mfbrandi

6 hours ago, Darius West said:

Do Mostali live forever if they keep true to their programming like the Brithini?

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:

14 hours ago, davecake said:

I think that there are quite a lot of anti-Chaos mystics in the East

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):

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[T]he Taoist knows how to live in the world without being of the world, how to be at leisure without the solitude of ‘hills and seas.’

And this is Ray Turney saying what’s wrong with Chaos in Cults of Terror (p. 19, lower box-out):

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The chaotic are arrogant: they want to be in the world, but not of it.

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:

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To love the people is to harm them; to side with those who are in the right in order to end war is the way to start fresh wars.

And Waley again (pp. 66–67):

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What then is man’s true treasure? It is his Inward Vision (ming), a generalized perception that can come into play only when the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between ‘self’ and ‘things’, between ‘this’ and ‘that’ has been entirely obliterated. Chuang Tzu’s symbol for this state of pure consciousness, which sees without looking, hears without listening, knows without thinking, is the god Hun-tun (‘Chaos’): [then follows the famous story about how Chaos is killed by his guests]

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.)

6 hours ago, Darius West said:

That implies Issaries and persuasiveness, not vicious criticism that cuts people and arguments to ribbons.

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.

6 hours ago, davecake said:

Not only do I think that there are quite a lot of anti-Chaos mystics in the East, it would be so terribly disappointing if there were no Chaos Sorcerers.

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.

17 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

What is Redhair Place (Trolls prefer redheads?)

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.)

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Bringing back a lost beast seems to be a very standard heroic challenge … Would people be interested in adventures using this concept?

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.)

39 minutes ago, Joerg said:

The Syndics' Ban in Fronela brought similar problems to all manner of seasonally migratory beasts. Would these beasts have marched off into the mists of the borders, to re-appear out of these when the season was right?

(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.

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

The current canon is a RQG canon. YGWV if RQG is not your (only) approach to the setting.

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 .

10 minutes ago, David Scott said:

The Issaries Rune will be in the upcoming cults book: 

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The Runes of Issaries are Movement and Harmony. Together these are often expressed as “Issaries” or “Communication,” a Rune unknown or unused except in trade functions. Other than Issaries, few spirits have it, save those who took or otherwise obtained it from him.

For comparison, the Cults of Prax text:

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The Runes of Issaries are Mobility, Harmony, and “Issaries,” a Rune unknown or unused except in trade functions. Other than Issaries few spirits have it, save those who took it from him.

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.

37 minutes ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

so what could add communication trade as power ? for me, nothing =  + 

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.

2 hours ago, davecake said:

creation of the Jolanti Tamestone consciousness and ability to act as independent servants, capable of carrying out orders, aka sentience, requires the participation of a Diamonddwarf of the Tin caste.

I only meant — jokingly — to ascribe a form of physicalism to the Mostali: animating an entity doesn’t require non-physical ‘spooky substance’ to be instilled in it. As to who has the secrets of the final stages of Jolanti creation, I am agnostic on that.

21 hours ago, Eff said:

Perhaps Law's percentile rating is simply half that of Fertility on the character sheet's, and Trade's is Harmony's but with one of the digits turned sideways.

Hmmm … or perhaps Law is Sterility and 1 - Fertility = Law. But then we all know that if there was an ancient cup from which the whole world was poured at the dawn of creation, it was Chaos. Perhaps in the game of let’s throw out or downgrade some runes, we have been looking in the wrong place. Ditch Fertility in favour of Chaos and have an opposed pair of Chaos–Mysticism and Law–Sorcery. (Perhaps we can see a potentiality (is not) vs. realization (is) opposition here, too.) [[Edit: Looking back to Hero Wars, I see that Chaos was indeed paired with not as Law but as Cosmos.]]

But what do we oppose to Death, then? Glad you asked. If Death is separation — a big ‘if’, I grant you — then we oppose it to Issaries, which is coming together. As Law looked like a broken Fertility, so Death looks like a broken Issaries. But like I said: big ‘if’.

