scott-martin

Bulk mining might be another reason dwarves are such cosmic assholes. God diggers down there worming through the graveyards of the world, a little like krarsht. (Hey, can someone remind me what iron is, really? Which gods died there?)

Yara(ch)Na Haranis, great and terrible spider woman hear our prayer. One of my favorite paragraphs ever on this site. The female origin of the knowing god in this part of the world is deeply satisfying, I wonder if that's where the women in Lhankor got their beards. It's also a little heartbreaking to position Dayzatar's self-exile beyond the Sky Dome as a lunar mystery. We know one moon that lives outside the sky and occasionally drops in a flash. Maybe Upper Brother gets "his" revenge after all when the Bat comes home.

I haven't seen any documents but since Arim's regime revolved around a restored earth rite I'd love it if the formal name of the country was actually "Torshi" on the model of the Tadashi Tumulus. Mountain of Tada = Tadashi. Mountain of Sorana Tor = Torshi. Then a few centuries of exposure to New Pelorian shave off that last vowel and raise the one in the middle, giving us the modern "Tarsh(e)". And then there's the once and future Baro Shi, Forang Faro Shi, etc.

I like the crystal nuances here so close to "hard earth" and his death (poor old Stone) . . . I wonder whether Whitewall might've originally been "white" with newly cut lime and the name stuck even though the walls have weathered. While Belintar might've been reluctant to restore the defenses of a particularly recalcitrant Sixth he probably did have elemental magic to regrow the carbonate (!) if motivated. "Behold thy city, white in wall in fact as well as in name! Thus is my promise kept!"

I think this is our first shot at the winter shear and any local handicrafts people have completed over the indoor season. There's probably also a Issaries Mystery related to the lambing but timing depends on who owns the Peaceful Cut around here.

Love it. It's an emergent property and not something that exists in the world separate from the god. If you have Communication you're at least a reciprocal associate of Issaries (the god will find you) and if you're in Issaries you have Communication. Probably at exactly the same rating as your Worship. This is different from most "conditions" that rarely have personified divine sponsors. Of course the western brethren alienated Communication from the god and pursued pure exchange on its own like it was some other condition rune, but they're generally dead now.

God, what if they ask me the Duck question and I give the Cook answer, where does the illumination go? (spoilers: this itself is the Fast Talk riddle.)

In before the riddlers. This is an interesting statement because we know both Lokamayadon and ultimately Shepelkirt fail to assimilate the great contrarian. Does this mean illumination in your view always reaches a limit? Maybe that limit is Time.

"All of the Gloranthan Council appeared to be giants whenever they came out of the mountain." Mountains are children of Larnste. Issaries is a child of Larnste. Is Issaries a giant? We know Issaries is the god of a few giants and that his geas is to put the hyenas back together. If one of those giants is another piece of Genert, what is Issaries?

I'm an idiot. M A L K I O N L A N K O (R) M I

The Blue Moon resurrection mystery in Arcane Lore points to a plant that can propagate from discarded buds, allowing it to be consumed and then miraculously restore itself in the grave without benefit of normal fertility rites. A rhizome would do just as well. If this "devil's parsnip" happens to have psychoactive parts, bonus. They say it came from the moon and grew in its wreckage. It probably doesn't grow well elsewhere without substantial investment. Actual "potato" content in Teelo Norri bread [die Brösel-Botschaft] may only be symbolic at this point, in remembrance of the meal Jakaleel prepared for them before things got intense. But someone who collects enough of the real thing and cooks it right can work wonders.

It's in the "Mortal Lords" playtest compendium . . . obviously paracanonical at best now but I'll put the relevant bits together, buzz me if you don't hear back relatively soon.

