scott-martin

Oh yeah, you can take the girls out of Naveria when they come into the city for work but you can't take Naveria out of the girls. We love 'em for that, to misquote the Kate Bush video with all the fruit dancing. Intimately related: why Pamalt is friendly with mountain gods but not the jungle.

In areas of Glorantha where the technology of ritual enchantment draws more heavily on weaving and knots than on inscription and tattoos, you find these interesting "unicursal" variations. Tribal Prax supports both systems. One old woman tied this for me and said it means "Biggle Stone." When I asked, she explained that the first one shows how the fruiting body forms, then you retrace in the other direction to remove the fruiting body. What's left behind contains the infinity rune, but she didn't talk about that and I didn't ask.

One of the deep motives of this thread is of course to provide a space to talk about the most profound aspects of Glorantha without tripping too many internal censors. Sometimes these things can only be effectively communicated as a joke, a dream, a shaggy dog story, a dumb theory. For example is damn good stuff. There probably won't be room for it in Shannon's book. It doesn't matter . . . we have it here now and would-be mycoshamans can follow the golden spore as far as it goes.

You're doing community service, like hunting down a rabid beast no matter how many legs it walks on. Unless it can speak up, wave the white flag of truce, find someone else to blame . . . and in these more sophisticated moral scenarios, adventurers need to be extremely careful. Getting back to the reddit thread, it also strikes me that one of the dangers of bending normal rules of engagement around monsters is that there's a very real chance you'll become some kind of monster yourself. If you know you're committing "war crimes" you're going to need expiation or the weight of it will eat your community alive after all. HMKT has elaborate systems of working through this and so do the Sisters of Mercy. But the surest approach is simply not to relax the rules too much even when you fight monsters. Monsters are what they are because they fight like monsters. Humans have to have faith that fighting like humans is ultimately better . . . otherwise roll illumination.

Talk of morality aside, I don't recall any reference to them respecting the ransom system, which takes them outside the normal rules around violence for "people" in the core setting. Someone who doesn't treat captives according to certain parameters is basically an animal with no legal status or rights. I suspect feral broo behave in such a way that they qualify as animals. A civilized or cleansed broo, should you ever meet one, would explicitly embrace ransom and other foundations of a social contract, no matter how primitive or disturbing their execution of the terms might be.

Most well-known "hsunchen" tribes aren't actually archaic survivals who never learned civilized ways, but instead represent the fallen (I do not use the word "degenerate") descendants of nations that pursued alternatives to the great imperial systems or opted out . . . and were cursed for it. Dragon people, great wolf empire, lords of the dance (bull dancers, snake dancers), Hykimites, barkulists, pipers at the gates of Dawn. Some of these alternative systems were if anything more sophisticated and even more "modern" than the aggressive cultures that first methodically eradicated competitors and then heroquested to cover their guilt with a compelling story about beast rune people inexorably receding from the world under the ablative pressure of Time. That is a sad story, but not True. The true tragedy of history: the brutes won and the material traces of their fallen foes were universally suppressed, again and again and again. While the God Learners turned this into a literal science of conquest, the roots of the ideology are found in the rhymed genocides of Hrestol against the lion kingdoms (on the one hand) and Nysalor's expulsion of the Broken Council rebels (on the other). The bitter womb of the trolls is only a metaphor, a new story to dress their perpetual solar sadness, an armature of fresh blame. Otherwise the arkat would have fixed it. As for the lion people, it took a few generations beyond the flamesword before their great-great-great-grandchildren once again sat on the throne of Seshnela . . . and thus was their doom rendered permanent and truly awful. But we are who we are and we can do better. - Black Hralf, Weasel Words / Weasel Wisdom

That earned me the extra +1% illumination. Now I know how elves and dwarves really emerged out of a common Earth stock . . . and why they learned to hate each other once the lines were drawn. Some shrooms went Mostal. Most of the rest drifted into the Dark or were born there anyway. We dare not go a hunting, for fear of little men.

I think what we need before or after Shannon's book comes out is an aldrya census. Go to all the wild spaces you can find on the lozenge and ask the spirits of the grove if they've heard about aldrya and what their relationship to her is. Some answers may be surprising! As a bonus we will then know where the truly weird ecologies are.

Could be the horrific real reason the Empire had Six Legs! We have krarsht now, of course.

Really old Brithos texts describe a society of three castes while others a little more recent classify people into as many as six, including the "sailor" (waertag) and "man-of-all" (engrion). Say for the sake of fantasy I'm bidding on a scrap of inscribed leather that memorializes the exact moment when the fifth and sixth castes were forcibly combined and the island entered into its penultimate civil war. Don't jinx me, it might come true if we wish hard enough. The sailors will have their revenge.

