scott-martin

16 minutes ago, dumuzid said:

The friendship between Argan Argar and Isarries is one thing I've found zero sources on thus far, other than bald statements that Argan Argari are welcome among Issaries cultists and vice versa, and would love to hear more about.

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.

24 minutes ago, dumuzid said:

The Guide to Glorantha gives Argan Argar's runes as Darkness, Communication, Mastery; RQ:G gives them as Darkness and Harmony. 

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. 

On 2/10/2020 at 10:57 AM, David Scott said:

Gata is technically the Earth Witch, but as she's now effectively gone and only Earth Witch is left.

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.

1 minute ago, metcalph said:

I doubt that even with a liberal attitude to teaching sorcery, a culture can get more than 5% sorcery users (knowledge of one spell).  Even the Loskalmi are mostly spirit and rune magic users.   

 

Just quoting the Genertela box.

17 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Honestly though, the only reason the Orlanthi win is because they have a Gary-Stu PC on their team...

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.

2 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

It is extremely unfortunate that many believe that they "know" this.  Ruins the game.  How interesting is a wargame where The Horde always wins, or the Central Powers always lose?  Besides, we don't know this - even Greg said that KoS was just one point of view.

 

We agree completely on the first part.

38 minutes ago, Minlister said:

So  my question would be: what are, from your point of view, the "dark and mean streaks of the Orlanthi society" that are worth staging for the sake of a good, balanced, game"? 

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.

1 hour ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

What are some major internal differences, or if they can't be seen as a common culture, what are some major splits? 

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. 

55 minutes ago, dumuzid said:

the point of him isn't that he's a storm.  He, or it, is just what a zzaburi might call the natural manifestation of the forces unleashed by the combined power of three contending pantheons and the Waertagi's own sorcery, given a malignant impetus by the Chaos that began filtering into Yelm's imperial cosmos with Umath's eruption through the sky dome earlier in the Golden Age. 

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.

3 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

could a Dara Happan worship Rebellus Terminus? Does anyone, in fact?

I suspect it happens all the time adjacent to the Monster Man complex but those people don't leave the kind of literary records we've been able to see so far. An underworld DH scenario would be amazing as part of an imperial campaign! Of course in the lunar world those people become very useful for keeping D5X embodied.

And great point . . . sometimes the world moves past cult expressions and it's time for them to go away. Maybe they come back, maybe not.

On 1/29/2020 at 9:43 AM, Revilo Divad Of Dyoll said:

I once asked a similar question of Greg Stafford back on the old Yahoo forum, and the ultimate answer seemed to be "yes, but . . ."

I suspect that's the key factor. People IMG have tried all these things in various times and places (and will undoubtedly try them again as everything bends in the hero wars) but it's rarely easy and almost never sustainable so far. These "subcults" have burned themselves out. They don't spread, so when the original worshipper(s) move on or die, the unique expression is lost. Maybe it gets rediscovered somewhere else. Maybe not. 

There are compelling historical reasons why each variant hasn't bloomed in reality. But player characters are endless and often try their hardest. Maybe one of them will ultimately succeed.

On 1/28/2020 at 10:01 AM, Sir_Godspeed said:

considering that one of Orlanth's most defining actions was murder

One flourish here: outsiders often cultivate and spread deliberately negative views of enemy/rival deities in order to weaken the community, discourage converts or simply divert worship from the organically healthy "core" cult to something like a mask or an illusion. Devotees see this "false god" as a blatant lie but those with fewer spiritual resources may fall for the deception for a surprising period of time, interrupting the flow of orthodoxy and the magic point economy in the process. If the fake is ugly enough, people have a strong incentive to quit, taking their magic points with them. Ultimately the true believers are in the minority and need to negotiate what everyone else is saying about them with the inner truth they know. 

This is often where pirates, witches and other outlaw cults come from. Start with a healthy religion, starve it and you end up with something marginally sustainable . . . except as a sort of breeding pool for heroquest adversaries. At various times and places this has been Orlanth. Let's hope it never happens again.

53 minutes ago, dumuzid said:

There is an arc to be illustrated in her journey: 1)the maiden earth goddess 2)becomes a concubine in the court of the chaste Solar emperor, 3) contrives her own liberation with the help of her storm-god lover, and 4) ascends to become a queen in her own right with many husbands and many more children, till 5) finally she dies in the Greater Darkness, and descends into the Underworld to participate in the Great Compromise.

Love this. I think she's clearly made mistakes but until the publishing made room to demonstrate her triumphs focusing on them would not have been productive. But the day is coming when the goddess complex passes the Bechdel Test . . . female spiritualities lined up on multiple sides, conflicting views, social war in Tarsh, social war in Esrolia. Many Earths. Ultimately a good day but maybe some will feel nostalgic for the solidarity that preceded it and few hands will be easily cleaned.

