Eff

Incorrect. Entropy is a state variable related to the thermodynamics of a system, which cannot decrease with the evolution of time in an isolated system only. This means that such systems evolve towards an equilibrium point of maximum entropy, and that some physical processes are irreversible (and others aren't). From this, we get the arrow of time. It also represents the number of possible and probable microstates a system composed of many smaller parts can be within, with more entropy meaning more possible microstates and more probability of the system being found in each one, meaning entropy also communicates complexity and freedom within a system. Finally, Shannon entropy is related to thermodynamic entropy, but considers information, data processing, and signal noise, and works out to the gap between the information needed to describe the macrostate of a system and the information needed to describe the particular microstate of a system, and Shannon entropy means that the process of gaining and producing information increases entropy both in the Shannon sense and thermodynamically. There is a lot more to entropy than simply "oh it means uselessness", right down to Glorantha not being a thermodynamically isolated system, thanks to its specific cosmology. This may or may not have been intended by Stafford, but the beauty of texts is that meaning is generated in a more complicated way than the author shoving it in.

It's actually all the way from White Bear and Red Moon, where "cyclical magicians" (including most of the Lunar Field School) were at full power (12) within the Glowline and within two hexes of the Bat. They were at 7 power on Empty Half and 9 power on Full Half days. The Glowline's power boost wasn't a feature of the Cults of Prax Seven Mothers cult, which instead had the following Lunar cycle effects on Rune levels: Dark/Dying: only 1-pt Rune spells Crescents: only 2-pt Rune spells Half Moons: only 3-pt Rune spells Full Moon: all Rune spells available, all Rune spells last 30 minutes where they would normally last 15. (These rules don't seem to affect stacking, notably.) RQ3's Gods of Glorantha has two separate charts for the two Lunar cults it details- Red Goddess and Seven Mothers. The Red Goddess cult's chart concerns Lunar Magic, the Seven Mothers cult's chart is distinct from the Cults of Prax one in considering stacking, but in both of them, the Glowline means the Moon is always full and you use the line for Full Moon. The first game which altered this was Hero Wars, which has a Lunar cycle chart which only affects affinities of Lunar deities if you read the text about the cycle in Chapter 10, but which affects all affinities, spirits, grimoires, blessings, and talents from every detailed Lunar Otherworld entity in that book except Taraltara mysticism. This chart affects target numbers by multiplying them by 0.3 on Dark/Dying days, 0.5 on Crescent days, 1.0 on Half days, and 1.5 on Full days, thereby making magic more difficult but not specifically restricting the kinds that may be performed. The Glowline in this rendition makes everything neutral like a Half Moon day, except for characters who know the Secret of a Lunar religion, for whom it is always a Full Moon when within the Glowline. This does not change for Heroquest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. Heroquest 2 proper doesn't mention it, even in its section on the Lunar pantheon, but Pavis: Gateway to Adventure, has a chart which revolves around the "stretch" that Heroquest 2 formalized, which applies to "Lunar glamours" only. Neither mention the Glowline. Heroquest Glorantha does, but simply repeats the Pavis: Gateway to Adventure text and adds that the Moon is always at Half within the Glowline for everyone. Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha thus takes the RQ3 Seven Mothers chart and combines it with the Heroquest Glorantha text on the Glowline and produces this situation where the Glowspot is greater in effect than the Glowline, because RQ:RiG is the first game since RQ3 to have rules for the Crimson Bat's Glowspot published. At no point previously in the publication of Gloranthan games was this ever the case, and the specific form and limitations of the Lunar Cycle generally varied significantly from game to game and within the same game. Or to sum this all up, this is an invention of RQ:RiG.

