davecake

Just that a master at a language probably can, and there are likely to be one or two around in any significant group of Atyari, so it may happen occasionally. Confusing qualitative aspects of an argument is a good way to make straw men, but doesn't yeld much (Dark)light. You seem to be more or less arguing for the point of arguing here - of course there are good arguments against it happening on some sort of industrial scale, but the argument against seems to be based on all cultists universally agreeing with your reasoning. Well, I took that straight from the Gods book draft, so if it changes by publication we can discuss again, but if it doesn't your argument becomes based on you disbelieving in canon. Of course YGWV, but I'm more interested in discussing the shared one. I find it plausible enough - Thanatar is a weird secretive cult that is particular about who it lets in to its inner mysteries, not a broad based sect. And in particular, it means every priest of Lhankor Mhy (or most other knowledge cults, like Buserian or Irripi Ontor) is eligible for initiation, and the majority of competent sorcerers. And, of course, there are multiple other paths to initiation than the intellectual one. I figured anyone who has Devour Book is going to usually use it only relatively irregularly due to 'indigestion' and the arduous and unpleasant nature of the process, so usually won't be simply Devouring things immediately but finding a few days of private time (though far more for Comsume Mind etc). But the motivation isn't just an urge to acquire knowledge in the short term, but in the long term - generally speaking Devouring a few books a season will still be plenty if it can be sustained over the long term. There are plenty of reasons to want to have a copy - mostly because it seems to be a major cult practice to maintain a library (presumably as more than a sort of literary larder), but also including worrying that books that disappear from the shelves of another library will arouse suspicion if they disappear permanently, a bargaining chip to other cultists to trade for their juicy books to devour or other favours, someone may know you have the original, to ensure that others in the cult have the same knowledge so you can work with them (relevant for some sorcery), or for reasons to do with maintaining a less suspicious mundane life. But sure, plenty of the time they will just Devour books as acquired too. I didn't get that at all - without wanting to get heavily into epistemology, issues with the Book of Secrets and the Abiding Book are more to do with the way the knowledge is used (particularly the multiple ways in which knowledge from the Abiding Book can be interpreted - cf. Hadmalism) rather than the method of acquisition. The spell description says you acquire all knowledge in the book, but doesn't suggest that its different in any way to other knowledge, of course you can have 'knowledge' that contains some false components, but thats a normal thing - a body of knowledge will contain biases, hypotheses that will prove false, etc. Nothing indicates it is any less doubtable than other knowledge. That is a fine story, but not sure of its relevance. You could certainly incorporate extra messages into a book - and while it could be used to sow particular ideas in the mind of the Devourer, would this be any different to planting the same ideas in the mind of a reader of the paper version? Perhaps. Maybe some problem to do with the text and its interpretation is what happens when a Devour book roll is fumbled.

Sheng was ruler of Kralorela during his first life, from 1442 to 1460, and it makes sense he would return there. I get the impression Sheng cares more about Kralorela than Peloria, just hates Red Moon and badly underestimated the Red Emperor. the Darudist central government does, and plenty of others I’m sure. But not everyone - in particular, much of Boshan province supported him. And I suspect he had many allies amongst the rural villages whose culture is more hsunchen descended, and opposition was concentrated in the Darudist cities. and I think there is an element to the narrative of the Exarchs etc being corrupted by Can Shu and the Ignorant cults, so Sheng may be seen by some as an incorruptible solar hero, come to liberate and to send the wicked to their just punishment. Obviously that would be a crazily optimistic view of Sheng, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be believed by some.

Love it! @Jeff how big are these intelligent otters? Anything else you can tell us about them? Love this as well. Very gothic.

Sandy's RQ3 game was definitely a bit more high powered than most peoples.

Yes. The reason why the Brithini really really hate the Vadeli is the Brithini are able to logically prove their superiority to everyone else, but not the Vadeli. You can't prove logically disprove nihilism.

