Tatterdemalion Fox

11 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

The name is such a give-away! Can you imagine the hysterical screeching if Cults of RuneQuest: The Lunar Way had given the Lunars a Chaos-powered ritual called “Summons of Evil”?

“This spell summons representations of the moral evil of the world: 1d3+1 Orlanthi, who all worship the Uncle of the Devil.”

Data point: I bought my copy at the Con from the JC table, and it doesn't have that logo on the cover.

1 hour ago, Professor Chaos said:

The mere fact that people and animals did not ALL starve to death in the complete absence of the sun suggests that natural processes of vegetative growth are not dependent on photosynthesis in Glorantha.

The Aldryami still found the Greater Darkness to be incredibly, civilizationally traumatizing. The Brown Elves (which is to say, the deciduous elves) all buried themselves beneath the earth and slept long, slow dreams of death; only the Green Elves (which is to say, the evergreens) remained to fight the servants of the Taker. Halamalao was vitally important to them during this time, the bringer of light without heat. So there's still some connection to necessary Light here.

8 hours ago, Darius West said:

Rashoran couldn't even convince the Unholy Trio not to destroy him

Who says she tried? There is nothing to fear, after all; which is to say, there is no reason to fear nothing.

Were the forty million years before thy coming intolerable to thee? Not less tolerable to thee shall be the forty million years to come!

6 hours ago, Darius West said:

Hey, they lost that battle, because they lost divine favor.

That’s a technically correct way of saying “because they did not have the mythic insight to understand the relationship between Lodril and Oakfed.” I don’t think Oakfed was fuming about Broos fighting on one flank there.

I found Andrew Logan Montgomery’s writing on the differences to be formative; it naturally also plays an underlying thematic role in The Company of the Dragon.

I don't think there's a good Watsonian explanation for why you explode into a broo as the result of getting chaos features. It's just "somebody thought this would be a cool effect for the spell to have: randomly roll to see if the character becomes unplayable!" One of the limitations of the popular system, as it were. You can try to rehabilitate it or give it an interesting explanation, but if it causes problems (like extrapolating all-Broo regiments of Scarlet Scimitars), toss it out on its ear. MGF and all.

(I shall be hypocritical and toss out an explanation anyway: the first Broos were, in fact, human, and the condition of being a run-of-the-mill Broo is just what happens when a person gets parts of their soul scraped out and replaced with Chaos. Then there's a whole lot of interbreeding with animals that goes on over generations, and then ta-da! Modern Broo herds.)

42 minutes ago, theconfusingeel said:

From reading about heroquesting. If you heroquest enough you gain a hero soul, which is a permanent presance in the otherworld. That's how people gain cults and become gods.
Also note that many heroes are reborn even after they gain a hero soul,Sheng seleris' star(the sign of his divinity) rose while he was still alive, he died and then was revived by argarth. Arkat, Jar-eel ad others have probably done the same.

I think it is a mistake to equate the New Lunar Gods with even Superheroes. There is a difference in degree, even if not in kind.

31 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Deezola was the queen of Althil, a principality along the Acos River which most folk have never even heard of.

Ah, there it is, missed the specific name in her TLW write-up. Sure, I’ll incorporate this into my belief system, as the saying goes.

32 minutes ago, Jeff said:

heck, she doesn't even end up as the ruler of the Red Goddess' domains. The Red Goddess appoints one her children to do that.

Well, naturally. We can’t very well expect administration to be carried out from the Red Moon herself. The commute alone would be untenable. Better to leave that to the Absentia, with his crown and his tests and his palace at the liminal point, not to mention his very recognizable style of leadership.

(This is only half a joke.)

24 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Deezola starts as a "queen," whatever that means, feathered or otherwise. She only becomes important when she sacrifices all that identity apparatus in order to face existential crisis head on . . . children and orphans think of her as the nice lady with the crown, the rest of us understand that just as the king must die in the NavErian system (so controversial across the continental earth complex) even the queen needs to learn that she too is very mortal. The wheel turns from privilege to martyrdom. This is her liberation, her glory and her transcendent experience.

Gorgeous. The best interpretation I’ve seen yet. Worth posting for.

26 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

And what gets "bound" by the Binder Within, who does the bondage, what does that entail. This is probably where her real power is, once the crown, wherever it comes from with its funky rune, comes off.

In my experience, the real power in the scene lies with the bound, though the power transfer is always negotiated; that’s the game of it.

(I once heard “Hedkoranth!” yelped on the other side of a doorway while walking through Mernita, but I must surely have been mistaken as to whose Voice it was.)

