scott-martin

Not Dumb Enough! I am not convinced there was ever a "historical Donandar" who originally crossed the world teaching performance and deep in my heart I suspect there was never a "historical Issaries" either. I go back and forth on a "historical Chalana Arroy." These are composite figures cobbled together from diverse parts and cultural matrices now mostly lost. They belong to the world now. The Lanbril network at least seems to have fixed geographical scope and boundaries so we can seek the origins more easily. Maybe there was no founder as you say. Just isolated crimes resolving into patterns, and then those patterns of crime became conscious, acquired a name and accepted sacrifice. This is an amazing line. Where do Gloranthan guilds come from? Where are they going?

The smoking man might have one or two surprises left for you if you veer a little past Civilization / Discontents in either direction. I am out of "thanks" reacts for the day but would like to highlight this extended insight: "Game creation and shamanism were intrinsically linked for Greg. Both gave him constructive means of sorting out his life. If you believe you're a bad or fallen person, what's your storyline? Can you change it and yourself through mythology, like lucid dreaming instead of just being swept along by whatever comes? The redemptive story arcs in Arthurian mythology gave him the understanding, and Glorantha (and specifically Argrath) was its personal expression. And once he had his mythology he could make it real. All versions of myth are true, and if Percival could achieve the Grail, and Argrath conquer his demons and become a god, well now Greg's got a roadmap. I think he very much ended his quest in an Arthurian way. Shamanically speaking." So back to the original post, Glorantha is overfull of assholes. Our work here on the therapeutic battlefield is to teach them not only to talk but to sing.

TOP thread!

Love it. My other Dumb Theory on Lanbril is that these "skill based" or "professional" cults are the first expressions of cosmopolitan Glorantha's pivot out of "spell based" and largely initiatory consciousness. We were once defined as who we are. Now, in the cities, we come to be defined as what we do for a living. That's the future: autobiography emerges as myth recedes. The role of the Issaries, strangely subdued in the Lanbril context (what's their Compatibility Number?), is a factor here . . . and it's probably time to rejigger the narrative as personal passions and their magic emerge. Vadel always a possibility, My Dumb Theory there completely unspeakable. I really like the Artmal Hypothesis because it then gives us materials we can retrofit into the archaic South, complicate them up. On the other hand we might be bringing them the plague.

Where do Gloranthan prophecies come from? We are told the gods, like the human unconscious, do not recognize the distinction between past, present and "future." But not all divinations are literally true. They require expert interpretation. Perhaps these divinations function as "prophecy" until someone emerges to decode them correctly. Or perhaps all the "prophecies" we have are not magically supported at all but are instead consciously constructed as wish fulfillment, propaganda or to serve some other goal. This would make me a little sad. While I'm sure plenty of mystagogues actively promote fake visions of the future, it seems like a waste to attribute the entire Hero Wars complex to this kind of activity. Moreover, in a world where the gods are real etc., it strikes me as extremely dangerous to lie like this . . . sooner or later, the right people will find out and you will get in big trouble. Either way, where does all the foreshadowing come from? Who sells it? How is it made? Where are the margins?

My Dumbest Theory around them is that they're the draconic power of the true (magnetic!) West. In the tragicomic fullness of time they tried many things, made and broke many alliances (including a super weird "marriage" with the jelmre) and the Western Wars will determine the ultimate blah blah.

I like the intuition you display in picking at that particular line with its unusual syntax. He is "of" the Heortlings and his cult inhabits the outlaw umbra of Heortling society but he is not "the" Heortling Thief God. This is where he comes from . . . but he is not Our Guy. IMG Thief and Trickster emerged historically as overlapping monomyth constructs. Some God Learner schools were invested in aggregating the Trickster cults into something that survives within modern Eurmal. Most died in the devastation of Slontos, hoist on their own gigantic final petard. (To risk an especially eccentric personal joke, other sources say "canard.") Others focused on expressions of the Thief. While we know a whole lot less about their role in the Empire, it's not hard to imagine them as magical saboteurs and subversives who infiltrated the criminal undergrounds of rival cultures in order to disrupt the "normal" local magical economy, steal secrets, support friendly resistance movements and probably smuggle contraband drugs, skills and spells for profit. You come into a village, find the local outlaws, "convince" them that you're a co-cultist and ultimately if all goes well they work for you. Then you go on to the next village. You do it again and again, collecting local magic along the way. Once you achieve a critical mass of expertise, you can go into a culture and set up your own Thief network that can operate within the local mythic landscape without too much resistance. You can use this quasi-artificial cult for various purposes, as above or so below. Some are hero cults built around a mortal exemplar. Others are constructed from useful fragments. Whether this is where a "historical Lanbril" emerges from the Heortling mythic underground is not a question I am willing to entertain in uncertain company. I will say that his origin myth is very strange. Some western adept seeking immortality may have come to Pavis to start a mystery sect in the shadow of local eurmal. Imagine a century or two of shadow war between the cults leaving Lanbril in control of the Thief aspect and local eurmal "deciding' to get out of the way. Imagine loose threads tying back into niche cults like Black Fang, which preserve lore that no longer exists anywhere else and so are important enough to rate their own writeup despite completely negligible influence and initiatic population. Imagine someone like Arlaten in Strangers In Prax coming to run a similar scam. Maybe in the fourth age there's a Cult of Arlaten and the boundaries of Lanbril have changed. Imagine "Knowledge" Thieves with a more explicit parasitic role to play in the world's information economy. As the Empire broke up various expressions of Pirate might have emerged as well.

