scott-martin

IMG doctrinally they are never named because they're basically just the random dudes you see in the village on holy days. All farmers are his sons. The important thing about Barntar is his (our) relationship to his father. Of course this might have been different before Orlanth really got going as the primary masculine identity cult. If you live in a place where people focus on Barntar, he might reveal hidden, lost or "new" segmented roles for his heroic followers to explore.

Or even by that most itchy of factors, "someone else's" illumination. If ZZ is a cult cultivated to both carry Arkat illumination and be bonkers berserk then we blame the architect or ARKATect as it were. That's his imposed vision that pushed them over the edge. By the time they wake up it's too late. They're in his dream until they find their way out. Of course ZZ with third eye open can break away from that role any time they like, but for most that means breaking away from ZZ and becoming someone else . . . maybe back up from the cliff, maybe driven even further out. In the meantime, the imposed vision is resonant enough that they hang around. There are several cults like this. Gerlant and Talor remained within the parent cult's illuminated orbit. Looking back to old texts where "Argat" is literally crossed out and "Humakt" penned in above it, I think the sword cult cut its way out of bondage and is its own free entity now. There was one other but it slips my mind right now . . . too much going on and the Autarchy had all kinds of strange ways erased from the records we have. Also amongst modern adherents the endless sectarianism demonstrates that the definition of "chaos" and the limits of how we (are allowed to) choose to interact with it are open to interpretation. The cult architects were so driven by hatred of what they called "chaos" that that they wrote that requirement into the cult framework . . . but the nature of illumination means that every illuminated initiate is absolutely and horribly free to draw that line wherever their vision decides, even redefine it to the point that their co-cultists cry foul. If you like spending your illuminated life standing watch over the world in a grim crusade, that's cool. You're still in the Arkat cult. If you get bored with that, I don't recall seeing supernatural reprisal so you're absolutely and horribly free to go do something else. The biggest obstacle comes from your former buddies who are a strange and touchy bunch with powers like yours. I will say that for a lot of illuminated people, "never say never" is a pretty smart way to live. You might find yourself dealing honestly with some chaotic thing for reasons of your own, in which case either the rule is not inflexible or the thing isn't as chaotic as your buddies told you it was. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

In my dream it was revealed that "the" Dwarf of Dwarf Run considers himself an almost narcissistically unique individual, the only true representative of his species . . . a nonpareil entity. And then the vision opened and every mostalite of note behaves the same way, florid in their particularities and diamond in their distinction. This means that councils like NIDA are always incredibly fragile collaborations that spend most of their effort trying to find and maintain a sense of common ground between widely scattered fragments of the original machine. But it also makes dwarf history a lot more interesting.

These theories are too good. Dumber version: every time one of these stories gets told a new root race of triolini gets its fins. All hail the Eighth Kindred To Come!

In my Glorantha the priestesses are deciding something new behind the scenes in the aftermath of the Esrolian Civil War, coming up with a fresh interpretation of the earth pantheon that shifts away from things like the old "Charlotte Light And Dark" benign/malign binary crossed with the generational triplicate girl model . . . and shifts toward a more Ernalda-centered universal intercessor instead. While I wish this realignment could play out on screen, it leaves its traces and that's enough. Something exciting is happening inside the Ernalda cult. There are fireworks. How I would apply this in play is to simply rule that the old version was the orthodoxy that girls taught and were taught as recently as 1615-20 or so but now the people in charge of educating novice adventurers have decided the truth is elsewhere. Of course if you want to "play the controversy" all you need to do is introduce the party to people who have not embraced the new ways yet. For example, I would not be surprised if the old tripartite model is still the official doctrine of the Shaker Temple and Old Tarsh, which was isolated from southern Ernalda for a long time and never really had much love for Esrola at all.

Perhaps a more refined and yet dumber version: The western otherworld can only support Vadel or Brithos but not both. The eastern otherworld can only support Vithela or Vormain but not both. The Luathan intervention in the west was mirrored by a land rising in the east. Alternatively, the eastern otherworld is the sum of the western parts plus time: VITHELA + BARDO = VADELA + BRITHO DA(N)MALASTAN - ALAS = ADAMANT

Vormain and Brithos never coexist in the middle world at the same time.

There are details in the archaic texts that make someone suddenly take in their breath and then forget to exhale to avoid breaking into an ugly bit of weeping for the past. One in particular revolves around the imperial cult, "market" and "maritime" being associated in some etymologies.

Surely not Sleaford, a town rarely associated with Maker's little "machine" elves! Now I can't remember either.

I was thinking of something we might not have on earth that would blend saffron with opiate "latex" cultivation as well as impact. Something red for the red god of ecstatic island that supports the communal uxorial trance. So yeah, it would taste killer on scallops and would trigger HQ effects! On the other hand people in distant lands would pay a high price for cumin and pretend to get high. That's okay, it still tastes good.