1 minute ago, theconfusingeel said:

I was going off the other thread.

Perilous. 

4 minutes ago, theconfusingeel said:

You become a god by heroquesting,that's the apotheosis. She became a god after the 7 mothers quest was completed, she changed the world by creating the red goddess. The moment she died and left the mortal world wasn't mythologically special, she was already a god.

May I ask where you picked this interpretation up? While I don’t in the abstract disagree with the idea that HeroQuesting was the means of the apotheosis of the Lunar New Gods, I do not think I have ever seen an assertion that the birth of the Red Goddess turned the Seven Mothers into gods immediately. If I crack open TLW, it even says that they “found their own way to divinity” and that they all left the earth and joined the goddess in immortality within thirty years of the goddess’s own ascension into the Middle Airs. This would also make the deaths and resurrection of multiple members of the Sev-Ems during the First Battle of Chaos even more wildly remarkable, have major implications to the period in which the Red Goddess was struggling to establish a safe place for her and her people, and so on. YGWV, but I’m not sure you’ve thought through the implications here.

38 minutes ago, theconfusingeel said:

Only gods that have leadership as an important aspect of their myth gain ruleship magic, Yelm as emperor, Orlanth as king of the gods, Pamalt as leader of his pantheon. Just because a god ruled over a place doesn't mean they automatically gain rulership magic, that's why Deezola doesn't get any.

You may note that what I have written above doesn’t actually talk about “rulership magic,” and that I specifically pointed out I’m not talking about the mechanical details of RQRiG here. But this is an interesting tip of the hand nonetheless. Are you arguing that Deezola did not have leadership as an important aspect of her myth? If not, what are the important aspects of her myth?

40 minutes ago, theconfusingeel said:

Plus, because she was a mortal, her magic must have come from some cult she practiced or a heroquest of hers, historical events don't translate into mythology.

Are you arguing that the only magic that Lunar New Gods can pass on to their worshippers is the magic which they learned in their mortal life? That there is nothing transformative in their moment of apotheosis, that they had not already imprinted themselves on the fabric of existence outside of Time? That would be an inherent diminishment of the Lunar Pantheon, if so.

30 minutes ago, radmonger said:

Part of this is that there is I think a difference in presentation between RQ and HQ/HW. The latter focused on what the gods can do, and so, by implication, what a devotee or hero emulating  that god can.

Correct. That’s the lens I’m looking through here, and one of the reasons I spun this off as a new thread was to widen the scope from arguments about what specific RQ spells Deezola’s cult should or shouldn’t teach to the underlying ideas about Deezola, who she was, and what her legacy is.

42 minutes ago, radmonger said:

For most of the empire, rulership and sovereignty belongs to Yelm. Dendara is his wife, and Deezola is Lunarized Dendara. As such, she does not rule or command; she supports, protects and heals. The temples that exist will be funded and patronized by noble wives who want magic to protect their loved ones.

Good analysis, but I’m not entirely convinced that Deezola is only Dendara in red-and-black paint, any more than Yanafal can be said to entirely just be Bendy Sword Humakt, or Etyries as Girlboss Issaries.

45 minutes ago, radmonger said:

There is a strong argument that this is the case because the Lunar Empire was put back wrong after Sheng's conquest. The Yelmic ruling class he introduced was never wholesale replaced, merely suborned.

What isn't clear is if you go to the far north and west of the empire, far away from Dragon pass, that still holds.

How do they remember Deezola in Torang, we might very well ask.

I’m spinning this off from the increasingly contentious “Lunar Way Observations” thread, because I think there’s something here that deserves its own increasingly contentious thread.

So. Queen Deezola. Ruler of lands on the Arcos river, priestess of (depending who and when you ask) Arachne Solara, “the local Earth goddess,” or Dendara. Keeper of Vows, Avenger of Wrongs, the Unshakable One.

In the previous thread, an interesting hypothesis was brought up: that it’s possible Deezola was not actually a ruling queen, but just a powerful earth priestess leasing out her lands. And after looking over the sources I have available to me (Cults of Prax, the Sourcebook, and The Lunar Way, most notably) — I think that this theory is plausible but unsatisfying. It’s in line with the idea that (outside of Esrolia), women only possess soft power, having management over land that must be leased out to male kings, as well as being a necessary component for the legitimacy of a man’s rule.

However, I feel that this interpretation sacrifices complexity for the satisfying simplicity of asserting the dominance of male leadership; this is close enough to Dara Happa to be blinding. Speaking of Dara Happa, put on your trollglasses and look north instead.