Hi Greg -- I never wanted to bother you and figure you're even busier than usual right now getting set up with Corporal Zen's brother but maybe you'll see this some day. Thank you for the grand adventure. I regret to inform you that there's a delightful old lady out there (easily old enough to be your mother) who has run off with my set of Avalon To Camelot and will absolutely fall in love with the annotated Malory when she gets it so watch out for yourself. She's the one who blinked when I mused as a boy "how wonderful it would be if" the desert was really full of impossibilities like in an early Castaneda and tartly replied, "it isn't?" Scorpio. Now you two will have to wait a little longer to pool your lore and stir up serious trouble. For now the sword goes back into the lake for safekeeping as the sun sets for the night. The realm sleeps. The realm lives. I am sorry we never figured out Vortigern's tower but I was a lot younger then and am always too slow. What an amazing family you leave behind as dad, granddad, husband, brother, uncle. Storyteller, sage, magician, publisher and pirate chief. They've done great things and will do great things. Remember Harald Hardrada, wyter of Wyrd? Disintegrating Smallbrass, Dehore and the prayermaker and the old woman, the angels and the ark, that strange planet where the three-headed worm man willed himself to stop being unholy? Remember that outrageous belt-buckle-busting buffet back in the belt buckle days? Arguing the merits of Shang-Chi comics and Dr. Strange, all those reviews and letters fired off to Gerard and Chuck and the Breidlings, the pure chemical joy of the gestetner? Moonbroth? Weirdbook? I was just exchanging email with Darrell the other day. Just little things you left behind, "chattel property" you might've called it once but it's a comfort for us. Snodal and Siglat, Hrestol and Faralz, Arkat and Gbaji and Harmast. Figures of Earth. More of the pieces get discovered every year, like mercury drops rolling back together. The speeches, the essays. Open now to all but muted. All the narrative captions of Camelot are fixed now. The lozenge is mapped to the hex. Nothing left for us but to draw new pages you can enjoy now from your vantage. "Illustrated fantasy." You take the true identity of your David Starling with you. You were mine. So thanks and fly well. Remember here now that you are there. "Here" remembers you in the meantime. But I wish time was longer.

That's going to be amazing. My 90-year-old-lady mentor is absolutely in love with the fatherless boy and has been eagerly awaiting the Annotated Arthur a few years now. Still hoping she gets her copy.

Lots of weird elemental rough drafts up there in the unenlightened country, would not be surprised. Closer to home, something's got to be driving Storm Pent. Coincidence or sinister Hero Wars arcanum? I imagine the ultimate Monster Empire as the perennialist's worst nightmare . . . elements out of control, decadent cosmopolitism, the perversion of everything that made the Country Holy. Koyaanisqatsi. The ultimate end of the Pain Star might indeed have been to replace Yelm forever, maybe something like how Shargash got up there. In that scenario someone like a Bijiif would have ascended on the last morning (I like your Kazkurtum reading for Sheng but don't know where that god lives during the day) and once again all the hells would empty out.

There's that weird page of penciled notes on "A Westerner's View of the Lightbringer's Quest" that ends with the birth of a synthetic culture hero, called "zzabur" there, with five daddies and two mommies. This is how you forge a "we" from scattered selves. But in that scenario, it's possible that an archaic LBQ created a corporate "orlanth" to give all participants a stake in the shared enterprise. Take local forms -- a worlath and a humkt and an elmal and a hurumal or an orlantio -- season with desperation and stir. In the primeval west, a zzabur came out. In what becomes Dragon Pass, you now have an orlanth. They go different directions. Eventually a similar rite in Torang would give birth to a goddess later theologians would see scattered in various prefigurations across the past. In the far south, you have two necklaces, one that makes cities and one that doesn't scale that way. Harmast re-creates the orlanth cult and the parameters change. He's focused on the reconstruction of the fables (hi, rick, thanks as always) and not so much forging a new "us." As far as I know IFWW is not his concern. He knows who his We are. He has a ginna jar already in mind. What he wants is to emulate the part of the rite that is about the resurrection of the dead. What he gets is an expanded Us, an entity new to him to change the game. From one perspective, this is a reconstruction or a resurrection of the hero who had already torn his way through Ralios. But then from one perspective, every LBQ is all about renewing the sun. Maybe it's originally an elf rite similar to what they have where HKE kisses the dryads and tickles every runner, rite of spring. Harmast was fighting a bright god and his intent brought back a dark one. Argrath is fighting an empire and brings back Sheng. I don't know how Sheng spends his Sacred Time. But I wonder now if that first "sun" the lightbringers preached in the dawn days was named orlanth, the new bright god and new generation to come. Some people accepted different parts of that revelation -- storm and sky and dark and earth and water circulated across first clans and then the continent, so you have pockets of what we'd now call "elmalites" and "orlanthites" across the pagan landscape. Some people were given a zzabur instead and followed that trajectory. "Monster" is a funny word. In the Holy Country it's just another I to help us Win. In the West it's krjalk, the devil. In the solar bowl it's the rustic uncle whose antics impede our career. In the East the hsunchen tribes seem to be the shock troops for the nefarious huan to scheming to bring down cosmic order. Nature itself. When Sheng comes back it's as the emperor of the "monsters." A classical orlanthite writer would just say "chaos." The shock of the new. This might be one of the deepest arcana of the Hero Wars period, or at least one of its gamier masks. You all are rocking. And around the time King of Sartar was new and melting fan minds, I had a great mormon friend who loved Joy Division and the Smiths, we would constantly mishear the word "mothers" in "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" as "ovens." It's a little biologically reductionist but hard truth: some girls' ovens are indeed bigger than other girl's mother's ovens. Maybe Sheng is a woman.

