scott-martin

When a local cult is consolidated into a larger organization, many of the stories are incorporated but the aspects of the god or spirit that were incompatible or just didn't make it into the successor entity are left behind as alienated material: rune metal, crystals, less durable magic item components. This is the Gods War expressed in mythogeological terms: as above, so below.

The fact that so much native bronze, copper and gold is available for mining reveals the relative success of the storm (lightbringer), earth (lifebringer) and solar (starlight ancestors) missionary diasporas, which radiated out across the world and left a handful of world religions and a lot of local ore deposits behind. 

In some cases the diasporic era replaced entire archaic pantheons, leaving metals without much organized mythology behind. Restoring these materials to their original divine narrative is an alchemical mystery of the hero wars.

The immediate mystery is that despite this, rituals for enchanting bronze are rare despite the ubiquity of the lightbringer complex. Not even Orlanth cares enough about hu-metal to teach its intricacies . . . but the ur-metal spell is surprisingly widespread. As below, so above.

11 minutes ago, Joerg said:

A port/harbour with a syntax?

Now that you mention it, maybe Waertag's Pier was structured like a language as well, being so close to the original Kachasti territories. A different language. Great interview with Jeff by the way. Nice lore.

"Old" Trade is not an island and is only incidentally a state of mind. What it is: a language.

EDIT: Or rather, "structured like" a language.

44 minutes ago, kalidor said:

Can Sartar be aproached as an Ancestors Cult?

If lineal descent is important to your relationship with Sartar than I suspect it would be difficult to approach Sartar in any other way.

Another thing is that people in the terminal third age IMG are discovering that these "genealogical" links are less a matter of proving your bloodline than demonstrating to the wyter that you're aligned with the founder's vision . . . a spiritual heir. One bit of MGF this opens up is that the wyter can be free to refuse someone with otherwise impeccable ancestral documentation if someone else makes a better competing argument. Families of choice are a real thing in magic, why not open that choice to the spirits themselves?

1 minute ago, Joerg said:

Maybe because all sky-related entities have fathers, even if there may be no mother.

A close reading of his nativity narrative and the fact that his signature spell is Suppress "Aether" tell me a lot about his unacknowledged paternity. I have THOUGHTS on him and Xentha and the primeval earth cults of the Shadow Plateau (and the female nature of the bat) but am distracted elsewhere.

24 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

But if Krishna merely browbeats or dazzles Arjuna into fighting, or tells him that the decision to fight or not is above Arjuna’s pay grade, what then do we learn?

I always laugh at that part of the Brook/Carriere when they elide the entire thing with a wink and the line "he spoke for a long time, a very long time" and then get back to the action at hand fortified with whatever it was. The religion is there for those who chase the religion. The play resumes after barely a pause.

And it strikes me that a lot of these arguments are for Yudhishthira types worried about the fine points of dharma (can good dogs go to heaven) and not necessarily the Arjunas crowding the game table. So with Arkat, who was ultimately just an eccentrically trained horal and not designed to worry too much about sacrifice and prayer.

 

Each of the major Troll Gods in that book represents a fundamental approach to Darkness that has as yet resisted consolidation into modern standard Kyger Litor. Shargash appears there but not by that name.

17 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Also, I cannot shake the image of all of an applicant’s blood being siphoned off into the aether (like something out of that other game, the unspeakable one), the dried husk collapsing to the floor, a “kerr-ching” sound, and a somewhat tenuous paper slip fluttering down on top of the corpse. When picked up and read, the slip says simply, “Approved.”

The Tap is not the only technique known by reputation by the pious liturgists of this fallen era. They who traffick with demons outside the Man Rune pentagram of zzabur the wise gain horrible knowledge & conversation but at what price?


 

4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Nobody? Did anyone ask Rabbi Loew?

Especially funny given the "grey" faction in the MOLAD being an unruly array of independents: trader princes, hermits, tricksters, sorcerers, Power Rune cults, dwarves . . . and Stone Men. Might as well be silver given the printing technologies available at the time.

23 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Sounds to me like we can read it almost uncoded in the Abiding Book, and with examples (the lineages of witnesses).

If only I had a copy with the "foreign" lineages left in! Maybe if I put together enough of these ancestral accounts it will serve well enough.

Speaking of imagined ancestors I still think Daka Fal as "separator" (arranger) of the souls of the living from the souls of the dead is a mask or transformation of the Soul Arranger who we now call Larnste and that the mountains are a way to describe the territory of the dead ("god learner mythic maps"). The part that is new is that I am thinking we can identify these "stone grey deities" or "Law" givers with a rarely attested archaic malkion . . . the transregional yet local king of three corners plus the center. But this is unlikely to make me many new friends.

