mfbrandi

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.

14 hours ago, Eff said:

a dozen goatmen shivering in a cave somewhere are chewing holes in reality with every breath

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?

11 hours ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

In essence, it isn't Chaotic. But widespread Illumination, by itself, will inevitably lead to Chaos.

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.

7 hours ago, Eff said:

I think that that 2007 text is very problematical in that if you take it seriously, that Chaos manifests in Chaos critters as an ineffable lack or void that cannot be explicitly identified, but is intangible- well, then you'd start drawing some parallels to how this line of rhetoric is applied in the real world, and start asking some very hard questions about why "the world" singles out particular people or beings for its hatred and attempts to torment them.

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.

2 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

He even created a ruling family by mating with himself

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

18 minutes ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

Chaos it remains. Oblivion it remains!

So Chaos is Nirvana, after all?

20 minutes ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

This can be a profoundly disturbing realization to have thrust upon you, and the realization itself does not necessarily equip you to integrate it into more prosaic parts of your existence. Most so afflicted turn to the Shadow of Illumination, become "Occluded", and will give themselves to Chaos.

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?

13 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

Where is there a cult write up besides in the Gods of Glorantha book and is there some source for the possible full list of spells?

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!

3 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

Yes and was to be hidden.. sorry!

No, I am sorry. Fixed.

16 minutes ago, Ormi Phengaria said:

That is probably not why Nysalor has the Chaos rune, no. The "Nature of the Cult/Reason for Continued Existence," "The Dark Side" and "Arkat the Destroyer" entries in Nysalor/Gbaji's CoT writeup, read in succession, are particularly pertinent to addressing that question, in my opinion.

From The Dark Side (CoT, p. 89):

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[L]aw and chaos create in different ways, and all creativity rests upon cooperation between elements of existence. He who operates solely from personal desire will not cooperate, since the childish core of any being’s personality knows no constraint … fully lawful beings can be as much agents of the dark side as was the worst Gbaji prophet.

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?

1 hour ago, Erol of Backford said:

ended up like Sir August in a sort of suspended animation

Yeah, I’ve got no idea who that is.

5 hours ago, Joerg said:

a mystic shielded by (an instance of) the Absolute

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?

On 10/7/2022 at 12:31 PM, Joerg said:

Voi Law...

@Joerg: I think you might like this from Plato’s Timaeus:

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Wanting everything to be good and nothing bad, to the degree that this is possible, the god took hold of as much of the All as was visible and not still but moving inharmoniously and disorderly, and he brought it into order from disorder, judging the former altogether better than the latter.

I got that plowing through Carolina López-Ruiz’s Gods, Heroes, and Monsters, which also has this on Nysalor related (or parallel) cosmogonies:

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Phoenician cosmogonies seem to have shared basic concepts with Orphic ones, most remarkably the idea of a cosmic egg but also the mention of Time (here as Aion, “eternal time”) and Protogonos, “First Born.” The latter was the name some Orphic cosmogonies gave to Phanes (“The Shining One”), a divinity said to be born from the cosmic egg, which in turn was made by Time (Chronos — not to be confused with Kronos).

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.

44 minutes ago, Beoferret said:

"Tasting History" with Max Miller? Some good stuff, including Mesopotamian-derived recipes. 

“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?)

On 10/7/2022 at 7:47 PM, Eff said:

In all this, the underformed void of pre-existence is easy to make drop out, because it's not relevant to the present of the setting. 

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:

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A chaos taint is a hole in reality, a hole in existence. Have you had anyone close to you die? If you have, perhaps you know the feeling of their absence. There used to be something, but you have an awareness that now there isn’t. A chaos taint is like that, only more so. It is not the absence of a person, but the absence of an underlying actuality. Something so deep that is inexpressible just simply is not … it is not tangible. Sometimes the world, protesting the violation of its reality, bursts forth in a wild effort to fill that non-hole, and this is expressed as a chaos feature.

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.
 

29 minutes ago, Joerg said:

chaotically equating Chaos with the Void

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?

