Ynneadwraith

This might fit better in 'Your Dumbest Theories', but here goes.

What if the Gods of Glorantha don't actually provide boons to those who worship them? What if their relationship is exploitative?

So, Heler doesn't provide excess rain because people ask her for it. Heler withholds rain from everyone who doesn't. By positioning themselves under the mythic shadow of the Red Moon, Heler doesn't dare force them into tribute, and they receive the regular amount of rain they would expect without Heler's interference in the process (because the Lunar Gods haven't declared a monopoly on rain yet).

I don't particularly like that explanation, but I expect someone a little further down the Marxist scale than I might...

2 hours ago, radmonger said:

Sartar is crippled by the loss of Storm-based fertility (i.e. Ragnaglar)  to chaos. Which means 50% of the population can't contribute directly to agricultural productivity, and have to find workaround like herding cattle, or worse. Which as everyone knows results in 10% of the calories per hectare of a primarily-vegetarian diet. And, as not everyone knows, calories in is magic points out.

This explanation I like. That the Lunars can compete because their peer competitors are all mythically (and thus materially) crippled in differing (but roughly equal) ways. If that feels a little convenient, then you could rationalise it that this is as good as anyone's got*, and anyone who is more mythically crippled has either been absorbed by those more capable, or exists as marginalised peoples on the fringes of the more powerful states.

The last time anyone genuinely solved their various mythic flaws they got too big headed and were wiped off the face of the lozenge.

*Glorantha is a post-apocalyptic world after all. The World Machine is thoroughly broken.

That is a solid point!

13 minutes ago, Eff said:

related to the magic that is available for that polity. 

I would say 'related to, but not solely dependent on, the magic available for that polity. Magic is incredibly useful, but you can also just bonk someone over the head with a really big stick and achieve a similar end result as a thunderbolt (the recipient is now dead). For me, things like 'societal cohesion' and 'reduced deaths through infighting' are tangible things that could let a comparatively magic-poor* culture punch above its mythic weight.

That's more where I was going with that one.

So my answer to the question of "what does Lunar religion add which...makes the exclusive and sole worship of the Seven Mothers...something which can displace the worship of traditional deities?" would be 'other social factors'.

*I wouldn't necessarily say that the Lunar empire is magic-poor, but more magic-concentrated-in-the-upper-echelons, but from a regular citizen's perspective that might not be any different.

I suppose you could hypothesise that they have a different, more God-Learner-like philosophy for producing magical potency. Rather than having a large number of less powerful magical forces (the Orlanthi model), they have a largely demilitarised general population but a more specialised magical/military branch. That might allow them to undertake all sorts of weird God-Learnery experimental heroquests that make up for the general magical deficit.

A spirit of the road could be a fantastic boon if you don't know your route. Has satellite navigation been around so long that we've forgotten how hard it could be beforehand?

It could be that 'getting lost on the road' isn't the most exciting thing to be roleplaying so it doesn't come up very often, but there's definite narrative potential in it (especially if the spirit of the road is deliberately confusing the route because it's been offended in some way). Or things like an ill-placed pothole hobbling a cart-horse perhaps.

Thinking about bandits/highwaymen, it would be very much worth their while to get into the good books of the road spirit of the stretch they frequent. It could be that when you're waylaid the road spirit is on their side!

As for communication spirits, I suppose it's not just the words you're saying being understood but the sentiment too. Say you come across a very wary (and very well armed) hsunchen band. You very much want to say 'we mean you no harm'. You might even know the words for 'we no hurt' in a language they'd understand, but would they believe you? A communication spirit might be able to help communicate the base sensation of 'we're not a threat to you' to them and diffuse the situation, or give you a hint as to what customs they have that get this message across (a mutual exchange of gifts for instance).

A spirit of commerce might be a 'quest initiator' for a wandering merchant. Something like a marketing lead. An insight into where there's opportunity to be had.

