scott-martin

DUMB THEORY: There are no desert trackers. Those people out there are doing something different. There is no economically viable trade route across the Genert Wastes. When we talk about What Caarith Did we're really talking about something else, one of those complicated concepts of identity that you just can't uh communicate in any normal combination of Harmony + Change. You need to invest in a special rune for this stuff.

Oh you guys. Community philanthropy is the heart of every temple or shrine that accepts (or demands) public donations. What they do with the income is a factor of the cult in question. But this is really an excuse to glorify Issaries. Yes, every sanctified Market is still a portable shrine at least. The business of the Market is more comfortably pursued from a stationary position so most merchants prefer to travel to a fresh site, hammer in the pegs, set up the shingle and then you can "pray" before striking site and moving on to the next campground. But if you're rolling slowly enough or can pause to make transactions there's nothing theologically wrong with running a truly mobile 24/7 operation from a barge or wagon or whatever. If you can make orders and take the money remotely you can in theory run the shrine as a delivery service, always on the go. Obviously this has tactical ramifications for sick or suppressed lightbringer cultists who need a shrine to come to the door bearing staples but also friendly rune point replenishment. IMG Raw Greed is increasingly a self-policing factor within the monetary supply itself, a poison chase card of sorts that is only magically effective on repeat or prolonged exposure. We see a lot of fancy rocks in the course of the day but every one you covet raises the odds that you're going to overdo it and suffer the effects of Unfree Unexchange or hoarding. But it's all just statistics and the luck of the draw, really. God doesn't say "this one over here is pushing the margins, send the rock." If you push the margins too hard, you tend to acquire the rock that takes you down. And there are various therapies. I like the notion of the countercult whose job it is to take surplus cash out of circulation and seed the treasure cycle to come. There are other "chase coins," Issaries is indeed the father of silver so why not set various tribes of currency circulating around the world, fetishized commodities with their own little uncanny spirits each a little less fungible than their dumb cousins. Hyena is the real spirit of reprisal IMG and is also managed by the cult bigwigs. If you get the pelt and can't turn it around, you basically need to settle your earthly affairs and liquidate all your crap to fund the Desert Track ahead. I like to think this can be good for people (the ones who come back are healthier and get their groove back) but there's usually great wailing and gnashing of teeth. And many simply never come back.

Well when the vicar visits it's either cake or death, isn't it. I love how this thread has laid bare the priestly orientation lurking behind the "god time must be abstract and simultaneous because otherwise how could all these stories be true as we have agreed to agree" shibboleth. A god in the theyalan view, as we all know, cannot "change" or "learn" or decide to do things differently. That's on us alone, the mortals. Maybe the gods are allowed at best to cycle. Otherwise, a priest might've said once, what's the point in emulating an entity who screws up, changes his mind, disrupts, makes things worse before they get better? That grubby entity prone to failure could not be not our god, the king of the gods. That's some kind of trickster or even something tied to the moon or worse. And we don't have to reconcile the stories because by definition that's the kind of story that doesn't make sense. Forget it, Jake. It's god time. To the extent to which the gods are characters, maybe, they enter into the structures of the world and participate in narrative. This narrative will be punctuated and fragmentary, something that partakes in both the archaic and the modernist. We put the fragments together like isolated panels cut from a comic strip. Rules and intermediaries evolve historically to restrict the way the fragments are collected and who is allowed to have an opinion. "There is no answer" is no answer. Sometimes the compromise of civil religion becomes a net that holds adventurers back.

SANDY DENNY, THE ONLY GUEST VOCALIST EVER TO APPEAR ON A LED ZEPPELIN ALBUM: First of all, I think a Rolling Stones track, which might seem a bit of a surprise but I certainly enjoy them as much as everyone else does. This one's from the Beggars Banquet album and it's called "Sympathy for the Devil." Which is a minor dodge (evasion noted) but big day at the office and I need to find our copy of Kerenyi's Prometheus to review the Goethe stuff going on here.

Genert was clearly the old sun. This particular configuration of lightbringers couldn't bring him back because the return of the repressed always requires a twist. So they made a deal with the other guy instead.

