scott-martin

The call is definitely, as we say, coming from inside the house.

As we all know, the blue man and I "have come to terms." By which I mean he continues to ignore me and I in turn no longer see any threat emanating from the island. He wants to live in the world where he's the only god who matters? Bon voyage. We'll stay over here and take our chances. I think his definition of subjectivity is always going to be colored by a deep and IMO irrational failure to tolerate the ambiguities of experience here in the paseren or strange phenomenal world (double veiled kate bush reference). He just can't do it. He also refuses to really accept intersubjective viewpoints or other people as really real. And in this view, any threat to his subjective existence (the only subjectivity that matters to him) is a threat to creation itself. Contemplating his own death, overthrow, surrender of agency, compromise or any other forced transition is equivalent to contemplating the end of the world. Naturally he struggled to separate himself from all such potential indignities and now I believe, since I no longer care what he's doing to whoever or whatever is left on the island, he's succeeded. I really like the evolving view here that acceptance of death is the compromise. Where the "I" leaves off is where "you" can begin. We'll go separate ways. Maybe we'll get in each other's way. The dead recede, increasingly ancient ancestors converge with "gods" the farther back you go, becoming static but also hieratic in their postures, harder to contact than mom and dad and Aunt Harriet who know you. The blue man also receded in what I think is another subjective direction (all roads lead to death) and is something like the most ancient of ancestors except for the little fact that I don't think he tolerates a line of inheritance as we understand it. The blue man might or might not have had children who can contact him today like a forefather. He did, however, promulgate a system of apprenticeship that takes over some of the same functions.

Keeping in mind that other cults like Orlanth have been historically suppressed and recovered (blessings upon you, Harmast Rainmaker), there's an entire hidden epic saga of loss, liberation, betrayal and revolt here for people invested in Little Sun to reconstruct. Or go to those distant domes and gather all the scattered magic kept from them by political expediency, then come back and we will admire the great work.

This is really, really, REALLY good. Thank you. I'm sure it was common knowledge to most but I can be sluggish.

Even if a lot of the inhabitants simply "blinked away" when the City shut down, there's probably a substantial diaspora of people out in the world now with enough deep magical lived experience to make life around them ramp up the weirdness. My first thought was of an overripe spore body bursting when it's time to spread, but now it's all about Charlotte's egg sac. Of course cosmic people with agendas would have tried gathering as many as they could find and that's a little hero war in itself. But with natural attrition and the inhabitants' lack of experience in more profane environments hope of collecting anything like a full set recedes from year to year.

I'm one of those people who find documentation for uninterrupted dragonewt occupation of Glorantha unconvincing. Instead, I think it's more likely that the colonies are part of a deeper process or cycle of hatch and hibernation . . . when local conditions are favorable, the hyperdimensional dragon eggs incubate and ultimately hatch. Because the new colony retains continuity with its previous experience ("karma") the new newts can't be convinced that they haven't been there forever. If sages find ways to test the artifacts, there's no empirical difference between them and authentically ancient stuff. Or else there's no reliable way to age test dragonewt material objects at all . . . forensic divination "slides off" the obsidian and dragon bone in known ways, forcing the sages to abandon the question. Sometimes it appears that a dragonewt irruption replaces an existing non-newt population. In other circumstances, a colony vanishes and at least sometimes a non-newt community (that may or may not have always been there before) continues in its place. In its entirety, EWF may be the closest thing we have to documentation of the whole of the cycle. I have my suspicions about Kralorela and Teleos, however. In this cyclical model the dumbest and most perpetually neotenic newts are left behind every time. Screw ups. Juvenile delinquents of the soul. While they theoretically advance from irruption to irruption it's hard to say . . . talking to them about this rapidly becomes confusing and produces dinosaurs. We can hope for their sake that the ones incarnated now are the last ones left who haven't learned what they want to learn here. The Hero Wars may give them a short cut, rescue mission or other metaphoric way back to full dragon consciousness. Presumably the most evolved expressions spend their time working on this kind of challenge. A cyclical species would naturally have an interesting ideological relationship with the modern lunar way. Again, however, the Kralorelan perspective is probably even more interesting . . . but talked about even less.

Tamali were a thing in the archaic texts. Almost certainly not our trolls but a kind of who lingered in western cities of the terminal second age. I seriously would not be surprised if they were the original children of XU whose soft way was then exported to soothe the unlucky womb elsewhere. may even have been the carrier, taking over otherwise forgotten in the process while keeping a professional interest in the magic. In general I also suspect that Gorakiki shamanism in its entirety preserves another strand of () that today only persists on the uncomfortable fringes of troll society, the shadow of the kygerlith as it were. This might have been an original troll religion displaced by one or more kygers, an adaptation of a foreign lycanthropic system to better suit weirdos like or even something imposed on some trolls that then spread. The mothers don't like them but what can you do.