In the beginning, there was everything-and-nothing, which the navel-gazers call the Void. The god-groupies call it the Silence, and the chalk-and-candle types call it the Prime Mover, and I'll call it the Primal Plasma. This stuff was everywhere indistinguishable from itself, and so was infinite and took up no space at all at the same time. Perfection in the strict ruler-edge sense. But maybe it never really existed, because it somehow differentiated. Different sections of this raw stuff of vitality and existence took some of its properties for themselves, and they began to interact with each other. One of those properties was "allness", and another was "thoughtfulness". These were left over, and they coalesced into the Great Organizer. Now this being saw the raw stuff that was swirling about and disintegrating and took their allness and broke it in half, and then took their thoughtfulness and broke that in half, and they put both of them into the mix, and the allness bonded everything together, and the thoughtfulness made it take on shapes and forms. And then they had allness and thoughtfulness. They were made of everything and could interact with everything, and they had thoughts, and they set about enacting those thoughts. But there were thoughts that were not part of the world, and there was allness that was not part of the world, and so those thoughts could enter into the world too. The first of these thoughts was "deidentification", and it broke the bliss of that time, for under its influence people began to deidentify the parts of the world that were not them. Fearing this diabolic thought, the people selected leaders from among themselves who seemed like they could rebuild the bliss of unity, and then overthrew them when they proved otherwise. So the Aether gave way to Arraz-the-Servant, who gave way to the Sun Queen, who gave way to the Emperor Brightface. And once they had decided that someone was above them, the people made others who were below them, to do the work they didn't want to do. But then another thought came into the mix, and this thought was "discernment". And this thought made people react in different ways to the same events, and meant that when the Emperor sat in judgement, one or both would go away unsatisfied, and the Emperor accepted it too, and so he said that some people were exiles and some people were favorites and some people were doing important work staying where nobody else had to listen to them. And then these people were confronted with another thought- "surprise". They realized that the world was not simply the Empire of Brightness and Splendor, but that there was also a Family of Darkness and Depth, a Community of Eaters and Eaten, and others besides, and that many of the monsters that the Emperor had overcome were, surprisingly, people of those other gatherings. And some people began to move between these gatherings and others began to make their own small ones and still others rejected all gatherings, having found the new thought of "solitude". But with these new thoughts came ideas that were born from the thoughts. And one of them was "multiplicity". Nobody acknowledged this presence at first, but when the Turner, the Burner, the Blow-Hard, the Puller, and the Topsy-Turvey came together and summoned the Eyes of Justice to judge between them and Brightface, all had their own desires for what would happen after and all had their own grievances, and multiplicity was among them. And when they slew Brightface, none of them heeded the Eyes of Justice at first, but the first two relented and admitted that, although annoying, he had a point. And so this was the age when anyone and everyone did what was right in their own eyes, and all the orders that had been ordained before were broken and replaced with ad hoc patches, spaghetti code poorly documented if at all, and where kings and emperors and prime ministers and consuls and chief executive officers and chairmen of the board and first speakers existed, they all had to acknowledge they were not alone. Some resisted this, and strove to be the new Brightface, and in doing so, they knew they would fail. And they made new exiles. And these exiles went out to the edges of the world, for now everyone had to acknowledge the full size of the world. And there they met three thoughts, coming into the world. The first was "inexplicability", which rejected that allness could ever be all, that there were