Rinliddi extends to the foothills of the Blue Moon Plateau, the wreck of Queen Ceruilla. Prior to the release of TLW, Deezola was understood to have associations with Lesilla, one of the more interesting myths of female leadership (for all that it ends tragically). A queen before Time mirroring a queen after Time, both of them in dire straits.

(Note, too, that Deezola attempted to teach Teelo Estara about statecraft and rule, and it was miraculous that she instead found herself educated by the goddess— a fragment of contemporary myth that loses much of its impact if she was speaking as “just” an earth priestess.)

My own conception of the Seven Mothers is that Deezola (likely the ruler of lands north of Torang at this time, if not the city itself) provided shelter for both Irrippi Ontor and Yanafal Tarnils as part of her modest household/court, and was likely convinced by Irrippi that calling forth the missing goddess would be crucial in the delicate game of playing the Carmanians and the Pentans against each other to maintain her tenuous position. Political expediency and a very reasonable desire for power, given her position.

I’m not a RuneQuest gal; the mechanical details of how many Rune spells Deezola might have isn’t as important to me as a coherent narrative understanding of the Queen by Arcos and how her legacy is understood in the modern Lunar Empire, particularly by “Lunar nobles, poets, and healers.”

So, what do you all think? When you rotate a 3D image of Deezola in your imaginations, what narrative features stand out? Is there room for a minor queen to hold political power between Carmania and Pent, between the Blue Moon and the Tripolis?

1 hour ago, Eff said:

Her cult isn't anything, because Glorantha is a fictional setting. It's not a question of what I want, it's a question (to me) of whether her mythological actions (breaching the barriers of the Lunar Sacred Time rituals, befriending the dragon and sending him away from Doblian, turning the Telmori into wolves to break their curse, bringing back maize through ritually slaughtering the Blood Sun, the long and complicated mythological actions necessary to produce the twin deities Nightlight and Twilight, and proving that She-Who-Waits was Ernalda to the people of Tarsh) are indeed represented fairly by those two runespells and only those two runespells.

This raises interesting questions about the nature of Lunar deities and the shape of their cults. Are they, and their magic, as presented, the result of the actions taken inside of time, or the result of the needs of their worshippers? (And for my next trick: expand the thought outside the Lunar Pantheon.)

If the latter, then no wonder that Hon-Eel’s cult as presented is focused so heavily on maize, and that Deezola has no magical associations with leadership. It is sufficient to say that leadership resides within the Red Emperor, and there is therefore no reason for the cult of Deezola to have developed magic reflecting her crown.

22 minutes ago, Eff said:

Another thing you might have expected to see in Deezola is some kind of magic associated with ruling and rulership, as even though she may have been a Dendaran prior to her newly revealed extended torture session, she was still a queen regnant afterwards.

Discussion has convinced me that I am more interested in Deezola as //. Not the first substitution I’ve done among the Lunar pantheon; I’ve written elsewhere about Etyries as //, the goddess of The Economy and The Invisible Hand— though that’s tied into my very heretical origins for her, and non-canonical but compelling depictions of the Red Dancer of Power.

Shut one eye and cover it. The Great Darkness is a catastrophic weather event that nearly causes humanity to go extinct. The Vent roars, and the sky is choked with clouds. The sun is gone. Nothing grows. Winter stalks the land, but ash rains from the sky and the winds are still. Society falls apart. The great Lightbringer cultural explosion happens because they have a narrative that explains what happened: the gods all died, but in the underworld they won, and now they have returned, and that’s why we can grow crops again. Heort and Lord Victory Nightbrother maintained an almost impossible continuity of society (or, in either case, successfully convinced their people that they were heralds of the old order, the mythic time of the gods), which made their societal structures very appealing to bands of survivors all across central and western Genertela.

The future shall be like the past. Which one? All of them.

Shut one eye and cover it. The sun really did follow the Theyalan missionaries. They had Orlanth’s Mandate, after all. The imagery of Orlanth breathing life back into Ernalda’s lungs is a deep metaphor for the process of reanchoring the shattered fragments of reality back into the Net. If Glorantha has ever felt patchwork to you— if certain elements feel thin, or unreasonable when placed together, or like lacunas on the map: blame the missionaries. Their failures in the east are particularly galling. The people in the places they went almost certainly were preexisting, but they were lost, outside themselves, without self— and then the sun rose, and they knew themselves as part of a new world, a world they had not been a part of before.

Which one? All of them.

