scott-martin

This might be the richest angle on Gloranthan alchemy in years. Their metallurgy (what little we've learned about it) would naturally aspire toward gold or a "sun." As for suspect stories, I never trust a bright god's Truth . . . always too brittle to take an edge.

Side note here, the earliest grunt of "Shargash" I can find in print or the surviving fan chatter is full-formed in GROY, which Greg was effectively finished with by summer 1993. That's really quick on the heels of the Elmal revelation in KOS so he was either moving fast or (less likely) integrating a significant backlog of unpublished material. After all, as you point out, before that we were still in the world of Gods Of Fire & Light and the nebulously complementary tripolitan city gods of the Box. What's interesting is that reading the Shargash / Buserian view alongside the Lodril / Dayzatar layer indicates that while Yelm might have brought his brothers with him or adopted them when he got to Dara Happa, Lodril and Dayzatar do not seem to interact with Shargash and Buserian. The cross-identifications don't stretch that far. I forget whether "suns" coexist in drowsy Teshnos or just fires.

He is definitely a bright god. Which is the kind of thing that Breaks Councils when you think about it.

We just don't say such things where drinking bulls and unilluminated swords may overhear!

Maybe I'm stupid but would this be the sun "Orlanth" killed at the end of his contests . . . but doesn't seem to have brought back?

QFT Average Viet Cong guerrilla was SIZ 9. Gringos at the time were maybe SIZ 13.

If the stock comedy / bathos types hadn't been created some motivated dramaturge would have needed to invent them.

Someone more optimistic than me might say "battlefield sorcery is the continuation of witchcraft by other means" and that zzabur only fights Orlanth when intermarriage / conversion has failed.

The distinction is welcome. If the Talking God's "writing system" is based on the tattoo needle and not the pen there's room for a more shamanic approach to the lands beyond as well as the beard's relatively sorcerous or "logical" understanding. As far as planning to fail against an army of flying Leroy Jenkins, it's an interesting point. Blue sorcery works best when it sublimates the messiness of reality into a relatively neat, predictable, rules-based and stereotyped set of behaviors. We can control our own behaviors but the important thing here is forcing the enemy into a categorical box that our plans can then manipulate to most efficient effect. "Demonization" seems to be an exception that proves the general rule: if your categories fail, the last resort is to ascribe "chaos" and aim your sorceries accordingly. But day to day this may work opposite to "experimental" heroquesting: instead of opening up new pathways, your tactical objective is to close off unknowns in order to banish more effectively. Much formal blue sorcery probably revolves around banishing. Once you know the runes your opponent draws on, you know the classical responses and their demonstrated effectiveness.

I think he'll be overjoyed. He was always proud of the way his first wife's family exposed him to real Chinese culture beyond the broad strokes of '70s kung fu.

Tell me o sages of "Kralorelan Lodril," earth king viewed from the east of dead Genert.

YES

The source for this is the birth of Obduran, which sparked a brief talmudic flurry over what exactly his left-handedness signified, do the Orlanthites do that with all unusual babies, how could someone even tell that a newborn even favors one hand over the other. The practice was extant before EWF and either survives into the 1580s when Orlaront (weird name, wonder if it runs a long time in that family) is born or is conflated with his biography later. Like a lot of things I suspect the line between monsters to cull and gods to worship is blurry at birth and is largely at the discretion of the godis, which is how Obduran survives in the first place. Sometimes you want to bank a special child for emergencies. Other times you screw up. History decides.

If everybody weren't tempted to Tap there wouldn't be nearly as much effort delineating loopholes. Things might've been different when live crystals were readily available but not in these grim times. The spells to subvert the independent judiciary won because the independent sorcerers were the ones casting them and the judges cast on were talars. Q.E.D. For me the interesting thing is that the logical construction of the "nodes" whether they're expressed as sacred geometry, pathworking, an alphabetically-mediated experience or whatever. The trace of consciousness required to execute an effect. In book communities they love their books. In communities where literacy is prohibited or simply prohibitive, draw a shape on the floor in flour and get moving. Intersections between Western and Eastern sorcery.

