Darius West

An interesting idea, but how do you bypass someone whom you seek to embody and emulate and be a living symbol of? You and they are intrinsically connected. I suspect that Humakti would be more powerful in the underworld, and would probably prefer to remain with the Einherjar.

So the Lunars never use chaos... except when they do... The Crimson Bat, the Chaos Gift spell, not to mention Eyzaal the Chaos Alchemist etc. If you mean avoiding the use of chaos as a propaganda move in occupied areas so as not to annoy the locals and whip up anti-Lunar anti-chaos sentiment, that is very different to a universal stricture. Don't Lunars have separate deities for "good" and evil chaos?

Lunars use Yanafal Tarnils, not Humakt as their war deity, and as an illuminate, Yanafal could break cult strictures without repercussions... well, his sword bent into a scimitar, but it didn't break (Humakt is his own spirit of retribution, and that was a joke I inserted there). And when has "never use chaos" ever been a universal Lunar stricture? The Crimson Bat, the Chaos Gift spell, not to mention Eyzaal the Chaos Alchemist, but I digress, the Lunars are not the topic. On the other hand, I agree with the notion of Humakti being "off the path of reincarnation", but there is a reason that you don't find Humakti heroes coming back the way Jaldon does, the notion offends the very basis for becoming a Humakti in the first place.

As you say, there is no record of Brithini going to the underworld, except for Arkat, and he wasn't a Brithini by that stage. Now the Vadeli pose a different problem, don't they? Clearly no Vadeli wants to break their caste restrictions and slowly die, exactly as the Brithini would, and entering the underworld for them would be instant annihilation. The fact is, they would have to have developed a way to be alive in the underworld through sorcery, and that is yet another exception to "the rule".

Even Humakti heroes have to abide by cult strictures. Coming back from the dead is strictly forbidden.

I tend to agree with you. Joh Mith might be able to hero quest for high altitude abilities as Iskalor says, but it is possible to make it over the pass without respirators, it says so in Griffin Mountain, otherwise player characters couldn't do it, and the inference is that it is possible to enter Balazaar that way without Joh Mith's caravan if you can find the pass. As to the Mostali outflow pipes being a design error, remember that Greatway is an Openhandist outpost, they aren't hostile to outsiders who aren't their natural enemies, and they themselves may well use the pass. I suspect the place really gains its name from it being used by the EWF, but that is just a hunch, based in part on the history of the region.

Definitely the worst contract the Longspear Slayers ever took.

Here's a question. Can you use a small sylph as a respirator?

A quick observation. According to "The Rule" Brithini cannot be in the underworld, as, being dead, they would cease to exist.

I think when Humakt kills grandfather mortal, and then Orlanth kills Yelm, that death gains a pretty important place in the world before the Great Compromise. Before that period of the Lesser Darkness however death was a strange thing and I agree with you on that. In fact Kargan Tor, the holder of the Death Rune doesn't seem to have had much meaning, and is best know for fighting himself in that weird period of pre-temporal contradictions, and deserting his post and allowing the Devil to destroy the Spike. The old death seems silly and weak, being merely a sort of guardsman. Now before time, Death and a Life exist side by side AND at the same time with the same entity, because without time such paradoxes are possible. So how can we understand death pre-time? Death becomes geographical. If you died in Prax, your story there is about being dead, though you might be alive in Dragon Pass and also dead in the Holy Country. Of course part of the story is now about time in the underworld, because that is where you go when you die, hence the notion that death can be a direction you head in. On the other hand, there is good evidence to suggest that you don't die just by stepping through the Gate of Dusk and wandering into the Land of Darkness, despite it being in the underworld, and as I have said before, Humakti would have to stay in the underworld forever if they Hero Quested there, because if the underworld were truly the land of the dead, then they are forbidden to return from it, for that is by definition resurrection. There are lots of other precedents that cast doubt on entities always and compulsorily being dead in the underworld that I have enumerated elsewhere. By suggesting that 100% of people in the underworld are dead, you introduce some big contradictions into your game. Now as time travel isn't possible in Glorantha, despite Lunar experiments, when you hero quest you are not stepping back in time, you are stepping into a particular story that is held in a form of immortal stasis like the gods themselves. It is the hero quester's movement within time that makes things appear as if they are moving in the myth; a sort of "paramythic relativity". That is how deities can be dead but alive at the same time in different places. Seen as a whole from outside of time, the whole of Gloranthan mythology could be viewed as a series of coexisting "vapor trails" (like the blur you get when you move your hand really fast, but co-located back through time to all the places you have gone) worming around and through each other. When a vapor trail ends, it goes in the "death direction" of the underworld, or sometimes the entire trail is erased by chaos, leaving only tiny spotty agglomerations and hints of what may have been, such as with Splendid Yamsur. Now this entire paragraph is not in any way part of my argument, it is just how I speculate that Hero Quests and Myths Before Time work presented for, hopefully, your entertainment, but based on all the evidence I can find. I also provide a link to a truly unusual video game that is under development called Miegakure that deals with travel inside 4 dimensions to give everyone a sense of what that might be like

