scott-martin

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!

10 minutes ago, Minlister said:

I always thought that Esrola was a sister of Ernalda, I understand that it is no longer the case?Am I right? Or did I misread the genealogy p. 13 of the Earth Goddesses? Esrola is not even mentioned in the who's who of the Earth pantheon, p. 8-11

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.

28 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

The Vadeli Isles and Brithos likewise. Unless they’re the same place, of course, but I’m sure we covered that earlier.

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.

13 hours ago, bronze said:

Emperor: How magically powerful were the Emperors of Land and Sea? They were foci of worship around litearlly half the world. Considering how powerful are the Emperors of third age empires, they must have been walking, breathing living high gods. They are referred to as the Mortal Ruler, a mortal peer of immortal gods. It is curious that the Prosopaedia dosen't include the Emperors in the list of Malkioni pantheon. Although Svagad is included, his runes aren't described. 

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.

6 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Not Backford, not Dangerford

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

2 hours ago, Erol of Backford said:

Saffron and bay scallops, as long as the spice doesn't overpower the scallops! if that is what you meant by "red"?

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.

47 minutes ago, Malin said:

I just counted my knuckles and was blown away. This makes sense.

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.

 

53 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

One of the eight “sausages” is really a detached part of Eurmal, just saying.

This too is part of the cosmic mystery, the "wriggle room" that guides theyalan demography, event catering and other statistical sciences, +/- 14%

 

On 1/8/2023 at 11:38 AM, Jeff said:

Theyalan languages give a number for each of the days of Sacred Time, so 1-14. 15 gets represented as 1-1, 28 as 1-14, and so on until we get to 210 which gets a new signifier. 

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.

13 minutes ago, Eff said:

Why would there be? Einstein's too assimilated to break the fragile brain of a cartoonishly, affectedly bigoted closeted homosexual from Rhode Island nowadays. 

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?