scott-martin

Who needs organic POW when Free INT is the short cut to real power? And the blue man knows all.

One insidious take on the POW economy (which might even approach inner canon) is that "donated" POW may not get absorbed into the spirit's magical footprint. It could stay with the donator as a kind of "black box" power pool that the donator can no longer access . . . but the spirit (or god) can manipulate in some fashion. The entity will always own that slice of your soul for the rest of your life. Spirits tend to use it differently. Trance possession happens. Specialists can fiddle with the "accounting." This would fuel something like Stormbringer demonic pacts as well as the more orthodox relationships we have in the rules now. The shaman sacrifices him/herself to him/herself and becomes strong in the spirit world. The worshipper sacrifices to god and receives RP as compensation. The heroic figure receives a spirit double and in some circumstances diverts sacrifice to that allied entity. The sorcerer remains alone (unless you get really into the artifice of familiar magic) and the mystic makes an aesthetic judgement from afar. Thank you! Undoubtedly not new to anyone but fresh lightning for me.

You have blown my mind. My current suspicion is now that the allied spirit is the theistic counterpart of the fetch, activating parallel routes to magical power in a framework the priests can usually tolerate. Great stuff!!

IMG every spirit is hungry. Few ever get anything more than the occasional MP and don't have much to offer that's worth anything more so a gift of real POW would be extravagant . . . unless for some reason you are grooming this particular spirit with a specific magical goal in mind. I like Crel's note about worship situations . . . feeding an allied spirit on your own POW feels like idolatry or some other sin. Maybe all orthodox allied spirits (YGWV whether any of them can be otherwise) will simply accept your gift and pass it right back up to the big boss, evading potential abuse and helpfully making sure you aren't breaching your deal with god.

Cliff Palace is still extant as an exemplar but it's not hard to imagine abandoned sites of a broader "Tarsel Hills culture" feeding various phases of architectural imagination like the ceremonial Kencom Tombs. A lot we don't know about the archaeological record up there. Odds are pretty good that they were a Mostal-adjacent people (apostates, escapees, survivors or scavengers) but the truth can be stranger than the first guess.

Several candidates in Fronela, which is an eye opener. For Anasazi proper I like the notion that this was the style of the archaic "Wind Children," in which case we might find sprawling but low density complexes surviving across the Shan Shan as well as ruins closer to home.

The saga of how top grannies weaponized the grain futures market in particular to take down Hendira and as a bonus sterilize the maximum contango left over from the Great Winter crash is endlessly fascinating to a handful of specialists while keeping tens of thousands alive. Love them. Don't know what crazy thing we would have come up with to feed people instead. Nobody dares trade that far out now of course . . . all the premium has gotten crowded into the near contracts and then goes over a cliff, which has the weird effect of compressing what used to be a theoretically endless future down into something the technicians call a "dragon's eye" formation. Weird stuff. Got to be money in it somewhere. By the time it was liberated, Leningrad’s population was down to 600,000. Three quarters of them were women.

Within Star Wars canon, what characterizes dark side deeds as mechanically distinct from naked self interest? Maybe that's a direction to pursue.

I asked that in Nochet once and they're cool with the amateurs piling on . . . every temple that supports the idea of commodity wealth as something more portable and sublime is doing god's work even if they nominally compete with us for fee flow. Come in, introduce the concept that coinage can travel ("dance"), blow the locals' minds and build the Market for us. Then the local temple invariably either gets bored and brings us in to handle what is effectively an inefficient non-core function for them OR discovers they have a natural talent for Fair Exchange and becomes a white label enterprise with shingle and everything. We don't mind. More places that accept abstract "credit" help money move faster outside secular systems, we can get points back there. Wheels can be a serious challenge but because Sun Dome communities rarely interface directly with each other we are still essential as intermediaries and couriers, which is fun and lucrative in itself. Like a lot of locals they gather the assets and then feed them to the professionals for disposition / management. Also the Domes themselves are interesting unique warehouses of intellectual property so there's a covert spell banking opportunity there as various people launch their Hero Wars doomsday contingency hedges. The beards were one of the biggest initial competitive threats there because they can actually count past ten with their shoes on, but cutting them in on the evaluation side kept them fat, happy and just distracted enough to never seriously build out their own network. We don't really care what fantasy number they put on the treasure that goes into the account logs . . . high, low, we know the price of a thing is in the occasion so it doesn't really matter. But as long as the beards get to feel useful we remain the only truly reliable provider. Oh hey, is this recording crystal on? Where's the delete button on here.

I think that's a qualified tax demon offset as well in some provinces but check with your local diviner for confirmation, we can't be responsible if the demon eats you anyway.

We can say "do ut des" here, it's OK. Love this stuff.

That is one heck of a line! I love it.

I'm open to that outcome!

It's pretty esoteric. I am loving this widdershins journey but wonder if the horned serpent has a different ritual function from the horned man. We know that as a noruma gendered entity it is not a horned woman either but that's secondary. Noruma spelled backward is as big as things get, somewhere on the level of northern dragons. I like the appearance of elemental snakes down here a whole lot. A lot we don't know about the elemental system here as well. Kralorela also. Let 10000 shamans converge and share wisdom.

