scott-martin

That's what I'm saying, man! People showed up dressed for an argument and got rebuke instead. To be fair I bet the programming was pretty sophisticated but who even thinks about deploying that kind of thing? Lucky Theo blew it by gambling on the big man. Bad genealogy, especially if good things come out of Dan like we hope. Sad. 1627 or bust!

Beautiful invitation, all gold and that phosphorescent calligraphy we had in the good old days. I guess he still had some or figured out how to make it again? "You are cordially invited to the Seventh Ecclesiastical Conference of Malkion to participate in the clarification of the True Faith and birth the Egregore of the Occident. Honorarium will be provided." I was tempted for three whole minutes and flattered for maybe one, then mysteriously the prentices forgot to book the flight and by the time we figured it out the weather had turned. Anyhow he's figured out range-boosted brain busting at high enough intensity that it's practically indistinguishable from God's Will if you catch my meaning. Got to go!

All out of "haha" reacts! I hear you man, but those guys' heads exploded. Clearly he speaks for God and the West Is One. I for one like my brain inside the skull. Crusade mode engaged. But there's a trick to it or else the spells don't work.

Out of reacts. Yeah, the assault on crazy town is going to unleash all kinds of crazy up there for those players. Good times! Love this. No one move a muscle as the dead come home.

That is the thousand-mage question that rolls up all these other ones. (I think the broad answer to all the others is "yeah" or at least "sort of.") Technically the One King Of The West gets access to imperial authority as long as the ritual architecture was tight enough. Which I doubt is the case because I'm alive here in barbarian country and I know there are others who conveniently "missed their flight," got snowed in or sent an actor to the seventh ecclesiastical party and went underground. It's been a crazy couple years for those of us who aren't actively dead so I haven't really gotten a chance to think about it until now. The ritual architecture has at least three gaping holes in it big enough to drive an actual dragonship through, maybe as many as five. Depends on the island Aamor happens to recover. But I am but a simple genealogist and don't want to say too much on an open crystal ball. What is everyone else up to as we look toward 1626: the year we make it through if it kills us? How are you planning on kicking things up to slow the big man's roll? That's all you need to do. Slow him down a little so we can keep this part of the world playable and let the ritual architecture implode on its own. Your friend, Geleron Green deep in the sticks halwal: not a town, not a castle, not even a dude . . . a state of mind (Basm. Niiiiice.)

Love all this. I just want to get back to Coney Island so Scar and the Riffs will leave us alone. In cold light of morning I realize that Guilmarn has trouble enforcing his will on the Road for a funny reason but it's probably a SPOILER and close to maximum MGHV. Basically every time he tells the Traders to submit they say "pass" and he says "okay." It's the weirdest thing. Funny things show up in the terminal Hero Wars era, maybe for the last time. Likewise I wonder what Arstola really wants, where the seeds travel. They can hold a grudge a long time and their biggest one is Rist. At minimum there's probably also a Brown / Green philosophical schism going on from tree to tree: do we come out the other side? how do we come out the other side? how do we define that? Suddenly Maniria becomes very important to people looking for what "conventional" elf tutelage looks like. Dragonewt is to Kethaela as Elf is to Maniria. Either way, I would love to know what Redwood wants. A real Reforestation Project will need to reach out to all the known stumps and invite them to contribute their precious quarter cup of pixie dust. It's good manners. The worst they can say is no. I'm still at the stage where the chronicles of the archaic Entruli cross my eyes . . . I think the important early thing is that these are apparently LB "missionaries" who might have had a distinct objective in resettling what some people called "Ernaldaland" after magical disaster wiped out the relatively advanced original nation. So they would have started out a little funky and then developed along their own lines. Later this is the prime Arkat route so he's going to leave a mark on religious consciousness that future generations wouldn't even know they needed to try to scrub away. I've always liked the 'Mane as a juicy Shakespearean role, "Lion in Winter" jokes notwithstanding. Oliver Reed. Somebody in this period should put the puzzle of what happened to the last Pendalite nation that went into exile in the east . . . there's probably a geezer or defrocked sage or somebody nearby to provide exposition on these things. It doesn't really matter to the epic saga but it ties off a few loose ends in a dramatically satisfying way. As for my friends in Pasos, what I want for Christmas is a compelling Episode Two: The League Bites Back scenario. The southwest gets boring if the bad guys win before the curtain even goes up. We need to collect pockets of resistance and revolt now. Slow that guy down. Hurry up please, it's Time.