things which were eternal cleavages between people. The second was "irrationality", which said that people could be thoughtless and still be people. The third was "irrecoverability", which said that thoughtfulness and allness didn't overlap, that there were parts of the allness which could never be found by thought and thoughts which could never correspond to something that existed. Before, new thoughts had entered, and they had been ignored at first, or feared, or despised, but people had gotten used to having them around eventually and even found joy in them. Where they had been exiled before, they had eventually come in from the cold/heat/rain/dry/slood. These three thoughts came into the world and nobody could accommodate them who hadn't been born from them at first, and then people made new thoughts which pretended to accommodate them while not actually doing so, and this thought of "deception" turned on them as well. The paradoxes were thorny. To fight against the thoughts, it seemed, was to admit they were right, and so made them stronger than you. To try and speak to the thoughts was to run up against the denial of communication that flowed from their existence. Before, when someone had forgotten something, they had known they could always recover it, but now they were confronted with the possibility of losing it forever, of not being able to know it when they found it again, and so many thoughts and people that had been part of the world began to be seen as not part of it anymore. But the thoughts couldn't accommodate each other, either. Irrationality was an explanation of the inexplicable. Irrecoverability greedily obscured the meaning of the other two. And inexplicability and irrecoverability fought for the love of the game. And so they were forced to split apart and take different paths. And apart, they could be integrated separately. Irrationality was integrated in this way- people confronted it head-on and fought it heedlessly and heedfully, and accepted that they were both irrational and rational, and that the one could pin down the other. Inexplicability was integrated in another way- the people accepted that they were much smaller than the world, that individually there was a great open range for inexplicability to wander, but by putting many people to think about a thing, each could place their fences in such a way as to corral the inexplicable and keep it in bounds. But irrecoverability was difficult indeed. It came down to the instructions of a spider, who said this: "You who I have devoured and hold within myself, hear me! You have brought irreversibility into the world, and those who bound you think this a power which can only destroy them. But by doing so, you have brought meaning into the world! You have made it so that choices matter! Liberty exists now, because of you. And because of this irreversibility, you have made it possible to know more things, for your bones are the skeleton of an order that places all actions in relation to one another. So you have done good as well as ill. Therefore, I shall remake you and disgorge you, and I shall put the world under your liberating authority. But I shall split you into two, and one of you shall wear a crown, and one of you shall hold a ledger, and the first shall witness all things which are going to happen from now on, and the second shall remember everything which has happened, so that all pasts will always be here." And there is the time which passes forward, which we live in, and there is the time which moves in all directions, which we remember. And because we have accepted we are small, we only remember some things, and because we have accepted that we are both irrational and rational, even the time which has already happened can surprise us. And the spider whispered into the ear of her older daughter a secret, which I have had from that older daughter in turn, and it is this: "the clock always runs forward, but you can reset it and start again, and the hands will point to any number you want, so long as you take responsibility for what you are making." And because of what we all agreed to, what we compromised on, there are some thoughts who were rejected as part of the world, for no one would remember them as part of it, and we insisted on this. But we also agreed to the demands from the other side of the table. We accept that thoughts can become part of the world as well. And that is the world we live in.

