scott-martin

These are good notes. You're in luck: the upcoming Cults of Glorantha series will fill in a lot of that later this year. It's been a long time coming but we're almost there at last. It should help fill the gap. Also, if you like the RQ engine but are looking for a broader source pool that goes beyond the Gloranthan canon, MYTHRAS actively supports several settings that can be mined for stats.

I like your energy. What kinds of creatures in particular are missing for you to run the kind of game you want? I ask because it takes time to develop any line of GM options . . . current RQ has only been out for about five years and they've been kind of crazy years. Of course that's no excuse so it would be helpful to know what sort of encounter slots you consider poorly supported. If you need monsters, let's get you some monsters. One challenge they have right now is that current RQ is world specific. If there's no room for an animal, spirit or other entity in Glorantha, it won't appear here. That's a limiting factor compared to the kitchen sink drama other publishers provide. Another factor is that RQ "forked" off other roleplaying franchises extremely early, before the term "monster" got set to mean fantasy species. Back then, a "monster" was any encounter, from the old lady you meet at the post office to the leviathan that cleans the sea. The developers took an approach that the differentiating part of the encounter was on the inside where it comes out in play . . . the external stats could become a little streamlined and even generic. At one point they even sold a sourcebook advertising 1200 "monsters" for a penny apiece. They were really NPCs . . . not unique fantasy species because that book would have needed to be a little under 1000 pages long, cost more than $12 and been a daunting enterprise to come up with that many on the go even with the help of a computer. (And we get what we pay for when a computer does the writing.) That DNA is with us today. RQ can cheerfully generate infinite NPCs. That's what it's interested in doing.

I think you've revealed big jade hidden in the rock. The living experience Glorantha as a collective projection that might be noble in some lights and savage in others but is almost always considered in opposition to life here on earth, whatever trajectory that might take. The fantasy bronze age gives us something we aren't getting at home. From that perspective, everybody's Glorantha will be different because we're all here chasing something different. If one "Glorantha" stops being fun there's always another. Seriously. For some people, the real MGF comes from adjudicating the various interpretations like they're divergent stagings of the same script. The game (ludus) as it tends to be played is not that kind of ludibrium but there's nothing stopping it from going that way except all the other fans. This seems central to the Arkat story, which is really only marginally interesting IMG but matters a whole lot to other people. That's okay. But I can read the story well enough to know that the central tension is about where we draw the final line around the self and say "thou art not that." For Greg, one of the central disappointments of conventional life here on earth was that "religion" meant not just compulsory chapel service but full-fledged mid-century sickness unto death. Glorantha art not that. Glorantha exists in opposition to that. We can build on that birthright or not. Even in the official hagiography (let alone Sandy's spooky acid cowboys of the astral realm) Arkat spends his life and wrecks the world pursuing a primal sin against being itself by going to war against an aspect of being that could have just as easily been himself. There's a death drive. The gnosis gets busted, the dawn age always breaks down. I just find it sad, but it happens. Is that "chaotic" at any point? I find all that sad too, but the sea and the rain are full of tears. And what does it say about Nysalor who may or may not be a "gbaji" at any given moment. That part can be fun to think about from a distance. When we're done thinking of it, maybe we're home after all.

There is a strong post-kierkegaardian strain here + a few other places that I find personally wicked delightful but tends to run aground on the game as it tends to be played. Drop most of us in a 14th century protosartarite stead Outlander style (apologies to the sassenachs) and they'll classify us all as "arkat" individualists, somewhere between devious, evil and insane. They, on the other hand, have their organic connection to their perennial wisdom and so on. That's how we know they're "Gloranthans." We might take refuge in their trickster complex if we get any time to prepare, speaking of sophisticated lightbringer contexts. I think any Orlanth community sophisticated enough to develop a strong sense of CA and the other professional lightbringers will really only interact with the Bull through CA intercession . . . she houses the berserks safely away from the china shop and lets them out in times of trouble, only to welcome them back when the trouble has been stepped on. Bad bulls get tricked into leaving town altogether, going out to make trouble for the real hillbillies. Of course this is MGF for the CA player who wants to keep her hands clean and still maintain a big stick to threaten people with.

