Ynneadwraith

Ooh I like the idea that the secrets the God Learners discovered in their deep heroquesting was the True Names of the gods/runes. I've got a bit of a vision of what paleolithic/neolithic Glorantha looked like that this fits nicely into (and would also fit well in this thread!). None of it is particularly new mind... The idea being that the Gloranthan paleolithic was populated by various different Hsunchen-like animal totem people in a sort of wild magic/spiritual environment, before a lot of the theistic mythic structures formed. Sartarites, for instance, may well be descendants of Alynx-totem people. There's some sort of Bull-complex between Prax and the Carmanian Bull-Shahs as well. The myths and stories of Godtime are all post-hoc rationalisations of real-world events (back when the real world and the spirit world weren't really separated). These events have been wallpapered over by thousands of years of mythic reinterpretation until we get the gods that we know in Glorantha today. So, the 'True Name' of gloranthan gods is less some incomprehensible daemonic jumble of letters, and more akin to knowing that the Night King was just a man who wants to go home. Deep within Orlanth lies a kernel of the first prehistoric man to create a bullroarer and call the storm, upon which all the later mythic architecture is hung. This is one of the Truths that the God Learners discovered. By calling out the childhood name of that long lost soul, they could speak to the very core of a God/Rune and convince it to do things that all the rest of the constructed personality would never even entertain. Perhaps that's why the Lunar Gods are that much more present. Nothing to do with being in or outside of the net of time (as anything more than an allegory), but simply because the Lunars knew who they were, and their gods still remember that too. End dumbest theory 😄

If it's all the same system, then sorcery makes the god produce magic involuntarily. Like whipping your hand back if someone pokes you with a cocktail stick. No wonder they don't like it! It's just plain rude...

Interesting. Was Grandfather Mortal murdered, or was he just fed up of Yelm's unchanging world and just wanted something interesting to happen for a change? Nah, I think destruction is a good way to describe it. We're just wannabe Nysaloreans 😄 You could claim that 'destruction' just means 'change', but that doesn't mean you're suddenly happy that someone has stamped on your sandcastle. Whether the new thing is better or worse than the old thing is a valid consideration (that I'm sure many riddlers dismiss as a prosaic practicality unworthy of serious consideration by enlightened minds). This, again, is a point I see Orlanthi and Lunars (the fanatical ones) disagreeing on. Lunars claiming that change is inevitable and thus a good thing, and Orlanthi saying 'but what you're changing things into is worse'. I quite like the idea of a Lunar who doesn't ascribe to the idea that Chaos is an innate part of the world to be welcomed. Perhaps, in conversation with the Orlanthi, they acknowledge that it's a purely destructive force, but argue that as it's here anyway we might as well use it. Sounds like a Tarshite way of thinking to me, intermediate between the two camps. I also quite like the idea that the Lunars are absolutely right about Chaos simply being the force of creation...but not really considering that what it's creating might be not be in their own best interests. A real 'Finally we've done it!........Oh god, what have we done' moment. Or even that the Lunars think they're right, but in reality they've colossaly misjudged things and Chaos does mean the destruction of everything without the creation of anything new. The whole Lunar conflict really thrives when no-one really knows quite what they're doing or how things actually work.

And here we see some of the irreconcilable differences between the Orlanthi and Lunar worldviews. Is Chaos a part of the world machine, or an outsider trying to wreck it? Mostal probably knew, but he's no longer answering my calls.

Perhaps, and you're entitled to have your own interpretation of events. I dare say your interpretation is the more popular one. Certainly among the Orlanthi at any rate. It's not how I see things, but then again I do like my Nysalorian riddles. Change often looks like destruction if we were fond of the thing that is being changed, and don't like what it is being changed into. Umath did destroy things. He destroyed the harmony that had existed in the world before his creation. He destroyed the unison between Sky and Earth. He wrought great destruction upon primitive Glorantha in his creation of a space for himself. Is that not a form of creation? Where once there were two things, now stands one thing that is something new. The unison of England and Scotland creates the United Kingdom. The unison of beans and toast creates Beans on Toast. The unison of tin and copper creates bronze. Was it? Do we know the Invisible God's intentions (if it was even them who did it!)? Do we even know what exists in the void beyond the Sky Dome? The Dragons do, but anyone who finds the answer to that question goes to join them before telling anyone else...

Is it though? Is not the Chaosium the fundamental well from which Glorantha springs? I think these things are not so different once you peer past the masks they wear... This does not necessarily make it true, simply a thing that people believe to be true. And yet, the sun shines to make crops grow (as it does in our world). The wind blows and brings the rain (as it does in our world). Why not have change that leads to ultimate stasis? Whether the mechanism is physical or mythic is neither here nor there. Having Chaos embody both is myth enough perhaps...