Maybe better to oppose Issaries (mutuality, equality) and Mastery (taking, dominance) — this might drive conflict better than Bluster vs Chaos. This is why few have the Issaries rune and thieves and merchants may be more interested in Mastery. And rather than seeing true Death as separation, maybe see it is finitude, having an end. Then we can oppose it to Infinity.

Of course, the game of re-jigging the runes to make a more humane Glorantha can feel a bit like that played by the dead in ‘Mr. Wilde’s Second Chance’:

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‘That is beautiful, sir, beautiful,’ said a voice in the poet’s ear …
‘Do you think so?’ said Mr. Wilde curiously.
‘Lovely, sir! Such agreeable colour. Such delicacy.’
‘I see,’ said Mr. Wilde …

Oscar Wilde, poet, dead at forty-four, took his second chance from the table before him and broke the board over his knee.

Still, you know you want to take a handful of power runes and throw them into the maw of Krarsht or Kajabor.

1 hour ago, Nick Brooke said:

a cowardly mortal dragged way out of his comfort zone on an heroic adventure he doesn't really want to participate in, isn't "Flesh Man" -- he's Flashman.

Which raises the uncomfortable — but all too likely — possibility that we are all Flashman (minus even the hint of adventure).

7 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

So a PC is alive, they kill or trick the guardians of the Hell Gate, cross the gate and they die? There is no resistance to a spell or something.

Again certain heroes are able to escape Hell and when they do the become magically not dead?

If (pretty much) everyone in Hell is dead, this is how I would play it (or so I say, but I am making it up as I type). Bound to be a heavily variant Glorantha.

Perhaps the first thing is to completely ditch is our IRL (modern?) conception of death. IRL, things are easy: if your body stops working for good (i.e. permanently), then you are dead; all existence is embodied — you cannot think or feel without a body — so no need to fret over post-death experience. (Certainly, Descartes and company thought of the soul as a substance distinct from the body, but let us not worry about that mess, here.)

What about the Gloranthan conception of death? Once upon a time, we might have thought it was as simple as separation of the spirit from the body (and if that meant a shaman off on their travels was dead, well, that just added to their mystique), but we now know that is not the canonical definition of death. It probably is still a good way to kill a Gloranthan in normal circumstances — it just doesn’t define death.

Maybe best to think of death legalistically — after all Daka Fal is inter alia the judge of who is dead and who is not. Death is a legal state (i.e. a status in law, like being married), and one’s status as alive or dead determines the rules (more laws) which apply to you. This has the advantages that: (a) we can argue about whose laws apply; (b) it is clearly not an important intrinsic property of a person: the dead can have bodies and thoughts and run around the place performing actions just as the living typically do; (c) laws may change arbitrarily for MGF.

So: dead is a status in law not purporting to codify or represent some natural fact about the supposedly deceased. There is no “legally dead but not really dead.” There is no natural law of life and death. There is only infernal legislation. So if you are planning a return trip to Hell, recruit a logic-chopping sage–sorceror or a devotee of Eurmal the lawyer.

As to exactly what the laws of life and death are, I am not the person to say, but we do know that according to the guardians of the various Hells:

• there are dead in the middle world (e.g. the recently dead waiting a week before reporting to Hell’s check-in desk)
• the living may not enter Hell
• if you are in Hell, you are dead
• the dead may not leave Hell (not without the right vellumwork, sealed and in triplicate)

So your papers may say you are alive once you pass the portal, or they may say that you are just out on day release (still dead) and have to return. But what if you escape? Well, you may still be dead — and agents may be dispatched to bring you back.

But what about Ethilrist, is he alive or dead? If he is alive, he certainly wasn’t permitted to leave Hell, but it may be that if you escape in any of a short list of prescribed ways and manage to stay escaped for the prescribed period — a year and a day, perhaps — you are now alive and crossed off the roll of the dead. Congratulations!

