scott-martin

22 minutes ago, g33k said:

Until Argrath the Regulator comes along, and bursts their economic bubble?

The last time I reviewed that section of the overall crisis contingency framework (dba "the great sorting"), the girls said something that would terrify many fans: "IBG YBG." It means something. Something important. She will make a beautiful fossil.

I could bloviate on but since I took over the options desk next door we are making mad bank betting on tomorrow's die rolls. There seem to be quite a few "lost" trade gods consolidated under the ISSARIES cult umbrella though. Wonder if any of them gets recapitalized and spun out again in the hero wars. 

 

9 minutes ago, Joerg said:

common to all sky creatures

Primal Horse stays in the picture! As always you make it better. 

It strikes me that modern Kralorela is not known for its "horses" and the "eagles" have been out of power there for a very long time. Instead they have something they claim is different. But just across the Shan Shan they have endless "horses" and a memory of "eagles."

Incorporating a ghost lion into the solar mix is rational but bears deeper investigation. Which lions? When? Where? Who did this and why don't we hear more about it? How many EWF are there?

On 5/12/2024 at 1:04 AM, JayLay said:

Lo, the blue moon has bestowed upon me many pieces of wisdom that I shall share now. I cannot and will not elaborate, because she hasn't told me more than what I share here.

That's a lot of points of blue divination gathered here in an unwholesome pile like her body. I can't say she cares but want to say she would like it. Thank you for burning the points and daring to share the raw results, uninterpreted and so safe from breaking blue law.

All of them have a "truth" rating but I want to corroborate just one right now.
 

On 5/12/2024 at 1:04 AM, JayLay said:

• All the dragonewts of the first age were actually dragons. All the current dragonewts are humans from the EWF which is why they resemble the Human Rune.

Griffins are special because they are analogous to dragonewts on a divergent path: someone hunting a griffin egg is not really looking to breed bird-lion-horse animals but to breed consciousness. We have to read the King Griffin story backward. Only a few people know anything about this, which makes the big bird machinations around the Raus family cosmically important. You aren't just running military aircraft to the feuding tribes of Balazar. You're negotiating a partial reintegration of the big bird way.

In theory every korgatsu practice aims at something like a griffin or a dragonewt but the easy ways have been carefully obliterated, maybe by the spider or the spider's rivals or the spider's friends.

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

The current population of England is > that of Genertela, so mapping the Lunar Empire into London seems doable.

As we all know, from a "certain point of view," Nochet is also Portland Maine complete with explosive population boom . . . or Portland Maine is Nochet.

This is great stuff.

This is easily one of the five most exciting things I've heard in the past five months. Thanks for keeping us in the loop.

8 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Now you have me thinking of the Tunguska event as (a middle-world echo of) the fall of the Red Moon.

We know that Gloranthan "moons" (temporary or dying planets) need to fall somewhere, leaving weird wreckage in their wake. I wonder if suns do too. Maybe that's why the luathans have had it after getting hit with yelm after yelm. If I thought the altinelans did it, I'd be angry too. Or maybe parts get hurled east . . . the blast could theoretically be big enough to reverse the polarity so perceived east and west flip. And if suns don't leave that kind of cosmological junk behind, what if anything does remain when a brightface dissolves? The souls fly in their various directions from the Dara Happan Book of the Dead of course but what does all the debris from the disintegrating body do to Gloranthan weather? 

Now was planet Umath a fugitive moon, a failed would-be sun or something entirely different? Who knows, who cares, MGF prevails. But it's tempting to blame the altinelans, who as we know intervened within time to ensure that the red moon rises and why would they do that. The path flips whenever the north jumper wobble turns into precession. The people of the north flip the switch.

Hamlet had a mill after all and it ground exquisite salt. 
 

7 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Maybe there are at least two problems (ours, not the play’s):

These problems seem to converge. Scripts are written and imposed on performers as the limits of their repeatable existence: initiates ritually rehearse the incidents of god and the full record of those performances add up to history, which for Gloranthans is only the sense of how the play is going so far before it reaches the final curtain and the stage resets for tomorrow's matinee.

