scott-martin

That is good. YT is rarely classed among the great magicians of the Mothers but working your way out from under the inflexible HMKT code required better than the average twisty mentality. This would naturally feed into entirely different fencing styles for ritual duels and everyday work. Wherever HMKT pedagogy evolved to prefer straight stabs and fixed directional parries, YT throws all that away for something that avoids straight lines whenever possible in order to better evade the grim god who only sees across hard corners. To some it looks undisciplined or inefficient but the liberation from geas makes up for it. And of course there are cosmological ramifications. "The angles!" he heard Black say. "They [the Hounds of Tindalos] will most likely come in at the corners of the hall! Use not the points of your weapons, for these will be powerless! Strike with the curve of your blade and use a curving cut."

This is my favorite insight of the season.

Just to piggyback on everyone else's good thoughts to reinforce your own original impulse . . . if this is the kind of village situation that interests you, you're probably going to be exploring a relatively ground-level game where more people than usual are focused on the basic labor of keeping a household running. More people spend their days in direct interaction with the crop cycle. That's okay. They're people too. You can really explore their aspirations and character here, bringing in the larger-scale Orlanth + Ernalda mysteries around that foundation. This village might be unusually poor or isolated so it can't reliably provide Orlanth + Erlanda (I almost typed Orlanda there, mount your chariots o my revisionaries) to everybody. They just don't have time or resources to stretch the rites all the way around. This then creates a social tension between the people who get access to adventurer-style magic, initiation and status . . . and those who don't. It's more of a quasi-feudal structure with farmer families and slightly more rarefied "aristos" who think past the hide. If the local leadership is particularly unpleasant they might even reserve O+E for themselves and their friends, denying it to the little people and so that's why you have separate Barntar + Grain here. The question for your game would then revolve around what O+E thinks about that the common B+G rites don't provide in any refined form. Does something like O+E naturally and spontaneously evolve out of B+G, so a really good homestead will naturally produce sturdy and clever children who can tap into the more adventurer-style mysteries on their own? Does fortune favor the bold, even if that's the idiot youngest child who can grow up to be someone important? Or are some people just not fit for the O+E life and B+G is all that they can handle? Are Orlanth and Ernalda naturally expansive or exclusionary, and how does that work in either scenario? Is the secret stuff a universal adult human right or something that can be granted or withheld? To avoid pushback from the known history of how the Orlanth cult in particular has evolved in places like Sartar, you might consider setting your village in the past or in some far-flung corner of the theyalan belt . . . getting a "rites of spring" vibe from the place, a little archaic and simple by modern Storm Tribe standards. Maybe somewhere in Aggar, second age Balazar, somewhere like that. Of course in Balazar you would also have a shot at bringing in expansionist Yelmal influences to complicate the mix, and we know how well that works.

Repeatability also signals you can teach the lightning. The great alchemist Fulcanelli even stretched the rule to suggest that even twice is lucky, you need to be able to do a thing ("RE") two and a half times to demonstrate real Mastery over the process.

Along these lines, especially in this context, is there a known shamanic tradition in Glorantha where Bad Man is a(nother) woman?

Oh, who is the real star of that show though and how many hit points does he have?

That's an extremely interesting prompt. IMG at that level there are multiple distinct routes to power. Maybe a few routes culminate in the "superhero" state with the immunity to conventional magic, heroic escape and so on . . . but there are others that lead other places, some of which didn't show up in the existing board games. You can become all kinds of things if you work hard enough and you have a little luck or fate on your side. Maybe we call some of them saints or archmages, awakened mystics, monsters, demigods, dragons, engrions, nagual, chimera, supreme idiots, scary creeps, thin white dukes, dharma bums and so on. If Josephus had lived a little longer, he might have become a pompatus of love, whatever that means. Most of these theoretical people of power have evolved along very different lines from the superhero. They accumulate different tricks and habits of being. Maybe some of them still bleed. Maybe others are even tougher. Either way, if one of these parallel paragons were to interact with a "superhero," you'd naturally generate sparks and other strange phenomena . . . but they might never interact directly at all. It's unlikely, for example, that Godunya and Jar-Eel ever end up in the same room. They're both busy and their personal "magnetic fields" slide away from each other when they orbit too closely. I suspect that as the rules clarify these advanced questions, the esoteric distinctions will become more familiar terms of art. For now, we know a tiny bit more about what makes a "superhero." Like any well defined state of being, it's as much of a prison as a power trip. Karma's a bitch that way. Even a slow wheel turns.