This distinction plays out on the everyday gamer level as well. Bulls are violent, disorderly and dangerous even in the absence of overt chaos. Their experience and emotional situation translates into a form of perpetual PTSD ("eternal battle") that can drive them to lash out at innocents. It also grants them paranormal sensitivity and a special legal role in communities that have learned to support them. One way communities learn to support the bull is through the CA complex. You can even think of Storm Bull as a kind of auxiliary to the White Lady in more sophisticated lightbringer contexts. Arkat and those who emulate him are bound by no known social constraints. This might not necessarily make them "chaotic" but if anything you'd rather have a bull around because you know how that story plays out. Arkat by definition disrupts the magicosocial fabric and leaves nothing new in its place.

IMG Issaries implicitly carves out the languages of "undercommunities" -- the poor, sexual and religious nonconformists, unassimilables, alternative markets, outlaws, surrealists, criminals and other refuseniks -- as AA's specialist domain. This reflects the bolg god's role as patron of Darktongue (especially in visually written form) in societies that have pushed their uz / tamalite components below the surface. But YGWV and the thread probably deserves less esoteric response.

I still like this, even though it's vanishingly low on the list of things to do.

I have a vague memory of a UK fan or three spotting the polari and spilling over into the letters column to educate the rest of us. Of course this would be completely lost in the collection. But this is not necessarily a street with a little bit extra podcast . . . Morbode as literally "fading land" liberated from geography is brilliant. Maybe a lot of AA worship in the north has "faded" or taken on different masks, hiding in something like plain sight. Hey, there's actually an issue of BDR:D on the Amazon right now for less than the cost of a racing bicycle!

Shannon "with help from Greg" claimed in Tradetalk 4 that Morbode was located in Old Rinliddi but ambitious Kethaelan darkness worshippers are unlikely to be able to access this information . . . for a few years now I've just assumed that the site's whereabouts became a state secret in the Holy Country after the general suppression of OOO heroform paths and so is carefully expunged from all available texts. They probably know more about it in Halikiv (and IMG ancestral Spol) but for some reason people rarely go there. Either way, AA's primeval wandering may conceal a secret of Gloranthan prehistory. Or not!

is to as is to

Tolat!

It does look like a deeper challenge. My initial thought was that the god's regalia has changed Since Time to conform with various religious reforms and prophetic encounters. In this model, the Shreds version might be relatively archaic or even refer to an outdated conception of the god (could be "Alkor," for example) and then at some point the relatively fancy little man at I-5 took over within the broader empire with his purple and gold. The red demon would be another view entirely, either "hostile" (outside Alkoth) or "esoteric" (the mysteries deep inside Alkoth). And the only images from the Cults book I've seen so far are the feathered version and what looks like a later Carmanized (European style) coronet. There might be something more "official" waiting for us but for now I wonder if the people in charge of the larger Dara Happan iconography have done their best to deprecate all the "city crowns" potential Yelm rivals were once depicted as wearing . . . and so in the terminal seventh wane the question of how you depict a free and independent Shargash just never comes up until someone in your game forces an answer.

Oh Sten, you wound me. This is still my Glorantha: Maybe that's been erased (all I have on hand is the older books) but if so, it runs the risk of being erased again in the ever-evolving pursuit of MGF. I have to look at what the books show me as well as what they tell me. I must be wrong. I like the harvest feast as sacrificial communal rite, but the scenario you paint strikes me as more of a protection racket than a spell. IMG the priestess casts Worship and all initiates kick in all their magic points but one. The earth mothers also collect their 5% cut as my material sacrifice. We eat. The sickles don't get any better unless they also teach me Bladesharp at the festival (presumably Barntar handles this); I still need to rely on my own householder skills to do the actual reaping. Keeping in mind that there are listed spells that people can sacrifice in order to handle eating plants, butchering meat, extra-fancy feats of craft (ritual enchantments), sowing (if Bless Crops and Bear Fruit happen at the start of the crop year), conception, gestation, couvade and supernaturally effective plowing (as opposed to the baseline for people who don't take the spell), am I missing a spell associated with the reaping? Does Bless Crops come at the end of the crop year and that's what the harvest feast is really all about? Can Bless Crops be applied at any time of year? How do people handle this in their Gloranthas? I'm not finding a reference. Again, I like the vision of the sacred universe, but as I'll pester Jörg about later, what I get from the older books and the newer character sheets is a world where we're told a lot about how everything is numinous (a spectacular animistic vision) and then shown a lot of day-to-day work where no magic points are actually transacted. Adventurers do not burn magic points in the course of their "everyday" lives, do they? I would hope not. But I must be reading the wrong books.

Before the communal heroquest (holy day, sacrifice, spell, song, dance) we in the runequest roll our chop wood and carry water skills, grubbing for pants that fit and clacks to pay the bar bill. After the communal heroquest, we roll the skills again. EGWV.