16 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Form chaos army seems over powered to me, because the OP's question was what rune spells the chaos gods' followers would get.  Getting a whole army goes beyond what you get from any other rune spell, and appears to combine summon and control.

I interpreted that a little differently. 'Form Chaos Army' as an equivalent to the Orlanth Rex rights. Less about magicking an army out of nowhere, and more about legitimising a random assortment of chaos bods into a unified force (largely as an attempt to get them to stop murdering each other for long enough to achieve the objective).

Whether that fits better with Kajabor or someone like Wakboth I'm not sure.

11 hours ago, Eff said:

Going back to the ostensible subject of this thread, what would it say about a society that its divine community is one that's effectively disarmed by relation to its social context? That's the question which lies behind questions about Seven Mothers as a cult, which really come down to questions about what Gloranthan societies look like and whether it is sensible for a society to have a relative position of so-and-so with this neighbor and suchlike with that neighbor given its expressed magical abilities and defined historical trends.

For example, if the adoption of the Lunar religion led to a resilient and strong state that was able to unify a fractious Peloria, and part of that religion is the opening up of new magical methods, then does it really make sense for that religion to produce adherents who are, by the available measures, significantly worse off than they would have been before the Lunars, bereft of the magic that other Gloranthan societies enjoy?

Interesting points!

I'd maybe suggest it's something to do with the building of legitimacy. I don't get the impression that the micro-states of Peloria were republics, so the regular citizenry don't seem to get much of a say in who's leading them. There's revolts I suppose, but they're extreme measures for extreme circumstances.

Meanwhile, the elites do have something to gain through conversion to the Lunar Way and the legitimacy that brings (what with the sodding great orb-goddess floating above them). That conversion then percolates down through the rest of the population, because it's less risky to take the slightly less useful magic than it is to get on the wrong side of the Lunar authorities (and the Lunar's don't seem to be all that keen on religious pluralism).

Might this suggest, then, that the Lunar religion is one that is primarily beneficial to the elite (and thus the benefit to the non-elite to conversion is in not getting persecuted by that more powerful elite).

I don't know, just my interpretation.

Another one could be that the general disarming of the population is actually a net benefit to everyone involved. See the gun crime statistics between the US and Europe as an example. The lunar population see their disarming as a positive thing, because they're less likely to get thunderbolted during a random bar brawl than their windy cousins. Deadly violence is for those whose role is designated as the dealers of deadly violence (e.g. soldiers).

11 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

Modernism is an outworking of Reformation Protestantism, and is not separable from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, I am afraid🙂🙃😇  

I'm with you, but I do think they are slightly separate processes stemming from the same root. In my understanding, the Judaeo-Christian reform* primarily sought to supplant existing clan and tribal concepts of community with a religious one. I very much see it as an extension of the tradition born in the fertile crescent of building a community around serving a deity as opposed to familial relationships.

The fact that this (eventually) broadly backfired and ended up stripping people of their sense of community (deracinating them) without necessarily planting religion as a substitute community was far from a given. Its causes were mutlifaceted (including such other factors as the impact of the Industrial Revolution, among others).

So, no, I don't think it's wholly separable. But I do think they're separable enough to warrant calling attention to both as factors to be wary of when interpreting the actions of ancient peoples that shared neither. The way I interpreted the terms was:

• Judaeo-Christian tradition = theological conceptualisation of the world based on Judaeo-Christian cosmology. For example, things like a dualistic division of deities into wholly good and evil, conceptualising the underworld as a place where sinners are punished etc. I suppose you could lump in structural things here if you wanted too, like having a canon of accepted beliefs (others being deemed as wrong or heretical), or having a defined 'church' as a parallel society/political structure.
• Modernity = the breakdown of the conceptualisation of 'the community' as the base unit of society, and the rise of individualism. Game of Thrones is a good example of this being projected backwards in time.

I suppose another connected term to be wary of is empiricism. The concept that true knowledge comes only from observation. The idea that the default state of a person is to be sceptical of something unless they have personally observed the thing in question. That belief is not a valid source of truth.

