mfbrandi

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!

Of course, a trickster character needn’t be played as being as powerful or as potentially nuts as the Trickster god themself. Also, not all trickster cults are the cult of Eurmal — though if you like that, go with it, and the title of the thread is … — and a devotee of a Trickster more resembling Prometheus or Enki/Ea might be fun and provide a different set of problems. It wouldn’t be that the PC would necessarily be at odds with the other mortals, but they would still be rooting for a god at odds with the other gods (because on the side of the mortals). Now maybe it is not the Orlanthi who are pissed at the party, but Orlanth raging at them and their god. In the Atrahasis, the gods get sick of the noise of the ever more numerous humans every 600 years or so and contrive means to wipe many of them out so they can get some sleep. “Every 600 years you have come” — that sounds familiar. (Ellil, the storm god, is the genocide-in-chief — “No form of life should have escaped. How did any man survive the catastrophe?” — I mean, the storm god is always the bad guy, right?) Atrahasis is a worshipper of Enki/Ea, who helps him survive a number of such attacks — including via an “ark” when matters come to a head and it seems all humans are going to be killed. The cycle is broken when a number of population-limiting measures are imposed: shorter lives, barrenness, childhood diseases, celibate ‘taboo’ religious women. That is, there is a compromise that breaks the cycle of catastrophe, this benefits humans (and the gods, as someone has to cook their meals), but there is a cost: we are in Yomat, friend of men territory. Atrahasis himself is described as a wise man and he has to indulge in some deception as to exactly why he is building a reed boat on an unprecedented scale, but he is not a demented clown figure with terrifying magic. So there are other ways to work Trickster worshippers into stories. (By the time we get to Noah, storm–genocide and trickster–friend are the same god. Is this a step in the right direction? Don’t ask me, but it does fit with Wile E./Crafty Coyote as Jesus.) I would play it that all Tricksters are masks of the same god, even if the worshippers don’t know this, but I suspect it makes no practical difference.

For the avoidance of doubt, I like the idea of Chaos as the Void, but I do not see the Void as morally charged — not negatively and not positively. It does not justify chopping our furry friends into kebabs. I am now going out to start the Church of the Twelve Hornèd Ones and to teach you all to chew holes in reality just by breathing. Who could not?

See, I read it as illumination does not justify dark side behaviour, as it is explicit that one gets from “there is no fundamental difference between law and chaos” to “I can do what the hell I like and screw you” via a false parallel. But if non-cooperation/non-creativity (the dark side) is explicitly not to be identified with Chaos, then even if we buy illumination + human nature - new improved cult brand X supervigilance = dark side, where does the slide to Chaos come into it? As for nirvana, I am only playing on such as “‘blown out’, as in an oil lamp” and “deprived of fuel, the fire goes out, and this is nirvana”, where it is is characterised in terms of an absence. I don’t pretend to be bringing insights into Buddhism.

But if what we don’t like is the idea that a creature’s having something of the void about them is a justification for stringing them up from the nearest lamppost, then why not just say that a chaos taint provides no such justification? (IRL, we cannot always respond to “lynch a because they have property F” with “¬Fa”, because sometimes a really is F, so we have to say that Fa is not a good reason to lynch a, no?) Personally, I’d ditch the idea that we can just say of any evil or grotesque behaviour that it is chaotic. Sure, there will be characters that say it, but up here in meta-land, we don’t have to believe it. And, yes, I suspect Stafford wanted it both ways, but I didn’t know the man and cannot absolutely rule out that he was teasing us.

Classic Heinlein/Gerrold/Arkat behaviour, I’d say. 😜

So Chaos is Nirvana, after all? Words like “shadow” and “occluded” make it sound like we are talking about the dark side, again, but that is explicitly not a Chaos thing (in the indicated passages of Cults of Terror, anyway). Neither does contact with Chaos/Nirvana/whatever sending you off your trolley sound like what is meant by drawing a false parallel to excuse one’s uncooperative behaviour (i.e. there isn’t really a sound argument justifying dark side behaviour in the insights of illumination, but temptations don’t need to rest on good arguments). And surely plenty of other things than illumination will lead to one making such excuses and behaving badly, no?

Pages 59 to 72 in Storm Tribe are given over to an Eurmal cult write-up including the Death Finder and Destroyer aspects. Don’t expect anything like a usable spell list, though, because Hero Wars … and Eurmal!

No, I am sorry. Fixed.

From The Dark Side (CoT, p. 89): So selfishness — failure to cooperate — leads to failure of creativity and to (or is) the dark side, but that is explicitly not a chaotic feature (if you will excuse the expression). Chaos creates, and according to this line of thinking that means chaos admits of cooperation. The cult exists because we will always ask questions; some of the “answers” we might get could tempt us (through a false parallel) to the dark side, which isn’t a chaos thing; Arkati are uptight about chaos and the dark side, which are not the same thing. So what insight does this give us into why Nysalor has the chaos rune (as opposed to why illuminates might be self-absorbed arseholes)? If I figure it out, will I have to cross my fingers next Sacred Time?

Yeah, I’ve got no idea who that is.

No, you’ve got me there. No idea. I’d have guessed that the absolute was what the mystic experienced union with (e.g. Chaos, YGWV), not what protected the mystic from their practice. Still, where can I buy one? The local off-licence?

@Joerg: I think you might like this from Plato’s Timaeus: I got that plowing through Carolina López-Ruiz’s Gods, Heroes, and Monsters, which also has this on Nysalor related (or parallel) cosmogonies: Heaven, Earth, Kronos, Zeus (i.e. Orlanth), and Dionysos all come after Time and Phanes (i.e. Rashoran/Nysalor) in the Orphic cosmic succession. Another piece of the puzzle.

“Do you want a recipe from the white book or the blue book?” It must have been a recipe from the blue book that made Max go blind for three days in Mesopotamia. (Will this mean anything at all to those outside the UK?)

I know you don’t suggest we drop it, but would it be that easy to drop, anyway? The illuminated hero or aspirant deity seems key to the setting, and isn’t illumination all about touching Chaos conceived of as the Void? Isn’t that why Nysalor has the Chaos rune? Dipping a bucket into the Well of Daliath, I came up with this from that Stafford guy on the taint of Chaos: So back in 2007, it seems to have been hemi-demi-semi-quasi-official that Chaos is the Void and that that tentacle trying to strangle you is not itself an incursion from the other side but the phenomenal world having a very bad reaction to finding out that there is Nothing behind the curtain. Now maybe IRL the headlong rush toward Nirvana is dangerous, but haven’t the rabidly anti-Chaos factions in Glorantha — characters in a fiction, remember — always seemed rather comical to you? Someone was sending them up.

Well, it is certainly true that I did that — and I have now slapped myself on the wrist with a pencil. Who knew that the origin of the world in Chaos was so controversial?

I thought I already did — in the sense that “the One” comes from Chaos/the Void = the Malkioni Zero (GoG, Cults Book, p. 6): Didn’t I do this with diagrams starting with the “slashed zero” version of the Chaos rune in another thread? If you fancy Harmony (from which we construct Law) as necessary for the world to be knowable, all the better.