mfbrandi

How many copies of The Coyote Gospel does this temple’s library contain?

Err … yeah: not descended from Kyger Litor or Dame Darkness (per latest genealogy — and this fits older material, IMO). This goes for Xiola Umbar and Argan Argar, too. IIRC, they don’t have the man rune, either. They are straight out of Darkness (although Argan Argar was born again later, but still not in KL’s line). They are depicted as trolls because — many/most of — their worshippers are Uz, no? Contrast with Karrg, Vaneekara, Jakaboom, and Korasting & her children. (That is my take, anyway. See also, this thread — where @scott-martin promises fresh revelations … at some point.)

@scott-martin and I kicked this about a bit, recently — which should be warning enough for most not to read on. Only the bad ideas in the following recap-cum-ramble are attributable to me. Yomat = Humakt. IIRC, iron was created to “carry death”. Yomat–Humakt is the friend of men because he brought death to the world. (Humakt “inherited” death from Eurmal, and perhaps that is as seriously as one needs to take Eurmal’s begetting Yomat.) “Friend” is not merely ironic, as death is the agent of the progressive thinning of Glorantha through the Ages, leaving short-lived humans dominant in the Fourth Age and the troublesome gods and elder races dead or gone. (A trickster-centric fantasy ought to read against the grain.) If the iron connection leaves those adorable time-travelling robots fighting their incomprehensible change war as agents of thinning, that would seem to fit the original conception of the Mostali. (If your captured putative Mostali has organic components, perhaps it is a cargo cultist — or an anti-semitic stereotype on the run from the Ring of the Nibelung.)

Plans and maps are different in this respect: the plan shows how it ought to be, the map (in the sense under discussion) shows how it is (or how to get around it). I don’t know what the historical reality is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if “accurate” and detailed plans preceded accurate and detailed maps. Think scores versus transcriptions: they may look the same (when done well) but they are different — the output of different processes. Or use a pantograph to copy maps? I know that isn’t bronze age technology, but if Hero of Alexandria actually had it working in the first century CE, that wouldn’t seem to break the not-really-bronze-age tech level that most people seem comfortable with in Glorantha. (And yes, this doesn’t do the same job as the spell, which could still be useful, but it is a first step toward mechanising reproduction, although it doesn’t prevent errors of omission.)

Mostly, these are the stupid, aggressive giants who partake of the disorder rune, right? So although they are said to be there to enforce the rules, I take it that is a joke, and they are there to deliver random acts of senseless violence. So the trolls won’t want the lighting to be too good … when their team is near the referee. Is there enough light that the red zones look red, or is the wetness of the blood enough? I was wondering why any trollkin would want to be a spectator. Rule 8 says that the players may not harm the spectators in any way. I have a horrible feeling that it wouldn’t occur to anyone that this included trollkin. When we are told that the centre posts are important and “house the esprit of a team”, I guess we are meant to take that literally, so where do the spirits of — bound to? — the posts come from? What if the post is a motionless troll? That might help with religious significance. And just who gets sacrificed to these posts?

Word of Trollpak (book 1, p. 24) is: I suspect this wasn’t fully thought through: presumably, the red is only there because Zorak Zoranis love to wear red, and it would be embarrassing for them to have to ask someone else. Plus seeing red is a ZZ’s raison d’être. Although … as Zorak Zoran is not himself a troll, it might be fun if he could see colour and his troll worshippers couldn’t — and only wore red because he said so. (Maybe trollkin sports who could see red would then be the exceptional trollkin allowed to join the cult: “Suits you, sir, brings out the red in your eyes.”) You mean that where we use colour for decoration, trolls can and do use texture — confusing humans and trollkin? Good point: instead of trollball team colours, team textures. (They cannot use darksense/sonar to detect colour.)

That sounds right to me. But that is not to say ZZ isn’t illuminated, whether he likes it or not. He does look a lot like Arkat, these days.

I never knew what you have forgotten, but I suspect that it would be anachronistic to accuse the Maya of 900–1521 CE of being insensitive about parallels with stereotypical depictions which post-date their work and are of people they had never met. (Not that you are doing that.) But we have baggage and as @AlHazred said, some things can’t be unseen. Still, this isn’t the place for me to rattle on about it.

