Memestream

Yeah, the more I hear and the longer I think about it, the more I like it. It also seems to fit with the idea that she was originally a literal bean counter prior to her encounter with TRG. It strikes me not only as grist for individual encounters between followers of Etyries and adventurers, but as reasonable narrative material for Orlanthi and Lunars alike. It's easy to imagine whole adventures centering around either disrupting or establishing these bizarro credit economies. Okay that's not what immediately came to my mind, but I can see how that fits much more in line with the broader darkness/uz mindset, and represents an ideology that amiable relations are based on mutual benefit more than sentimental affinity for one another, or alternatively a ritualized way of communicating the awareness that given the strength of the parties involved, it would be better to trade than to take. Speaking of, I dug even deeper on AA and that only made things more nebulous. It seems his accomplishments are more or less all relative to trolls interacting with the surface and the races on it, plus the Lodril building the obsidian palace for him thing, at least as I've read so far. This makes me feel more comfortable representing his followers broadly and according to whatever would be the best fit for the narrative demand at hand in a way similar to how I handle followers of Issaries. EDIT: Also, not necessarily germane to Glorantha, but it seems that the practice of compounding interest goes back pretty darned far, much further than I had imagined at least.

Okay the AA stuff is really helpful, especially the Esrolian tie-ins, and that makes a lot of sense. It conjures forth images of trollkin desperately running around trying to meet quotas to stay out of the food bracket in service of dark troll "mafiosi" who make their presence felt when one of their runts gets robbed or cheated. The sort of traders humans would only deal with from a position of established strength or total desperation. The stuff about equal exchange and the martial qualities of AA's part in the mythic history makes me think of them as hidebound and undynamic traders who might become easily upset and look to means outside of the market when they are outcompeted. I don't know if any of that is intentional, but it sounds like something I could spin entertainment out of and seems like it would be a decent way to portray at least some uz traders! The mention of followers of Etyries as innovators in the realm of bookkeeping, accounting, and bureaucracy(I can never spell that word, that's how much I hate the idea behind it) pairs nicely with other impressions I have about Peloria under the Lunar Empire even if it's not canonical, and also works well with my ideas concerning the way imperial power structures enfranchise people cheap and then wring them dry with hidden fees and rising costs down the line. I think it could be really interesting to posit them as on the forefront of more complex credit structuring within Genertela. Everybody seems to understand the idea of a favor, but the sudden introduction of interest into the equation strikes me as ripe for drama.

So let me begin by saying I read this article on Well of Daliath, and it was definitely helpful with regard to distinguishing the various "trade" deities from one another. To put it broadly, I took from it(and a lot of other sources) that Issaries is the most famous in this department because he's oriented around the medium of trade itself, which is communication in the very broadest sense, whether it be of goods, ideas, people, or otherwise. This suggests to me that followers of Issaries are the most diverse, but are also the most concerned with promoting trade for the sake of trade. I loosely stereotype them in play as being talkative, nosey, busy-bodied, energetic, and possessed of wanderlust(at least relative to others of their homeland). They love to make a deal that benefits everyone, and love it even more if that deal benefits them just a bit more than everyone else. When I need to make them special, I just call on their regional background and transmit "the Issaries thing" through that lens, and it seems pretty easy to get a lot of mileage out of that approach. Etyries seems to be more oriented around the merchant as a person and a profession. A 'typical' lunar compartmentalization which takes the already present idea and reflects it across the moon rune to embody the meaning of the bigger concept within the context of the Lunar pantheon, ethos, lifestyle, the way the concept/force embodies in a person within time(?), what have you. I don't really know what to think of her followers beyond that though, and I don't feel satisfied rendering them as 'like followers of Issaries, but down with the red.' My first thought is to make them considerably more dishonest and prone to predatory trade practices, operating in the same way a Dollar General does in Small Town, USA. I think this could make for some interesting situations, but I would prefer to start from a stereotype or quality that's a bit more 'value-neutral' if you know what I mean, then bring sheister/honest into it later in the process. Argan Argar, trade falls under his tent because of his role as an interface between the Uz and the more nebulous facets of Darkness? The Glorantha Sourcebook is really tight lipped concerning Argan Argar. He beat Lodril and he's easier to reach than older more primordial deities, that's about all I know about him. I naturally assume those trading with his blessing are more trollish about how they do things, but surely there's a je ne sais quoi to him beyond that. An Uz trader is a bit easier to make distinct, even with as little as I know about Argan Argar specifically. I'm at somewhat of a loss regarding Lunars though, particularly in how they would conduct themselves abroad. The argument that "trade is trade" is somewhat legit, but I'm ultimately fishing for some ideas on how to dash some flavor into how I render these sorts of characters in my game that I'm running at present. Especially given that the Issaries player's trade ambitions are proving a steady fulcrum for the direction of the party in general.

