scott-martin

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.

Great catch. So if, as he says there, this is a vestige of Veskerele or some other transplant cult with a different kind of "underworld connections," the modern belief that this is the religion of outlaw Heortlings becomes a little more complex. MGF here to contemplate a patchwork of suppressed Sairdite cults -- maybe including one or two from, yeah, around Vanch -- forced south during any of the upheavals we've seen Since Time. Some undoubtedly die out or are subsumed into more mainstream cults. Some at least briefly set up realms of their own like what becomes Tarsh. Others, perhaps like the Lanbrilites, persist somewhere in the middle, never quite losing but never quite establishing a status quo either. Specialist cults. "Guild" cults.

I love this line because it reminds me how primeval Larnste got the title "Soul Arranger" and so undoubtedly hints at deep relationships among the various psychopomps we know. Would not be surprised if it touched on the problem of what Kargan Tor did before Death as well.

Awesome! Zero interest in rushing a new interpretation of Gloranthan shamanism but I always loved the animist approach for bending many of the conventional relationships between non-corporeal entities ("spirits") and bodies, life and horrible dead stuff. The shaman can, after all, operate independently on both levels at once, resuscitate the body if its ability to support life is interrupted, share the body with ancestors & other eager spirits, discorporate and travel invisibly like wind, etc. For ordinary Gloranthans, these ordeals would probably skirt the line of Death, but for the "nagual" (like the Humakti beyond the bridge of swords) the terms get slippery.

Is all of this an objective and universal mythic "fact" or do, for example, pure animistic cultures (if any) interact with Death differently?

Love that. Anyone else or does "guild" really denote "Issaries-like cult structure" in modern Glorantha?

Lanbril in Pavis explicitly blurs the line between family organization and professional criminal gang -- the Pavis players were probably dreaming of Lankhmar but Greg would have thought of the benevolent Tongs -- so all of this is probably right. Follow-up question there is which (if any) gods in our modern understanding of Glorantha sponsor "guild" structures.

