Tatterdemalion Fox

You successfully puzzled out my motive in asking! I was discussing Deezola last night and had a moment where I pulled out both Sourcebook and the Lunar Way to cross-reference.

Quick question for anyone who has the new printing. Gods of the Lunar Way, list of the Seven Mothers, pg. 148-149 in the first printing: which lunar phases are Deezola and Jakaleel associated with?

I am still disappointed that my schedule left me absolutely no time to fit in a RQG game anywhere. Thursday night I was meeting the Tribe, Friday morning I was shopping (and snatched up the very first copy of The Lunar Way on display, which I’m quite happy with), Friday afternoon I had to leave open for dinner with friends, Saturday was just the Jonstown Compendium booth and Home of the Bold, and then I had to scramble out of there Sunday morning. So getting to hear these reports does let me experience that side of the con vicariously, at least. So that this isn’t completely off-topic (and speaking of which, I’m surprised there was no Con Thread over in the Skull Inn for those of us who don’t use Facebook), I’ll add that Home of the Bold was a blast. It went by in a delightful blur of tense conversations, screaming matches in the street, observed attempts to break down Geo’s door, sacred Earth dances, and attempted seductions. Everyone who plays it this year is going to have a phenomenal time, and if you haven’t picked up the Rough Guide yet, run-don’t-walk to DTRPG. Anyway, here, have a bonus picture of what my shopping ended up procuring. Frankly, I’m itching for 2025 already.

It’s quite possible that not only is there one, but that it actually preceded Harmast’s progressive revelation of the grand Lightbringer’s Quest. Call it the Lifebringer’s Quest, perhaps. Set is a loyalist; it’s just that he’s Ra’s man through and through. Osiris’s wife, Isis, manipulates her husband onto the throne in the place of radiant solar Ra, and Set (tumultuous, violent, the god of the wilderness and the foreigner) overthrows the usurper by force. But he is still necessary to defend Ra’s sun barque as it travels through the underworld, and the one time he took a day off was the day that the monstrous serpent Apep managed to devour the barque, and so Set had to cut the snake’s belly open at the eleventh hour to save the cosmos. Elsewhere on these forums I have likened Orlanth to Set, and it’s very apt, but Shargash similarly shares many interesting traits with the god of the Red Land. Before heaven, Before earth, Before the waters, Before the dark, Nothing moved on nothing, Nothing entered into nothing. Before the gods, Before the runes, Before me, Before you, Nothing moved on nothing, Nothing entered into nothing. Look into my hand. What, do you not know that Death is in Life?