I portray the Vadeli as: - sociopaths, their entire society. - generally speaking, they are immortal and very smart and have centuries of experience with their spells and mastery of many skills. - they have a set of caste rules that they follow rigidly, to the letter, as that maintains their immortality, but actively work around the spirit of. Lots of things that seem obvious they just don't do - and this includes Brown Vadeli becoming warriors, and using sorceries that aren't caste appropriate. So the Brown Vadeli tend to be sneaky and manipulative to get what they want in indirect ways, and make expert use of a surprising range of sorcery spells. - but otherwise, they are human. Very skilled humans with lots of sorcery and no conscience. - The Red Vadeli are the absolute worst, because their caste rules DO allow them to use direct violence at every opportunity (and they enjoy it, and are usually sadists), and do let them learn and use combat sorcery. In addition they are absolutely without any sense of honour or mercy or fairness etc - indeed, they regard such things as essentially hilarious and about as sane as running into combat with weight tied to you, a voluntary handicap - and will use every cruel, deceptive, vile trick they can. They are not interested in risking their potential immortality unnecessarily, so will do everything they can to avoid a fair fight, even though they would generally win one due to their skill and sorcery. They like ambushes, sneak attacks, assassinations, poisonings, traps, subversion, blackmail, terror, etc. They love to Tap the lives of captives, enemy spirits, enemy lands etc. A cool suggestion from Joerg I think was that the Red Vadeli 'healing' spell is to drain life from captives and transfer it to themselves - ideally done very visibly so their opponents can watch their attacks result in the life draining from their loved ones. Spells that otherwise turn their opponents against themselves are particularly admired. Poisons that cause their enemies to experience agony, and subdue them so they can be captured, are another Red Vadeli favourite. If you are attacking a Red Vadeli position you might find pit traps with poisoned stakes, poisoned wells, traps baited with captured prisoners left in agony, ambushes from positions of safety, ghosts turned against their own people by sorcery, and similar things.

I think they also have far too many points of Spirit Magic?

Not my experience - I've generally seen it run at about a third of characters in Orlanth for games set in Sartar or around Pavis. Nowhere near enough Ernalda worshippers, but that's probably because I have a male group of players. My longest running RQ group (back in the RQ3 era) eventually had a Wind Lord and a Storm Voice.

I'm not sure that is how it works. It would make Devour Book crazily problematic - who knows what might be written in the margins, false or contradictory etc. It would essentially make it pointless - if you are directly inserting knowledge if your brain in a way that will mess you up if it contains contradictions or lies, then you'd want to carefully assess the contents of the bok before you Devour it, which kind of misses the point. I would expect that it is much more like knowing things in the normal way (well, perhaps more so - maybe you would have essentially an exactly memorised internal copy) that you otherwise know things from books you have read - you know what was written, know where it was written, and are able to assess it in context. Knowing every word of GROY would not make you think Plentonius was correct about everything, for example.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I didn't write it. Relying on fellow Thanatari for just about anything is insane, yet there they are. They could do all sorts of insane things, and no doubt many of them do. But not necessarily the same crazy things. You seem to be arguing that a cult of people with a strong hierarchy, but all covert and underground, and essentially on the fringes of sane behaviour and all dedicated to a variety of shortcuts to obtaining knowledge, will all make exactly the same reasoning about appropriate management of that process, including the same risk management decisions about the behaviour of their underlings. I think that they will be rather less consistent than that, and some will make decisions that seem crazy to others. They are a bunch of barely sane psychopathic conspirators, who radically vary in their relationships and behaviour. Yes, but some of them haven't got much else to do (the unfortunates that have managed to make themselves clearly visibly Chaotic, for example). Circumstances of cultists vary widely. And anyone who wants to make use of Devour Book isn't going to be THAT desperate to do it very regularly - it causes general hit point damage, so you are going to want to take a few weeks break between casts. While it is an interesting idea that I have some sympathy for, it's not one I find any support for in the rules. Of course, many grimoires are likely to include some sympathetic magic or enchantments to make them more useful. There were some draft rules for books published a while ago, but they didn't really talk about sorcery. If they turn into more official rules in the future (maybe in the campaign book?) I guess we will know more. There certainly could be a lot of interesting rules for books, as anyone who has played Ars Magica would know, we don't have them yet though (though noting Ars Magic has been mentioned as one of the inspirations for RQG sorcery more than once)