Possibly even more fun is if Ethilrist is secretly still dead — not undead, but dead — but at least one of these applies: (a) he is so tough that it is not worth the trouble trying to keep him in Hell; (b) he is such a crashing bore that no one wants him in Hell: there were so many complaints that he was exiled to the middle world; (c) he has found a legal loophole allowing him to pass freely between Hell and the middle world — but if he tells anyone what it is, he will be recalled to Hell permanently.

What about the undead? The law of death only recognises two categories — alive and dead — but unfortunately, neither is defined as ‘everyone who doesn’t fall into the other category’. The law was badly drafted. People fall through the cracks, assignable to neither category. These are the undead. The bureaucracy of Hell hates them — they make a mockery of their nice neat ledgers, and unlike the escaped dead, they cannot simply be put back in their correct ‘box’, because they do not have one. The quill pushers want them destroyed utterly — thrown into the memory hole that is Kajabor, ideally — they are an embarrassment to Hell’s civil service.

2 hours ago, davecake said:

[Flintnail and Isidilian] don't seem too be able to create Jolanti, but they do seem to be able to understand their physical construction if not their sentience.

My Mostali informant says, “Heresy! If the physical construction is completed to plan, an item will have all designed-in features, including ‘sentience’ — if there is any such thing: the category is likely delusional, like ‘growing’.”

55 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

This almost feels to me like some sort of undead banishing vortex of true death? There should be some sort of ritual which if done correctly opens a one way gate to Hell that draws undead to it sort of like the giant pumpkin?

Could be: decide where your particular undead have violated the reverse elemental path and devise a way to get them back on it.

56 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

Would Styx Water hurt Chaos in any way? Just curious

As Styx is the intermediate stage between Nakala and Zaramaka, it might: “Nakala was born as a defense against the Oozing Chaos of pre-creation”; Zaramaka “contains all the things and powers of the watery depths” [emphasis mine] and there are watery Chaos fighters, so you could argue he is salient, too. But who would want to hurt a lovely fluffy chaos monster? Precious little goat-child — cootchie-cootchie-coo!

11 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I don't know who originated the Gloranthan Styx.  But the question would seem to be: How much  does the Gloranthan underworld match Greek, Roman, or Italian Renaissance underworlds?

Oh, I have no objection to its failing to match, I just wondered what the myth logic was for Styx water being dangerous. One can see how it might be dangerous to the undead in any situation: undeath fails to respect the division between life and death, so it is an affront to Styx, the terminator between life/death and Darkness and the possibility of something else.

But the living only fail to respect this when in the underworld, so even if it is deadly to them there, does it retain its power if stolen and taken to the surface world? One can imagine a quest for a universal superweapon which just results in a bucket of dark zombie solvent, useless against the living.

31 minutes ago, svensson said:

Hey, it's not even politicians

I did mean, the “job” of being famous.

34 minutes ago, svensson said:

I think the point of that graffiti statement is the subcontext that Western culture is actually devaluing intelligence in favor of ignorance.

Ironically, I think people have been saying that since the invention of writing (or at least, the Greeks rediscovery of it): if you can write stuff down, no one will bother thinking or remembering anything. The Mostali aren’t worried: once the World-machine is fixed, it will be able to read its own tweets — no organic components required!

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

The root (or tail) of all rivers is in the Styx.

Which is intriguing, as one would imagine Styx to be liquid darkness — which preceded true water, Zaramaka, the infinite sea — and not water at all. (And Chaos was said to ooze, even before Nakala–Darkness was born, so water isn’t the concept — or property — of liquidity.)

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[Zaramaka] was the second of the primal elements born to the universe … He is the source of all water … The most remote mysteries of the unfathomable deep reside in this god. He was the first of the entities to separate, centering upon itself first, then separating in the manner in which mixed oils separate in a bottle.

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The Styx is the Last Drop of Darkness, and gave birth to Zaramaka, the first true water.

Perhaps, we can see Styx as a process: she is the birth of Water from Darkness — rather than the entity that gives birth, which would then be Nakala — and though this is a candidate for the first non-Chaos birth, it is still going on. She is also something to pass through or across on the return journey: in death we all return to our mother, Darkness.