16 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

(but Emily loved him).

We will find it we will bind it we will stick it with glue glue glue.

IMG "Daka Fal" is really more an umbrella category for how we structure our true & faithful relations with some spirits of the dead . . . and since practically all the gods have died, with spirits of that scope as well. The procedure often involves letting the spirit sample your blood to confirm a lineage but clever people can make other kinds of compelling claims. (Sometimes just knowing the name and having a relic of the person is enough.) Either way, the goal is to get the spirit to recollect enough of itself and then recognize you as part of its posterity in the world worth intervening over. 

Blood is easy for a lot of spirits to recognize. But blood also makes them thirsty. And blood can be changed through adoption or other magically sufficient procedures. What I find useful is simply getting the spirit to feel sufficiently sentimental toward me and my predicament. You want to move them, remind them how precious life is and get them to help you out. On Earth we might call this something like the orpheus technique. If you can arouse enough passion, you get results even from people who weren't historically related to you.

Again in theory you can concoct a relationship, a spirit identity or both but in Glorantha this is usually facilitated through dreams and other spirit contacts ("seek your real grandfather") so in practice this looks a lot like simply asking Uncle Eddie for advice. The random ancestor roll reveals how much of the shade you recover and how well you overcome their innate thirst for embodiment. The archaic talars, for example, used this to explore their inheritance from the burtae. A more experimental approach then created the genealogies of the gods and even allowed for contacts with "hypothetical" entities like Tanian. 

I also suspect that the God Learners are the reason ancestral myths are described as being so fundamental to Gloranthan reality and yet so sketchily documented in the primary sources. Being able to infiltrate bloodlines played a huge part in their magical success. They probably wrote all this stuff down but it is one of the pieces that was successfully suppressed in the fall of the imperial age, erasing their records of comparative mortal origin while leaving the pantheon genealogies behind as an isolated relic of the system.

13 minutes ago, Phil O'Connor said:

Is it still in the pipeline and if so what is the new estimate?

Hi Phil -- they are still working on it but you're right, they decided that projects like Cults (5+ years in development), the Sartar Book / Box and the refreshed Guide To Dragon Pass needed to come first as a foundation. Then they can build up from there. If they get clear roads and nimble art direction it could come pretty fast on the heels of those products. I also can't wait.

2 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Like a PC Vingan, Larnsting riding a dragon with red hair glistening in the morning sun?

Her most of all!

57 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

What Rikard then can do is: 1) simply find that no one in central Heortland is of the Talar caste; 2) declare himself both King of Heortland (he has the regalia which the Heortland clans recognize) and Talar over those clans; and 3) require the tribute due to the Governor for himself.  Who that most prominently impacts is not the Commoners of Heortland, but the clan leaders! They aren't "noble Talars" and therefore may be stripped of their leadership in the Orlanth cult (because under the Aeolian model, IMO, only Talars can be Rune priests/lords of Orlanth).

Since you lay the pieces out so clearly here it gets me wondering whether he was hoping to shore up his IMG shaky claim to the forms and regalia of talar rightness with a healthy slice of Rex. In theory the systems of authority are compatible if someone puts them together in the right way . . . he couldn't pull it off but MGF suggests someone with more extensive local resources will try.

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

“None shall live near the hornless beast.”

This deep cut on the morocanth way is indeed relevant to my interests. I see that they are 2% ZZ, 6% 7M, 19% Daka and 11% other . . . significantly better integrated into the waha way than the Pol-Joni but when you really crunch the numbers the bar is pretty low.

Suddenly I need to know how prevalent horns are among the great herds.

On earth, here's how it plays out:

BISON, SABLE - both genders have horns
IMPALA - male only
LLAMA (LOW) - no horns
MAN (HERD) - no horns

I would not mind if IMG female impala had horns and all high llamas had something, even if it's only something like the earthly giraffe or male okapi . . . only again extended to the mothers. But I could be wrong.

I would not be surprised if the morocanth groom their herd to create hornlike crests from wild head hair. (Think of the wilder om hairstyles in "Fantastic Planet" and not anything earthly. We are not going there.) They then parade their property in front of the other tribes as proof that these are the two-legged people who drew the food card. Even though modern morocanth do not present any kind of horn or tusk they are culturally sensitive and tend to wear hats anyway among strangers.