Nice! I like it! I think the two might certainly be linked. I don't think so, but I can see why the idea makes some sense. There is certainly a link (as per RM p54), but yeah, not simple identity. I've thought that Xemela Arroin, being the two main healing powers of Western Genertela, is far too close to Chalana Arroy to be a coincidence. And of course we know the White Goddess has other names (such as Erissa) and the Lightbringers encountered her first in the West. Quite possibly the White Lady was not known as Chalana Arroy to the Orlanthi until they encountered her in the West, and while I don't CA is the same as Xemela, it may be that the White Lady was named/referred to/confused with by the Westerners after two beings they knew of who invoked her powers?

When it resurrects a mortal, I think what comes back is more than they were before. At the very least a Kaelith as per the Xeotam dialogues (as Harmast, Arkat and Talor all explicitly are) but a bit more as well. They've been in the underworld, they've confronted gods, they have connections to the world of the gods they can draw on.

In order to become an initiate (a Doom Seeker), they must have mastered a cult skill - and one of the cult skills is Read/Write. So a small but notable minority of initiates will be quite capable of copying a grimoire. And presumably you threaten to have them murdered if they fail you But yeah, they can just steal and devour other peoples grimoires. And sorcerers make good Guardians, that you can then make teach you sorcery, too.

Arkat's war and Nysalors Empire are both, separately, favourite darker aspects of Glorantha. Which ever one you think is more ultimately correct, they are still both monstrous justified only by the other being more monstrous.

Though a hero level sub-cult usually has some Rune magic, sometimes that more often associated with another deity, all of LMs magic seems a lot. On the other hand, the Atyar cult surely knows at least all of LMs sorcery if you want to go down that route, and surely have ways to rapidly teach it too - Devouring Book on sorcerous grimoires, for example (making initiates copy out sorcerous tomes so the priests can devour them seems one likely possibility).

Yes. I think there are several different sects and sub-sects among the God Learners, as detailed in Middle Sea Empire. MSE plus material in the Guide is basically the best current text on the God Learners. From that, is clear that they were a long way from intellectually unified, but actually quite diverse and while they were all one empire they contended with another intellectually and magically - different groups had different great projects to prove their worth. And these factions were not exclusive, but there was some mix and matching between them. The two main factions were the orthodox Makanists, and the Malkioneranists. The Makanists were the purists, sorcery uber alles, all magic is means of understanding the world (and approaching the Great Mind), sorcery is the magic with the least error. The Malkioneranists leaned towards more active engagement with mysticism/Illumination - and the idea that an Illuminated sorcerer could be an evil more powerful sorcerer, especially with access to other magic as well. Both wanted to go into the otherworld and bend it to their will. I am not sure if both used the RuneQuest Sight - probably. Different parts of the God Learners had different secrets - even for the greatest of the God Learners, their cosmic re-engineering required vast resources, including many many sorcerers who between them could create magic projects far too complex any single human mind. Yep, a core God Learner belief. Anything that shamans or priests could do, they could do, if not directly then by summoning and binding the appropriate entities. Yes. The Gods create the Compromise, but if you can directly command a god and then break through into the God World, then they can break it. And that anthroponorphisation is both a weakness to be exploited, and an error to correct. Though intrinsic in that understanding is that the true sorcerer is ultimately a form of mystic/Illuminate. More or less. I think they argued about quite what was meant by 'All', but all agreed that the perceivable world of Matter and Energy was not. I think the Irensavalists had fundamental disagreements about this - and thought the Hidden Mover was not just devolved Law, but the thing that created the Law. Before the Great Error, self-identification, effectively all beings were Illuminated. It is all this believing in the reality and value of individual intellects that causes you to behave in an unilluminated way. If you could achieve union with the One Mind, it would be very clear. Yes. Understanding the Runes is only made more difficult by thinking of them as Gods. If you could master the Runes and have sufficient power to manipulate them, you would be as a god. The rest is just a small matter of Magical proficiency. What is Magic but the manipulation of Matter and Energy, including the transmutation between the two? (though even for the God Learners this was usually hard, equivalent to bringing a material object back from a heroquest? Not to one with proper understanding and the RuneQuest Sight. It's all just Runes, spoons are merely a transient perception. Absolutely! The Enochian magic of John Dee is my model for how most God Learner sorcery, especially the more Makanist stuff (including the Reconstructionalists). Edward Kelly, dubious chap that he was, shows what in practice many lesser God Learners are like, sneakily bargaining with divine beings. Helena Blavatsky and the theosophists make me think of how the God Learners dealt wth other cultures, constantly re-interpreting other peoples myths and trying to fit them into their scheme, adopting the parts they like but keeping their own colonialist sense of superiority and using it for their own purposes - particularly the Malkioneranist wing, with their cooption of mysticism to mean what they wanted. The sense of endless Runic re-combination is very similar to the way the Enochian system generates its thousands of angel names, for example.