I am not laying down absolutes. You have utterly failed to understand my argument if that is what you think. My argument is the one in support of diversity, and is against absolutes. I do not accept that 100% of the time you are dead if you are in the underworld. I do not accept that 100% of Gloranthan cultures accept that you are dead if you are in the underworld. Those 100% arguments are my opposition's contributions, not mine, and every 100% argument is an absolute. They are two absolutes that people have misinterpreted about "the canon". One bad reading of "the canon" has introduced "the rule" and I am pointing out that 'the rule" contradicts so much about Gloranthan lore that it must be wrong.

Welcome to the mud pit. I have long suggested that the whole "being dead" thing is merely a poetic allusion mistaken for a fact i.e. mythology's language is metaphor. Tell that to Flesh Man. Living flesh in a dead place. Also, did Arkat hero quest into the underworld as a Brithini? Because Brithini are spiritually annihilated upon death, and that would include going into the underworld if you believe "the rule". Sarcasm...yes... yes... all parents want their children to die. Perhaps the entire ritual is not what we think, but actually a huge abortion that ends with the baby going down the plughole? The giants are going through a ritual that would have been fine during the Green Age, but has probably sealed their extinction with the coming of Time. While this is conjecture, I suspect that the babies are being sent to the underworld to be educated so they don't turn out like the rampaging giants that come down Giants Walk to eat people. Dead babies don't grow, ergo, Giant Babies aren't dead in the underworld or the entire Cradle story is pointless and the God Learners are utterly correct in plundering the cradles, and Argrath and all the people on the Cradle are merely being wasteful. Resurrection is defined as "coming back from the dead". A spell is not different from a heroquest in this respect. Humakti won't do it, it is the defining restriction of the religion. Go join Yanafal Tarnils if you disagree. A contradiction is not a mystical truth, it normally means somebody doesn't understand something, whether in a mythological or a rational sphere. Take Xeno's paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise for example.The ancient Greeks knew that an arrow could fly, and could through repeated measures get a sense of its performance, but could not come up with the theory of why it did what it did. This was eventually solved by Isaac Newton's use of calculus in determining ballistics. Through the use of the transcendental function of infinity within calculus suddenly you can keep an arrow in flight, and Achilles can overtake the tortoise. Normally a contradiction means you have misinterpreted the facts and asked the wrong question and, as a result, reached the wrong conclusion. "Hard to get back from the underworld" is not my issue. The underworld SHOULD be hard to get back from. My issue is that... despite the fact that Gloranthan cultures agree on very little, and despite the many examples where it obviously isn't and can't be true, that 100% of Gloranthan cultures somehow believe that you are "dead" if you enter the underworld according to one foolish and ill considered misinterpretation of the evidence. You Roko Joko quite reasonably want to draw suggest that agency and voluntary vs involuntary death play a part, but the point is that according to the prevalent and jaundiced reading of the canon, nope, if you are in the underworld, you're dead matey, and 100% of Gloranthans agree, not the usual 85% Orlanthi version of "all". My argument is that not everyone who goes to the underworld is dead, but I happily concede that most who go there are dead, but not all. A rule, once established, is better adhered to and kept consistent. There are repeated examples where "the rule" is broken, and yet somehow people still pretend it is "a thing". Nothing breaks suspension of disbelief more woefully than contradicting the established facts of a narrative. It is one of the major differences between good and bad writing. So despite all the contradictions, you aren't prepared to wonder, even for a second, if they have agency because they are in fact still alive, like say, trolls, who still live down there. The dead in the underworld are undergoing a process, it is the living who have agency. They are also alive. Flesh man dies eventually in some versions I believe. Being in the sky doesn't make you part of the sky any more than being in the water makes you part of the water. As above so below. There is a very important geographical relationship between the pantheons and the landscape of Glorantha, to the point where death can be considered a direction, but being in a cemetery is not the same as being dead.

