Alex

Which it might, if this is a "tribe vs clan" type of power struggle. If it's more a "Storm vs Earth" one, then as jajagappa says, we might be more into "10 plagues" territory. I think this maybe comes down to what you see as a "normal" cult-membership status, either IYG or in a particular location. For me, the average Orlanthi clan is pretty initiation-crazed, so it'd be the normal expectation for such an important role, and an "if not why not" special-pleading situation otherwise. If lay membership is the local norm, then grand, so! Yeah, the "holder" of a single hide wouldn't be reckoned as a carl socially. This might vary quite a bit from clan to clan, but I see the steads as being generally on the large side, with just a handful of main ones, and maybe a long tail of smaller ones in a different socio-economic niche. They're not really a "nuclear family" sort of society. Though nor are running Collective Farms: someone may have day-to-day responsibility for and use of a hide without being seen as a steadholder more formally. Sorta making them the tenant of a tenant of a tenant, or thereabouts.

Ah, gotcha. I think. So they're kinda saying this is the Primordial Sludge (or should I say Ursuppe, for fellow Doris & Frank fans!), according to the divinations of top Jrusteli sorcerers, and their stab at an Eldritch Wizardry Standard Model. Rather then them having a 20th-century take on the distinction between prokaryotes, protozoa, yeasts, and other such unicellular malarkey. Slightly jarring terminology, but then again we'd a similar complaint about Essences, and any number of other Western concepts, so pick yer poison, i guess. Or perhaps I should say, choose the form of the nomenclature Destructor!

I'd say the sources are a little mixed on that one. At least if you count oral ones. I can recall Greg on a couple of occasions saying "those guys are mystical materialists", and expanding on the point somewhat. And then on another, having that quoted back to him by some obnoxious pedant -- not excluded to have been your present humble scribe -- and saying something along the lines of, "yeah well, I say a lot of things". FWIW it has has a strong whiff of High Theism/self-sacrificial mysticism to me, at any rate. Somewhat like initiating to one of the Greater Gods whose aspects you can get usable magic from... only without the useful aspects. (With all apologies for the nod to the Bad Old HW model.)

Arguably a dragon-totem. Not one that's anywhere named, mind you, but hey, one thing they definitely are is a mystery cult! To me though it sounds rather more than a strange form of animism, if you take the form and structure of their magic as indicative of anything significant. You might add speculation to speculation and wonder whether the 'strangeness' is just incidental, arising from the peculiar social form of the cult, and it's essentially just some sort of (re)constructed dragon-hsunchenism. Or a low-end mystical thing -- some sort of illumination-type effect that affects the nature of their magic. Or is to do with their God Learner origins. Again, that sounds more like you're describing mainline animism, than anything in any way diagnostic of mysticism. I would personally take both the narrator-voice and Godunya-cult/imperial bureaucracy snidiness about the PoIM with a salt mine or two. It's not the way to personal Enlightenment -- well, so what, it wasn't really ever billed as that, was it? It's certainly seen as Skillful Means of Cosmic Dragon Realization, according to their apparent judgement in encouraging it as a popular practice. So chalk up much of the snark to snobbery, and suspicions about the NDR connection. (That was only a few centuries ago, so much too early to say, to borrow a line.) For the authors of (the original) GoG, it was IMO also a rather clever device to set out a 'draconic' practice, hint at how it may or may not be a 'mystical' thing or not, but avoid being seen to set out any sort of definitive prospectus about how those might 'correctly' work as systems or not. So on the facts in evidence, what the Archexarchs get up to could be functionally identical, just better regarded for reasons that could be any combination of the painfully obvious, or the too esoteric for any of us to care about. Or equally, maybe wildly different.

Limited to the point of 'doesn't exist', according to one notable (and notorious!) source.