Shut one eye and cover it. Time is being spun by something with eight legs or excreted by something with six legs and radial symmetry. It is an artificial framework and an attempt to stop the world from shattering. What went down at Castle Blue was a screaming match over the books and the dice before Orlanth sulkily conceded that Sedenya understood the game being played, but only because she’d been briefed by the GM.

Which one? All of them.

One day, Kimantor sat up. The wool blanket slid down the place where he had the silhouette of a six-pack. He sniffed the air, and then he listened as hard as he could, so hard that he could hear the breath of insects, then hard enough that he could hear silence, then hard enough that he could hear the noises inside of silence, and what he heard inside that was—

Norinel shifted in her sleep, then, and rolled over, dragging the blanket with her shoulder. He leaned down and kissed her cheek. (He would remember that moment, the way she looked with her brow scrunched up, the rumples of the blanket in the dark, the shape of her breath, the scent of her skin; the moment itself came back when he least expected it, over and over again.)

“We won,” he whispered in the dark. In the shadows, there was a movement, a sign of blessing, and Kimantor bowed his head in honor of his father. Then the moment was gone, and he rested the shape of his unobserved head against the wall of the cave chamber, cold and dry and solid.

”And we have so much work to do.”

3 hours ago, Arkangel said:

I'm thinking one level might be for travel in one direction and the other vice-versa.

According to the Guide, the upper level is of ritual significance and used in “magical ceremonies of importance to the Empire,” while the lower level is fully open to the public. Hwarin is associated with conquest, the civilizing urge of empire, and valor in battle against the barbarian, after all— literally walking in her footsteps is symbolically potent.

The stone arches keep the Road off the ground. One may also be reminded of Sartar’s own acts of magical roadmaking.

Harald Smith’s Edge of Empire has some interesting content about the Daughter’s Road, as well as a great illustration from Simon Bray of a shrine on the Singing Trail (page 197, if you have it to hand). The Singing Trail is the road that runs from Cafol to Hilltown, in Imther, which naturally makes it of great interest to the Imtherians.

54 minutes ago, Memestream said:

Congratulations!

I ordered the POD last week, and have been kicking myself for being stingy and not springing for the bundle. The adventurer's guide will just have to tide me over until it finally arrives. My players vibe with Nochet really big, so I anticipate that a lot of fun will be had with it.

I’ll warn you that it can be easy to get lost and/or overwhelmed in the book, given that it is doing its best to encompass parts of the city down to a building-by-building level. (After all, it started as an index for the map of Nochet.) My recommendation for once it’s in your hands is to focus on the neighborhood introductions, tread lightly through the building lists, let yourself be enchanted by an entry that catches your eye or by the ubiquitous sidebars, and then go back and do a closer reading on the neighborhoods that really caught your attention.

I hadn’t thought about how well the small details in the player-facing section work to enrich Imther in play, but I definitely agree with Austin regarding their quality.

Ezkankekko is always (was always) your shadow, the Other, the person like you who is not you, who offers you a way to bridge the gap between the known and the unknown. He was the ambassador of Darkness to all things that were not-Darkness (but not-Void, the things that Darkness made room for). He wasn't casting magic or shapeshifting; he just was always the Darkness reflecting those who look upon it. He was Argan Argar's hope for peace, the Darkness's attempt to understand the things that gushed forth out of it, and yet his own being even so.

Because of this, in the Rightarm Islands he is still known as "Swimmer in Shadows," and because of this, the trolls of the Shadow Plateau seem incapable of stamping out the legend of "the best enlo who ever lived" once and for all. (Thank goodness the creatures of Chaos are uninclined towards accurate recordkeeping, at least in a form that the Beard People can access, and so we do not know about his Other Face, his war face that he did not even show Belintar his enemy.)

17 hours ago, John Biles said:

'Elmal is what Yelmalio becomes if you 'fix' him.

And similarly, Yelorna is what happens if you fix 'him.'

Color me disappointed. I mean, not just that the game didn't happen (and I wish I'd had time to sub in, since it was near the top of my list for games at the con), but that it looks like QW isn't getting any Gloranthan support. "QW Core + genre pack" was on my own shortlist of ways to run Glorantha in the future, as I'm most comfortable with narrative systems and I like QW's refinements to the base HQ system. Lacking a genre pack will make the barrier to entry for both myself and prospective players that much higher.

This wouldn't sting as much if the official Gloranthan narrativist system wasn't already a year out of print when I started getting into this gorgeous setting. Sure, I've got a decent collection accumulating, but it's expensive and often a literal gamble. (I massively lucked out on getting Kingdom of Heroes, for example, and that was still over $150- and my owning it means that there's now one less copy circulating for someone else starting their journey.)