I love this. Having taken a step back (in order to get a running start on a leap) I think Seshnela has its choice of dramatic roles in the terminal third age. The land, its human resources and mythic history can be used as a reservoir of exotic ideas and materials for the Dragon Pass hero war. People are driven east and their abilities are put to work. Whatever independent agenda they follow is not recorded in the documents we currently have. Meanwhile your tomb raiders and other opportunistic outsiders are raiding the area for secrets to deploy back home. Not much of this makes it into the Dragon Pass chronicles, which suggests that like many of the more interesting people fleeing Rokarist tyranny a lot of it actually ends up elsewhere, in somebody else's hero war we don't know about yet. A Hero War finds a use for things. While it's superficially tempting to imagine western resources flowing into the Lunar war effort, it's just too awkward a fit unless you look north beyond the Janube. The larger diaspora seems to flee along the more southerly corridors into Nochet and the islands, but there isn't a lot of documentation of Argrath finding a use for these people and their magic. They must go somewhere else. I think they ultimately go home to play out the real Seshnelan hero war, which is fought on the domestic symbolic territory in order to reveal the land to itself. In this version, the saga plays out a lot like the old Sartarite campaign, with exiles scattering across strange lands and gathering experience and resources along the way to make their return convincing. Some of these strange lands are foreign countries: the wreckage of Malkonwal, Black Horse Country, the apostate enclaves scattered hither and yon, the vast sleep of Umathela. Others are in the past now, buried treasure underfoot. A lot of these people are actually within the Wolf Pirates right now and so will feed into that epic, far from Argrath and the Moon.

The mountain story now called "The Rockwoods" is one of my obsessions so beware . . . surface may be slippery. Internal evidence suggests it was collected from the Arstola, which suggests that we're specifically talking about the Mislari twist in the range here. But I love your scrub goblins up there helping to ensure that nobody tries to cross. Maybe these elves are red, maybe they even retained a few echoes of the "lost" white elf way up above the tree line. Maybe we've been reminded over the years that it's easier to find a smart theory than a dumb one. However I love this one because it means that the Hound talks with the voice of [spoiler]StarScream[/spoiler], which is highly valuable character work.

The Japanese stuff is great. A tangent makes me desperate to give them an Algonquian ambience but haven't made it past "Da-shi" in Ojibwe, "the many" or "the quantity," "the collective." I love the notion of them being either very small or sometimes very large, the primal original inhabitants of the range. Since some stories suggest that the Mislari were made to separate Maker from proto-elf and proto-dwarf nations from each other, maybe the ones who survive into history have characteristics that we'd associate with both today. Either way, my gut is that Ethilrist got his "goblins" from somewhere.

One of the things I really like about this twist in the thread is the way it reinterprets Hon-Eel's magical crusade against the horse people as also a reform within the post-Sheng Pelorian narrative. From a certain point of view, proving herself as a better Bride Of The Sun in that era simultaneously rectifies the relation between the Yelm and the Dendara they had in the Celestial Empire's wake. Before that achievement, the narratives didn't agree. After that achievement, after centuries of divergent development, they did. She found the Pelorians a new way to think about Dendara that might also be the return of an ancient way. She found the horse people a new way too. Some settled down and became "lunarized." To quote Tight Indigo Pants, poet-prophetess of the white moon city, "Hon-Eel proved she was somebody's Dendara but not necessarily mine." Now what's exciting about this of course is that the memory of this becomes imbedded in the imperial state policy apparatus as something you can try to integrate someone else's mythic system into the lunar way. Most cultures have somebody like a Dendara so they tried it in the south. But the identity of Dendara with Ernalda is controversial so it didn't really work. FHQ in particular laughed it off. This frustrated, confused and maybe even scared certain people who relied on this particular expression of the Eel complex, the "third" inspiration and not the present inspiration. So they kept trying weirder solutions that we might hear about some day when someone explicates Red Earth and "husband switches" and so on . . . but ultimately they pushed too hard and the wind went away.

We can actually have it both ways if in your Glorantha the Carmanian occupation brought new aristocratic naming conditions into the Pelorian bowl as well as their interpretation of Western zoology. The "romanoid" families today would be old and conservative, flaunting their antique lineages even though the actual lunar elite and true Dara Happan old money would both roll their eyes in different directions at the comic pretense of it. They're probably most prevalent in the working imperial services and so you find them in the officer corps, bureaucracy and so on. Not so much the Western Reaches where the elites had already moved past these trappings before the moon ever even rose. A slightly less flattering version of this story is that when the Carmanians came in, broken post-Kill lineages were assigned artificial sorcerous names just like newly discovered wild animals in need of a working genealogy. Pelorians being who they are, a surprising number of them liked it and still use the names today.

This will come as a shock in the right quarters. I love it.

Once you're off the beaten track you can end up all kinds of hundred-letter thunder places, oh yeah. The trick is reconnecting with the timeline afterward. I suspect a shocking number of people didn't.