Love it. Yeah, any heretical work on the green world I end up distributing will heavily reconstruct the kind of thinking Neil Gaiman wanted to get up to on Swamp Thing . . . identity and its limits become controversial within the old vegetable religion where John Barley welcomes a little ritual murder in order to prepare the way for the resurrection to come. Meanwhile established intelligences send out "runners" to recapitulate their own ontogenies knowing that maybe only one in a thousand little spores will grow back to "adult" status long after the parent is gone. Still others resist the notion of death altogether, either because environmental conditions ensure a perpetual growing season (yellow aldrya, "mrel") or out of more selfish motives (conifer aldrya, "green") . . . others will cultivate fruiting bodies (kresh etc.) and so on. (We just took possession of a stretch of fairly virgin pine, oak and ash overrun by fern and fungus here at groundling level so the diversity of strategies is on my mind.) Some fungus may operate like a kind of "ogre" within the larger vegetative system, superficially working in cooperation with the more normative plant members of the community while secretly draining their hosts of nutrients. But I think most are sympathetic enough. Tom Brady on the other hand is clearly an unholy creature, especially now that he's gone rootless in pursuit of a land without winter. Sooner or later his refusal of a clean new england death will catch up with him! And before that he will probably be forced to pursue increasingly eccentric, wasteful and bizarre methods to stay young and robust. To stay on topic I'm not convinced that many of the aldryami adventurers will encounter are actually made of wood. Most are probably flesh and blood bodies animated by aldrya consciousness . . . basically people who fell in with the forest generations ago and never quite got out again. Only at high levels of initiation do they actually bleed balsam when you cut them, leave amber bones behind and so forth. And then once in awhile, if you're extremely embedded in the forest ecology, you might meet the bona fide tree who walks like a man. But this is going to be more controversial. EDIT while I'm here, what do people think is a "grig?" The grigdom seems incredibly important in this context.

Yeah. My rubric right now is about as simple as it gets. If a plant acknowledges "Aldrya" or works for a plant who does, it's aldryami because the distinction is more about religious communion than botanical taxonomy. Any fungus, kelp, orchid or fern can join at any time, but right now the compensations around their current situation are compelling enough that they resist conversion. Likewise now that you bring it up there are going to be recalcitrant trees and even whole grains who reject the aldrya . . . either maintaining older ways or developing radical alternatives of their own. We know about krjalk. Others will emerge. Ditto the other races in their ways.

In the beginning there were no uz, no aldryami, no mostalites. Those broader categories came later, after missionaries spread the gospels of kyger litor, aldrya and the machine to what were once isolated and divergent enclaves of eaters, growers and makers. This process of consolidation culminates in the incompletely documented elder race wars of the imperial age, probably heralded by those infamous "black ships" and the better known elf seed exchange, as well as subterranean doings among the dwarves. By the time it ends, divergent forms are largely eliminated from the middle world, leaving only something like poorly remembered dreams behind: white and red elves, tamali, bearded and hot trolls. But nothing really dies.

IMG this remains an unsettled question of history. For purposes of both art and expediency, I want to believe that this may be the most ancient surviving mortal caste expression left on the lozenge . . . maybe even the original Malkonwal settled after the Expulsion if you believe the local street prophets. In pursuit of maximum gloranthan complexity, I am willing to be convinced that the current aeolian system emerged at a specific time and in specific circumstances, maybe in the wreckage of empire or even in the early Belintar revelations ("Demi-Birth Era") that also fed into the modern Trader Prince doctrine and so on. But there were probably people here in ancient times who acknowledged that the prophet was descended from storm. ObDumb: demibirth, demivierge, demiurge, demibird

I don't know if this is a "dumb idea" so much as the Gloranthan emerald tablet, an alchemical recipe lost in the imperial wreckage.

Separately there's still a lot we don't know about the venn diagram describing the relationship between "agimor," "arbennan," "doraddi" and "pamalt." One might be a religion, another might be a race . . . or a cultural, political identity, or a spiritual technology. As a southern hero war erupts the intersection might indeed get clarified into something like a holy country. And as we know, lenses can magnify or reduce apparent scale so as you point out the dai in the kaiju may be a trick of the "light" in this particular corner of the world. The original inhabitants of Brithos are famously little. Here, almost 360 degrees away, the irruptions are big. The persistence of the "tentacle" as contagious organ in the Great Chaos Mix seems crucial to the southern contribution to the metaplot. Although I suspect that quite a few "exotic chaos monsters" like the headhanger are actually extremely degenerate forms of chaos cult/ists stranded in the imperial collapse so facehugger and charnjibber may once have been somebody.

So many beautiful and profoundly stupid / illuminating concepts here. I hope to get to admire a few in greater detail soon but for now, today's hot mess from me is a hero war generator . . .