Holy smokes, talk about blood from a turnip! I was only attempting to make the relatively pedestrian point that life might imitate art more often than art imitates life(doubly so in Glorantha I would say), but yeah that all seems to fit as well. What follows is perhaps more tangential than convergent, but perhaps it will afford more to riff on in this vein. That said, Clint Eastwood has always fascinated me. Initially because his films are at face value tales of derring-do which exalt the power of an individual who lives in the moment and does what needs be to make right in the world. Later, because I discovered that many of these same stories drew on an apparent classical(Homeric even) basis of story telling which was considerably more nuanced, and which presented a subtext wherein the tragic qualities of these übermenschen were apparent, and perhaps in a degree which exceeded their supposed heroic agency. I thus came to be informed of the impression that Clint Eastwood himself must be a very thoughtful person with a privileged insight into the human condition, a figure capable of deconstructing the notion of heroism itself, and furthermore in a way that was eminently watchable by hoi polloi and calloused intelligentsia alike. A Hero of the Gloranthan sense here in our very own world, who had ventured into the mythic space to retread this complicated archetype so many times that he had enabled some part of himself to transcend his mortal coil and become enmeshed in the world of the logos itself. Then I saw him talking to a chair, and worse yet, in a context which was absolutely sordid with hysterical pathos toward the end of banal instruments of control. To be clear, I refer to the whole arena in such terms, not the team he played for on that day. At first I reasoned there must be some hidden nuance to this bizarre performance much as there was clearly, inarguably, nuance in his other work. This was the same man who made Flags of Our Fathers, and released it virtually concurrently with Letters from Iwojima after all. A man who had demonstrated that humanity and heroism transcend nation, geography, and political affiliation, the proof was right there in his work for crying out loud! Naturally, I began to probe others about the content of his work and how it compared to this recent outburst. What I found was that people tended to only agree with my interpretation of his work when we shared a common base of media outside of his work, and those who did not share that common base of media drew something entirely different from it, with the only clear majority being that his films had some sense of layering and nuance to them, but what that nuance suggested was as varied as the people I spoke to about it. One of my friends who is a diehard consequentialist, an operationalist even one might say, promptly pointed out that his films were more popular among people who didn't hold my view than among those who did. He then further went on to point out that most of those people were under the impression that his films only further edified the spectacle of public pathos that I was finding myself so distressed by, and that there was no apparent discontinuity in his character. I felt convinced that they were simply mistaken, searched high and low for authorial statements of intent, and came up empty-handed in spite of the fact that scholarly literature is replete with comparisons between his work and classic Greek tragedy. This only lent further credence to my anecdotal experience that only people "like me" felt the same way about his work. We can point out similarities between plots all day, and we can even look at the similarities of content such as violence, catharsis, redemption, etc, but it seems that what all of this 'adds up to' in theme is subject to a process which is far more nebulous. As a million hands have carried the Iliad from antiquity to modernity in the form of Unforgiven, the meaning, and even the intent of the teller, has changed substantially, and has indeed become so mutable and nebulous that it is itself no more than a smoking mirror which reflects the energetic currents some dub ethos and pathos back into the world around it. There is no true meaning of the story, just as there is no single image which appears in a mirror(smoking or otherwise), but what remains steady is the consequence of human instrumentalisation of media to amplify their perspective at that moment. In Glorantha, we see the same stories told over and over again(Like somebody killing somebody they actually needed, just to make clear that I know the topic of the thread and care about it!). Perhaps it's not the stories that matter though, but the shuffling of the actors, sets, props, and directors which bloom into the thousand petaled lotus of creation. A sort of fuzzy relay system which allows for novelty to grow from a fixed set of axioms as everyone attempts(and fails!) to reproduce them in the greatest game of broken telephone ever. A way to cheat out myriad multitudes from singularity. Perhaps Argrath slaying the Red Moon is 'just' the broken telephone's rendition of Orlanth slaying Yelm.

