mfbrandi

Just wait till Competency Based Interviewing (i.e. ditching all hypothetical questions) reaches the cult of Storm Bull: Describe for me a situation where — in an effort to banish the Crimson Bat — you were required to gather a large amount of data, to analyse it objectively, and to make a decision or a recommendation based on the results. Talk me through a time when — to frustrate the local Broos — you had to implement challenging and measurable goals for your team. Describe a recent situation when — to prevent the return of Wakboth — you worked across departments successfully. Lead us through an example which shows your ability to manage resources effectively — to kill more Chaos. IRL, this may be a terrible job interview strategy, but in RPGs, it will likely work fine, as the GM can cheat and tailor the questions — in generous and in malicious ways — to the individual candidates.

Taken literally, I don’t like it either, but if we take the sex & gender assignments out of it, if we take the younger generation of Earth goddesses as manifestations of Asrelia (not literal daughters), and if we allow warmth = life & Fire + Earth -> earthquakes & volcanoes, then it makes a lot of sense. To the extent that I was looking through old sources trying to find Lodril cited as the father — and not just to annoy the Orlanth fanboys, obviously —, having missed it in Jeff’s comment. But yeah, Fire/warmth or Air/breath coded male coming to blows to see who gets to bring life to poor old barren Earth coded female is a big yawn.

I think you are supposed to (even though the Yelmies and the Orlanthi are always running him down). He is a bit of a Thor character — not the Marvel version, who is up himself — a sky god concerned with fertility and humanity and married to the earth. It is cheeky how Orlanth — as part of Air’s usurpation of Sky — steals functions and family from Lodril while justifying it by the awfulness of Yelm. (Dayzatar, as always, is keeping well out of it.) But I suppose there is also a case for treating Dayzatar (completely withdrawn), Yelm (snooty), and Lodril (down the pub) as aspects of the same god — as we sometimes do with the many Earth goddesses.

So, Alf Garnett, then?

Yeah, I was thinking ‘please, not another dick pic’ and you say ‘here, two for the price of one — never mind the quality, feel the …’ I bring these things on myself. Oi!

Asrelia in her underworld aspect would in some respects make a good pairing with Lodril, but we are told (e.g. in GRoY) that Oria is the wife of Lodril. Oria is just Esrola by another name — the “sister” of Ernalda and Maran Gor. So is Lodril married to his own daughter? It is exactly the sort of thing a god would do. Is Esrola omitted from the list above as not important in the context of Sartar, because she has a different father (or no father), out of squeamishness, or for some other reason? Of course, sometimes, mother and daughter Earth goddesses are seen as aspects of the same goddess, and this might reduce the squick for some. However, we then ask: in what sense is Lodril the father of some of the earth goddesses? Does he just bring out some aspects of the earth goddess by being the fire in/heat of the earth? Lodril’s “marriage” to the earth is just a blending of elemental powers. Sounds like it might work … In the myth Ernalda and the Golden Age, we read: Weirdly, by the Glorantha Sourcebook (pp. 89–90), Ernalda has become the bountiful patron of sex and Esrola is seemingly downgraded to mere matter. A bit of a power grab, there, as presumably Ernalda gets to keep her magical, spiritual, and social aspects. Of course, sexy Ernalda does sound more like a daughter/wife of Lodril than the Ernalda of the division of powers myth. Is the Esrola rôle on its way out, which would leave Lodril as father-in-law of and co-husband with Orlanth — as well as the father of Caladra & Aurelion, Oakfed, Gustbran, Mahome, and Quivin, and father-in-law of Barntar (who is Orlanth, anyway? — I lose track). No wonder insecure Orlanth wants him sent up.

Or made by machine … like a perfect vase.

I had certainly assumed it was some kind of agricultural implement, but if this is a god whose erect penis drags along the ground, I anticipate images of Lodril with his phallus replaced by/depicted as a plough — or is even that too much to hope for? Are there many Gloranthan cults who are actively against reproduction (of people)? Those who conceive the growing of cereals in other than animal terms?

I think it is 5m without the legs — and maybe without the head, too. So as you say, Huge.

Who can forget the quest to rationalize the Dewey Decimal Classification? Now the 200 division is entirely devoted to beards.

“No, you have to pay me the bribe and then wait six weeks for me to do something — it is part of the heroquest. Let me read you the myth, again.”

[Emphasis mine.] So clearly the “map” was not utterly incomprehensible. Did it in the end prove useful to the party? I wouldn’t be surprised if Petersen had some real-life examples in mind.

Whatever may be true of hoolars, I think it would be unfair to say of real life savants that they do not have much in the way of minds. (Not that I am accusing Joerg of saying that, of course.) Some of them are doubtless a lot smarter than I am — though I do appreciate that that is not setting the bar very high. Of hoolars, perhaps we could say that they are alien, distractable, and have some trouble communicating with humans (and similar creatures). Mightn’t that be enough to save the phenomena?

If they are so dim, how come they are master smiths, can make enchanted objects, and can build cities? Maybe — like the Cyclopes (from manufacturers of thunderbolts to idiot shepherds) — someone has been giving them a bum rap. —————————————————————— They seem to be statted in Mongoose Monsters II, but I am betting that if you have the Petersen campaign document, you already know that. I don’t have a copy, I am afraid.

