mfbrandi

I thought “a big piece of his posterity” was a euphemism and that he’d gotten started on the utuma early, storing the severed bits in his pouch. (In my head: Julian and Sandy from Round the Horne.)

Done: Storm and Moon (featuring Vinga)

[Spun off from Vinga in Pavis ’cos this is nothing to do with Pavis] @mfbrandi said (because, you know, broken record: our worst fights are with ourselves): @Nick Brooke said (in Godtime — it is an eternal recurrence): And this is all part of my sneaky — well, OK, moronic and obvious — plan to bring the discussion back to subversive non-canon theories about Vinga. We know that there are Seven Lightbringers and Seven Mothers because the latter are supposed to echo the former. We know that Moon is the power of balance through cycles, but Orlanth’s great achievement (I am sure he’d claim the credit) was to kill the Sun and have it come back half the time — balancing Light and Darkness in a cycle. But the Sun is Light is Life, and Darkness is the Hungry Void and so is Chaos. So the balance Orlanth/Storm achieved looks a lot like the balance Sedenya achieved between Life/Fertility and Anti-Life/Chaos. And what are free will and change — surely dear to Storm — without time? The murder wasn’t a mistake, it was a necessity. As for the Moon and free will: Natha was “one of the earliest deities who acted on her own volition in the Gods Age” (Hero Wars, p. 82). Rufelza, we read, “is the Red Moon: red blood, red earth, and red rage. She was created when Wakboth the Destroyer impregnated the great goddess Glorantha.” (Hero Wars, p. 85). The cosmology in Cults of Terror speculates that although Arachne Solara’s “origins are mysterious and subject to speculation … there are strong indications that she is the ghost of Glorantha, the Mother of the Universe.” So the origin of Time in the ritual of the net echoes the birth of the Red Moon. Now Vinga is the Red Woman “the last defense for women. When a woman screams for help and it arrives, that is Vinga’s power. A woman who has taken the Red Vows is called a Red Woman. Ernalda subcult” Hmm … red earth, red rage, red woman — that reminds me of someone. So if anyone is upset that Vinga = Orlanth means that Vinga is “really a man”, they shouldn’t worry because Orlanth = the Red Goddess, so you could just as well say Orlanth is “really a woman”. And if when you squint and in a poor light, Sedenya = Inanna, well Inanna could make a man a woman and a woman a man. Humans’ failure to see that all is one, and all is change, and all is held balanced and spinning causes laughter in the middle air. At least, that’s what one whispers to cultists in crisis, and then one scarpers before the lynch mob arrives.

Hmm … I thought Storm hated Moon because they both claimed “the middle air” — that it was just another turf war, and that the “oh, no: chaos!” thing was just propaganda — but I invariably get these things wrong. In their way, the Storm lot are as much about balancing opposites as the Lunars: “no one can make you do anything” vs. “behave like everyone else”. And can illuminates discern any real difference between themselves and others? “We are all us” … even them.

Trouble is that crusaders may end up being a bigger local problem than a mere gang of rowdy alcoholics.

But as in the discussion of Vinga, there is surely always room for another take on those gods’ worship alongside the traditional one.

Sure, absolutely.

Just for the record, I am not saying that because there seem to be societies with gender rôles in Glorantha, we should all play sexist arseholes in Glorantha (not your wording, I know) and revel in it. No — yuck! I am saying that just as there is colonialism in Glorantha and some people like throwing off its yoke in play, some people might like to play to throw off the yoke of the patriarchy in the PCs’ own society. That is OK, isn’t it? To allow something into the fiction is not necessarily to endorse that thing. And to be able to overcome in the fiction what one cannot overcome IRL may be fun and even therapeutic, no?

[Emphasis above mine.] I did a double-take. I mean the Orlanthi do seem pretty hung-up. So I am in two minds about this. If the alternatives are [a] women will get back in the kitchen and like it, or [b] we wave a magic wand and despite all the Sky Fathers, Earth Mothers, and adolescent Stormboys acting out, down on the ground sexism was never there — if those are all we have to pick between — then I choose Team Brooke. But what about the anarcho-vegetarian, cat-loving sisterhood kicking against the patriarchal pricks of Waha’s miserable band of butchers? How about the women from Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast books turning up on horseback in Prax and causing some trouble? You are “stealing” my enemies by de-fanging the traditionalists. IRL the links between myth, religion, and the facts on the ground are complex and maybe pretty loose, but aren’t we asked in Glorantha to buy into a much tighter as above, so below (albeit with a mechanism for tinkering with the above from below)? And, yeah, the creators — I have no inside scoop, I am just guessing — were probably way too into what we might think of as the problematic aspects of their creation, but rather than subjecting it to an audit from the Ministry of Truth — Waha for men only: down the memory hole — I kinda want to blow it up and watch the pieces rain down on the plains, annoying the already fractious rhinos. Of course, there could be mischief to be had in explaining to the youth of Prax, Sartar, or wherever that despite what the gods did and what the priests say, we don’t do it like that, we never have done, and we never will. I just don’t know.