蠱 Having pored over those manuscripts, Sandy's sense of "broo" stretches a little beyond the standard goat men of the north into metaphysical territory . . . God Learner explorers discovered specific rare "broo" forms at aberrant stations of the hero plane that seem to function as a kind of symptomatology or alert system for a world under great stress. In this vision of Glorantha, God Learner insights now lost elsewhere may be fueling the "broo" evolution of the south, whether as vestiges of recombinant colonial chaos (Six Legs, vadel, artmal, the noose, whatever) or some purely local project emanating from deep in the rotten Nargan. Much more work is required. I think the general classification of Genert chaos being plural while Pamalt chaos is solitary is a good one to follow. Genertela is generally closer to the edge of corruption and so you tend to encounter chaos at an earlier irruption stage, where it gets to differentiating as fast as it can (chaos features gotta mutate) but there's only so much time before it's discovered and routinized in some way . . . preferably terminal. On the veldt, an aberrant form can fester unmolested for a long time, slowly becoming bigger and more gruesome as it were before encountering an organized community that can deal with it. "Western" chaos blurs with pure Genert forms early on (arguably the Gbaji war is an early version of the Great Chaos Mixing Metaplot that actually got some traction) when the two devils meet in mutual annihilation. The East, as we know, is a mystery. If you were involved in the Great Chaos Mixing Metaplot development please get in touch. I'd love to talk.

I am slowly working up an Issaries Hero War so this is definitely relevant to my interests. Funny how quiet Etyries seems to be, despite allegedly being a major third age cult and a pillar of the empire, at least historically. Wonder what they're doing. Then you have true pacifists, your option 2. Sisters of Mercy, etc. A lot of strange people skirt the edges of the more combat-oriented hero war and maybe end up far from the known narrative. Maybe they're actually going where the real action is!

Why not both simultaneously? Talk elsewhere about the old board game mechanics has me thinking about that layer of the lore . . . and it strikes me that the emissary system may be the seed of something exciting for you. As it turns out, while the hero wars revolve around the clash of heroes and armies, the major combatants recognize that they don't have enough heroes or armies to achieve victory on their own. They need to identify and court allies among the various independent weirdos of the region and beyond. We need to figure out who we can work with and what they want. Some of these relationships may be opportunistic or transactional. Others may become something larger and in that process provide you with the kind of story that you are eager to see.

For all you Fourth Age types: Since sorcery requires literacy, the Illiteracy Era may actually be apocalyptic blowback from Western Hero War developments playing out mostly off camera as far as Dragon Pass chroniclers were concerned. The beards may be forced to make surprising choices.

I love this so much that it got bumped up to the "real" personal development burner and so will take more work to comment effectively. However in my dumbness I also now believe that the morokanth diet is a heroquest artifact much like Monrogh's revelation, establishing a new mostly functional mythical status quo but leaving a lot of confusion, recrimination and ontological driftwood in its wake. In fact, they might even be tied together in a kind of cosmic balance, the tapir people get to be eaters for awhile and little sun recovers his fire . . . when one adjustment breaks down so does the other much as day destroys the night and night divides the day. Try to run, try to hide.

Elsewhere . . . I have a DUMB THEORY that there was once at least one culture that believed that Orlanth's father was actually Larnste, making him the rowdy brother of the otherwise urbane great god of the deal. The business with Umath may have been an evil stepfather situation or just their real dad on a bad week. When dad died, the cults retained different versions of their parentage and so naturally evolved to conform to the standard lightbringer relationship we all know. And that there was at least one more culture that identified Issaries' rowdy brother with HMKT until the introduction of an intermediary storm god from elsewhere upset the binary and forced a realignment of characteristics. This forced "division of war from peace" or winter and summer is then further garbled as the birth of Umath pushing sophisticated sky and crude earth apart in order to open up an exciting new space in between. And finally there was a culture or maybe even just a crazed religious visionary who believed that Issaries was Orlanth's real "father," or more accurately but more vague, that Issaries is to Orlanth as Asrelia is to Ernalda: a senior cult role that young fathers age into when they get a little slower on the way to the grave. In this "six winds model" you could have widdershins shadow gods to fill in . . . the shadow of Issaries here is Umath or even archaic Jagekriand, death father who shows up when good dad leaves the building, the opposite of Superman never being where Clark Kent is visible.

That's really, really good. Wounderhome.

Love it. IMG it's a matter of where you're looking in a process of dynamic opposition. The active yields to the passive and the passive activates, women and men, world without end. Flirted with regaling the thread with funny insights derived from my clinical training but tonight I think the most important thing I can say is that within the lightbringer complex you have two "genders" . . . the quest taker at the center tasked with doing the deeds and making the moral choices, and the quest giver who facilitates and motivates "him" from the background and around the edges. All the lightbringers are more or less "passive" in this construction, ranging from the entirely inert GJ and the sacrificial FM to the instigator who keeps everything from getting stale but lacks real creative force. Are they male or female, active or passive? The rite really only recognizes two angles on consciousness, the actor and the spectator. We call the actor the orlanth nowadays and foreigners assume the role is somehow associated with masculine performance. We know that sometimes that's true and sometimes she's a vinga. The spectator has a lot of names, situationally attached to serve the moment in the drama. Subject and object, quest taker and quest giver. If you're pressed for time you can compress it a little more and simply have the quester and the quest as your archaic O/E "pronouns" . . . when anyone is active, they take the old O mask, otherwise they're assigned something else. If they don't like it, they can speak up and take over. But to most foreigners, it's all that normative mom and dad. We know it's a little more and less complicated.