Aren't those specifically different in Gloranthaspeak? (Depending on your particular dialect, naturally. See usual 'language is a virus' disclaimers'.) My recollection of the gist of Revealed Mythologies and related forms of that document is that its take was that you had-: Asceticism, giving rise to "pure" mystical practices; Ecstatic meditation, leading to "manifest" mysticism;, and Austerities, producing "failed" mysticism. If you wanted to be a one-club golfer (or perhaps we could count this as four clubs, to be slightly kinder), you could take that approach that all mysticism -- indeed all magic, finessing the 'but is it mysticism?' semantic question entirely can be described in one of these ways: It's actually one of the Trad Three, but perhaps presented in a slightly offbeat way. e.g. say such-and-such a Malkioni saint's path is understood to be 'esoteric wizardry', but ultimately still remains in the 'sorcery' quadrant of the Big World Diagram. It manifests as a nonstandard mix of sorcery, animism, and theism, "and make good" to permit this with an Illumination-like insight (vary details to taste if the RaW aren't quite right, or if you want to keep it plausibly deniable if they're 'really' the same or not). It's not a magical act on the part of the character at all, but simply a property of the game-universe. So at that point you say "it's an NPC!", or "it's a narrative tag!", or something similar, depending on preferred style of play.

I was too lazy to look out my copy of Thunder Rebels (and given that all mentions of it are mentioned with vituperation and declarations of Anathema to Canon, poorly motivated). But even if one draws the 'leadership' aspect fairly narrowly, it goes beyond Rex per se -- the most common form is going to be The-Chief-Subcult-Formerly-Known-As-That-Term-We-Mustn't-Use-Any-More. As for whether such positions are playable or not, as I say it depends on the scale and scope of one's game. Those are small fry compared to the characters you're playing in the average Gloranthan freeform! I personally won't get out of bed for being less than a duke or a tribal king, these days. Never mind the Sartar High Council game of even longer-ago yore.

I guess actually a trichotomy, as there's a 'neither one nor the other' default category (and indeed majority). ("Balanced" is an especially weak-sounding term, though.) In-universe this is apparently Heort's doing, so possibly he was just temperamentally very fond of this sort of broad-strokes categorisation. Or maybe more likely, there was a pragmatic reason to do so. Like some sort of codification of different views and customs on the matter of violence as a political and economic means. A 'historic compromise', as it were.

Whoever's been detecting prokaryotes has been stacking a whole lot of Seeing magic, too... I'm curious about the prevalence of the equation of the Dawn and Time. Though I guess that as both the Orlanthi and the God Learners seem to have this belief, it'd be common currency in 2nd Age Nochet...

The 'Allfather' aspect as we called it more broadly in Ye Olden Days is a tad more niche than the others, but potentially playable in some games. At the scale of the usual RQ campaign, granted not very.

I'm guessing this in the Guide, as there's so little else in print for the East? (And because I'm too lazy to check, and there's a bulb out in that room (... that I've been too lazy to change).) So in what sense is this mystical? And in which (OK, bit of Wazboth's barristry here) is it clearly not Illumination?

The similarities to Gloranthan Illumination continue! (OK, barely begin.) This is clearly -- I say clearly, not so clear as I didn't forget to mention it in my li'l list in my previous post, oops -- a factor for any sort of mystical revelation. (Or more broadly still any metaphysical one -- it's the Return With The Elixir, or whatever version of that structure (if any!) one favours.) If your community doesn't accept the validity of the 'truth' you've returned with (and you don't have the cop-on to keep quiet about it), you're going to be in a whole world of trouble. Even it's 'magically true' in some or all of the various other senses I did think to mention. Numerous Gloranthan counter-examples to this, though they're generally so drastic and disruption that it perhaps tends to powerfully argue that it at least should not. Hrrrrrm. I guess it's certainly a form of mysticism, and it does capture the first of those as they themselves would see it. And it's comparable to 'worship' of the totality of a Greater God -- by definition a 'Rune Owner', after all! -- which goes beyond common-or-garden mystery-cultic emulatory theism, of the sort we're most familiar with. (As alluded to up-thread.) But that's definitely not how the Lunars or the Kralori would see their practices. They're seeking unity with the Ultimate, not with a 'mere'(!) rune. That's a W9 vs W15 difference right there! (Another obscure and cheesy Hero Wars-era reference -- I'll apologise for that one in advance...) OTOH, they both have a rather Augustinian approach to that in practice -- O Oneness, I seek thee: but not just yet, I have an empire to trundle around with down here, such fun. So arguably closer to the reality than they'd care to admit. Kinda inviting us to conclude, Arkat: big ol' Moon Worshipper ahead of his time... (And ahead of the time of there being any moon in the sky to speak of, slightly more awkwardly.) I kinda like that, actually. For the self-conscious RuneQuesters -- see what I did there, huh, huh? OK, I'll get me coat -- this could be an active, wilful act. That'd be your Larnsting example, the Old Wind goðar, Dayzatari, Great Earth mystics in the temple complexes of Nochet, and so on. For 'pure' mystics it would be more of a passive 'side-effect' -- the ascetic remains without action, the universe turns around them according to its own workings. Middle cases like the the Lunars and Draconics, rationalise to taste. Certainly the 'your POW is now zero, remove character from game' case is entirely apt...

