EricW

I thought I read somewhere trolls eat Walktapi to get rid of them...

Just speculating, but I always figured the seven mother’s hero quest was a twisted lightbringer quest.

What happens if lightbringers (including a darkness cultist!!) make it to the court of justice, and ask for the return of a chaos god? 

Perhaps they receive a goddess who is a confusing mixture of light and dark, who plans to heal the world with chaos.

What about Urain?

Too much fun to leave out. And he does gather followers, warriors who discover they enjoy the battle a little more than they should.

There is an interesting reference in King of Sartar;

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Argrath and his companions set off over the broken realm of myth. The bad rain swept across Dragon Pass when he left. Vilgars pursued him, and were killed over the Precious pool. They went to Ygg's Isles, and the people there called upon their god to help Argrath. When Argrath could tell Ygg's genealogy correction, the god agreed to fly him to the West. All went well after that until they saw the Blue-like-a-corpse Woman, who sent decayed vulgars at him, armed with Argrath's own weakness. He was wounded to death, but the love which his wife sent to him in a feather sustained him. And then his tribes folk rose up to fight off the vulgars, and the black spear slew them. In such a manner Argrath and his companions fulfilled the twelve steps necessary to reach the Court of Judgement.

In the Court of Judgement, where the Lightbringers receive the gifts of their labor, Argrath passed the purification test of the Flame of Ehilm. The assembled gods agree to give him the gift of liberating the god of his choice.

The treasures of heaven were available to him: peace, food for his people forever, personal immortality, friendship with demigods, a homestead in heaven, his own star.

But al the gods were shocked when he asked for Sheng Seleris, an ancient enemy who had chased the Emperor off the earth, and had even scarred the celestial face of the Red Goddess when he was alive. But that demigod was beyond their reach, quarantined in a Hell which was made by the Red Goddess outside of their cosmos. The ancient gods could not do what they had said they would do, and as a result the whole of Genertela shuddered, and the earth grandmother groaned, as if her bones were bending. The stars were afraid.

At the centre of the world Argrath compromised. He extracted some new promises from the gods who ere unable to fulfil those which they had just made. And so it was done differently, and instead of following his liberated guests to the world again [as required by the Lightbringers' Quest], Argrath went on another, deeper quest, into the darkest parts of the underworld where torture is like breath, and pain like clothing, and where suffering is like food. Argrath helped his countrymen there, and gave hands to Hofstaring Treeleaper, who in turn helped Argrath inside the forge. And at last, with much loss, Argrath found the prisoner, and broken the chains which held him. Chalana Arroy healed the pulped soul and spirit. The ruins of Sheng Seleris rose, chanted three things, and then raised himself up once again. He took two steps, and was back in the world of the living. Argrath followed him from the underworld, and Sheng went to his own people in the Redlands and established himself among them as leader once again.

 

Obviously the Goddess might have built a special hell just for Sheng Seleris, so maybe Seleris' personal hell has nothing to do with the fate of dead Lunars in good standing with the Goddess. But Sheng's Lunar Hell can be reached by a very difficult deeper quest associated with the Lightbringer's Quest, so Lunar realms of the dead are at least tenuously connected to the Gloranthan underworld (maybe).

9 hours ago, Darius West said:

Hmm... My money is on the Alrdyami, the Guide to Glorantha points out that apparently hazia isn't the only drug of addiction they have created for human consumption and control.

Trickster could still have been involved. 

I mean, imagine the Aldryami coming across the smelly scene of Trickster's careless vandalism of their green space, wondering what the hell to do to clean up the mess. Then someone notices a few humans smoking the strange plants which grew from Tricksters earwax or nasal debris (or worse). Just as they're about to attack, to prevent more careless use of FIRE in their forest, some of the humans who smoked the strange plants started cuddling the trees, behaving like elf friends .

Horrible - they burnt some of the plants, used FIRE in the FOREST, inhaled the smoke. Then they cuddled the remaining plants. What a dilemma - they're burning some of the strange plants that Trickster left behind,  then started cuddling the trees. That hazia dryad looks cute - a little loopy looking, but very pretty. Maybe the mess left behind by Trickster isn't entirely useless after all... 

And thus the cult of Green Eurmal was born.

Ha - could make the sun worshipper a follower of Yelmalio the Krjalk.

Perhaps Hazia grew from fragments of Trickster's ear wax or other unmentionable detritus which he carelessly dropped in the stinking forest during the green age... 

Ralzakark - Perhaps a few loosely connected fragments of Gbaji which somehow got loose? The Godlearners may have been trying to resurrect Gbaji when they unleashed Ralzakark. And Ralzakark seems an oddly divided entity, badly knitted together maybe.

The cult of Eurmal Odorous has a strong affinity with cabbages and sprouts. Provides the Trickster "flight" spell. Eating cabbages or sprouts can increase duration. 

Ha. I see your unviable Boltzmann brains and raise you eternity.

You are right that most Boltzmann brains will die pretty much the instant they appear. But even if the chance of a minimally viable Boltzmann brain is as unlikely as the chance of a Boltzmann brain arising in the first place (so we have tiny fractional probability multiplied by itself, producing an even more ridiculously small number), in an infinite period of time all possible unlikelyhoods are inevitable.

