scott-martin

IMG "pure" monotheism is the historical exception rather than the rule and there was enough ruin & complexity in the empire that every one of these reconstructions is valid in its context. Consider it a version of the "Orlanthi All." And there's so much unexploded mythic ordnance left in the surviving records that any mention gets noisy.

Trivia: any ur-proto-GodLearning on the island before the Nralarites arrive in the early 600s would have been in the Olodo cities for what that's worth. I don't think they had the kind of zzaburites we would recognize through the rokarist lens. That's interesting. And then there's that funny line that while a wave of brithini "tried" to settle the island a generation later, most were "recognized as being incorrigible" and were sent further down to Pamaltela. 

My current hypothesis is that both answers are right. Original Ernaldela was probably the territory southwest of modern Caladra that sunk in the dawn age. Scattered revivalist movements retained the memory of that civilization and occasionally got it together enough to reclaim the original name across the primeval Vingkot zone. Then when their cousins came back from Jrustela things got a little weirder.

I like the notion of Wa(r)chaza and Wa(r)cha being a controversial identification or an imperfect foreigner's understanding of the same entity in two aspects . . . this is where hard work on the mer religions starts.

20 minutes ago, davecake said:

masarins

This is really great stuff.

3 hours ago, Joerg said:

But that would mean that Umath remains in one piece. And neither Shadzor nor Alkor can have that.

Not a purely rhetorical question: can any member of the Shadzor / Alkor (Tolat) complex exist simultaneously with a unified Umath? 

3 hours ago, dumuzid said:

Not if the brothers share in a stormy victory feast while they recuperate, the truly Darkness way to do things.

"Varying" is such a kindness. I first encountered the Losk-alim in an archaic Deep Source that Greg called The Book of Gbaji and of course it blew my mind for the obvious etymological / toponymic reasons. Here's a teaser for those who rightfully suspect my ability to perpetrate a hoax:

As with everything regarding pre-Runequest Fronela, detail is acutely scarce, somewhere between what I'd call provisional and fragmentary. I think I've babbled on here with everything I've found out. They might also figure in one of the many states of Arkatsaga but I doubt it since the Losk-alim are only important in the north where Arkat doesn't go. We've had war in the market this week so I am too tired to walk across the house and see. But realistically after a search you know what I do right now, maybe another collector will pipe up.

1 hour ago, benwaggoner said:

I suspect most of us just use the font or graphics that have been around forever and not really think about it. But someone I know wants a Harmony Rune tattoo, so it's become an important question.

It's a good and extremely important question. For ink just the three straight lines gets confused for "Roman Three" without additional design elements whereas too ragged a line may always look unfinished or cause the artist headaches. The official redbubble treatment is extremely ragged, looks like three twists of rope. That might not be what this person wants to convey.

In game the topology is the important thing. Greg just drew them with a ball point or pencil line like any other symbol. The magically sighted will probably see the edges in a kind of fractal flux as they interact with ambient reality but some runes will follow sharp borders and precise angles. 

I think the effect they were going for is "old and weathered." Sharp lines have softened and there are some incidental losses . . . chipping, flaking, abrasion, whatever.  Archaic. From the wear patterns it's probably originally clean calligraphy. It's an open question whether an ideal Darkness, for example, would be a perfect circle or whether modern copyists would painstakingly build in irregularities to match the ancient exemplars that have come down.

On 2/21/2020 at 11:00 AM, Qizilbashwoman said:

argument, which I've made kind of ad nauseum: she's got Umath's name, she's called "Umath's shadow", she is called by Umath's (male) name, she wields an Addi: a staff or club akin to a vajra that elsewhere is only held by male phallic deities, including the sex and alcohol deity whose name I forget, by Turos, by Lodril.

Hey Addi, who is the Entekos figure of the Esrolian earth complex? OOO takes the spear and then where does it go after Belintar? Is there a Wife-Protector?

I suspect Hon-Eel had most of the pieces of that particular puzzle but the Tarsh rebels will forcibly disprove her hypothesis.

On 2/21/2020 at 10:45 AM, Ali the Helering said:

If an Illuminate constructs a suit of scale mail using alternating scales of different rune metals (since unbound by cultic strictures) what might be the result?  This isn't asked by way of munchkinnery, but simply academic interest...