Everything in Glorantha comes from the Void. See? And yet one of the hallmarks of Chaos is mutation, which is a form of change. In fact, all change is both destruction and creation- one must destroy what existed before to make what will exist now. (Source and Creative Commons license.) Now, Umath had to destroy the connection between Sky and Earth in order to have his own realm of Air. Magasta had to destroy the perfect Earth Cube for rivers and seas and bays and harbors to exist. Xentha destroyed the golden color of the night sky, and Yelorna broke the Sky Dome to lead out the stars. One of Kyger Litor's large adult sons destroyed the inviolability of Aldrya's beloved trees with the Tree Chopping Song to make axes. All that destruction... but now we can feel the breeze as we sit on the dock of the bay and lean back and look up at the night sky and count the stars. Destruction, for lack of a better word, is good. Destruction is right. Destruction works. Destruction clarifies, cuts through, and if you listen to the Malkioni, it captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit, though they'd say "devolutionary", because they're all Devo over there. But... destruction is generally best accompanied by creation. The destruction of ignorance clarifies by creating knowledge. The destruction of a barrier creates a doorway, a window, a path. So there is destruction which is unaccompanied by creation, and creation which is unaccompanied by destruction, and the two are hard to distinguish from another when they start up.

What's death to a god? Or conversely, what's death to a mortal? Is it when the heart stops, or when a state of what we moderns call "brain death" sets in? Perhaps it's when the soul, spirit, or essence is separated from the body? Does toking up on hazia count as a... not a "little death", but perhaps a medium one? Maybe a descriptive definition would work better, at least until Chalana Arroy answers my emails. "You're dead when you're cut off from your body and can't return to it." Some things related to bodily trauma can cause this, as can a Humakti glaring at you really hard, and so can some diseases. And maybe metaphysically I can say that they change both parts as they separate, so that they can't be joined together on their own without a Resurrection spell that looks remarkably like a spirit possessing a corpse in the descriptions, or a shaman's ability to casually expand their selfhood to incorporate their fetch and other spirits they've integrated, or more arcane secrets and mystical powers. But there are problems with casually assuming dualism like this, where the "body" is separate from the "self". And that gets us back to gods. King of Sartar very somberly tells us that Wakboth smashed Orlanth into 48 pieces, but if he had smashed Orlanth into 49 pieces, that would have been it for Orlanth. It also gives us the story about Umath and Harana Ilor and Predark. This story takes place before death, so what the Predark monsters do instead is cut parts off of the gods, and if the parts stay detached for long enough, they become a different person that possibly doesn't want to be part of the original god anymore. Yelm shatters into six pieces, Tada falls apart into Grisly Portions, and when Umath is blown apart by Shargash, his sons leap up from where he fell, clutching his weapons. Poor old Jokbazi on the Gods Wall is just a collection of disparate pieces that don't add up into anything. Dragons also seem to explode into smaller pieces, some of them animate on their own, and friendly to the dragonslayer. (Who themself may well have shed that "s" shortly afterwards, though I doubt it gained a will of its own.) I propose that a dead god is simply a Humpty Dumpty- all the rex's horses and all the rex's men can't put Vadrus together again- and has been splintered into too many parts to be treated as a cohesive whole anymore. Or maybe parts that pull in different directions. After all, every god died in the Gods War. All of them were there for the Ritual of the Net. Maybe all the gods are an assemblage of these different parts that are at peace with one another, and which can break up or have other parts brought into the compact that defines them as "Yelmalio" or "Drosopoly". Vadrus is dead because the results of Vadrus being repeatedly fissioned off into smaller pieces are uninterested in working together to be Vadrus or are too small to do anything in response to sacrifices. But you could put them back together again, with some work, or a lot of work. What am I saying? As we all know, the Godtime is unchangeable except when it isn't. Don't ask about Five Arkats Returning.

So let's think mythologically. What does it mean that the Devil is under the Block for Praxians? After all, we could say that the Devil was only ever in one place, but looking back over Revealed Mythologies makes it very clear that Vovisibor is also the Devil as understood by Pamaltelans, and the Nargan Desert is where Vovisibor's (c)remains would be. So there is clearly some kind of mythological meaning to these places where the "Devil was defeated", and perhaps it might just be that that's where the weird Chaos critters come from. But let's put that possibility aside for a moment. Wakboth is crushed by the Block of Law, Storm Bull dies, and Waha emerges and begins building things and determining the order of Praxian society. Waha digs a canal to wash the Devil away, as one of his first acts. The Devil is held down by the laws of Waha and by maintaining the things which Waha built. The Eternal Battle still rages across the plain(e)s, so Storm Bull is perpetually fighting the Devil to a draw, but the Survival Covenant is what puts the Devil down. Let's go one step further. If the Devil is under the Block, how can you encounter him on a Heroquest? Trivially, the body does not move through the material world for the precise distances someone would have to move in order to carry out the actions of mythology when on a Heroquest. As such, the Devil, who clearly has to still be a potential threat if he's at all meaningful, and thus must have some kind of mind, can be present in the Gods War when you are. But stepping back a little, the Devil's imprisonment or ineffectiveness is conditional. If the laws of Waha are violated too deeply, if people forget the Right Footpath of Pamalt, if people reject the justice of Antirius, then the Devil might be freed, in part or in full. And if the Heroquesters believe this is the case, then they will encounter or at least see the Devil in their Hero Plane, partially or fully freed, where someone else might simply see a vicious demon. What would a multicultural group see? Quite possibly different things, or quite possibly an overlap of them all. A more interesting question- would an Illuminate see "The Devil", or would they see an entity with personhood- the avenging son of Thed, the abandoned son of Malkion, whatever lies behind Vovisibor? Under what circumstances would an Illuminate encounter the Devil? Arkat didn't call Nysalor the Devil, after all.

Permit me to clear away as much of the gory remnants of my post you so mercilessly vivisected and aim for clarity in response. Ah. So Chan Buddhism but rejecting the Great Vehicle's sutras as fraudulent? I am satisfied. You're propounding a false dharma by Buddhist standards, one without any affiliation to any school, and holding it up as received truth. That's bad manners at the very least. This is a truly fascinating claim. Have you any evidence for it, beyond superficial resemblances? It certainly isn't part of the generally accepted historiography of the Stoics.