 

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Darkness (cold, ice) came from Chaos, and we might expect that to be reversible. Darkness and Fire will loop happily in time, but this being time, it won’t go on forever. Is there an exit from Fire to Chaos? What will the Gloranthan apocalypse look like? It is no good asking ZZ — he swings both ways.

Funny story. 

People don't talk about it much now but the major conflict of the Broken Council LARP (memorialized in the modern ouranekki board layout) revolved around whether the New God would get its initial education from Day (light gods, emergent Dara Happa, elves) or Dark (the rump IFWW alliance of OOO, storm and trolls). In canonical history the Day faction got the votes and this is how you get Nysalor, the exit from Fire to what chaos-rejecting cultures reject. 

So the apocalypse already happened, it was literally how the light got in. ZZ was of course ultimately arrayed on the other side: burned by the light like a shadow burned into the walls of Watchmen. But I think the light by definition can't see in the dark the way ZZ grudgingly makes out shapes and movement. The sun in the sky might cast a shadow but has only abstract experience of the night. Some people think Shargash was a sun once and Alkoth is hell. In that scenario, Shargash and ZZ may sometimes provide reciprocal initiation . . . other times they fight like Ernalda and Dendara, jealous of their fine distinctions.

I think pumping corpses full of the spiciest "zombie sauce" (probably with beetle gland extracts) to jolt them to an unholy parody of life is brilliant and should be canonical. It's literally the fire within, the one thing a troll can't quite digest and so it keeps the body warm and twitching, constantly rejecting the intrusion like an autoimmune disorder, the bite of forbidden fruit you can't swallow or spit out. God only knows what it does to the living, probably instant illumination. 

Where it gets dumb is that IMG this is also Tanian, the impossible element that the Jrustelans brought down from their beetle-infested mountain and sprayed on their mucoid seafaring rivals. That one is theoretically spicy "water" but the standard elemental progressions are breaking down for me these days, the part of the world where they came of age didn't have much room for darkness as an element and the primary antagonism for fire was water. In this model, fire is the alien from the absolute elsewhere . . . the sky is dominated by a "nuclear chaos," if you will. Water steps up to shield the world from it in much the same way darkness operates in the old Council system.

Note that this means the waertagi overwhelmed by tanian sauce work their way back up from hell through sheer persistence (they are unkillable twitch machines now, alive with flavor) and a wink around the whirlpool.

By the way everything here has been great. I have been distracted but am flying to California incredibly early tomorrow and hope the office will calm down after that as the Issaries community continues to evolve.

1 hour ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Flesh Man

Hot. Now I wonder if there was a Pelorian Flesh Person in the ancient times, some universal person rune figure who was originally all of us but got lost in all the layers of hierarchy and shit rolling . . . a cult that pops up in generations of extreme social strain to renew the broken universe and relight a dead sun. Maybe this person was what they had up there instead of Yelmalio: the revolutionary recognition that the real sun was inside you all along, you are the central character in the rite when thelemites do Resh vel Helios in its turning: the mythic source of Karvanyar, Yelmgatha, modern Teelo Esta-- hey wait, once again Yelmalio as a woman, what are the odds?

Basko don't get it.

4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Gorakiki Beetle

Much like the scarab section (theorem XVIII) is the most important part of Monas Hieroglyphica, this may be one of the more important outputs of this thread. The key to illuminated elf consciousness, what Arkat got wrong, the disposition of the bees ("flaxen hair blowing in the breeze" / you want alchemy), a Miyazaki reference and more!

6 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Arachne is the sun spider, yet she is said to give birth to time, not the sun. Why is this, given that time and the sun’s cycles seem so very nearly the same?

Solara Tempora (S.T.) reckons from the "first sunrise" but modern Yelm is not the first sun.

Zorak Zoran is both the rehabilitated devil and the father of all great trolls, making them brothers like the sons of some kind of cave tolat ministering to his multi-breasted amazons.

 

12 hours ago, John Biles said:

basically eliminate any passions connected to order and chaos

Now my scores have gone up. Thank you!

5 hours ago, Martin said:

Does anyone know the names of any of Barntar's sons?

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.

42 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

driven over the edge by one’s illumination

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.

21 minutes ago, Tindalos said:

"The great cold monster lashed itself forward and sought to bite Murharzarm. The god broke its teeth with his scepter. The monster then wrapped itself around Murharzarm from his left foot to his chin, encoiling his body seven times, and lifted its great head to stare at Murharzarm in the face. But the god was not paralyzed like prey."

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!