This needs its own thread and ultimately extended development. In My Glorantha there was always a strand of primeval mostal influence within human Jrustelan history. It has simply been hidden in the fragmentary records that survive. (Urtiam, etc.) Theories relating Blue Zz-b-r Magic (historically adroit at shattering or sinking lands) to the Purple Luatha Project especially welcome. Who is the natural enemy in this? The dwarf. And also the altinelan.

It's surprisingly complicated. Greg had already written at least a little about just about every place except for what we now call Central Genertela (Sartar, Prax, Shadows Dance, Holy Country and Empire) but that material wasn't grafted onto the board games until the RuneQuest era, when the composite world became "Glorantha" and you could walk from Seshnela to the Vulture Country and back. If you want what we know and love about the West, East or South, it grows out of the freeform material, parts of which are vestigial and parts of which are intricately detailed. Otherwise, as far as I know, the board games are the earliest extant source for what becomes King of Sartar, Prince of Sartar and deep background for what we can call the Third Age Argrath Heroica. As for Argrath, I believe he's both a wave and a particle. Greg's informants indicate that Sartar ultimately wins and someone -- call them "the historical argrath" -- is the catalyst of that. A terminal hero wars environment undoubtedly generates endless potential argraths, most of whom are transient and pose only an incidental challenge to empire before being neutralized or coopted. In that respect, every player character with a healthy grudge is participating in the argrath legend and their scattered acts of sabotage ultimately pull down the moon. Think of it as a version of Monster Man building up power until finally it erupts. The scrawny kid from Pavis just happens to be the one whose chit of resentment happened to sway the roll and trigger the eruption. And so that's the story that's the most interesting, because it ends differently from all the others. To flip the lesson of the oracular film The Three Amigos, everyone is theoretically the imperial "El Guapo" (pain in the ass or "argrath") at any given moment. We all contribute in our small ways to history. Some of us get punished for it, others do okay. The scrawny kid manages to make it more than a metaphor and become the actual argrath, which is why we tell his story. And as such, he might be an asshole and he might get in our light sometimes but he's on the right side of history and so he becomes our asshole, a force of nature. You don't fight that. You just ride with it until your journeys diverge. If you don't like where he's going, get off the bus. Glorantha is big. A lot of opportunistic crap gets pulled into the terminal vortex that is Dragon Pass but a lot of crap gets spun out as well to land in other regions and seed the hero wars energy. Maybe you're in the outgoing crap. Me, I am eager to see the moon liberated from empire so she can get on with her work and we can see what Greg's informants missed. I'm eager for a lot of things. The kid has taken it farther than anybody else so far. Keep rolling the dice. A wounded world cries out for healing one way or another. It looks like disruption when it comes. SOURCES: Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie Lorne Michaels, !Three Amigos!

It is a delicacy but mostly for export markets. When you're rolling at that level hypoallergenic alynx wool for luxury spin is probably a better use of your labor. With all seriousness this is great. I like the constant references back to the silver standard and the evolving sense of the traditional hide as a productivity metric that salt of the earth types often conflate with land footprint. Multiple interlocking economies . . . I suspect the right square foot of Gringle's storage unit is valued the equivalent of several "hides" among the cognoscenti while the great spell traders are worth more than the entire kingdom (and covertly support a hell of a lot of otherwise marginal agrarian posture).