Suddenly I'm convinced that the Waters are mostly enthusiastic partners in this project. They might have all kinds of political, economic or eschatological arguments for why they're participating but I think it boils down to Death (Magasta) taking a forced holiday. Water won't "die" while the drain is plugged. It keeps falling as rain and sweeping in from the outer ocean, but that final psychopompous journey back to the Dame Dark is interrupted. Instead the Water rises and maybe in some places even leaps to reclaim its old favored spots. Awful waterspouts form, bride of the monster god carrying Water straight up to Sky. Gloranthan alchemists see an invitation to a divine wedding appear in their little flask. The rest of us know a grand banquet has been arranged. Blue Streak rolls up the dome, taking her people with her like always. But maybe she doesn't even drop this time but stays up there, a moon again. This time it's Tolat who dies, like Shargash who failed to fight the dragon. Wachaza and a new Wachaza. Boats and Boat Planets. Unalterable hundred-lettered Styx words. Blue People. Dormal's Last Stop. Good times. If all goes well, Engizi may finally be healed. Of course there will be recalcitrants to deal with along the way but one way or another they'll eventually be convinced to go with the flow.

The West in particular is a little like Kate Bush fandom. There's only ten studio albums we all share and then endless alternate mixes to die on.

This is one of many reasons I'm not completely on the New Idealist bus . . . would rather be in the forest as treasure house of images even if that means operating out of some brokedown keep on the Castle Coast struggling against the idiots out of Leplain. I have a feeling even the New Idealists' manichaean thrust is more nuanced than the standard definitions suggest. For one thing, we know they celebrate the (idealized) human form in ways that are now at best abstracted elsewhere in the West with the Man Rune, seal of zzabur, etc. If the body is worth depicting in devotional art then it has lessons to teach. Maybe the body is unique in a fallen world . . . everything ("all") made to the measure of Man, Man made to the measure of all. I suppose a lot depends on who the northern devil is. For me zzabur is already the devil we know so there's not a lot of point cultivating new ones. As for talar practice, I still can't help but notice that only in Loskalm is the "ultimate rite" of kings still mentioned, even on a nominally volunteer or meritocratic basis. They might have the last legitimate talars left outside immortal enclaves, even if the caste powers are now transmitted outside the old hereditary systems. Either way I like the north as a warehouse of material that died out elsewhere . . . Talarite magic, Dronarite, Menenites [sic], Horalites. One of these days we'll be able to chart the original colonies and play the strings like a harp.

They are one of the biggest buzzkills on the lozenge, it's true. Sober sufis at best, burning good people whose only crime was asserting like Hallaj that the fire and the rose are one. All they have is their "sorcery" and if that's a solace it's a cold one. Since the question of how to model Hrestol's magic outside zzaburite sorcery has opened up, I'd might as well stick my face in the snake pit of canon one more time. While I'm not deeply invested in the New Idealist system as the One True Way it does preserve at least the traces of archaic Talarite prerogatives that are no longer modeled elsewhere . . . they might even still have the Leadership ability up there as a way to directly translate free INT into fealty. I'm also seriously investigating ways to run miraculous effects off Passions now that we have them here and not just Pendragon. Passions are the new hot mechanics, gang. Trust me. At least in some abandoned efforts the knights MOA could sacrifice permanent POW for miraculous defenses symbolically anchored in their armor. This scaled up to an impressive permanent Dispel Magic effect guaranteed to wreck a blue meanie's day. Maybe nowadays we'd run this as some kind of mystic refutation (laughter is the best banishment, as it were) with the MOA as a kind of transitional or "errant" active mystic literally wandering the earth to meet people, get into adventures the way other people negotiate an "abyss." Whenever I'm within the Hrestol consciousness every material manifestation is received as a direct communication with my soul, etc. Her people probably make that connection constantly and sententiously, especially in contexts where Malkion The Sacrifice is considered an unfit topic for common conversation or even blasphemy. Be good, turn the other cheek, look out for people smaller and weaker than yourself. I Fight So You Can Win. There's probably a mystery cult in Ralios right now that equates her to X[iola] Umbar and maybe they're not 100% wrong. But the story of the well may be an apocryphal sentimental addition to the epic of Hrestol. Probably Akemite or at best dating from his Akemite period. He doesn't have a lot of time for it in the early versions . . . too busy running one genocide or another and if he took time out to save his mother's soul you'd think it would matter enough to the chronicler to set down. The plague imagery is new. In the earliest versions the "dehori" are simply besieging their town and she cuts a deal. That said, the TOTRM story hints at Xemela as default healing system before the Riddlers came from the east bringing the disease that was also the cure like Freud and Jung on their cruise ship, so it gets attached pretty early as another of the wonder tales.

I love this thread but she does not survive into Time when Hrestol's reforms happen. Of course she might still participate in the society after her fashion. Her miracle is more likely to be related to the "ultimate rite" of sacrificial exchange that survives in Loskalmite kingship / talardom than any conventional zzabur-driven sorcerous technique. If nothing else, this is symbolic calculus I seriously doubt the blue man understands. Whether she could have learned conventional magic or even been considered a Talarite and not just a woman (and whether the zzaburites have women of their own) is interesting. As far as I know the original crime of zzabur that forced him to concede basic magic to other castes originated within time and so as always Xemela would've missed out on that. However, she might have also predated the caste complex altogether. She may not even have started out "human" as we use the term today.

