scott-martin

That is known as "Genealogy, the Brithini," found in the Seshnegi Book of Foreigners (both states). I haven't gotten around to dating it internally but maybe 1967-8? Obsessives will note the "engrion" title.

Yena is apparently an air wife in the way of the children of Aerlit. All four caste fathers and the caste mother are hers. Phlia vanishes at the moment the vadelites emerge and her children also vanish from the narrative (or are transformed), which is suggestive. The children of Malkion have three mothers. The children of Vadel have three fathers.

I wasted precious minutes flipping through my "cursed" copy of WBRM (someone laminated it 50 years ago so the thick plastic pages stick together like old corduroy) so missed my chance to beat @jajagappa to the punch. Wind Children ("Children of the Wind" are indeed in there. As @Eff notes, Newtling "Renegades" are in Nomad Gods, which is I think pre-Perrin. The children of Waertag and the children of Triolina are about as old as it gets. In terms of where they all come from, we should ask Sandy if he remembers hearing anything. There are textual simularities between the Wind Children writeup and some of Greg's musings about relationships between earthy mortals and airy spirits but the early art feels more like someone saw a Led Zeppelin logo. They're cool looking!

Yeah, his overt satanism only incidentally interests me so I'll let people who do more work with the unicorn king weigh in on his motivations and his plan . . . but the flip side of the abjected identity is the collector's urge to recover the full set (and setting). If stamps do not exist in his glorontha he will be forced to invent NFTs.

"Prax" . . . with all its big and little altars everywhere, pockmarked by cosmic history . . . is only secondarily an ecological zone with significantly better weather than the true wastes. It's really a state of mind where you're at home in the landscape and that feeling renders every hill and bush somehow sacred. You can be anywhere and be in "Prax." The shamans just have better records for the part west of the river.

I am not his dungeon master and do not have his strict analytic records. However, looking at the fragmented NPC notes discarded in the wreckage of modern Dorastor I think that whatever he thought he wanted wasn't actually it. He tried that already. It didn't take. If he's looking for company, they are not it. Whoever interests him now is whoever is up there in the castle. Maybe they're it, maybe not. It's a work in progress. The pulmonologists let me keep it. It looks like an IUD on a plastic hinge. Supposedly its only function is to force stronger bellows breathing for the tests . . . the opposite of what you actually want when you're asleep and need to clear the nose for deeper dreaming, so it's funny. We only hear about the ones who come back, who get caught. The world didn't end because some stupid big brother somewhere got so pissed off that his rage called an unbreakable space rock down from heaven. As the line goes, "the ones who return are the ones who suffer" or struggle, the agonists. The challenge is to "live as if you've never lived before." I think of the bite of apple or pomegranate seed becoming uneaten, coughed up in some heimlich hugging maneuver. I think of my favorite line from Kristeva, there is a kind of problem in eating the fruit too soon . . . but maybe it always comes as a shock and the fall is always a shove. What I still enjoy about the two devils collision hypothesis is that you can see the transition in Greg from innocence to experience captured on the wall for all time like a nuclear shadow. Before the moment, everything bad in the world was an abstraction, something thermodynamic ("angels are mathematical") and agnostic in its moral architecture like your answers to a Hesiod reading quiz. After the moment, formerly good people make bad choices and lives are ruined. Greg has thickened. We have wakboth now and nobody talks about kajabor. The puppet show ends with harlequin harrowing hell. What a marvelous thread.

He would be gone by now but would probably do something horrible to the ocean on the way out. This way he decathects at a slow enough rate that the Canal isn't overwhelmed, even if it means tolerating his persistence. This is also Time.

My summer is Mexico's bat season because all their hummingbirds are up here drinking my red sugar water and I rejoice. When they go home again I only have bats to console me and they have slightly stronger tastes.