I'm spinning this off from the thread about Mahayana Buddhism the degree to which it's possible to interact with deities after they die, because, y'all, the relationship that the gods have with Death is something that's been fascinating me. (Particularly given where I ended up as regards the Skinning of Thed, which is a fragment I've only shared on the blog in my sig thus far.) Thesis 1: the gods can die like mortals can. This seems fairly self-evident at first glance: Yelm very famously gets Inigo Montoya'd by Orlanth and does not pass GO, does not collect $200, but goes straight to HELL until he can roll doubles. Vadrus gets torn apart and now it's useless to try to contact him inside of Time. The Devil is dead with only his ruby slippers and one hand sticking out from underneath the Square Mountain that dropped on his head. Many gods succumbed to Death after listening to Rashoran/a speak, though the bearers of Life and Death themselves were instead enlightened. (Perhaps if Orlanth had not learned how to save the world, and all the others too, Humakt would have been the last one left: left there waiting to blow out the candles, fold the quilts, and set Death as a crossbeam for the doors.) Once a god is dead, that's it, game over. Antithesis 1: but hold on, what about all the times that the gods die and that doesn't stop them? Orlanth freezes to death and Yinkin brings him back with his good good mlems (and that's not even acknowledging Wakboth shattering him into forty-eight pieces). Babeester Gor exsanguinates herself in order to drink her own blood. Tien gets his head lopped off and proceeds to kill Hrothmir and steal his head. It seems clear that the gods are not simply just people; they are capable of doing impossible things with their magic, and having a much looser relationship with Death seems to be one of them. Thesis 2: okay, fine, let's concede that a god dying doesn't seem to stop them to the degree that it would stop you or me. That's just because of the Ritual of the Net, obviously. When the gods turned their hands to the weaving of the world into the net which is named Time, they did so down in the underworld, so every god who was dead could weave themselves back into the pattern: Yelm returns in glory with Time as his cloak, Ernalda finds breath filling her lungs at her husband's kiss, Storm Bull trots back out with blood on his hooves and a smug look on his face, Shargash creates a conterminous zone and calls it Alkoth, so on and so forth. The gods of Chaos barely managed to squeak in holding the tassels, which is why they are losers and unquiet ghosts and suchlike. Antithesis 2: but hold on, even the gods that didn't make it back in have a presence in HeroQuests! Vadrus is still dead as the proverbial doornail, but it's not like there's a Vadrus-shaped hole in every story that he made an appearance in! When Vinga goes off to exterminate the enemy gods so thoroughly that not even their names survive, there's still an enemy to fight and not just "well, I'm at the space where the battle was supposed to happen, guess I'll have lunch and then wander back eventually." Rashoran/a comes back in cycles, and the Lunar goddesses are mended, and the line between the living and the dead seems very permeable. If you can kick Vadrus's ass while wandering outside of Time, you should be able to kick Ragnaglar's ass - or that of his son. Thesis 3: maybe it's because people believe that the Devil is trapped beneath the Block, and that Vadrus was shattered and nobody cares to try to put that asshole back together again, but all the good gods and goddesses were beloved enough that they were welcomed back into the world? And those awful things of Chaos crept in, too, because we need some sort of explanation for why Broos exist, and scorpion men, and other such things. Antithesis 3: you are treading perilous ground concerning the power of belief and its effects on the Hero Plane. Synthesis: still uncertain. I will need to prepare the proper rites and secure a copy of the Second Arkat Journal before I properly descend in search of the answer.

Of course, reading the Devil as the urge to say that the world does not deserve to exist lines up neatly with Teelo Estara facing up against him, dried red paint on her throat, and a life of poverty and fear and rootlessness stretching smaller and smaller behind her, and finding that she does not have a justification for any of it, after all. And then down she tumbles until she is caught by a net/web/shawl/goose’s neck. To say nothing of the Lives of Sedenya account. I’m rather open about my obvious bias for the Theists (or I’d like to think I am); They Are All Us, you might say. Perhaps all the idols should be smashed and the proletariat liberated from recursive self-defeating thought, but I’ll miss all those little shrines from my walking tour of southern Sartar. Especially that moment of looking up at a bronze statue of Sedenya and thinking: oh, so this is what you meant.

The Devil as an urge to flip over the board and wipe it clean. (Bear with me, even if you don’t have shades of Mordred in your Wakboth.) The urge of the Devil as entropic destruction and reveling in it, of reducing everything back down to nothing; if there has been good, let it be perverted and broken to show where it has never been justified, and if there is evil, let it be justification to speed up the dissolution. The great victory of Orlanth at the end of the world was in saying: the world is broken, but it is still worth saving. In rejecting the void-urge to give up, give in, and put away the chairs before turning off the lights. The Devil is everywhere in the whole broken manifested world, and still we live in it. And every year we tell the story of how the world and the gods were judged by the void, and how they bore up under that judgment and chose to live anyway, just like we do. And if Argrath isn’t stopped, eventually he’ll wipe the board clean, himself, or so one version of the story goes; he’ll declare that a world that contains the Red Moon and the gods that allowed his suffering are both unworthy in his eyes. And who will be left to say, again: the world is broken, but it is still worth saving? (And what is under the Block? Metal, like the corpse of any god, only this is metal that makes the world sick. Catch the more literate Storm Bulls putting up signs around the Marsh that say THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR! WHAT IS HERE IS DANGEROUS AND REPULSIVE TO US!) (I would have said petroleum, instead, but that’s claimed already.)