I think we're all in roughly the same boat so let's goof around a little while we're waiting. The function of the Road now is probably to keep ur-metal from going directly into Harrek's war machine. Everything else is a sideshow to fill in the caravan slots and give partners on both ends a low-cost / slow-speed option. There's probably a lot of what we would call smuggling. The question is what if any contraband the Safestrans wouldn't want to go east. Maybe the better question is what would be too dangerous to run through Pasos so close to LePlain's watchful and punishing eye: religious artifacts, "heretical" texts, the body of western magic going to join the cousins in the Holy Country. Ethilrist has buyers in the cities. So do God Forgot and those lunatics in Malkonwal, or they did back when they could afford it. Maybe there are things the Dwarf needs too and he hasn't figured out that the ships are back. We also need to figure out where the slaves come into the western end on their way to the labor-starved Esrolian farms and dwarf mines, or just to Saltcastle. Ramalia really isn't on the way . . . more to the point, if Ramalia were the entrepot the Road would have been built to swing south of the hills. It's tempting to speculate about a breakdown somewhere farther west we don't know about yet that forced people into long-distance servitude. Captured Ralian barbarians? Impoverished urban dwellers enslaved and deported? When did it start? Why does it continue once population pressures eased and labor demand stabilized? It might have started as a refugee program in the wake of the luathan disasters that got institutionalized. Mother Esrola Needs Hands. Either way, it's a triggery topic so it's probably controversial among the Traders so we can have sympathetic and unsympathetic factions. When shipping broke the business model it would have seeded a religious crisis (business = religion within "Ashara") that working for Greymane only distracted them from for a little while. Now that he's gone, they're busting out trying to figure out who they want to be and where they want to go. The Pralorelans might covet a piece of the action beyond Highwater but I don't see them having a good shot at even taking Yolanda without serious help. Some of the Traders (especially around there) work for the forest. Castelain married an elf. It's how their trail stays cut through the Arstola . . . so far. The forest might ultimately prefer the elk people but I'm not so sure. Maybe they're conflicted too. Guilmarn covets it all because he's a jerk. He's in full One True King Of The West mode right now. Good luck out there. Gini is everything. It's all about human resources in motion, people on the move. SOME NOTES ON THE ROAD. Drom to Nochet is (very) roughly 700 miles if you go Highwater / Yolanda / Jaraz / Ferry / Yellowstone / Swartz / Saltcastle / Staton. At about 30 km a day (mule train) you can do it in about five weeks. There will be set Markets on the way where you can lay out your beads and shingle and get your points back. There's probably a bifurcation between "Trader" Trader Princes who stay on the Road from end to end and Trader Prince "Princes" who maintain a particular town. I forget if Blood over Gold talks about this . . . the alternative of local Traders taking over the caravan across a particular segment and then handing it off at their limit is not nearly as fun. You want the romance of the long haul trucker here, brothers and sisters of the Road. "Geasa" similar to the ugly hyena business might also apply out here to force comfy people to light out for the territory when they roll bad. God is good. Because the Road runs roughly parallel to the coast shipping has a huge edge in terms of speed. Under RQ3 rules you could move the same cargo from Alatan to Nochet in roughly a third of the time. (Looking at the coast raises the question of what exactly the League was exporting. I guess they'd get tea from the interior but the population centers of Tanisor that survive really aren't coastal.) I like Ashara quite a bit but I am a perverse individual given to fancies of esoteric issarism. I'm torn. On the one hand, it's tempting to assume it's a post-Closing (post-apocalyptic) phenomenon when the sea routes stopped working and we needed to roll out a Road instead. But it's also interesting to treat it as a stubborn atavism within the Empire, a specialized network of relative traditionalists who preserved a strain of pre-imperial cultus that would otherwise have died out. It's really only a question for hobbyists. Now there are 3 new replies so signing out.

Who doesn't love grenadine?

Around here we call that "midori" but the ladies' visceral reaction to it is usually more of a shudder than a roar.

Maybe over the holidays we start putting some gini together on some of these homelands! When this came up last year consensus was that the old man and the boys are all dead but I think something needs to survive from the Lion's organization into the RQG era simply to conserve that background for actual play. It would be a shame otherwise. Maybe there's a previously unrecorded heir / pretender / regent situation to feed the inevitable power vacuum. Maybe the Wolf Pirates make people an offer they can't refuse and so their story feeds into that whirlwind of adventure. Depending on how the gini plays out there might be an incentive to use the remnant tribes to open or close the western routes. It's what I'd do if I had a motive.

