of the examples are of the why would you bother sort — “a riverford” [presumably, a river ford], “a Ralios river manor” — though “a horse nomad nation” is intriguing. I mean, one Ralios river manor is going to be much like another, no?

Weren’t we back in pre-history — before Moon Design was a twinkle in anyone’s eye, so we couldn’t hold the present regime to it — (if my memory can be trusted over so many decades) promised ‘blank lands’ that would never be filled in? A temporal version of that would be cool, and easier to implement. The Fourth Age as a temporal ‘blank land’ seems appropriate. And if it is a ‘thinned’ time, it would probably make commercial sense, too: lots of people want big colourful things whacking each other; Chaosium has a dark ages game in Pendragon. And there is always the option of rewinding. I bet people would go for a God Learner — remember your mantra: Mongoose does not exist Mongoose does not exist … — or Nysalor campaign.

With ‘Argrath & the Devil’ being seen as the fall of the GC or as imposing the GC with a very big stick?

I cribbed it from my memory of a piece by Avram Davidson (“The Great Rough Beast”), but on checking, he in turn had nicked it from some unspecified and unspecific source, but Regent Street is certainly “around Piccadilly”: When my mother was very young, she knew a “very ugly old woman with the sweetest nature; we called her ‘Pearly Girl’” who had — she said — known AC and had nothing good to say about him. I wasn’t sure that my mother’s friend really had known Crowley — surely everyone of the right age had a Crowley story — so I was surprised many years later to learn of AC’s “scarlet woman” (Evelyn) Pearl Brooksmith. Seems it was true, after all, but the stories she could have told were presumably deemed unfit for my mother’s young ears. AC seemed a good fit for IO: invisible and the author of rotten poetry. Does that mean we have to audition Yeats as Yelm? Yikes!