scott-martin

Tight Indigo Trousers, last known surviving white moon hierophantess and my favorite novelty NPC, has entered the chat. This is the empire. It is the way. Step inside. They have something like a passover and something like a christmas and even something like a dream of life but no easter. As she says, "the world starts after the fourteen year old drug addict version of your life quits and then stops again when you quit quitting . . . Sedenya came to liberate that world from itself. Say you like it. Say you need it even if you don't."

This is clearly the golden age of gloranthan studies.

Rolling back all the way to that particular opening crawl reveals something: "broo reproduction" doesn't appear in print until Borderlands decides to reveal or invent that narrative. Before that, broos are, like Iggy Pop says about the "philistines" in the movie Dead Man, mostly just real dirty people . . . "given to atrocities and foul practices" but mostly spreading diseases. This becomes their "Mallia" aspect that supports their role as mercenary muscle in Nomad Gods, RQ1-2 and so on. Or another way to say it is that Mallia is the entity who shamans can summon within the rules of the Jaldon Games. Thed comes later and I encourage people to read the COT version closely. If you find anything sexualized in this era, shout it out. To me, these broos come off more like S. Clay Wilson bikers than anything else, maybe with a Kenneth Anger scorpio rising vibe. There's no parasitic pregnancy motif, which tells us that while Alien has come and gone theatrically and home video exists, it doesn't seem to make much of an impression on Greg or Sandy until 1982. They wouldn't hold a revelation like that back, especially when the Thed layout ends with significant page space to fill and they were already throwing everything Sandy could think of to stretch as far as they could. After Borderlands, the "broo as sexual violence" and "Thed as rape goddess" narratives get rolling with Noyeep in the Big Rubble (1983) and forty years later here we are. But Borderlands functions as the literal crossroads at which we meet the devil, as it were. You still have the "Mallia" broos, who are basically all the females (closing a loophole in COT) as well as the males who "dislike all-male associations." That's a strange thread. Does it mean all Thedists are gay? Or is each of them the only male that matters in their perspective, so that everything else is potentially a "wife" and a "mother" to your children? The one unspoken rule here seems to be that they can't or won't or don't like to impregnate each other, or else only the strongest broo would survive beyond two seasons +1d8 weeks and we know that they can coexist in relatively stable gangs for a lot longer than that. Another thing that's interesting is the reference to "varied maternity." I know we've talked about Wire Mother and Soft Mother before but every male broo has a choice of which mommy to follow in terms of how they relate to the larval host. RQ3 Thed obliterates any surrogates. Her broo might not identify with her or emulate her so much as she (as a ghost and not a conventional goddess) yearns to emulate them. She gets them to do things to recapitulate her trauma. In the RQ3 accounts, that trauma is all she has left. In that ecology, there are no other women, just an appetite for new victims. I feel like many of the more deliberately occult NPCs in LOT and DOLAD reflect these complicated and polymorphous family and gender identities, where a son can be a daughter and a brother and also a wife. But Mallia is simpler. By definition she's the other woman and that's really it. When you emulate her, you are not the cruel absent mother. You're your own woman. The boys become carriers of your complex, spreading her sign. And this is the broo mother you can contact in the Jaldon Games. The stepmother can be approachable in ways the mother never is. Where is this going? First, IMG Thed is a perversion of the Covenant because her cult deliberately blurs the taboo relationship between herd and harem. Her broos don't have wives and their children don't have mothers. They have plenty of meat but they don't get milk as a baby. She's one of the things that happen when something goes very wrong with the meat. Nobody who observes the Peaceful Cut will countenance any of this. Prax can't afford to tolerate chaos. Life is already too rough in their broken world to intentionally make things worse. Second, Thed's association with the Crack spell is poignant in light of both Dorasta's ruined cleft and the "breaking of the vessels" that seeds creation in the zohar or wherever. She knows how to break everything. Maybe in a demiurgic context she has wisdom to provide but it's hard to say . . . sooner or later, people who have delved her mysteries end up functionally equivalent to broos. On the way from here to there you find the mysterious Cacodemon character in the courts of chaos, son of the devil (looking at you Argin Terror, we've barely touched on the West) and grandson of Thed. He's fond of ogres, who start to look a lot like broos when you breed out the obvious goat strains.

