ChildOfEru

What was the rational for no shield bonus for either participant when making a reckless attack?    IMHO, feels wrong both mechanically and thematically.

One idea I had ( I have not convinced myself that is a 'good' idea) is to let a player switch to 'defending' when the other player declares a reckless attack regardless of the order they have declared their actions.    That rational being it is easier to see a reckless attack coming in than it is to see the normal feint and parry style of a normal attack.

In terms of RuneQuest I think most of what I learned is already generally known.

The Prosopedia was for sale.  More of the cult books should be ready for GenCon (how many?).

Most what I learned was about Pendragon. The work for the new Pendragon release continues.    There are plans for community based content akin to Jonstown and Miskatonic.

1. There will be a separate Players handbook and GM Book for Pendragon
2. The Great Pendragon Campaign will be broken down into 5? separate books, one for each era.
3. The Pendragon Starter pack should be ready for sale a GenCon and they had proof that we had a chance to look at.

Question is all in the title.   What is your favorite portrayal of the trickster archetype in popular culture?   If you want to explain why character fits; that is all bonus material.

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Castile Olive Oil Soap, Spain, 2000 BCE

Legend has it that the first soap was accidentally produced on Mt. Sopa, a site of animal sacrifice. As the goat meat burned, fat dripped down through the fire, bonding to lye leaching out of the ashes. The combination flowed down the mountainside and collected in the clay of the riverbanks, where women used the clay to scrub laundry clean. Although soap was known in the Fertile Crescent as early as 2000 BCE, it was used in the treatment of wounds and in hairdressing before its cleansing properties were understood. <SNIP>   Although the Arabs used animal fat for their soaps, the abundance of olive trees in the Mediterranean area led to the development of soaps based on olive oil and lye from the ashes of the barilla, a common plant. The soap shown here is Castile soap, an olive oil soap of the region of Castila, Spain.  -- https://www.smith.edu/hsc/museum/ancient_inventions/hsc07b.htm

If you do your animal sacrifices correctly, the gods add the additional gift of some soap.

No reason not to have bronze age soap.

On 2/11/2022 at 8:21 AM, EricW said:

YGMV, but illumination is a threat because abuse is such an easy path to power.

That is true of all power really.   I was raised on the quote:  'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.' -- Lord Acton

The problem of abuse of power is there regardless Illumination.

Thanks for all of the interesting commentary.  Sorry for not playing a more active role in the conversation (startups will do that to you).  Redemption was a loaded term and I probably should have avoided using it.   

The varied and interesting commentary is part of the reason I love the world of Glorantha.

Andrew Montgomery describes lunar Illumination (blog entry: "How to Stop Worrying and Love the Red Moon") as mastering Chaos as opposed to being corrupted by it.  In my musings about Illumination I was wondering what this meant for those who have already been corrupted by Chaos. Is there a path back for those corrupted by Chaos through Lunar illumination?  By path back I don’t mean removing the Chaos taint but understanding how to not be ruled by instincts which are driven the Chaos taint.

This set of musings started with how Orlanthi initiation rites can sometimes leave the initiate permanently scarred, sometimes to the extent that there is no path back to normal society for them.  Does Illumination provide a path back for them? From a Lunar POV Illumination does provide exactly that path.  It mirrors the path that Red Goddess took. The Red Goddess is defeated by Wakboth, is Illuminated, and then she defeats Wakboth.

For an initiate who has failed their initiation, who will not be allowed back into society:   the lunar way provides a way back.

The following paragraphs have spoilers from ‘Six Seasons in Sartar’ (by Andrew Montgomery) and ‘The Coming Storm’ (by Ian Cooper and Jeff Richard).

10 hours ago, Pentallion said:

All you had to say was "Vadel was right."  Which we Vadeli have known all along.  At last, an illuminated brother!

Another piece of Glorantha lore I am not familiar with...where can I learn about Vadeli?    A quick google search didn't reveal much.    

1 hour ago, David Scott said:

What do feel is the relevance of this to the average Gloranthan or player in Glorantha? (I'm actually interested to hear this).

It is a diversion and I wouldn't be offended if the post was shuffled off to an off-topic board.  On the other hand; I do love tossing around thought experiments. 

Jon Hunter's comment is a good one:  This can be looked on as a form of illumination which argues that chaos is part of the normal functioning of the cosmos.  Like nuclear power ( who do I credit for this analogy?) it is a powerful tool; just don't get any on you.  

On 11/29/2016 at 10:42 AM, Revilo Divad Of Dyoll said:

The chaos set should be infinite rather than very large, so I believe that you're starting with a false premise.

Also, the probability of the reality sets intersecting is not null (see, e.g., the Hidden Greens).

Can you give some references to the 'Hidden Greens'?   I'm not familiar with that.   

The original Chaos Set can be be infinite.   The real assumption here is that the set does have an Aleph number.   "aleph numbers are a sequence of numbers used to represent the cardinality (or size) of infinite sets "   -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number

The conclusion that I have drawn from this is that when reality forms out of the chaos;  then the reality that is formed is entire and complete.   What follows from that is what we normally think of as 'chaos' isn't really an intrusion from the chaos set but rather a bit reality we have not discovered yet.    Rephrased:   Intrusions from Chaos Set should not happen and what folks normally call 'chaos' are actually part of the original Reality Set that formed out of the Chaos Set.