YGWV but I like the idea that Melib got so sleepy because the island was overrun with tropical aromatics . . . primarily clove, which doesn't help you much, but also cardamom, cinnamon and galangal for the curries. Reopening all these crops to export has taken a lot of the heavy pressure off the local air and helped the people get moving again. This doesn't really address the question of origins but some truly funky plants probably do come out of Trowjang. Maybe they have a "red saffron" there that will blow all the minds.

Bonus round, it means all the hand jive you see when people launch their magic in this part of the world has a dynamic computational component and is not just a static pose . . . they're loading the program and when the floating point hits GO the spell happens. Which is fun. People who like to preload a lot of "hanging" magic can work most of the way through it and then hold their hand that way to save strike ranks in a crunch. Of course you don't need the physical fingers (hot dog reference) as long as you have a developed sense of the astral calculations . . . a real master magician can launch the magic even if forced to wear special boxing gloves engineered to discipline mere apprentices. This too is part of the cosmic mystery, the "wriggle room" that guides theyalan demography, event catering and other statistical sciences, +/- 14%

This is of course "knuckle bookkeeping" where uh digits fill up one hand and then transfer to the other register. Not weird at all as a way to track where you are in the theyalan octave. It would be nice if their hot dogs were also sold in seven-packs so everyone in a lightbringer ring could have one. However this is probably not done for ritual reasons. I truly suspect the dogs are sold by the eight so you have an extra (ritual reasons) whereas the buns come six to the pack because the Ginna abstains (ritual reasons). I am hoping this doesn't come off as an unusually goofy statement because it actually hints at cosmic mysteries.

People talking trash about my mother in law, show some respect, her brain is not fragile. The last time I was in Rhode Island she showed me Berkeley's house and that place was a dump. But yes, the powerful things out there are not our problem because they belong to the other game. In here we interact with the younger and more anthropomorphic gods who are equipped and interested in interacting with us.

I feel like the linkages between the mostal system and the impossible are providing protective cover for the part about the red stripe . . . like a gigantic floating cement block distracting us from the dazzle boats riding the surge. But I am not one to interfere with another magician's mirror array by choice so let's roll the big block. When I hear the word "impossible" in a Gloranthan context I naturally think of the book that helped the proto god learners dream more than previously imagined in their philosophy, the book inhabited by the harmless and corrosive little dancing man and pictures of places that cannot exist. And it strikes me that the dwarf way was originally much more diverse, with heresies (from the middle stygian, "hrestelechies") completely erased from human records nowadays. What we have now is the streamlined version shorn of logical contradictions, paradoxes, bad plumbing. But being Glorantha all these crudescences had to go somewhere and that is the plane of things that no longer exist but can still be interacted with if you have the right symbolic orientation. The dwarves closed a lot of doors. The ghost windows swing open like in a Kate Bush video. Go tell the [cybernaut] Thamus the great god mostal is [dead]. Wasn't there something about the lunar way in here somewhere?

IMG that part of the south (Falamalela) is really part of the eastern quadrant and so they have no sense of Flamal as a dying god . . . that cyclical mystery was expressed through aspects of the Errinoru imperial cult instead. Being an embyli means being innocent of death unless for some reason you stray too far from the jungle center to the periphery where the world breaks down and can see the horrible things for yourself like Siddhartha getting his eyeful of pain. But then again I increasingly wonder whether the god at the center of the Doraddi cultural complex is really just a divergent form of the vegetative force, a tree that was cut down and became a spear that provides a mobile vertical feature in the otherwise undifferentiated veldt. (The stool is the spike.) The implications here for the historical rivalry between Pamalt and Falamal ecological blocs are pretty obvious and include the revelation that the Kresh movement is not necessarily a dramatic infiltration or subversion of Doraddi principles so much as a revival of ancient origins. Something like this can be reconstituted in the north as well, maybe especially in the rice rites of the east where nobody has heard the news that the great god Genert is "dead." But this might be getting a tad esoteric.

As someone who bears the stigmata of LHP/RHP confusion, I will always find the traces of Greg's occasional compass point dyslexia (east for west, existential death-of-god sorcerous theology for macrobiotic meditative practice) comforting. Much as the north mirrors the south in a minor key, the west and the east converge at the groovy Alan Watts high church rap session. Why has bodhi arkat gone to his relative east? Why does bodhi harmast journey to his relative west? They're both looking for something they can't see themselves getting at home, an emerald city pivoting between the "evil" sisters at the solar extremes. Surrender Dorothy! And bodhi arkat comes out of the sorcerous and secular west in response to a transcendental and gnostic revelation, a shared but rejected insight. We don't talk nearly enough about Vithelan interactions in the dawn age. Wonder why. Love it. Everybody makes the decision to be born and then after that you're caught in the "mood" as it were, stuck in the web of interaction, trouble and desire. Flip the map, of course, and nobody gets out alive.

