scott-martin

1 hour ago, g33k said:

Who is "Strength"?

In archaic Holy Country materials (this is one), "Strength" gets briefly assigned to a three-legged rune that looks like the modern Change. This attribution of course went away sometime before RQ2, along with "Justice" for what we now call Stability, "Love" for Harmony and "War" (close to your "Battle") for Disorder. By mid-1980 the triskelion has shifted to clear association with movement and moving matter: breezes, tidal waves, "skipping [traveling] stones," mobile automatons, riding animals. 

IMG this particular piece is parallel to the mystery of the extinct Ginijji civilization (hard earth, sky titan and one other) that gets incorporated into the MOLAD but the point is that there are three flavors of violence afflicting the Forgotten God. The presence of a few "War" ("Battle") runes associated with earth counters suggests that this was the combat mode of that element, call it "hard earth" if you like but if it evolved into Discord and the giants tainted by it, we can see why the myth singles it out as especially impure. "Strength" could be a different kind of angry giant, like the Great Sage Equal To Heaven says. Call him Jagrekriand if that matters, or Tolat ancient of days. Shargash belongs to the solar court but Tolat has more explicit water (mastakos is a blue god) connections. And Storm is an element we all know with a unique relationship with Death.  So YGWV really after this archaeological diversion.

On 1/31/2024 at 7:55 AM, mfbrandi said:

Wholesome matter can only be made to live by infusing it with tenuous soul or spirit.

This is really good because it uh grounds them in their original role as a competing earth ecology, neither vegetable nor ernaldoid but maintaining access to gnomes. The key concept is that is not really a womb or hourglass figure but food . . . eater and eaten.

This in turn is why when you flip the rune  is also called hunger, appetite without access to food. Note that trolls will famously eat animals, vegetables or even inert matter, dwarves and dwarf stuff. Part of the secret work of the Machine is to convert as much as they can to Stone that resists falling into the shameful and embarrassing food cycle . . . they find the notion of becoming food for worms or worse terrifying. Thus the canning.
 

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

sun spider

Putting the Solara back on it!

42 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

If only the Brithini had been the Campari, maybe people would have warmed to them a bit more.

We should probably take this to #theories but if you take Greg's early encounter with Alan Stivell records seriously enough to read "Brithini" as a corruption of "Brezhon ys"  or "Breton île" (see also "Prydain") then the obvious derivation of "Vadel" is "Gwad île," of or originating on the island of blood. This gives you two root alchemical factors, the white and the red, which are then refracted across their various castes. This one is for you, Greg. These are your two dragons in Vortigern's dream. The campari is of course on the red side.

EGWV

What's remarkable about this otherwise innocent fragment is that it feeds into a sense of Dawn Age Brithos as a politically dynamic place. Here's a privately circulated timeline providing some cryptic and of course impossibly ancient support for developments on the island in an "ENGR Era" lost to later zzaburcentric historical propaganda. It reached me free from encumbering book curses so I post it here in service to knowledge and the greater light of shared knowledge.


 

10 minutes ago, Joerg said:

What could the son of Zzabur and chief sorcerer of Brithos (after the retirement of his father) be rebelling against? The Engrions?

Ultimately we'll never know unless we fill that blank page ourselves with the best version we can come up with. If two or more versions emerge, the weight of MGF will decide which is more or less authentic . . . which addresses Nick's point. Hello everyone!

2 hours ago, glarkhag said:

I had not seen it in the places I currently look

(thanks @jajagappa for observing that I rarely read #Runequest these days)

This is from the early compilation "Records of the Malkioni" that ultimately gets bundled into The Seshnegi Book of Foreigners (Roots of Glorantha XII). None of what's lurking back there will impact anyone's sense of the setting . . . if it does, you have uncovered a Great Secret! The price of that is that nobody else knows what you know or is interested in communicating with you about it.

I would view it as new / recovered information unavailable anywhere else and keep an eye on Jeff in the Facebook group for more. Careful fans will see that there are shocking blanks in the received history of the west. They haven't hurt us yet and have yet to prompt intense investigation. Why is that I wonder?