18 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Next you are going to suggest that the Invisible God/Prime Mover is a Chaos entity?

I thought I already did — in the sense that “the One” comes from Chaos/the Void = the Malkioni Zero (GoG, Cults Book, p. 6):

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Pre-Creation …

Malkioni—Numerological Succession
Since nature is a recognizable and measurable function, creation begins with the first arithmetic functions. From the unknowable (zero) comes the One, or the Creator; who makes Two, or Cosmic Duality; which generates Three, the Knowable World, and so on. The various elements and powers from which the world forms spring from one another in mathematical succession.

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.

14 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Weird that you pick the left-handed (draconic)/Eastern perspective as authoritative, when the Theist (and thus most relevant) approach has emergence from Silence, quite a different proposition.

Isn’t Silence the Void cast in acoustic terms, just as Darkness is the Void optically?

And I am left-handed, after all.

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

Black holes don't cause destruction of information

Surely the traditional view is that they do (black hole information paradox). This upset physicists who like everything to be reversible. I believe that there is current research that suggests that they don’t after all.

4 hours ago, Darius West said:

collapsed while preparing to cross a highway in the rain soon after the diagnosis.  People stopped to help him, but he only lasted a few days thereafter.

He fell ill in the USA in 1949 (visiting Cornell) and got the diagnosis of prostate cancer back in England on 25 November 1949. I imagine he must have had the cancer for some time before the visit to Cornell. He died in April 1951, so not a few days after the diagnosis. I don’t know whether things would have gone better for him if the disease had been caught earlier or whether it was ‘his fault’ that he didn’t get an earlier diagnosis.

Off topic? Well, a little biographical excursion on a thread on LW’s take on magic is OK, isn’t it?

8 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Would have been the Battle of Heroes in 1628.

Thanks. I had seen a Battle of Heroes reference, but didn’t have a date. Argrath and Ethilrist must have clashed before, as the KoS section on that battle gives us this (which happens before the battle proper, with the death of Jar-Eel):

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Harrek the Berserk marched first against Black Horse County, whose lord had fought against Argrath years earlier. Harrek and his men ruined it, and plundered great treasures from its bottomless basement. But in the task Harrek’s best friend was killed, and so he was very unhappy.

Footnote 69 says that the best friend was “an unknown individual” — though I would have guessed his best friend was Gunda — but this is KoS (even if 2nd edition), so take that with a [pinch|bucketload] of salt. However, it does explicitly say that Gunda helped in the later actual battle:

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Nor was Argrath without help. Harrek the Berserk and Gunda the Guilty, a valkyrie woman from Fronela, led the Free Army to help their old comrade.

… whether she survived it and whether Ethilrist was there, it doesn’t say (though you would think he’d be licking his wounds). The Guide doesn’t help: it has a lot of the KoS text but in a different order, making it seem that Harrek marches against Ethilrist after Argrath pulls the Wolf Pirate protection racket on Kethaela — but the KoS order seems to make more sense. WBRM/Dragon Pass might help, but I don’t have that.

Then, after Jar-Eel’s seeming resurrection (or a variant text not recognising her death at the Battle of Heroes) and Argrath’s marriage to the Queen of Holay, there is another confrontation, precipitating Argrath’s Lightbringers Quest:

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[The Lunars] brought the giant Crimson Bat, which ate battalions at a time; the Bombardiers, who called down stones from the sky; the soldiers who could turn themselves into stone; the Black Horse Troop, demigods riding upon demidemons; the crimson ghosts; the Knockdown Machine; the Unheard‐of Wind; the scarlet specters; the red phantoms; the Empty Wind; and the Goddess of Six Arms.

After Sheng Seleris is retrieved from Hell (and returns to his people), there is the Battle of Dantolfol (trad. date 1680, revisionist 1646), where:

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Argrath, inflamed into heroic proportions, slew the enemy king, and drove away the horse demons, even though they were invisible … Perhaps the demon steeds of Sir Ethilrist, who could cast a cloak of darkness to hide himself and his company.

