scott-martin

I don't think we are disagreeing here. History probably presents FHQs who at least attempted to effectively "marry themselves" and wield their symbolic power in their own right. It would be interesting to identify them.

In ancient times (WBRM "rune counter" edition) she had the same runes as Beat-Pot, Gunda and Argrath: "Man" like other relatively human individuals as well as Mastery along with an unhelpful range of other entities like the Dwarf, the Sylph and Ethilrist's Cloak. If we were doing it now I'd suggest Earth/Queen and Magic because while she rules the Grazers, it's by right of "thaumaturgy" -- "she must speak only on matters of magical interest" -- and not conventional sovereignty.

The humble belt buckle salesman is of course a reference to one of Greg's more itinerant early career choices. It comes up most recently in the description of the town of Hsin Yin in the Guide.

This thread feeds beautifully back to the Pavis Project, pod racers and all. I wouldn't be surprised if that kid with weird parentage took a lot of "original Adarites" with him "back" across northern Prax in order to (re)build a more perfect Adari by the river. Helps explain how old Pavis could get so weird on a much grander scale: consider the models he had to work with.

Love this thread . . . had a response over there that bracketed the Adari connections as veering away from The Man Who Was Pavis so it's great to see it collected here. Those fertility maps are really something. One more crumb to throw into the pot is the linguistic note in RQ 2, posted over here to help recover my shame in initially missing the draconic connection: OLD PAVIC Some 500 years before, this now nearly-dead language was spoken in the Empire of the Wyrms Friends. The Empire ruled Old Pavis in that age when the huge ruins were cut off from the outside world, and the native humans still speak it. Now that the city is reopened, it is again known to the outside world. It is also used in ancient religious ceremonies at Adari, but not spoken by the populace there. Speakers of this language also know Draconic at % x their Old Pavic ability. So Adari preserves vestiges of some "ancient" religion behind the present stinking squalor. Who were they? When I think of stinking people I think tusk riders.

A little busy this weekend pushing out a new exchange-traded fund product but in these precious 30 seconds I would argue that these two wellsprings of Issaries cultural capital are two sides of the same "coin." Money is the artificial universal exchange medium, the material equivalent of POW. Once the spiritual effervescence (see durkheim) of free POW is commoditized into various "spells," the marketplace gets to work. Each point of Spell Trading allows free exchange of cult commodity. Naturally God Learners on the make see what this can do for them and absolutely have to have it. A deal the god could not refuse. IMG the roots of this unique and occasionally controversial technology grow out of Issaries' relationship to the ancient grandmother cults of Esrolia and more immediately his response to death, but this is only incidentally useful to most. Fantastic thread!

Ugh! No interest in rehashing old battlefields . . . and the Guide has "Dragon" for what the Long List called "Kralorela," which is already triggering the flashbacks. For me the central point remains that if EWF sought to sacrifice their Man connections they had an interesting set of other runes to embrace in its place.

Makes me wonder how Old Pavic originated as a distinct Theyalan language in the first place. It has no mechanical relationship to Auld Wyrmish in RQ3 so there's no dragon structure there, but unless it's simply an isolated survival of pre-EWF Manirian dialects things get murky fast. (EDIT: In RQ2 of course Old Pavic translates up to pure Draconic so there's a root connection after all.) It might also be fruitful to look at how the Pavis Project differed from what we consider core EWF. A lot of EWF seems to revolve around transcending (eliminating) Man Rune influences as one identifies with the dragon path. (Interestingly there is no singular "dragon rune" in the core set unless you lean toward Dragonewt, "Kralorela" or Beast (Dragon's Eye), but that's a side point. Also Immanent Mastery keeps Man.) Pavis may have been a reservoir of mortal influence they maintained in the laughably unlikely event that something might go terribly wrong. Now that they're gone, that treasure house remains behind.

That vast territory of Uz, humans and monsters might be the key on this side. I never really considered what it meant for Alkoth to "rule" the early digijelm belt that the Unity Council scouts went around -- nice one! I was just reading a variant on the God Project narrative in which the need for better war gods motivated them to pivot veneration from Xiola Umbar to ZZ. Another pair of dark twins. Undoubtedly not direct analogues for Annilla and the red god, but maybe some of Bina Bang's people would draw conclusions. ZZ loves his red. Talking about telescopes, I wonder what the planet looks like under Darksee.