I think the RQ2 version at least works better as a narrative of personal development. Orlanth is only a relatively big wheel in the larger breakdown, never explicitly the devil here but only one of the people who weakened the world to the point where the devil becomes possible. There's always a delicate negotiation in this community framework between that "lesser" darkness or storm age (bad but not awful, bearable, redeemable, not chaotic, I'm a little stinker) and a "greater" darkness that poses a real ontological or ethical threat to everybody. Other community frameworks don't obsess over that particular bit of wiggle room. The point is that the really bad stuff is always somebody else's fault. That person doesn't seem to take responsibility or make restitution. Except in the most gnostic and weird fragments we have, the devil never reforms and is by common definition that person who is unreformable. Presumably people tried and tried but he never got any better. Likewise, death never apologizes. What he does instead is sacrifice his personal history in order to eliminate personal responsibliity . . . a species of "illumination." Eurmal, as we've seen, only gets it together through the tutelage of an Orlanth who presumably knows better. Zzabur decides it's the world's problem, he's totally fine actually. Orlanth and Pamalt are the ones who make it their problem. We can dismiss how well they do at that based on how we see their followers behave themselves, but on the whole the world seems to be holding on so somebody is holding it together. I like to think the Net is truly collaborative and you need all the known gods to keep pulling at every station to hold up the cosmos. Some gods need more outside validation than others. And I think this is part of the baby boomer aspect of Orlanth in particular. He's one of the first of the gods who didn't make the world. He wasn't around for much of creation. All he really does is live here and arrange the resources of the postwar surplus. He invents rock and roll, gets involved in exotic spiritual systems. But push him and he might get a little bewildered and huffy about why there's suffering. It's not really his fault. He was just born here. The government and human nature did it. He's not really a martyr in the texts. We can find room for that in there but on the whole the Bath doesn't even appear in the RQ2 version: suffering is something that happens to other people, mom and dad, and we're going to find a new way that gets them a better deal. The emphasis is on adventuring because this is Adventurous. He could forget what he's learned on his adventures at any time, relapse and go back to being Orlanth the teenage dirtbag until the next time the campbellesque Adventure came calling. I really do think Harmast is where it changes. What Harmast is looking for in his era when whatever archaic storm man they had was almost entirely suppressed was his childhood god, the god of his fathers, an entity he could embody who was still bigger than himself. Someone to look up to. A grownup. In his era, the storm god had been pushed down to the kiddie table where a lot of people still make Barntar sit today. So Harmast gathered up the dad left in his head, went looking and found some friends along the way. He learned how to emulate that dad, be dad, get married. It turned out the god of his fathers and the father of his god were in a similar predicament. He tried to help out. They are a pastoral people after all. Herd sacrifice, substitutions, the sins of the fathers are visited. Anyhow his adventure brought them into contact with foreign ideas when they needed a boost. They've gotten pretty comfortable lately . . . I can't imagine Kallyr and her people considering even symbolic sacrifice of the central ego as the key, they were instead just looking for a quick and dirty do ut des in their dogeared copies of Umath Arcana or whatever. If we do this thing, a thing happens. It's so predictable we do it every year. But when it stops working, you need to take a deep breath and get back to basics. I always liked how it used to be such a surprise that Argrath comes back with Sheng. If you look at it closely, it's not business as usual down there. He really has to push until they come up with something truly unexpected and spectacular. The texts always used to be very clear, very few people even think to try this . . . and very, very, very few of them succeed at this deep level. Harmast did it. Argrath does something like Harmast, apparently.

Love it. By the way, I find it instructive to keep an eye on Eurmal, especially here. While modern theologians cherish the distinction between Trickster and the character who becomes adult Orlanth, I have it on good authority that this actually gave young Harmast Barefoot a little trouble at first and so I roll to disbelieve mythic economies where two Goofuses have uncannily similar exploits until one grows into a Gallant. Under the right conditions, Trickster resolves into one of the masks or "parts" of the mature storm king. Under others, storm king disintegrates into one or more tricksters and maybe some other interesting derivatives. In an irony this evolutionary spiral is largely lost by the time we encounter imperial Sedenya, who suffers and recovers but the missionaries don't seem all that eager to talk about the ways she learns.

Yeah, this is part of why I find this original (RQ2 rulebook) version so compelling. He's only accidentally the big figure at this stage, only getting caught up in the journey of other people who are at least equally important early on. But because he took personal responsibility for fucking up most egregiously, his ordeal is what saves the world . . . and his status goes from lowest to highest. It's not too far an oedipal leap to identify him with various local devils in his unreconstructed misadventures . . . all aspects of himself he needs to identify, renounce and reject as he builds a new identity. Too many mysterious bad boys in the prehistoric storm pantheon we never hear about, "dead" gods who went relatively straight. EDIT BECAUSE THIS IS THAT KIND OF THREAD, WE ERR IN PUBLIC: And at least one mysterious sad girl who falls in order to rise.

