scott-martin

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.

I love this because it assumes that either those people can read or a reader / liturgist is willing to risk caste transgression in order to read it to them, exposing themselves to an apparently sincere explication of the horalite ethos in the process. MG favors the former but the latter scenario is also intriguing. -------------- There were whole dragon forests once, whole plant systems that embraced the mysteries of utuma. These were the mothers of the dragon grains that no longer exist except in rumored lost caches of mind-melting dragon bread. But this is why Sartarite scholarship obstinately classifies elf and dragonewt studies in the same academic department, forcing them to compete for the same budget and grants.

Love it. And the Merovingian, Persephone and their flunkies as survivals from "a previous matrix" . . . built on code so archaic it's practically alien to the modern physics engines. Having space for people older than the current human model in a game lets us wallow in a kind of dream logic with all its potential dream antipathies. Maybe in the terminal third age they start dreaming different.

Trust your uh gut. Anything you don't like in canon can be reframed if you find the right argument that accepts all the textual and experiential data we have about the setting while making room for additional Gloranthan Fun. For example I don't think they are all that enty myself (more of a radically divergent man rune species occupying a specific religious niche like the dryads in Robert Graves or how trolls start out as h. gigantopithecus survivals trapped in a h. sap. world) but recognize that most everyday Gloranthans think about them in those terms and most fans have worked to capture that perspective. We can both be "right" and propagating my take gives me a way to keep my critics amused. But in my Glorantha most elves are not trees grown to resemble people but people (drawn from a broader class of "people") who deliberately grew to resemble tree consciousness. But it's that broader class of people that brings us here today. On the one hand, you're right, the human cultural diversity of Glorantha is celebrated and rich, and one of the deep themes of the setting is how humans who start out in very different places can learn to cooperate and get great shared outcomes. This is Greg the optimist, high on the civil rights struggle and the interplay of philosophical currents from all over the world. In a fantastic setting, we can extend that diversity to fairly extreme permutations of body and mind . . . and then because the world itself is alive, to the rocks, seas and waves themselves. How great! Unfortunately, Greg was not a utopian thinker so there had to be room for the intractable prejudices that have managed to take over in our history again and again, setting progress back between generations. We can cooperate any time. He just didn't have complete faith in our ability or will to do it in a crunch and the farther back he looked in our history, the worse it got. So the oldest people in the setting who predate h. sapiens itself tend to be the most emotionally rigid and in-group oriented, stuck in their niche or consumed by what to me might be the narcissism of incomprehensible differences. They are awesome but they are stuck. Ultimately I think the optimism wins out and so the ability to empathize outside the in-group becomes a fairly universal trait for "humanity" in the setting. Anyone human from any culture, no matter how exotic or conventional, can make friends when you put them in an adventuring party and force them to depend on each other for survival and other common goals. This can easily stretch to embrace tree people, rock people and so on. It can be a broad tent. But the people who don't embrace that basic lesson are on the road to extinction. The world keeps making new people. Maybe they can learn what they need to know next time. I agree with you that in general Glorantha does best when people from diverse backgrounds can set aside their prejudices and share what they have. The tragedy ("not a utopian thinker") is that there are always people who reject the shared solution of a survival covenant . . . and in deciding to go it alone they might or might not win, but the collective outcome is poorer than it might've been otherwise. Some people's Hero War is like that, a doomsday scenario of universal exhaustion. Maybe the rest of us will be somewhere else, "this is how we walk on the moon," so to speak.