A fine example of argumentum ad verecundiam. Clearly you have never been "Gregged". It is the curse that most Glorantha Fundamentalists most dread as it skews their doctrinal purity. Things have never been as clear cut as you suggest here. To quote... "Disagreeing with the overall pattern"...? No, I take great issue with a single salient point that screws up and contradicts a great many things. I am always suspicious of majority opinions. Jeff is an editor who won't edit. Your appeal to conformity is not an argument.

Griffin Mountain page79 (Information) suggests that Wyrms High Pass is too high for wyrms to fly over, and that is where it gets its name. I like your idea better though. As to the notion of hot springs,that's a great idea, but rather than Lodril, what if the steam and hot water is actually from a series of concealed Mostali outflow pipes coming out of Greatway?

Yes it has limits. The limit is that as the schematic doesn't advance your argument. I am sure you would consider it iron clad evidence if it supported your case, but surprise surprise... it doesn't. So now you have to abandon it like the proverbial hot potato and back pedal rather that accepting that maybe I have a point. I would point out that this also utterly undermines the notion that Baby Giants who are sent to the underworld never die because they remain on the river Styx, and thus between life and death, because as the schematic clearly shows, and as the Guide to Glorantha clearly enunciates on page 10, half of the underworld is the realm of darkness, not the realm of death. Thus you don't die by entering Rausa's Gate of Dusk, or by entering the underworld. Clearly Baby Giants would be dead if they enter the underworld if this were not so, and if that were the case, then why would giants be upset if humans killed their babies and robbed their cradles if they were sending their babies to die in the underworld anyhow? Similarly, there is no satisfactory answer to the point I raised regarding the internal contradiction of Humakti Hero Questers being required to remain in the underworld if being in the underworld is "death". Let me say with gentle sarcasm that Humakt is a very reasonable and compassionate deity, and despite being a god of Death and Truth, he is always ready to break the rules so that his mortal worshipers can protect their precious lives. Humakt isn't grim and fatalistic, and he understands that not every worshiper of his is as dedicated as others, so he makes special allowances for the less committed members of his religion. The path back from death for a Humakti therefore allows for them to resurrect themselves and don't worry about those little cult strictures if they get in the way; after all, every good Humakti knows that honor and fair play and keeping both the letter and the intention of your oaths really only applies to other people... Oh dear. No. Really, no. That is neither why I am raised this point nor why I am sticking to my guns on it at all. Allow me to explain my motives... The thing that draws me back to Glorantha is the internal consistency of its myths and the interplay of cultures and their mythologies, and how those myths allow players to interact with that world. On the other hand, the thing that sets RPGs apart from merely telling a story is that they have game mechanics. No some people bitch about game mechanics ruining their stories, but I disagree. The fact is that the real world has physical rules that set hard limits as to what is possible, and in order to make magic plausible, and a mythological realm believable, a fantasy world has to be consistent or the audience will break their suspension of disbelief, and you plummet from art to farce. Similarly if the GM breaks those rules in some sort of "Fiat - Deus Ex Machina" way to move the story in a direction the particular GM prefers, they undermine the enjoyment of the game and devalue the achievement and experience of the players. Good game rules well applied provide the all important consistentcy of context that any audience needs. In Hollywood for example they pay people good money to read scripts and look for plot holes; in essence that is what I am doing here, free of charge, in order to make Glorantha better. So you are probably asking yourself "so what is Darius' gripe with people being compulsorily dead in the underworld"? I will hence refer to this as "The Rule". It would, on face value, seem to be a good rule well applied. My position is that this is sadly not the case, and as I have pointed out repeatedly, this point introduces gaping and irreconcilable contradictions in an otherwise beautifully consistent game environment. I have also, throughout this discussion entertained and frequently conceded points that were well reasoned and well argued within the "Gloranthan Scriptural Canon", something that has been notably and ungenerously absent among those who take the alternative position. My point is essentially this... the notion of being compulsorily dead in the underworld doesn't work. The more you inspect The Rule, the more obviously flawed it becomes. If you look at Gloranthan lore it doesn't fit the facts. Now Gloranthan cultures and their mythologies seldom agree on anything and the notion that all cultures in Glorantha agree 100% on a rule that is obviously flawed is so absurd within the context that it constitues a "plot hole" kind of mistake. I have also generously put forwards some suggested remedies, if you are of a mind to consider the possibility that a contradiction is a mistake not a mystical experience. Primarily this consists of relaxing The Rule. I am not saying The Rule should be abolished altogether as clearly some people and deities