Are you sure about that? This chap looks quite healthy: As far as I know, canon used to be that troll skin was “greyish”, which allows for it to be as pale as you like. Snow trolls were supposed to be paler — camouflage? — but cave trolls were supposed to have green-black “hides”, possibly(?) because they were chaos-touched. I don’t know whether it is worse to have dark skin because you are a creature of darkness — Vivamort dodged that bullet — or because you are a chaos monster, but there you go. Of course, current canon may be: (a) we don’t mention troll skin colour; (a) Uz come in rainbow fruit flavours; (c) you can have any colour Uzko you like, so long as it is on the Farrow & Ball paint chart. I’d be happy with any of those suggestions and many more, but a knee-jerk “they must have dark skin” doesn’t really do it for me.

I guess I never liked the idea of the Spirit of Darkness — Darkness Itself — depicted as a dark-coloured thing with a torch shone on it. Darkness is the one thing we will never see, as every time we switch the light on, it is gone. But then I also fancied the darkness-dwelling trolls as being distinctly lacking in melanin — rather than being “Uz the People Who Are Darker Than Blue” — so what do I know?

A comment by @scott-martin over on the Trollball thread sent me back to Trollpak, where I found this myth-I-cannot-believe-I-forgot in a sidebar: This marks these darkness spirits as having a special relationship with Fire/Light/Sky and neatly prefigures XU’s friendship with Yelm and AA’s treatment of Lodril as just another godling, as well as explaining why ZZ is the screaming maniac we all know and love (and can best Yelmalio, having already faced the undiluted version). The three are also liminal figures: Xiola Umbar is a midwife; Argan Argar is of the surface world and the underworld; Zorak Zoran is between life and death — presumably, if death had been invented/discovered at this point, ZZ would have died of his burns, but he goes on as a “zombie”. Perhaps, it is also supposed to model responses to illumination — or to the stimuli that produce it. ZZ is driven mad by illumination; XU is illuminated but remains sane; AA just shrugs it off. Note that the three have already made up their minds before being exposed to the light; “set and setting” as the acid heads used to nag us. (Or “It is my nature,” said the scorpion.) We are told that Arkat was illuminated when he was young, and it looks like it happened before the Sun was born.

She has a framed certificate on her desk? (Is it just me, or is the depiction of Nakala too Robertson’s jam for comfort?)

The shadow wants to turn Sparrowhawk into a gebbeth, right? As it is his own shadow, I would say fighting it does count. Eventually Ged gives up power to recognise/de-fang his shadow, so it is not a munchkin heroquest. (I hope I have remembered that right.) But if Argrath always meant to kill the gods and if the illiteracy plague did for sorcery, too, then maybe we can see Argrath and the Devil as enforced nuclear disarmament — which doesn’t look like a munchkin move either. IIRC, Le Guin did complain and was disappointed — and not just by skin colours. (I believe racial representation in anime is not straightforward, but I am not qualified to blather on about that.) The Puffin paperbacks I read as a child had very “European” people on the covers, too.

I was thinking of an acid burn rather than flames. I don’t know what Brian had in mind. Probably don’t want a third element dragged in, anyway. It would be fun, but would it appeal to Humakti ducks? It sounds a bit … Zorak Zoran.

Or maybe combine these to have the “blessed” earth beneath the swamp purify the water above it producing undead-burning “holy water”. You can have fun with this: area effects that fade toward the edges of still water; blessing the riverbed upstream of an undead enemy; tricksters selling buckets of supposedly purified water to zombie hunters …

Maybe, and I wouldn’t want to impose my vision even on myself, never mind anybody else. However, I have a perverse tendency to take the opposite view: if an aspect of a culture seems unsympathetic, try to get into that mindset, rather than adjusting it to fit my preconceived idea of what is sympathetic — extend sympathy rather than taming the “wayward” culture. (And, yes, for some aspects, I wouldn’t bother: I am not interested in the Bronze Age War Crime Glorantha Nick Brooke so hates.) The SAGA tendency — “things were much better back when …” — is familiar, and playing the Mostali as this turned up to 11 seems appropriate for a stasis cult: even the very first motion/change (way before the first life) was a mistake, marring the initial cosmic perfection. I don’t recommend an IRL program of cosmic sterilization, but I could imagine playing such a character, even though I suspect it would degenerate into satire. As to how the Mostali could wind the clock back to zero, well they do seem doomed to failure, don’t they? And playing technological progressives as the ultimate “conservatives” — although what they are trying to conserve is long gone, if it ever was — seems like a fun idea. But you know …