The challenge with pivoting to other lightbringers is that historically those cults didn't provide the O+E magic that maintains the vibrant world. Initiates and converts alike will try their utmost to make it happen . . . maybe they'll get partial results or recover strange buried mysteries, but on the whole full success eludes them. The best they can do is deploy their specialized magic to keep the world more or less alive. You're going to remember variant survival stories in a hurry. Even people who want to remain faithful to O+E will be tempted in extremis to resort to suppressed variants that were excised from the normal cults long ago but never really went away. Gagarth comes back with a literal vengeance. People undoubtedly get mixed up in (Sor)Ana Gor in the mother belt. All the questing may reopen deep questions about other ways to venerate Storm and Earth that people discarded in historical times. Maybe some of them work more or less. The fringe results will be surprising and shocking. IMG this period is increasingly more of a deep communal dream or nightmare than anything empirical. In this model the seeds still sprout, the winds still blow the rain in, the crops still mature . . . but none of the people can see it or feel connected to the cycle in any meaningful way. It's the Waste Land vision, the death of god experience, the dark night of the world soul. The inner gates of heroquesting slam open and whole nations are cast to wander the spiritual desert in search of the same answers your players are looking for. How do you fix the world, where is god ,what does the grail king need--

This thread has convinced me that the mythic system of Kanthor's Isles contains a somewhat different mix + that based on the sedrali of Ralios this might be where you go to find the human heads. I think they would definitely have lion forms based on the regional history. Giving them wings is a slightly tougher proposition but possible . . . a lot we don't know about lion empire religion.

I love it but might as well count every flower in the field and then in Esrolia there's always another field. Agreed that the "land of 10000 goddesses" formula reads like somebody's religious program . . . maybe it's a line in the old mother catechism that drifts in and out of obscurity within time and rises to the surface in the doctrinal struggles of the 1620s. I think it's probably an Ernaldist slogan establishing that that particular goddess is For All Women (orlanthi all, orlanthi women) and contrasting her universal church to whatever multitudes they offer in the Paps or Peloria (10000 is 100x100, literally the entirety of the gods wall system squared and the square is the earth shape) or wherever. If you can name a goddess there's probably room for her somewhere in the long list and then you have been coopted into the Ernalda Complex. Ironically there's a minor achilles heel in this magical program much like the City of 10000 Magicians, which might share its history. Once you establish that there are no more than 100x100 slots available, every one you fill takes you closer to the moment when you need to revise the list or admit that you're done. This might be an apocalyptic scenario somewhere but I don't think it's much of a problem in practical terms. Hon-Eel didn't try to stuff the list and Jar-Eel doesn't seem interested. I think Deezola understood it with her comb and strange rune but she's long gone now. And in her day Nochet must have seemed impossibly far away . . . better to focus on where she was standing and let the strange land goddesses circulate, she had other things to do. Local theologians know they have enough wiggle room to establish a few identities among the most minor cults, squeezing (for example) Delaina and Deleanora together and liberating the redundant slot when the doctrinal distinction that initially mandated two entities is no longer relevant. As long as they can keep doing that, there's little real threat of Goddess Ten Thousand And One showing up some day and ending the cycles of time. Although maybe in a Hera War it will happen. For now, they're pretty clever in Nochet about this kind of divine taxonomy, possibly a residual defense (or offense) mechanism left over from Goddess Switch Times. But the thrust isn't immediately useful in the struggle of empires and so tends to get overlooked.

Why stop at two [Jar] Eels? Surely she encompasses multitudes! --[ * ] -- God Learner claims that the Elder Races had gone extinct (or more precisely were converted) within their territory are actually grounded in empirical exploratory data. However they failed to anticipate the recidivism rates when the empire shifted into reverse; terminal second age as shadowrun scenario.

I forget when Gonn Orta harrows Nida and delivers the jolanti to the elves' tender gifts . . . this would be the perfect moment for shocking revelations. Great stuff. Gathering notes.

Love all of this. While I'd be happy to receive a dump of newly excavated pages from the 1960s not a lot of fragmentary documentation has made its way into circulation yet . . . there's a strong sense that as with other Soul Arrangers some nymph or other autochthonous force distracted Greg from this corner of the world and left it to develop out of sight. As a result, we have to either acknowledge that History is thinner here (after the Gbaji interruption, the God Learners, the Ban) or that the sources simply haven't been found. One thing that makes My Glorantha a little heretical is that I attribute the collapse of the Greenwood to the horrific struggle between Brown and Green that consumed so many forests in the post-Nysalor reconciliation. If any faction of western men did that deed they would have left records bragging about it. Instead, their silence tells me it was something not even the elves are fond of discussing. But this is unlikely to show up in the publishing. I'll check the maps on Talastar to see the ebb and flow of forest there, or at least on the eastern frontier.

Mostal had a wife and she was the mother of earthquakes, not a rock lord but an inhuman queen. Not even the shakers remember now, of course. But oh how they dance.

Suddenly flashing back to alt.magick.dojo!

I've been hunting the "Dragon Ernalda" who apparently vanished or was transformed when the EWF system evaporated and think we've found her. One of the reasons this thread exists!

I really like slowing the year to make room for Moon Season. Reminds me of other efforts to reform the calendar, which reminds me that while the colored moons have a foot in Robert Graves they're also the virtues of the republic. Of course the blue moon is free but sad, the white moon is "comedy" (cruelty) and the lonely sexy one is dominant.

Big win!! Are modern high llamas that tall? Either way, new context for why horses are not native to the Garden since they only really emerge in the Miocene . . .