But I will say that the tantalizing thing about this particular fragment is that it comes under the heading "The Sixth Caste of the Malkioni." Isn't that interesting? Granted, there's a word crossed out that "Malkioni" replaces, but that's probably just one of those typographical errors.

The next section, even more tantalizing, is titled "The Rebellion of Kaldes" and then the page is blank!
 

2 hours ago, Snugz said:

Arkat the Yellow King, or vice versa

All kings (talars) are yellow if you walk far enough into the west but if you go too far the pantone flips (violet).

Coincidence is probably the MGF response. There was an earlier effort in the '70s to surface the phrase as "Impossible Possibilities," but it ironically does not exist in the original French and so can be considered a failure. Some force keeps wanting to make this happen around the fringes of the conversation and won't rest until satisfied. See also: Los Seres Imaginarios.

33 minutes ago, Broadsmile said:

But what am I regular  Antipu antipus (Joe Schmoe) going to do with mindblast, madness, reflect and regrow limb.  

IMG most of this magic is an application of the real work of the 7M cult, which is the cultivation of personal psychological states . . . not quite the radical individuality of full illumination but a kind of progressive realization that social identity is a construct and the imagination has power. Thus someone who is advanced in 7M meditation will naturally figure out how to trigger similar states in others or shake off / repel magical aggression. You know the underpinnings of consciousness. That's the important part. The weaponized forms are good for the conventional character sheet but really incidental . . . they point toward another kind of game that might or might not show up when lunar heroquesting rules are published.

(Regrow Limb is a secret of Dying Moon therapy and so is a little different.)
 

24 minutes ago, Erol of Backford said:

But would the fish and chips be any good in Pavis?

It's like Vegas . . . since everything is flown in, everything in the world is available and it is of relatively high quality for the price point. The Ingillis have worked out a secret magical system where black cod from Feroda get sent back up to the docks and distributed to the fry stalls or turned into hand rolls if you know the right people and show up on the right day. I can't vouch for the chips though.

Along with the original question, who originally acknowledged Kargan Tor as a god? Which civilization(s) interacted with him and his mythology? Where does he come from? Did he preexist the Celestial Court power rune pantheon passed down to us?

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Orlanth is happiest when his wife is dead

Looking back, the identity of the Jar is a cult secret kept from Adventurous, whose participation in the quest is more oedipal (Kero Fin is the dead goddess and dad is a suffering titan) than romantic. Since then the pendulum of understanding has swung to promote the settled interpretation. And that's okay.

I think you just solved the dangling question of why the "theyalan" seasons progress in the order they do, including finding a role for Indlas Somer.

5 hours ago, Joerg said:

Hrelar Amali was the seat of Holy Estorex

Hot stuff!

39 minutes ago, radmonger said:

This is clearly propaganda created on behalf of the Red Earth faction.

Now that you bring it up the occult symbolism is even more complicated. Map the eye lines and a clear division emerges between land goddesses who look to the west (Frona, Pelora, Teshna) and those who face the other way (Seshna to Esrola), while Ralia and Slonta complete the directional repertoire. What does this mean?

First, the archaic Pelora joins Frona in looking away from the sun toward the original northwestern survival covenant of the Neliomi basin. This suggests that the early Janube played an important role in unifying these lands, and because we all know Sog was built on the ruins of a dead geothermal regime we can postulate a lost "husband protector" (call him the red king) who was ultimately replaced in Peloria at least by modern Yelm. Note also that only Teshna is looking directly at the sun as her original consort.

Esrola, on the other hand, faces the Bull to signify the Waha covenant centered in the Paps, while Seshna looks across in that direction as well. Ralia is neutral as befits her role as custodian of the original seasonal marriage contests at Hrelar Amali: sometimes she pivots "west" toward the water (lodril) marriage and sometimes she pivots "east" toward the sky. Slonta's disposition is a secret. I can't talk about that beyond hinting that this relates to the esoteric meaning of the goddess "switch" in which a heretofore uncontacted entity emerged to replace another whose era was over: note that neither modern Ernalda nor archaic Soruvela appear here under those names. This is a visual manual for building or, if necessary, destroying goddesses.