Love it. Just a tiny sidetrack on land use because we've started laying out a personal "hide" (don't ask but I've got Findhorn on my mind) . . . Every AAA hex is 21.8 square miles (14,000 acres, 115-120 hides) so there's a hard population limit IF Dragon Pass is really self-sufficient even in the best of times. That makes sense. It's bumpy country more like Tibet than Iowa and the yields will reflect that. But I'm starting to think the price points are an arbitrary artifact of the Esrolian trade that really feeds those land-poor but strategic mountain clans. There simply aren't enough hides in Sartar to feed all the people using traditional magically enhanced agriculture. Instead, while someone in a sweet spot could support a household on a lot less than a hide and even generate an economic surplus, for most families the hides are largely symbolic. You farm your footprint and dole out fertile patches as status markers. But most of the food comes from the "store," one way or another. Other parts of the lozenge are very different. This might actually be how the Winter wasn't actually apocalyptic. They relied on imports before, they relied on imports during and they rely on imports now.

Love it. IMG they're highly efficient phytominers. When you want a little copper, plant "copper tree" seeds that metabolize the metal, accelerate the growth and collect the fruit.

Harmast didn't take the core LBQ with him on his journey to the west. He found the rudiments when he got there and put them together in a new system. Whatever rite the lifebringers originally used to repair the world is a now matter for conjecture.

How continuous are accounts of Cragspider's residency at Aranea Kad?

I love it. The veldt could be teeming with lampressae and other expressions of serpent power. Why not a spirit tradition that follows the "snakelines" to give us a way to work with that material? The Six Legged Empire might have called them liki lines. For all I know this is a big deal in mysterious Kimos. Historically the "naga" in the Jraktal War seem to be the people Greg was elsewhere calling the "nagi" in that era and later lose a letter to become our "agi (-mori, -tori)" of today. While it's a deep pointer to secret history of Pamalt buried in the Nargan wastes, for our modern purposes it would be good to treat this as one of the reptile creations we know now in the south. (Leaning to thinking of the Ivamali as secret red elf progenitors also, but that's another thread.)

Yeah. A really in-depth take would look at the various roles lucas virae plays in the larger Great Tree cycle: seedling dryads all the way to mature canopy. In some phases, sisters might grow tightly clustered. ("An Aldryami Shaman's Grove" has at least four tree "nymphs" of different species coexisting in a relatively small but intense bit of woodland.) As they get older, time will naturally space them out. So this part depends on what level of dryad experience we're looking for.

Love it. For MGF I'd consider staging them at least a few days travel apart on average to make each one feel more like a passage into a separate ecosystem even for elves in their own forests. This gives each of the girls space and encourages the clumping patterns you point out. Let's run some tests. Say an elf on the go needs to run a wild and happy day from grove to grove when it's Awakening season. If we treat native forest as trade road for their purposes, those dryads might be 30 km apart for an average territory of 700 km2 . . . more like 500 groves in Vralos and each would function as a living great temple to Aldrya with maybe 1,500 full elves (again on average) under her shade. Naturally they aren't all frolicking right there 24/7 so it doesn't get crowded. They have things to do. But when there's trouble and/or a festival things get ugly for intruders fast. Maybe you want smaller clumps more closely spaced. That's great too. At 50 km2 the girls are maybe 4-5 km apart, call it one in every AAA hex on average. We can do that. It's up to you. If you want a little drama between them, slow the runners down. This won't keep lucas virae from using spells to know what's going on in neighboring groves, but maybe you like that spooky hivemind vibe. YGWV. Some people like dryads to be awesome campaign-culminating events, "hero-level heavies." In that scenario, I would just park one on each of the Plant Runes in AAA and the Guide, so that's 11 mature groves in Vralos. Is that too thin a distribution? On the one hand, you get maximum drama when you meet one. (I have not personally encountered many.) On the other, if you need to run a week to kiss the dryad and pass the Awakening baton, it's going to slow the spring down a lot before everybody gets the good news. Maybe they have special magic to motivate you in that season.

I do love a turtle. Now that we're here I wouldn't be surprised if our original source for a lot of this comes from Sofali informants and what I now want to believe is that they have a weird unique spiral astronomy and that their word for sky is bronze. Dragons, waters, trees, snakes, fruit. EDIT "Apples." I was going to mention the Holiness of the "tide-wracked" Holy Country, half solid and half fluid, but forgot to go there. Golden apples, silver apples. Apple Lanes. A lot of this was probably developed into whatever form Ernalda Dragon (Ernalda Likita?) was allowed to take inside EWF and then spectacularly suppressed . . . I think this is probably the best answer to the original question. They knew more about these connections and worked them more explicitly than they do today. Anyway people don't like to talk about it until the terminal third age reopens all the locked mythic boxes and those ghosts of previous epochs come briefly home.