This person would be hugely into metal lore so I'd give it an alchemical framework. One of the most interesting earthly alchemical procedures is the compound regulus (distillation of the eagles) in which you start with the crudest of all your metals and keep introducing it to successfully "higher" amalgamations until it can work transmutations and do other cool things. Newton played around with this and got pretty far.

A sample recipe would start with alloy bronze and add a little iron . . . maybe 1 part to 2 bronze, maybe homeopathic proportions . . . to achieve an "ur regulus." This paradoxically deadens the iron's normal magical effect so it's considered a waste of valuable material. Only a crazy person would do it. But then you introduce it to ul-metal, which again is expensive and normally has no immediate magical advantage. The amalgam might start to follow the lunar/tidal cycle. Maybe it glimmers with weird red notes. Feed it ga to fix it.

Then feed it sa. There's a trick to this. Do it right and you get a kind of metallurgical storage system that can accept any of the metal powers and project them onto the environment. It's contagious. Maybe it makes dwarves fall in love because finally this is what Stone was like when he was alive. Maybe elves can tolerate the iron in this format. This being Glorantha, someone will make an outfit out of it and wear it around. 

Other people would start with lo or even Sandy's weird and ghastly chaos metal that fell from the sky. Or they would keep adding metals until the thing ultimately explodes.

This in turn reminds me of a recent comment on one of the Discords where a friend observed

Quote

Unpopular opinion: the Lunars are the heroes of the setting.

Now of course old hands remember previous uh "cycles" of sympathy swinging toward Glamour even though King of Sartar has been making a convincing argument since 1993 (exactly half a wane ago) that the Lunars are wrong and that they lose. My Glorantha is partially an effort to find the story where good people can follow the Lunar Way to good outcomes. They get what they want, or what they said they wanted, or something. It's just that the KOS chroniclers blinded by the fury of their argrath (Leonard Cohen quote) don't understand that and couldn't see it. Even though the Lunars lose the setting has to be generous enough to give them the chance to be heroes, even if just for one day.

Otherwise the corners of the lozenge I'm interested in are still fairly close to Blank so canon is a delicate thing. My West developed something like the "chivalry" of RQ3 and will reach for it again as the hero wars metastasize. Before the Dawn Brithos looked a lot like a Derek Jarman movie complete with something like motorcycles, heirloom cocktail shakers and gigantic marabou hats. I also can't shake the intuition that Hrestol and Faraalz were in what we would call love. Dwarves were not always assholes. Bird people ruled Kralorela before the dragons came in. Etc. As the light of canon approaches these phantasms recede and that's okay. It's how we find out.

5 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Any wonder why they get called soulless?

Who needs organic POW when Free INT is the short cut to real power?

And the blue man knows all.

4 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

But then, there is also POW as bribery and POW as Fetch sacrifice.

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.

2 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

This is actually a big deal!

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!!

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

• It makes an interesting way for interacting with spirits - magic points are cheap, but POW, that counts!

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.

1 hour ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

This surprises me a lot. Who are those candidates? 

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.

1 hour ago, Jeff said:

If I recall there are a few cliff dwellings in the Guide though.

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.  

6 hours ago, davecake said:

But their ability to preserve large quantities of perishable goods indefinitely effectively lets them arbitrage over time instead of space, which is a big deal (futures trading etc!). Plus now they have the greatest sea port in the world. 

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.

49 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

it's a people rune eat people rune world out there

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

1 minute ago, Tindalos said:

Letters of credit are effectively one of Issaries' special things (RQ:G 406), so I'd be hesitant about giving it to other cults, especially ones where trade isn't their main focus and temples have been separate for centuries.

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. 

5 hours ago, MOB said:

Each Sun Dome Temple has an attached Chalana Arroy Hospital for ethical investors.

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.

1 hour ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

quid-pro-quo

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

2 hours ago, jajagappa said:

He's got the scales.

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

32 minutes ago, Richard S. said:

I'm pretty sure that's how you get an entirely different god...

I'm open to that outcome!

1 hour ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

isn't Langamul-Amuron literally the explanation as to why there are no dragons in the South

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.

23 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

I am asking this both because of new players and because I'm interested in a Chaos mechanic thing I'm thinking about inspired by Fantasy Flight's Star Wars game's Force die.

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.

12 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

The Horned Man was draconic in the South...

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.