Who knows how many reacts are left in any one day? I run out a lot lately. It's probably obvious to many that this layer of the material points to the rise of a patriarchal sky culture from the female earth mysteries. You start in a world that might only barely have a word for "fathers" and end with a society where women are an active vector of ritual taint. Consciousness shifts. Once upon a time there was no sky and we all kept our heads here with our bodies. The difference between boys and girls was mysterious and abstract. Mothers ruled their children. Girls grew up to become mothers. Boys had ceremonial roles to play. Excess boys were expendable. You don't need a lot of boys to waken the mother within. In some places boys came and went in bachelor herds and learned to demonstrate their value. In others the women concentrated their affection into a limited number of boys -- one is most efficient as long as everyone who matters gets her turn -- and replaced them when they wore out. These are the archaic Earth Rites. Call that boy a "king." Almost like a moon, he comes and goes, rises and falls. The point is that one generation this cycle changes. A king in one place decides he wants more life. He refuses to repeat the mistakes of the ones who came before. He engineers a way to come back from the red rite. Maybe there's a priestess who helps him. She has what we would call an oedipal urge, the heart wants what it wants. He goes on providing daughters but this time there's a preternatural boy baby too. Equally importantly, this king goes on. He has posterity. The red rite is becoming irrelevant now. The mood changes. A green world turns gold. We call his gold world "sky," space filling up with new dreams. More men decide they want to take more life. Eventually they get it and you have an emperor jealous of everyone else in what was once the bachelor herd. You have a new element alienated from the Earth that mothered and married it. GA has produced endless earth kings in her day but now she's produced an AETHER. Within that element the rules change. They don't think they need women any more. Some men remember but it's too late. To the extent to which they share the sky it's as subordinates, little suns in orbit. To the extent to which they remain lodrilite earth kings they are doomed to transience. Either way they're all more or less cucks. But before the Red King came back, you had a Green Age. After the Green, the Gold. Who is red and green and a sky god also? Shargash. That might be another story. The gap between sky and earth breeds prodigies. Cities down here rise and fall. Up here, some new stars flare and persist. The sky was dazzling then. But the sun creates its own shadows. Now we know the difference between people and trolls. People -- earth people, sky people -- have changed from the primal horde days. Earth conserves more of the old black rites within its depths. Sky by definition is the rejection of shadow. The waters begin to move. It takes a conspiracy of sons and others to murder the monstrous father and break his monopoly on all the good things. Back when there was just a relatively simple Monster Man terrorizing a family you could tame him with your oven and then give him a "haircut" in his sleep like any other animal. The primal father of the horde was not yet immortal, as he later became by deification. If he died, he had to be replaced; his place was probably taken by a youngest son, who had up to then been a member of the group like any other. There must therefore be a possibility of transforming group psychology into individual psychology; a condition must be discovered under which such a transformation is easily accomplished, just as it is possible for bees in case of necessity to turn a larva into a queen instead of into a worker. One can imagine only one possibility: the primal father had prevented his sons from satisfying their directly sexual tendencies; he forced them into abstinence and consequently into the emotional ties with him and with one another which could arise out of those of their tendencies that were inhibited in their sexual aim. He forced them, so to speak, into group psychology. His sexual jealousy and intolerance became in the last resort the causes of group psychology. We start out as an us in order to accomplish our allied aims: revenge, justice, ambition, restitution, who knows. It all boils down to killing the king who stayed too long for us to tolerate any more. All the repressed elemental weapons can participate. Gratification is rarely instantaneous. Sometimes individuals lose but the us goes on. When we win some of us might