That sounds interesting! IMG the specific expressions of chaos are culturally determined although there is consensus among experts that certain broad fields of behavior are close to universally "dark side." Many things that trigger a Storm Bull straight off the prairie are really just the indoor plumbing of any civilized society, something new, exotic and superficially incomprehensible. Many communities do not have any kind of clean Sense Chaos diagnostic. They can only reliably recognize various shades of "bad" and that often simply means things they don't like, which conflict with their interests or are alien to their explanatory models. So that's touchy feely. But with Greg, the cosmos still has a mechanical bias away from some phenomena and that's the objective "dark side" of chaos taint. Stuff Greg Hates actively reduce the amount of structure and energy in the universe, taking a once vibrant world and murdering some small but essential part of it. They weaken the bonds holding Fenris [not a gloranthan term] and other agents of the apocalypse at bay. "Bad" things simply shuffle the cosmic structure, building it up in places by tearing it down in others. We can measure the inputs and outputs and if you see less good stuff in the system (community, region, world) after a deed has been done, that was a chaotic thing to do. Ironically this often includes the Tap. Jraktal is one of the chaos gods. The embodiments of these generally catabolic or "chaotabolic" processes are assigned the chaos rune. In the board games, this was a negative magic factor, something completely different from a high magic factor on the other team that would effectively cancel out opposed magic factors and leave the world back at status quo. Chaos is more than zero sum math. It's the eradication of the field that makes the "math" of community possible in the first place. Eaters eat and tear down but they also fertilize the ground for the next cycle. Eaters leave something behind. Death leaves something behind. Chaos, like "dark side," can't be fixed.

Traces of the tantra getting historically complicated down there too. Still so much we don't know about so many of these shamanic systems. Probably someone is going widdershins around the lozenge bringing all the spirit ways into conversation while others are collecting seeds or theistic magical insights. Can't wait to meet that person or team.

The old guys definitely do not like to talk about it when they're sober. Maybe we'll figure it out together as a sideline to your main project. I think the shortest rebus to solve might be who got the pieces when the Communication joint venture was dissolved. AA was loaded for Harmony but always imported his Change from across the bay (Larnste country) and then the Belintar reforms uh canalized that relationship so it flows differently now.

Funny story, they called me into Mother Market a few weeks ago and over a staggering number of drinks one of the old guys mumbled in my ear, "you know Issaries is a black god too." I did my usual but would not be surprised if that rogue factoid plays a role here. Eager to see where you go with all this.

This is a revelatory line. Are the Horned Man and Bad Man sometimes women and was the first Mortal sometimes a Grandmother? The parallels here are pregnant, as it were.

Just quoting the Genertela box.

Yeah, not a huge fan of that guy myself but until we get the esoteric "Lunars Win" side all I know is that his magic is stronger in the texts we have . . . the teachable moment is to figure out why in that particular Glorantha he wins and what that tells us about the universal constants of the world. Hi Bill, where you been? Oh cripes, big guy has replied.

We agree completely on the first part.

IMG whatever Prince Valiant tells us about where Greg wanted the people of Orlanth to go, Li'l Abner shows us who they really were. They're not stupid. But they are pigheaded, ornery, touchy and deliberately contrary. When we move beyond the comic strip world this means violence as tempers flare in enclosed emotional environments. The gini economy might save lives but it won't fix anyone's feelings . . . and grudges drive smart people to do destructive things. If you don't point the storm in a clear direction it will just attack itself or worse, die down to an ominous depression. The context around the question is extremely interesting. We know Orlanth's way is objectively more vibrant than everything the Empire can provide at this moment in history because we know who ultimately wins the Hero Wars, at least from an exoteric perspective. They're just a better team overall. But here in our hobby different aspects of Empire and Orlanth become attractive in different eras because they're aspirational or let us escape what we get too much of at home.

Love it. Mechanically they've always been considered a unitary "culture" (RQ3) or "homeland" (HQ) so it's probably best to consider the commonalities before dissecting the distinctions. As you note, they all consider themselves the successors to the Autarchy. What they can't agree on is what exactly that means and how to take it forward. The depth psychology is interesting but practically it means endless narcissism of what to us outsiders would be trivial differences. If they could ever agree to anything it would probably change the world. From a functional perspective the population looks a lot like neighboring New Seshnela, maybe a tiny bit more urbanized overall with all that entails but still easily 70% of the people work the land or the lake one way or another. Caste seems to be more of a historical guideline than a law with about 65% of the population having access to basic sorcery . . . IMG this would be picked up from mystagogues or otherwise in the marketplace. The other 35% are something like conventional theists, complete with priesthoods.

I've been passively monitoring this and your great notes on the family drama behind AA (!!) but just wanted to stick my neck into this tempting indentation. This looks pretty much like the long expression of "storm" in at least one sorcerous elemental model, or rather like an effort to bridge multiple models. Poke the interstices aggressively enough and you're going to generate a kolatic system. What distinguishes us is how we choose to interact with them. I think my question would be where the Adventurous heard the story and brought it back as a novelty to them in Boldhome.