People who get caught up in the puppet show (माया, ) identify more strongly with various aspects of the performance and insist that those lines must be read as written. If not, might as well tear down the proscenium because there's no boundary any more between the nice box of dramatic reality ( dare I say, spider web marionette opera) and the vertiginous  of everyday life where everybody's rolling dice and we are forced to accept the results.

Whew. That's enough for almost anybody's game. But out there on the grotowskian frontier the lunatics lean as hard as they can on every chord on the charts in order to see where the moment can take us right now. These people are either impossibly decadent, so rich in sacred theater (too many runes) that they can't find a thrill in the cheap seats, or everything else has been taken away from them so they need to seek alternative channels. Or maybe they're just weird. Either way, sometimes you want to twist a point of costuming or staging or the text itself beyond recognition to see what new thing you can liberate from it.

The rote rehearsal turns experimental. Macbeth goes voodoo, Miles Davis' uh "witches" brew gets real. Maybe the gods themselves are summoned onto the stage to resume whatever unfinished business they might have. Or maybe you're just screwing around, drifting from incident to incident like an old-time adventurer to see whatever there is to see and do whatever there is to do. Moving between the scripts like moving between the notes. For riding[,] the gods require[s] a horse. Chivalry. Situationist cowboys. Qaballeros. Dionysus in '69. Prax. Experimental heroquesting is only hard work when you're trying to sacrifice the old script and get into the right head space to write a new one. Mostly it's just riding in the middle.

The Fourth Age is like that. Maybe the Fourth Age, like all science fiction, isn't evenly distributed. But the future is what's coming either way. Sometimes it's murder. Sometimes it's the miracle to come.

11 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

After Welles?

If I could heroquest back and retrieve two Welles, that would be the other one. Looks to me like Gertrude did the deed.

But this is central to the apocalyptic argrath scenario if you know where to look. Somebody loaded the gun before hanging it on the setting wall. After that, the audience would feel at least a little subliminally cheated.

14 minutes ago, Eff said:

They can zerodize, with the right eye and, for all I know, with the left. 

Presumably most of the stars survive so these techniques survive with them or are rediscovered.

Talking about actors, this one was always one of my favorites and one of the few I managed to see live. He played a cop!
 

32 minutes ago, Eff said:

it's a shame that the multiplicity of the devil, the emptiness of the mask, has remained an inner teaching

"When all you have is an argrath everything looks like the devil." - Nietzsche

People bicker about the German and whether it should be translated "a" devil or even pluralized but the text is clear: "der" Teufel, not "ein" or "die." This in itself is just part of the cycle. Multiple argrath staging was hot for awhile in the wake of what was going on in depth psychology but it turned out the amount of work involved with that turned a lot of fans off. People wanted to see messianic figures performed and not be those figures. It happens! But when you revert to more or less unified readings of the characters you tend to end up collapsing all the probabilistic choral alternatives . . . especially the devil and we know who that particular argrath's devil is.

I have no idea whether Mel Gibson's Hamlet is a better movie because I haven't seen it. A good play deserves to run forever in repertory. I think there was a kinescope of Peter Brook's out there somewhere but that was the year I went chasing bootleg Lears instead so might be getting the Paul Scofield and the Orson Welles one mixed up.
 

On 5/9/2024 at 2:11 AM, XcessiveNinja17 said:

The 4th Age is probably not headed for a "Darkness" but it may at least be headed for some kind of other un-survivable condition, like a magical version of heat death of the universe, and lack of any new souls to inhabit newborn mortals, and inability of anyone to do anything heroic to fix anything.

It makes me happy you are here. One trick about the literary fourth age is that while things for them are clearly very different than they are in the classic game setting, people do well enough to crawl out of the catastrophe like they always have before. Writing comes back. Hundreds of years of stuff goes by that feels dire and crucial at the time but at the end of the day people move on from every event and only the sages are invested enough in the minutia to argue about it. There are institutions and they aren't universally popular. Rebels push back on rules they don't appreciate. Some people say it isn't Glorantha any more at that point because Glorantha as we know it died in the utuma net betrayal maneuver. Some people argue that at that point it's just a story about life on earth. People get up, do their thing, obsess over hobby projects. Maybe the fourth age is the story of your adventures and all this other trash is just the egg you peck your way out of. Maybe the moon was also that egg.