By definition, the Lanbril cult covers its traces and defies divination so a skeptical reading of the texts may be the surest approach to its inner mysteries and role in the larger cosmos. Officially, he's the thief god of the Heortlings -- the personification of a specific violation of the norms of Orlanthite society -- and his network largely extends across the southern barbarian belt, congregating in the towns and occasional city. Where do these people come from? How do they fall into this criminal way of life? In moments of social upheaval, the answers are obvious: pragmatism and the logic of survival push individuals to break the rules. Those who survive the spirits of reprisal become the seed of a persistent criminal counterculture, raising their children in the family business and initiating ambitious outsiders -- don't push, they'll get in touch with you -- within the framework of mainstream religious culture. When the upheaval ends, some thief cults may find their devotees in privileged positions in the new social order. Others remain in the shadows or die out. Obviously in Lunar Pavis the crime cults are in play. Official Orlanth degenerates under the occupation while Adventurous takes over, and then when all aspects of Orlanth die adherents are forced to convert or go underground, finding day-to-day support in the closest cognates they can find. Gods of Glorantha finesses the complications here: sure, Lanbril is the dominant crime cult in settled Orlanthite times but in times of stress we remember that "many accepted gods have thieving abilities. Orlanthi thieves follow the tradition of their god." In other words, when Orlanth is outlawed only outlaws will remain Orlanthites. Lanbril almost certainly forms part of the framework around Argrath's religious mosaic. It may even be an archaic native school of Heortling heroquest technique -- after all, anyone whose esoteric myth revolves around stealing the gods' practical magic (foreign and domestic gods, it seems to make no difference) knows a little something about getting around the wards, defeating reprisal and taking a little something secret back at the end of the caper. Theft is a marker of many successful "heroquest gods" -- marriage and trade are others -- and the RQ2 cult write-up is adorned with traits that probably originally belonged to other cults. Divination Block turns out to actually be the signature spell of the antinomian Selarnists of Afadjann. The controversies around Lanbrilite alchemy can be resolved by noting that mastery of this body of knowledge doesn't assist cult promotion: alchemy travels within the Lanbril complex but remains something a little separate. Lanbrilite alchemy, in other words, came from somewhere at a specific point within time. Religious authorities would say "it was stolen." Practitioners may say something else. They may even lie under interrogation. That said, esoteric Lanbril revolves around the pursuit of personal immortality and the ambition to compete with the gods. It's one of the few explicitly euhemerist cults we have outside the Lunar orbit. He was just a man, born before the onset of Death and resentful of his doom. Feign Death is actually recognized as a skill deserving of cult promotion, so there's a yogic, maybe even a tantric component to the cult's mysteries. It's probably no coincidence that Black Fang had access to Lanbril secrets before he became a very minor god within time. Argrath's relationship to Death is a little more obscure, but we know for a fact he becomes a god too. Maybe these secrets are stolen. If so, they're stolen from somebody. Lanbril also incorporates engineering processes that a casual observer would associate with the dwarves or, a little more hypothetically, the East. The dwarves are infamous immortals. If I were a cult dabbling in the defiance of Death I would want to pilfer as many of their secrets as I can, so maybe the fruits of that pilfering go into the criminal gizmos of Pavis. After all, the Rubble is full of abandoned dwarf gear ripe for the reverse engineering. The alchemy may also come from there or from misunderstood contacts with the esoteric alchemy of the mysterious East: if it wasn't immediately practical, Lanbril despised it as no use. The cult itself may have originated in the barbarian belt and evolved over the centuries. (Remember, "the gods don't change" but it's transparently obvious that cults within time DO.) Lanbril acquired spells and skills from foreign contacts or innovated internally, which within Glorantha is generally a similar dynamic. The Pavis circles in particular may retain archaic knowledge practically extinct elsewhere: perhaps a Sartarite alchemy (itself arising out of its own mosaic of dwarf and other foreign contacts), perhaps older things rediscovered in the Rubble or traveling in secret from even more exotic eras. Some deprecated sources hint that Lanbril was useful to the Middle Sea Empire, so there may yet be hidden "God Learner interactions" in play. In any case, that stuff, to use the vernacular, is tricky to fence. And so it accumulates, largely unused, dormant but not quite dead. At this point, Lanbril is whatever each criminal magician wants it to be. It's a moveable feast. What we know is that Lanbril is not quite Adventurous and not quite Eurmal. They either evolved separately and came together or diverged at various points within History. Cult dogma hints at a moment in the God Time when Lanbril "permeated the world," so this may simply be a vestige of an entire civilization that lost before time got started. This Lanbril moment may be in the background when Orlanth and Eurmal met. If so, he may be another of the buried gods of Slontos or the beast empire, but who knows. The farther west you go, the harder time they have keeping all these entities straight. Everything depends on the roots of Thieves' Argot. Either it's a lost theyalan dialect (perhaps a sister of what becomes Tradetalk), something that modern Teshnans would almost recognize or something else.

Lanbril is also interesting because the cult perpetuates advanced (al)chemical knowledge that's tricky to reconcile with what we consider mainstream EWF. I'd look for his origins on the other side of the Wastes and in another thread.

Many core Gloranthan cultures acknowledge that not all dreams are authentic otherworld contacts so by analogy secular "fiction" is theoretically possible. Impossible Landscapes (from Middle Sea Empire, 8th century or earlier) is the central grimoire there. Author: unknown. Historical impact: immeasurable.

It's a great achievement. p. 17 I might check sources to see if we're talking about a "Red Class Tower" or a Red "Glass" Tower since while this story was previously unknown to me, the distinction has ramifications for deep lunar magic.

That forceful generational nostalgia is hot stuff.

Different healing magic, access to legendary "power plants," stubborn karmic attraction to the mysteries of Grower. She's recognized in the Paps complex so mom at least won't mind. Dad might have trouble unless we're a Light clan anyway, in which case I might represent a form of upward spiritual mobility.

If you did a fanzine I'd read it. Yeah, that's a dare. Looking for an authentic pre-colonial Kralorela at this point is a mandate for saints and revolutionaries -- in the earliest surviving documents they worshipped "Yelm" over there. Maybe that's just where "Yelm" comes from, dragging his set of "runes" along with him across the sky from the morning exposure of empire. As generations of travelers come and go, they put two clacks into the prayer machine for a look at the sun just like everyone else. Eventually the cult gets to Raibanth and that's where the Malkioni with their universalizing categories encounter him. They reintroduce their expectations when they go to the Eest. Some of it sticks, most of it doesn't, but it's all available for enunciation as "la langue."

Let's do it. The scary thing? I think it's actually what's happening within the setting development. Weird things happening around trickster, illumination, spirits of reprisal, all those game artifacts only players used to take seriously. In terms of tattooed savages, I was just seeing that come up in the first pages of Cults of Prax. So it's always been with us, apparently.

