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scott-martin

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Posts posted by scott-martin

  1. 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.

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  2. 43 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

    So Richard Adams was the grandmother of Harrek? With that, Art Garfunkel, and Bunnies & Burrows, the man has stuff to answer for.

    Art Garfunkel would have found a way to become a problem in multiple timelines. I will forgive Adams for giving the world the band Owsla, which in turn gave the world my favorite novel of the plague decade, Seek The Throat From Which We Sing.

    However I'm told we should roll the clip

    clip-shardik.thumb.png.3993860e9bbb7cdabb56d5724eaba676.png

    This is not really a goofy tangent. What I like about it in the context of this thread is the fact that Greg got super inflamed by it initially. A bear who was god! But then he wanders off to make his own bear god man, a more satisfying execution. All our gloranthas are like that. "Take only what you need from it."
     

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  3. 16 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

    You believe. I guess that for a New Yorker, it is more like gravity holding or the sun rising tomorrow — in theory reality could let them down, but for them it is beyond doubt. 😉

    This is another good point. People who are still in the city simply KNOW that the train is running and when it doesn't (flooding, blackout, operator error, metal fatigue, pandemic, unannounced track work, wildcat strike, terror attack) it's time to seek alternate routes. When the alternate routes stack high enough the last route is back to the mainland. Those left behind will say you gave up. But maybe the day will come when the final train grinds to a halt . . . this is the doubt that drives us apostates from the city once and for all.

    Maybe the gods are like that. Or whatever the mostalites commune with when the machine stops.

    I believe London has something similar about ice ages, nuclear errors and other catastrophes being mitigable so long as you live by the river.

     

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  4. 1 hour ago, radmonger said:

    A Gloranthan believes in their god in the same sense a New Yorker believes in the subway.

    Top quip!

    My spies just told me that "it's gotten really bad down there, like '70s bad, no wonder they called out the national guard" and I ponder how the nature of the subway gods can change . . . as above so below. And yet I still have fairly high confidence (truth rating) that the trains still run down there, years after even seeing a station entrance much less riding with the damn things.

    Not sure if it's what jorganos was talking about but I always liked the RQ3 mechanic for loading temple guardians with magic, as seen in Sun County and probably updated sources.

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  5. Love it. Response will be endless and it's all accurate. Like they say, whatever you love has already worked its way into the roots of Glorantha. For some people, this means Orlanth is Thor or Zeus, someone from an Edith Hamilton paperback. For people who prefer Karoly Karenyi, Orlanth is actually Apollo or Hermes the Thief and it's complicated. He can be Indra. He can be Seth, the other brother.

    Same with everybody else. You go where it takes you and you either see Glorantha there or you don't. Ernalda is easy. There's a lot of Robert Graves in there from when Robert Graves was blowing a lot of dudes' minds. Then there was a lot of Marija Gimbutas. A lot of Mists of Avalon, even though that one has fallen far from favor.

    He really loved Hesiod. But then again he was really moved by the book Shardik and the work of Rogan P Taylor, which is perversely available in plain sight to anyone bold enough to get an account.

    Issaries is simultaneously a cheap gag ("Am Issaries = Emissaries") and a complicated footnote to Gurdjieff as suits the great god's nature.

     

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  6. 7 hours ago, Joerg said:

    But then could not a majority of Glorantha have fled to happier times, never quite facing the Greater Darkness?

    Their Glorantha(s) Varied. Or maybe they stayed in "Glorontha" or "Acos" or some other state of being before the apocalypse that created the modern world. From our point of view engaged with the text of Glorantha, they did not survive. Unless they come back or we go over ("er meint irgendein sagenhaftes Drüben") anything can be true.

    I think one constant is that once you are in Drastic territory your Glorantha is varying beyond the range where text can help you in a crisis.

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  7.  

    6 hours ago, David Scott said:

    One of the special abilities that some illuminates have, is that with a successful illumination skill roll they will not register with Sense Chaos.

    1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:
    Quote

    When we crossed into Bilini, we all were silent, but Oddi’s silence lasted longer, for the creature [the Crimson Bat] was a thing of chaos, yet his Storm Bull sense had betrayed him and he had known nothing chaotic was at hand.

    Sounds to me like the Bat, while horrible to all external senses, might have experienced that flavor of illumination and so would befuddle the Bull. But we know less about that particular flavor than others.