Cut through a lot of bluster + blame and you've found the oldest form of Adventurous we have, one of my favorite candidates for "foundational myth" of modern Glorantha. I think what's different is that Adventurous moves past taking responsibility for his cosmic mistakes to focus on how he can fix the world he broke . . . call it less passively "sorry" and more active "atoning." He killed a guy. He made it right. Admittedly, the part in the middle is only implicit. You have to read between the emotional lines and a lot of storm botherers aren't interested in that. A version of the god forced to take responsibility for the mistakes but not necessarily the solution might be found in modern institutional DX, the for-profit liberation industry that runs the imperial prison complex.

What is that lady in the red dress doing to that cow daddy Is she the butcher?

Double Down Dumb: This is where the lightbringer diaspora comes from, one way or another.

One of my favorite things about this character is that a very young Peter Brook remembered him pulling a very similar routine around Piccadilly in the early '40s and either he used the right LARP signals or it worked, endearing them both to me forever in the process. Dumb theory: increasingly captivated by Hrestol's father being something like what we would call a "tiger brother." This is how he fell and why relations with the other cat people of the region started well and turned sour. It's complicated but has sprawling implications for Rikard's millenarian cult as the hero wars erupt. Also the vithelan character "hsa" (夏) is "coincidentally" pronounced something like a native Welsh speaker would approach it.

That's really evocative. I wonder if it went the other way around, with the Eest regime introducing aspects of a more familiar red god to Amazons eager to learn fresh ways to kill things. Vorthan may be the result of a different phase of that project or a different phenomenon altogether . . . what's left behind when part of native "Tol" is transplanted.

I think the local oppositions here still point to that larger synthesis but the route ends up being a little more circuitous . . . which ultimately glorifies the goddess in her cycle, right? We just have to go all the way around. On one hand, the purely lunar authorities in the west are not recorded as caring one way or the other about Invisible Orlanth. The fact that this not explicitly Palamtales' problem gives you the accommodation you're looking for. The people with their eyes on the south are the ones interested in forcing that mythic conflict but they do not speak for the whole of the lunar way or even the empire. However, Invisible Orlanth is explicitly a problem for the hierophant, who tacitly maintains his office through an accommodation of his own with the imperial apparatus but ultimately derives it from the Old Carmanian system. The pattern of detail situates this as an Old Carmanian problem, essentially a local theological dispute. It's among the Idovanoids and Irensavalists. The sorcerers are the ones who care. Haggling over whether or not there's room for Invisible Orlanth in their world happens around the game table. The players get to get involved. Sourcebook writing success! Regular Orlanth may have come in with the bulls but I don't currently think so because they show up in the list of engaged "foreigners" at Castle Blue and separate from the Charg delegation besides. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that these people arrived from the farther west (or southwest, around Brolia) sometime after moonrise and before the Ban, in much the way that many of the modern lunar influences reflect immigration in the early wanes and not so much real mass "conversion" from the existing Carmanian accommodation with preexisting local forces. That last point is I think a decisive factor in negotiating between the West's role as a storehouse of lunar civilization during the Celestial Empire period and Yolanela and her spawn's ambivalent role nowadays. The boys we know about have been almost conveniently placed to each embody a different relationship with the heartland: one is so involved in the imperial court that he's completely absent, another runs what's left of the old aristocratic lineage worship and a third is the bratty one who brings us together today. The way Saranko's entry is written, it's no wonder people assume that he came to Invisible Orlanth cynically and may yet not be a true believer. Maybe it gets away from him. It's classic plot-seed-heavy sourcebook writing, do what you want with it. Reading between the lines, Yolanela herself evidently once had wider ambitions but they did not go well, forcing her to focus on the Spolite demesnes as a consolation of sorts. The gossip around her may be libel about an authentically saintly Mother Theresa type but then again, the land is teeming with "dark viziers" in her dubious employ. Now we are no longer rolegamers from 1985 and can explore different things. Lunar theology can be as radical and revolutionary as we want it to be. The looming horror is that the historical Warlord of Charg had a duty to eradicate everything he identified as "chaos" and there's little hope that they've changed too much in their isolation. And yet miracles like the Kingdom of Valmark have happened to give the faithful a place to go. Plot seeds are distributed for all players to exploit. The motivated simply have to be uh "clever." We have to give players a reason to care about the splendor of the red goddess' achievement.