Fascinating. So you accept the Lotus Sutra as authentic but reject the notion of the bodhisattva entirely? Where did you receive your education in Buddhism? From whom did you learn the dharma/dhamma? Because what you are expounding is not a part of any school of Buddhism with which I am familiar- the schools of the "great vehicle" and those of the "way of the elders" both agree that there is a kind of person called a bodhisattva, that this is a positive phenomenon, and disagree about what specific positive meaning to assign to it and the extensibility of the phenomenon. Perhaps some of the esoteric schools of the "thunderbolt vehicle" might, just might, say what you say here, but frankly, I doubt it. I suspect strongly that this is your original or personal interpretation that you are presenting as the "truth of Buddhism", which would frankly make you a teacher of false dhamma from a Buddhist perspective. But this is only a suspicion. So before we go any further, where did you receive the dharma?

The text contradicts itself. The question becomes whether you prefer a world with mechanical clockwork deterministic gods that move in complicated epicycles or one where the world is built on a fuzzy agreement with boundaries that are negotiable and difficult to avoid crossing, but where the gods behaving as if they have free will under the right circumstances makes sense.

Well, you've got your crusade and that's that. I think there's quite a lot to unpick in how even the idea that fantasy might take the ideas of Buddhism and place them in a different context, such as having bodhisattvas who fuck or having a morally ambiguous transcendent entity, is apparently beyond the pale for you, but it seems quite clear that the offense lies in suggesting Gloranthan Illumination might have any connections to anything other than what you consider to be pure evil. Case in point: This is an utterly ridiculous way to characterize Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, or Dostoyevsky. In fact, taking existentialism, which first and foremost takes human freedom amd capacity to make choices as a good, as an essential part of being fully human, and characterizing it like this is frankly to align yourself with truly poisonous ideas of social control. This venue is of course not one that would allow such a wide-ranging discussion even in the specific context of Glorantha and Gloranthan fantasy and whether the world becomes meaningless if it needs thinking minds to see it and give it value, whether existence depends on garroting human beings to the point where moving more than an inch out of line chokes them, and the like. So all I can do is point at that potential discussion and note that there is something to talk about here, beneath all the- frankly nihilistic interpretation of Gloranthan texts you bring to the table.

Fascinating to see an apparently genuine post from you. Shame it's over whether the word "applicability" means "exactly equivalent to" or not.

I would go in a different direction. A buddha is not automatically a god (neither a deva or an asura) and is most likely to be a human, but within Buddhism, the knowledge of the Shakyamuni Buddha transcends that of Brahma the ruler of the devas. The applicability to Sedenya and Nysalor seems fairly relevant. Of course, some gods are also buddhas, and some buddhas wear the masks of gods in order to spread the dharma more expeditiously. The categories are not a pyramid, nor a ziggurat.

Well, many gods also have physical presences in the world, being present in the water of a river or the stone of a mountain or in every lamb frolicking in a field.

I am not so sure that this makes sense, logically. I don't believe that Glorantha has a meaningful hierarchy where all gods are above all non-gods.

Are those the only two options that exist? God or "random schmuck"?

Was Nysalor a god?

Referring to him being described as a pupil of Zzabur in the Guide. Hypothetically possible in the right Gloranthas, but suggestive.

An alternative way of looking at it: 1. zaburs: Energy workers. 2. dronars: Matter workers. 3. gwymirs: Obsoleted. 3a. horals: Matter-to-Energy workers 4. talars: Mediators. 5. vadelas: [REDACTED] workers. 5a. hykims: [REDACTED] workers. 5b. seshnas: [REDACTED] [REDACTED] workers. 5c. Pending. 6. menenas: Talent Recruitment and Development. There is definitely a space 7, and maybe an 8.

This does seem to scan with God Forgot and Malaskan Philippe's apparent caste-hopping.

I would love to see disease as a concept fall down some stairs. Does she have a sister? Is that sister into that kind of stuff too? What's her sister's number?

I want to know more about Yena Wambla now.

The Newtling Renegades first appeared in Nomad Gods (1977), and Wyrms Footnotes #4 (1978), if I recall correctly, describes them in more detail.

I can swallow Kajabor. Feel free to ask me how.

I had underestimated the degree of work I'd already been doing with the unicorn king. Though in another guise. Tricky how many of those Ralzakark has!

Poor creature! Someone should invent stamps for him to collect.