    IMG a bull cultist infected with nysalor consciousness might have trouble making the old easy intuitive distinctions between wholesome creation and corrosive chaos . . . but there are other schools, arkat consciousness in particular has historically intensified the abreaction response to an apocalyptic degree. I suspect we'll see this kind of thing unleashed on the world when Charg opens.

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  8. 24 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

    Why so many Klingon Battlecruiser variants?

    They're all really just generic warp cores plugged into a cloaking device invisibility spell matrix so klingon autocrats accustomed to more open architecture of force went a little overboard on bespoke greeble. However, this suggests a follow-up question: what does "invisibility" really reflect in modern Gloranthan religion?

    Invisible God, sure. The pamphlets say this is just a highly sublimated philosophical evolution of the archaic Malkion cult, a radical exclusion of creator from all things created . . . imperceptible and absolutely alien to the everyday spiritual life. But I've seen compelling arguments that the inflection that we translate as "invisible" today was originally understood as more of a conjugation, something more like a future subjunctive tense. In this scenario Invisible Malkion is by definition not the god of your fathers but the god of what might be, the well of possibilities, the completed integral of time.

    And in this light Invisible Orlanth becomes less a kind of passive philosophical or "deeper" understanding (Kate Bush reference) of the crude god of the mountain (Kate Bush reference) tribes and more of a theurgic posture: advocates of "invisibility" (Kate Bush reference) work to abstract entities from existential reality where they are both active in the world and vulnerable to it. True invisibility is indistinguishable from immortality: they cannot harm what they cannot see, touch or interact with in any way.

    When the cloaking device is switched off, we can see the formerly invisible entity emerge in surprising places, such as at the heart of a rival pantheon. Jar-Eel enjoys a similar tactic, lurking undiscovered in a competitor's ritual dreamscape until the moment of shock revelation (ambush). So did the stygians, apparently. We often think of these assassin tactics as romulan- lunar-aligned but advocates of an invisible Orlanth can flip the deck and reveal storm forces hiding deep in the lunar way. For example, it's funny in this context that one of the reasons the Blue Moon is imperceptible to the naked eye is that the perceptible sky itself is as blue as she is. She blends. Or maybe they always shared the same nature all along and Orlanth and the tide are one.

    But the cloaking device is a POW sink so I've probably dithered on too long. The absence of a true invisibility spell in modern RQ as the site where Blue Moon magic and Black Fang magic and the Sandals of Darkness don't quite converge yet . . . but they point toward a convergent point "ahead" where we can imagine such a spell discovered and deployed.

    Invisible and red? This is a description of a magical effect.

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  9. 1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

    Oops! Just seen Jörg’s edit, so at least some of what is above is wrong.

    Thanks for putting that here. I like seeing that in what would ordinarily be a mechanical thread.

    And it builds on the synthetic storm tribe hypothesis that has been on my mind this week anyway.

    storm.png.b61d90a5b30b38e1d3c1846f13a5eedc.pngConsider a place like archaic Fronela  where there is no inherent understanding of "Orlanth" as a separate storm god. Instead they might have a Humakt to oppose the sun and an Eurmal to mediate with the sky, steal fire and get up to other trouble.

    They also have their version of the great bull mysteries, the losk-a-lim, but this is already an early syncretism . . . not one of the nine great gods.

    In this situation you can have a phase change across Humakt and Eurmal that determines whether "Illumination" (Humakt is one of the students of Rashoran) expresses as honor/truth or tricksterism/illusion. Great, how interesting.

    The "death" axis is a little less coherent because the bull itself is outside the early Fronelan system in some ways and so will duplicate some functions while confusing other relationships. We just don't know as much about it. Not as much effort was made to philosophically integrate it into the lightbringer framework . . . maybe that happened in the unwritten teachings of Talor in the liberation of Loskalm, who can say without going there. The important thing is that these are two fighting cults and the local secret of death is hidden here. Maybe the phase shift is about sacrifice and sacrificer, eaten and eater, meat and man . . . a covenant. 

    For the relationship on the third side of the triangle, I've reinserted "disorder" because that archaic rune is on my mind and it fits. Again, on the Eurmal side this is the disorganizing power we associate with storm, something like change or movement or transformation. As you transition down to the bull, it translates to something more like "strength." Eurmal dynamics provoke volatility, which then provokes the bull to restorative action. The trickster gets slapped down when the limits stretch too far to tolerate. "Chaos" must be resisted. Disorder.