All of these things have their roots (or are a root of) Reformation Protestantism, as you say, but are different enough phenomena to warrant individual examination.

*here I'm mainly talking about the one I know best, the largely Catholic reform in Western Europe

11 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

Unfortunately I think you have missed my point - if you tweak the wording then you change the meaning.

The only word I tweaked was 'goddess' to 'God', and the pronouns from 'she' to 'he'. The rest of the meaning of the text (that someone has fallen out of the graces of a deity for reasons they cannot fathom) remains wholly intact.

Unless I have misinterpreted the meaning of the word 'goddess' in this context, and it's intended meaning is something closer to 'community' rather than 'deity that holds sway over me'. That's certainly possible, but not something I picked up on!

Just now, mfbrandi said:

Perhaps all you have to do is nuke the moon.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Sink the moon, raise the block...

Ralzakark is Argrath.

6 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

You can’t step in the same chaos god twice?

Well whatever it is you've stepped in you should brush it off before you come inside. You'll ruin the carpets...

15 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

What is Storm but the opener of Voids and the bringer of Death? Storm is intimately connected with Chaos and the end of things. If you want to be Marduk, you have to be Tiamat, too, right?

But sometimes we just want to stick our fingers in our ears and go ‘la la la, not listening!’

Certainly fits with my personal view on Gloranthan theistic cosmology: that all gods go through a 'chaotic' phase as part of their creation, before they are rehabilitated and incorporated into the world. This happened to the gods of Storm during the Lesser Darkness, and the Chaos gods were going through this process during the Greater Darkness before it was cut short. Or perhaps Storm were the first to go through this process, and the others were less traumatic.

To return a little closer to the original question, I'd posit that Kajabor cultists should have some form of memory altering magic. Something to make someone forget something ever existed, as the first stage of total and utter annihilation. Lots of interesting narrative potential with that one...

11 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Maybe just small because he has spent all of Time dead, and that will take something out of him.

That's an interesting thought. If he was dead and is now resurrected, how might that change the myths (and thus magic) you could gain from him? The Ragnaglar you bring back isn't quite the Ragnaglar you killed before.

1 minute ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I'm not sure about the storm thing.  Just because he's Orlanth's brother doesn't necessarily hive him the air rune.  What's the mythology there?

I don't know, as a direct son/fragment of Umath I'd expect at least a little Storm in him.

It might be a little less canon-friendly, but I'd like to see a little speculation in the cult spells of the Chaos Gods. Something that hints at something that we don't already know about them.

For instance, you could play into the whole 'Orlanth the Usurper' narrative by giving Ragnaglar a smidgeon of twisted Rex magic. Just the slightest of hints that the rightful heir was Ragnaglar after all, before everything went to pot...

8 minutes ago, theconfusingeel said:

In this thread we support the red goddess and the boys in the lunar army, you are kindly asked to leave😠

I do as well (by and large), just couldn't resist the cheap shot 😉 

What sort of spells does Sedenya give?

#HailArgrath

17 minutes ago, Joerg said:

The cult of the individual as the center of the world doesn't seem to have been a good survival strategy. It may have been common with those who were as gods to their communities, though.

Interesting observation, considering that the advances in modern technology essentially allow 80% of us to live like elites used to.

Though I do think there is still a trap there. Our degrees of individualism (especially in the West) is still far, far higher than I suspect the vast majority of pre-historic God-Kings were. Even at that level, there was still a conceptualisation that they were 'first servant of the gods' or 'living representative of the god, and thus bound by the responsibilities that god had to the community'.

Hark me arguing for heavy community-mindedness just after arguing for individualism! I suppose my stance is that these cultures conceptualised themselves as far more communal than we do (especially ones like Bronze Age god-kings, or neolithic EEF cultures with those communal barrow-tombs), though not so communal that there weren't individual interests at play. Stalinism is the parallel I draw most often.

26 minutes ago, Joerg said:

I think that Odysseus was convinced that his interests were those of his (Ithakan) community

Now that is a trap if ever I saw one...