AFAICT, a woman may join Orlanth Adventurous. In the RQ2 write-up, “Orlanth welcomes almost all beings who breathe air. This includes the Elder Races (yes, Trolls too).” Way back when, your only other choices were Kyger Litor and Black Fang — or to be a shaman. It would have been pretty harsh to retcon out of existence all those early female PCs: “When we said almost everyone, even trolls, of course we didn’t mean women!”

Sure, but let us not allow the forces of conservatism — Orlanthi or IRL — to play women and trans people off against each other. There is room for both. There is even room for the conservatives. I won’t be drawing a Venn diagram.

So keep it, using any of the justifications discussed here, your own, your nieces’, … or none at all, as really none is needed. On occasions like this, I always think of the cover of Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing: She’s a warrior woman BUT … So maybe — just maybe — don’t let Vinga be a clone of Orlanth (let her be that “warrior goddess who does her own thing”) and don’t let (every version of) the cult be a way of defusing rebels/revolutionaries/square pegs by making them honorary members of the boys’ club. But for a one-shot, I am doubtless overthinking it.

I suppose the might-makes-right stuff feels OK in this context — trying to convince knuckle-headed barbarians about one of their fighty gods — but I will just put in a plea for religious tolerance for those with funny ideas but no mighty thews or flashy magic. Maybe there are schismatic White Ladies (some of them gentlemen) who think that sometimes you just have to let the patient go. Perhaps they couldn’t resurrect someone, even if they could bear to contemplate it. They won’t be using special FX to make their point, but ask them and they, too, will have their “proofs”. Looking down on Glorantha from our “meta” level, let’s not say that religious truth lies with the biggest bullies — “God is on the side of the big battalions” — and let’s not have everyone in Glorantha think that it does.

Well, just think about IRL religion. [1] The Christianity we know and presumably loa tolerate: Orthodox, Catholic, a zillion kinds of Protestant (right down to the wee frees), Coptic, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, and whoever else. They disagree on loads of stuff, including the nature of their god — just ask the Unitarians and the Quakers, some of whom are atheists, as far as I can tell. Co-religionists argue, claim fresh revelations, nail their theses to available architecture, and sometimes die — if not happily, then voluntarily — for arguments over the undecidable/imponderable. If Gloranthan religion is to live, it needs religious disputes. The Lunars have them, surely. The Orlanthi might have trouble writing their theses down, but I bet they can shout. [2] Cults get taken over, and the winners rewrite the losers’ myths. Running a religion is an Orwellian enterprise. But the old traditions may linger on in secret or in backwaters. (OK, maybe this last bit is not so IRL — or at least the image it conjures is a bit Christopher Lee meets Edward Woodward.) [3] Think about religious experience: you have a vision of a god; does it contain evidence that the entity you are seeing is a god, or is it just part of the content of the experience that you are confronted with the divine? (And there’s that atheist on acid who has almost the same experience but catches not a whiff of a god.) What does an identity between gods look, smell, sound, or feel like? It is a pretty abstract thing to prove. Proof is hard in religion and religious conversion is not about logic or evidence, though of course the convert thinks that their new belief has been demonstrated and that their old belief cannot be right. The world just shifts, and it is not a rational thing. So you’ve been told that Vinga = Orlanth, but what could prove it to be true if you don’t feel it anymore? And then your auntie Bob — a woman who has never carried a spoon, a sewing kit, or any of the rest, but who has impressive scars, a very sharp sword, and who has never been refused a vote — tells you a story about the true meaning of Vinga. I don’t want to push any particular conception of Vinga (or whatever other god you have in mind), but if you want it to, Glorantha can surely accommodate religious dissidents. Whether your Orlanthi confronted with such want to lean into their love of freedom or double down on their crazy conservatism is up to you, but there must be stories in it either way. Just — pretty please, for me — don’t re-invent the Spanish Inquisition, shunning is more than bad enough — maybe a small religious non-conformity tithe and a few badly disguised whispers.