Not at all. But Yelm worship is about the idealised One, even if his worshippers are still among the Many, and still flawed. That doesn’t mean their worship of the One isn’t sincere, or that they don’t strive to approach an unattainable idea - or that the effort to reconcile these with Lunar ideas isn’t sincere.

The Yelm cult is the cult of the hereditary aristocracy. If you are a member of a Yelmic family, you are already on that road to power. If you are ambitious and aren’t in direct succession, the Yelm cult still generally provides enough paths to power for anyone with relatively normal levels of ambition. There will be those In Yelmic families who are still unsatisfied with Yelm as a ‘career path’ (especially those who do not excel at traditional Yelmic martial/masculine virtues), but for even those it’s almost always Yelm and Lunar initiation, rather than choosing one or the other. You don’t give up all the magical and temporal power that Yelmic privilege brings. Of course for women it is different - Dendaran wife of a Yelmic noble is very much reflected and subservient social power - but it’s important to note that it’s a LOT of social power and a lot of privilege and luxury. And again, Deezola is a Lunar cult that welcomes Dendaran noblewomen of Yelmic families - the two complement one another, not oppose. As people have said, the two cults and associated power structures have been integrated for centuries. Think of it a bit like the UK monarchy and Church of England in the last couple of centuries - historically there is a big story of competing religions and conflict there, but now the two are very neatly organised as supporting and complementing each other, with few remaining natural conflicts well managed as part of the natural dynamics of empire. Post-Sheng (and earlier, Jannisor) the Red Emperor has been very clear that they do not support anyone holding *exclusively* to Yelm. Want to be a member of Yelm Imperator? (The tiny exclusive cult status restricted only to significant hereditary temporal rulers - the rulers of Dara Happa) Then you need the direct permission of the Red Emperor (who is a Yelmic Emperor too, so head of the Yelmic religious hierarchy as well), and he will only grant it to those that are also initiates of the Red Goddess (which requires Illumination). The tradition idea of the conservative Yelmic aristocratic class is probably one that, like many upper classes, is somewhat of an official facade. Think of like the sanctioned hypocrisy of the Victorians, or for that matter the Romans in some periods. The Yelm cult functions are done carefully in the conservative manner, following ancient rules to the letter and with due pomp and circumstance and much social enforcement of appropriate displays of virtue and gravitas. But the very same class of people, behind closed doors or otherwise out of the public eye, or in a different context such as when far from the heartland, may be indulging in all manner of eccentricities and debaucheries, and managing the resulting scandals (especially with the deranging and liberating tendencies of Illumination) is a regular part of Yelmic social life, something your Dendara matrons concern themselves with.

Any creative heroquesting does this, really. And a heroquest doesn't have to start with a known myth, thats just the way people tend to do it because it increases your chance of a successful result significantly. Any journey into the otherworld is a form of heroquest. And creating something new may not even be that difficult - it will just be a myth about the creator, not a mth about the god directly, which not everyone will accept as correct. What is truly difficult is contradicting what is already known. There are many heroes that have done this. Start with Hrestol in the year 2.