That said, if you find yourself killing someone and then finding out later that they were necessary all along, that's what the regular lightbringer's quest was invented to do. 

6 minutes ago, Eff said:

And so the day may come again when a man becomes an uncle and the nephew comes for him to avenge injustice against his mother or his father, and the world falls apart piece by piece.

My favorite part of the Branagh Hamlet is when Osric dies in the hall of mirrors as though he was only another reflection, an optical illusion required to stage the full play in luxurious 70 millimeter. Here come the Norse!

But I also still love the Almereyda as an artifact of a certain time and place.

The identification of "Maggotliege" and other dead suns with the incumbent yelm was not logically necessary and happened later. The real story is practically overdetermined if not overcomplicated.

Thinking through the horn-headed rune shows me new things about the devil's two or three moms and the person who drops out of that calculus is the murdered vegetable arroin.

EDIT: These may well be the same story.

27 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Dark and Light Dragons

The binary elemental system (Light / Dark) always felt like it came from somewhere outside the seasonal cycle. Maybe the hordes brought it with them from the other end of the Genertan empire along with other things they carried. Maybe this created significant distortion in existing systems, forcing a season into the calendar for example or pushing "storm" and "troll" (and dragon) symbolism together.

God Learner versus Dragon is only the historical backdrop for Mao Tzen's cosmic gesture. The outcome of that gesture remains unclear. It's the story of our lives.

Chalana Arroy had a mountain too. Her other face is Mallia, pharmakon queen with spikey crown.

3 minutes ago, Eff said:

third Feathered Rival

If hawk is solar and thunder bird has thunder, raven (although a darkness affiliate) is explicitly associated with "lightbringer." What archaic encounter or system does their cyclical "rivalry" preserve? I would ordinarily suspect that they came from three directions but it seems more likely that hawk and raven came more or less together, possibly as a vestige or precursor of some larger lost bird system ("vrimak") . . . and we know vrimak had a dynasty around the Suam Chow before the upheavals over there.

Two and a half dumb theories:
A. Trickster as a system of consciousness found its highest expression in the "dragon" way and, having fertilized those eggs for the mind, has since largely died out in the ostentatiously reactionary hillfolk communities that followed. Too dangerous to keep around unsupervised, too weird to kill, too rude to die.
B. Another "dragon" system, perhaps the first, entered the dawn age clash of civilizations from the east, behind the solar horse diaspora. Very little is known or appreciated today of what revolutions of consicousness these people pursued beyond "mysticism" and a certain dinosaur kung fu. But the traces can be tracked.
B Sharp. Law is a fourth corner. We know it today as the sorcerous mindset of course but in its day it was deployed to slay a lot of dragons. I know this because I had the unpleasant vaccine experience of spending a night with law dragon. Humakt comes from somewhere, is not a lightbringer or a feathered rival. Of course law is not antichaos. Law is its own thing.

18 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Lightbringer -> Firebringer -> Prometheus bound.

Jetzt komme Feuer . . . now that you mention it, I see that the archaic firebringer aspects of universal trickster have been brought under the Lightbringer umbrella and teaches wind words now like some kind of unreconstructed orlanth. But that's heavy magic, a drastic resolution, not a good time for the good people of Slontos.

If the spiderweb was the primary signifier of the "lightbringer" revolution in consciousness and the bright god of the north is the bright god of the north then the weird celestial phenomena of late 375 can be interpreted as a clash of spiritual civilizations or a grubbier sort of assassination. And yet the spider has communion with fire. She just no longer knows who to invest that power in, unless you count ZZ and other vestiges.

8 hours ago, Whizbang said:

Also, raspberry bushes can just go fuck themselves.

The wife loves the idea of having acres of them surrounding the house as long as someone cuts a path through them before she thinks about going down to the creek. They keep gesturing vaguely toward taking the house back . . . so far not yet but part of me likes to think it's inevitable. But I've already given them just enough blood that I am their creature now we have an undertanding.

Moonlight is colorblind so all berries are red in the light of the red moon, which makes some of this sumac dangerous. I wonder if the prismatic approach (pink floyd record cover) is part of the white moon gospel . . . knights in "white" satin indeed.