Where's the harvest spell? How many player characters use it every year? The Grain Goddesses teach Bless Crops and Barntar teaches Plow for the sowing but does Ernalda support her own unrecorded version of Food Song on the other end of the cycle? My Glorantha has evolved as a response to the game as it is played and the world as it is currently described. The "urban Sartarites" aren't professional fighters. They're not farmers either. They rely on Orlanth and Ernalda for the spells and the identity Orlanth and Ernalda support and work a shop or a service occupation between temple days. They buy bread baked in one shop that buys flour milled in a second location and sourced from multiple fields, some of which observe the conventional Bless Crops rites and some of which might have other loyalties. Up in the hills, life is still older and different. That's okay. I prefer your vision but it requires different play and different description, let's make that happen! Is there a Glorantha that runs everything on spells with no skill checks? Is this . . . animism?

Isn't this "the Jagekriand weapon" or northern thunderbolt I see on all the lightning chariots these days? Maybe the imperial problem with Orlanth is that they're really talking about a vestige of sinister Tarumath too recalcitrant to assimilate and too stubborn to die in the dawn wars. That's who they were hoping to kill down in the south. And the moon turns. Related: Derek Jarman once made the observation (illuminating to me at least) that "brown" is only an opaque orange, an orange that no longer emits light. This feels like it has strange bearing on the elf-on-elf religious wars, with their original orange gods hardening into a new relationship with death as alien to the green establishment as to hapless meat chroniclers.

I think you've uncovered the secret origin of the infamous blue moon self-resurrection rites here . . . and maybe an obscure bit of Rocky & Bullwinkle animation. When someone at home in the underworld wants to go to the surface, all you really need to do is recapitulate the exile and dig your way back out. Or if you're not strong enough to do all that digging, exit via the Crack. The irony of course is that most trolls probably avoid this easy short cut because they're finally back in underheaven and can rest awhile in their version of peace. But wily humans who get access to this lore can come back again and again.

Love it! Looking at the weekly cycles, I'm starting to suspect the sages who translated the calendar actually got it backward (the Godtime year began in the ruin of spirit and ended in the wisdom of silence) but it's more likely that their Kralorelan informants gave them this version for their own reasons. The Ignorant might openly proclaim the reverse version and the fact that it goes widdershins actually makes it more appealing to them. The 6 x 7 x 7 layout would generate an incomplete set of power "trigrams" (combinations only, one western power is not used so you have seven radicals to start with, no doubles or triples) but without additional insight into their court magic I don't know how exactly they stack the radicals or whether each week has a fixed trigram or something the oracles dynamically assign. Probably all have been true in the Gloranthan past and all will get their curtain call in the hero wars.

You simply have to translate "god learning" as θεοσοφῐ́ᾱ to take the mellow "sober" way . . . or for the inebriated (BLVTRSKY) route superimpose Man Rune onto the elemental pentagram like the cool kids and the rare unreconstructed/naive ZZBR precipitates as a fresh-faced enfant terrible. There might also be a third ferlie where you and I are not necessarily going today because only the bonnie brown man knows. I wonder what they have in Kralorela instead of an equivalent to the LBQ/7MQ/zzaburquest. Maybe they just don't think they need one.

There's a full-page picture of the god of Alkoth in Shreds of Light and Reason that might be inspirational for more than just headwear: He will be portrayed in the upcoming Cults book. I don't recall any official share of those images but "the odds are good" that the iconography remains largely intact . . . a fairly tight cap with an ornamental coronet with an orb suspended up top to identify him with his planet. However, the version seen here seems to be archaic. Modern Shargash seems to lose the projecting "horns" that support the orb and instead has feathers or fronds . . . possibly a later infusion from Tolat.

I love it. The usual suspects are unlikely: Dara Happa still resists the five-element model, opting to either stick with four or sublimate straight to "six" without making space for the air. The archaic west struggled to fit its more fragmented elemental system (best embodied in the alchemical metals, including "zrethus" and "uleria" as well as the problem with quicksilver) into the five-element model. Pamalt simply doesn't seem to care because every entity is an individual with a name and personality . . . and not so much a representative of a larger state of matter. A vithelan origin hypothesis would also be really useful for giving us at least two somewhat overlapping primal magic frameworks there: the binary calculator that generates something like hexagrams out of the fundamental eight power situations, and the mutual generation / mutual overcoming matrix of the elements. The tension between these frameworks in turn generates their history or whatever they have there.