become individuals depending on conditions remaining on the board: a wise leader will share, a new Uther is probably as bad as the old one. Within the sky world they won't tolerate multiple fathers, only uncles. That's the sun rune with one dot that matters. But outside the sky world the dream goes in the opposite direction. We start out with the slivers of individuality because some spark within us feels that it deserves outrage. We deserve to want. We deserve to hate what keeps us from what we want. We deserve to work against what we hate. We deserve more. And everyone's difference from the norm is unique, we start alone. I fight. If I find the right "we," we win. Once we win it's "my" responsibility to do better this time. I could drone on about where these two versions of the story place the blame for breaking the world in the first place, who Bad Brother is on different sides of Dragon Pass, etc. The interesting thing for me right now is how WAU is a solar formula that explains how community expands from an original locus whereas IFWW was pioneered by OOO and his dark orientation. The "Only" in his epithet is noteworthy because it protects a privilege of unique seniority. His followers want you to know he is the only dark god at this level. And he is generally considered male. Depending on your POV, Lodril is a black god or a bright god hidden in the dark places of matter, an impoverished god, castrated uncle cast down, our real father. Everyman. Acknowledged in modern Esrolia, land of mothers. Husband but maybe not necessarily Husband-Protector. OOO was the face of AA and AA was on the Husband-Protector list last I checked. Down there he ruled as something like a shadow emperor. Earth is the only element that reflects the split between light and darkness, sky and shadow, "benefic and malign." It's a Holy country for a reason, endless rival of the sun, built on infinite diversity and infinite compatibility. Land of race mixing, element mixing, insight and commerce. Arkat is also a black god who teaches that the I who fights today becomes the we who will win. In honor of the Transvestite Sar Tar Hypothesis I yield that the Larnste contains within itself the power to propagate according to both sexes, almost like some kind of vegetable principle. Mountain "seeds." The problem of Krarsht. It is now. In practice this probably looks like an esoteric ravenkaaz, which of course is the Battlefield of Night and Day. First a caveat, I'm no Sheng apologist nor friend of Brightface. They're both winking assholes and Carmanos can be as bad. But my balanced viewpoint is that he is clearly occluded because why go through all that effort when he could've spent the time working on himself instead? He, at the very beginning of the history of mankind, was the Superman whom Nietzsche only expected from the future. Even to-day the members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterly nature, absolutely narcissistic, but self-confident and independent. We know that love puts a check upon narcissism, and it would be possible to show how, by operating in this way, it became a factor of civilization. But even "failed mystics" have outcomes. (Especially "failed mystics" have outcomes.) I suspect he recognized that something was wrong in the exterior sky, the world that reflects more or less accurately in every mystic's inner eye. The sky offended him. Fixing the problem consumed his life. He didn't want to tear down the Moon. He just wanted to make sure there was a place for him and his gods on it. He wanted to "stand" there. That's a vector of hubris right there, but that's true of a lot of magic. Along the way to doing that, he intervened in as much of the sky reflected down here as he could. (As below, so above.) He shuffled the pantheons and the stars moved in their wake. The moon resisted. What's interesting is he doesn't seem interested in pushing through the Holy Country to the surviving Ralian sites. Something there stopped him as surely as Delhi stopped Genghis. Maybe it's this sense of OOO as imperial shadow, a kind of southern black sun with his shadowy hat and sunglasses. Maybe it's the revelation of IFWW that confounded or even evaded his mystic narcissism. It's funny that the solar people call the bad side of revelation the "occlusion," the shadow. Later an anonymous editor of the Entekosiad would note that something preserved the Pelandan bowl from the mass mythic interventions of the imperial era, creating a fertile space for the revelations of the third age: a new woman-centered spirituality, an altered sky, a moon hanging between them, dark and bright in its cycle.