This I like. Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Would the Heroquest be impossible because the god is dead, or is the god dead because no-one remembers how to heroquest for them?

Perhaps, though I'm sure that's what Storm looked like to Earth and Sky when it didn't have a place in the world yet either. The opposite of what Glorantha looked like then, back when it was only Earth and Sky and nothing inbetween. Separation when all Glorantha had ever known is unison. And does not all change eventually lead to nothingness (heat death)? I'll concede that it's not exactly a view that would be popular in-universe (anywhere outside Lunar philosophy that is). Chaos as the ultimate Other is the Orlanthi viewpoint (and they would take that viewpoint wouldn't they, if Chaos is the Zeus to Orlanth's Kronos). Chaos as a fundamental component of the World Machine feels a lot more Lunar (that isn't to say correct, but not necessarily incorrect either).

Is there already a seasonal fertility myth that involves Orlanth descending into the underworld to resurrect Ernalda - Orpheus and Eurydice style? If not, that would make a great option for a bunch of Orlanthi living in the shadow of Valind's Glacier (or somewhere else suitably tundra-like and inhospitable). Perhaps their version of the myth keeps going wrong, and Orlanth can't resurrect Ernalda, leaving the ground cold and infertile as death. Perhaps they are waiting for a heroquester who is able to walk out of the Underworld without snatching a glance to see if Ernalda is following, and restore the lost life of the land.

In my vision of Gloranthan cosmology I see Chaos more as 'Unfettered Change'. The polar opposite of stasis. The reason people don't really like it is that, by and large, people don't like things suddenly changing into something else (like your arm, for instance). If this is the case, perhaps the reason being killed by Chaos seems to be more final than other forms of god-death is that it's not Death at all. It's Change. Into something wholly spiritually unrecognisable, and irreconcilable with what you were previously (that may also involve you becoming dead as well, but that's more of a side effect). Hence, also, how the Lunars were able to 'reconstruct' the Moon Gooddess (how accurately can be debated). If Chaos is Change, then you can't truly create something new without changing how the world is. Same goes for Nysalor (and, in my estimation, Umath).

Agreed. I see it as a sort of 'viewing different parts of the same elephant' thing. Or, potentially more accurately, the thing that old-school palaeontologists did when they were stitching together old skeletons: sometimes connecting the bones of one creature together to see some of its whole, but other times connecting together the bones of completely different creatures and getting a false vision of what the reality is. Ah, but doesn't that hinge on why Ragnaglar and Wakboth are unreachable. Is it because those gods are dead/trapped? Or is it because people have forgotten how to reach them (read: all the people who knew how to reach them have had their heads chopped off). How much of the dawn myths are intended to be interpreted as read, and how much are they intended to be allegorical? The reason this matters in a practical sense is that Ragnaglar and Wakboth may be unreachable theologically as the expertise to do so have been wiped clean from the lozenge. Perhaps, though, they are still lurking beneath the surface, stalking through the Spirit Realm, waiting for unlucky shamans to stumble into their trap. Perhaps, so long as a god is remembered in any facet (including as a character in other gods' myths), they are not truly dead and gone.

Definitely agreed, though food culture and agricultural practices can be very weird as well! Take Malta. Island slap-bang in the middle of the Med. Enormous maritime bounty to be had literally on their doorstep. Yet, for over a thousand years, the people of Malta focus almost entirely on terrestrial agriculture and hunting. Why this is I don't know, but I speculate that it's something to do with the cultural practices of the peoples who resettled Malta after its depopulation in the 9th Century. Perhaps they were from a mostly inland population with little relationship (or expertise) with maritime foodstuffs. Perhaps the seas were dominated by another cultural group, cutting them off from what would otherwise be a fantastic resource. Whatever the reason, traditional Maltese cuisine just doesn't use fish. Anything you find on the island these days is a product of Italian influence. You find a similar thing with some of the early neolithic cultures in Northern Europe, where they persisted for generations eating a millet based diet (poor sods) next to the veritable cornucopia of the North Sea. That's not to say all cultures (or even the majority of cultures) are like that. But it gives you latitude to add as much variety to Glorantha as you please. Want off-season fishermen-farmers, go ahead! Want a caste-like split of fishers and farmers (a la India), go ahead too! Want an ex-caste-like split of fishers and farmers where one or the other has gone extinct, go ahead for that as well!

Perhaps it's pigeons all the way down! Until one of them turns out to be a maneater, of course. Let's hope that doesn't happen to one of the players Jumanji-style!