"Arkat blows a horn, Atyar has a horn. What's the difference? Your angle on " - Jaccius Lacanicus I was thinking about that head trip in the recent return to Drastic . . . the resemblance is striking The angel rises, the head ignites, the skeleton drops.

ATYAR is really just ARK(Y)AT spelled sideways. I'm as skeptical as you are but it ultimately resolves more problems than it creates.

As Mr Phipp notes, Drastic doesn't have a lot of Thed content beyond a mechanical amendment that makes it easier for Spirits of Thed to take good people over and a belated credit to Sandy for the original COT version of the cult. But the idea sheds interesting light on aspects of Orlanth as lonely goatherd [sic] so I'd love to explore the details myself. Reverting to the COT chassis completely desexualizes her role, leaving an impression like the take on Kali that might show up in a matinee screening of Gunga Din. This is probably close to Sandy's original vision. We can ask him! But by the time you get to the short GOG writeup in 1985 her role is already changing. Maybe there are two or more Theds knotted together here . . . if modern "Orlanth" is a consolidation of multiple regional precursors then why not her too? A Praxian Thed who interferes with local shamans but is worth an occasional bit of worship, a Heortling Thed, maybe some other entity venerated closer to ancient Tanisor. A couple of details drop out. The LOT catechism blames her initial wound and her grudge on Urox. I would not want to slander the Storm Bull in front of his fans but he is not the sort of figure that leads an error-free life . . . as the Ragnaglar entry says, "there are secrets of the Mad God which I will tell you when your soul is strong enough to face the terrible truth." I would not be surprised to discover that Urox and the other one were mutually exclusive figures in archaic theyalan religion: a community might know one or the other but never both at once. A little like how someone's dad and evil "stepdad" are rarely in the room at the same time. In the logic of parables, when the good father surfaces, it's because he's defeated the evil father. But when the bad dad rises, the effect is as though he's murdered the good one. All the children of Umath may be like that, wearing each other's clothes when their followers find real identities inconvenient. Greg definitely wrote about this kind of dad business. I love the sunken Thedela hypothesis but the fact that the Heortlings remember the Trio setting up in the distant "north" leaves me open to the possibility that the first broos were Lokamayadon's people. But maybe brooism is an emergent property, the identity of the real "patient zero" is deliberately ambiguous. The important thing is that a broo or a broomother can erupt at any time. Keep your heart open and your hands steady.

Love it throughout. Sad to have been away when this was going on the first time. This is obviously one of the edible amaranths, possibly with an unfortunate / opportunistic passenger like claviceps purpurea . . . the witch grain, the trick in the food that makes the body sick and the mind swoon. No wonder she's so intimate with Malia!