The Alda-chur Confederation has the Princeros; they were famous for "giant fighting," and were defeated by Harvar. Now they have to pay him humiliating tribute to atone for their resistance against him. Or the Tovtaros, which was once known as the "Source of Heroes," but had many feuds inflamed by Harvar's machinations. Since he stepped in and settled most of them, they owe him deeply- which was exactly his goal. (Or he convinced others to feud with the Tovtaros and then repeatedly passed judgment against them, forcing them to spend their wealth to settle these matters; the text is vague enough that either is possible.)

Alone, meanwhile, has the Tres Tribe, which consists of refugees and political dissenters from Alda-chur who fled out to Alone to make a new tribe.

I'll also note that Harvar's own tribe, the Vantaros, is known for being dominated by Yelmalio and Lunar cults, which makes the choice of which tribe to have as rivals very easy.

My source here is Kingdom of Heroes, and while some of this might be updated or changed the next time we hear about Alda-chur and Alone properly, it's what I have to hand.

4 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I have an urge to write a scene with dialogue, words of command, a chorus, and catastrophic magical effects several kilometers away.  Would that be how Great Sister protects against the Pentan nomads during  the interregnum?

Not only is this a very fruitful line of thought to go down, I must point you towards one of the greatest “dancelike ceremonies” in all of the records we have: Tatius the Bright’s Great Lunar Transformation. (Page 40 of the Sourcebook or 126 of KoS.)

”Everyone had spent months in preparation and each celebrant had invoked one of the celestial powers with such success that anyone watching would easily have recognized any participant to be the proper star, planet, or other selected celestial body.”

I’d also recommend listening to the Overture from Stravinsky’s Argrath Rex (1912) for inspiration.

25 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

But Great Sister's Army is listed with battlefield armies on page 143 of The Lunar Way.

5 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Her "small mobile army" is more magically significant than a regular fighting force, and to the best of my recollection has never been used offensively.

One of the great tactical developments of the Lunar Empire has been the discovery that well-trained ritualists, even a small mobile band of them, are a significant force multiplier in Gloranthan conflicts. The adage that wars are won through logistics has an asterisk next to it in Glorantha: “and through ceremonies.”

In that context, it’s quite coherent for the Daughter’s Army to not be a battlefield army and to still be deployed internally for the good of the people in a defensive capacity.

Great Sister is interesting in one (of several) sense in that she is yet another subtle, sensible feminine counterbalance to a more prominent masculine personality. Then again, I don't think Ernalda often maneuvers to have Orlanth assassinated for the good of political stability (...at least among the Heortlings, though I hear that sort of thing sometimes happens down south).

A lot of my perspective on Deneskerva comes from her portrayal in Life of Moonson and Crimson King, and if you wanted to get a feel for her, perusing one of those two isn't too bad of an idea. (Though be warned that Crimson King is a doozy of a scenario intended to be run for folks who are clueless of the third act twist.) And I would lay down money on her appearing in Dark Side of the Moon when that finally comes out; she's a fertile character for exploration, particularly in the Origin Story, seeing the woman who would become Great Sister as a counterbalance to Doskalos Sword-in-the-Eye.

I had a third paragraph in mind, then I had to walk away, and now I have lost it. Mm. Hopefully it comes back sooner rather than later.

When you call upon the magic of the Other Side, out beyond the confines of the Net, there is a moment when the worlds touch. (Not three worlds, before you cut me down where I stand; two is enough here.) There is a moment of bleed, where the sacred and the profane meet, and for a moment the Other Side is made recognizable through the world, and the Godtime is made manifest for that same moment inside of the Net.

Sometimes this is visual (as we have seen in many pieces of art), but just as often it is olfactory (the sense most deeply tied to memory), and perhaps even more often it is auditory. As we know through the story of Yelm's Challenges, and our own experiences of contacting the gods, the world before the world was one where communication and music and dance were three strings of the same harp, a world where the gods would break out into poetry and song as an expression of their vital essences. This is why we use these methods to touch the Other Side ourselves.

Those who have impressed themselves upon the Godtime and touched Infinity find that this bleed does not leave them; it ebbs and flows, but never entirely recedes. They are a nexus point where the world of the gods meets the world of men again, and signs and omens are endemic to their very nature; when they reveal their full glory, the world is painted in strange colors and haunted by strange songs.

Which is so much to say that it is very easy to tell exactly when you are about to be killed by Jar-Eel the Razoress.

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.