Lore suggests that while a helmet forged from "lo-metal" will interfere with these detrimental transmissions . . . although the civilization that came up with this defense met a sad and secret end anyway.

Oho.

Of course I love this for reasons. Do they interact much with Oakfed and other lowfire contacts (Mahome)?

This checks out. Awakened riding beasts theoretically maintain their quadruped lust . . . although some probably try to find ways to sublimate awkward love for their riders, while others are only attracted to their awakened peers and revulsed by a dumb mind in a herbivore body. While we're here, how is Alter Creature used? Who uses it? What tends to happened to Awakened riding beasts and what status do they tend to have within Waha?

1. Anilla's mythic enemies list 2. The Book Of Drastic Resolutions 3. Efforts to make the dwerulans and their mucusy pantheon happen

(Y)embyli tend to aspirate the sound we know in the north as [f] as [p] . . . thus the origins of "Palamal," the sun spear force. This became extremely controversial under the (Y)errinoru/(Y)elamle revelations but I'm told something like a Sun Dome system was actually run out of Umathela centuries ago.

Right. You've got to Impress those Examiners to let you in. Which is why we're having a sale on spell trading throughout the network this season to give you the benefits of multi-cult flexibility without all the headaches of community compliance. Sell one, get one. Sell two, get three. And if you're willing and able to give us six points of spell, we'll give you back a full dozen of your choice from network inventory. (Offer void where taboo. Trade protocols apply.) A little more seriously, MG is pretty open to multiple initiation because I see the Gloranthan soul as a rewritable medium. What worked for you as a kid or a young mom might not really apply any more as you age or your community needs to evolve to keep up with the times. Some people grow up in an Orlanth (Orlanth + Ernalda) environment and stay there their entire lives. Others, pushed or pulled into more complicated adventures, need to change horses. Some cultures develop a natural progression where you usually pass from entry-level cults to cults that reflect more "mature" life stages. There is a lot of tension in the storm tribe, for example, between whether you see classic Orlanth as mostly for kids or mostly for patriarchs, but Voria conventionally transitions toward the mother stages and then beyond. Take that part up with your priests. If you don't like the answer, become a priest yourself. Some of these adventurers drop their initial cult affiliations and rewrite them with something more relevant to their current stage of life. These are converts. The new cult tells them to let go of the old initiation, the old cult takes the old magic away. I think this is rarer in Gloranthan polytheism than in modern earthly models, but it happens when the examiners or higher-level cult leadership (on either side of the process) decide that the new you is incompatible with the old one. Ernalda is not compatible with Voria in mainstream Esrolia right now, for example, although this might change in the Hero Wars era. The question is which side insists on the erasure of the old slot. IMG entry-level lunar cults are theologically OK with letting an Orlanth person come in and keep the old identity. This isn't the Protestant Reformation here. You get a new shirt and make a sincere effort to pay attention to what the missionaries tell you. (Sometimes it doesn't work, but that's a whole other story.) But most of the time, you're still Harthang from the Vale or whoever you were before. You maintain most of your old community consciousness . . . family structure, generational performance, your sense of who you are as a person, only now with a little bit extra. You're going where you need to go as an individual. The old cult might feel threatened or otherwise cut you off. That's on them. Find something else to do on Windsday. Politics can swing this all over the place. I'd let people roll to smooth things over with the old cult (modified by the relationship table and the usual factors) to see what happens to that old slot in the soul. The number of possible initiations anyone can functionally support at any given time is nebulous but I think it caps out at six or seven. The 10% rule also applies to your ability to juggle your cults. Each demands at least that sliver of your mind in order to remain active. Otherwise, it evaporates and your initiator might be bummed out. Communities under stress will generate cross initiations more often for various reasons. One thing that's interesting is that in a Hero Wars environment someone is probably weaponizing these mechanics right now . . . "just in case" or for some specific objective. Could be Carmanians, Westerners, Aeolians, Etyries, Argrath, anybody.

This feels like the saddest forest story I've ever seen.

I think it can be finessed with a "did not return . . . yet." Dead gods who cannot be contacted today and have yet been unavailable within time may one day follow their colleagues back up from the velvet underground into the world of the living. Their strange aeon simply hasn't come round at last, their long hour not quite here. Even the Gold Wheel Dancers were extinct once until somebody prayed hard enough. Some esoteric Gloranthan thinkers probably see time as the long process of recovering every lost god from the brink of oblivion. Given the cyclical / tidal ebb and flow of the seasonal powers, they'd put great stress on calendrical calculations. Others deride these "makers of 'moons'" as muddled mystagogues, rehearsing endless streams of meaningless syllable combinations in the hope of catching an otherwise lost god name like Baroshi or Sedenya or whoever.