"The eternal, on the contrary, is the present. For thought, the eternal is the present in terms of an annulled succession (time is the succession that passes by). For representation, it is a going forth that nevertheless does not get off the spot, because the eternal is for representation the infinitely contentful present. So also in the eternal there is no division into the past and the future, because the present is posited as the annulled succession." There are interpretations of Talor where he laughs ceaselessly and deliberately, others as an alternative to weeping at the woe of the world and still others where it's a transvaluation of values. To be honest I suspect all these sidestep the point of him. Climacus / Anti-Climacus: All Gloranthas Vary. Another: "The laughter that destroys the seriousness of all authority and the gift that sweeps away the fundamental value of exchange: both participate in an alchemy of the self whose crowning glory is love, the philosopher's stone in which existence comes back to life and genuinely creates itself."

A hard Kristevan run on Socrates may be coming in the fullness of Time. I am not the hardcore Platonist in my gaming group and even my neoplats are rusty. I've read Bataille a lot more recently. IMG this sense of "rightness" or fulfillment feels almost like a hygge experience of comfort when the potentials have been matched with manifestation and the plenum is satisfied. I don't ponder Solace much but that sounds like Solace. You did it. It's done. Your incarnation can rest. Call it "fati" also. JOY for me something just beyond. Instead of pleasure at the end when life achieves its meaning, it's a precarious and transient encounter with something that isn't pleasure, pain, happy or sad. It's unmediated, ineffable, below and before language, beyond the pleasure principle and the law of the name of the father. It's outside Time so it can look a little like a reversion to that other condition that gets built into "God Learner Maps." Sometimes it just hits you. You're drifting through the Internet like always and something catches and you remember who you are, where you are, how you got here, how it's all connected. Then, fast or slow, you get back to the hard work of life. Sometimes it's spontaneous. Other times people work at it. It's connected with a deliberate and conscious embrace of all those things you remember. You can choose not to construct that world around the self that does the choosing. You choose it anyway, because you have amor fati, a love for what it is. Yes to all that. What is will be no matter what (que sera) but we have the power to embrace it or struggle against it. That's the "something more" we bring the plenum through conscious apprehension of everything that is. The Nietzschean embraces it as though it might recur eternally, as though this is the fulfillment at the end of the day, "all there is." All there is . . . is enough and more. It's actually intimately connected to Kierkegaard but I have literally forgotten more Kierkegaard than I retained. Also probably Camus but that's even more deeply buried, we must imagine Hrestol "happy" despite all evidence to the contrary.

Mom is super weird even by brithos bride standards. She is a bona fide Tamala on at least one genealogy, by which we mean darkness demon of archaic Pasos and elsewhere . . . the "Xem" particle is not as arbitrary as it might initially appear. This raises new questions about how much of Froalar's later heresies were present in utero from the beginning but this is not the place for that. We knocked on the doors of Hell's darker chamber, Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in, Watched from the wings as the scenes were replaying, We saw ourselves now as we never had seen. Portrayal of the trauma and degeneration, The sorrows we suffered and never were free. Where have they been? In general though I've usually resolved JOY to the french philosophical framework around "jouissance," I think others would say "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft." Like many good mystical concepts, it's too big and too small to fit comfortably into most game mechanics, but maybe now that we have passions and the heroquest paths are open the road is finally clear. Could blither on at tedious length about Ram Dass, being here now, etc., but life's too short.