And there seems to be concern that if Boltzmann brains outnumber normal observers they might have strange and outlandish effects of the structure of the universe, though I don’t understand the reasoning behind this issue.

Of course all this is highly speculative.

We know other universes exist because they have been observed. The most distant stars are effectively not part of our universe, because they are forever beyond our reach - even if we had a near lightspeed starship, we could never travel to those stars because the accelerating expansion of the universe means some stars we observe billions of years away are now receding from us faster than the speed of light - they are beyond our cosmic event horizon.

Another question is what would a cosmos size Boltzmann brain look like? I suspect it would be full of planets and stars, and maybe even intelligent beings who ask deep questions about the nature of the universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_horizon 

On 9/30/2018 at 2:37 AM, Darius West said:

We all know the story of the Jrusteli Empire, how a group of sorcerors got together and reverse engineered the RQ rules then figured out a bunch of clever rules-lawyer exploits that turned themselves into a world power.  We even know the names of the original people who came up with how to exploit hero quests from other pantheons, but who were the actual heroes doing the missions?  You would imagine that they would have been completely terrifying, and one might even suppose that they would have the skills and wherewithall to completely escape  even a cataclysm such as the one that befell Jrustela at the close of the Age.  What do we know about these heroes, if anything?  Who were they?   What became of them?

Personal visit from Arkat? The God Learners did a lot of harm to Arkat's designs, breaking his cult, plundering his empire and abusing his secrets. Perhaps Arkat found a way to return for a short time. I doubt he would have been pleased.

There is precedent for the God Learners mutating into chaos monsters - the twisted beings working to resurrect Zistor. And we know Delecti who had some God Learner heritage turned to chaos when all else failed.

As for what Pavis knew, perhaps Pavis underestimated the Ogre threat. Some arrogant bull might have assured him they were all killed off in some purge. After all, ogres are very good at concealing their presence, and survivors of a major storm bull incursion would be better than average at concealment, even for ogres. 

You could desk check the characters - create or find a set of NPCs, spend some time doing trial combats using your PC character sheets to see whether the PCs are at too much of a disadvantage. If they are at too much of a disadvantage, find a way to even up the odds.

The other alternative is to suggest your characters innovate a bit. In RQ not every hostile encounter needs to end with a fight - if you are faced with overwhelming odds maybe you should try something different than pulling your swords and getting killed. I played a trickster character a long time ago, he just lied a lot, hardly ever killed anyone. Having said that he was quite formidable when he did have to fight, NPCs kept convincing him to go on dangerous trickster heroquests to try to get rid of him.
 

Eurmel’s harmony - a powerful new trickster spell which causes everyone in the area affected to talk over each other and assume everyone else agrees with whatever they are saying.

Make up your own description. Whatever you claim might be true - pinning down a unique description of the god of tricksters in a mythological landscape as fluid as Glorantha is a big ask. In fact, why don't you provide different information to different PCs - Eurmal would be immensely entertained by a heated theological dispute between PCs, especially if it led to them doing silly things to try to prove their position.

Cthulhu might actually exist. Scientists have predicted the existence of unimaginably strange intelligences of potentially immense power since the late 1800s - though most scientists believe this prediction is evidence of a horrible mistake somewhere in their calculations. 

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In physics thought experiments, a Boltzmann brain is a self-aware entity that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. For example, in a homogeneous Newtonian soup, theoretically by sheer chance all the atoms could bounce off and stick to one another in such a way as to assemble a functioning human brain (though this would, on average, take vastly longer than the current lifetime of the Universe).

The idea is indirectly named after the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), who in 1896 published a theory that the Universe is observed to be in a highly improbable non-equilibrium state because only when such states randomly occur can brains exist to be aware of the Universe. The fatal flaw with Boltzmann's "Boltzmann universe" hypothesis is that the most common thermal fluctuations are as close to equilibrium overall as possible; thus, by any reasonable criterion, human brains in a Boltzmann universe with myriad neighboring stars would be vastly outnumbered by "Boltzmann brains" existing alone in an empty universe.

Boltzmann brains gained new relevance around 2002, when some cosmologists started to become concerned that, in many existing theories about the Universe, human brains in the current Universe appear to be vastly outnumbered by Boltzmann brains in the future Universe who, by chance, have the exact same perceptions that we do; this leads to the absurd conclusion that statistically we ourselves are likely to be Boltzmann brains. Such a reductio ad absurdum argument is sometimes used to argue against certain theories of the Universe. When applied to more recent theories about the multiverse, Boltzmann brain arguments are part of the unsolved measure problem of cosmology.

 

Source Wikipedia

The odd thing about this prediction is that it has survived several major revisions of theory. The original thermodynamic Boltzmann prediction was found to have a parallel when Quantum theory was discovered. Even the newest cosmological theories have room for Boltzmann brains in their calculations.

The famous physicist Richard Feynman added to the confusion by calculating that universes containing a single Boltzmann brain should be far more numerous than universes full of structure and stars, like our universe.
 