I really love the way this is phrased because it looks almost like an origin for the ransom system. Warrior communities accumulate captive civilian populations (serfs, "thralls," vendref, oasis people, dronars and so on) in various circumstances. Once you're captive, you survive through labor. In theory, you can escape or fight your way to freedom, but one way or another this simply tends to remove you from the community (death or exile). Some communities support systems of exchange where a captive can earn out or outside resources can be deployed toward liberation. We usually think about this in terms of individual ransom relieving adventurers from falling into permanent captivity but the principle can be extended. Likewise, somewhere in the west the hrestolist principle of caste mobility has got to have been applied to populations that have become a permanent laboring underclass . . . subjugated lodrilite bands and so forth. Pay the right price for these people, work the right bargain and you can establish new free nations. This might be how city formation works in various parts of the world, with liberated serfs abandoning their rustic origins and crowding together in places where their labor enriches them directly. Those with a hrestol orientation would probably emphasize enlightened self defense and militia training while others would associate with regional mercenary bodies for muscle. And another god associated with the ransom system becomes extremely interesting as a liberating figure. Maybe this side of him is associated with clandestine para-revolutionary "guilds" in some places, cells of vocationally organized labor operating on the fringes of aristocratic authority to buy out the system from within. They'll buy you from your master, remove the signs of your captivity, give you something new called a "job." Maybe that's an even fresher spin on where Trader Princes come from.

Last postscript for now, the best developed "man of all" we have today is probably Ethilrist. While he is profoundly heterodox in innumerable ways, the only western title he ever seems to accept is the simple and slightly archaic "sir." That's the only one that fits, as far as he's concerned. What's his take on "joy?" How does he solve for death and other problems of the soul? If you kill him on the WBRM battle map, will he find a way back? (He will also accept the title "hero" but I'm not convinced that one originates in the west.)

It strikes me that while ascended master cults are common lore, I don't actually know much about where and when they actually emerged or who maintained these structures as part of their ordinary spiritual landscape. Given the surprising paucity of even "saints" in the orthodox southern materials and the quasi-manichean twirl people like to give the Irensavalists, this may really be a northern phenomenon with living masters honored like Cathar parfaits or sufi pirs while the persistence of contacts beyond death foregrounds some of the transmigratory dimensions that people are chewing on elsewhere in the thread. "Ascension" is when something survives. The "master" is what survives. And there are technical vocabularies for routinizing contact with these survivals as well as just maybe replicating the feat on your own . . . some of these would be those Malkioni Books of the Dead you're looking for. Others, sadly, might secretly steer the reader toward vivamortism and other blasphemies. I don't believe the line of Syranthir was ever venerated in this way . . . their route to historical immortality was probably different and more extreme . . . but I welcome correction if experts want to pipe up. This is important because it would suggest whether ascended mastery gets a foothold in Carmania because if the imperial founder or his divine son don't get ascended master status then what's the point of anyone having it? Of course the Stygians might well have perpetuated the practice as seen in places like TOTRM and references to people like "St. Paslac." Whether they had easy lines of communication with the north is an open question. I suspect they did (Arkat conquered the passes and the Wolf Empire seems to have managed on both sides of the mountains before him) but we can disagree. Somebody, however, evidently venerated Paslac as an ascended master after the fall of the Stygians. Who were those people? Where did they live? Are any still around? They might, for example, have been some of the elemental magician-priests who show up in the northern sagas in Jonat's time . . . stygian-tinged sectarians on the fringes between emerging imperial orthodoxy and the pagan traditions. Maybe they conveniently vanished in the ban if not before. In any event this thread is developing a cluster of strands that each weave into the fabric of conventional "hrestol experience" but may not be equally present in all places and times. There's caste liberation. There's "joy," which may or may not be a philosophical consolation against mortality. There's ascended mastery, which may or may not be a condition of lasting joy. There's the transmigration of souls. And then, as oppositions to this complex, we have the various brithinist and quasi-brithinist (and mostalite and quasi-mostalite, if there's a real distinction) rejections of mortality in favor of caste performance that currently drive movements like the devout rokarist's hope to live forever. We know all the moving parts. How they get dealt into time is an interesting proposition. (I'm half inclined to just wave a wand and state that the HW approach to all of this, "sorcery plane," "grimoire network" and all, is a fantastically distorted version of what recent Irensaval-oriented philosophers actually taught, before they were wiped out in the purge and their inner teachings lost. But that's a dangerous wave.) The one thing I forgot to say in my earlier screed today is that I think modern Loskalm has psychologized caste identity by separating it from caste performance. "You are not your job," Siglat may once have said apocryphally or in public where the scribes were waiting with pens juicy with ink. "A farmer may have the soul of a warrior, a sage, a king. Our crusade is to find that soul, feed it the proper food. For when I see the workers of the body, I will give you warriors of the heart. Is not every man a duke? Does not every woman have man rune, is she not a man also?" Of course this feeds directly into my more recent dumb theories. There's too much we will never really know about the north. Their history is too broken and Greg wasn't really interested.