There are of course other intricacies waiting to be teased out but getting back to the thread topic it reveals the way the Yelm / Orlanth rivalry is managed historically while the older Yelm / Neliom / Lodril contest is no longer relevant to most people. The forest has shifted. The old Flamal was a water god. The new one, not so much.

Among the malkionites there have always been marginal schools or sects so unschooled and emotionally impoverished that they insist in the physical reality of "Solace," as though it were some actual place set aside for the transmigration of the elect within Time. While the orthodox dismiss the teaching as harpazism (one of the projective fallacies), nonetheless it appears in the Abiding Book and so will be with us as long as there are desperate people who feel they have no place else to go.

Unsubstantiated accounts of mass disappearances in times of social and tectonic strain contribute to the persistence of this belief. These people went somewhere out of this world, the faithful and unlettered say, a step ahead of death into the absolute elsewhere. So far these are facts of religious history.

MGF suggests that these people have been warehoused somewhere and will be released before Time runs out. Call it a back door from Brithos if you like. It will be shocking and awful as the vanished-but-not-dead come home. This is especially distressing for the functionally immortal, who worked really hard for nothing in the long run.

1 hour ago, Ynneadwraith said:

Trolls I can get on board with, though I'd like to see more cultural variety. Aldryami I find singularly uninspiring, which saddens me as a die-hard 'elf person'. I've yet to come across someone's version of Glorantha that has made aldryami 'click' for me, or thought of a way to do it myself. Mostali I sort of don't expect to find compelling as I rarely find dwarves compelling, but that's more of a personal failing than anything else. If injecting a little more cultural variety to break up their monoliths would provide more opportunity to make them compelling, I'm all for it.

You should post more. The most generative approach for me is to treat each of these parallel approaches to consciousness as an unstable cultural coalition organized by distinctions that matter enormously to them but are hard to translate to people on the outside. Thus each of the troll strongholds IMG has a separate origin and expresses its own prehistoric panoply of dark entities underneath the Kyger overlay . . . even using the different published variants of the cult for local flavor.

The dwarves never resonated with "Doyle" either so beyond fairly crude satire he didn't spare them the cycles. IMG the key to their civilization is that each of the extant colonies was not born that way but literally made, assimilated into the mostal complex from existing raw man rune materials. Conquered. Again, each colony has a different original situation and so is constantly facing a different set of internal recidivisms that surface interactions with their remote immune system rarely even hint at. Of course this does make the mostal orthodoxy into the assholes but this is a Doylist bias that isn't really worth fighting against . . . the important thing is to be able to get far enough into the heads of individuals (already an oxymoron in orthodox terms and paradox = heresy, the computer is your friend) to make them playable. To give them the chance to concoct a soul.

(Some people enjoy making the elder approaches "alien" to an extreme as a dramatic challenge but as more or less a human being sharing this hobby with other human beings I don't worry about it too much. If I wanted to be ostentatiously weird other games already provide malkavians.)

Which brings us to elves. I spent a lot of time in my youth getting really into the Frazer mythos, the whole seasonal ritual & romance of the dying & resurrected vegetable god. I have a Plant rune score. However, I recognize that most of the time what we call vegetable consciousness is really just more humans operating on a different emotional economy that looks superficially "archaic" relative to modern factory farming and its bronze age equivalents. I don't really ask them if their veins pump sap instead of blood or if they actually die in the fall or simply sleep a lot more. Or never sleep at all in the cosmic south. What matters is that the various cyclical routes in and out of death matter a lot to them and they have fought merciless wars over what we would consider fine points of timing. None of this is likely to ever get much in the way of brain hours as far as the publishing goes. That's okay. Let the publishing emphasize how our elves are different. It's a marketing thing.