Literal 'Gods in the Machine'. Boltzmann Brains coalescing from the swirling runic landscape. Agreed that the compromise doesn't limit their free will, just their ability to exercise it, which raises a point for the philosophers of course. If you have free will but no mechanism to act upon it, do you have free will at all? Of course, the gods are fortunate in that the way they act on their free will is through delivering magic to mortals. I never envisaged the system of magic in Glorantha as an impersonal one, where you sacrifice X to achieve Y and the God is simply a delivery mechanism. I'd always pictured it that the sacrifice is a way to persuade the God that you are acting to further their interests. It's more conversational than transactional. That's where gods are still able to exercise their free will. I've been mulling around how to operationalise that approach in game contexts, but I think having to justify how each spell you use further's Orlanth's cause* would get tiresome pretty quickly. Perhaps saving that for BIG MAGIC would work well. *note that Orlanth's cause isn't just 'make Orlanth a more powerful god'. It's tied to his domain. So 'make the world a stormier place' would also suffice.

Cue weird Olm-like blind albino cave-ludoch. Ludoch who have had a proportion of their Water rune replaced with Darkness.

And the Lunars would have you believe these are the same things... I'm not necessarily saying they are or aren't of course, I'm just positing the idea that there could be shades of godhood between 'heroes' like Harrek and Jar-Eel and 'True Gods' like Orlanth and Shargash. Perhaps, with her refusal to truly depart from the world of Time into the mythic, Sedenya is one of these shades. A shade like Nysalor, perhaps. Slightly different upper-tier steps on the path to enlightenment, that look indistinguishable to us puny mortals grubbing about on the ground. Alternatively, they're all one and the same thing (just in and outside of time), and all of this 'different steps' pigeonholing is nought but propaganda. Any sufficiently advance mortal is indistinguishable from a god (so perhaps all our gods are sufficiently advanced mortals).

What about something somewhere between the gods and Harrek? What about something like Sedenya? Is Sedenya even a god like the others? She certainly differs markedly by being a physical presence in the world, rather than an intangible force accessible solely through Godtime. Are the Lunars schmucks for believing their great ball of floating dirt is a god? I'm sure many Sartarites think so...

I hear she did a wonderful job with Yelm. Now he's not at all bothered by how those nasty heathens wrecked his perfectly manicured lawn. You might need to feed her pet bat first though...

Dune's more Kargyraa than Sygyt if you're googling for it. Though it's an excellent use of overtone singing to build atmosphere! Sygyt gets used in film a lot when you're designing mystic siberian snowscapes and stuff like that. Think Orlanthi mountaintop temple. Yeah it's a really good channel! There's loads of little shorts of the guy just playing a neat little tune on a different flute.

"See this one is especially interesting because the smith has made a print error when applying the Death rune. See, just below the teeth marks. That's very rare as they're normally extremely diligent with such an important rune. I've been offered an entire collection of miscast Hyaloring helmets by a Lunar collector in Saird, but I just won't part with it."

And here we get a little closer to what seems to be my own philosophy on life. There are no weeds, only plants. This is neither a good thing, nor a bad thing. It just is. Not a terribly tempting philosophy though. Doesn't exactly promise much. I doubt I'll get a mass chaos cult following going...

This I like from a 'everyone used to be Hsunchen before all these Great Spirits started having ideas above their station' perspective. Perhaps the beliefs in Prax are an echo of this thinking, reverberating through the generations where everyone else has forgotten.

Congratulations for making me snigger out loud in my office 😉 now I've got to explain what I was doing! I feel like this might be a non-issue, considering where all of these Humakti Rune Lords will be when they're finally relieved of their expensive iron armour (deepest, darkest Dorastor). More of an issue is the mounting colossal pile of iron armour buried within Dorastor. Like an anti-magic Great Pacific Garbage Patch. What happens when that much anti-magic in one place gets heavy enough to punch through the magical firmament of Glorantha? So yes, brave young initiate, you should go and try and retrieve some. Don't worry that the place was so dangerous it's killed multiple Rune Lords. I expect they died because they were weighed down by their heavy iron armour. You in your tunic and sandals should be plenty quick enough to escape any danger you find. Off you go! The world's counting on you!

What if the Devil is right? What if this world is sick and cannot be healed? What if the slate needs to be wiped clean to make way for a new Dawn? A new cycle in which Death, and Thed, and Mallia, and all those horrible things haven't been found yet. In a cycle of rebirth the old must die before the new can flourish. The Devil isn't murder...it's euthanasia. Whether these things are synonymous is up to you to decide. Orlanth clearly has a view (or perhaps it was just the method he objected to). Aha! The cycle does repeat, but is stalled by Zeus' refusal to bow to his son, and gaming the system with a daughter. Birth and succession is always a painful thing, as Umath demonstrated, but to turn back partway through is folly. Once the pain's through it's always better*.