I will climb the steps down to the basement on Saturday and unearth my copy of Drastic Chaos, which is so rare I had to source it "o'er frae France" as they say and largely unspeakable in the official fandom at this point. I don't even really remember what exactly is going on in there. In the meantime, three or four things I know about her that undoubtedly repeat what everybody knows. First and foremost, a fresh encounter with the full lyrics of the English song cycle commonly known as "Tom Bedlam / Mad Maudlin" reveals to me at least that Thed's real function is as a witch cult, maybe the primary witch cult on both sides of the Praxian frontier. Let's look at some of those verses. Across the spectrum of madness and badness and sadness the silver thread that unifies them is a fierce grievance nursed to the point where it defies all libidinal standards, logic and the other gods as well. What separates the protagonist from the rest of us is that she broods on her grudge and disappointment down in "satan's kitchen" to the exclusion of just about everything else. This is a witch anthem. IMG I suspect Thed is like that: the Bad Woman who is not satisfied with the victim or villain narrative that the Ernalda establishment works so hard to perpetuate. As such, the Lords of Terror extended cult writeup gives us a sense of how a Bad One tradition plays out from something like the inside . . . but filtered through a fairly obvious lens of conventional theyalan scholarship ("among the Orlanthi . . . "). One of the worst crimes a witch can commit is probably a lack of solidarity with other women. Thed's grudge is such that she will take sour delight in cooperating with broos to perpetuate her primary trauma / myth. This is not necessarily sexual. As long as you are ruining some aspect of someone else's life, your actions are holy and delightful in her jealous gaze. By the way, the "male only" restriction on her cult has been removed from the RQG drafts last time I checked. (So is a lot of the easy talk about her "willing" complicity and "own choice." She's more ambivalent now.) You do need to become a broo though and I think this is part of the enigma of where female broos come from. Like the girl interrupted says, they are very rare and they are mostly men. But not completely. Her nature as a bright and leaping nymph is only of theoretical interest to me because like I said, she's had some crimes done to her but she's also made some choices around that. No matter how we judge her choices, I think we can all agree her own case could have been handled a lot better. She was failed. Some rehabilitations fail. They can't get over it or haven't been able to get over it yet. Some people perpetuate abuse. We mourn the nymph and maybe we can contact the nymph under the right circumstances but when you meet her as the skinless goat mother she only brings trouble. The world is fallen. The relationship with Kyger Litor in particular is very interesting . . . how would troll mother in particular be interacting with this person? They have womb trouble in common. And among the goddesses her suffering and defiance remind me of a red woman we all know about. And then there's Malia. No Kate Bush references here. Nina Simone. Anyway, Saturday. Appropriate.

OK sassy Where does Thed come from? Any effort to even ask that question is an effort to rehabilitate her story, what could go wrong there? She was somebody once. She made choices.

THIS IS [HERESY/INDIVIDUALIST] CITIZEN. But let them try. To a properly broken dwarf or self-initiated shaman every can and pipe has its spirit. With the right access to the official population records you can probably achieve some kind of mental communication with vanished generations and ultimately come to an abstract understanding of the Ancestral Mostali. The structure of modern dwarf society suggests that this has been done in the past. Maybe it's the route forward. You take a step back in order to make a great leap into the future beyond the hole they're stuck in now.

Art Garfunkel would have found a way to become a problem in multiple timelines. I will forgive Adams for giving the world the band Owsla, which in turn gave the world my favorite novel of the plague decade, Seek The Throat From Which We Sing. However I'm told we should roll the clip This is not really a goofy tangent. What I like about it in the context of this thread is the fact that Greg got super inflamed by it initially. A bear who was god! But then he wanders off to make his own bear god man, a more satisfying execution. All our gloranthas are like that. "Take only what you need from it."

This is another good point. People who are still in the city simply KNOW that the train is running and when it doesn't (flooding, blackout, operator error, metal fatigue, pandemic, unannounced track work, wildcat strike, terror attack) it's time to seek alternate routes. When the alternate routes stack high enough the last route is back to the mainland. Those left behind will say you gave up. But maybe the day will come when the final train grinds to a halt . . . this is the doubt that drives us apostates from the city once and for all. Maybe the gods are like that. Or whatever the mostalites commune with when the machine stops. I believe London has something similar about ice ages, nuclear errors and other catastrophes being mitigable so long as you live by the river.

Top quip! My spies just told me that "it's gotten really bad down there, like '70s bad, no wonder they called out the national guard" and I ponder how the nature of the subway gods can change . . . as above so below. And yet I still have fairly high confidence (truth rating) that the trains still run down there, years after even seeing a station entrance much less riding with the damn things. Not sure if it's what jorganos was talking about but I always liked the RQ3 mechanic for loading temple guardians with magic, as seen in Sun County and probably updated sources.