I've used up my likes for the day but yes, I love it. We have U.S. president Herbert Hoover's translation of De Re Metallica around here somewhere.

Love it. Poor Baranwolf! I need to respond with something more detailed about the fate of old Stone (finally found a few credible reports of Mostali colonies eradicated Since Time) and Dawn Age runic systems but for now, this "Agricola" person is evidently a polite pseudonym for Black Arkat, the Farmer. He is a black god like the soils of the Felster valley.

This is where the needle scratches off my record so hope people will forgive the long double post. Emilla is also "the name used by men" in accounts of gendered Zaranistangi blue moon worship so it's not hard to imagine tantric relationships -- "Uleria" -- similar to what we see on Trowjang today. They must have been a very strange people. But they were also convinced that "Anehlla" wouldn't be restored "forever full" in the sky until they recovered the sword. Maybe Mastakos is close enough for the wandering men -- maybe we call them the "loper sect" -- while others consider the blue jumper just a fragment of the lost larger entity. A lot of people say a lot of different things, especially defeated cultures with nothing left but talk. The power of the sword has two big associations for me that might tie into "planetary" magic or at least the movements of hell and sea within the sky. First, the sword lifts lands and resists the waves. That reminds me of the strange powers of the Wachaza cult to meddle tactically with surface tension . . . and Wachaza is the only son of hell and sea that I know about until you get into the weird blue moon family powers. Second, everyone who cares about the blue moon agrees that it crashed. If the sword had been there at the time, it may have remained aloft. Maybe the miserable remnants of the Veldang will yet go home some day. But Wachaza, strange god. No direct sky connections, luckily, but it gets me wondering how Lorion and Great Magasta interact except via the Sky River Falls and heler phenomena in general. Remember the maps showing the fleets of the "Helerites?" Who were they, really, that boat people? Where do they go? Unless it's the moon, it's a side topic.

That's awesome! Let's bracket the implications to avoid obscuring your central points here, but this is a lot cleaner and more useful. Not least because as it happens I woke up obsessed with mysteries of the Telmorites -- the text in question refers to the Genertelan Blues as "the Wandering Tribes of the Northern Continent" -- and to me at least the lunar wolfman cycle could benefit from stronger astronomical contacts if not any relationship stronger than bride theft. There's also Basmol as yet another crippled god to factor into the complex. I wonder where the Bright Empire seven-day week comes from. Separately, one of the few things we know about Unvoreth is that his 28-day cycle is important, 14 days in "active" mode (purify/sky) and the next 14 days in "passive" prayer and magic. The "traditional" Kralori calendar cuts across this cycle so the red planet isn't the primary time keeper there, at least from an official exoteric imperial point of view. There are, however, exactly 7 16-day sacrificial periods in the Artia cycle, so maybe in the loper people's desperation they turned to the Bat. As we get old and the East gets slowly less enigmatic I wonder if the Tolat culture of Melib sent emissaries to the God Project as well, only their identities were relatively obscure (to us fans at the time) or special care was taken (by the victors) to obscure their participation in particular. In this scenario Tolat would come up into the Bright Empire, recover vestigial relationships with the dread lord of Alkoth and estranged Hykimite cousins, then recede from the mainland as the loper people fight their long guerrilla retreat. In any event the "Shargash" form doesn't seem to have had much influence outside the green walls of Alkoth unless the jungle is full of recognizable "enclosures" that nobody's talking about. I'm not even convinced it's easy for his people to migrate across Dara Happa without serious ritual support. "Tolat," on the other hand, is known in widely separated areas. Did I dream Tolat as a parti-colored god, half red and half blue, or am I thinking of the cover of Revealed Mythologies? Either way, I wonder if the intense color cults of the far East have astronomical origins. And I wonder where Shargash's green comes from. Like Tolat, he can be a mighty fertility figure when motivated. Back to Jaja and "hamstringing," somebody caught the Dawn Age sun in a black "net," so who knows what secret powers great Jannisor had at his command . . . before southpath entities killed him, of course. And as it turns out, one of the beast peoples knew it all along. Makes me wonder what else the Sable People remember.

