scott-martin

I love this structure because broadly each one climaxes with a phase of the Kubler Ross mourning process.

The "bearded wind" worshipped by Lokamayadon survives in severely vestigial form in the cult of another bearded god whose name is pronounced something like "Loka May" and misspelled by just about everyone, especially those who prefer not to talk about it.

Care to name a few? I'm honestly curious because while the proto-SCA (for example) had a little overlap with Rusty Sporer's Knights of Baphomet, that was a Canadian thing. Grady's crew was remarkably insular in his final days, largely due to the Motta Affair and Bill's benign gatekeeping. This is not the scene my informants report. People like Llee Heflin who wanted access to De Arte went to London and came back with the goods they weren't getting at home. Eventually the PR changes but if someone else was blabbing IX material, I need to know who! If a rogue Solar Lodge manuscript got out, how did it travel? We can do this! I did not know about the Crowley vibe at Greyhaven!

Great Gnon now I have to!

Thanks all. Yeah, very pleased to see this page hiding in plain sight after months of asking people where they encountered the technique back in the day and getting a lot of puzzled shrugs. Those who came up after the Eighties can forget how scarce and mysterious some of these texts were back then, which is why this makes a great sort of trial run on something larger. All who coveted MMM as children can of course now get sets at reasonable prices while they last, or simply avail themselves of the electronic versions. Cavendish and fellow popularizers are due their share of data mining. As for the notion of a typhonian Call of Cthulhu, I guess we just have to keep watching the skies!

So we all know the Uleria spell reflects a divinatory technique promoted under that name by Aleister Crowley. Greg was in touch with a lot of deep cats, read widely and Chaosium publications have always been packed with in-jokes, so the nod and the wink make sense, right? But there's a problem. Unlike the public "Energised Enthusiasm" available to all, Crowley never published the technique or any description of it in his lifetime. It's still officially a secret teaching. The details only appear in manuscript instructions for very high level initiates (maybe 20 people worldwide in 1985 if you squint), and sub rosa in Kenneth Grant's Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God as well as a few bootleg publications. It's not the kind of thing you just have on the shelf and decide to incorporate into your game world. And while Greg was hip, the treatment of Lovecraft in Call of Cthulhu would probably have bent in a very different direction if he was conversant with Grant. Of course the technique circulated by word of mouth in the Bay Area as hardcore seekers made pilgrimages to Grant and brought back a book or two. The original bootlegs stem from this source and once it was in print it kept circulating around the fringes to this day. Was this Greg's milieu circa 1984-5? While some overlap is always possible (the original manuscript of the Book of the Law, for example, wending its way to the Change of Hobbit bookstore), you had to be pretty far inside to get this kind of word of mouth and I've yet to hear anyone from that crowd mention Greg hanging around. Nonetheless, the existence of the spell requires transmission from somewhere, right? Today I think I solved the case: Man, Myth & Magic, ladies and gentlemen. Ubiquitous desk reference into the 1980s and readily available to someone hunting spells for the courtesan of heaven. A little less heavy than the alternative hypothesis, but it fits the biographical data a lot better. Where did MMM get their information? Tantric scholar Benjamin Walker, who read Grant and bears further scrutiny.

Oho! Happy to know you all are still in it. Sorry to misremember . . . long couple of years. It sounds like you are discovering amazing things. Look how happy we all are to hear them! The middle question is easiest. From a pure experiential perspective, this is not a part of the world where sun worship emerges or thrives organically. It gets cold and cloudy. While the sun is a source of light and heat, for much of the year that can feel like a tentative proposition. The sun might not formally "die" every winter, but sometimes it's hard to be sure. We don't trust the sun as much as we do in balmy Peloria or Pent, let alone the East where the sun is always being born. When outsiders tell us that sometimes sickly light up in the sky rules the universe, we need to be convinced. Now we all know about the sun god who suffers. Where it gets complicated is that lists of the Rathori gods in the time of Jonat don't include any "sun" god at all. In his place there's a white "moon" who gives light and measures time but also participates in death. Depending on how weird you want your Glorantha to get, this might be the way they envision the cold sun up there in the far north. Maybe elements of that divergent religion made it into the local Sun Dome before the Ban and may even still be there. (But who ever knows with the Ban, you're free to throw out all history to suit you.) I don't think Monrogh got all the way up here, by the way. Whatever sun they remember in that particular Dome may come as a shock to the southerners and we can all look forward to new heresies and schisms. (This comes up because I think the original solar religion brought into Southbank was heterodox by Seventh Wane standards and while they think they have a "Yelm" there now, traces of the separate evolution will persist into the Hero Wars. But this is only here for you as a story hook if you get bored.) Now the last question, I think the Rathorites are about as ancient as it gets but they also recognize the sun as something that suffers and dies. Very few of the bear people have any experience of winter at all because they sleep through it. Only the White Bear knew the deep secrets of the dead sun and he himself is dead now, the wanderer took him away. (I hope your players have good luck with the cubs.) But the green elves who stay awake in the cold dark to guard the dens knew these things also. This is part of their "Yelmalio" mystery. Even in the south the elves of Rist, almost uniquely, seem to have abstained from getting in the Suffering God's face at the Hill of Gold. Maybe they even offered help.

