Alex

Nope, that's an Orlanthi no. They're kinda notorious for it. "So you'll definitely meet us at the agreed, time-critical rendezvous point, O Honourable Orlanthi allies?" "Oh, you can all-ways depend on us!" Other Gloranthan neve-- no, wait, I mean always include... Lunar All: 51%. Yelmic All: 99%. (That blasted shadow!) Malkioni All: 99.9%. Within the limit of wizardry error. Brithini All: actually 100%, but sadly now on the Hero Plane, so inaccessible. Mostali All: 100.1%, to allow for World-Machining tolerances. Shargashi All: 110%. See also, Nigel Tufnel.

"Yello, J. Michael Straczynski's office, J. Michael Straczynski speaking!" "Mr Straczynski, we have a proposal for you, regarding--" "Oh, the Doctor Who showrunner role?!" "... no? It's about your Babylonian Productions franchise. We have a treatment for a new season--" "A season six of Babylon 5!?!" "Not exactly? More of a... season 216."

Sure, but that's what I was trying to do -- to point out that there are different observationally-consistent models for the outcome of the different 'fates' of the universe. There's Big Chill. in which case the universe will outlast every star, and essentially all coherent matter, after it's been chewed up by and eventually spat back out again by black holes. And there's the Big Rip, in which the universe ends in medias res., while we still (or almost to the end at least) still have galaxies, stars, planets... protons. Things like that. "Conjecture" is a little unkind, though. Cosmologists aren't just spitballing scenario ideas, they do have to smuggle this stuff past peer review, tenure committees, grant bodies, etc. 🙂 Ideally with reference to existing observational evidence, or at least some sort of proposal to at some stage get some some!

Also, part of the discussion is of the "my Glorantha will vary" sort. (Anyone remember those John Cleese Accurist ads? Pay your fifty quid and and you do what you like with it!) Part of it is attempting to divine authorial intent. And all points in between -- understandably, as one naturally might want to know what the text reasonably supports, what other people might be doing with it, and where it might go in future as it's expounded in greater detail.

I'm a long-dormant guy, what can I tell you. Wasn't posting here when the thread was active, dunno what custom and practice here is about zombie-threading. If you'd prefer new posts on older topics after (let's say) a year of inactivity, I'd be equally happy to go with that. I've no beef with how RQG presents Ernalda (and I already gave my issues -- and very obviously not mine alone -- with the HW take). Just attempting to frame Shawn's 'presentation' point in terms of aspects/subcults/cultist variation.

Isn't that exactly the Ernalda Allmother aspect, in the sense of Thunder Rebels? Which was (righteously, to a degree) criticised as "domestic drudgery" and "salami-sliced subcults", but that's more an error of execution than conception.

Holiest site is in Missouri, key magic includes folding badly under pressure from aging Floridians. (If you'll pardon the redundancy.)

This is galaxy-brain level! Not dumb enough for this thread at all!

... unless it will not, and does not. This is a possibility (as I just said), but not within the realm of prediction with any amount of confidence, due to both how poorly understood 'dark energy' is -- basically it's a name to slap over the hole where they hope some theory will go at some point -- and the lack of definitiveness in the observational evidence. OTOH it could occur even within (what would otherwise have been!) the lifespan of our own solar system. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2078851-when-will-the-universe-end-not-for-at-least-2-8-billion-years/

Very plausible, but it's a comparison of two unknowns! (Not to be confused with an unknown unknown, of course, which is always an option. 😄) Stellar-mass and up black holes will persist an absurdly long period of time, even if the Hawking Radiation model is bang-on correct. Planets will persist indefinitely in a Big Chill universe, and possibly lifeforms too. Though quite what they're doing for energy 1064 years in the future is a good question. And you may have thought the Paris Climate Agreement was an unreasonable restriction on your lifestyle! 🙂 But if go with the Olde Worlde Big Crunch idea, obviously that's moot. And if the most recent Big Rip model is correct -- and bear in mind the observational error-bars on it are huge, and the theoretical basis of it incredibly sketchy -- then squishier objects (planets and lifeforms) will indeed get Ripped before singularities do. But that accelerates hugely towards the end, rather than there being any lengthy stable stage where you have isolated populated planets wondering where their sun went.

Great segue if they buy into it, and avoids those pesky Session Zeroes if you hate those. People still scarred by the ending of Lost and by that lost whole series of Dallas might stage a riot. 🙂

Depends on the size of the 'hole. A "small" mass -- stellar-mass or modest multiples -- would have a very steep gravity well, so the tidal forces are extremely strong, and and you say you and your ship will get 'spaghettified' long before you reach the event horizon. OTOH for a super-massive black hole -- galactic-core range -- they're waaaaay less. Less than earth-gravity indeed, much less insta-crushing. There's a big evidential distance between "just speculation" and "confirmed by direct observation". The 2019 photo, while an astonishing feat of imaging science, isn't the strongest evidence for the existence of black holes. After all, in isolation all it is a bright accretion disc around... an invisible thing. How do we know it's not a neutron star, say? The same evidence we had before the direct observation: the stellar astrophysics, the orbital mechanics, and so on. Contradicts what other stuff? Most of which is "guesswork"? For similarly sized BHs, there's been observations of them merging, which is part of the body of evidence for them existing (AKA the speculative guesswork), by way of the resultant gravitational waves. Though I think at that point it was seen more as evidence of the theory behind the GWs themselves, given that in order to make the observation, they had to identify the merger ahead of time. (Well, "ahead of time" relativistically speaking...) As for one that are of drastically different sizes "nesting"... Dunno! Sounds like there could be many crippling headaches and a PhD or two in that. On the piece of it, if you're inside the event horizon of a SMBH, and you're next to a star that goes supernova, then this could occur? It's not obviously paradoxical, as means in the first instance that you have an outer set of closed light paths, inside the super-massive EH, and another set of closed light paths inside those associated with the stellar-mass EH.