IMG there are skill secrets and spell secrets. We know they both exist because they inhabit different zones of the character sheet and rely on different progression mechanics. "Guilds" teach skills without direct interaction with a spirit or a god. In theory, practical experience makes you better and can even unlock technical innovations that you can then choose whether you want to share with others. Under normal circumstances, your expertise remains with you for life. Because technical skills do not have independent existence outside people's heads, they can be lost (and will need to be rediscovered) if not passed on. "Cults" teach spells that are the property of the tutelary spirit or god. You don't need to practice and you don't need anyone to show you the tricks. All you need is the right relationship with the entity that supports the spell. And finally, casting a craft spell over and over doesn't make you better at the craft. If you leave the cult and lose the spell, the expertise was never yours, so it's gone. In what we like to consider modern Orlanth society, craft "spells" have atrophied since the dawn into a scattered body of specialized augments that make skill use more efficient in some way: faster, reduced material or labor inputs, fewer fumbles, whatever. What they all have in common is that they're "extra" . . . procedures that someone stacks on top of a skill in order to get incrementally better results. You spend the same day in the workshop either way. Most of the time you shovel charcoal into a furnace and the metal gets hot or the pots get fired or whatever. The next day, you reload the furnace and do it again. Sometimes you really want it to work so you do a special dance when the stars are right and wear your lucky socks. As long as you keep getting appreciably better results, you keep using the spell alongside your skill. And as the collective library of technical expertise grows, the spells recede further into the background. Maybe once upon a time spells did most of the work and you were largely a passive observer of what the gods and spirits created for you. Now gods and spirits who are only worshipped to provide craft augments get pushed into the background. They become increasingly obscure. Maybe once upon a time everyone who wanted to weave a basket needed to sacrifice to Baskamenta. Now you just keep the rushes moving day by day and once in a great while you bring in a spell to help make sure a wedding or other ceremonial function gets all the special stuff it needs. The higher your skill and the more advanced your physical plant, the less you need the augments. Within modern Sartar, the role of the "cult" shifts from facilitating the material basics that sustain human existence to providing answers to bigger questions: who are we, where do we go when we die, how do we perpetuate the work of creation or not. This is where spells that do things we would truly consider supernatural persist . . . the deep secrets of souls and bodies, powers and elements, energy and matter. Miracles. Once upon a time there was a little goddess of changing diapers and another one who knew about yarn and a third who wove the baskets. Those fragmented situational identities and their specialized techniques converged into a consolidated Ernalda, a way to be a well-rounded adult human who can do a lot of things and can always learn more. Others became a consolidated Orlanth, a different way to live, a different route to consciousness. The process may not be done yet, but for now, these are the two main ways of being human in modern Sartar. You don't need to be a professional fighter to perform the Orlanth mysteries. You can have just about any job. But your soul belongs to a god who supports a catalog of mysteries that go beyond your day-to-day occupation. Now the skill-driven "guild" system runs up against both sorcery and the western / mostal caste ideology in obvious ways. Maybe that's the future of Gloranthan humanity and maybe it's the past. I like to think unbundling technical knowledge as the secular skills frees up room in the soul for the important business, but that's just me. And of course other cultures are different. In Dara Happa most workers are cut off from the high mysteries (no individual initiation) and their identity revolves around job associations, family, other secular pillars or the Lunar Way. In deep Pamalt country everything might still be handled on transactional animist "spell" terms where we give a spirit of the basket (!) the body today and when we come back the spirit has made us that basket we needed. Who really knows what they have in Kralorela these days. I do love the notion that coinage is literally the medium for this historical exchange. When production and consumption are both within the home (or slightly larger commune) then these are wyter functions . . . the spirit of the stead is circulating, feeding and being fed in return. Once a pot of spare grain gets alienated from that primal scene, the world changes. "Magic" isn't necessarily diminished, although this is the dangerous moment through which the old gods can be silenced if things go in that direction. Luckily there is a god at the crossroads who can negotiate these situations.

There's a lot in this thread but the thought that these people may actually be an elite corps of Pralorite serpent brotherhood is too tempting to ignore.

Moving to the other thread to avoid stinking things up here. And timeshifting it since this will require at least a brief search of the lower stacks so we can really talk about the spider . . . and technically I have yet to close the markets for the week. Tomorrow and tomorrow. But I think it's not so bad.

Is this not an imperfectly screened recollection of the Dora mysteries?