scott-martin

I believe the first part. Not going to presume to share Illuminated Argrath's understanding but the West takes pride in having a different devil, I'd look for his hoofprints on their wreckage. The Dragons may not have even seen the end of EWF as a failure at all. Who banishes the Western Devil? Hard to say. From a theist POV the West was the devil (see also: "I believe the first part") and everyone who helped end the empire played a heroic role. The Second Age Collapse may not really even end in the north until Snodal so his role is interesting.

I like it. Whoever pursues these lines of inquiry might end up with something like the abortive Shadows Dance board game, which was apparently all about elf versus troll, grower versus taker. But the interesting thing was the rumored mechanics for chopping a heroic individual into "parts" or relics that could then be simply consumed or preserved to grant some measure of the sacrificial victim's power. Maybe that's what Axe does as opposed to Sword. The labrys people are definitely one of the most prominent human sacrifice cultures in the literature. And of course the process could be reversed to put "parts" back together and resurrect a hero like Flamal resurging at the climax of the Dangan Rites or any elf when the sap rises. In theory, at least . . . of course the game was never made.

When Brother Stone was alive he was evidently something like Flamal's own body. Then the murder estranged them. Stone would never Grow again.

That's really interesting! (No time to install it yet.) Does she take your fire?

If I were a gambler I'd bet that their "omnipresence" is another Carmanian import aimed at giving the conquered urban lowlies something to do. The original gods of the teeming Dara Happan underclass are probably deep buried now . . . and since every family came into town carrying strange gods, that's other angle on the diversity you see. Empire of immigrants, imperfectly unified.

For me it boils down to different historical choices. As you point out, Theyalan missionaries syncretized a wide "barbarian belt" of storm-compatible communities and then the Dark and Silver Empires each helped finish the job in their own ways. On the other hand Peloria was largely free to evolve in isolation, like some landlocked darwinian island in a sea of storm and others. Yelm (as opposed to Nysalor) didn't really send missionaries as much as "recognize" lost tribes. Militant Carmania evidently kept the God Learners out. (Strikes me there's an untold epic there.) And even Arkat evidently had no interest in this part of the world when he was done. (Ditto.) So you get a world where storm people are quick to acknowledge similarities when they find them far abroad (we are orlanthi all us) whereas sun people at home revel in the narcissism of the relatively small differences that were omnipresent at the dawn. Take the sun out of the picture and the world reverts to local rites. I don't know if Peloria has IFWW except through solar worship or smaller "city gods," for example. (And yeah, textual priorities. Much of what we have is an effort to "make Peloria interesting" and that means emphasizing difference behind what would otherwise be a hierarchical monolith eternally opposed to the urban mob. Neither produces history in the classic sense.)

Now we know why Cults of Prax era LM had all those forensic detective spells.

All great things. Looking for the moment I remember when Greg emphasized the transitory nature of Illusion so strongly over its opposition to Truth that the classic binaries changed, I see a paragraph that should warm some hearts and chill others: Imagine the time, which is going to come, when the entire world community of Yelmalio believers gives 100% support to their hero in a Quest Challenge to contest with the hero of Elmal, also backed by the entire Elmal world community. One will lose, and the entire world of that god will no longer be able to believe what they had before. The victor will then go on to contest whether their god is the True Sun God, pitted against Yelm and his worshippers. (Q&A September 2002) So which model of the little sun god survives the Hero Wars is up to the magically courageous to determine and the ultimate rewards can be huge. Dare to dream a future where your guy is the hottest or brightest thing around. Dazzle us. The age of multiple visions (at least Two Counts) is upon us. Use it. Of course that plays out in the way planets and stars continue to move after they've left the objective sky. In the inner eye, in the human interior, in the "underworld" most people only see when they're gone. Out here in the day Black Yelm is an invisible god except when you close your eyes in some left-hand meditation or theoretical Buserian calculation (if there's a difference). The monks debate the small points, set multiple theoretical "suns" in motion until the sky confirms which models were only fiction. Truth is a matter for Dayzatar and he is perpetually unavailable. But that was Buserian. Here in modern times the sophisticated knowledge god of the empire of Illusion is the brown man. I've never really needed to look at him before . . . the beards closer to home keep me mighty busy. I imagine Irrippi as a dirtier monk than often depicted, bronze age Rabelais. A punning cunning man, king of the sophists. His insight was that Truth was relative and that if nothing is objectively True, almost everything is permitted up to the point where "reality" bites back. And that if the interior sky is manipulated with enough conviction (truth value = high), the objective sky warps with it. "As below, so above." He apparently wrote several Gloranthan novels but there's no authoritative edition. He knows the known masks of god and will bullshit his way through the rest. Anyhow, if Greg switches celestial court partners, "reality" is whatever we bump into in the dark. It's the shock that wakes you out of the dream. There's probably some Arachne Solara rigmarole around this but I'm not interested in that right now.