Not so disturbing in the Artmalite context because they have Anellha to mediate the relationship between Hell/Sky and Sea/Sky. Actually Shargash has a sister too now, when we think about it. I wonder if things would go differently if he had to fight a flood again. Either way, it's striking that Tolat (or at least the sword, which some sources identify as a gift to the family from otherwise fugitive "Promalti smiths" of the cardinal south) is associated with buoyancy and so resists Sshorg where his Pelorian analogue fails. (Trimming a whole lot of false leads to keep this iteration of the thread a little more robust.) Looking back at the lore, I can't help but notice that as Melib looms larger Trowjang recedes. Tolat in Trowjang seems to be the obvious "love and war" Amazon cult and I'm sure they have a story of how they came to live without men. Tolat in Melib, on the other hand, is explicitly a Loper People survival -- brought with the sword by refugees from the disintegrating Artmalite civilization -- and that's also a place where they remember Blue Moon worship as bifurcated along gender lines. Maybe Trowjang is the place where the gendered mysteries (a) broke down (b) developed to support only Tolat without his twin, only female worshippers and no men. But this is probably one of the deepest enigmas of the southpath, waiting to get us into trouble. But Tolat worship was definitely imported to Melib at least, so if the archaic Abzeredites knew the red god by that name before the floods and Loper People incursions, I'd be surprised. Maybe they recognized him as something like Shargash as part of that Avalon Hill era pan-solar cultural belt that has now receded. Or maybe they acknowledged him as the nebulous Unvoreth. When the proto-Brithini went roving, they apparently met the red god first as Tolat[h]. You know, it's funny but with so many Blue Peoples to choose from I never thought of Artmalites marrying into the West, but there's a reference to Cathora as "the daughter of the king of the Fralari nation," which may well be some slight garble of Froalar and his line. It would definitely explain how people like Xeotam learned what little they know about this mythos and why Tolat[h] is acknowledged (as judge of the underworld) in that weird Hrestolite story. Jagekriand seems to be a native Orlanthite name for the planet, which is a god they don't like. I like the "Jaga" root pointing toward Saird, especially since Jajagappa loves dogs (bad dogs figure often in Heortling grudges) and rules a hell. Would not be terribly surprised if similar cults persist in Henjarl to this day. "Hamstringing" and crippling imagery comes up a lot with Southpath entities -- Mastakos obviously, the broken family of Artmal, a fleeting First Age reference to "Orlanth's family" taking down Shargash [sic] by hamstringing him from behind -- so I want to look for an Elmal (I'd almost say "Emil" but that's another labyrinth) or other wounded little sun there also. On the other hand an extensive list of defeated enemies of Shargash studiously does not mention any time when he beat the bat or the blue moon. Maybe they're his sisters too. Another strange thread running through a lot of these gods is their affinity for the cosmological scale of "giants." Isn't there a reference somewhere to Jagekriand as a rogue planet, or did I dream that?

This is the one I'm thinking about -- preserved here. A more obscure parallel version attributes the events to the reign of "Khorventos," so this may be at the very cusp of Alkoth's integration into the DH system as two archaic dynastic lists converge. That Xeotam reference to me is a smoking gun. Scattered Fronelan fragments agree that Tolat[h] had a sun for his father and hell for his mother. Do we know Shargash's mother?

Shargash appears in a few rarefied myths as a self-annihilating war god (you might see hell connections there) and as an enemy of rising waters. I'll pass over the references once I check the daunting western sources available to me.

Welcome to the Issaries Desert Trackers. Your franchise agreement, handsomely calligraphed on rich faux hyena hide, accompanies this card. We suggest you sign it.