There was, there was not. 3.1: When I descended, I met there the Devil, named Wakboth. 3.2: He overthrew me, and then I overthrew him. 3.3: From his mouths rose the chant: MENE MENE TEKEL WAKBOTHSHIN. 3.4: And by MENE, he meant “I have numbered the days of your kingdoms and brought them to an end.” 3.5: And by TEKEL, he meant “You have been weighed and found wanting.” 3.6: And by WAKBOTHSHIN, he meant “Your kingdoms have been handed over to me to devour as I please.” 3.7: So to you, Death of Empires, I proclaim these words: MENE MENE TEKEL SEDENYASHIN. - Excerpt from the Castle Blue Sutra We have precedent: the way to the Spike and the Celestial Court is shut. No one can find their way back. (Now some, they find their way to the Court of the Emperor, and it certainly seems to be on some great mountain, but that cannot possibly be the Spike, now can it?) “Who cares for you?” said Teelo Estara, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

I love these two pitches, but I am obligated by the Curse to add in two more much less serious explanations for “herding alynxes.” 1. All sheep have ancestral memories of Voriof being defeated by Yinkin “Murdermittens” Kerofinson, and are thus wary of getting on the bad side of even Sleepy Timtom. 2. All alynxes have access to the hitherto-unexplored “Herd Sheep” spirit magic. A small burst of spiritual power and the sheep all fall into line.

That’s a mid-sized herding alynx, and what a beaut. Big for a housealynx, mind you, and nowhere near how big the wild ones get. My grandfather said he once saw one as big as a bull, up among Quivin’s cedars, silent as Xentha as he padded from shadow to shadow— but surely that was a tall tale.

Let us hypothesize, for a moment, the existence of the legendary Dogs-and-a-Half. How could any normal dog be expected to keep up with God's People? Perhaps they died out; perhaps they went feral, becoming another peril of the Praxian plains; perhaps only a mighty deed justifies the rite to create one. Or perhaps Argrath found the secret again, and returned them to Prax like the Auroch to Sartar. One might draw a line from that hypothesis to the Skinning of the Wolves, afterwards. Only the mightiest hounds fight against Telmori brothers as equals. (Shall we name one Huan, and awaken him?) Not that any proper Sartarite has any truck with them, given Yinkin's Race Up The Tree, but Argrath's hardly proper anywhere he goes.

Wasn’t Valley of Plenty pulled from sale and then republished specifically to change it from HQG to QuestWorlds? Isn’t the QuestWorlds SRD the only legally available version of the rules previously known as HQG for anyone who didn’t manage to snap a copy up before the HeroQuest trademark was sold off? I understand the concerns about folks trying to recreate Hero Wars material, but restricting use of QuestWorlds sure seems like it’s saying: if you want to make anything narrativist for the JC, you’d better already be In The Club. On the third hand, for all we know, this is stalling before the proper QW release, at which point various FAQs will be updated. And what’s absolutely certain is that this is well in the realm of speculation by this point. (Bleakly funny: the directive to just buy the older HQ books, as “most of them are available in print and/or PDF format from Chaosium,” in that FAQ.) EDIT: Orlanth on a bicycle, this forum hates trying to copy/paste things on mobile. I apologize for the sudden change in font size there at the end.

Yes, the line itself does come across as confusing: perhaps it's gesturing towards campaign structures like The Company of the Dragon or Valley of Plenty? Not scenarios for Glorantha, precisely, but intended for others to use in making their own campaigns. After all, the whole Six Seasons trilogy is explicitly playable across any of the three Gloranthan systems (even poor orphaned 13th Age), and Valley of Plenty is a campaign framework for QuestWorlds now. Or it's just as simple as "oh, if you want an answer to this question, go to a different document which will tell you the answer, which is no."

Observation: the story of Tien and Hrothmir suggests that it is sometimes more difficult to kill a god than one might think. At the very least, some troublesome deities found awful ways to preserve their existence. Observation: though Than found himself a replacement for his head, it had a tendency to rot off his shoulders, and so it was needful for him to have it replaced regularly. Observation: the Broos, who cannot make things grow, are skilled at making use of every part of their prey, especially the skins, and have a one-sided adoration of their Mother. Conclusion: no, the Witch does not have two hands at the wrist, one brown and one red. Do not look any closer. Further Consideration: where did Hon-Eel learn the secret of the Husking Bee?