need to be dead and in the underworld, but the way The Rule reads at the moment, it devalues and confuses both life and death within the game setting. So what is death within Glorantha? Well, it is and remains the point at which your body and your spirit are separated because one or the other has been severely damaged. In the case of the Brithini who view themselves as perfect expressions of the Man Rune unadulterated by the Spirit Rune, death represents annihilation. For good Hrestoli and other non-immortal Malkioni it represents a one way trip to Solace. For pantheists it represents the beginning of the reincarnation process as understood by their culture. Shamans obviously have learned the trick of leaving their body with their fetch, as far as tricks go its an oldie but a goodie. The point is, you aren't dead until your body has been taken away from you and you can't get back inside it within that seven day grace period of the resurrection spell. Heroes like Jaldon and perhaps Jar-Eel and others know how to break that rule, but they had to do something extraordinary to find that secret, and that is part of what makes them exceptional. When Yelm dies, his spirit goes to the Land of the Dead and only Bijiif (deity IV-24 Gods of Gloranthat p679) remains of his body. The Lightbringers don't die in the underworld any more than a Baby Giant does, because they symbolize the descent of Life into the Land of Death to resurrect the Sun. The Lightbringer's Quest is a resurrection spell laid out in mythological form, and it is also representative of the turning of the Seasons from Winter to Spring i.e. from Storm Season through Sacred Time and into Sea Season. For the metaphor at the heart of the myth to work, there needs to be an unbroken link and association to the Living World, and the Lightbringers while hard tested, must remain unbroken for the multiple levels of the myth to work. Now the parallel drawn mythologically here to real world myths is to that of Inanna and her descent into the Underworld, where she dies and affects her resurrection (corresponding to the transit of Venus). Now this is very like the story of the Red Moon Goddess and her various stages, but in Glorantha the RMG doesn't self resurrect, she has Seven Lightbringers to serve as her Seven Mothers who bring her back through their connection to the Living World. However Inanna is ONLY ONE EXAMPLE in the real world. The real world cultures that the main played mythologies are drawn from are the Norse, Greco-Roman, Hindu and Celtic cultures, and without exception in ALL of those cultures you have heroes and deities entering the underworld while alive and returning. A lovely example of this is when Orpheus in his descent into the underworld pays Charon the two obols to get across the Styx, but he knows the secret of also paying a sprig of mistletoe for the return journey, because mistletoe blooms in the middle of winter, which is symbolically synonymous with being alive in the middle of the land of the dead. The point of this? The Rule doesn't work mythologically either. I totally grok it, I grok it so well I know it is wrong. Please reconsider this entrenched position, it doesn't work within the rule system or fit within the mythology. I am offering you free plot hole checking here. I am not saying get rid of it, I am saying it needs reinterpretation. To paraphrase Inigo Montoya "this rule, I do not think it means what you think it means". "Among the dead" does not mean "dead". Being in a Place of Death does not mean you are dead, any more that visiting a cemetery means you are dead. You think this relationship is definitional, I think it is symbolic at best. Also, does Dayzatar who is so very pure look at a mortal hero from the middle realm and think of them as being "part of the sky", no, he thinks "I wonder who this mud footed interloper is. I hope someone else respects my purity enough to deal with this dirty Earthbound creature". As to the Red Goddess being red... what about in her black phase? You may think that is an idle point, but it isn't. Death carries the seeds of life, just as Life may be viewed as a journey towards death. As to Uleria not dying, she is the cosmic principle of life and fertility, if she had died, everything would have died. Now I agree that position is important in Glorantha. Some Gods are powerfully mythologically linked to some places and have weaker relationships to others, and some are even "dead gods" in some places. To say that the death implied in The Rule is anything other than a map co-ordinate or a poetic allusion taken as fact is an error. Yes the underworld is a bad place to be a living person, it is quite antithetical to life, but so is a Haboob dust storm or a savage hurricane, or a massive blizzard. You can be caught in any of these terrible things and still heroically find a way to stay alive, that is what heroes do, and if heroes do it then so do deities. Well this is low hanging fruit. No, I think you have chosen to embrace contradictions rather than correct the obvious mistake The Rule represents. Edit (noun form): A change or correction made as a result of editing. Isn't correcting mistakes the DEFINITION of what Editors do?

Drawing on non-canon sources now? LOL. And to show a map that demonstrates that apparently more than half of the underworld is not actually the land of death, and in fact you aren't dead just by going through Rausa's Dusk Gate, you are just in the land of darkness. Why it makes you wonder whether crossing the Styx represents anything either. Notice also how Magasta's Whirlpool is positioned right over the Styx, as though the Styx is a continuation of Magasta's Whirlpool? That's because we know it is.