Maybe, and maybe my sources have been retconned away (or were only ever a Lunar perspective), but back in Hero Wars we read: “Rufelza is the Red Moon: red blood, red earth, and red rage. She was created when Wakboth the Destroyer impregnated the great goddess Glorantha, and born when the Spike exploded.” (Hero Wars, p. 85). That would make the 1247 ST moon Rufelza returned/Natha re-incarnated, no? I think it was the heroquesting as time travelling allusions in comments above — I don’t think it was stated outright — that got me thinking again about the Mostali as Skynet and the dwarfs as its/their little terminator drones. But possibly the worldview of a Hal 9000 or one of those pesky bombs from Dark Star. Of course, it might be funnier to play it that the AI doesn’t have the power to make good on its threat to unmake the world and if all its “I’ll help them now to betray them later” plans come to nothing and are merely helpful. But I ramble …

Hmm … that seems to me either to be going forward or not winding things back far enough. This from the Gods of Glorantha Cults Book (p. 6): That for me is the fall for the Mostali: the World Machine was there, perfect — and therefore static — before creation, but some idiot/catastrophe set it in motion producing the world with all its chaos, entropy, change, air, and life. All these things are anathema and must be eradicated. If anyone asks, we are just “making sure the world runs smoothly again” or “getting things back on track to completion per the Great Blueprint: progress; condominiums and cable TV for all; trust me, you’ll love it.” But we know the only way to prevent the parts wearing — becoming increasingly imperfect — is to stop them moving. The plant things know we want them gone, but the flesh things are too stupid to realise what will happen to them when we unmake the air and collapse sky and earth back together — and don’t you go telling them! Think of the World Machine as the Cosmic Dragon: setting the machine in motion is the equivalent of the first utuma, but rather than being required by duty, it is the first and worst mistake.

Hmm … So what do you think they are/were up to with that? Rufelza — Red Moon 1.0? — was present in Godtime, so I guess it depends how seriously one takes Godtime simultaneity. On the face of it, you would expect the Mostali to be opposed to anything requiring the detonation of the Spike, but maybe (a) they don’t think of the unexploded Spike as a prior state to that bit of Godtime with Rufelza in it (they have a theory of some kind of superposition?), or (b) their plan is to wind the tape backwards to a point of perfection, so Rufelza has to be there ready to merge back into the Spike in its recreation/reverse explosion. I don’t know.

It absolutely does mean “a state that does not change”. Of course, one thing’s being static doesn’t mean everything else is: if day length is fixed at 24 hours, that is static, but the planet isn’t. Don’t fall for the propaganda, the Mostali are aiming for total shutdown/perfection — probably at zero Kelvin. There may be some purely localised and temporary increases in motion, but they are playing the long game. Eliminate organic components. Build the big OFF switch. Flick it!

Shouldn’t that be “inaction”? Let us take that stasis rune seriously. Here’s Wittgenstein in the Nachlass: I imagine the Mostali World Machine as being like that: “It will be fixed when no gear any longer turns.” Mostali and their lesser constructs are dangerous: if you see one, remove its batteries or stick a fork in its USB socket.

Sure. Great bit of design, though.

I don’t think I would disagree with any of that, but I guess I would stress an aspect and ask a question: each is the other’s shadow: it is not that shining a light on Jar-Eel produces Argrath; each because the other (or both because some third thing); putting it visually, does the universe demand a black disc for every white disc, or is it more that each shadow pair is one yin–yang?

I guess Jung gets into Glorantha by way of Joseph Campbell and the fantasy authors influenced by Jung — Ursula Le Guin and Michael Moorcock spring to mind. Here is a bit of the Wikipedia entry on the Shadow: What is the relation between the mutual shadows? And what do we do with our shadows? “Those were all the bad thoughts I never really had, and now I have killed them. Hooray!” doesn’t work for me. “Yes, that is me — and synthesis/compromise is possible” I like better.

Tring: It’s a Rothschild thing. See also Mark Steel’s in Town: Tring