All great things but I should be doing homework so just one flourish . . . 

15 minutes ago, davecake said:

The third accoutrement of authority is the Orb, I think? At least is was mentioned in a few old sources IIRC (including mention of it being used a weapon like a shotput). In our world, this was a specific Christian symbol, the globus cruciger symbolising Christian dominion over the globe, but of course there a lot of things wrong with that in Glorantha! It may have been omitted from the Guide intentionally? An alternate symbolism is that of something like the Eye That Pierces the Veil that is the symbol of God Forgot?

Still trying to find the talar "ceremonial" weapons . . . it sounds like a Brooke thing but the source is as elusive as that original "Adventurism and Angazabism" quote. The cross is challenging but I do it as a saltire and make it more about alchemical fixation so we can recover the Greg bit in TOTRM 13: 

Crusaders are carriers of the [cross], an ancient symbol inherited from the mythical Kingdom of Logic, which existed before the gods destroyed the Old World. Prince Hrestol's initiatory experience was outlined in a secret map which was cross-shaped: from the central court he traveled to a test suitable for a member of each social class, then achieved the final challenge at the center to succeed at the initiation. When he returned, he bore the sword named Justice of the Ages, into whose hilt the [X] sign was cast. The [X] sign became an initiatory secret: a symbol of having achieved the salvation symbolized in the public sign of the triangle. [.'.] Only the ruling noblemen [!] wore it openly, usually as an addition to their personal coat of arms. Outsiders usually think that it is strictly a badge of office.

This has the added advantage of telling us something about historical Hrestolism without muddling down into earthly religious symbolism or even the familiar Death Rune, although it's hard to fix an X on top of an orb. Maybe it's surrounded by "hrestol crosses" like the Sacred Heart! Anyhow maybe this is the year we Go West together.

33 minutes ago, davecake said:

I think the idea is that a ‘sceptre’ can be repurposed as a mace, though I admit to being somewhat confused between a scepter as a symbol of authority of a king, and a ceremonial mace (such as those used to open parliaments) which are also symbols of authority, but seem to descend from actual weapons used to enforce that authority? 

I love that. Part of the talar complex IMG revolves around sublimation and the creation of symbols, as opposed to the wizards who manipulate existing symbolic systems but rarely innovate. In this model, classical talar accoutrements would aspire toward the "poetic" or materially useless . . . and then the Seshnegite collapse would subvert that process by reclaiming these art objects as tools for murder (crossing the horal line) or other purposes. For all I know this is a persistent tension in historical hrestolite thought . . . do "the gunas revolve" and if so, how?

The caste founders definitely pre-date the D&D classes so any "joke" would have been reintroduced during Charlie Krank's abortive Western RQ build. One thing that's intriguing in there is the way talars get weapon skills like anyone else. They aren't especially well trained military specialists but there's nothing like a taboo against edged weapons that spill blood. It feels like further evidence that each of the classical castes was a separate society once before they were welded into their current hereditary specializations, while retaining vestigial traces of the lost functions throughout: talars once had warriors (who develop into military leaders), horals once had aristocrats whose end point is a little less clear, dronar people once had their own bosses, cops and magical specialists, etc. In this model only the most exemplary sub-castes would need to follow all restrictions and so the "talar of talars" would have only symbolic weapons. Others would retain or discover loopholes in the law.

On this note I keep trying to concoct a kind of caste tarot where the horals are obviously swords and the wizards are obviously wands while the dronarim do nicely as disks, leaving the talars the cup function. In this model the "sceptre" might be a glyph of wizard supremacy or at least the wand's dominance over the cup. If said sceptre is weaponized to achieve martial ambitions things get even more muddled. (The true birthright of Talar being the scales, of course.)

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

How is the Hill of Gold a better core myth than Elmal Guards the Stead?

For me at least Hill of Gold is more broadly applicable to a wide range of life circumstances. 

Guards the Stead is great but it revolves around accepting a subordinate role. His greatest pains come from following orders despite all temptations to the contrary. Failure means you're not Elmal any more. Full success means realizing that submission to your duty transcends personal loyalty and is a higher reward. It's a magnificent story with something to teach us all, especially the winners who need to learn how to step back.

But Hill of Gold forces failure by setting you up to lose. You're probably not going to keep your fire. You're vanishingly unlikely to win anything back. But you go anyway. You get your butt kicked and the parts of you that survive will always mourn the sacrifice. We've all been there. Shitty things happen to the best and brightest. And that's how the work of the world gets done. It's a magnificent story with something to teach us all, especially the losers who need a reason to go on. It supports a more nuanced and flexible moral consciousness, which is good unless you see nuance and flexibility as part of the problem.