Love it. Response will be endless and it's all accurate. Like they say, whatever you love has already worked its way into the roots of Glorantha. For some people, this means Orlanth is Thor or Zeus, someone from an Edith Hamilton paperback. For people who prefer Karoly Karenyi, Orlanth is actually Apollo or Hermes the Thief and it's complicated. He can be Indra. He can be Seth, the other brother. Same with everybody else. You go where it takes you and you either see Glorantha there or you don't. Ernalda is easy. There's a lot of Robert Graves in there from when Robert Graves was blowing a lot of dudes' minds. Then there was a lot of Marija Gimbutas. A lot of Mists of Avalon, even though that one has fallen far from favor. He really loved Hesiod. But then again he was really moved by the book Shardik and the work of Rogan P Taylor, which is perversely available in plain sight to anyone bold enough to get an account. Issaries is simultaneously a cheap gag ("Am Issaries = Emissaries") and a complicated footnote to Gurdjieff as suits the great god's nature.

Their Glorantha(s) Varied. Or maybe they stayed in "Glorontha" or "Acos" or some other state of being before the apocalypse that created the modern world. From our point of view engaged with the text of Glorantha, they did not survive. Unless they come back or we go over ("er meint irgendein sagenhaftes Drüben") anything can be true. I think one constant is that once you are in Drastic territory your Glorantha is varying beyond the range where text can help you in a crisis.

I could say that about a lot of the storm bulls I've met . . .

Sounds to me like the Bat, while horrible to all external senses, might have experienced that flavor of illumination and so would befuddle the Bull. But we know less about that particular flavor than others. IMG a bull cultist infected with nysalor consciousness might have trouble making the old easy intuitive distinctions between wholesome creation and corrosive chaos . . . but there are other schools, arkat consciousness in particular has historically intensified the abreaction response to an apocalyptic degree. I suspect we'll see this kind of thing unleashed on the world when Charg opens.

They're all really just generic warp cores plugged into a cloaking device invisibility spell matrix so klingon autocrats accustomed to more open architecture of force went a little overboard on bespoke greeble. However, this suggests a follow-up question: what does "invisibility" really reflect in modern Gloranthan religion? Invisible God, sure. The pamphlets say this is just a highly sublimated philosophical evolution of the archaic Malkion cult, a radical exclusion of creator from all things created . . . imperceptible and absolutely alien to the everyday spiritual life. But I've seen compelling arguments that the inflection that we translate as "invisible" today was originally understood as more of a conjugation, something more like a future subjunctive tense. In this scenario Invisible Malkion is by definition not the god of your fathers but the god of what might be, the well of possibilities, the completed integral of time. And in this light Invisible Orlanth becomes less a kind of passive philosophical or "deeper" understanding (Kate Bush reference) of the crude god of the mountain (Kate Bush reference) tribes and more of a theurgic posture: advocates of "invisibility" (Kate Bush reference) work to abstract entities from existential reality where they are both active in the world and vulnerable to it. True invisibility is indistinguishable from immortality: they cannot harm what they cannot see, touch or interact with in any way. When the cloaking device is switched off, we can see the formerly invisible entity emerge in surprising places, such as at the heart of a rival pantheon. Jar-Eel enjoys a similar tactic, lurking undiscovered in a competitor's ritual dreamscape until the moment of shock revelation (ambush). So did the stygians, apparently. We often think of these assassin tactics as romulan- lunar-aligned but advocates of an invisible Orlanth can flip the deck and reveal storm forces hiding deep in the lunar way. For example, it's funny in this context that one of the reasons the Blue Moon is imperceptible to the naked eye is that the perceptible sky itself is as blue as she is. She blends. Or maybe they always shared the same nature all along and Orlanth and the tide are one. But the cloaking device is a POW sink so I've probably dithered on too long. The absence of a true invisibility spell in modern RQ as the site where Blue Moon magic and Black Fang magic and the Sandals of Darkness don't quite converge yet . . . but they point toward a convergent point "ahead" where we can imagine such a spell discovered and deployed. Invisible and red? This is a description of a magical effect.