One easy MGF solution is always to bring in a foreign savant and receive tutelage outside the formal caste monopoly. This can range from a broken dwarf or dissolute LM to something more exotic. Now that there are relatively easy routes from the Lunar Empire to the West, you can also bring back technique + lore that evolved outside the Law, and those lunar mistresses are especially fun as a destabilizing philosophical influence. The challenge is that the blue caste may pragmatically interpret its privilege as owners of sorcery as a mandate to exterminate "wild wizards" whenever they start getting any real traction. Maybe some secrets are perpetuated in guilds and secret societies. I'm curious to know more about what's going on in Pasos, for example. Either way, an effective rival system is not only competition in the rokarite sphere. It's blasphemy. MLKN in his wisdom gave sorcery to the blue caste. If you have sorcery and you aren't blue, you're outside the Law. Odds are good they suspect you of "vadelite" contacts and at times the doctrine is interpreted so that all independent sorcery legally originates from vadel and all vadelite sorcery is by definition any operation non-zzaburists perform. This raises fun deep background questions about divergent / rival sorceries in the War of the Wizards period as well. Of course in the north it's a moot point. Everyone in charge has already gone through wizard school and any jock who tests well can aspire to getting training. The blue and gold castes are in perfect alignment, Siglat Says. MGF practically ensures that you'll also get some cincinnatus-style retirees who feel the pull of the farm or workshop and you'll get a geezer who retains full knowledge of sorcery. Does this person teach a little in secret? Maybe. It's the Hero Wars and a "retired" full MOA is going to be an extraordinary person a little outside the rules. Do they hate these people in Sog? They kind of hate everybody in Sog, when they think about us at all. But they almost never leave, so who cares. What native northern magical traditions survive below the crystalline Siglatian surface? Fronela seems to have supported a weird henotheistic sorcery (Jonatsaga) that might actually end up as part of the Carmano-Lunar system. It's worth finding out. The Janube is a big river drenched in sorcery. Somewhere on its banks is, was or will emerge the independent teacher someone is looking for. OF COURSE This is my interpretation, I could be wrong. Currently rethinking the ascended masters as well. Unlikely to be productive but Fronela on the brain.

I am not aware of any formal ban on sorcery (spirit magic is officially permitted in some revisions of the covenant) but the question is who in the blue caste will teach and what they're willing to get out there, so it boils back down to pragmatism. Talars may think they're getting a functional course in miracles from a hypothetical indigent teacher but caste-compliant sorcerers probably emphasize how hard it is, how smart you need to be and how much more delightful life would be if you just had a well-compensated sorcerer on staff to do the heavy lifting for you. The idea of a Tanisorian noble who fancied himself a wizard is an interesting plot device, but I suspect they wouldn't be encouraged. LePlain finds strict caste rules extraordinarily useful. Let the rich kids party while the rest of us get on with our work. The castle coast is of course a place where pragmatic choices can feed unusual scenarios. And in Safelster it all depends on who you talk to. Get a defrocked sorcerer with the right heretical bent what he (she?) wants and maybe you get deputized into that version of the caste. MGF.

(I owe a message on Hrestolsaga to a fellow who slammed Wall Street. Travel got in the way.) It is one of Greg's early contacts with Glorantha, he dates it to '67 but close textual analysis would reward closer scrutiny. The world is very different a decade before Prax, Dragon Pass or anything like a Lunar Empire. It is very archaic and officially not even fit for public consumption, much less anything like essential or useful to conventional work in our hobby. It's not a hidden gold mine of deep lore. It's fairly short. The core narrative is barely 70 pages typed and a lot of those pages are mostly blank. But it does give us one of the purest looks at Dawn Age Seshnela in utero . . . while the view of that time and place has changed, the maturing plant retains the smell of the seeds. It's the story of Hrestol at the beginning of history when everything was new. His friend Faralz plays a key role in a 50-page extension that often travels with it, a kind of sequel where they run amok on a "Brithos" that no longer resembles the island we know. Nobody is any worse off for not having it. When you need to have it, it tends to find you. When you need to have it, it's a generative experience.

It's how the light gets in.

It can get zany. Remember how "key days are 20% longer than earth days" because "key years were 20% shorter," therefore everyone ages at the same rate after all?

This flights wifi is glitchy as hell (thanks gremlins) but it suddenly strikes me that moa might have developed a kind of serial transmigration model for each caste you live out and ultimately outgrow. If so A might have become several personas and symbolically died in however many of these incarnations he passed before jumping to the call of the pagan sword god. Then these past selves would cloud his trajectory until palangio smashes the system. this might also be a bridge to the HMKT work of ritual ego death, severing the personality from entanglements, etc. of course all of this may simply be Stygian innovation now lost. i don’t think the boys of malkonwal did a lot of explicit underworld questing on their own but this might be prime serpent king praxis, go into the pit and come out a king.

Oh hey. But before my flight boards I have never scratched a culture hero and not found the previous generation's trickster close to the origin. To bring a new order you first have to destroy the old . . . Alexander the Great as last of the Persian kings and first of the new. What this means when the old order has broken down on its own (possibly due to surfeit of tricksterism) is interesting. What is trickster rebelling against then? "Chaos," maybe. Disorder emerges from the void. Nihilism.

His surface cult orientation at that moment is a little controversial but I wonder if they forced him into a paradox where the humakt portions would have overridden his central desire and refused any resurrection effort. Might be worth some meditation on how LBQ interacts with that.