Think of the explosive liberation theology we get to play with when the older cousins of the modern penitent cult finally declare victory, the smelliest + most prodigal of the burtae has thought hard about his transgressions + finally found his way back home. There might even be factors of Rightness at play here, let the viziers tremble for a SIGN will come in the west + all the old obligations literally melt into Middle Air, the rocks + stones themselves may start to sing!

A. The return of the repressed. B. IMG yes, what we call aeolianism is a substrate across much of the "malkioni belt," surviving in different forms and transmutations. C. Largely antagonistic right now (competing revelations) but the future is unwritten, things can change. There may also be an Invisible Moon spreading from the Janube side to complicate things. D. Lunar Civil War. People seem to like that motif. E. Not that I can remember. I would, however, plug the story of Damol in the Guide as a folkloric precedent that informs how Invisible Orlanth intellectuals understand their thing.

Parts of the Genertela box feel a little scamlike to sophisticated modern readers because they tried so hard to create plots that connect new regions into the central Dragon Pass conflict (the "core game") that the results feel somewhere between ingenuous and inauthentic. It's a trap, a naked adventure seed for the GM to crunch down on when the players ask what's interesting to our characters over on this map over here. We're wise to that tempting maguffin now, won't get fooled again until we take a peek below the text and digest what's really going on. I think Invisible Orlanth on one side of the empire and Storm Pent on the other appear a little too convenient as ways to broaden the storm-centered storyline far from Dragon Pass and provide a sense that the spiritual conflict is at least continental in scope, more "epic." Bracketing the empire with natural antagonists Sartar-aligned characters can discover and enlist as allies created a natural gasp in those George Lucas days . . . when the glowline reaches to the horizon, the place to look for hope is just over the horizon. Now that feels too easy. Too strident in a major key. There must be a twist. But we also know today that there is a persistent strand of pagan air spirituality in the West for modern visionaries to draw on as they look for solutions to their own problems. It's been repressed but one of the closest things to a law we have in Glorantha (maybe even The Law itself) says that the repressed always returns transformed. Attach it to the right elements within the establishment and you get a charismatic revolutionary movement to play with . . . MGF! Of course those attachments within the establishment come at a cost. People in power are going to want to use the new movement to solve their own problems. The Yolanelas of the world will try to dig their nails into your thing and render it harmless to themselves and dangerous (or at least distracting) to their rivals. Maybe they even helped create it but I'm sentimental enough to think it won't be so easy to control. They won't exactly get what they want and the genie is out of the bottle in the west now. The question Yolanela really should have been asking is whether Invisible Orlanth has a wife. I think she wouldn't have minded being his mom (sons are easy to control) but don't think that's really on the table right now.

IMG the old man himself is down there waiting for him with a gruesome surprise and a short cut back to business, sorry about the mess. "I am not the first Ethilrist. Nor am I the second, or even the third."

This is an epochal thread. I aim to get to it one of these days. For now, a box of my school crap just worked its way loose and what do I find, complete with period post-it note? Part of how I worked my way into Glorantha as Glorantha worked its way into me. The note says "I'm leaving Brigadoon," which is funny in context of conversation elsewhere. And then as the pen was dying, "it is the end." So sort of a suicide note for a pre-disenchanted fourth age never signed or sent with decades in the meantime . . . but really just a dramatic beat I found worth saving for later. Turns out the forest was always waiting behind the iron cage. We just had to get through it. Or something. The decision to exit Brigadoon can be apocalyptic, unraveling the entire deal they had with god if Harry makes it across the village boundary before they catch him. It can also be an exquisitely gentle thing like a unicorn vacating its territory, you just slip out the back by moonlight and then the real story starts. Founding myths are interesting. More later!

Do not speak to him of this, I implore you.

Without the wall, where would we scribble our slogans? For example, while I'm busy at the office this week I'm reminded of Kafka's little enigma, "On Parables" when it comes to special-case pleading for the instrumentality of religion, especially gloranthan religion as a projection, a sort of band constructed by music critics. What are dreams but diseases of consciousness? What is consciousness but a disease of [desire]? And yet here it is, the mythic.