Once is always free to read deliberately "wrong" in pursuit of wisdom, power or MGF. With that in mind, I would start by interpreting the Block not so much as a gigantic cube of cosmically hard rock but as the way the astral traveler encounters the reality principle itself, the blockage that insulates the world from truly diabolical desire. Because I lead a nice wholesome lifestyle I don't think I know anyone right now who has even seriously tried to contact the forbidden urge . . . I'm happy to keep the Block between me and them, the situation simply doesn't come up. There are no player character cultists of terror and because I am the game master there are not even any NPC cultists of the real wakboth. However, because the return of the repressed is a foundational law of glorantha, there will always be symbolic leakages and other "grisly portions." The primal crime can be abstracted, talked about, even instrumentalized. Someone like a Ralzakark or an Argin Terror works the blasphemous tantra, assigns (cuts up, butchers, "portions") roles in the received drama of the unhappy family. They participate in something like a cult of someone they call the devil. But even that's a mask (a bolongo) for their own family situation, the situation that really matters. Symbolic devils, abstract "unhappy families." The real devil is elsewhere. When that devil is present, creation is not. You're out there. The game is about things that happen on the inside, where creation is here behind the block. There are some other stories like that where for various mechanical reasons the rules of consciousness are suspended . . . outside the law, before the law (kafka reference), beyond the law. The block is solidified law. A paradox in the law illuminated arkat.

Hmmmmmm.

I recall a specific phrase like "then a spirit that had never been important before spoke up" but I want to say it's pretty archaic. Later development prefers to fudge the question of whether or who she was before the Compromise. The mystic link in Troll Gods between herself and relatively profane Aranea (profanea) might be a tempting thread to unravel. IMG this is "pact" or understanding is the mythic basis for how her/their Divine Intervention works, with one representing the other in something like a legal as well as a semiotic framework. ---- Modern "folk" narratives around a theoretical Great Darkness or "Gods War" are not as traditional as the priests think, but are instead draw heavily on the apocalyptic malaise that sensitive participants in the Jrustelan Empire felt for the world they wrecked. In this model, popular characters like "Orlanth," "Pamalt," "Devil" and "Only Old One" who are now deified went through a more literary phase, symbolic forms available to magicians and poets for working through their nostalgia and regret . . . and then in a less urbane era the artifacts of authorship and exegesis are unsustainable, leaving something like a hoax behind. This is best seen when we compare the rhymed "realms of beauty were lost" construction common to Pamalt in RM and the original Orlanth cult writeup to the doomy Jrustelan epigrams that survive. ("Too late too late / to save the dreams.") Prove me wrong! Point me to something authentically cyclopean in the textual evidence or archaeology that we can use to date the historical collapse a full millennium before the Close. Of course there are those who argue that the collapse is cyclical and every dying civilization goes through similar crises: 300 ST, 900 ST, now.

Now that's the hot stuff. I'm slipping!

I like this six-sided mirror, consider associating each with benign/malign earth across the three generational aspects of the goddess. Put all six of them together and you have something that can reflect the image of the goddess to herself as she is. Cam would definitely have one, as would the grandmummies in Ezel.

Tight Indigo Trousers, last known surviving white moon hierophantess and my favorite novelty NPC, has entered the chat. This is the empire. It is the way. Step inside. They have something like a passover and something like a christmas and even something like a dream of life but no easter. As she says, "the world starts after the fourteen year old drug addict version of your life quits and then stops again when you quit quitting . . . Sedenya came to liberate that world from itself. Say you like it. Say you need it even if you don't."

This is clearly the golden age of gloranthan studies.