"Practices" . . . the cage they build around the experience in the hope of making it a little more predictable like you say. So let's look a little more closely at those bars. Start with the element of uplift. The historical Hrestol doesn't seem to have had a developed sense of the castes existing in any kind of hierarchy, but instead seems more receptive to a matrix view where the soul is drawn to overcome existing constraints. If you're born into a talar family, you naturally crave a more active and adventurous lifestyle. If you're a horal, you might never really be content in that role . . . and anyone might want to investigate the intellectual disciplines of the zzaburs or figure out how to live productively. You're never really going "up" or "down" across caste lines in the sagas. You're simply expanding "across" barriers. By the time you arrive at post-imperial Loskalm, the caste matrix has hardened into more of a pyramid with a few aristocrats on top, a teeming perpetual underclass on the bottom and some specialists in between. It's a dark age where pragmatic political economy enforces some squalid feudal divisions. The aristocrats already grow up with everything they need to be happy, so the utopian impulse is to extend that largesse to the workers. Max Weber would say the motive here is something like altruism and something like guilt, embarrassment. There might also be a surrender to demographic inevitability going on that we don't know about yet. (The secret history of the West is full of dronar liberation movements, some of which might even be more or less successful.) So what you end up with is a system where everybody's "free" to recapitulate the hierarchical system by starting at the "bottom" and working up as high as their talents and opportunities take them. Most people don't get their consciousness expanded all that far . . . from a cynical POV, opening up horal consciousness to the dronars basically means instituting a universal rolling draft (Greg met Hrestol during the Vietnam War) and so your "reward" is getting put in harm's way. Those who survive that experience and can handle more qualify for initiation into the chivalric meritocracy, which is where the deeper Hrestol consciousness emerges. If I remember the math correctly something like 90% of the population never gets there in this lifetime. Now the horal (kshatriya) is an interesting figure within this work because the real tension for the historical Hrestol and his friends was whether horals could lead and talars could fight. That's the caste line that concerned them, probably (IMG) because of shifts in the balance of importance among the castes within the dawn age communities. We even see this back on the island where the question of might (military force) versus right (the law) rises to the surface. Hrestol is an aristocrat who craves a life of action. The other prominent early "men of all" (engrionor) are grunts who crave a broader life than simply following orders. This is the pivot in the modern Loskalm system as well, with the aspirational warrior (drawn from the workers) rising while the children of the rarefied classes (aristocrats and professional / ritual support) are sent back to the bottom to make room. What we have is a society in which everyone in a position of authority has distinguished themselves through feats of arms and craved something more. That "craving something more" is when they're initiated into the Hrestol mysteries and presumably get access to the meditative practices that feed the more philosophical pursuit of joy. (I suspect most people below MOA are not "literate" in our sense, although I welcome surprises.) The content of these practices is worth exploring! I think the bulk of the teaching is applied ethics, how to consider a situation from multiple personal perspectives . . . the game impact would be a kind of "illumination," ironically enough, a kind of relativistic consciousness. They had riddlers in the north too. Anyway a lot of words but it's that kind of thread, might as well lean into it!

Lore has already given us a built-in way to check. Create a campaign around a person (*) who has a relationship with the goddess and let them try to contact the goddess in various parts of the world. Where contact can be established, you can find the goddess. And where there are already people (*) who acknowledge someone like the goddess, see if you can worship together. If so, their local deity and your goddess are close enough. Velhara already lives there. She might have different rites there but you know who she is. Or maybe the local people (*) don't recall anyone like the goddess. See if they'd like to learn. * Two legs, four legs, six legs, eight legs, no legs, whoever. "People."