If so, @Sir_Godspeed, I suspect I'm far from alone. It took me a few years to come around to how "Nysalor consciousness" has a corrosive quality in Greg's body of work. Each riddle truly does seem to pull on some fragile loose end of the cosmic fabric and so opens gaps in the weave where chaos can recover. The result is a wakened mind and a weakened world, which for some people is the goal of meditation anyway. You want to get the goose out of the bottle. Various gnostic strands of Hrestol initiation may or may not have "Vadelite" origins but they strike me as more sympathetic in their effort to reconstruct the world they deconstruct with the other hand. The knight errant MOA drifts through a world of "adventure" making spiritual "gestures" that may or may not express some higher personal truth but at least they make the most of time and incarnation. You enter a world already in thrall to the law-of-the-name-of-the-father and you'll probably leave it in roughly the same condition. The struggle in the middle is the important thing. The Hrestol of Joy is of course a later construction different from the historical Hrestol of the sagas. He seems to be most popular in the north where the historical Hrestol went late in life, or that might just be a historical accident. Either way, back here on earth I would say "jouissance," the ecstasy that's always in translation whenever you put it in words, stopping the mind through embracing the world (as a direct communication with my "soul" as it were) and the next day finding mind and world restored the same as ever. Or not. There are probably esoteric Hrestolite versions of the Ox Herding Pictures that go into detail in Gloranthan terms. A set or two of these might have found their way to Carmania and then into the hands of the Seven Mothers, who put their own radical spin on the cycle. But Talor simply laughs. No words, no riddles. A joke, maybe a joke of the general at the expense of the particular or the other way around. Read it the one way, you start with a pimento, add wings and a dragonfly flaps away. Read it in reverse, a child pulls the wings off and the fruit of the cruelty left behind is just sort of empty and sad.

For me it's a little simpler for once. To the extent to which Annilla's mother is Nakala and not some other Dame Darkness, the tidal relationship had to be introduced. Nakala was the expression of Dark Mother that emerged in landlocked Ralios where tidal forces were completely esoteric if not unknown. Even if they emerged early enough to see an intact Blue Moon move across the sky, they'd have no empirical way to connect her power to oscillating water levels, and even if they contacted her in those days her power wouldn't have been communicated in a way that boat peoples understand. And since Annilla and Tolat travel together at this layer, when she comes to the Dangan culture her brother comes too. This doesn't prohibit their original mother from being some other Dark Mother like Xentha along the southern coast, Subere wherever she was originally contacted by that name, a female "Dehore" in the western quadrant, an eastern figure lost to us now. ("Naga?") If I were a magician in a Dark Empire I would take steps to revamp the Ralian elemental pantheon to favor the Dark and hobble the sky forces that collaborated with Nysalor. And as my knowledge expanded, I'd work in the exotic insights of far-flung lands to create a more inclusive system. A proto-monomyth might well have been one of the secrets the Seshnegites wrestled from the wreckage. But before that happened we would've seen the far east, met surviving Blue Moon people, taken their gods home as useful additions to our burgeoning theogony. I'm fascinated by the footnote that a shrine to "Magasta" was built within the Hrelar Amali complex within historical times. What god was that, exactly? There's no trace of a Sramak there previously. Is he the same god who marries Ernalda sometimes in Esrolia? (An early draft of Orlanth and Yelm has them fighting over a goddess who's already happily married to a water god.) And "Magasta" has that strange son, half darkness demon, whose exoteric attribute is a weird lifting and dropping of surface tension. Father of monsters. Even the Only Old One raised a fleet once.

If she's the Dame Darkness originally venerated at Hrelar Amali then this may be a later syncretism, a pregnant idea in itself . . . "adopting" the twins into the pantheon establishes a bond with the lopers among others.

"Sometimes you just gotta LAUGH." In some of these practices the objective is to exhaust (if not "destroy") all rational thought in order to make room for the transcendent. This is especially crucial when you're fighting the logicians but we even see traces in how Ulerian erotic lucidity is also "comatose" and why Arkat's ultimate retirement broke the penultimate caste taboo in pursuing a quiet country life. Great thread. I suspect there's an entire history of conflict between Illumination and Joy lurking in the buried history of Fronelan Malkionism, complete with gameable mythic opponents.

Suddenly Rinliddi got even weirder!

Waha has a cult monopoly on "the intoxicating mushroom drink," which IMG has a similar effect.