Memestream

I want to make clear that I read every word of this thread, and got so excited I started firing off half cocked in all sorts of scatterbrained tangents and rambling, but became concerned that I was going to end up making the waters even muddier. I appreciate each and every reply, and I am pretty sure I have more to say after I let some things simmer in my noggin for a minute. This is a very good summary of my intended point. Likewise, in the parlance of Mage, "vulgar magic" is still very much a part of my Glorantha. People still conjure lightning from the sky(or even their hands), and things still transpire which even the most staunch materialist would not be able to readily explain. I just fob things off as plausibly explained otherwise and ambiguous anywhere and everywhere I can. I'm not saying that Ernalda's story about sleeping through the Dark to rise again at the Dawn is a metaphor for a plant dropping a seed which lies fallow through Dark season to sprout in Sea season, I'm saying that a plant dropping a seed which lies fallow in the ground over the Dark season to sprout in Sea season is a metaphor for Ernalda sleeping through the Dark! Ernalda herself being a metaphor for whatever utterly inscrutable 'thang' that lies at the heart of the generative force that causes such a thing to transpire in 'mundane' reality. Simulation & Simulacra by Baudrillard plays heavily into my perspective here. Disney World is a place that one may go to and have a genuine experience, yet everything within it is the consequence of artifice, fantasy, and seeming. People have real emotional responses to the things they witness and participate in, those are actual clockwork automata shaped like little singing men! Things represent things authentically for a while, then become imitations of other imitations, then eventually imitations of things that have no discernible touchstone in supposedly 'objective' relaity. However, just because something is an imitation of an imitation doesn't mean it isn't *real*. I think another way to look at what I'm saying here with regard to 'magic' in Glorantha is "We are all us." I take a very "we are all us" attitude about whether or not any given event is magical or mundane. "It's all silk from the same spider" one might say... There's a very generally Vedic outlook that I have on it, but I don't want to elaborate on such an idea without further thought for fear of looking like a fool or unintentionally misrepresenting a real world religion that's still in practice. It's kind of in the vein of the Greg Sez article that got linked though. Yet not perfectly! Their story is a delightfully brilliant illustration of the inherent philosophical absurdity that challenges us incessantly, among other things. They did all the math and lined up all their ducks, yet their conviction that they resided within a clockwork universe bound by deterministic rules ultimately proved incomplete! Whatever the 'mundane' phenomenon of inertia is a metaphor for.

I've been lurking around here for years now, but with substantially more fervor over the past few months, and figured that I may as well make my inaugural post one concerning my own Glorantha along with the explicit invitation to hear about how others interpret the setting, namely how magic looks, plays, and functions. It's very much going to risk running into the realm of a meandering ramble, but I feel like I may as well put it here as well as anywhere else. First off, I'll disclose that I was introduced to the setting via the King of Dragon Pass pc game(the original version) somewhere around 2009 or so. However, even though it was far from my initial introduction to the world of fantasy, and even narrative settings which demanded some serious measure of adjusting one's own paradigm, I found it to be astoundingly opaque. Not only the first few times I played it, but even the first few times I installed it. Regardless of starting numerous clans and watching them all go to pot "even though I did everything I could," there was something about the game's design and aesthetic that informed me on a subconscious level that it wasn't just another half-hearted visual novel with some sloppy management mechanics welded onto the side of it, and this kept me coming back. It wasn't until I blundered through the Orlanth and Aroka heroquest to be rewarded with a picture of a man painted blue stepping out of a dragon shaped tent that it all suddenly snapped into vivid focus. "Wait a second, this game is almost entirely concerned with where 'subjective' and 'objective' reality meet!" KoDP and Glorantha weren't the only things that suddenly slipped into focus in that moment either, hundreds of hours of idle reading and independent study of real world mythology did as well, and then by extension, much of my relationship with fiction and media altogether. From there everything about the game fit together neatly, the world is a story to these people, I learned the story, I learned way it represented their world, I became King(and Queen) of Dragon Pass over and over again, possessed of a bold new insight, no longer stumbling through a series of seemingly arbitrary questions about cows, marriage, and how to treat red-headed children. I find it mysterious to this day that this of all things was the ignition point for such a radical change in how I view the world, especially given that this was far from the first time I was introduced to an idea like this. Indeed, some years earlier a good friend of mine had introduced me to the White Wolf's, Mage: The Ascension, which I had similar issues comprehending, and much to his frustration I might add. Hilariously enough, it was likewise a circumstance in which I had great difficulty comprehending the central point it was trying to communicate in spite of having devoted a great deal of personal time and interest to studying real world occult traditions. Nonetheless it was a game