Maybe Hamlet's actually the source of the problem? Perhaps if we stopped telling this Hamlet story, this tendency of reality would get rippled out by the other narratives and allow us to do something other than kill ourselves in the name of vindication?

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.

Gladly. I will disclaim beforehand that my knowledge of Lunars is sophomoric at best though, and most of my take on them comes from a combination of what I've picked up from The Life of Sedenya, the Entekiosad, and filling in the blanks in my understanding by drawing parallels to various bits of real world mythologies and religious practices. I forget exactly where I read it, I was pretty sure it was the Book of Heortling Mythology, but the stories repeat and are rewritten so many times I can't conveniently find it. (I also want to respect the house I'm in and not unwittingly infringe on copyright) To paraphrase, it's stated within during one telling of the compromise that all of the gods brought something to creation in spite of their enmity and challenges with one another, and that suffering was already a part of the story, but Wakboth's only 'contribution' was that he made the suffering much worse than it needed to be in order for the world to be made. Even the Unholy Trio brought (bad) things to creation that were uniquely their own. Not Wakboth though, he just made it worse for everyone involved. I take from this that he has no agenda as such, he's just there to deflate everyone else's agenda. Agenda is too light though, he's there to deflate and rob everyone else of their joie de vivre, their essential reason for their agenda, their selves. He's like Luther, the leader of the rogues from The Warriors(1979), "Why did you waste Cyrus?" "No reason, I just like doing things like that." On the same hand, the other Gods get up to all sorts of bad behavior, but it's for a reason. It could be argued that Orlanth killed Yelm because he "just likes doing things like that," but that's sure as heck not the explanation that Orlanth would give, or even the third, fourth, or fifth one. The rest of the Gods do their thing because their thing is fundamental to who they are. Wakboth has no thing. Without the other Gods he wouldn't exist, the closest thing to a thing he has is crapping on other people's things. Maybe the Chaos rune changes that though? I seriously don't know. Even then though, where I see the chaos rune in Glorantha, I still see a Melkor-esque perversion of other things, not the creation of things themselves. From there, it gets more into a personal relationship with nihilism as a philosophy, emotional state, and persuasion. Nothing stops me dead in the tracks of my joyful reverie like the thought, "Yeah, it's ultimately pointless though." Which, everything taken in a vacuum is very much just exactly that from my perspective, utterly pointless. I've thought long and hard about a tree falling in the woods with nobody around to hear it, and as far as I'm convinced, it doesn't make a sound. I've encountered people who alleged otherwise(probably devil worshippers!) but nihilism has never inspired me to do a darned thing other than feel bad. But a tree in context, a tree that's heard, that suddenly means something for a reason I can't comprehend. Just like it suddenly meant something when the web of Arachne Solara bound all of the Gods to one another in concerted relevance. The things they all did suddenly meant something because now the things they all do will add up to something beyond them as individuals, and this is what defeated the Devil. Cue Sedenya, "to live is to suffer, but to suffer is not to live." There's a bizarre, almost mathematical, logic about this statement for me. It also highlights something of a contradiction to what I said above. Glorantha is a web made to catch the fly that's Wakboth, so it wouldn't be too ridiculous to consider that "No Wakboth = No Glorantha." To live one must suffer, but the state of suffering is itself not living. The Great Red Goddess says, "No problem G, I got this on lock, that ain't Wakboth, that's THE GREAT MYSTERY." Suddenly, Wakboth has meaning, albeit inscrutably so by definition as a mystery. There is a point to this crappiness, to his crappiness, but without illumination we cannot understand it, but the Red Goddess has a placeholder for her unilluminated followers to tide them over, "The Victory shall be ours!" That victory is the moment everyone gets why Wakboth is so crappy, when everyone understands the great mystery, and it most assuredly is happening. Even though you don't know it yet, that painful hangnail, stubbed toe, and watching the bat eat a hundred children just educated you a bit, however imperceptibly. It's okay if you don't get it though, because "you are not yourself," you are not your family, you are not your clan, these are all masks upon the faceless face(just like the devil was, you're actually the devil!), which you are in the process of becoming(hell, you may already be a winner!) right now in this very instant no matter what you happen to be doing. Everything is pointless because everything is equally valid, there's no forward or backward, we're all us on the same train going to the same place, but it's a good place. Not because the devil doesn't exist there, but because you'll be able to exist(and act...or whatever the appropriate equivalent of acting will be) in a way that isn't oriented around avoiding him. I was wondering this while reading the "Meeting Wakboth" thread prior to registering. I can't detect a meaningful difference, and it seems to me that the shamanic rite of initiation is something of a "I fought, we won" event. Now that I have registered though, I'm probably going to weigh in fully on that thread too about this.