 

1 hour ago, Ageha said:

By the 2nd or 3rd conquest by a foreign power the idea that Dara Happa/Peloria is itself a significant hegemonic power should be played out. What it should be is the contested prize of the great Pentan, Carmanian and Orlanthi empires which have dominated it throughout its entire history and seek to always secure it because it does possess great utility, but little to no power.

Funny story, IMG this is roughly where they are these days but don't tell them that. Some would say "they protest too much" when it comes to protecting their imperial prerogatives in a world their cloistered aristocrats find increasingly bewildering. Attempts to recover past glory are disastrous.
 

1 hour ago, Ageha said:

I also agree it'd be nice, if Orlanth is meant to be this somewhat scary and destructive force, if more groups then actually kicked him out sometimes, because currently it just doesn't seem to be the case at all.

Funny story, you've described the way the Council got Broken when the trolls, dragons and southern storm people got kicked out for being scary, destructive and annoying. We just don't hear much about it these days because the documents we have were preserved by the most ornery of said southern storm people, who have their own obvious bias.
 

1 hour ago, Ageha said:

It sounds interesting and certainly I would prefer a situation where Peloria had also achieved cultural expansion in some areas

Funny story! Or rather, two funny stories. The first one opens up the Dawn Age map to make room for multiple diasporic waves radiating out of their initially isolated survival covenants. While we know the most about the theyalan diaspora that originated in the Choralinthor basin, careful reading can support a parallel troll-oriented missionary movement spreading the OOO cult, multiple rival elf expansions, sea people, totemic people and for your purposes a solar migration coming out of Pent ("starlight ancestors") and carrying solar ideas across the full breadth of Genertela. As these movements start interacting the world as we know it today finds its foundations, with for example some long-buried strains of starlight ancestor "Pelorian style" cultural dissemination surviving inside the little sun clans of the barbarian belt where they promptly become too fractious for me to keep track.

The second funny story is that IMG the theyalan missionaries probably weren't spreading the gospel of Orlanth as we understand him today. That came later. Their real message was that light is reborn, the world is alive and isolated individuals can find common ground. That the elemental regimes not only can work together but cooperation / compromise is necessary. That's the real "light" bringer gospel, not the stormbringer gospel, which belongs to a completely different fantasy saga. But as they were bringing good news about light, they could be considered a light (or at least light-leaning, light inclusive) culture incorporating the worship of light gods into their spirituality. At a certain early stage in history, this light aspect gets concentrated into Peloria and Saird where the sun was reborn in splendor while the dark and stormy parts are pushed to the frontiers to refine their ancestral tale of illegitimate birth, stolen patrimony, adultery, regicide, deadbeat dad syndrome and cosmic redemption. 

Because this was the "funniest" (saddest, truest) story of all, it resonates widely to this day and the storm keeps spreading in an elementally confused world. There are a lot of good stories. We could always use one or two more.

3 hours ago, Ageha said:

I mean is there any region in Genertela which is traditionally Orlanthi where a different culture/religion has come to power like happened in Southern Peloria which is mostly Orlanthi now? Maybe in Pamaltela, I have not yet read as much about them.

This whole post is a real cri de cœur, thank you. To start by pulling this particular thread, the history of the West IMG (including Umathela) is largely a narrative of "malkionization" as the scattered storm-leaning communities (and others) assimilate into the sorcerous framework one way or another. From what we know now it's also likely that archaic eastern storm people (call them "kaharites" if you like) got folded into modern Kralorelan society but there's still a lot of work left to do there.

More broadly, I think that for most of history Dara Happa is actually winning through persistence and organization. They excel at continuity. Their aggressions tend to be symbolic and directed at suppressing internal rivalries. They can do this successfully for a very long time. When they are winning, the histories gloss over centuries where "not much happened" . . . change is slow, routine and bureaucracy take hold, the system works because it works. They never really lose in these periods because there's no need to even have a real fight about anything. Something like a golden age prevails.

