EricW

I think absolutely 1970s dreamland would be different from 1920s dreamland, but 1920s dreamland should still be reachable. The Great Race from "The Shadow Out of Time" could psychically possess intelligent beings from their future, and Cthulhu has its share of ghostly presences lingering from the past, so I don't see why dreamlands of the past or future wouldn't be accessible, and fully populated by visitors from that era. A scattering of time travellers wandering through different dreamlands could add some interesting scenario starting points. Obviously you could attach various dangers etc. to exploring the furthest reaches of dreamtime. But its your game - do what you want 🙂

Nysalor / Gbaji was both a wise councillor and a source of corruption all at the same time. Consider Arkat: Was Arkat acting corruptly or with nobility when he violated his oaths to the gods, switched cults, and betrayed his followers and friends, in his ruthless pursuit of power to defeat Gbaji? It's not enough to say if Arkat hadn't done this, the world might have fallen - he broke sacred oaths, and violated the trust others had placed in him, yet at the same time Arkat upheld that trust and destroyed the empire of light. In the same way, illuminates can violate oaths and even take on chaos features, and tell themselves they are acting for a higher purpose. But if they abuse their illumination, their actions are still corrupt, even if they fulfil their mission and use the powers granted by that corruption to overcome other corruption.

He he - the Tommyknockers is weird science, mythos weird, devastating and terrifying weird science, an entire town slowly coming under the influence, everyone building insane and mostly lethal science fiction tech gadgets in their garden sheds. It also produced one of my favourite movie quotes. The main protagonist in the story had a steel plate in his head, everyone in town thought that is why he wasn't falling under the malevolent influence, the plate was blocking the signal. But someone he helped finally realised the truth - "It was never the steel plate in your head, it was the iron in your head".

I think there is a lot to be said for keeping the horror low key. Consider one of HP Lovecraft's most engaging and terrifying stories, "The Picture in the House", about someone who stops at the wrong house. No cosmic world ending horror, just an ignorant backwoods hermit who found the wrong book, who couldn't even read the words, but just from looking at the pictures lost his sanity to a fragment of mythos insight. Or one of my favourite horror stories, Stephen King's "The Tommyknockers", about a woman out walking her dog one day in the woods, who stumbles across a mysterious rock sticking out of the ground, and decides to try to dig it up. Stephen King is a master of this kind of horror, he takes an everyday setting and changes just one thing, just one small thing wrong or out of place, from which the rest of the story flows. (BTW the movie is much better than the book, one of the few cases I'd recommend the movie. King wrote the book when he was high on cocaine, and it affected his writing). The whole point of keeping the horror low key is IMO it makes the horror more relatable, more real. Anyone can imagine stumbling across something odd in the woods, or stopping somewhere to call for help if your car breaks down on a bad night. The British series Doctor Who forgot this lesson, it went from Horror at Fang Rock in 1977, about a lighthouse which wasn't functioning properly, to cosmic end of the universe horror with every episode. The special effects are amazing but it's less relatable than the doctor turning up somewhere ordinary, where there is a little problem, which turns out to be a clue to something worse.

Human science already knows how to make a lighting gun, the missing piece is making it man portable.

Weird science could cure something considered incurable - and it wouldn't take much of a nudge in many cases. Someone asked a while ago on another forum whether rock legend Freddy Mercury could have been saved from dying of HIV, by medical technology available in 1991. The answer surprisingly might be yes. A study was published a few years ago, and more recently in Nature, that people who receive bone marrow transplants, effectively an immune system transplant, can have permanent remission from HIV. A small percentage of people are naturally immune to HIV due to a mutation in the receptor site which HIV uses to enter cells. If you receive an immune system from someone with such a mutation, you also apparently acquire the immunity from HIV. Bone marrow / immune system transplant has been a standard treatment for some forms of cancer since it was discovered in 1956. Similarly, it wasn't so long ago that Barry Marshall proved to the world that stomach ulcers are a bacterial infection. For decades previously scientists believed stomach ulcers were a disorder caused by excessive stomach acid production. Just the other day I learned there is a repurposed medicine which appears to be an effective antidote against death cap mushroom poisoning. Actually the weird thing is the antidote isn't really what most people would consider to be a medicine, it's a medical dye used to improve some forms of medical imaging. My point is, a scientist who somehow obtained glimpses of future breakthroughs could deliver sensational medical cures, in most cases by repurposing existing treatments. How far would a dedicated, passionate doctor be prepared to do, for glimpses of knowledge which could save thousands, or even millions of lives? Would they struggle with their conscience, telling themselves the next time would definitely be the last, losing sanity every time they consort with whatever mythos madness is giving them their unnatural medical insights? We already have a grizzly historical example of doctors consorting with criminals to advance medical science. Doctors in the 18th and 19th century paid body snatchers good money for stealing fresh corpses for research. The doctors paid the best money for really fresh corpses, so some body snatchers went the extra mile to ensure the best quality. I wonder how many doctors ignored their doubts and misgivings when dealing with such people?