As much as I hate to say it, the answer to this seems to rest on consequences. I definitely read both Wakboth's mess and Lunar ideology as nihilistic, at least in as much as they both seem to put forward that nothing you can experience within Glorantha is truly meaningful. Where they differ comes after that common base though. Wakboth seems to go on and suggest that not only is everything in Glorantha meaningless, meaning doesn't exist, period. The Lunar party line at least seems to suggest that after ridding yourself of attachment to things that are essentially meaningless, you will be able to step out of the cave into an authentic meaningful self-reality-thing. If that's all one self-deceptive delusion that gets you to poke holes in the bottom of your boat adrift in the sea of chaos, well woops it seems it was actually just the devil in disguise yet again. Then again, maybe it turns out you're a fish and didn't need the boat after all! That said, and perhaps it's naive on my part, but I think when it comes to something as fundamental as meaning, intent actually matters. If you're doing it in the name of something(which admittedly might not be a good thing!) or anything at all for that matter, versus in the name of nothing at all, that's a truly night and day difference. Well the bat obviously sucks because it's taking people out of your context. It's making your world smaller, duller, and scarier. Then again, it's not like we have any first hand accounts from those who have been eaten by the bat to rely on. Maybe they are enjoying life outside of the prison cell while the rest of us hang out in a world of shadows. Maybe it's all about our own selfish needy compromised nature that we can't appreciate that they've been freed from the constraints of our being.

Okay so I had come to read Lunars are something roughly comparable to the Mexica(among other things!). However, it wasn't until this hummingbird stuff that I started to draw comparisons with Huitzilopochtli. Heck, just typing out Huitzilopochtli starts making me look at those names of the Seven Mothers differently. That's a lot to chew on, especially when looking at the myth of the Left Handed Hummingbird's birth. Well, bats eat pests. 😛 I live in an area with a really large bat population, we're talking world class. I've heard supposedly educated people insist they don't eat enough mosquitos to matter, and I just plain don't believe them. But really, it's an ugly thing that does an ugly thing to ugly things. After the bat eats all of the irredeemable apostates and souls that stubbornly refuse enlightenment, we won't have a need for it anymore. We'll all ascend into an illuminated state and reconcile chaos with the rest of it! But at present, ugly things exist, and so there's a need to tolerate, and even embrace this ugly process of blowing them out. Of course, given that we're talking about lunars, this isn't just a matter of getting rid of the literal pests, but the pests that reside within our souls, our own pestilent nature. The parasite of the persona as it were. There's also the bit from Lives of Sedenya wherein she falls through darkness. I can't think of anything better to be than a bat if I ever find myself in that situation. A bat doesn't need solid ground to stand on. A bat doesn't need light to "see." It's perfectly adapted to existing in an unmoored state of axiomatic poverty.