Middle: The flat Middle World with the Earth “lozenge” is surrounded by and floating atop Sramak’s River. The northern continent ends with huge glaciers, the southern continent with deserts of fire. In between is Magasta’s Pool, a whirlpool that drains into the Underworld. Good reference. Read it more closely next time.

Just remember that you might be setting your crew up for one of the most perverse party wipes ever. Death by mass alien deity impregnation. Memorable, but a bit rapey.

In answer to your specific questions: 1) Fear is a response to a number of things... danger, unfamiliarity, a source of pain, abandonment, vulnerability etc. One of the most primal is the sense that you are being stalked by something unknown. Movement perceived from the corner of the eye, rustling in the bushes, creaking on the stairs, things go missing, all revealing nothing but prickles on the back of the neck and adrenaline butterflies in the stomach. Sun Tzu says: If I determine the enemy's disposition of forces while I have no perceptible form, I can concentrate my forces while the enemy is fragmented. The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it. This is the use of the enemy's ignorance as a weapon against them. But in C'thulhu, knowledge of the enemy can be just as dangerous as ignorance. That's pretty scary, when your best weapon, knowledge, leads as certainly to your ultimate destruction as ignorance. The next thing is to properly understand the difference between fear and horror. While horror has its foundation in fear, it is a knowing abhorrence of what you face. Horror is when you understand that the thing you were afraid of is worse than you imagined and you are permanently tainted by association with it. You build horror through suggestion and investigation, to quote Lovecraft: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. When the players begin to "correlate all the contents" and fit the jigsaw together, that is when the horror should kick in. 2) This step is of primary importance. You need to tell the players beforehand that CoC is a game about investigation, and that if they fight monsters before they know how to beat them they are likely to die quickly and foolishly. Tell them that if they go into combat under-prepared against non-human enemies the fights are likely to be bad and one sided. That gives investigation a purpose, you are building an arsenal of information. Get players excited about chasing leads and clues. Personally I love writing scenarios and when it comes to CoC I especially enjoy writing the handouts. In fact I like them so much I have even written a mythos story in handout format a few years ago, and I have attached it for your perusal. 3) A measure of tolerance to frequent mythos encounters of the same creature is not impossible, in fact there is a precedent for it in the Lovecraft story "Dream Quest of the Unknown Kadath" wherein Randolph Carter begins to feel less disturbed by ghouls through frequent contact, and it has periodically been part of the CoC rules in the various Companions. It is also acceptable for veterans to have an immunity to seeing dismembered human bodies. Remember however that few people can ever get used to a creature that causes more than 1d8 SAN loss, and you never get used to seeing a creature that always causes SAN loss. 4) Generally a quick sit down Q&A session to discuss the character is enough to get a decent performance out of players if the background info for the character is not enough. Let the players divide the characters up among themselves so they can at least choose a persona they like. Papers pertaining to the disappearance of Mr. Richard Upton Pickman (Artist).pdf

The scene in question is around 1:14:45

Agreed. Hopefully "Mr Wong" will produce some more material of the same quality as his earlier effort soon.

Don't be afraid to take lore from the past editions, it is the story that is important. Whatever moves the story along best. So go and pry through musty tomes from the past until you find what you seek. I have always shied away from using Eihort because of "the bargain"; it's a bit too "Adult Content" even for some adults I know. (The writer descended into a vile rant of frustration and expletives at this point)

Sounds good. Lets start a new thread.

Yes, I am aware of those things, but the cradle will pass through the underworld to get to those deeper waters on the Magasta whirlpool. I doubt that the Styx doesn't flow to help Magasta's whirlpool. Yes, there is an under dome that protects the underworld from the primal water, and whether it is a bubble or rock is up for grabs. What doesn't change is that the spiral of the whirlpool will pass through the underworld to get to the primal waters. Ergo, everyone dies, regardless of whether they survive the journey. Contradictory? Intentionally so.

Hang on... isn't the River Styx very much a feature of the underworld that you can find once you pass through the Gates of Dusk? And aren't you automatically dead if you are in the underworld regardless of which side of the river you are on? I regard this as yet another case of the "dead" in the underworld rule being broken. I mean, it says that the Puzzle Canal links into the underworld and the Styx in the Big Rubble adventure book. BTW I have also long harbored the suspicion that giants should be reported to social services for their neglect of their babies. On a more serious note, what is your basis for thinking that about the 1621 cradle? I mean, apart from upping the ante for that adventure? It is an interesting idea.