I'm not accusing you of being a racist either g33k - nice that we can have a civilised conversation without throwing such slurs at people who hold different views. There was certainly a period when HP Lovecraft was horribly racist, but there are plenty who believe these views tapered off after he embraced socialism, though I agree there is no smoking gun in the form of an apology letter for his past views. Like you say, the guy is dead, so we'll never know for sure.

I think there is a definite hint that parts of the old world may have been lost. Perhaps this is one of the reasons experimental heroquesting is so dangerous - if you follow a path to a place which never got caught in the net of time, how do you find your way back?

I'm not in any way trying to excuse racism, sorry if I gave this impression. Appalling cruelty has been done and continues to be done, because people believe vile things about others which simply aren't true. HP Lovecraft may himself have perpetrated some of this cruelty because of his racist beliefs. But I like to question, to understand - sticking a label on called "racist" and pigeonholing the issue doesn't help with this sort of understanding. I think it's important to consider the context of the times. Was HP Lovecraft a racist because he was just a hateful person? Or did he simply absorb the learnings of the time - a time when school teachers, academia, church leaders, politicians preached the gospel of Eugenics, the vile and completely untrue claim that colored people were a threat to the future survival of humanity? What about his later conversion from being a typical conservative of his times, to embracing socialism? How did this affect his views? Why did this happen? Was his "anger at being in mixed crowds" because of conflict he felt in himself, which was eventually resolved when he abandoned conservatism? Was his anger because he tried to reconcile contradictory feelings towards others? Or was he just as much of a racist after he converted to socialism? Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. What blind spots do we have in our lives? What can lead to an awakening from such blindness? Because I guarantee there are things all of us, myself included, believe are true, which our descendants will look back on as being as inexplicable, foolish and cruel, just as we look back on the racists and Eugenicists of the early 20th century. But just maybe by understanding other times, and learning how awakenings occurred from past mass delusions, we might gain some sliver of insight and understanding into our own failings.

Sure, he wrote a bunch of racist letters in personal life. But I find it interesting that white people aren’t automatically the heroes in all his stories. There is a claim in Wiki that his views changed quite radically towards the end of his life, he became a socialist. He was a brilliant writer of fiction, he trolled his entire fan base by presenting a fictional explanation for their prejudices so compelling they kept asking if the mythos was real. Who knows what the guy really believed.

The villagers consorting with deep ones in "The shadow over Innsmouth" were white. The people responsible for cleansing the original nest of deep one hybrids were non-white pacific islanders. Wizard Whateley, the wicked degenerate whose scheme almost wrecked the world in "The Dunwich Horror" was white. Lovecraft was using Eugenics tropes to make his stories more interesting to readers, harnessing a high profile social issue of his time. It wasn't straightforward racism. People who opposed degenerate consorting with mythos monsters were the good guys, white or otherwise. Those who enabled or facilitated such consorting were the bad guys, white or otherwise.

HP Lovecraft's degeneracy themes are a little more nuanced than straightforward racism. Just as we have the climate crisis, people of HP Lovecraft's time had the Eugenics crisis. Charles Darwin might have created a sensation with his theory of evolution, but Darwin's cousin Francis Galton started the Eugenics crisis, when he hypothesised that the softness of modern life might have caused a catastrophic failure of natural selection for humans. Thanks to the softness of modern life, genetic weaklings were surviving and reproducing, weaklings who could never have survived in a more natural setting. Followers of Eugenics worried this accumulation of weakness might lead to human extinction. Whites were believed to be the pinnacle, the least degenerated race, because of the obvious material achievements of anglosphere cultures compared to everyone else of the time. The history of quite how big this movement became was kindof forgotten in the aftermath of WW2 - the horror of NAZI Germany abruptly made it very embarrassing to be associated with the Eugenics movement, so people just stopped talking about it. But in their heyday the Eugenicists managed to organise 3 major international conferences to discuss their alleged crisis - in a time when you had to travel by steamship to get anywhere. People from all over the world attended conferences in 1912, 1921 and 1932. The people involved in these conferences in many cases were serious scientists - people like Ronald Fisher, widely considered to be the father of modern statistics, was an ardent Eugenicist. The conference report of the 1932 conference makes disturbing reading, an insane amount of scholarship went into this pseudoscience. I personally believe a great deal of this period has been covered up as being too embarrassing for the participants. There was a politician who was an ardent admirer and correspondent with the Eugenicists of Britain and the USA - Madison Grant, author of "The Passing of the Great Race", was so flattered by this fan, he included his feedback in the blurb of his book. "This book is my bible" - Adolf Hitler. US and British Eugenicists gave Hitler a great deal of financial help during his rise to power, they hoped he would turn Germany into a showcase for their ideas. But very little evidence of what must have been an extensive body of correspondence has survived to today. HP Lovecraft used this widespread popular concern about a Eugenics crisis as a narrative plot point. Just as the X-Files provides a compelling fictional explanation for why people keep seeing flying saucers, so HP Lovecraft provided a compelling fictional explanation for why non whites were allegedly degenerating so quickly - it was because of their foul religious practices, and the corrupting influence of their association with otherworldly deities! People of the day kept asking Lovecraft if the mythos was real - Lovecraft’s stories explained their prejudices a little too well. Come to think of it, the X-Files pretty much recycled HP Lovecraft's degeneracy theme, though they stripped away some of the racism. All those alien hybrids or vicious mutants - very HP Lovecraft, yes? How should we handle these themes today? Obviously there is no requirement to do anything which makes anyone uncomfortable. Personally I feel I can enjoy the stories and plotlines, while appreciating the historical context of some of the sub-narratives is sometimes an uncomfortable fit with today's values, but I completely understand if other people have different feelings towards some of the material.