Pure Prax and a good deep glance at their gendered economy. Mothers provide sustainable milk. Fathers provide sacrifice. The notion of vegetarian herd men degenerating into "something" after capture or in the wild gets me wondering about where our friends the baboons fit into this larger mythic ecology, but they probably wouldn't appreciate the discussion. The putative "desert pig" that no outsider has ever seen is amazing, I wonder if it has a long prehensile nose or the complete and utter opposite.

Love all of this. The revelation of the morokanth tribe as at best ritual non-vegans leaves a little economic wreckage behind like a flash flood in the chaparral. A two-legged son of Waha doesn't run out of herd flesh to eat because herds can digest forage. These two-legged tribes compete for meat by raiding each other. On the four-legged side, a hungry morokanth competes directly with captured herd beasts (impala, llama, etc.) for forage. These "prizes" are not just economically useless except to ransom back to the two-legged tribes: every impala you keep around is literally eating your lunch. Meanwhile what does your two-legged herd eat? While it's nice to have slave hands at the ready, you either have to feed those animals from your salad bowl or capture riding beasts for slaughter and stew. Unless I'm missing something huge, two-legged herds are a prestige item but ultimately a drain on the most important economy of Prax, the stomach. Maybe there are dark(ness) secrets around what exactly the morokanth barter in exchange for the captured riding beasts they presumably do not want. Maybe they are a drain on unwanted or unsupportable two-legged children -- a trade nobody would want to talk about. But even so, these "herd" trades are probably rare. Another lingering question revolves around whether two-legged herd meat is still acceptable in, for example, a Bison stew pot. Presumably the Covenant holds that eating tapir meat is technically cannibalism, which may be the real motive for winning (or cheating) in the first place. Being taboo food can be worth all the headaches of participating in two-legged society: giving your herds bites you would prefer, coming up with thumbs, etc. But if the tapirs are "eaters" who don't eat, then the story gets dark if two-legged herds are actual omnivores just like us who get eaten. Luckily morokanth magic ensures that the things don't talk or cry as they go into our pots. (Do morokanth have the Peaceful Cut, the holiest and central rite of Waha religion? When would they use it? How do you participate in the Waha mysteries without spilling blood?) Also I would imagine mournful morokanth like Eeyore who long for the tapir days when life was simple even though occasionally you might get hunted and eaten. They might have a similar emotional resonance to other herbivores of the chaparral as the uncanny herd men have for us. In that case, their sympathies, art, poetry and mythos may be very different from two-legged tribal ways. Maybe they sometimes actually release captives into the wastes, which is where wild herds come from and so the magical ecology is replenished. Only the mothers know for sure. On the other hand, if the morokanth have an origin distinct from riding animals -- if they're from elsewhere at a certain point in Gloranthan mythic history -- then they may not really care about what happens to an impala, etc. It's just animals and we, of course, are proven men. (I forget, do morokanth even have Man Rune now beyond a politeness?)

Sassy! The turtle is my favorite pokemon. For me the key is that the Gloranthan "emic" (gloremic) is itself informed by centuries of in-setting intellectual efforts toward a true (gloretic) theory of religion and tragic rejections of those artificial abstractions. Right now (hobby year 1620-ish, publishing year 2016) the POV characters tend to be defensively and even a little stridently "traditionalist" while unwittingly revealing the latent structures of repressed innovation at every turn. It happens. I suspect that as the Hero Wars roll in and the timeline advances the in-setting magicians will have to wrestle with or reject the overdetermined nature of their theoretical understanding. Civilizations under extreme pressure get hot. Any better?

You'll find a generic "Runepower" as a placeholder in the list of rune spells (Classic version p. 65, original RQ2 p. 63) but it was never really developed in print beyond elemental summoning spells. Pity! Still, that may be corrected soon.

That Harmony connection is interesting but more ground would need to be prepared before our understanding of the cult can bear it!

Well I can rise to the level of distraction machine! Two to start out with: you mentioned somewhere (maybe the orange Glorantha box) that you regretted not reading the theory of religion books they assigned back at Beloit. I can relate. Do you remember which books they were or even which classes you were taking or who the professors were? Second one is easy and fun. Warding cubes. Was that a reference to Katherine Kurtz's Deryni books that snuck in, or were she and the RQ group working independently from a shared common inspiration? Thanks,

Love that. Their cousins might still be extant within northern temples as well, only completely unspeakable.