But when the Dara Happan system hits its limit, discontinuities force events and "storm" emerges in all its unpredictability. Most of the time these disruptions are reincorporated into the system one way or another through institutional channels like Lodril but occasionally the trouble goes all the way to the top and the unchanging regime changes, complete with plenty of moral and intellectual turmoil as the new winners work to justify their ascendent positions and the losers struggle to rationalize the defeat. These moments of transformation are interesting to historians and gamers alike. The game is not coincidentally set in an era when the solar order is stretching too far and storm forces have started to multiply in the margins. It's a dangerous time of high adventure.

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Chaos is darkness putting out its first tentative pseudopods — Krarsht reaches out hungrily in all directions, naturally — or darkness is chaos retracting its feelers. Chaos reaching out. Darkness turning inward — to examine the light within? Darkness withdrawing — from the painful external stimulus of light?

Now that you mention it, IMG one of the alchemical powers of  is that it recedes to become a reservoir of unrealized potentials . . . rotate along all its angles and you end up with something like the black egg of आकाश. This probably has ramifications for the illumination schools ("why has sar arkat gone to the trolls?") but I have little time for that stuff these days.

But giving the Gloranthan five-element system (as eccentric as it initially appears in a sea of paracelsan fantasy references) an ayurvedic origin opens a lot of doors, most importantly giving the taoist 五行 dynamics room to bloom elsewhere on the lozenge. Maybe in hypothetical Vithela every element is raised one step along the spiral, with their  playing the role of the western , their  is the western  and while  and  are still   and , they introduce as the western  at the top before the cycle repeats. So a bit of nuance to their sorcery and of course their alchemy.

Yeah, like you I initially gave the  mirror stage a miss but "it's all done with mirrors" is probably one of the revelations the modern Malkionite umma finds so horrendous . . . hits too close to the way Abiding Books are composed with camera lucida rigs, but we digress.

 is the fuzzy derived from rotating around itself

 is the implied revealed when is rotated around itself

or  is to  (as you've already explicated) as  is to .

These are both orientations toward the statistical field that encompasses good things, bad things, good people and bad . . . without always assigning the outcomes we might hope for in our philosophy. 

I wonder if the key is that getting to abstract  requires trimming the outlying "horns" off the modern  . . . I've cleaned it up a tiny bit, the more accurate version may be more of a , the other Krarsht rune. Trim the extreme outcomes from the die roll and you end up with Krarsht, the tyranny of mean statistical reality.

But rotate  and trim the extreme branching paths and you actually end up with , the undifferentiated plenum and mother of creation.

57 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

I am loving these. It strikes me that perversely reflects the full indeterminacy of the Heisenberg wave (as I barely recall from hippie books) while  describes the situation that precipitates in the wave collapse.  as the die that spins, the sum total of possible outcomes, as the die that stops and reveals how it goes for you now . . . in some ways the opposite of how we might interact with the runes but when considered as "our" luck and the statistical web of branching paths it adds up. Either way, cut the radial symmetry fromand see the  revealed.

1 hour ago, Kloster said:

I see more the Aeolians as Glotanthan equivalents of the Hazaras, that lives as a homogeneous group, are considered as shi'i muslims by muslims, but as budhists by the budhist world, even if their beliefs include elements of mongolian shamanism.

I love this also (from elsewhere) because it makes them sound like sufis or rosicrucians to me, a community adroit at adopting the outward philosophical costume of whatever nation of belief they find themselves in. When in Rome, they conform just enough to Catholic norms to be considered a little esoteric but still part of the prevailing in group. When in Benares, they wear a different outfit and blend, and so forth.

This is funny to me because in a recent conversation with the esoteric scouting people a quote came up that set off a cascade of thinking about lightbringer psychology:


"Observe the customs of your tribe." Dress according to the "custom" of the country in which you dwell. As it turns out, the founder of this particular strain of esoteric scouting was a family friend of Manly Palmer Hall so there's a rosicrucian universalism there if you squint, an urge to converge the best parts of every creed in pursuit of something absolutely inclusive: every community, every "tribe" has strength and wisdom behind its dances, respect that and learn from it.