It's hard enough to extrapolate between different magical traditions in the same world, never mind between the real world and Glorantha... Not least because of the risk of ending up being obnoxiously reductionistic about RW belief systems. But kinda comes with the territory, oh well. But suppose for the sake of argument that a Practical Kabbalist starts off with the belief that following the Law of the Torah by the letter is necessary for:- Their personal spiritual well-being; Their PK to work magically; and, The universe to operate in a morally well-ordered manner. Then a RW analogue of Illumination might lead them to believe the first is no longer the case, to find that the second isn't, but still belief the third is true. (Or if you prefer, flip the example around and consider a Malkioni wizard, of some comparable tradition, in an analogous situation.) So the two aren't obviously glaringly incompatible, as such, but it's not at all clear that anything in Illumination as written is especially helpful in helping describe Kabbalah as a 'mystical' practice. And of many discussions on t'internet generally!

Mysticism situation normal, in other words. Neat analogues are rarely fun. And rarely even neat, as people then get annoyed at something being too direct a steal, cue maHOOsive argument. (I was about to throw in an example or two, then sanity prevailed.) But my thinking was roughly on the following lines: the Kabbalah is, on the face of it (but see also below!) a type of liturgical mysticism. Seems likely that Glorantha has at least one example of liturgical mysticism. In fleshing that (or those) out, how do RW examples from the same part of the Big Chart potentially inform those? Or more crudely, how much can we nick without it being too cheesy or too awkward a fit. That actually fits into the Four World/System concept rather well, as it's another strand that could also be seen as liturgical animism, rather than -- or as well as? -- liturgical mysticism. Those are both essentially universal, I think, just varying the 'detail' -- not that the 'details' aren't pretty large and significant. Yeah, that's (with a lot of informative detail I didn't know, for which thanks) the sort of thing I was filing under 'Worship [Liturgical Deity] (only in a much more ecstatic rite)', in broad-strokes game terms. Conceptually the divination angle might tie in here, as the type of narrative structures you might need for each seem to me at first wink to be similar. Hey, it's a mystical thread -- the rails were only ever illusions! @.@ I look forward to your other thoughts on that generally. Rest well, middle way, don't be overdoing the Austerities!

Surprised that's the case, must go read those rules! But I guess if nothing else, the player is giving the GM a One Man, Two Guvnors type of stick to beat them with. Though not in a James Corden type of way -- that would be cruel and unusual.

I wondered if Sikhism was maybe a slip for Jainism here (which is pretty consistently ascetic, moreso than Buddhism, or the (poly)theistic aspects of Hinduism), but apparently not as you repeat this later. As I understand it, Sikhism is significantly influenced by the Abrahamic religions, consequently adheres to ascetic practices much less than (other) Dharmic religions, and indeed is doctrinally anti-ascetist. These are all possible examples, but all also problematic ones, given the (both RW and Gloranthan) arguments that such practices are not mystical in nature at all. (Or are 'false' mysticism, which may or may not be the same thing.) Those are pretty common, but the semantic question is 'but are they mystics'? And the answer from the pount of view of the 'purists' -- the precepts of Buddhism, Vithelan mysticer-than-thous, Greg most (but not all!) the time he was asked about this, would be 'no'. But given that they exist, and certainly do exhibit magic powers, the more practical question is, how best to describe them? And one argument is that since they do, and since magical manifestations are pretty much by definition sorcerous, theistic, and/or animist, martial artists do one or more of those. And if they do more than one, we're starting to edge back into the realm of 'Illumination-like effects', in rules terms. (Loath though I personally am to get anywhere near the area of declaring whether different such practices are ultimately 'the same' or not.)