To be fair, that's a fairly reasonable and indeed minimal expectation from the "L" part! 😄 With all apologies to the British Antarctic Survey and colleagues...

Sometimes you do a session zero and you realize you needed to do a session -1, maybe a session -2, etc, too. 🙂 (Or maybe like the casinos, and a 0, then a 00, a 000...)

I enjoyed the comment that who knows, maybe the humans are the sidekicks for the critters. Good foreshadowing! *coughcoughblackhorsetroopcoughcoughcough*

Cult compatibility sparse matrices! I think what I'd do is to have one inter-pantheon matrix, a la GoG, then an intra-pantheon one for each such, and then a list of notable exceptions. Or heroplane map intersections, to get real fancy like FDWC! ("We're going to need a bigger book.")

Not all the Sartarites see the LE as 'evil'. Look at the number of people who cooperated with them, or even converted to Lunar cults. Some of them no doubt for venal reasons, but surely not as universally so as is sometimes presented from the "rebel-eye view" (or victor's justice) perspective. And in Esrolia I think that's even more true. We're haggling now who're the bigger patriarchal idiots, the Storm ones or the Sky ones! Unless your tula is Grazelands-adjacent (as one of the suggested options was, but then they're not also with ready access to Esrolia -- at least not by any Euclidean reckoning -- or a large, coherent group of Grazer exiles, I struggle to picture them maintaining such traditions intact. Though with animism, as long as you have one shaman, you can't be counted out! Right, but the new solid whole should feel like a solid whole. If it's more like a Vulgate-style run-on laundry list of all the different things it consists of, it seems less like that. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but what I'd do is to keep all the ideas and elements, but space them out a bit. Make your a bit clan bigger, so there's at least a certain cohort of people per funky strange element. Turn them into a tribe, with some of the ideas farmed out to either other refugees/exiles, or with Sartarite (or either Esrolian or Grazer, depending which you go with as your other locals) neighbours they can join with, or at form some sort of accommodation with. Spread some of them out in time; if everything happens in backstory, then the narrative proper might either be a little anticlimactic, or risk jumping the shark to top it.

Yeah, it did occur to me there was a whiff of the Monsters, Inc about this situation, especially if you read exogamy as being applied extremely prescriptively. "Listen carefully, Initiands, this part is very important! When it comes to marrying your eighth cousins or so, you must never, repeat never--" <someone whispers in ear> "-- as I was saying, always, repeat always do this!" As you say, this is much less likely to occur in modern times. Populations won't typically be growing so fast -- though post-Windstop, watch this space -- and the politics is more complicated than the earlier "just us here, gorra bud, then" situation. As with nukes, another possibility is a combined fission-fusion situation. If a tribe (or larger unit) has a disgruntled minority spread across several clans (ring any bells?), then you might have this sort of situation, though geographically that's going to be more complex and conflicty. Or a similar situation in happier circumstances like the Anmangarn clan, done for magical/ritual reasons.

Now there's an "in order to rid your kitchen of bread mould, blow up the entire house" option!

I was saying "vaguely plausible", not "actually wise". And trying not to fall into my customary habit of copiously restating previously stipulated caveats!

Quite. The mind truly Boggles. We're deep into scifi-horror territory here. "You blew it up, and now there's even more of them!" The only vaguely plausible method to spring to mind would to start organised membership drives with solemn initiation oaths...

Not really a customary sort of number for any sort of clan, especially if you go with the 'shrine size' rule-of-thumb for specialised theistic deities. (Just one, mind you, much less multiple such!) In "standard model" Glorantha they'd be some refugees looking to be adopted into a larger clan. Or given the nature of the Hero Wars times we're in, merging with some equally devastated refugees to form an entirely new one. But of course, Your Glorantha Will Vary as always applies.

Or the Green Dragon is a somewhat restless sleeper, and turned over mid-siesta a few years ago, radically changing the internal topography of the valley. If you're a knowledgeable local, yet another reason not to go near it, but if you're none the wiser, or a desperate refugee...

Oops. That feeling when you've spend an embarrassingly long time looking for a rule in RQG, as opposed to 2s looking at the "RQ2" in the thread title...

Yes, that's the first corollary of Murphy's Law... can't use it to beat itself. But in this case I wasn't actually suggesting that intent! Rather, trying to point out the difficulty of trying to keep the magical and ritual benefits of having a Trickster -- such as they are! -- while policing the 'unacceptable' subcults. I suppose in theory you could try to find and deconsecrate or defile each shrine you wish to suppress the magic of... No way that could ever possibly go righ-- eh, wrong... right?