    Somewhere between these factors it is possible to generate a synthetic mastery in the middle, a weltsystemtheorie . . . an "Orlanth" that governs the storm-driven order of things. While this phase is artificial it is relatively stable once it emerges. However, under pressure, it can disintegrate into its precursors. We've seen it happen historically.

    The whole is in the shape of a Law.

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  10. Love it. Frank Herbert is always an option. 

    What I'm hearing here is that you want them to move around and the game will help pick where if anywhere they settle down. The cousins are easy, they can wander through life together. A hermit needs a reason to travel in their company. How would you feel about giving the hermit some kind of dream or visionary mission, a reason to get on the road and experience the wider world? Just pick a few of these elements that you've listed and make a kind of verbal "movie trailer" out of them, then hand it to that player. Coming attractions. That's your promise you make to yourself and them, the game will go there.

    Maybe the vision showed him that one or more of the other three needed to be there too at key points. This gives the hermit a motive to convince them to come along. It sounds like they're relatively malleable in terms of immediate goals so this can start out as a job for one or more of them. The others can get pulled along or pushed in from outside . . . someone can get outlawed, someone can have a vision of their own, you know how to do this. 

    They don't have to wander forever. There are a lot of oases in Prax that could use a rain man's attention. Maybe that's what the vision wants. On the way they see amazing things and if they ever pick a community they'll know it when they see it.  If the vision thing is too much woo woo you can make up an oasis town under brutal oppression (imperial entanglement, bandits, chaos) and the rain man can gather outside muscle to shift the liberating scales. A little more Magnificent 7 than the 3 Amigos. That's okay. This way, the town picks them and they're stuck with it. Downside, they're stuck there unless they lose and need to run like an Atreides to gather additional support. 

    You should at least let the Storm Bull see the Block.

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  11. A little busy but some bait needs to be bit at . . . 
     

    1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

    The occultists’ rubric clearly states

    :20-sub-light: = :20-power-disorder:

    and furthermore 

    :20-sub-light: = :20-power-harmony:

    Blah blah blah for sake of union. 

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  12. 8 hours ago, davecake said:

    dramatic upturning of the stool

    This entire post is one for the record books but I only have time to tease out one proof point.

    stool.png.713bbf66c287dabdabfc2b51ddf31a4e.pngstool-b.png.73c0629d2cbada93df5dfe3e6e129025.png:50-combination-power::50-condition-mastery:


    (In the north we may have :50-condition-luck:instead.)
     

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  13. 1 hour ago, g33k said:

    Who is "Strength"?

    In archaic Holy Country materials (this is one), "Strength" gets briefly assigned to a three-legged rune that looks like the modern Change. This attribution of course went away sometime before RQ2, along with "Justice" for what we now call Stability, "Love" for Harmony and "War" (close to your "Battle") for Disorder. By mid-1980 the triskelion has shifted to clear association with movement and moving matter: breezes, tidal waves, "skipping [traveling] stones," mobile automatons, riding animals. 

    IMG this particular piece is parallel to the mystery of the extinct Ginijji civilization (hard earth, sky titan and one other) that gets incorporated into the MOLAD but the point is that there are three flavors of violence afflicting the Forgotten God. The presence of a few "War" ("Battle") runes associated with earth counters suggests that this was the combat mode of that element, call it "hard earth" if you like but if it evolved into Discord and the giants tainted by it, we can see why the myth singles it out as especially impure. "Strength" could be a different kind of angry giant, like the Great Sage Equal To Heaven says. Call him Jagrekriand if that matters, or Tolat ancient of days. Shargash belongs to the solar court but Tolat has more explicit water (mastakos is a blue god) connections. And Storm is an element we all know with a unique relationship with Death.  So YGWV really after this archaeological diversion.

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  14. On 1/31/2024 at 7:55 AM, mfbrandi said:

    Wholesome matter can only be made to live by infusing it with tenuous soul or spirit.

    This is really good because it uh grounds them in their original role as a competing earth ecology, neither vegetable nor ernaldoid but maintaining access to gnomes. The key concept is that :20-power-life: is not really a womb or hourglass figure but food . . . eater and eaten.

    This in turn is why when you flip the rune :20-form-undead: is also called hunger, appetite without access to food. Note that trolls will famously eat animals, vegetables or even inert matter, dwarves and dwarf stuff. Part of the secret work of the Machine is to convert as much as they can to Stone that resists falling into the shameful and embarrassing food cycle . . . they find the notion of becoming food for worms or worse terrifying. Thus the canning.
     