57 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

a comment on IRL missionaries and empire

I bore a lot of people and amuse myself framing the riddler plague as psychoanalysis . . . both systems spread first by raising awareness to the level of a "problem" that they are uniquely situated to address, Freud and Jung coming on the steamer like Dracula . . . but the broader colonial reading is less esoteric nowadays and should be chased as far as it goes.

For example:
the primary missionary vector of the new bright god was the riddlers
the primary missionary vector of the new spider god was the tricksters
something reminiscent of modern "Eurmal" led the lightbringer diaspora
bound trickster of modern times is an artifact of the Harmast restoration
rival systems of consciousness

 

How is the devil different from a (shamanic) bad man?
How does bad man factor into mysticism, if that's what the goddess does? Or is there a deep shamanic component to the lunar way?
Is something like the bat what happens when a shaman binds their own bad man? Vice versa? Third option?
Is the Spolite thing best understood as a fusion of sorcery and shamanism, with or without mysticism?
Does the sun have a shadow? Do Golden Bow shamans have a bad man?
What is the black orbiter and does the bat live there
and who shall I say is calling
 

6 minutes ago, Eff said:

These paragraphs do not describe a difference in kind, but a difference in degree. 

Love it. Does this mean that the so-called "elder races" lack a degree of free will (Hepherones, a Ganbarrian) and so are closer to conventional "gods?" Or that the "spirit races" like the Altinelans, Luathans, Luxites and so on have a degree of individuality?

4 minutes ago, Eff said:

what meaning can be had

Let's see what we can lure back to #theories . . . after all, we are building an ark of the anticanonical over there, aren't we? Plenty room for unicorns.

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

[That last cup of cocoa was clearly far too strong.]

Since I was just reminded of the shamanic entheogenic drink poyomatli, a lot depends on which aromatic bloom (eliminating salvia from serious consideration) you are dissolving in that cocoa butter. This is a great thread. The question I am wrestling these days revolves around the way Gloranthan history clearly resists these kinds of ontological WMD applications of narrative most of the time. Experimental heroquesting is portrayed as rare and difficult. Practitioners tend to be ostracized from the very community resources they need. And yet because people who break out of the box naturally turn first to Mage: The Ascension style feats of sovereign subjectivity, something embedded within consensus reality must be at work to erase their achievements much as we here on earth tend to forget our dreams when we open our eyes in the morning.

Otherwise, why haven't all the big brains fixed Yelmalio yet? Maybe they have, but the story remains unconvincing and so the consensus view persists. This is an especially visible problem for Gloranthans, whose mythic reality is often portrayed as one step farther from earthly experience (more "magical," less empirical, closer to the root engines of desire or the transcendental) than the layer of the RQ experience that concerns itself with how durable your pants are and who has some for sale. Something is protecting that layer where all the pants sellers live. I would hate to give the shadowy but theoretically indefatiguable Arkat Cult credit for this (like buttonholing Eco about the Knights Templar) but maybe the Arkat Cult is itself a metaphor for something deeper going on.

What was the question, in the immortal words of both Kate Bush and, of all people, Eddie Vedder? Anyway, memestream, you're doing great. Welcome to the circus. Of course Glorantha had a huge influence on the World of Darkness. On different days that can be a badge of pride and also a crime requiring hard atonement to work off. For "chaos" I'll find a thing for you from back in the G+ days, you might find it amusing or restorative to see the graffiti on the cave wall. 

Secret history of the lion people in three acts, or ye original sinne repeal'd

 

4 minutes ago, John Biles said:

New Tork City

Escape To New Tork!

Here's to healthier times + higher energy

18 minutes ago, Eff said:

It takes a General Jinjur to, ah, put some ginger into those sparklingly pretty and perfectly choreographed Berkeleyan types.

Sharpen those needles ladies, there's a scarecrow that needs letting out. "This too is Great Sister."


 

41 minutes ago, David Scott said:

glam platform shoes

25 minutes ago, Tatterdemalion Fox said:

Daughter’s Army

As luck would have it my recent revelations about The Lady Of Graclodont fit nicely here. A symbolic army for symbolic warfare.




 

Yeah. The Facebook thread might tickle your brain but her relative absence in The Lunar Way boils down to the fact that she is not conventionally worshipped . . . these books are for entities with active cults. Of course YGWV.