Yes, something like that, but how many rune points or feats is a character likely to have? I suspect things would not go wrong often enough. I mean, Wile E.’s ACME “magic” always goes wrong, and he hasn’t even managed to fry one little bird, yet. Or maybe it is the Road Runner we should be scared of. ————————————— … plus trickster magic has to go wrong frequently, so they have plausible deniability when they do stab you in the back.

But the gods were always part of the problem, and Chaos was always part of the solution: the gods are sealed off in the roiling bloody id of godtime; Arachne Solara swallows Chaos (nothing) and spits it out reconstituted as Time (nothing, but on the installment plan) — time with its arrow pointed at ever increasing entropy and the heat death of the universe. Godtime is hell with the apocalypse running in a tight loop, eternally, with every grudge held tight and burning hot. Time is the realm of mortals, who can accept that everything ends but that maybe not everything will end today. The end of the world tomorrow (or in billions of years’ time) is better than the end of the world all day, every day, forever, right? And that’s the standard Orlanthi view. 😉

Fair enough. I was just thinking in terms of the alleged problem of trickster power gaming — how this wasn’t true to the concept, and not really a problem, anyway. In terms of binding the trickster to the group, how is a group usually bound together? If by common aims, that can apply to tricksters, too. OK, the trickster won’t always agree with their colleagues on the right course of action to achieve common ends, and they will sometimes have a hidden agenda, too — but isn’t this true of non-trickster characters? And remember the trickster friend of mortals motif: “Oh, no! Our trickster stole something from the god. — But oh, yes! It is just the tool we need to complete our quest. We will worry about returning it later.” Are tricksters intrinsically more trouble than characters with honour codes or undead fixations? What about berserk chaos fighters? I mean, it is not as if you have Eurmal themself in the party, just someone touched by Eurmal. (Sometimes, Eurmal may take over, but presumably that would be GM intervention, not player power gaming. And the GM can always drop a rock on the party — trickster or no trickster.) If a particular trickster is purely inimical or purely random, that sounds like an NPC — to me, anyway. Why should the party want to put up with the overhead of wrangling a trickster? Well, if a trickster can improvise magic that no one else can do at all, that is useful. But nothing comes for free: it won’t always work, and it may blow up in the trickster’s face — or the party’s. And if no one wants a high body count, play it like Wile E. Coyote: the Road Runner is always fine and Wile E. always lives to fight another day. IMHO, the players don’t need to worry (on behalf of their characters or their own fun) about having a trickster onboard. The player characters probably should worry a bit, though. You have a player who wants to try a trickster? What is their take? Never mind my rubbish.

Well, if you are happy living in Monomythland, you can just recycle bits of the Yelm–Orlanth–Time story with Heler in a leading rôle. “Heler drowned the bright Emperor, then invaded the sky” (Storm Tribe, p. 75) sort of thing — I am not recommending that, mind, but isn’t it — wasn’t it? — the accepted way to get mythology by the yard at knock-down prices? Wikipedia even gives you a handy template: Cynical, moi? What’s in previews of the Cults Book(s)?

Hence the “person behind the curtain” doing the real magic while the over-promoted nephew/niece stands at the front muttering and waving their arms ineffectually. In spell classes, the teaching assistant will be carrying a lot of the weight: “Ignore the chinless wonder; try it like this. Better?” “The minotaurs are attacking? Send the rune lord. They have 300% in filing and sharpen quill, I am sure.” There will be blood on the sand, pretty soon, but the niece/nephew won’t survive to be awarded both ears and the tail. Or she will, having got a lot of other people needlessly gored — think every first-time out US Cavalry lieutenant on the silver screen. You see? Comedy gold!

Or maybe it is just good politics to exile someone called “Dragonfriend” if a dragon has just killed friends as well as enemies. Doesn’t Vistera, the Feathered Horse Queen, get a look in on the conspiracy? Perhaps I missed a mention of her above, but she seems to have been in it up to her eyeballs (Sourcebook, p. 17):