Argrath was pretty open about his draconic connection and other odd affiliations. I’m surprised the Lunars didn’t try to stir up old ways divisions.

A powerful sorcerer researching concentrations of magical energy would have plenty of reason to visit Pavis. Might even be on commission from the Lunars. Of course, playing with such energies might be akin to dancing wildly in an electrical substation. All sorts of ways such a character might fail to be present during Argrath’s liberation of Pavis.

I think the horror of the resurrection spell is they seem completely normal, except to intimate medical examination, in which the cells appear a little "coarse" (according to Charles Dexter Ward). The danger is you don't know what the person you resurrect is capable of. Resurrect a random mummy and you might end up raising a wizard of unspeakable power, who once dominated the entire world with his ancient knowledge. Try putting that one down before it incants something which prevents you from causing harm. Of course, if the spell goes wrong all sorts of strangeness is possible, like composite beings accidentally composed of multiple people and / or animals, vampiric feeders, monstrous abominations if you accidentally raise someone who wasn't really human. All good fun.

20 years ago we used to laugh when the party Storm Bull went berserk and did something absurd. Nobody equated such hilarity with anything the player was likely to do in real life, or thought of it as murdering real people. "Um I guess we should leave town...". I'm a big guy, nasty temper. When I was younger, I could walk into a room full of white supremacists and not look out of place. I used to live in a place where I got into a fight pretty much every day at school, and more than once in adulthood. Come to think of it, I got into a fight last year - someone took exception to me telling him to go f*ck himself, when he started ranting at me for criticising and rejecting the vax. Backed down after he failed to land a punch. Sometimes in the old days I hung out with people who'd done time, there was a place which did late beers and had a wild crowd, but people respected your space, mostly, and nobody tried to tell you what to do - except a couple of aboriginals who couldn't hold their beer, but mostly just shouted a lot when they lost it. Nobody minded, they were just doing their thing - they never got barred or anything, they just got kicked out when they got aggressive. People still get out of my way sometimes when I walk down the street. I hardly ever played storm bulls or humakti or whatever - I got enough excitement in real life. My most enjoyable character was a weedy little trickster who much preferred pranking and deceiving people to killing them - the only reason he ever got 90% in a weapon skill is because he went on a heroquest. Glorantha is a game.

I'm not convinced total sanitisation is the best solution - it can have the opposite effect. I was once in a pub in London, this young guy started swinging off the back of my chair, so I turned it into a joke I said "Sorry darling, you're not my type". A few minutes later I looked up, he'd glassed someone, smashed a beer glass into their forehead. They were both screaming, the victim was holding the aggressor's hands, because he couldn't see with all the blood streaming into his eyes, but it was very clear the aggressor had never been in a fight in his life. After they finished dancing I went up to the aggressor, who was still hanging around, and asked "aren't you worried about being arrested or something?" He said "No, I didn't do nothing wrong". 3 minutes later half a dozen flying squad police officers stormed in, grabbed the aggressor, and whisked him off. I was really confused about what I saw. I mean normally people over 18 know that if they have done something questionable and don't want to answer for what they did, they need to make themselves scarce. So I asked my school teacher cousin, she said she's seen it before. People who grow up totally sanitised school environments, no bullying, no schoolyard fights, no violence, who reach adulthood with absolutely no concept of real world consequences - and do something terrible, without realising they are likely to get into serious trouble. Because they've never been in serious trouble before in their life. The aggressor thought he could talk his way out of the problem with the police, because he had never been in serious trouble before, and he'd always been able to talk his way out. What I'm saying is I don't think you reduce violence by trying to sanitise every environment, even fantasy environments like Glorantha. What you produce is young adults who have no concept of consequences, who are capable of committing atrocious acts of violence, because they have no idea what they are doing is wrong.