God of Fluid Dynamics! We said the same thing at the same time in different ways so the model must have explanatory power.

Thanks for putting that here. I like seeing that in what would ordinarily be a mechanical thread. And it builds on the synthetic storm tribe hypothesis that has been on my mind this week anyway. Consider a place like archaic Fronela where there is no inherent understanding of "Orlanth" as a separate storm god. Instead they might have a Humakt to oppose the sun and an Eurmal to mediate with the sky, steal fire and get up to other trouble. They also have their version of the great bull mysteries, the losk-a-lim, but this is already an early syncretism . . . not one of the nine great gods. In this situation you can have a phase change across Humakt and Eurmal that determines whether "Illumination" (Humakt is one of the students of Rashoran) expresses as honor/truth or tricksterism/illusion. Great, how interesting. The "death" axis is a little less coherent because the bull itself is outside the early Fronelan system in some ways and so will duplicate some functions while confusing other relationships. We just don't know as much about it. Not as much effort was made to philosophically integrate it into the lightbringer framework . . . maybe that happened in the unwritten teachings of Talor in the liberation of Loskalm, who can say without going there. The important thing is that these are two fighting cults and the local secret of death is hidden here. Maybe the phase shift is about sacrifice and sacrificer, eaten and eater, meat and man . . . a covenant. For the relationship on the third side of the triangle, I've reinserted "disorder" because that archaic rune is on my mind and it fits. Again, on the Eurmal side this is the disorganizing power we associate with storm, something like change or movement or transformation. As you transition down to the bull, it translates to something more like "strength." Eurmal dynamics provoke volatility, which then provokes the bull to restorative action. The trickster gets slapped down when the limits stretch too far to tolerate. "Chaos" must be resisted. Disorder. Somewhere between these factors it is possible to generate a synthetic mastery in the middle, a weltsystemtheorie . . . an "Orlanth" that governs the storm-driven order of things. While this phase is artificial it is relatively stable once it emerges. However, under pressure, it can disintegrate into its precursors. We've seen it happen historically. The whole is in the shape of a Law.

Love it. Frank Herbert is always an option. What I'm hearing here is that you want them to move around and the game will help pick where if anywhere they settle down. The cousins are easy, they can wander through life together. A hermit needs a reason to travel in their company. How would you feel about giving the hermit some kind of dream or visionary mission, a reason to get on the road and experience the wider world? Just pick a few of these elements that you've listed and make a kind of verbal "movie trailer" out of them, then hand it to that player. Coming attractions. That's your promise you make to yourself and them, the game will go there. Maybe the vision showed him that one or more of the other three needed to be there too at key points. This gives the hermit a motive to convince them to come along. It sounds like they're relatively malleable in terms of immediate goals so this can start out as a job for one or more of them. The others can get pulled along or pushed in from outside . . . someone can get outlawed, someone can have a vision of their own, you know how to do this. They don't have to wander forever. There are a lot of oases in Prax that could use a rain man's attention. Maybe that's what the vision wants. On the way they see amazing things and if they ever pick a community they'll know it when they see it. If the vision thing is too much woo woo you can make up an oasis town under brutal oppression (imperial entanglement, bandits, chaos) and the rain man can gather outside muscle to shift the liberating scales. A little more Magnificent 7 than the 3 Amigos. That's okay. This way, the town picks them and they're stuck with it. Downside, they're stuck there unless they lose and need to run like an Atreides to gather additional support. You should at least let the Storm Bull see the Block.

A little busy but some bait needs to be bit at . . . = and furthermore = Blah blah blah for sake of union.

This entire post is one for the record books but I only have time to tease out one proof point. (In the north we may have instead.)