And perhaps, we creatures of clay can be said to pass through amniotic Zaramaka, too, on our way to be born — and taking @jajagappa’s co-option of Lethe, we partake of Styx’s amnestic powers in passing from Nakala to Zaramaka in the process of rebirth. I am sure one could work in Fire (emerging into the light) and Storm (taking a first breath and then wailing like Orlanth when someone took his rattle away). And then run things backward on death: lose breath/air, lose light/sight and/or warmth, return to the earth, cross the river of the underworld, and so back to mother darkness. This provides a framework for religious arguments about burial customs: cremation, towers of silence, and burial at sea might be said to skip steps or to scramble the correct ritual order.

5 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Kilgorn plans to perform heroquests to re-enact all of Yelmalio’s battles against unlife …

Eventually, even Delecti will fall, and then the Earth, bride of the Sun, can be cleansed once and for all.

Did Yelmalio win all of his battles against unlife? Did any of them involve kindly old mad uncle Zorak Zoran?

Is it clear that the Earth wants to be cleansed once and for all? A Cold Sun fresh off a zombie-killing high might be an absolutely terrifying “returned husband”. It is rather ominous in a Michael Douglas in Falling Down kind of a way.

8 hours ago, svensson said:

Stop making stupid people famous

The trouble is no one else wants the job.

As the war machines rumble into against life and fizzing magics gather, the little people are worried. What do they do? Scrawl strange glyphs and fragments of poetry on every available wall, of course.

The world's great age begins anew,
   The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
   Her winter weeds outworn:
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream …

Oh cease! must hate and death return?
   Cease! must men kill and die?
Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn
   Of bitter prophecy.
The world is weary of the past,
Oh might it die or rest at last!

Everyone loves — loves to laugh at — a doomsday cult, but what if this one has a clue?

1 hour ago, jajagappa said:

The standard price is a copper coin.  (It's why they put coins on the eyes after all.)

In the mouth, surely!

Why does Jeset — a self-respecting darkness deity and troll ancestor — not want payment in lead? There must be a story there — something beyond Charon’s obol being copper or bronze, one hopes. “And that, little Uzlings, is why Jeset’s bolg is made of copper. Don’t have daymares!”

Traditionally, the living — if we allow there are any such (in reality or in the eyes of Hell’s gatekeepers) — wanting to cross into the underworld have to offer something better than the usual coin (e.g. Aeneas and the Golden Bough), and the Well of Daliath follows suit with “a small magic item”, though what use Jeset has for such, I don’t know.

Where does the idea of Styx water being dangerous come from? Is it doing double duty as Lethe water (associated with erasure), or is it something else? Is Styx maybe all the water-not-water of the underworld with different magical properties in different places or at different times at her whim? If she is Lethe, is she maybe Mnemosyne, too — if Darkness is associated with erasure, it is associated with keeping secrets, too, and … returning them? [mutter … mutter … Darkness deity of dream … not another one! … memory games … nightly visits to Hell (often swiftly erased) … mutter … mutter … mutter]

1 hour ago, JRE said:

I see a difference between dead people in Hell, and live people who go bodily into Hell … But many things can kill you and move you from embodied to normal dead.

But aren’t the normal dead bodily in Hell? Sisyphus can push his rock up his hill no problem, so how would a supposedly living “visitor” to Hell persuade any of its officials that they are solid flesh — so alive — and Sisyphus is just an insubstantial ghost? The bodily visitor wants to be able to interact with Hell’s furniture in the usual way — no bodily hands going right through “spiritual” rocks, right?

(Yes, this does seem to leave the normal dead with too many bodies. Handwaving it with burial or cremation doesn’t really make that go away. But that’s the least of their problems, right?)

I know he may not seem to be the most reliable narrator, but surely Ethilrist would speak up for the embodied dead hypothesis: much more impressive to bore your dinner guests with a tale of marching bodily through Hell and coming back from the dead than one of merely doing one or the other but not both in the same trip. (This is the epistemic principle of cleaving to whatever would make Ethilrist most unbearable.)