Love it. Have we ever seen Mostalists interact directly with (other) dragon forces?

Oh yes, there was no intentional implication here that you are apologizing for the creators. For one thing, making excuses for their choices is my go-to posture. For another, they are just fallible people even if we have to respect the creation as its own independent revelation, as you do. We wrestle with it because we love it. Somewhere in the massive and long deferred take on Arachne Solara is a dissection of Greg's ambivalence (even antipathy) toward "mysticism" as we understand it around here, as opposed to this-worldly "paganisms" or "shamanisms." I think that shows up with the Wool Cloaks and other scene dressing. But some day, not yet! The goal is to integrate them back into a dyad . . . both halves of the project budget are roughly the same size even though I bristled a little at having to pave a few more square feet in order to get the hardscape. Ironically the elemental bias revealed here is that grower is really just a local form of water. She flows. Unregulated she flows too fast unless you can intervene by surfacing maker features in the system. But there is very little room for unregulated water in the terminal third age we know, the endless opening crawl of Prospero's Books.

This bit is unfortunate given the call of the masarin, abduction from the seraglio plots and so forth. However, relatively few hardcore gamers encounter the folk etymology for "sufi" (or even "islam") in their travels so the ticking needle in the heart remains there. Ironic because I was going to drop in to flag your "what is / what is not" as my preferred way to start a fairy tale in Arabic: kan ya ma kan, it was and it was not there. Otherwise I aim to interact more intensively with this thread and all of you soon but have been distracted with 3-4 tons of rock being moved in the front yard and now the trees are going in. Look at all the great things you're doing! OBTheory: as in sanskrit, death is illusion spelled backward.

This thread has convinced me that ompalam is more of a fundamental orientation toward consciousness and less the usual third age personalized devotional entity . . . more "experimental heroquesting" and less "arkat," more "cyclical magic" and less "sedenya." More "zzaburists," less "zzabur," as it were. More the tap and less some kind of "jraktal." A technology. With this in mind, I'm sure some factions take this propitiatory / apologetic attitude toward slavery as an unpleasant fact of life as they understand it. Ironically these would be some of the more sympathetic factions, the ones who can operate as "the enemies of your enemy" and so be relatively friendly to free Doraddi or visiting Theyalans or what have you. They don't like what they're doing. They can find another way. The ones who are really deep into the way of submission have learned to revel in it as a route to personal aggrandizement or at least power fantasy that inverts or even perverts the basic LBQ/7M (and others) insight . . . we come together at the beginning from all directions embodying all the powers to create a new world, but then we deliberately murder that new creation in order to grab what we can from the corpse. Since we are all conspirators, we know we're all guilty, what we're all capable of doing. We can't trust each other. The necklace fragments back into ominously glowing beads, each bead is the seed of a separate chain of custody, its own slave city. They fight to exhaustion, extermination or forever, whichever comes first. They fight. I-and-I-Alone win. That's the ompalam. Of course these sound like "vadelist" economies but IMG the hip sages don't really talk much about a separate historical Tribe of Vadel. Something alien to the theyalan way happened down here that gets associated with "vadel" and vadelist revivals at various historical moments. Who knows.

What fell out of PA MAL(T) to construct (OM) PA LAM was of course What they incorporated into the stale (OM) PA LAM to get the world moving again was of course

That's not even including the ones who made the biggest jump of all

The notion of the disenchanted "iron cage" of late capitalist blah as the projected outcome of a fantasy setting is fertile enough in an elegiac kind of way but it's been done. Dragons live forever but not so little boys, as it were. The magic goes away. They set aside childish things and have what was once considered the adventure of productive adulthood, only returning at the end. King of Sartar plays with this as the trolls have died out, the gods are gone, the moon leached of color and orbiting now, Merry and Pippin a little taller than Bilbo, etc. A suitably deadpan archaeological take would be funny and to be fair some people are playing around with "the academic record" these days. But one way the Gloranthan project has been exciting since the very first page it emerged as a commercial enterprise is that it replaces the secular received history of that iron cage world with a secret history better suited for an equally mythic California. If we cultivate a particular sense of present, Glorantha becomes a viable version of our past. And when both of these axes of time are reenchanted we see that the dragon does in fact live forever. And of course given the nature of dreams we should not be surprised that past and future converge. This is when they converge.

I love this because you could be talking about Sar Hrestol himself, recognizing the interiority of the horalite caste and even a spiritual yearning.