But then we started getting into the "fourfold path" that this particular strain of esoteric scouting derives from the Native American medicine wheel and I realized that the directions are the developed lightbringer professions (healer, trader, scholar, clown) with the core personality in the middle as the "Orlanth." Or in feminist terms the angels rotating around Kate Bush in the "Lily" video as she walks the straight line forward. Anyway a funny thing that might end up productive in the coming year . . . Glorantha as holding environment for realms of the repressed awaiting their return.

6 hours ago, radmonger said:

The Aeolians are the world experts on the storm deity links of Malkion the Prophet, so any details on that known to scribes in Nochet likely reflect their perspective.

When we view Gloranthan history as the struggle between this storm lineage on one hand and what we could call "the party of the mother" or the waereran line on the other, a lot of interesting deep history snaps into focus, including the transportation of the umathelan and jrustelan nations, the ritual significance of the empire of land *and* sea, and so on. 

Of course the water faction ultimately lost.

21 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Of course, an alternative to both/and and inclusive or exclusive or is neither. What may have a beak like a bird but skin wings like a bat — and pycnofibres, rather than mammalian fur or avian feathers? But we have flapped that space before.

6 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

a crop that resists state formation

Sounds like rhizome humor, which suggests that there is no unified record of the potato within time (no history) or in mythology (no story with any pronouns) . . . no ritual rhythm, no god or goddess, no spells that would appear on anyone's character sheet. Just a reservoir of calories reproducing in secret in the neglected corners of the field, a weed.

This is unspeakable in conventional Glorantha where every phenomenon has a soul that can be communicated with if you learn its narrative. The potato is as profane as it gets. No symbol, all noise. It might not be a distinct plant at all. Maybe there's a whole class of undifferentiated stuff down here that will never get a real name in any Gloranthan language. Just euphemisms and vagueness.

The mothers call that stuff "potato." It represents the scattered forces that could be integrated into a lunar element but haven't been yet. Raw matter. Trash. Trash has a vital ritual function for them because they are a missionary order tasked with integrating fragmented pre-lunar consciousness (trash) into the synergy of the new way. They mostly only eat trash once, in a conversion meal that awakens the previously fragmentary moon rune mind:

Before the mothers, no potato.
After the mothers, no potato.

The D5X are tasked with preparing it and managing its toxicity because that's exactly what D5X does. This is a factor in the Beat Pot Revolt and makes him more interesting as a radical theologian in his own right.

But the potato question is a little more complicated. First, as the primary "idiot plant" with no known soul or spirit, potatoes are more characteristic of the botany we have here on everyday planet earth where only hippies drone on about vegetable allies or devas or whatever. The planet with a potato is earth. The one with no potato is Glorantha. This is the difference. Sophisticated heroquesters can transit back and forth at will.

After potato, earth
Before potato, Glorantha

Second, wikipedia reminds me of the philosophical distinction between rhizomatic plant models and the arborescent system. We know the tree: all exemplars get mapped down to a single trunk called Aldrya. The potato grows differently with its head in the ground and its feet in the air. A rival vegetable logic, another green world.

This is central to the war on the Kresh.
 

47 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

The boogie woogie is built up from barbarous incantations. This reminded me of one of my favorite grimoires. What does it mean? I've never bothered to look up each syllable separately much less do the math . . . but I'm told (and I believe) that it's the language of the dead.

 

"Zo"ria is Zorak Zoran identified with the goddess of love. This has wild ramifications.

If you ever get access to the Ourania cloisters there's always an archaic idol of the goddess carved or chewed from some soft black stone. I'm told this is the "third wink" or "eyes wide shut" aspect in their meditative work, where "Ou" rania becomes "Glo" rania or even "Gorarania." The common design feature is too many arms, as though the night sky is a web and she is traversing the strands. But this is never shared with outsiders, you really need to push to get that part or else burn a few blue divination points.