You are being sloppy to slip a theory between the cracks. Stone died in the Lesser Darkness, not with the destruction of the Spike. They are different events, widely separated in time and in their nature. I don't even know why you are trying to conflate them. You didn't just take an obscure out of print Sea myth never referenced since as the primary myth for understanding Earth, overriding Earth mythology, but then you wildly extrapolated it to create an eccentric private theory and then decided that overrides the only (multiply, in print) myths about only vaguely related stuff. And then mix and match it with geological theories in order to try to claim something not very well supported by either. Please just stop this line of argument.

If you make marriage a thing that does not involve love and romance, then you create the ideal conditions for traditions of illicit romance to flourish. Courtly love acknowledge that, and then tries to separate illicit romance from sex and physical pleasure as much as possible so that romance can at least flourish artistically. The Yelm cult absolutely will believe in arranged marriages, chaperones, etc. Power is inherited, and must be protected. The Yelm cult has to play funny games in order to both be an uptight cult that denies romance and sexual attraction, while also being about fertility (one of his titles is even Fertility Bringer) and sex myths, and it has to do so (somewhat hilariously) by separating Yelms phallus off into an entirely separate deity, Berneel Arashagern, with its VERY OBVIOUS serpent imagery. But sex and reproduction is absolutely a part of the Yelm and Dendara cults, and I suspect the Berneel Arashagern rites and myths are a good deal filthier than the Yelm worshippers like to admit in public. In fact Dendara is very focussed on marriage and motherhood, because so much of her other functions are sort of separated away, and Dendara can be regarded as a deity of sexuality and female power tamed. Oria is far more separate from Dendara than Esrola is from Ernalda, her sky powers and own sovereignty powers are separated off into Entekos, and many of her aspects of protecting woman and female power (and women in fully control of their sexuality) are separated into Gorgorma and demonised. Dendara's myths (or at least, the ones we know) are mostly about what she isn't rather than what she is - the big myth about Dendara is the Marriage Contest from GROY about all how all the other different female deities are unsuitable for being Yelm's wife. Dendara's role as weaver lets her clothe naked humanity, further cementing her role as being about restricting sexuality. So yes, arranged marriages with sexuality and romance thoroughly restricted only to its use in creating children to carry on the dynasty. But that's not the whole story of Dara Happa. The Dara Happans acknowledge other goddesses, they know of Uleria, they know of Oria, they know of Entekos and Oslira. The Yelmic dynasties appear to have concubinage traditions from ancient eras. Uleria is hated by the more pious Yelmites (such as Plentonius), but is hated in part because they know of her disruptive power, and they are a tiny proportion of the Dara Happan people.

The tradition of courtly love flourished precisely because most marriages were arranged for reasons other than love, and so a tradition arose that allowed the expression of love and romance with a partner you were not married to, and it was about as Apollonian a romantic tradition as you could imagine - love that could, at least in theory, be expressed only through noble deeds, worship from afar, and lyric poetry. Which isn't to say it didn't turn into illicit affairs in practice, but it is a tradition designed to separate the romantic desire from sexual lust and activity as much as plausibly possible, even if its frequently failed in its denial of human nature. I've not heard of turning up in Gloranthan society, but if it did it would seem the Solar pantheon social rules were well suited to it.

Yes. And most of his followers are military officers. Which clearly means regimental balls. Because it's funny.

Certainly not the only body of Stone. The Mostali myths have never referenced Stone as dying with the Spike, but always as dying due to the elves and so becoming cold and lifeless, long before the destruction of the Spike. Thats an entirely separate myth about the death of Stone that you more or less just made up. It's not the same as the myths from, say, the Mostal writeup in The Glorantha Sourcebook, Elder Secrets, or any other source. And, in fact, rare but real fragments of the true living Stone are even findable. It's Truestone, no longer moving but retaining magical 'life'. So part of the body of Stone survives. Which do seem to ignore pretty much all common myths about Earth and mountains and rocks in favour of taking a single out of print Merman myth as fundamentally determining all Gloranthan geology, an eccentric and wildly speculative approach which I'm not going to take as particularly convincing.

If normal trolls could do 2d8 with their bite, they would not, in fact, be better armed using anything less than a Maul.