that taught me a lot about how one's perspective and interpretation of the world influences not only their experience of the world they live in, but the experience of others in the world with them. It allowed me to don the mantle of someone with a series of beliefs completely distinct from my own and work to imagine what made reality tick from their perspective. I bring it up because I think it had a major influence on how I read Glorantha, and while I haven't looked into it, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Glorantha had a major influence on Mage. Okay we're well beyond a risk of meandering ramble at this point, but I bring all of this up to set the table and provide something of a shorthand in outlining what follows, which is how I actually play games in Glorantha, and how I personally interpret the setting. Granted, as I've read more and more concerning 'canonical' information regarding Glorantha, I'm more and more convinced that what I'm describing is definitely *my* Glorantha. So with all of that said... I place a really strong emphasis on blurring the lines between the mundane and magical in my Glorantha. So much so that many rune and spirit magic spells, as they transpire in my games, would not have any apparent magic about them at all if witnessed by a post-enlightenment observer. Mechanically, it's the same thing, somebody obtains a secret from their cult concerning how to influence reality. However, flavor wise, the enchantment/spell always takes the form of something nebulously plausible or at least downright inscrutable so as to obfuscate any simple conclusion that it's 'just magic.' An easy example of this would be a Humakti incorporating the bones of another Humakti into his blacksmithing process. Did he 'just' add carbon to the steel? Did his brother 'just' adopt a form closer to this true nature as a sword? Did the sword he's working interpose with the first sword when Humakt first grasped death? Did he 'simply' wave his hands over it and the bones were totally superfluous? Who are we to say? I mean what do either the players or the characters really know anyway? The fact is the sword became more dangerous after whatever the hell he did. I try to be similarly evasive concerning what happens during Heroquests. Certainly, from the perspective of the player *characters*, they definitely stepped across the great divide between mortal and immortal into the realm of the gods themselves, and all of the same effects carry through, they actually change their world doing this, but I try to drop in bits here and there which hint at the subjective nature of the experience. Perhaps Ty Kora Tek smells like your mean aunt because you're remembering you're actually Ernalda, or perhaps she smells that way because you're wrestling around with your aunt under a musty old blanket in a smoky room within a deeply altered state of mind. I even go so far as to extend this to many of the spirits and (especially chaotic) monsters as well. I go out of my way to make them as ambiguous with "natural" processes, emotional states, and general vibes of events, places, and people as possible. Using them almost like something akin to a sanity mechanic in many cases. Did something you feel guilty about? That's a spirit combat. Fumbled in front of everyone? The spirit of your humiliation might have a word with you about it later, and if it involved slipping in goat dung, a disease spirit might come along with it. Unless a shaman or a similarly attuned person is around to witness it though, it's all described in terms of mundane processes that the character identifies as a spirit. Is there really a meaningful difference between being attacked by cannibalistic outlaws and ogres? Was that a Dancer-in-the-Dark, or was it the tulpa of our unaddressed nihilistic lust? I never intend for the characters to ask these questions, but whenever I can cleverly do so, I try to put these thoughts in the heads of the players. I do all of this while contradictorily affirming that magic is definitely real and that the characters are capable of feats that would be downright impossible according to our consensus of reality. I don't always succeed, but I do all of this not with the intention of reducing the events which take place in Glorantha down to simple misunderstandings of what we interpret as physical processes, but rather with the intention to elevate what we interpret as physical processes to the order of magic and sorcery. I do it to highlight that in the same way one of my players might look at an event in the game and think 'oh the guy is clearly experiencing PTSD and thinking it's a spirit attacking him,' somebody from another time and place could easily look at that same player and think them insanely stupid for not knowing a spirit when it literally jumped out and bit them. That in the big scheme of things, we don't *really* understand reality any better than a bronze age shepherd(and concerning at least some facets of it, understand LESS). Whether or not anything else I wrote managed to effectively communicate that point, this specific epistemological challenge is the veritable Spike for anything and everything that happens in my Glorantha. Not only that, but to communicate to them that Glorantha(as I read it, at least) isn't like our world (at the present), which comprises of nebulous fragmented ideologies revolving around a central 'objective' reality, but rather a truly mutipolar interaction of various consensuses that form the aggregate which is Glorantha. That it's a place where the jury is still out concerning even very basic principles we take for granted and built our society on. TL;DR : Magic is real in my Glorantha, but at very large part of it transpires within a context that a diehard materialist of today could readily dismiss or appropriate, and there isn't a truly discrete border between mundane and magical skill in terms of flavor within my stories.