How exciting! Please keep us posted as the campaign rolls on. The factional structure in particular sounds interesting. Thank you for prompting me to look here. The deep history of solar religion in Fronela turns out to be quite illuminating. In terms of your question, Cold Sun worshippers can always challenge the authority of Imperial Sun on theological grounds. Maybe the entity they worship in Southbank after the Ban isn't the same as the one they started with . . . or the one the people in the Dome recognize as their mythic overlord. In that scenario, the Dome can simply defer to the Golden Tyrant for pragmatic reasons but in the event of a real conflict of interest are free to defy him. Then the Tyrant's problem becomes how to overwhelm the upstarts with philosophical grandeur. Cold Sun can also develop real spiritual autonomy. While this rarely happens, this particular Dome's time under the Ban may have forced them onto an unusual maturation path . . . something like what happened to the isolated Dome in Prax in the Time of Testing. What's interesting is that in Fronela the Imperial Sun faces much more adverse environmental conditions than in the long Pelorian summer. He's a foreigner here, barely as bright on some days as a kind of auxiliary whitish "moon." Your players can exploit this if they're as creative as they sound, and if it makes your game more fun. Maybe a useful angle to explore would be emphasizing the "dying god" side of the Yelm story and then letting nature take its course. Yes, the god of Southbank, no matter how fiercely the Tyrant protests, is doomed. But younger, better and stronger things are liberated in his disintegration. The bear people will help. The sun god they grew up with is cold.

I believe the concept was introduced (in commercial print at least) in the Moorgaki cult writeup, Troll Gods 1988.

If not the actual Bouncer they're probably related. Esoteric mysteries of the tavern masters, provisioners of the Feast sacred & profane . . .

Accidental mutation damaged the egg. The nature of the damage may be a combination of ambition and impatience, depending on neck to tail ratio. I consider this not quite on thread because it is veering esoteric into other technologies of consciousness, but what the hell, we can get it back . . . . . . penitent parasaurolophus ultimately grow wings and become something like birds, in which form they are considered aspirational in some forms of Pelorian mysticism (but never Kralorela). When the Bright Empire with its fixation on "highness" came in, they took to the sky and were never seen again, except in memories, dreams, reflections. Maybe some day they will return.

Say more. I'm trying to collate that stuff with the Burning Man dinosaur camp materials.

Handra's wide open and would be in my top priority handful for JC treatment as it "drains" an eclectic but under explored slice of ecosystem. Fay Jee is of course another but they're older and weirder. Maybe the way in is to do a survey of major river deity quests. As we know the watersheds in this part of the world have seen their share of engineering and shocks. Figuring them out is going to be somebody's mission.

Oh yeah. And it's 30,000 years old (cool!) with an uninterrupted written record of occupation to prove it. Local government runs similar to Chicago only with a centaur (cool!) for a mayor [sic]. Everyone on this thread knows Glorantha can be a challenge because it supports deep data-driven modeling as well as these flights of dream logic. Sometimes the dream confounds the data and forces us to do a little creative adjustment, but it's complicated. The best way to experience the place with authority is to go there in some sense, and then the dream logic tends to take over. I love the way RQ keeps the dream tethered within shouting distance of the data. Sartar is an explicitly weird place even by Gloranthan standards.

Top thread! Who knows where the day takes us but just want to star one of the lines: IMG this is worth reinforcing. "Sartar" is not a conventional country so much as a novel exploit of location and global relationships. It's a lens for higher-order economic math built out of local accidents of language and social structure. This naturally allows for statistical extremes that may not apply anywhere else in our fantasy bronze age: more coinage, bigger towns, more spells, more scrolls. More important people (runes), greater monster density. Maximum fantasy. Among other things, Boldhome is Nochet without so much commodity baggage. It's the Miracle Mile, a kind of holy country. The question of how sustainable the project was and under what conditions it persists is for the Hero Wars to decide. And how it scales. It will be interesting to see if other regions can find their inner Sartar and give us a similar high-density encounter table. In my heart I would like that but I know that the tragedy of Time is that most of the best resource sites were discovered, developed and abandoned early on. Maybe in the Dawn Age. Maybe along the great watersheds that tie regions together and keep "obvious" short portage opportunities on the margins.

I always liked the "throwaway" reference on the Trollpak skull spread where a diversity of exotic darkness creatures including nightstalkers (hoons, nightriders, frights) emerge after the midget slasher lost its man rune back in the terminal green age. Looking at it again, the specific absence of "bearded" troll skulls in the temples of the "beard" god is ominous, especially because their closest surviving relatives are the chaos-tinged cave trolls. We don't know a lot about the romal races but then again, we don't know a lot about the secret history of the Lhan/Than (Atyar) complex either. Maybe there was a "bearded" skull that went missing somewhere on the fringe of antigod country. Who collects skulls anyhow? A grand and terrible adventure of the mind awaits for sages willing to go all the way. Being a huge Bruce Chatwin fan I wonder if the midget slasher wasn't also a type of prehistoric superpredator ranging across both the Pamaltelan and Pelorian veldts: terrifying in its voracity and sadism, picking the weakest members out of the clan and harrying them for days until our ancestors' cousins died of blood loss, exhaustion, fear. The slashers gave up their man rune and became something like sakkars in Peloria. In Pamaltela they changed in different ways. On earth we would say dinofelis, the devil in the dark. Speaking of which, I also want to know who the dirt devils are! Something ancestrally like a rock eater, maybe.