Argrath cheated 🙂

"The Sorcerers Apprentice" is a good template for players who insist on power gaming. IMO things mostly go wrong in games with power gamers if the game masters facilitate the abuse. If people start tampering with things they shouldn't, they should start accruing severe consequences. How will this manifest? Pretty much the same consequences as PCs who rob and murder everyone they encounter. So for example, if a theist picks up a book of sorcery, they should suffer spirits of retribution. If they become illuminated so they can abuse the rules (assuming the GM is kind enough to allow this), there will be witnesses to every abuse, who will spread the word the PC is a trafficker in forbidden arts. Even if they aren't illuminated, dabbling in strange magic would raise serious questions about their conduct. PCs will start accumulating enemies who make it their businesses to make life difficult - steadily worsening encounters. If they actually are illuminated, Lunars will try to convince them or coerce them into helping. If they refuse, Lunars will consider them occluded, and demote them from possible ally to chaos cannon fodder - the Lunars will ruthlessly blackmail and coerce the PCs into doing their bidding. Sorcery schools with a strong ethic about heresy might send investigators to see who has stolen their secret knowledge. Dwarves may react badly if the PCs have a reputation for sorcery, seeing the PCs as a defective components and knowledge thieves. Stormbulls or Zorak Zoran worshippers may challenge the PCs based on whatever wild rumours they have heard. Every encounter where the PC uses their illicit or forbidden power game skills will increase the attention they attract. As for hero quests - well they haven't behaved very well, have they? Arkat might have been able to manage experimental hero quests, where strange things happen because they are not a perfect fit for whichever entity they are playing - but will PCs be up for the challenge? Fun all round.

He he - logically consistent, but not always knowable. Having said that, Glorantha has divination spells, and knowledge gods have even more extreme methods like reconstruction magic. Or they can talk to dead people and ask what happened. They have better knowledge of the past than we could ever hope for.

Isn't the diversity of contradictory stories leading up to the sunrise a completely understandable manifestation of the efforts of all to knit the broken world together? Different people's stories of what led to dawn contradict each other, but the contradictory stories are all true. People remember different versions of events leading to the dawn, because the world before dawn was broken - groups were leading completely separate lives, separated by unbridgeable gulfs, so there was no shared understanding of what constituted reality. The dawn, the creating of time, marked the beginning of a shared understanding of what constituted Gloranthan history, by knitting all the broken fragments of Glorantha which could be retrieved into a consistent whole. In that sense, Glorantha is surely a gestalt, a knitting together of contradictory realities, reconciled by the understanding that the dawn marks the point at which everyone agrees Gloranthan history should henceforth be logically consistent. There is one thread common to all the stories of cultures which witnessed the dawn. Evil was defeated in some manner. Because those fragments of the ancient world which didn't defeat evil, they simply didn't survive.

Indeed. But a major superhero has beaten pretty nearly everyone who had a problem with their choices. The same protection shouldn't necessarily apply to PCs, only if they develop their own terrifying reputation.

An illuminated trickster wouldn't necessarily know they were illuminated. I mean, the ability to break all the rules without feeling guilty? Trickster can already do that. Join other cults? Why bother? Trickster can supply an endless variety of interesting magic. I mean, Trickster is adept at lying to his own worshippers - including the illuminates.

Illumination should have dangerous consequences, otherwise everyone would be doing it. The slightest hint of illumination could lead to accusations the PC is a Lunar spy. Illuminated Lunars would be attracted to the PC. They could have all sorts of suspicious Lunar interactions, like Lunars acting hostile, arresting the PC party, then suddenly everything is OK when the priest sees them - though the priest wants a private word with the illuminate. "What was that all about?" - the PC better be quick on their feet with a plausible lie. Any attempt to power game could lead to hostile divination and accusation. Maybe better to kill the witnesses, even if they are friends. And of course, there is always the possibility of meeting an Arkati who assumes any illuminate they don't know is Gbaji - especially if the PC starts being careless about abusing their power, and the Arkati was drawn to investigate the PC.

You could have a lot of fun with this. Tempt the player to break the rules, like finding a scroll of sorcery skill, or other slightly forbidden magic. Put them in scenarios where they solve the problem by using the forbidden magic. Encourage them to convince themselves that rule breaking is justified by the greater good - I mean sorcery isn't chaos, and a little sorcery makes a great secret weapon which can save the party.