Are everyday initiates engaged with the full revelation of either story? No way. Most of them are only a little less petty than the rest of us. They want to win. Sacrifice is not something to embrace. But maybe in some sun domes they remember different pieces of it. There's still a lot we don't know about those other domes. Put them all together, maybe you get an even better god. Some will set their jaw and renounce what they see as tellers of lies, false prophets. 

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the Pavis Dome favors Elmal forms. I don't hear a lot about those guys even paying lip service to the idea of pilgrimage to Hill of Gold, assuming they even remember where it is. They play it down. More important here on the edge of the wasteland to maintain discipline, obey the chain of command, do what the other guy tells you even though it goes against your self image and instinct for self preservation. You take it for the team so the community can survive. You Guard The Stead. 

Whether that means Yelmalio-in-Pavis gets fire magic, the hero wars will say.

9 hours ago, Shiningbrow said:

What I don't get is why that big thing in the sky that provides heat, warmth, crops, livelihood, enjoyment, etc is not worshipped by the Orlanthi, who so clearly rely on it's powers for survival. Apparently, not even in a propitiary way.

Even children know the big guy is responsible for life as we know it. We greet the sun when it returns every morning when he's young and generous. But one of the central characteristics of Storm Rune is that we can separate our enjoyment of his largesse from any sort of respect or worship. We can take the guy's money but nobody can tell us to like him. Some of us do like him . . . maybe we hope he'll do it differently today, learn from his mistakes and do better this time. He never does. The fixed path is his nature. It's up to us to learn from our mistakes, make the tough calls and do better. If he won't save us, we have to save him. That's no incentive for worship. If anything, we pity the sun more than we propitiate. That asshole tries to buy a world of friends and that's how the world works. 

What does another husband-protector offer Esrolia to justify his seat at the uh table? That's up to her to say and her answers change with the circumstances. But usually what I see is that she simply loves having options. More options give her more routes to ultimately getting what she wants. Fire, wind, rain, dark, another dark, another fire, another wind, whatever. Keep the suitors guessing. Maybe there's a true love coming back by sea, maybe not.

I don't know if Belintar played that role, by the way.

1 minute ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

This is also why communal performance and recital of these myths is so important - creating common references on which society is built. Common experiences, often bodily, that solidify otherwise abstract relations.

Hot stuff! Gloranthans also have the upper hand here because the lucky ones can communicate directly with their collective effervescence (wyter) and know what unites them. We poor sophisticates have trouble with that sometimes.

7 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

I think my point is that within an emic framework, it's not really the job of the various myths to be coherent across narratives - each narrative is a story unto itself, and serves a purpose of making sense of some part of existence or the human condition. This doesn't mean that they all neatly crossover into - for lack of a better term - an Expanded Universe. 

 

Love it. This is a great journey for the brave! The stories contain their own discontinuities. The vocabulary of stories each of us knows varies from person to person. Initiates draw from a common pool of essential lore, but beyond that we still diverge from one another . . . and the Godtime-us we theoretically share becomes specialized. People fall apart and come together, world without end. "Culture" lives nowhere and everywhere, like a language.

43 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Although once a Gloranthan is Illuminated, they become at least as good as us moderns at it.

Love it. The natives at least get instant feedback (good or bad) when they test a hypothesis. 

I don't want to give the impression that I'm rejecting the heterogenous godtime out of hand. I like the ramifications of building a cosmos out of chaos in order to achieve an integrated consciousness. It's just that the whole sense of a universal "godtime" in the first place can be too easy a construct when it's the only explanatory model. 

Most of us start with an origin once we become conscious. Our experience of it is unified. That's our godtime, call it Godtime-me. As we encounter the limits of that experience, our Godtime expands to comprehend new experiences. When those experiences push back, we encounter the other. Sometimes the other talks and we now have Godtime-me and Godtime-thou to negotiate, one way or another. We develop a sense of a larger hypothetical Godtime-Glorantha that incorporates everyone's explanations. It's probably going to contain contradictions until and unless we "know everything."

This is probably illuminate / lunar theology in itself and they debate what this means. Even illuminates don't see I to I.

3 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

myth is ever even MEANT to be coherent.

Here in time, it isn't. Myth out here remains a disease of culture.

But the experience of myth doesn't start with awareness of discontinuities. It starts with a single story we are told or develop if for some reason nobody ever tells us how the world works. For Gloranthans who remain within that emic framework, that's where all explanations come from. They live and die within the envelope of local knowledge. To the extent to which it stretches to make our experience meaningful, it's as coherent as it gets. Otherwise it breaks down.