That is not my position, of course. Let’s look back to @scott-martin’s reminding us of the May ’68 slogan, “Beneath the streets, the beach!” The streets are the phenomenal world where all the aggro is — the cobblestones that make it up are being hurled at the hated CRS. The beach is the underlying reality, the noumenal world if you will. (Don’t take the Kantian lingo too seriously; this is, as you say, just a game — and a word game, at that.) And my proposal is that beneath phenomena, we find … nothing at all — the Void, which I am identifying with Chaos (which identification met more resistance than I had anticipated). Tentacle outbreaks — “chaotic features”, gorp/shoggoths, and the rest — are perhaps a symptom of the world’s intolerance of resting on a solid foundation of nothing at all. (See @Eff on H P Lovecraft and the Greg Sez piece.) The tentacles are not an intrusion from the other side (the noumenal), they originate in the phenomenal world — though at its frontier, supposedly — and are themselves phenomena. Or perhaps even this is just a story put about by the more sophisticated of those who fear the squamous and the rugose, and truly phenomena are phenomena are phenomena … The illuminant has “touched” the Void and has to some degree accepted the truth, but they may not be dealing with it very well: Arkat is super-uptight and acting out in the belief that uptight means right and reasonable; Zorak Zoran has been screaming in pain and fear since before time began, unable any longer to see his own beauty; Humakt, one suspects, never stopped staring into the Void, and you wouldn’t want to look into any of his dead eyes; selfish and self-deceptive people think they have one more excuse to piss inside the shared tent. So the illuminant’s insight is that when we divide the cosmos into the noumenal (the theorised Other outside of or underlying the known world) and the phenomenal (that which we can detect and interact with — Us, if you like), everything is Us/phenomenal and nothing is Other/noumenal/Chaos. Chaos is the Void, and the Void — of course — is not anything. This resonates nicely with mysticism’s not being an otherworld magic. There is no higher or lower reality/anti-reality, there is just this world — if you want to experience union with god, you had better do it here and now, because there is no future state. (Think of the mystic as more Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and less superpowered yogi fueled by asceticism.) So there is no justification for classifying your enemies as Chaos — coming from outside of reality — as reality has no outside. I really hate the idea that we are reality and so good and that they are from outside and so evil, getting at us through the cracks in the world (and that they must be evil because they touched the outside/non-being is hardly an improvement). I hate it with a deep and abiding passion, and this is my game-terms response. I am not suggesting this as a real-world metaphysics, but as a bit of productive fun for Glorantha. Ultimately, it will fail to make any sense (like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, perhaps), but it looks like it has implications, and it may suggest playful misuses of other real-world ideas to some — e.g. Godtime as the event horizon of a black hole which is being evaporated via information-destroying Hawking radiation (even the names of gods killed by Kajabor are lost); perhaps this is a Sufi story in Glorantha.

But is all this ‘corruption’ going on to pick between people who have already passed the magical/spiritual tests, or is it undercutting it? If the former, do we have a bunch of people with all the ‘magical’ benefits of rune status (they have gotten their ‘in’ with god) but no sinecure, pile of blessed iron, and full in tray to go with it (no parish, no flock)? That would suit some PCs just fine. Or are there a bunch of rune levels in name only, with the sinecure & the admin but untouched by their deity? (One can imagine a ‘real’ priest stood in the wings to make sure services pass off according to the script.) This offers humour, so I like it. As a third option, corruption & mundane actions may control who gets to take the magical tests in the first place. For some cults — where access to cult hardware & staff is necessary even to begin the quest — this would work fine. For less structured worship — e.g. Odayla — it would seem that it is all between the solitary hunter and their god, not mediated by any cult bureaucrats. Any sufficiently large and bent cult may develop its Martin Luthers/experimental heroquesters … We all like a good schism, right?

But tricksters shouldn’t be able to rely on their magic. Storm Tribe, p. 66: Doubtless, there is a bunch of Hero Wars rules cruft and outdated metaphysics to wade through, but it should be easy enough to houserule something along these lines: a trickster cannot be sure of the point cost of a ‘spell’ before casting it — including who pays the cost (random tapping) a trickster cannot be sure of the effect of a ‘spell’ before casting it — including who it affects a trickster cannot be sure of the magnitude of a ‘spell’ before casting it a trickster cannot be sure of the chance of casting of a ‘spell’ before casting it to balance this, a trickster can improvise magical effects (subject to all of the above) if a trickster learns non-trickster magic — which will be hard for them — it is subject to all the constraints above This could be arbitrarily complicated, or it could be very simple: the trickster player says what is supposed to happen, then the GM rolls a D4 or D6 to determine the number of things which go wrong and narrates whatever she thinks is amusing. If the GM cannot be trusted — perish the thought — draw misfire effects from a deck of cards. Elaborate to taste, for example allowing more control over weaker magics. So, for example, a trickster describes a weakened version of an effect she should be able to pull off, so the GM rolls D6-2, rolls a 4, and draws 2 misfire effects from the deck. You don’t need a special deck, just a table, which can be improvised on the spot, if need be (e.g. as a way of stake setting). This way, you can have a trickster character who can cause carnage but not to order, and so cannot be a munchkin because the player lacks sufficient control. To me, this sounds like more fun than playing a bonded trickster — I would keep bonded tricksters for NPCs, but some will like putting on the gimp mask and the leash. An illuminated trickster is fine, but what would they be like? Think Zorak Zoran, who saw the light but wound up more erratic than he was before: more power perhaps, but even less control. Even if an illuminated trickster is not spotted as an illuminant, they might be spotted as a trickster when their reality distortion field goes on the fritz.

You have always been free, and it doesn’t “mean” anything. Is this anxiety at the death of god? She was never there to lose. Why be anxious? I still don’t see what this has to do with Chaos, but I am a dim cove. Anyway, if we carry on talking past each other, I will bore you even more than I have already, so I will stop. Thanks for playing, and have a great week!

The Hero Wars write-up of Odayla in Storm Tribe has this for becoming an Odayla devotee: Good luck with playing that out!