It's almost like the cults are symbiotic like an old married couple . . . even though Everybody Knows grandma's husband had a different name, the name of Issaries' wife is obscure and the role of Talking God better fits elders who've already sowed their stormy oats and settled down a bit. Almost as though a version of Orlanth's father had lived.

Given the events of the day I just sacrificed myself to myself, sleep deprivation and trading away a perfectly good aisle seat for the middle to bring a few things back. For me the Widow's Son story suggests what the Yelm hierarchy does to all who challenge their monopoly on adult masculinity. It's not quite a slave system but most people are far from free to be more than "little" subordinate suns at best. Servants and concubines. If you "want more" they take your parts to nullify the threat. But the entire shape of the Yelm mythos revolves around how crimes against the fathers are revenged by the sons. Not every time and rarely perfectly balancing the scales, but belittle enough dads and sooner or later the next generation will throw off a kid ornery enough to get payback. Among others, that's Orlanth. When the emperor is a dragon that's Karvanyar. Sometimes it fails and the hierarchy delays the mythic inevitable by beating or coopting the kid. Who knows what Beat-Pot could've become? When a little sun is kindled it wants to become an adult, a father in its own right. Dara Happa is all about keeping little suns little in order to glorify the eternal emperor sun, all-father. At best you can be a little dad and have a little family. Realistically initiation there doesn't even extend that far. Now what's interesting is that there's a little brother too. For a god often characterized as having "tantric" aspects Lodril sure carries a whole lot of castration imagery, his spear constantly getting bent, busted or stolen. Who does this to him? Often darkness gods but not always. Who allows this to happen? Big brother. It's not hard to imagine a strange and secret story the Monster Men tell where Lodril asserts his prerogatives and his own brother slaps him down hard, hamstrings him, boots him from heaven, takes his Light and leaves only Low Fire behind. Umath claims his birthright and is pushed. The Fourth Man, the consigliere of heaven, is always content to remain a servant, always the uncle and never the all-father. Or at least that's how he's portrayed. Like Dayzatar. At best all that's left behind are little suns, unfree masculinities. Subordinates. And then there's Shargash, who is also a "tantric" god with his own rites. If we can point to the Sex Pit on the god learner maps whose city of carnal license would it be? Lodril's? Shagash's? Doomed Zarkos? Which commandment did Rebellus Terminus most want to break? Covet thy brother's wife? His son like Hamlet gets payback. At a certain point it gets hard to distinguish which ones are "little suns" and which are "storm sons." They're all pissed off youth who want something more than dad's deserts and are willing to fight to get it. They've got nothing to lose. They take different routes to justice. Some are just lethal. Others are just tricky. Others are upstanding. One combines all the best parts within himself and becomes an Orlanth. A lot of the tribes who remembered the father got shipped off to what is now Umathela. Maybe dad was a noisy spear god, a smith castrated for his presumption, last son of heaven. Maybe he was the first of the storm gods. It's hard to say. He might even have been a talking god, a mountain maker, a soul arranger. One detail that people tend to agree on is that he was in love with the old lady goddess, mother and mother in law. When he was the mountain maker she was the mountain. Dad *has* the spear. Mom *is* the spear. Also the Wall when properly interpreted is a combinatorial engine like the I Ching that reads the permutations of divine influence. Shuffle the masks of god and play the best possible hand. Be the biggest sun you want to be. Life's too short to work for someone else forever. This applies equally to the boys and girls of Dara Happa, come out of that place.

"The dew of dusk and the thew of an angel" may be deliberately abstract. Archaic references give him the epithet "of Bullshill," wherever that is. Could be more formally "Sora-na-Tor" depending on how our hobby languages shift vowels.

Maker, what looks like Cold, Malkion

To everything, turn turn turn.

I wouldn't be surprised if the kill lines primarily frightened people to death, ensuring that only the most desperate locals or ignorant strangers from far away would dare take their chances testing the edges. Maybe most died at first but a few came back to tell the tale. Like the Ban the effect would evaporate with repeat evidence that crossing the line isn't necessarily inexorable doom . . . in that scenario the line would roll back for the right people under the right circumstances until the land was completely reopened. So people could have persevered behind the line. Odds are good they don't like to talk about it.

No idea. I've been waiting for that one to be followed up on since WF 2. Earth is definitely in play. Hon-Eel and even Hwarin Dalthippa are earthing it up, the Twins are active, etc. But not just a season for witches, Sartar himself emerges at this time.

If you can shoehorn this into a sense of a "Later Classical Demi-Birth Period" I for one will be so happy.