Anything you'd like to recognize. New mapping, new lego dioramas, new art. Could even be podcasts!

In the eye of the beholder. Eccentric and obscure OK . . . not necessarily always a popularity contest.

It strikes me that this is a great place to nominate your favorite achievements in Lozenge Studies in this difficult year. Let us know and we'll move the prize money around!

Not to cloud the dance floor (a cloud like a star) any further but I suspect the Sartar Rising poets are a lot deeper in sky magic than I am with their juggling stars and planets and such. We can all fight over whether this means they were close to the Kallyr court or simply rocking adjacent mysteries . . . this is a good fight to have. Being a simple and uncomplicated person, I really do see the Dragonrise as a straightforward application of sympathy and contagion. The visiting team had set up their set of identifications so they could force the local sky to hold a certain configuration (perpetual full). Home team finds a weak entry point and within the ritual vocabulary becomes identified with the ring. The sky can't reject the ring once it's there. Everyone knows the ring contains a green star so the perfection of the ritual stage requires a green star to emerge from somewhere. As above, so necessarily below. The dragon emerges. Little orange stars exit as the ring does. The sky gets on with its work. The simplicity may be a tell that Kallyr and her tricky sky people truly weren't in the loop or at least involved with the ritual planning. All we really know is that they had orders not to molest Pole Star if they could help it, which seems to be a concession to her known all(eg)iances. It raises a great question whether Burbustus magic is intrinsic to the Reaching Moon network or just a local flourish designed to set the temple into the local ecology. If Burbustus runs the Yara temples in the east, that's awfully interesting. If he doesn't, that's interesting too because then the question is how those temples work, why they changed (feedback from local sacred mountains?) and whether Storm Pent has anything to say about Reaching Storm when that happens!

The CHDP chronicler doesn't appear to have had access to the Sartar Rising books and the architecture of their ritual sabotage is a little clearer in some respects there. The real goal was apparently always creating a sympathetic opening for the green star to make an appearance above and be answered by some dragon power closing the circuit below. The timing indicates that they wanted to be as far from the site as possible before that proton torpedo went off. At best, it covered their retreat. At worst, it looks like a suicide mission. CHDP is very careful about assigning plausible deniability. Even Orlaront says he didn't know the magnitude of the dragon power they were calling up. He gets banished anyway as Starbrow is "seeking to contain what had been awakened." Maybe someone somewhere is trying to cover up an inconvenient truth. I have always been in love with the CHDP account so really can't say. I think that simply calling the Ring to its rightful place in an otherwise sanitized ritual sky wouldn't have bought them anything beyond a short-term stalemate motivating the empire to torch the jungle, as it were. They needed to flip the board and put the empire on the defensive. That requires opening yourself up to something bigger than what you started out with. All the orange stars were in play but on a perfect mirror something green was required . . . and then the ground rose up to meet it. Because I like human drama I side with CHDP and think they were making a huge leap of desperation and faith that they'd draw a better card from the deck. Other people have more worldly perspectives.

Love it. IMG RGQ reflects the same world as HQG only showing the strains of a difficult decade. Old models no longer work as well. Sometimes the people in power make choices that alter the magical systems that run the world. Some of these choices are born of desperation and we know a little about how they happened. Others have yet to be revealed. I'm personally convinced that the sacrifice of Issaries rune to itself is one of these hidden choices that rocked the world off its underpinnings but we don't know a lot yet about how it happened. Maybe we all went to bed one night and when we woke up in the morning it was accepted across all the markets that the rune was gone. Maybe it was always a figment of the bookkeeping and we finally decided to give it up. It was too expensive, no longer useful, the opportunity costs stacked elsewhere. Maybe a cabal of esoteric merchants ("syndics") haggled it out . . . something like the Ban and the area of effect is now expanding out of that Zero Point to convert all Trade Runes stored into something else. Rune as crypto contract, but I digress. A notional sink of magical capital denominated in arbitrary numbers we invented and are now calling back. It's the hero wars.

Love this! In some sources there was an aberrant Dawn Age dragonewt community in the Elder Wilds. I think you've found them. After all, they apparently held the Water Seat on the Council so Hurrah, I awake from yesterdayAlive, but the war is here to staySo my love, [untranslatable?\ and me,Decide to take our last walk through the noise to the seaNot to die but to reborn,

All these replies are sizzlers but today I just want to tease out one juxtaposition: "Mysticism" just got interesting as something more than a renunciation of spiritual materialism. And if we glance in the right direction we might understand a bit more of what the East did in the shadow of the Dawn Wars. That direction might be forward in time.

Best Post Of The Year. Followed closely by I want everything available on this Southfaring, not coincidentally because we're temporarily down here in Florida and the only question is which of us is which. "We never saw them again."