Talk of Gloranthan fiction sends my mind racing again toward the intermittent question of how people in the lozenge categorize the imagination (khayâl) and its works, whether they play out as personal fantasies, deliberate evasions of Truth, meditation experiences or quasi-objective illusion magic. I could footnote this to luxuriant length bringing in people like Ibn 'Arabi but would rather focus on how you relate various specialist explanations of spirit planes, short worlds and sorcery nodes to the more intimate microcosmic realities our characters presumably inhabit when they close their eyes. Does god talk to your character in dreams? Every dream? Even if you never sacrificed for a true divination? How can you tell? Is it possible for a riddler, trickster, illusionist or plain old free-floating spirit to slip counterfactual information "under" the gates keeping my dozing mind from reality and (normally) from direct communication with yours? Language helps to bridge our subjectivities when we're awake and chattering online, but language can be exploited to mislead the unwary. Are all false dreams the domain of the red goddess and her associates? Whose games have explored this? Dragonewts and dragons "dream" and so do some of the people of the farthest East, piping at the gates of dawn. Is there a connection or just the seductive appearance of meaning here?

The old giants. Cults of Prax: The eight weeks are named after eight Powers or "grey gods." These divinities are often forgotten in temporal reality.

You've made just Irrippi Ontor extremely interesting as a hinge between Illusion and the literacy cults.

Done properly it's the key to Dawn Age Malkionism, taking off their sea skins and colonizing the land. A different kind of "burning their boats." Maybe I can take it up again soon but the forest has prior claim on my time . . . and to be fair Flamal is secretly a wet god too. P.S. There is a cryptic "Hiord" in the early notes. I wonder if the Yggites have him. Didn't people used to think Third Eye Blue came from up here, or is that just the grotarons?

An origin that archaic would definitely enhance the evolution shapeshifting process as well as the depth of the sacrifice involved. Hard to say how many great triolini kindreds there really are . . . sort of like saying who "Kahar" was or where zabdamar come from. Hoping some bright young person jumps on the patterns of triolini contact before I finish collecting all the relatively low-hanging uh fruit of similar aldryami tutelage. When we all lived in the wet as opposed to when we all lived in the forest.

Top dragonewt word of the year so far.

Not to tempt the "postmodern GL" assassins but I'm not sure the overwhelming majority of living Gloranthans even have a category for "fiction." They know about telling stories and know from experience that it's possible to lie, but the line between dreams and visions, narrative and prophecy is a blurry one. We know there are ballads and historical songs and that in Esrolia at least there's something like a scripted dramatic tradition . . . all of these forms can be collected and written down.

I increasingly suspect those ludoch nations came in from the deep and became walkers ("expelled") whereas most of the ouori stayed home. This is however somewhere between mystery and blasphemy. Either way, there's room for archaic ouori contacts all the way up the Fronelan coast, they may have shared lore and survival songs in elder days. Of course even a relatively smart walrus won't have fur but there's probably a lot of ivory on Ygg boats and a lot of blubber helped keep the people from extinction. Undoubtedly a Hero Wars curse in the making . . . you do what you need to do, though.

Giving a text to the god under the right ritual circumstances can keep it out of enemy Knowledge cult hands or preserve the information if its destruction looks inevitable anyway. However once that happens, you need to source secondary copies or else burn Divination points to borrow it back from god. At seven words per point Divination gets slow and expensive.

As you and your brother probably recall with terrifying vividness, the Bat can Swallow about 1/3 its SIZ on a normal bite. Presumably this is when the jaw remains hinged, so this is a decent benchmark for Hydra Swallow as well. Since Hydra is SIZ 450 it can gulp SIZ 150 . . . Bat is 202 so Trickster help would be required in order to get the whole thing down in one bite. (Not convinced Hydra can unhinge the jaws but in that scenario it can gulp SIZ 450 on a critical bite and the Bat is in trouble.) I would tentatively make both immune to each other's mouth acids, which takes away a lot of the Bat's WMD capacity. Otherwise, if the Bat lands a bite, the bite kills. However the Bat don't bite before SR 10 so Hydra bites first. Each head can mess up a location pretty bad even if you zero out all the acids. Depending on the number of heads, the Bat can get pretty messed up before it even gets that first shot at a bite. Maybe it kills one head. Hydra's turn. Not sure how big the Hound is but I would be worried about my insatiable hunger tricking me into gulping the thing whole, at which point it has the opportunity to Run from inside my stomach and really mess me up.

Hydra doesn't get out much but her spawn are a mobile and persistent but manageable challenge.

Love it. "Behind you!" Although some see a dragon, some of us need our prescription checked and see a Feathered Horse (queen or common).

There are many approaches to KL but as an outsider I imprinted on the synoptic RQ3 version, she is the old Dark that became important when she stepped forward to mate with Man for her mistress. If I were to speculate further on the deep dark relationships I'd probably do them a disservice and hasten a bad end.

Kyger Litor had to couple with Man Rune for trolls to happen. Where else would Subere get it?

On this rock a new church. If the wicked stepmother in some fairy tales really only doubles for mom on a bad day and sibling conflict is the family dynamic that drives Sun / Storm, then this is a question that Glorantha up to this point rarely seems eager to address. Where are the fathers except conveniently absent, betrayed by people conveniently not ourselves?

Love it. Law of the "jungle." The forest sacrifices itself to itself and the framework of that ritual is the year.

So what good news did the "lightbringer" missionaries carry? Just IFWW?