Rolling back all the way to that particular opening crawl reveals something: "broo reproduction" doesn't appear in print until Borderlands decides to reveal or invent that narrative. Before that, broos are, like Iggy Pop says about the "philistines" in the movie Dead Man, mostly just real dirty people . . . "given to atrocities and foul practices" but mostly spreading diseases. This becomes their "Mallia" aspect that supports their role as mercenary muscle in Nomad Gods, RQ1-2 and so on. Or another way to say it is that Mallia is the entity who shamans can summon within the rules of the Jaldon Games. Thed comes later and I encourage people to read the COT version closely. If you find anything sexualized in this era, shout it out. To me, these broos come off more like S. Clay Wilson bikers than anything else, maybe with a Kenneth Anger scorpio rising vibe. There's no parasitic pregnancy motif, which tells us that while Alien has come and gone theatrically and home video exists, it doesn't seem to make much of an impression on Greg or Sandy until 1982. They wouldn't hold a revelation like that back, especially when the Thed layout ends with significant page space to fill and they were already throwing everything Sandy could think of to stretch as far as they could. After Borderlands, the "broo as sexual violence" and "Thed as rape goddess" narratives get rolling with Noyeep in the Big Rubble (1983) and forty years later here we are. But Borderlands functions as the literal crossroads at which we meet the devil, as it were. You still have the "Mallia" broos, who are basically all the females (closing a loophole in COT) as well as the males who "dislike all-male associations." That's a strange thread. Does it mean all Thedists are gay? Or is each of them the only male that matters in their perspective, so that everything else is potentially a "wife" and a "mother" to your children? The one unspoken rule here seems to be that they can't or won't or don't like to impregnate each other, or else only the strongest broo would survive beyond two seasons +1d8 weeks and we know that they can coexist in relatively stable gangs for a lot longer than that. Another thing that's interesting is the reference to "varied maternity." I know we've talked about Wire Mother and Soft Mother before but every male broo has a choice of which mommy to follow in terms of how they relate to the larval host. RQ3 Thed obliterates any surrogates. Her broo might not identify with her or emulate her so much as she (as a ghost and not a conventional goddess) yearns to emulate them. She gets them to do things to recapitulate her trauma. In the RQ3 accounts, that trauma is all she has left. In that ecology, there are no other women, just an appetite for new victims. I feel like many of the more deliberately occult NPCs in LOT and DOLAD reflect these complicated and polymorphous family and gender identities, where a son can be a daughter and a brother and also a wife. But Mallia is simpler. By definition she's the other woman and that's really it. When you emulate her, you are not the cruel absent mother. You're your own woman. The boys become carriers of your complex, spreading her sign. And this is the broo mother you can contact in the Jaldon Games. The stepmother can be approachable in ways the mother never is. Where is this going? First, IMG Thed is a perversion of the Covenant because her cult deliberately blurs the taboo relationship between herd and harem. Her broos don't have wives and their children don't have mothers. They have plenty of meat but they don't get milk as a baby. She's one of the things that happen when something goes very wrong with the meat. Nobody who observes the Peaceful Cut will countenance any of this. Prax can't afford to tolerate chaos. Life is already too rough in their broken world to intentionally make things worse. Second, Thed's association with the Crack spell is poignant in light of both Dorasta's ruined cleft and the "breaking of the vessels" that seeds creation in the zohar or wherever. She knows how to break everything. Maybe in a demiurgic context she has wisdom to provide but it's hard to say . . . sooner or later, people who have delved her mysteries end up functionally equivalent to broos. On the way from here to there you find the mysterious Cacodemon character in the courts of chaos, son of the devil (looking at you Argin Terror, we've barely touched on the West) and grandson of Thed. He's fond of ogres, who start to look a lot like broos when you breed out the obvious goat strains.

"Arkat blows a horn, Atyar has a horn. What's the difference? Your angle on " - Jaccius Lacanicus I was thinking about that head trip in the recent return to Drastic . . . the resemblance is striking The angel rises, the head ignites, the skeleton drops.

ATYAR is really just ARK(Y)AT spelled sideways. I'm as skeptical as you are but it ultimately resolves more problems than it creates.

As Mr Phipp notes, Drastic doesn't have a lot of Thed content beyond a mechanical amendment that makes it easier for Spirits of Thed to take good people over and a belated credit to Sandy for the original COT version of the cult. But the idea sheds interesting light on aspects of Orlanth as lonely goatherd [sic] so I'd love to explore the details myself. Reverting to the COT chassis completely desexualizes her role, leaving an impression like the take on Kali that might show up in a matinee screening of Gunga Din. This is probably close to Sandy's original vision. We can ask him! But by the time you get to the short GOG writeup in 1985 her role is already changing. Maybe there are two or more Theds knotted together here . . . if modern "Orlanth" is a consolidation of multiple regional precursors then why not her too? A Praxian Thed who interferes with local shamans but is worth an occasional bit of worship, a Heortling Thed, maybe some other entity venerated closer to ancient Tanisor. A couple of details drop out. The LOT catechism blames her initial wound and her grudge on Urox. I would not want to slander the Storm Bull in front of his fans but he is not the sort of figure that leads an error-free life . . . as the Ragnaglar entry says, "there are secrets of the Mad God which I will tell you when your soul is strong enough to face the terrible truth." I would not be surprised to discover that Urox and the other one were mutually exclusive figures in archaic theyalan religion: a community might know one or the other but never both at once. A little like how someone's dad and evil "stepdad" are rarely in the room at the same time. In the logic of parables, when the good father surfaces, it's because he's defeated the evil father. But when the bad dad rises, the effect is as though he's murdered the good one. All the children of Umath may be like that, wearing each other's clothes when their followers find real identities inconvenient. Greg definitely wrote about this kind of dad business. I love the sunken Thedela hypothesis but the fact that the Heortlings remember the Trio setting up in the distant "north" leaves me open to the possibility that the first broos were Lokamayadon's people. But maybe brooism is an emergent property, the identity of the real "patient zero" is deliberately ambiguous. The important thing is that a broo or a broomother can erupt at any time. Keep your heart open and your hands steady.