We sophisticates switch among multiple frameworks to negotiate the breaks. We're aware of the discontinuities so we're the ones looking for heroquest solutions. Nothing wrong with that, of course. It's where innovative magic happens.

11 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

the God Time was never a single "timeline"

Here is my thought.

Every community starts with a coherent perspective on Godtime. No inherent contradictions, just a seamless experience.

When communities interact and share their perspectives, apparent contradictions emerge. Sometimes these interactions are spawned as internal divisions of identity / interpretation. Sometimes it happens when we meet the tribe in the next valley. Either way, that coherent experience fragments.

Whenever we try to negotiate those contradictions to create a synthetic truth, we are heroquesting on at least a humble local scale. Sometimes we succeed and the contradiction is transcended, becoming a new narrative large enough to unify our communities as far as it goes. Usually the results aren't perfect and the contradiction persists. We remain two communities and the larger perspective we jointly support remains inconsistent.

The failures of Gloranthan history revolve around these limits of "we" and "us" and "them."
 

13 minutes ago, Joerg said:

In a "dream logic" form of questing, such anachronisms don't even have any friction to chafe, but when you start counting the generations of Vingkotlings to determine when a Star Tribe has formed, you have left that dream logic, and the anachronisms do chafe.

Definitely. I suspect that friction is why (among other things) the Compromise incorporates both harmony and disorder simultaneously . . . and why the logicians have yet to (dis)solve the world. The inner world itself may be only the parts of experience most resistant to a mythic overlay. We are the paradoxes. It takes a spell or more serious heroic measures to transcend them and realign experience with Godtime. Whenever we interact with the gone world we are the anachronisms.

The sky historically provides an external chronology but I wonder if we might reverse your sentence: Sequential analysis of what is going on in the sky produces the cultural / magical / ritual framework we call "Dara Happa." These were the people who numbered the days and noted the cycles. When they encountered other people with a different orientation to the past, resolving the conflicts became more urgent on all sides. (We are working toward extending the bull belt model east to buserian.)

The Stafford Library has a few voids around the sky. I recall Enjata Mo being equated with Black Dendara in my print RM (too busy typing to walk across the house and see) but the pdf has Black "Entekos," potentially a third entity of mask of the planet entirely. I need to know more about how KataMoripi resembles or differs from the Pamaltelan figure. For that matter I need to know a lot more about Pamaltelan astronomy.

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Does anybody have an explanation why Gramps Mortal's severed soul was drawn to Rausa's gate (and why was that gate and spiral stairway where it was)? What could have been the precedence?

IMG this is connected to the mysteries of time itself. Without bogging down in too much metaphysics, an observer in the broken Genertelan north facing the sun will see time pass from left (maximum potential, origins, "early") to right (maximum depletion, endings, "late"). As entities lose their hold on the present and start to recede into the past we call the direction they are moving "westward." 

Because death is how we know time is passing ("death needs time for what it kills to grow") this means the western gate is the way into the land of the dead. The eastern gate is the way out, or at least the way into the world of the present. When Gramps felt the premonition of time, the direction he moved was toward Rausa. Rausa is red because from our point of view everything in her world is receding or has already receded beyond the usual wavelength. The frequencies of Vithela are too energetic to look at but probably tend toward the blue end.

This is part of the dharma of the Children of Malkion. Sometimes entities move from west to east. I am not explaining this well yet.

22 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Valare Addi pioneers a heroquesting technique named Chronoportation which enables a quester to do such anachronistic insertions from far more recent myths. I wonder whether this turned up as a gift and/or a curse in the Godtime.

Recent review of the work of William S Burroughs (especially "Ah Pook") leads me to suspect that the anachronisms are the shadows of heroquest vehicles projected on what would otherwise be a coherent mythic situation . . . something like changing lines in an I Ching hexagram. When we go back there we bring our present, the mythic "future," with us and sometimes we leave bits behind, unintentionally or otherwise.

And when we bring an encounter with them back from the Godtime it is like the fragmented experience we bring back when woken up out of a dream. The pieces just don't fit back together in any kind of logical order. But we can come close enough given effort and a little luck, even though those within the dream itself will perceive the effort as interference and if disturbed enough will respond, distorting the cosmic fabric even more.

It's interesting that your examples are mostly planetary. I don't know enough about Enjata Mo and her family, especially in Dara Happa.

7 hours ago, davecake said:

Plus, my private theory that the distinctive Sword breaker cult weapon is a form of talar mace, turned into a specialist weapon, a remnant of the Vampire Kings. There was a reference somewhere to Talars drifting from strict caste rules still not using horali sword but using their mace of authority as a weapon, and throwing 'crowns' - any know it? 

This is great. The controversy over throwing crowns appears in the Guide (407). The "mace" might be an older D&D joke. I'll look deeper.