    1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

    sun spider

    Putting the Solara back on it!

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  15. 42 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

    If only the Brithini had been the Campari, maybe people would have warmed to them a bit more.

    We should probably take this to #theories but if you take Greg's early encounter with Alan Stivell records seriously enough to read "Brithini" as a corruption of "Brezhon ys"  or "Breton île" (see also "Prydain") then the obvious derivation of "Vadel" is "Gwad île," of or originating on the island of blood. This gives you two root alchemical factors, the white and the red, which are then refracted across their various castes. This one is for you, Greg. These are your two dragons in Vortigern's dream. The campari is of course on the red side.

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  16. EGWV

    What's remarkable about this otherwise innocent fragment is that it feeds into a sense of Dawn Age Brithos as a politically dynamic place. Here's a privately circulated timeline providing some cryptic and of course impossibly ancient support for developments on the island in an "ENGR Era" lost to later zzaburcentric historical propaganda. It reached me free from encumbering book curses so I post it here in service to knowledge and the greater light of shared knowledge.

    chronology.thumb.png.db8130359b09ad71f118e6aecc0867ab.png
     

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  17. 10 minutes ago, Joerg said:

    What could the son of Zzabur and chief sorcerer of Brithos (after the retirement of his father) be rebelling against? The Engrions?

    Ultimately we'll never know unless we fill that blank page ourselves with the best version we can come up with. If two or more versions emerge, the weight of MGF will decide which is more or less authentic . . . which addresses Nick's point. Hello everyone!

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  18. 2 hours ago, glarkhag said:

    I had not seen it in the places I currently look

    (thanks @jajagappa for observing that I rarely read #Runequest these days)

    This is from the early compilation "Records of the Malkioni" that ultimately gets bundled into The Seshnegi Book of Foreigners (Roots of Glorantha XII). None of what's lurking back there will impact anyone's sense of the setting . . . if it does, you have uncovered a Great Secret! The price of that is that nobody else knows what you know or is interested in communicating with you about it.

    I would view it as new / recovered information unavailable anywhere else and keep an eye on Jeff in the Facebook group for more. Careful fans will see that there are shocking blanks in the received history of the west. They haven't hurt us yet and have yet to prompt intense investigation. Why is that I wonder?

    But I will say that the tantalizing thing about this particular fragment is that it comes under the heading "The Sixth Caste of the Malkioni." Isn't that interesting? Granted, there's a word crossed out that "Malkioni" replaces, but that's probably just one of those typographical errors.

    The next section, even more tantalizing, is titled "The Rebellion of Kaldes" and then the page is blank!
     

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  19. 2 hours ago, Snugz said:

    Arkat the Yellow King, or vice versa

    All kings (talars) are yellow if you walk far enough into the west but if you go too far the pantone flips (violet).

    Coincidence is probably the MGF response. There was an earlier effort in the '70s to surface the phrase as "Impossible Possibilities," but it ironically does not exist in the original French and so can be considered a failure. Some force keeps wanting to make this happen around the fringes of the conversation and won't rest until satisfied. See also: Los Seres Imaginarios.

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  20. 33 minutes ago, Broadsmile said:

    But what am I regular  Antipu antipus (Joe Schmoe) going to do with mindblast, madness, reflect and regrow limb.  

    IMG most of this magic is an application of the real work of the 7M cult, which is the cultivation of personal psychological states . . . not quite the radical individuality of full illumination but a kind of progressive realization that social identity is a construct and the imagination has power. Thus someone who is advanced in 7M meditation will naturally figure out how to trigger similar states in others or shake off / repel magical aggression. You know the underpinnings of consciousness. That's the important part. The weaponized forms are good for the conventional character sheet but really incidental . . . they point toward another kind of game that might or might not show up when lunar heroquesting rules are published.

    (Regrow Limb is a secret of Dying Moon therapy and so is a little different.)
     

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  21. 24 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

    But would the fish and chips be any good in Pavis?

    It's like Vegas . . . since everything is flown in, everything in the world is available and it is of relatively high quality for the price point. The Ingillis have worked out a secret magical system where black cod from Feroda get sent back up to the docks and distributed to the fry stalls or turned into hand rolls if you know the right people and show up on the right day. I can't vouch for the chips though.

  22. Along with the original question, who originally acknowledged Kargan Tor as a god? Which civilization(s) interacted with him and his mythology? Where does he come from? Did he preexist the Celestial Court power rune pantheon passed down to us?

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