Love it throughout. Sad to have been away when this was going on the first time. This is obviously one of the edible amaranths, possibly with an unfortunate / opportunistic passenger like claviceps purpurea . . . the witch grain, the trick in the food that makes the body sick and the mind swoon. No wonder she's so intimate with Malia!

I will climb the steps down to the basement on Saturday and unearth my copy of Drastic Chaos, which is so rare I had to source it "o'er frae France" as they say and largely unspeakable in the official fandom at this point. I don't even really remember what exactly is going on in there. In the meantime, three or four things I know about her that undoubtedly repeat what everybody knows. First and foremost, a fresh encounter with the full lyrics of the English song cycle commonly known as "Tom Bedlam / Mad Maudlin" reveals to me at least that Thed's real function is as a witch cult, maybe the primary witch cult on both sides of the Praxian frontier. Let's look at some of those verses. Across the spectrum of madness and badness and sadness the silver thread that unifies them is a fierce grievance nursed to the point where it defies all libidinal standards, logic and the other gods as well. What separates the protagonist from the rest of us is that she broods on her grudge and disappointment down in "satan's kitchen" to the exclusion of just about everything else. This is a witch anthem. IMG I suspect Thed is like that: the Bad Woman who is not satisfied with the victim or villain narrative that the Ernalda establishment works so hard to perpetuate. As such, the Lords of Terror extended cult writeup gives us a sense of how a Bad One tradition plays out from something like the inside . . . but filtered through a fairly obvious lens of conventional theyalan scholarship ("among the Orlanthi . . . "). One of the worst crimes a witch can commit is probably a lack of solidarity with other women. Thed's grudge is such that she will take sour delight in cooperating with broos to perpetuate her primary trauma / myth. This is not necessarily sexual. As long as you are ruining some aspect of someone else's life, your actions are holy and delightful in her jealous gaze. By the way, the "male only" restriction on her cult has been removed from the RQG drafts last time I checked. (So is a lot of the easy talk about her "willing" complicity and "own choice." She's more ambivalent now.) You do need to become a broo though and I think this is part of the enigma of where female broos come from. Like the girl interrupted says, they are very rare and they are mostly men. But not completely. Her nature as a bright and leaping nymph is only of theoretical interest to me because like I said, she's had some crimes done to her but she's also made some choices around that. No matter how we judge her choices, I think we can all agree her own case could have been handled a lot better. She was failed. Some rehabilitations fail. They can't get over it or haven't been able to get over it yet. Some people perpetuate abuse. We mourn the nymph and maybe we can contact the nymph under the right circumstances but when you meet her as the skinless goat mother she only brings trouble. The world is fallen. The relationship with Kyger Litor in particular is very interesting . . . how would troll mother in particular be interacting with this person? They have womb trouble in common. And among the goddesses her suffering and defiance remind me of a red woman we all know about. And then there's Malia. No Kate Bush references here. Nina Simone. Anyway, Saturday. Appropriate.

OK sassy Where does Thed come from? Any effort to even ask that question is an effort to rehabilitate her story, what could go wrong there? She was somebody once. She made choices.

THIS IS [HERESY/INDIVIDUALIST] CITIZEN. But let them try. To a properly broken dwarf or self-initiated shaman every can and pipe has its spirit. With the right access to the official population records you can probably achieve some kind of mental communication with vanished generations and ultimately come to an abstract understanding of the Ancestral Mostali. The structure of modern dwarf society suggests that this has been done in the past. Maybe it's the route forward. You take a step back in order to make a great leap into the future beyond the hole they're stuck in now.