Alex

2 hours ago, Godlearner said:

 a Gloranthan NO (which as we come to understand covers 80% of the cases)

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.

10 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

This would be a great setting for Paranoia. Perhaps the group could be on Habitat 47 to find out what happened to Habitat 46? Next session their clones could be the crew of Habitat 48, tasked to find out what happened to Habitat 47.

"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."

13 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

we are not talking absolute here.. but conjecture..  and sharing which conjecture was talked about 😉

 

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!

7 hours ago, soltakss said:

Part of the discussion is working out how "traditional" cultures deal with this.

Part of the discussion is working out how runic affiliation deals with this.

Part of the discussion is working out how the stated multi-genders fit into this.

So, people are tying themselves in knots trying to work out how all these things interact.

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.

22 minutes ago, Jeff said:

You have a tendency to bring up long-dormant threads Alex. As an aside, the RQG Ernalda cult is one of the more popular player cults in my experience, and far more popular than the horrible domestic Ernalda cults in Thunder Rebels.

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.

On 5/25/2020 at 8:39 PM, Shawn Carpenter said:

If Ernalda was presented as a goddess whose compassion is mixed with a healthy dose of pragmatism whose main goal is the continuance of community, I think she'd be a lot more popular with players. 

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.

On 9/24/2021 at 6:33 PM, scott-martin said:

We would pronounce "Arrowhead," an archer, god of directional focus and clarity at a distance.

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

10 minutes ago, John Biles said:

I incline to think Brithos resembles the movie Zardoz.

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

3 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

What he was referring to, and what I heard as well... and it's a little confusing, is that dark energy will forever grow to the extent it will eventually distort galaxy clusters, then galaxy, the star system , then planet, then atoms... not only the universe is slowly cooling (by extending) but dark energy is gonna make it extra cool....

... 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/

On 9/19/2021 at 10:26 AM, Mugen said:

@Lloyd Dupont  My intention was not to say everything will fall apart at the same time (the time scales involved in this process are absurdly long), but precisely that Black Holes will remain longer than any planet or life form 🙂

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.

On 9/22/2021 at 4:37 AM, Lloyd Dupont said:

I am going to conclude (in a while) my current fantasy scenario with player awakening in the respawn room, and "slowly remembering" it's all a simulation and awakening in Habitat 47... 😮 

Hopefully it will be a cool segway! 😄 

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. 🙂

38 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

My point was that the ship would probably be destroyed by gravitational forces long before it reached the event horizon, much like a submarine;s hull is crushed long before the engines will stop working. It's not like the event horizon is some line of death. It's just the point of no return for light. THe point of no return for everything else is further out. 

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.

38 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Yup. It's important to remember that over 99% of this stuff are things that scientists and mathematicians theorize about, and less that 1% of it has any sort of solid proof. We didn't get our first photo of a black hole until 2019. So a lot of this stuff is just speculation. Well though out speculation by some very intelligent people, but still speculation.

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.

38 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

There is a tendency for people to present it all as factual, especially in videos, when most of it is guesswork, and much of it contradicts other stuff..

Contradicts what other stuff?  Most of which is "guesswork"?

38 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

I wonder what a black hole inside black hole is? It reminds me of D&D magic-users casting nested rope trick spells. 

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.

3 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

At least your FLGS which can get a copy is on the same continent!!!

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...

31 minutes ago, Raebon said:

Yeah, most def! I did a session zero but more to set the stage of Glorantha and make sure everyone was cool with dying horribly because a trollkin got a lucky roll.

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...)

24 minutes ago, klecser said:

Surprise! 😉 Thanks to @MOB and @Dustin O'Chaosium for making this preview possible! You can subscribe to RPG Imaginings if you'd like!

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

1 hour ago, PhilHibbs said:

Yes, what I would do is a series of limited scope cult compatibility matrices showing cults that are active in various areas. And you don't need to know in a detailed enumerated chart which chaos deities Storm Bull is hostile to.

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.")

On 7/3/2020 at 12:46 PM, HeartQuintessence said:

I mean I wanted Orlanthi, but not Orlanthi in the Dragon Pass, I didn't want the Lunar empire to be 'evil', in their eyes (because its really cool, but yeah a soul eating bat as your mascot doesn't say 'good guys' persay).

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!

On 7/3/2020 at 12:46 PM, HeartQuintessence said:

And the grazelanders are neat, but hear so little about them.

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!

On 7/3/2020 at 12:46 PM, HeartQuintessence said:

Maybe my problem was trying to tie them together as a clan, where their elements are so different. But forging a new solid whole to survive is the point of a clan isn't it?

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.

On 4/15/2019 at 10:04 PM, Joerg said:

In older times, a three-way split would have created a triaty. While it is somewhat weird for former cousins to be promoted to your mandatory marriage pool, such a solution would simply promote the old clan wyter to that of the triaty.

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.

2 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Here's another thought: Eurmal isn't Chaotic, it's Disorder and Illusion - so possibly making it sacred to a Chaos cult would do the job.  This is when your vengeful Orlanthi are tempted to do evil "for the greater good". 

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

Just now, Joerg said:

You were saying?

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

4 minutes ago, Joerg said:

How exactly do you go about defiling a Eurmal shrine, though?

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...

On 7/4/2020 at 2:59 PM, HeartQuintessence said:

The more I started to think about exogamy, how would the clan because they're living in this weirdly temporal/physical valley manage to marry in or out of other groups. They're tiny (probably less than 100 people, since they were on borrowed land).

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.

On 5/6/2020 at 5:43 PM, Runeblogger said:

Nobody goes there in fear of the Green Dragon, so it is perfect for the Glimmerstone clan. Also, since True Dragons create dream dragons, they could potentially also create other lasting illusions, which would make an entire hidden valley feasible. 🙂

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...

2 hours ago, simonh said:

The restriction on having to learn by experience before you can buy another 5% training is specific to combat skills.

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...

10 minutes ago, Joerg said:

As soon as you start applying reverse psychology more than once, your bonded Eurmali might meeky obey your spoken word just to thwart your intent.

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?