… and there my Argrath vs. Ethilrist references run out.

So from Erol’s point of view, we want to know about the pre-1628 clash. With any luck, it is undocumented and can be whatever suits.
 

4 hours ago, Joerg said:

Glorantha emerged from the Void, that seething nothing of unfettered potential …

Calling Chaos the source of everything is a dangerous fallacy, spread (among others) by the Lunar Way.

Really, re-read Cults of Terror, and the four explanations of "Before Creation". None of those names Chaos.

Nonetheless, I think @soltakss is correct. Obviously, we don’t care about the other three accounts, just the first one (CoT, p. 11):

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THE VOID is the mystic origin of the universe. This pre-existence is said to be indescribable. “It is less than Nothing, Formless beyond Emptiness,” says a Kralori poem. The mystics claim that the dragon-powers manifested themselves in the void by becoming committed and entangled with the world which was yet to come, and in those actions created the barrier shimmering between the perfect void and our understanding of it.

And in the write up of the mythos of Primal Chaos (CoT, p. 24):

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Primal chaos is the untainted power of random change. It first entered the world through the cracks in the universe caused by the Gods’ War.

You say yourself that the Void is “that seething nothing of unfettered potential” — isn’t that “the untainted power of random change” by another name? The crack in the world doesn’t create Chaos/the Void, it just reveals that noumenal reality which draconic creation had hidden behind the barrier of phenomena (i.e. the world).

And of the “Devil” (CoT, p. 13):

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Kajabor wields entropy in the world. Often called God-Killer or Black Hole or Great Fear, he destroys all vestiges of matter or energy, annihilating all possibilities of individuality or unity. Entities slain by Kajabor have never returned, and often even their names have been lost after being pulled from the universe … Kajabor … is utterly impersonal and some say, as natural as the forces of creation.

As for the “lies” of the Lunars, the Lunar Priestess says (GoG, Talking to the Moon Woman):

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The Creator made the world and everything in it. He made the two races of gods first, the Celestial Court and the Tribe of Chaos … The gods of Glorantha fear Chaos in the way that living mortals fear death.

Very dull. I certainly hope the first bit has been retconned away, but anyway creation myths don’t always start at the beginning. The second part fits well enough with the nature of Kajabor.

So how about Kajabor, the Black Hole (which is maybe (Primal) Darkness, which the Uz tell us has always existed — GoG, Tales of the Night Hag), the Void, the true death of gods, Chaos, the Malkioni Zero, the destruction of information, and your unfettered potential all being the same thing, that which has always been, is not at all, and which lies beyond the veil of Maya? To touch it is illumination and extinction.

If Orlanth is the big I am puffed up with the wind of his own self-importance, you can see why he hates Chaos, the ultimate deflator, the infinite Void into which he will vanish as if he never was. But after a suitable course of treatment, he will open his third eye and let go his last stinky breath, finally blown out.

From Chaos we come, and to Chaos we shall return.

1 hour ago, Erol of Backford said:

I recall him acting as mercenary for the Lunars but not sure as to the details?

There was an earlier period of service with the Lunars:

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Ethilrist dutifully served the Red Emperor and fought at the Battle of Grizzly Peak. But in 1597, his 30 years of service expired without a renewal, and the next day he offered his services to the Feathered Horse Queen. Together they sacked Dunstop and halted Lunar expansion until 1602.

I don’t know whether there was a later one. Possibly.

———————————————————————
Edit: Harrek and Argrath definitely fought against the Black Horse Troop, so Ethirist must have been on the Lunar side again, but I don’t have dates at the moment.

59 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

8 hooves like one of those Greek or Norse god's mounts was it?

Sleipnir

11 minutes ago, soltakss said:

That isn't really the founding myth of Glorantha.

Sorry, I was just being mischievous: treating the world of time as “our” only real world and playing on the myth’s coming at the beginning of early RQ rule books. We had to wait for the myths of the really early universe till when, Cults of Terror?