I think that's one of the hinges of Gloranthan secular consciousness right there. While every aspect of the lozenge can be interpreted as the expression of mythic reality, in practice most of our Gloranthas are built out of a lot of busted gear and farting around, with the occasional interruption from somewhere sublime. Your cult identity mediates how your heroquests go. One thing that makes illusion dangerous is how a performance strips observers from that communal framework and addresses them one-to-one as "individuals" with the authority to interpret the experience on their own, sacred or profane. You get to choose which world you inhabit. Like any non-strictly-supervised initiation, this has produced plenty of historical freakouts as the audience grabs unexpected bits of "narrative" that would otherwise be impossible to even think in the normal ritual context. Perfectly good princesses break role to join the circus, etc. Illusion, in other words, is where a sense of "self" emerges from the community. We see things differently: when I see the rain-dirty valley and you see Brigadoon, two truths prevail in the world. As our experiences diverge, we become distinct individuals and the archaic Gloranthan ritual consciousness evolves into something else like everything falling apart at the end of a golden age. This is one thing that makes the rune so useful to the lunars, who in various phases are interested in self-building as a path to personal liberation and incidentally weakening the bonds that hold creation together. As our interiority deepens, something like illumination looms. Now you can also use illusion to achieve harmony, which is how cult-sponsored Donandar performances work. You reenact a myth that everybody knows, bonding the audience in a relatively cheap shared experience of other lives and exemplary lessons. When you roll high enough, you open doors that for all practical purposes are as good as magic. When you don't, hopefully at least you put on a good show. As far as I can tell, most independent illusion cults in central Genertela have concentrated in or around Glamour and the lunar complex. It's where the money is. I hope it makes the Dara Happans nervous. Because I love Rinliddi I wouldn't be surprised if the forms invented in the empire have a delirious strain of bird symbolism, running through them: Aristophanes, Attar, Peter Brook, Peter Greenaway. Masques and mummery: the play of the newborn goddess and the beasts, the play of the young elementals. It also plays well in the sticks. Speaking of money, another rune that works along similar lines to build secular consciousness is what we call Communication. Money is what we exchange for goods and services. It has no memory outside the psychopompous Issaries Mysteries. The most traditional cultures dislike working with it for very good reasons. Within the bounds of the neutral Marketplace taboos loosen, spirits of reprisal go silent and cult secrets come together in otherwise unimaginable configurations. "Spells" are traded, small talk is made and we come out changed and mutually enriched. Once you start making a little cash, the actors show up. Clearly the Jrustelites (who, as we recall, were cursed as well with the discovery of "fiction") were the gift that kept on giving.

The flip response is that any sufficiently advanced form of Puppetry is indistinguishable from acting so there's a practical point at which initiates of one illusion performance cult can get reciprocal support from people who follow other forms. As such comedy generally rolls into local Trickster, with even "scripted" comic dramas usually just an open collection of routines that work. Many of these routines are actually Trickster "spells." Deeper down I think the difference between putting on a show or telling a story, on the one hand, and exploring the mythic realm really boils down to the depth of your intent and the quality of your performance. Sometimes a ritual fizzles and we're just going through the motions; Santa Claus doesn't come down the chimney. And I think in a lot of people's Glorantha "small talk" is just secular chatter, with no "magic points" (or whatever) expended and no supernatural link implied just because we tell the story. Of course magical stories are generally ringed with taboos anyway, but relatively sophisticated individuals in the Third Age probably have a reasonable repertoire of profane or at worst para-religious stories to tell. (A lot of this body of knowledge probably relates back to vestigial animistic traditions and other "dead gods," but that's esoteric.) So it works a lot like the difference between having what we moderns would consider a "dream" (no oracular content, no divine connection, no divination points expended) and a Gloranthan receiving a vision. There's always a chance that casual talk will cross over, which is probably where a lot of the taboos come in. On the other hand many illusion cults naturally fuzz that line anyway, which is why a lot of people don't trust or like the circus when it comes to town. Arguably the line in itself is how the whole complex of illusion / "short worlds" / dream magic / impermanence / glamour operates within high Gloranthan magic, but the puppeteers decline to elaborate further. Some are, some aren't. Much was lost when Slontos went down.

Nice. I'd even suspect that modern Ehilm is a synthetic restoration of Fire to a Sky that lacked heat once Lodi below and DaYzatar above became estranged -- what happens when one particular Elmal somehow succeeds in regaining his birthright.