34 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Whether we know it or not, and whether we wish to admit it or not, the vast majority of us on this forum view the supernatural through a lens conditioned by 'popular' Judaeo-Christianity, simply by virtue of our countries of origin.

The ancient world operated by entirely different systems of understanding and relationship to the divine, depending on the local culture.

"The transgression I have committed, indeed I do not know, the sin which I have done, indeed I do not know,                    the forbidden food that I have eaten, indeed I do not know, the prohibited place upon which I have set foot,                 indeed I do not know.  The lord in the anger of his heart looked on me, when the goddess was angry,                               she made me become ill."

(7th century tablet in Sumerian and Akkadian interlinear translation) 

'Magical' failure is not due to the interference of another spiritual being, but is due to the innocent contravention of the desires of the deity, unbeknownst to the petitioner.  The lack of outcome is what has to be overcome to place the petitioner back in community with all of those whose prayers have been successful and with the deity.  It is the community that matters, not the magical outcome. 

While I agree to a reasonable degree, it's worth considering that Sumerian and Akkadian societies of the time (and it seems most other fully formed early civilisations in the Fertile Crescent, and perhaps other Early European Farmer cultures) seem to have been unusually community focussed. Conceptualising one's entire society as the servants of one or more gods (or god-kings) differs somewhat to the relationship other peoples had with their gods, which seems to be nudged a little more on the 'animist' side of the spectrum. On the far end of that spectrum, 'magical' failure absolutely can be due to the interference of another spiritual being (in fact, that's usually the main proscribed cause).

For instance, by the time we get to our written Greek mythologies we do get individual actors petitioning individual gods for personal boons. I'm not sure I'd prescribe Odysseus a single shred of community spirit over his own self-interest. I suppose that's what you meant by 'depending on local culture'.

34 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Whether we know it or not, and whether we wish to admit it or not, the vast majority of us on this forum view the supernatural through a lens conditioned by 'popular' Judaeo-Christianity, simply by virtue of our countries of origin.

I'd ascribe it less to the influence of Judaeo-Christianity and more to Modernity (though I would admit that one had a hand in bringing about the other). Modernity being the 'de-communitising' of society, and the rise of a really strong sense that the individual is the base unit of society rather than a group (i.e. a family/household/clan etc.).

It's this influence that people have trouble shaking. That everything is focussed around the individual.

Part of the reason I think it's this and not Judaeo-Christianity that's distorting things in this instance is that Judaeo-Christianity very much developed from the Sumerian and Akkadian religious traditions. There are many, many parallel concepts and conceptualisations between them that don't exist in quite the same way in other religious traditions. Such that I could tweak a word or two in the passage you quoted and it would fit perfectly into present day Judaeo-Christian discourse:

"The transgression I have committed, indeed I do not know, the sin which I have done, indeed I do not know,                    the forbidden food that I have eaten, indeed I do not know, the prohibited place upon which I have set foot,                 indeed I do not know.  The Lord in the anger of his heart looked on me, when God was angry,                                           he made me become ill."

(Ted Williams - TV Televangelist, October 2023) 

Unless of course that was rather your point, that we view all sorts of things through a Judaeo-Christian lens (translation of ancient texts included).

6 hours ago, John Biles said:

Earth doesn't exist until darkness and water are already in place.  So the world machine comes into existence... before fire.

Building on the transition to time thread, all of this happened before time was a thing. So there was no real 'before' or 'after'. Perhaps it was all happening at once. Like different engine rooms within the world machine, some filled with nothing but darkness and water.

Though of course, it could be that after time became a Thing then it was always a Thing, and everything was forced to sort itself into 'before' and 'after'. I wonder if this is what the dwarves mean by 'broken'.

19 hours ago, theconfusingeel said:

I think this is part of why the god learner goddess swap didn't work

My own little conspiracy is believing that this goddess swap didn't work...but others did and people haven't noticed/forgotten. The famous one is just the experiment that they pushed too far. The God Learners have messed with so much that we have no real way of knowing what or who is 'original' anymore.