I was tempted to say inverse too (in relation to our other sidebar), but decided at least another two cups of tea were needed before I strayed any further into formal or rhetorical logic. I was making that observation not directly in response to you, but in the context of the broader method vs. object point. I'm not sure how that immediately applies to the Kabbalah (or Gloranthan analogues), but am happy to have a bash at teasing that out, with the big disclaimer that you could walk through my knowledge about (or even of, as Bart Simpson might say) the Kabbalah without getting your feet wet. Let me try to frame it as the following questions:- If one were writing up RQ (or HQ, etc) Practical Kabbalah -- or some fictional Kabbalah-inspired practice -- how would it crucially differ from 'normal' Sorcery? (Assuming that's the closest available starting point.) Which 'rules' of sorcery might it 'break'? And likewise, what're the gameable effects of Ecstatic Kabbalah (or fictionalised analogue again), beyond what we'd see with the standard Worship [liturgical entity] sort of thing?

Personally I liked the names (mostly, though they did seem like Theyalan Scrabble, especially some of the extremes of near-duplication) and the specificity, but the problem was indeed the exclusivity. If we'd kept the subcults as descriptions, but tweaked the rules so that characters could 'specialise' to different degrees to a particular subcult, or mix-and-match within a deity or aspect's cult-at-large, that would have been much better. (Or indeed beyond -- it might be uncommon for the Orlanthi, but for the theistic world in general there's surely a certain amount of worship (and obtaining magic) across the breadth of a greater god, or indeed dare I say a whole pantheon.)

My apologies, that was unduly cryptic, I a) need more tea, and b) have a nasty habit of forgetting that not everybody has internalised every Gloranthan ruleset published in the last 40-odd years! Essentially way back when there was a rather crude model of the Other Side where you needed to divide everything metaphysical up three -- or maybe four, as we're adding mystical concepts back in -- ways, and then decide if you were interacting with them the One True Correct Way (grand, work away), or Wrongly Any Other Way (get an utterly absurdly large penalty).

A very good question. HW had one version of this -- you sunk more HPs than it would take to beat up the entirely Lunar Army into all the aspects of a Greater God, then you disappeared from play. I don't know if the implication is that's what Lokamayadon -- or some 'failed mysticism' version of it where you go thus far, then do a handbrake turn right before you Become One with the GG, and go around with your cheesy new mystical magic. Or if was supposed to entirely different. It strikes me that there at least some parallels, in that he seems to have been in some sense (re)assembling the Orlanth cult from fragmentary, isolated pieces of storm worship. (A ball the God Learners in their own way picked up and ran with.)

No, that would be the converse, not at all what I meant either.

Indeed, and we have a very close parallel to that 'in canon' -- or in what I think is still canon this lunchtime, check recent updates on that, or at least in a document Chaosium will still be happy to take your money for. That's the best-known of the possible interactions -- (poly)theism+Illumination. How that generalises to other possible parts of the grid -- shamanism+Draconic Realization? sorcery+High Worship of a Greater God(dess)? -- gets sketchier and sketchier. Especially when we're trying to cross-pollinate two things that haven't been entirely satisfactorily described independently in the first place.

I took the implication to be the reverse, if anything. Perhaps I made myself obscure.

Back in the HW era, and in the parallel track of Greg's draughtier ideas around the same period, we got sucked down the vortex of equating the method and the object. Thus if we were doing a spell on something, it was an Essence, even if it filled a part of the magical ecology that made it look a lot like what would otherwise be called a spirit (say). In that sort of concept, we'd declare that you got to the Transcendent Orlanth by some sort of High Theism, ecstatic worship was the shamanic method, so 'Manifest Mysticism' and 'High Animism' were essentially the same thing, and so on. Liberally issued -20s all round. Not exactly the pinnacle of the roleplaying or metaphysical arts. So I think we have to unpick those: what's the method, and what's the object. And the third dimension is then of course what the magical consequences of the interaction of the those two. And then yet another particular to the medium: if 'mystics' eschew magical powers per se, but grandiose magical effects 'just happen' around them, how are we choosing to handle that?

Everything is permitted in a rules and metaphysical sense -- not necessarily in a moral one. But whether Practical Kabbalah has anything much in common with rules stabs at 'mysticism' such as Illumination or Refutation does seem pretty dubious to me. Much less how one might map that to Monotheistic/Liturgical mysticism in Glorantha, as meaningfully distinct from 'normal' sorcery and IG worship.