Ian Absentia

Is there a reason you omitted the Men-and-a-Half / Agimori? !i!

So it's The Matrix. And every time Glorantha gets Gregged or Jeffed (apologies, but with great power comes great responsibility), it may as well be the God Learners asserting their power to change the world. Someone get Alan Moore and Grant Morrison on the phone. !i! [Edit: Ah, I missed that there is no spoon in a following post. All lines of evidence converge.]

And if one can succeed in putting a pair of socks on a hostile, armed, woad-clad opponent, then one's priorities seem a little askew. !i!

Two of my favorite characters ever were played by me and a friend -- Aleks and Oddo Gruntfartt, twin Great Trolls who as twins were, technically, trollkin. Don't tell us the rules, we'll only break them for you. We shall refer to this as the Schrek & Fiona Theory. Congratulations -- you, sir, are "dumb". !i!

This is bound to get very legalistic, but I'd rule that "no clothing" certainly refers to: Any worn item or device intended to protect one from physical harm; Any worn item or device intended to protect one's modesty or dignity. I might further rule that it refers to: Any worn item or device intended to promote one's personal comfort; Any worn item or device intended to promote one's dignity or status. In essence, any kind of advantage achieved by adding accoutrement to the body. So, of course, armor of any kind is right out. Incidental and unprotective clothing intended just for peacocking is iffier, but covering up your gender-bits out of any sense of protection, real or imagined, is also out. "Personal comfort" should be out, too, but does that include utility? Like belts and harnesses? Jewelry also seems to fall under the rubric of peacocking, but a lot of jewelry in Glorantha is imbued with magic -- what if that magic includes protective spells that take the place of armor? Hmm. What about tattoos that act as armor matrices? Seems like gaming the restriction to me. Personally, I'd request an explicit list of terms and agreements from any god before accepting such a restrictive geas. !i!

I really like the visual of a twin god, back-to-back with opposite natures. Every time they turn around to see what the other is doing, the other turns as well. Fire never sees Darkness, Darkness never sees Fire. Sorry, sir, your theory is too intriguing to be "dumb". You lose! Next!! !i!

Chin tattoo! Vasana isn't always depicted with one. Perhaps images without one are from earlier in her life? !i!

HeroQuest...er, QuestWorld...can do wuxia something fierce. Superworld, frankly, is a little number-crunchy, but could still be fun once you get the set-up math out of the way. !i!

Rules for asphyxiation can be found on p.156 of RQG. !i!

The Devil is little more than a QC analyst running a system test. !i!

Yea, verily. The theme of "Argrath is the counterpart to Jar-Eel" is recurrent.* On one hand, they're mirror images of one another in opposition; on the other, they're flip-sides of the same coin, joined at the backside. Together, they are Androgeus made manifest. So that's three heroes of the Hero Wars accounted for with one blow. Have we ever seen any of them together in the same room outside of a game of Dragon Pass? !i! [*Though, of course, so is "Harrek is the counterpart of Jar-Eel," so take that with a grain of salt.]

Okay. Prominent among the God Learner efforts to apply a universal template to a variable and relativistic world was the establishment of the Moral Alignment Enneagram Matrix. Though ultimately rejected along with the God Learners themselves, rumor has it that vestiges of the Matrix persist in other, parallel versions of Glorantha, and that it works better than the reality that we all know. !i!

Or a stylised extended tongue, looking back to the Maori again, to express fierceness among the more militant members of society. !i!

It's an established practice among the Maori, not that there's a 1-to-1 correlation between the Maori and the Orlanthi. Generally, they're worn to draw attention to, and to accentuate a feature of one's body. Women especially among the Maori wear them on their chins and lips, but again, not necessarily for the same reasons they appear in Glorantha among the Orlanthi (apparently regardless of gender). Are we going to let the mustachios slide, though? !i! [Edit: I realise that my reply didn't address why the Orlanthi want to accentuate and draw attention to their chins. Perhaps as the most forward focal point of facial communication?]

I don't think so, though metal does, of course, conduct cold. I've often worn cold weather gear for work, sometimes under plastic impact protection; the coldness of the hardware on the outside of our insulated clothing was imperceptible. So that brings us to the discussion of the effectiveness of the insulating clothing worn under the impact layer. As Thaz points out above, historically, metal armor was worn with padding (e.g., a gambeson), so there you are. What I can tell you is that wetness is what really matters. We have a bit of a joke in the field: Fifteen and dry over Forty-five and rain. It's a reference to the temperature in Fahrenheit and how we'd gladly be working in below-freezing weather in dry conditions over warmer weather in the wet. Curiously, the opinion is reversed for long distance running. Point being, though, that if your insulating layer gets wet, you're in a world of hurt, even if the temperatures are above freezing. !i!

I guess my dumbest theory is that the Tusk Riders are genuine candidates for spiritual redemption, but I'm a big softy that way. !i!

See? It's exactly this sort of flippant disregard for proper cartography that got us in this mess to begin with. !i!

On the nose with so many of these old shows (thank you for reminding me of divide between The Invisible Man and Gemini Man), but why dwell on nostalgia? Marvel's Daredevil - The Netflix show, not the earlier movie. This succeeded in capturing both the "street-level" hero realistically (the fight scene at the end of S1E2 is brutally gruelling) and yet combining the fantastic believably. Characters are sincere and sympathetic. Costumes are accurate enough to still be practical. And it was exciting. !I!

All hail the Ancient School Bus! Chariot of heroic children! Can we talk about straight streets oriented to map-north now? !i!

To Bill's sincere question, an online GenCon won't offer the experience I was hoping from the convention (yeah, I'd planned to attend in person this year), but I'm glad they're maintaining continuity in the face of circumstances beyond their control. !i!

The publication history of Glorantha... !i!

Yeah, yeah. Paul Bunyan, the Salmon Leap, seven flies with one blow, and all that majestic hoo-hah. Apple Lane! !i!

Boo! 👺 Yeah, I recall this old chestnut. I firmly believe that it was an error in either cartography or copy editing. Japan or the British Isles is an ample scale for adventure, but, still -- South America? This, I'm onboard with. Legendary or mythical scale is often, if not typically exaggerated. But, back to the point of discussion, this is Apple Lane we're looking at. I reckon that the original, somewhat bloated scale may be a sort of cartographic Americanism, as alluded to in the saying "In America, 100 years is a long time; in England, 100 miles is a long distance." Things are just bigger 'round these parts. !i!

Some of us prefer the term "alternative facts". !i!

I haven't run the new rendition of Apple Lane, but I'm not surprised to learn of the change in scale. In my experience, it's not uncommon to conceptualise buildings and open areas as being much more spacious than they are in practical reality. My favorite ever was the world map from Exalted, where 1 inch equaled 800 miles, making the "island" at the center of the world roughly the size of South America (good lord, is Ian still banging that drum?). The world's rather a bit cozier than people expect. The appropriate answer, of course, is that Apple Lane hasn't shrunk at all, but that it's being represented more accurately for tactical planning. !i!