Siglat was the devil. You know him by his works. I also had a dream where the timeline is off and the original Western colonists date "year zero" from the sunstop, arriving shortly before that period and meeting an unwelcoming response from the natives. But there have been many waves of migration landing in many places.

I love your user name. Thank you very much for being here! Let's embroider around these other great responses . . . maybe confuse you a little more, maybe give you the clarity you want. IMG this is controversial within the historical development of Hrestolist teaching so you are right to ask. The word "joy" appears many times in the Book of the Reign of King Froalar, the most complete (contemporaneous?) account of the great teacher's life we have today. The references are casual and not esoteric . . . "the joy of the returning sun," "many sorrows and joys," "and so the king was filled with joy." Instead, the central teaching as communicated in this extremely archaic text is very simple. This is the whole of the founder god's new covenant with the nation of Froalar: Let the old ways be changed in Seshneg, for you are set upon by a mighty foe. Let those who would lead, do so. Let those who would fight, do so. Let those who would reap and sow, do so. Let those who would study and ensorcel, do so. Go forth and do as you wish, for my blessings go with you. And may all the gods look upon you with favor. This liberation from caste constraints is, the teacher is quoted as saying, how to become as a god and how to gain the powers of a god. While remaining human. But to misquote Mr Crowley, the word "joy" does not appear here with its modern aura intact. This is not to strip away all the revelations that come after, only to highlight the rather humble insight at the dawn of it all. With hard work and willpower, you can become whatever you set out to be. You can learn any skill that appeals to you. Nothing human is foreign to you. You can innovate. "Joy" takes care of itself and seems to get conflated with the hrestolic experience at various points in history, rejected again, reclaimed. Maybe it originates in the exile period. Maybe somebody later comes along and inserts it. Maybe it was always there from year zero, riding alongside caste liberation, hidden between the texts that survive. Either way, your characters here in the terminal third age can fret at its minutia, sixteen hundred years of theological needlepoint . . . or not. Follow the road in front of you and eventually you'll get somewhere interesting. For the people of post-Siglat Loskalm I think there is a terrifying shadow between theory and practice. In theory, joy might come at any moment . . . often, as you suggest, completely unexpected. Joy is a Surprise and a Surprise can be its own Joy. You can experience it as a child digging in the yard, sudden moments of being, sun and smell and the work that is its own reward, the butter melting on the hot bread fresh from the oven. You can experience it at the end, looking backward at the whole carnival of being human. Joy, the riddle goes, is what goes on four legs in the morning, three legs at night, changing shape with you along the way. In practice, they don't make much time for it until near the very end, when they've absorbed multiple perspectives and lived multiple lives. It's in the contrasts that they discover the universal experience that unites us all. We could even argue that this is a form of native "experimental heroquesting" across incarnations, but that's heavy stuff. Just follow the tension between theory and practice and you'll discover some great memories. I'm going to say the first is almost always a role other people ascribe to you, with or without your cooperation. It's largely a matter of posterity, a death mask. They give you one when you were especially memorable and then their need keeps you coming back. The second is a role you elect for yourself. You see it in the mirror. It's a goal and a path as well as a status in the here and now. It's an acknowledgement that you are On The Road. Maybe you're modest, you're merely a man of some (with a fortune to come). Man of few. But you're trying. Joy comes and goes, finds you. All masks and mirrors go away. Sometimes smart people can see it on your face, sometimes not. Who cares? The rest of these responses are great also. In the fullness of sixteen centuries there are few objectively wrong answers, only things people asserted or believed or tried and time judged them for itself. The best parts either persist through the ages or are constantly perversely being reborn. I've discovered new things just writing this and reconsulting the archaic texts . . . for example, Hrestol and his "dragon." The curious "elision" of Hrestol's time in hell, a place for "joy" as we understand it today to emerge, if only that part of the story weren't somehow missing. inchmalle, surely?

My Dumb Theory here is that the sorcerous son of Malkion was dead (!) at the time (!!) and had yet to really recur on the island or elsewhere. Somebody else was Sorcerer Supreme then. At a certain stage the succession changed and now we have an immortal presence in the tower calling all the shots. This creates a useful paradox in that the current blue man claims to Know Everything but I suspect pointed questions about the Gbaji era will slide off strange and funny walls of evasive ignorance. The sad part is that this blind spot gets retroprojected onto a looming "hero war" and so drives people to drastic resolutions in order to forestall "future" assaults that have technically "already happened."