Hope this isn't too far afield from Glorantha.  

It smells a bit of God Learner...

Here we go...

So I decided to see what the probability of two things emerging from chaos being able to interact.

I start with a very large Chaos Set (CS).  The CS can be anything really, nouns etc..    We then select two large Reality Sub Sets (RSS) then calculate the probability that the intersection of the  RSSs is null.  Assuming the RSSs are the same size and selected without replacement (taking sCS and sRSS as the size of the respective sets). The number of possible first RSS is sCS!/sRSS!/(sCS-sRSS)!, the number possible second RSS is (sCS-sRSS)!/sRSS!/(sCS-2*sRSS)!.  Dividing the second count by the first gives the probability that the RSSs are disjoint. Applying Sterling's approximation and taking a Taylor series on sRSS about zero I got 1-sRSS^2/sCS for the probability of the RSSs being disjoint or sRSS^2/sCS for the probability of a non-null intersection.

 If the Aleph number (size) of the CS is less than or equal to the Aleph number of the RSS then there is a one-to-many or one-to-one map between CS and RSS which would destroy the presumed chaos. For chaos to continue to exist the Aleph number must be less than the Aleph number of the CS which implies sRSS^2/sCS goes to zero (ie all randomly selected RSSs are disjoint).   Therefore randomly selected RSS must be whole and complete upon its creation.

This does not preclude intersecting RSSs, but they require externally applied order.

Our concepts of distance and time can be treated as derived properties of our RSS.  Such a concepts is setup by defining relationships (an element selected from the CS).  In particular our concepts of here & now are subsets of the RSS.

2 hours ago, DhBodhi said:

>So the picture I'm getting here is that basically all of the clan women that get married will basically leave the clan and join their husbands clan.

The arrangements between husband and wife can be pretty varied in Orlanthi culture.    On average; I think you are correct in that most women will leave their clan.  

http://glorantha.tumblr.com/post/96691133493/can-you-tell-us-about-how-people-love-one-another

Wife and underhusband: The wife has more status and property than the husband. The man moves to the wife’s house, and the children belong to his clan.

Esrolian husband: The same as wife and underhusband, but the children belong to the wife’s clan. This takes its name from Esrolia, which has a strongly matriarchal society.

On 8/25/2016 at 0:36 AM, davecake said:

To clarify a bit there - when I say everything is permitted, I mean the Lunars admit to no moral absolutes. None at all, so genocide, slavery, the use of chaos, torture etc can all be justified under some circumstances.

The Lunars truly do believe that they are doing the right thing. Or at least many of them do. Its almost impossible to stop this style of reasoning falling into at best brutal pragmatism, at worst dark cynicism. And that is also true of many Lunars.

The Lunars do have an afterlife.   My understanding is that they are either consigned to one of the lunar Hells or they go to the Red Moon and reside next to the Goddess with the possibility of being reborn.   Even the slaves in Oraya Satrapy will be reborn with a chance for a better life if they accept their role in the hierarchy of the world.  I do not know who does the judging but doesn't that keep a certain check on behavior of true Lunar believers? 

This is great news!   The 'Guide to Glorantah' only shows up rarely on ebay (  I managed to miss this one back in June that went for 200$).

This set of bronze age houses discovered in United Kingdom would fit in very well in Glorantha.   Maybe Ducks?

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Tree ring analysis dated the posts to 1290 to 1250 B.C.E.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/bronze-age-inferno-preserved-extraordinary-view-life-united-kingdom-3000-years-ago

1 hour ago, jajagappa said:

I like it.  And it's in line with what Belintar did to create the Building Wall. 

I like this idea.  I would like to treat the Lunar Empire as a way of relating to the world that is different from the Orlanthi and not fundamentally evil.  For me, destroying a soul permanently crosses that line.    Better for a soul be bound into the glowline than to be devoured in the belly of Yara Aranis.    As mentioned in this thread, it readily lends itself to a HeroQuest.

I'm slowing reading the HeroQuest Glorantha book and came across this:

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Criminals and rebels are sacrificed to feed Yara Aranis and power the Glowline.

Are the souls of those sacrificed to power the Glowline destroyed?   If they are not destroyed what happens?   I doubt that an Orlanthi Rebel's soul would find its way to a proper Orlanthi afterlife.

Thanks for all the great information.  My Glorantha experience dates back to RQ2 and a bit of time playing when Avalon Hill was publishing.   I'm slowly buying the current set of books and reading them.

5 hours ago, davecake said:

I suspect the truly mind blasted are treated with compassion (and there are perhaps some techniques of healing),

If I may say so; I was not expecting the enlightened attitude towards treating the occluded.   Given the nature of infighting between clans in the Lunar Empire it seems natural that decision of who is Occluded and who is-not would be very fraught with politics.

How open is the Lunar Empire about illumination?   Is it common knowledge that anyone can aspire to or is it more along the lines of a secret society that only the few and select can aspire to?  From the Prince of Sartar comic it seems to fall more into the category of secret knowledge.    Perhaps another way to phrase the question is if a devotee of one of the Seven Mothers could become illuminated just by attending cult ceremonies or would they have to be selected by a Lunar examiner first?    Is it something you are selected for, happen upon by accident or have thrust upon you?    Can the Lunar examiners reliable detect the illuminated?

A follow question is what do examiners do with those found to be Occluded?