For what it's worth, I can't recall meeting a shaman who relied on categories of belief . . . the spirits had intervened in their lives with enough force to satisfy the standard of evidence and that was that. Most of the struggle after that revolved around how to structure the relationship created in the encounter, less Kierkegaard and more Nietzsche where the commitments precipitate out of the ontological instead of the other way around. This suggests that glorantha is really most deeply understood a verb or at its most nounlike a "transitional" object that supports various processes of consciousness formation. Sometimes there are gods in there with you, sometimes you're alone. The lunar way has historically understood this even if it gets lost in the modern imperial babble. The storm religion tends to fumble into it under pressure, an ordeal like classical shamanic initiation that reminds me that while storm people preserve an interest in universal initiation they rarely seem to take it to the point where consciousness is really transformed. That requires an Argrath-type deeper dive and is one of the reasons he is depicted as being unusual by storm standards. It would be fun to resuscitate "misapplied worship" in this context of people who absorb the initiatory content too well for comfort and so enter into relationships with the gods that deviate from normative theism. I think these edge cases (again, "transitional") are a big part of what interested Greg . . . the moving lines where hexagrams blend and twist.

As game master, these two only exist in my game as plot seeds or plot complications. That's the only reason I "welcomed them in" and it means I want them to cause the players trouble or at least distract them . . . it's your game, go with your gut and your dramatic needs. Besides, the priest welcomed them in the first place so either there was no apparent problem with them then OR the priest is now having second thoughts and is trying to find a reason to rescind that welcome. In this scenario, I think the priest has graduated to the role of plot complication. Why is this becoming a problem now? Was the priest busy or distracted earlier and is now paying attention? Or have Tom and Jerry changed their behavior recently and now need to be corrected? Or has the priest's motivation changed, perhaps in pursuit of a useful scapegoat to cover mistakes elsewhere or simply to close the door on heterodox influences? If your game does not provide intuitive answers to these questions that get the players involved in MGF drama, I suggest having the priest approach the players (possibly in a night of hard drinking) and ask them to talk with Tom and Jerry before making the ultimate decision on whether to tolerate their behavior or not. Then these matters of pragmatic theology become the players' problem, which is often the key to MGF. IMG the situation you've set up makes me suspicious of the priest unless there are extenuating circumstances (omens, dreams) visible to the players as well. Part of the quasi-utopian joy of pretending to be members of an Orlanth community in the first place is that they make room for eccentrics with weird ideas and unusual lifestyles. Tom and/or Jerry may simply be part of the "Eurmal 1%," for example, and then their behavior is ritually tolerated. (Maybe the priest needs a trickster to accomplish all the rites, but I digress.) If the priest is trying to shut that down, this has become a problem for adventurers to correct . . . and just maybe Tom and Jerry emerge as adventurer types themselves, it's just that they've been having different adventures than the ones the players have experienced until now.

In a way, all of us has an El Guapo to face. For some, shyness might be their El Guapo. For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo. For us, El Guapo is a big, dangerous man who wants to kill us. I was exposed to trickster authors like Idries Shah and Don Juan Matus a little too early so the sign is always sliding unless you expend superhuman effort to pin it in place . . . and then the rest of the landscape gets melty. Build a hero war around the limits of interpretation, where our ability to negotiate difference breaks down and coexistence becomes difficult. The itch. I like the popcorn that accompanies the spectacular. Thinking about how Harmast accumulated his lightbringer surrogates suggests that the LBQ is also about assembling an "orlanth" from trace encounters until you reach a critical mass that satisfies. You can walk away from it. It speaks for itself. In that scenario, Orlanth's unique relationship with a trickster becomes important. He's the only one of the great gods who will wrap Eurmal in his protective mantle of personality and embrace the luciferian disruption as a familiar. I think this is the transgressive strand that keeps emerging throughout the history of Orlanthite religion, the way his system remains open to trying it different this time. Improvisation within the chord progressions of time. And as we know, it gets harder to distinguish between the storm hero prince and the trickster as you walk westward. If there were three high elements present at the birth of time, I suspect there would be endless learned debate on how many eyes each kept open and what that means. Sun is famously stuck in the web of dharma and accepts the eternal return with something that I guess looks like joy. Moon equivocates, finessing the contradictions as far as they go. Storm classically is the one who pushes back. But the gunas revolve.

Musing briefly on how LBQ and similar heroquesting of last resort function within the game environment sharpens my sense that the experimental heroquesters remain "off board" while their flashier colleagues spend down the world's accumulated resources to finish saying what they need to say. A plotline of spiritual struggle going on simultaneous with the clash of armies as though a literal pilgrimage / bildungsroman / "quest" narrative had somehow been interpolated into a Lord of the Rings style epic. The hints toward how capital-H Heroism operates in non-Orlanth contexts are interesting as well! Perhaps these personages aren't quite as straightforward as cultural paragons as their hype implies.