I think, my friend, that beyond a certain scale of antiquity it is literally turtles all the way down. But this might be one of the primal struggles of that age. Are mommy and daddy "fighting" or is it another form of hugging? Some say one and become one kind of creature. Others say and become another.

That's a very deep question. Some people preserve vestigial memories of an era when the dominant elemental hierogamy was Earth and Water. Something happens to Water and the struggle to establish a successor sets up the "primal" (actually relatively recent on this time scale) rivalry between Storm and Sky. This is probably related to the flood but what's clear is that it's much older than a lot of the status quo we usually talk about. In the time when Earth and Water were united, they generated their own joint ecosystem. Snake forms were popular and beloved by both. The rivers were a sign of their union. Fish and snakes have scales. When a snake or river leaps it can become a rainbow or something like a "dragon," a winged (but probably not feathered yet) snake. The likitas (earth snake women, nagas) represent both tectonic "currents" and the literal flow of fluid energy through the landscape . . . dowsing, what we would call ley lines, the serpent force. It starts to look like a primeval dragon complex. Relative to other primeval complexes they read earthy and watery . . . but in the fullness of time the dragon world within itself has diversified to emulate other modern elemental vocabularies, one sheds his skin and becomes "brown," for example, another mirrors the sun, the red dragon from the board game remains a little mysterious. Cragspider's friend may be even more ancient than generally surmised or simply a recidivist looking farther back for a pleasing expression. The primeval dragon complex runs in parallel with the primal vegetative complex, children of Earth and Water we can understand a little better because they work a little harder to be understood. Different logic, different mythic economy but still contemporaries, fossil cousins cut from roughly the same stratum. There's a memory that dragons fought with giants that might conceal the fall of Water and the rise of Storm/Sky. If so, the giants are the shadows of one or more new divine dynasties, massive in "scale" but maybe more human in shape. Man Rune. The dragons are aligned with the older world. Giants and dwarves have an obscure relationship. Dwarves receive or acquire Earth affiliation at some point. Law, Stasis, Stone. As moisture recedes the ground hardens. Generations of elves and dwarves come and go. The world changes. East is where the old world never rolled back. West is where it recedes. People in the West who remembered the dragon world recede as the giant world and its monomyth comes into historical focus. But with strange aeons . . . .

Please keep us posted + consider publishing your results.

Love it all. As usual many of these are not trying hard enough to be dumb and actually deserve their own development threads when time permits. For example . . . "Executive" is its own category. From now on in a Glorantha very near mine the wizard schools are known as "legendary houses."

Lokarnos was a sun once in his native land reasonably well equipped to contend for the crown of heaven. He was a chariot god before they broke him. There were others.

If it helps, retranslate the "rightness" of these answers as "historically successful, conventional," much as anyone with the right paperbacks can respond to the question of a dog's buddha nature with "mu" without triggering the illumination mechanics or attracting the riddler's attention. We know that in such and such a time, so and so said a thing and was illuminated. People tell the story and feel spooky. Maybe with the right meditation and lucky rolls even the story can provoke a transformation in consciousness. More likely, nothing changes. Esoterically there is only one "right" answer in every riddle interaction because only one response will unlock that transformation for any given person at any particular moment. You can say a lot of things and act up in endless ways but unless it clicks, it's not the right answer. The answer that clicked once for someone may not work for anyone ever again. But once it clicks, that's my answer and I carry it with me unless for some reason my understanding evolves toward MGF. Nobody else's answer should matter unless for some reason I've engaged in a personal relationship with that person. Worrying about what works for anyone else is at best a greased rail to occluded vision. The story of Glorantha and the third age in particular is a story of occluded vision.

IMG it serves MGF. Any reasonably alert riddler should realize that a response has "provoked the great doubt" or relief from certainty that triggers the illumination mechanics. The linguistic content (if any) of the response is secondary to the riddler. You're just looking for the existential release. However, in the absence of broader experience, the respondent will often fixate on his or her personal "answer" as the key to the epiphany and so can miss the signs when they present in someone else. As noted across this thread, narcissism or at least solipsism is a common byproduct of the illumination crisis, leading many riddlers to become occluded to responses that diverge from their own. It all starts to revolve around the answer, which has been published and so you can cheat your way in. This cheat in itself serves the Nysalor cult as it enters the terminal seventh wane. They reward a kind of false consciousness that a good zen stick would cure in more innocent times. And this comment in itself represents the riddle associated with the Sense Ambush skill. There are other schools and infinite right answers.