Just to piggyback around everyone else so far (insightful stuff all around) to address this point . . . Once upon a time, near the origin of the setting, the antagonism among the elder races was much more foregrounded than it is today because the folkloric and commercial fantasy sources were much closer to the surface. Greg moved in the same circles as Poul Anderson, for example, and so the notion of an endless existential schism between "elves" and "trolls" or "goblins" or a seasonal conflict between "seelie" and "unseelie" or other "courts" was in the air at the time. It was just something that happened when you posited multiple poles of consciousness around a core humanity: the easiest way to model their interactions with each other in our absence was opposition based. They must resist synthesis because if they wanted to assimilate they would have merged by now. The fact that they remain distinct and alienated from each other suggests something fundamentally irreconcilable in their very nature. Great, how boring. But over time, the execution gets more nuanced as their folkloric origins recede and they become something truly rooted (displaying my native grower bias here) in the Gloranthan deep past. What they all have in common is that they are "elder," archaic, previous efforts to embody consciousness before human cultural diversity came along. They emerged at specific times and in specific places, specific ecologies or arcologies if you prefer . . . relatively specialized and narrow ways of being in the wider world. The elves are limited to their forests, the dwarves live under their mountains, the triolini do not walk and the crude but resilient trolls "prefer" to persist in the wastes nobody else wants. For each, the happiest memories are from when they were alone in the world. The worst moment was when circumstances forced them into contact and as others note, some still bear the trauma and the shock. These are their thought leaders. They drive religious policy, and back in the archaic where they live, religious policy is existential. It's who they are. They can't really leave that world without abandoning their otherness to join the rest of us here in the cosmopolitan now where the world is made of everything. Many have made that journey within time. Many still refuse it. That's okay. The dragonewts have a lot to teach about that process of transformation and liberation. So they fight because that's an artifact of where they come from and where they are. Strategies of consciousness that could consolidate have already done so: in my Glorantha, for example, the various mostalite communities were literally not birthed but "made," repurposed from orphaned man rune materials to the glory of the machine, while a lot of people we now call "uz" were originally scattered divergent dark cultures (digijelm, tamalites, shadzorings, probably some but not all "andins," etc.) welded together in the dawn age crusades. Others might still make that leap into compatibility but the clock of time is ticking pretty loud now. Hurry up please. But the ones who can fight their way free from hate have largely moved on by now. We're dealing with recidivists, ghosts from the deep archaic. They come up with all kinds of excuses and justifications for their grudges like the ones you've seen in this thread.

I need to try harder! The dumbness inherent in the Jrustelan Identity Hypothesis is figuring out where Hrestol goes and where the Return To Righteous crusade comes from if "Brithos" was only what we called Jrustela in the dawn age. It works but there's some slightly strenuous calisthenics involved. More on horses later. I still owe a response to the previous horse thread. Busy season. --- Form runes only superficially refer to the type of "body" you have. Each really represents an equally robust relationship to death. This means that for example the original Agi might not have Man as we know it. On the other hand, in the Arbennan system they may use runes that are elements in the north as their "forms" and vice versa, much as they swap in powers in the East.

Dumb Theory: the failed continent of Jrustela was once what we call the historical Brithos. Apparent discrepancies in location can be explained any number of ways: a bad reconciliation between mapping systems, known "jumper shift" as compass points rotate about 45 degrees, tectonic disaster, mostalic meddling, deep magic. This makes the relationship between the Blue Man and the god learner establishment unusually interesting. But if we're still talking about Hyalor, here's something fun, textual evidence for the "Not Yet" story:

Ordinarily I would follow this line of logic but this time it gets complicated. Greg already had access to the Ralian horse cult names and history in the early (c. 1980) mythic development of the Holy Country and yet someone called "Hyalor" (Hyalorings, Hyalorela) emerges a key competitor against the proto-Esrolians and other ancestral communities. This might not be "our" modern Hyalor of course. If not for its persistence in the GF story it would be easy to write it off as another of those cases where Greg recycles a name in a dramatically different historical context and hopes we'll negotiate the translations on our own. And of course we can construct hypotheses to explain how two Hyalor horse tribes emerge in the prehistory of both Peloria and the Mirrorsea basin: maybe the GF progenitors encountered the Pelorian culture early in their expulsion and that became their generic term for horse tribe of this type (instead of using Eneral or Galanin more familiar to the people who would become the Seshnegites), maybe the eastern horse diaspora had made it down to the coast by this point so these are "southern hyalorings," etc. IMG the persistence of Hyalor in the MOLAD rites makes the world richer so it stays. Other Gloranthas will vary . . . there are hints that these people were the real original ancestors of Mirrorsea storm/air people, for example, which I think the archaeology no longer really supports. But in the rarefied atmosphere of the tournament, this is the name they used and the story they told, the story surviving participants remember. Whether Belintar drew the name and the story from archaic Esrolian sources, God Forgot, both or neither is probably an empty question unless someone can recollect enough of that phase of the tournament to make an educated guess.