Bats in the Vineyard! Greg's fiction hasn't shied away from institutional sexual violence, especially in periods of social upheaval, so we know the lozenge isn't exactly a theme park. But on the other hand a lot of the cults are aspirational, portals to experience that people thought over the years would be neat to explore or we can't get here on earth. Uleria definitely qualifies as the goddess of "sex positivity" with gag Crowley-reference spell ready to roll. The way I fudge it is that particularly miserable people are rarely in actual cults because society shuts them out of opportunities and this is a self-perpetuating cycle. It also explains Chaos converts because if the normal social framework offers you nothing, you're going to be open to more radical alternatives. ("Nothing to lose.") A sex slave network structured around the slavery with a wing of sex would probably look a lot like Ompalam, a pyramid draining psychic resources like labor and magic points from wretches at the bottom. The "workers" enrich the pimp and are replaced as they wear out. It's a sad life but in Glorantha if they can somehow pray right they may find liberation. But it's so hard to pray right if your cult is taken away from you or you were born without any chance to find initiation at all. Lunar pimps might bend the rules by coercing people into Seseine and charging for participation. Your coders might wrestle with that one. Either way, the people we know in Balazar are far from representative of the best the Lunar Way can offer, so it's going to feel good to get some fresh air in there, so to speak.

Great but tough topic. For narrative purposes I might heighten the contrast between independent Uleria (a utopian and feminist tantric lifestyle) and people whose sex is exploited by pimps of one form or another. The pimps have a vested interest in alienating their people from any really effective religious framework because they want the "workers" (slaves) kept weak, dependent and easy to control. Uleria, on the other hand, is the center of all these wonderful rumors of cities of free women, sex as liberation, the power of love and so on. She's bad for business. And because this is Glorantha, if those oppressed sex slaves get a whiff of hope and a good enough opening, they're going to find their freedom. Maybe they go looking for Zoria. Maybe they build a new one right where they are. In the meantime I suspect that abuse is going to call various disease spirits, succubi and other demonic entities looking for an easy meal, so even if Cyriel isn't consciously flirting with Chaos his luck is going to get harder in the long run. While the Empire turned a blind eye to slavery last time I checked, sexual slavery is probably a flashpoint in segments of "lunar" culture that emphasize women's liberation in particular. Hard to imagine the canon NPCs feeling strongly about it but depending on your narrative needs, a new 7M presence in Balazar could make life rough for pimps . . . maybe Coders sent to clean up the frontier in the light of developments in the south.

Not quite the same thing but where I come from seasonal accounts need to settle at the close Fire/Truth to give people time to catch up from the previous Market Day and start prepping for the next one. Some people also forgive or at least roll over outstanding invoices going into Secret Way but there's no compliance requirement there -- it's just best practice as the roads to the underworld open.

Shows how much time I spend with those guys . . . I was remembering the ban as just a set of hardcore geasa but point taken. How's the rest of it hold up though? You died in the rite, he sends you back in the body (a loophole in the usual death cycle), after that you're on your own.

Love this thread even though it can get hot. I wonder if it makes sense to look at the SPECIFIC MASSIVE QUALITATIVE DIFFERENCES we see in various states of death and ritual underworld journeys. Some gods have secret trapdoors in and out of hell. They may or may not be the same doors but we won't know until we look. To me what makes the Lightbringers special is their ritual journey through the gates of dusk and in Orlanth's unique (?) case, the baths of Nelat. With that in mind, I'd look at the water mysteries of death, life and transmigration for clues on how Orlanth in particular gets to the other side without suffering the same agonies that afflict the wormy emperor down there. Purification is important. Maybe even a kind of atonement. While Magasta is the central figure worldwide, in this part of the Barbarian Belt the key myths I'd look at are the unclosing wound of Sky River Titan and the bizarre magical properties of the Creek•River•Stream. Also the rehabilitation of Mastakos, the adoption of Heler, etc. I'm not sure Issaries knows these particular pathways all that well, but then again, Issaries isn't the star of the lightbringer rite. Other people can emulate their gods in and out of hell. Falamal is a dying god, Blue Moon adepts grow from the dirt like potatoes, etc. Not sure Yelmalio knows how to die well, but that's a digression. I think when Magasta claims you, you're dead. I ain't gonna be the one to tell the Humakt crowd that Bridge of Swords is just another entheogenic puppet show, much less claim such a thing in front of all you serious characters. What I always thought it did was give the Death God ownership of your soul -- you are dead -- and then send you back in order to deliver his grim gospel here in the land of the living, i.e., kick ass. Once that happens, it's not really up to you whether you breathe another day up here or go back down to hell whenever the master says your time is up. You don't decide. And you definitely don't challenge his will by seeking outside resurrection. If you feel strongly enough when you run out of hit points, take it up with the master and roll the DI dice.