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In 1931, astronomer Arthur Eddington pointed out that, because a large fluctuation is exponentially less probable than a small fluctuation, observers in Boltzmann universes will be vastly outnumbered by observers in smaller fluctuations. Physicist Richard Feynman published a similar counterargument within his widely-read 1964 Feynman Lectures on Physics. By 2004 physicists had pushed Eddington's observation to its logical conclusion: the most numerous observers in an eternity of thermal fluctuations would be minimal "Boltzmann brains" popping up in an otherwise featureless universe.^[2][4]

^{(Same link as above)}

If Boltzmann brain theory is correct, a big if, the only thing protecting us from unimaginably strange encounters with such entities is they are all locked away at the end of time, or locked away in different universes. The probability of such a being arising in our region of spacetime is ridiculously low, as in one in one followed by a ridiculous number of zeroes. By the time Boltzmann brains become common, the universe will be a very different place to the cosmos we know - dark and cold and pretty much empty, except for the Boltzmann brains.

Of course all this assumes we understand the nature of space and time. There may be ways to travel across the empty ages, to leave otherwise empty regions of the cosmos, to visit the brief spark of light at the beginning of our universe, the space and time we inhabit. Beings who have nothing else to do but contemplate a dark eternity will have plenty of opportunity to discover such pathways to other realms, if such pathways exist. 

This is highly speculative. The theory is so immature that the Boltzmann paradox might really just be a mistake in the calculations.

Or just maybe our island of comfort and peace is even now being hungrily eyed by the desperately ferocious denizens of a cold and empty high entropy regions of the universe, who yearn and hunger for a brief taste of our universe's brilliant light and life.

There is a mind bending paradox at the heart of the Clanking City which I would like to share.

The purpose of Zistor, the mechanical god at the heart of the Clanking City, was to catalogue, categorise and comprehend everything in Glorantha.

There is a case for suggesting cultists and permanently insane might occasionally suffer temporary bouts of sanity.

In HP Lovecraft’s The Horror at Red Hook, the main antagonist experiences a brief moment of sanity when he rejects completion of the ritual which the story suggests might have caused the downfall of the world. In the words of the protagonist;

“He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe.”

You could argue that maybe the antagonist never quite hit san zero, and obviously you would have to be careful introducing a flip back to sanity into the rules - it would have to be incredibly rare and transient.

In terms of game mechanics its probably essential to win back some sanity somehow, if you want to reuse the same adventurers in future scenarios, but the original stories had very few cases of people who survived mythos encounters escaping unscathed, many of the survivors were troubled by hideous nightmares or worse. If you pick up mythos skill in an adventure perhaps you should be less generous about also picking up sanity. After all, whatever you kill, increased mythos skill means you have become more aware that the world is a dangerous place full of unspeakable horrors against which humanity has very few defences.

Why not add a trickster? Who stirred up the fight? Perhaps Trickster’s penance is to protect the new shrine from those who mean it harm - maybe even a trickster guard, creating a shrine which is both a place of healing and a place where trickster magic is especially strong.

My theory - addiction is Urain silently whispering the unthinkable to the secret hearts of those tempted to listen. The Hazia brings the addict a little closer to the madness. 

This theory adds a frisson of danger - at any moment there is a small risk the addict might burst into senseless rage, and turn their now chaoticly strengthened hate against their loved ones.

Old very rare books in good condition - maybe a few hundred dollars?

You could buy a seven story building in Manhattan for $13,000in the 1920s, so $3000 for a book would be an outrageous fortune. If people with that kind of interest found out about the book it is unlikely they would give the owner an opportunity to say no.

Who would sell such a book?

Someone who knew its true nature would never sell it, they would keep it, or maybe try to destroy it.

A thief or heir trying to dispose of an estate likely wouldn’t know what they had - to them it would just be a worthless mouldy old book, lucky to exchange it for the price of a good meal, or a bottle of rotgut...

A rifle makes a good jabbing weapon, even with no bayonet attached - it’s heavy, strong and narrow. If someone gave you a hard jab in the face with a rifle there is a good chance you would be disabled or knocked unconscious, or even killed if struck in the throat. Once your opponent is on the ground you could shoot.

This would be quite a natural way to use a rifle, even sneaking about you would point the rifle straight up or down most of the time - holding it horizontal all the time is an invitation for someone hiding round the corner to grapple it out of your hands. 

Using a rifle as a jabbing weapon is not very good for the rifle - maybe a small increased risk of a misfire or worse.

Ha. I haven't tried Genius Loci, but my thought - make it scary.

Maybe the players are assuming they will all get in, that they will be able to operate as a team once they are inside. What if only some of them get in? Say if one of the players is all alone in a scary place, and the others have been firmly rejected, either as patients or staff? 

Who knows what they will get up to? Will one of them try again, maybe do something really stupid and possibly illegal to convince authorities they are insane? What if they just get locked up in the local jail? What will they try next? Will they try to break in to help their fellow PC? What if the players on the outside receive a worrying message from their friend on the inside? Maybe the message is a forgery?