Cephalopods may be so prominent in That Other Chaosium Game that they never found a home in Glorantha. Someone should ask Sandy. As Tanith Lee observes, "to laugh under the sea was a painful and stupid exercise only rarely indulged." Of course the extinct kindreds may well have been the frolicsome ones but in general the survivors' emotional economy isn't really all that forgiving of excess. Heler in his bright and leaping phases may be as close as some of them get to a god of subversion or even irony. Golod's relations with Trickster are complicated. I wonder if these are the kind of people who dourly acknowledge Fate Rune.

Now that particular lady is available in PDF.

Great phrase. Looking at it makes me think back to a puzzling assertion the princess of the Altinelans makes to Snodal: At that time the oceans rose to the land, and the sun died to make the night. The winter started when Flamal, the vegetation god died, and also was made the race of the Brithini, the second race of men. The first having been these descended from Hykim, the animal-god, for many other gods had been born at by that time. It's easy to accept the droning of maseren and paseren and who came first when we don't have anything else to contextualize or contradict it. But while a demigoddess might lie about these things for her own undoubtedly sinister and interesting purposes, the notion of the Hykimites coming first and Brithini following actually confirms obscure details buried in the White Wizard creed. The "human ancestors" in question do not really come from a separate stock but are crafted elsewhere by others. Only later, amid the chaos upheavals, does a Malkion "bear logic to humankind." For most, the teaching fails to take hold and they remain what they were. Some, on the other hand, are converted and become Malkioni humans. A second race. The people of the "colonies." The colonists themselves may not come here in the flesh in boats but as a kind of armada of invasive ideas, a new teaching. They adopt the hykimites who are receptive and leave pure beast rune and forest in their wake: "Green Woods, inhabited by Beast Men, where no foes can walk.” Now in this scenario all the kachasti and other western precursor peoples may be pure spirit tribes or have bodies that work differently from ours. Some stay home. Others interact with other creations and become entangled there. Think of watchers, egregores, nephilim. They experiment with various relationships between bodies and spirits. One or two might come early to the islands off the west coast and transform the consciousness of native humans there, creating new covenants and new hybrid lineages out of hapless "warerans" and the people Vadela mated with. The really ancient people of the uttermost west may not even notice. Dissent in "heaven." One ideology argues for progressive alienation and separation. It dominates. The other "was determined to teach the truth once again, and bring together his peoples." It exiles itself and once again goes east like bodhidharma. Foreign spirits return to the mainland, this time to both teach and stay. Soon they're wrapped in bodies taken from whatever stock was available. A second race crystallizes within the hykimite world, sets up a new kind of religion on the mainland, builds a new kind of city. "Colonists." They segment according to their spirits, find themselves clerics and fighters and sorcerers and peons within the convert communities. They remember the horse gods and other gods of their ancestors but it doesn't matter so much any more. It's technical interest only, pushed down into a psychic underworld. We live different now. The hardcore zzaburites, as though tipped off to something, stay home. The western continent sinks, leaving its remnants interwoven into the north like roots from another tree. Separatists keep sinking land that looks too close for comfort. This much, at least, is true. EPILOGUE: In 1499 ST, the prince of Loskalm is troubled, remembering maps from the future and Fronela no longer exists. Somebody showed him those maps. It worked. Finally some time alone.

Zz-b-r Says is theoretically a direct communication with only passing concessions to define terms unfamiliar to the malestini audience . . . some of the entities mentioned alongside Ehilm are known in other contexts or are completely obscure today. For what it's worth, while the Serpent Kings culture is an interaction of colonist and continental patterns, my suspicion is that whatever the White Wizards were pushing was direct from the island so would only use continental vocabulary to demonize or otherwise belittle. Sometimes the words stuck and sometimes they didn't. I don't know the name the original solar people of Ralios called the sun but if it was Ehilm (and not for example something horsier) there's probably a good story behind it. Ehilm worship (so called) is extremely well entrenched in this part of the world, which is interesting. Reading more deeply into the names the Altinelans called the ancient gods reminds me of the cosmic grudge between the people of the northern and western corners. They fight like seelie and unseelie. Esoteric musing about Rausa's allegiance aside I wonder where we can find traces of a primeval "pole shift" far back in the never never. We know the fall of Umath tilted the Dome. Maybe the Blasts or some other cataclysm also bent the surface as much as 90 degrees off true north.