I'd always conceptualised it as the ability to, from our perspective, step backwards or forwards in time/causality (which was a lot looser back then). A little like living in a permanent heroquest. If you wanted to step into the event of Flamal and Ernalda's courtship you could, much in the same way that we would walk in from one village to the next. Without time, every single event ever was happening all at once and you could travel to any of them at any point you pleased.

Where this gets really scary is when you consider that Chaos folks like Ragnaglar, or Kajabor, or even lowly broo could do this too. Because they were not bound within time either. So if you were a regular human at this point in time and you fought a broo, that broo could just keep coming back again and again to that event over and over and over. It's a lovely system while everyone is all happy and good, but the moment someone uses it to terrorise someone it becomes a horrific weapon to wield. The thing that broke the World Machine was malice.

How this interacts with Death is a tricky one, as you could see that as the first tendrils of time creeping into the world. A change that isn't easily walked back from.

This sort of ups the stakes of I Fought We Won, as it's not just about beating chaos, it's about beating chaos all at once in exactly the moment that the web of time fell upon the world. Only at that point did everything become fixed, and you couldn't just go and replay things over and over to change the event. That's why so much of the world and the gods are dead or ruined, because this was the best they could get to in the moment when the trap was sprung.

I very much like the idea of differentiating the Trade Gods by how they approach trade.

Argan Argar is more 'diplomacy through trade' and expects an honest and equitable appraisal for all parties. To try and swindle, or generate excess profit is offensive. I give you something you want, you give me something I want. Everyone's happy. Think of it more as reciprocal gift giving, rather than what we'd understand as trade. Trade is a means to enact diplomacy, and build bridges.

Issaries is more of a market trader. You will be expected to haggle*, but not excessively. This is more of a formality than a method to get one over on the person you're trading with. You want things they have, they have things you want. Let's come to some sort of arrangement. This is the meat and bones of Issaries trade. Trade is a means to exchange things around the community.

Etyries is more of a startup entrepreneur, and it's about making it into the big leagues (playing on the improved social mobility of Lunar culture compared to others). The onus of determining if goods are of high quality lies with the buyer (unlike Argan Argar, where it's offensive to misrepresent your goods), and if you get swindled then that's just part of the game (unlike Issaries, where that's generally frowned upon). Trade is a means to better your social position.

Loads of opportunities for tense or comedic moments here. For instance, here's an example of an Argan Argari merchant attempting to trade in an Issaries market for the first time.

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

There is a rune for the original draconic humanoid - the dragonewt rune.

New dumbest theory. What if the 'man' rune was simply made in imitation of the dragonewt rune (which presumably came first, dragons being as ancient as they are)? We're not made in God's image, we're made in the image of his tadpoles.

@mfbrandi Build a god out of dead hyenas, you say?

Proper heroquest material, if you fancy a read.

32 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

Bird hsunchen and their keet-brothers, before they lost contact with one another. 

Actually this I'm less keen on. I think I prefer the idea that they both used to be bird-headed humanoids with now-lost animal bird-brothers. At some point, some magic went wonky and their bird-features got transferred from one lot to the other, creating Dara Happans and Keets.

15 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Lodril's beak might have been duck-bill shaped...

Now this I am here for...

Also, new dumbest theory stemming from this. Dara Happans are more closely related to keets than Orlanthi, the two sharing a common ancestor sometime before the Dara Happens convergently evolved(/created) the man-rune bodyplan like their distantly related storm-barbarian cousins.

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

common to all sky creatures until the first batch of human Dara Happans were made (including Murharzarm)

How do we know that the earliest Dara Happans lacked these features?

I've heard tell of some very old rock art deep in the desert listing the peoples of the world, with the inscription 'dr hp' beneath the falcon-headed figure:

16 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

I thought it would be Harrod's...

All the same spiritual sickness...