mfbrandi

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

Here is a myth of Enlil — Lord Air, son of An (Heaven, male) and Ki (Earth, female) — as recounted by Tivka Frymer-Kensky: This fits in with the notion of Argrath as storm god stand in and his Gloranthan Spartoi as the children of his seed alone.

Don’t let Ray Harryhausen throw you off the scent and send you to Colchis with Jason. The dragon tooth warriors (Spartoi — sown men) are from the story of the founding of Thebes by Cadmus. Cadmus was “the brother of Europa who was carried off by Zeus in the form of a white bull” (Michael Stapleton). It just had to be a storm god in the form of a white bull, didn’t it? Here they are as drawn for Robert Graves by my mum’s auntie Joan:

Not just that, it is a zombie digression to the segue to the footnote of the addendum to the apocrypha — I expect Delecti or some angry ducks to turn up any minute now. It is just a bit of fun for people who find this kind of thing amusing, not an attempt to piss on anyone’s chips. It is explicitly not an attempt to rewrite Gloranthan canon — that is safely in the hands of Jeff and company. But as you are here, take a glass of wine — red, naturally — relax, and join the party … Think of a D10 as a cut gem: if 9 = Vinga and 0 = Orlanth [insert favourite aspect here], clearly the facets of the gem are not identical with each other, nor with the gem. Hence octopus–sock puppet vs. identity. (I do appreciate that the way people naturally express themselves does not constitute a commitment to either theory.) My pet conceit is that Orlanth/Storm is the Red Goddess/Moon. It is an Arkat/Gbaji/Nysalor thing. Vinga, I am afraid, is a bit of an innocent bystander caught up in the kerfuffle. Remember, Enki and Eurmal are clever, but I am just a fool.

Thanks for your reply, Joerg. IRL, if someone said to me “p and ¬p”, I would not understand what they meant. You can have two equally well confirmed statements that contradict each other, but that’s not the same as saying they are both true. That is nothing to do with the putative physics of Glorantha, so how do we “relax logic” (as it were) when discussing fiction? That’s not a put-down or a counter-argument: I just don’t know how to do it. I am happy to be put right about Gloranthan celestial mechanics — my ignorance is, after all, boundless. I had in mind the story of Greg on being asked what the Fourth Age was like, pointing out the window. The wrinkle I added was: what if this wasn’t a rewriting of reality but a rewriting of Gloranthan perception (picking up from the Ron Edwards’ recreational drugs/Cali ’60s references). I know I didn’t spell any of this out, but this thread is explicitly a flight of fancy — not a jeu d’esprit, as that would imply a display of intelligence on my part — and not a solemn contribution to Gloranthan studies.

In case anyone gets caught in a loop clicking on “Episode 15 is out!” (link probably fixed by the time you read this): https://godlearners.com/episode-15-people-of-glorantha-the-tusk-riders/