What is canon, anyway? (Putting aside a collection of IRL guidelines for Chaosium authors. That is very sensible, and I am not addressing that, just the idea that this or that is true of Glorantha.) In the Guide we have on p. 35: That seems to state pretty clearly that Orlanth = Vinga. It also says that child-rearing is a glorious task, and it is not canon that child-rearing is glorious — neither sock-darning, nor pot-stirring. It is only canon that Orlanthi men would say that “hearth” tasks are women’s glory. (Non-canon aside: presumably in an attempt to keep women “in their place”, while in homosocial contexts laughing and saying, “Only stealing cattle and killing people is glorious, of course.”) Plus, the author may be sending up the ever-risible Orlanthi. The Guide as a whole is not an in-Glorantha document, but clearly there are sentences, paragraphs, and pages all written from particular Gloranthan points of view. It may sometimes be hard to tell when a sentence is the author telling us “this is definitely true of Glorantha” and when the author is adopting a Gloranthan point of view — novelists do this POV shift unannounced very often — because [a] it reads better sometimes; [b] it keeps Glorantha slippery, and it should be somewhat slippery. Sometimes, there may be no telling if a POV shift has occurred. I can live with that. If I were a Vingan PC, I might say, “Vinga isn’t Orlanth. The men say that. They are trying to steal our thunder.” But there are certainly other ways to play a Vingan: [a] as trans; [b] as a deluded betrayer of the sisterhood; [c] a whole bunch of other things I haven’t thought of. So then our previous quote from p. 257: I wouldn’t take that to indicate that it is canon that Vinga != Orlanth, but we are probably meant to take it that there is such a sanctuary, and I would pick that up and run with it. Have a religious movement that has Vinga as daughter of Ernalda but not daughter of Orlanth. The cult might insist that Orlanth cultists are deluded: Storm is female, you fool; where do you get your hazia? A splinter group might say that Orlanth = Vinga but the men have it upside-down: Orlanth is an aspect of Vinga — Ernalda has married her own daughter-in-drag to keep the males away from power. TL;DR: Don’t worry as a GM/player/Gloranthaphile about whether Vinga = Orlanth, but do have the characters argue about it (or at least take different positions on it). Characters can worry about what “proves” divine identities, but IRL we don’t have to. Now ignore everything I just said and embrace MGF.

You are probably a rabbit.

Shh … it’s a secret! As an aside, does the Trickster owe any loyalty to rocks-for-brains sociopaths like Stormlad? If not, then who was betrayed by the murder of the Sun (played by Kenneth Williams, with Sid James as Lodril)? I like a good sunset, me. Dawn chorus? Lovely!

I like to imagine that the only “devil” Arkat was fighting was himself — everything else is just collateral damage. Don’t externalise your “hero’s journey”, or innocent bystanders will get hurt. (M. John Harrison once called heroes “dangerous baboon colony stuff”, but that seems a bit hard on the baboons.)

I guess I see the world as we know it as the slow unwinding into heat death (entropy + time), which is not tragic or terrifying. The Gods’ War is the scary early universe in danger of blinking back into non-existence before it has settled down into anything comprehensible to mortals. (This is not meant to be real physics, just use of the tools of modern myth.) So I guess I am seeing the myth as an explanation of how the world we know and love came to be. Whereas having Wakboth in the net seems to be an attempt to explain a fallen world: the world was perfect once, but it blew up; in order to save it at all, we had to stitch evil into its fabric. This might be because one is trying to tell a tale of how one’s people survived a mundane disaster (which we have booted out of history and into the realm of the gods) through moral compromise. Or maybe one just has a really icky take on the universe. Or … ?

For reference, a solar take on troll hunger (The Glorious Re-ascent of Yelm, p. 18): To be taken with more than a pinch of salt, I imagine. Digijelm = Uz, at least per Anaxial’s Roster.

I have a soft spot for Krarsht because she is the patron goddess of London. We have an extensive system of underground tunnels, and at each entrance to the network we have a temple of motion/stasis marked with the deprecated chaos rune.

Or gravity collapsing matter to a point mass? And presumably when Kajabor was first called “the Black Hole”, we thought black holes destroyed even information. Chaos as memory hole. As the void.

I know I can seem boringly humourless and literal-minded, but I actually agree with you (I think). My idea is to leverage the absurdity of taking these things literally to discourage taking Gloranthan myths as the science and history of Glorantha. The God Learners are pretty clearly meant to be taking an instrumental approach to myth: “What is truth, anyway? See what I can do, man. Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” However, it seems to me that one strand of the Gloranthan project — as executed IRL by Greg, Jeff, and the rest — is to see how far one can get with literalizing myth. I am not saying there isn’t another strand of taking myth and religion seriously — IMHO, in tension with the first — but I am not imagining the first, am I? For example, we know that a Gloranthan would say that their world is a lozenge, but aren’t we supposed to be able to say it, too, in the same way that we might say “Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street” and someone could reply “Yes, that’s right”? It isn’t true, but it is make-believe that it is (or whatever construction you prefer — “in the stories …” perhaps).

Dog? Don’t encourage them! More like a very bad cat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feliformia

Well, if Fralar is not himself a cat and Basmol’s mother is not Kero Fin — a mountain! — it is not looking good, is it? If Basmol were Orlanth’s half-brother, we’d have heard about it, right? (Even IRL, however … well, just see this cladogram: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felidae#Phylogeny. So there is some reason for Gloranthan lynxes and housecats to be split from the lions.) I gave up on Gloranthan biology when fungi got lumped in with plants. Probably best to say none of our IRL natural kind terms apply in Glorantha and lose no more sleep over it. A Gloranthan “wolf” != a wolf, it just looks and behaves a lot like one, so what else are you going to call it? (I would say, “Look, these are just myths of origin; they are not literally true, even in Glorantha.” But that would probably get me lynched, so I won’t.)