No, it's really cool. I'm just personally preoccupied with Absurdity in an unhealthy way, and see it everywhere I look. It would be hypocritical of me to be too hard on the God Learners for a number of reasons, the least of which being that I'm quite an ardent admirer of early geometers who discovered our own runes so to speak. It's entirely worthwhile to point out that the God Learners very arguably just found the parts which were (by all observable measure)reliable and just decided to see what those parts could teach them. I mean, that's kind of what's at the heart of sorcery. We have these things, we know these inputs lead to these outputs, and we learn about and influence the world on that (at least initially) humble basis free of assumption. Besides, if I sell them to determinism, what room is left for the Mostali? You know, just as I had hit the reply button and laid my head down on the pillow, the thought came to me, "Maybe the Sefirot would have been a better thing to bring up than some dubiously oblique and possibly confabulated personal reading of Hinduism, oh well the milk is spilled..." Glad somebody else did it for me! I haven't read a lot of Montgomery's material, but I like everything I've read so far.

Okay, unfortunately this is going to draw me into providing a summary for my unified theory of Gloranthan (meta)physics. Namely because we've invoked such an esoteric definition of 'illusion' that I am practically compelled to do so in an attempt to enunciate some of the stickiness therein. I would start by positing a structure roughly analogous to what follows: Now, there's causality in both directions up and down that "hierarchy"(for lack of a better term), but in the way that there's causality between both directions between one's central and peripheral nervous system, it's circuitous. Now, as far as I'm concerned, the only thing that can be argued as truly "real" are the parts outside of the brackets, both of which are impossible to define or comprehend regardless of the amount of effort or skill put in, because their essential nature, should they have any such thing, is predicated on being beyond category. Categories are something that follow from, and are contained within Glorantha and/or Chaos, not something that can contain them. The best we can hope to muster in describing either of them is something like "It is what it is" if we're being even a little intellectually honest. Even all of the stuff within the brackets is subject to categorization owing to *subjective* or *illusionary* discretion. "Objectively" it's all Chaos and/or "Glorantha," and we(and the entities residing within the setting for that matter) simply have a subjective/mortal experience of these ineffable...somethings...everythings...whatevers. When mortals embark on Heroquests, they don't "go" anywhere as I see it, their perspective aligns with a region of being that grants them far greater "mechanical advantage" in this hypothetical network of circuitous causality. In such a state, their actions are no longer localized in effect to their one little tiny part of the peripheral nervous system, the strange nerve in the toe of Glorantha that they are, but instead hold signaling effects relevant to much broader portions of the system. Regardless, it's all an "illusion" under the esoteric definition we're working with, because nothing about the truly objective nature of Glorantha/Chaos changed. It's all still firmly in the 'it is what it is' camp. Rune spells, spirit magic, all that stuff, same thing but to a lesser degree. "Mundane" feats use the exact same infrastructure, but even more pared down. It's all figurative intercellular signaling, or Chaos/Glorantha talking to itself(The Dream of Brahma as it were), as I see it obviously, YGWV, and frankly mine varies between itself fairly often. Now, onto more "mundane"(or simply not crackpot?) ideas that jumped out at me: This bothers me a lot too. It seems that there is an as of yet unresolved dilemma in systems design which leaves us with one of two options, you can adequately gamify physics or you can adequately gamify narrative input, but you can't have both. I suspect this is one of many reasons that there's been so much resistance to formalizing rules around heroquesting, because keeping it loosey goosey lets you create a space where people can interact with narrative on a game level if you want that to be part of your thing. I tend to look upon them as philosophical pragmatists of the "it works so it must be right" variety of empiricist. I wasn't aware of Operationalism as a formal term until this discussion, but a cursory look into how it compares and contrasts with Pragmatism is uh, evidently a rather academic subject to say the least. Still, I always tended to assume that a God Learner wouldn't distinguish between improving agency and knowing more of the truth, and would see there being a natural continuity between the two in sort of an arete(the real world version, not the Mage one!)-like concept.

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.