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Eff

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Everything posted by Eff

  1. When Mostali cast Summon Ancestor, or other ways of interacting with the ancestry recognition system, what happens is that their pool of ancestors includes all contributors to their individual codebase, arranged by repository and by meticulous version number. Thus, all dwarves have not just the two dwarves that engaged in the protodwarf module production but also the quicksilver decanter as parents, creating a triple string of commits that go all the way back to True Mostali... But sometimes interacting with this system causes a revert to an earlier version, spontaneously. Proper forking and commenting procedures are an eternal struggle within a broken World Machine...
  2. You can taste the exile/escape from his personal Brithos there, wow.
  3. Lot of them. Some sources that are used particularly closely: Arthuriana, particularly the verse and prose romances and especially Malory. The Hebrew and Christian Bibles and source criticism of both. Norse mythology, but also the Icelandic sagas and Beowulf. Hurrian and Hittite mythology get a real workout in the Glorious Reascent and Fortunate Succession- an entire section of the Kumarbi cycle, the "Song of Silver", gets used for the Sun Dragon section in the latter. Greek and Roman mythology are valuable, of course, but especially look at mystery cults and both older, speculative analysis and more recent, soberer analysis. Mexican mythology has some striking parallels, especially Nahuatl and Oaxacan mythology, to later Staffordian Lunar writing. Then there's contemporary religions. Thelema, Theosophy, chaos magick, and a good look at pop-Zen in America in the 60s and 70s are valuable. Contemporaryish efforts at fantasy and mythology in conjunction, like Robert Graves, Michael Moorcock, maybe some Angela Carter, are worth examining too, along with comics. Scholars that I find useful for both playfulness with Glorantha and in "following the trail" are Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumezil, Margaret Clunies Ross, Vladimir Propp, Mark S. Smith, John Day, and Neil Forsyth. If you really want to damage your life and possibly your mind, there's also Jacques Lacan and Ludwig Wittgenstein. All of these are in addition to, or supplementary towards, standard answers.
  4. Yes. A roll of 96-00, in RQ2, means failure. There is always liminality even if by meditating upon the White Princess for 252 weeks straight I have accumulated 100% in my Sense Ice skill.
  5. Why is this "doing [it] wrong"? Consensual hookups with consenting Chaotic critters seem like close to the least harmful thing you could be doing with said beings.
  6. Liquid water and ice are the same thing, dihydrogen monoxide. But I can sense ice without confusing it with liquid water.
  7. A slight amuse-bouche from a recent retranslation of Plentonius: the Firespeech original distinguishes between fixed stars, moving stars, and planets in this fashion: "those who pine/yearn", "those who can drive"/"charioteers", and "butches".
  8. Zorak Zoran's three eyes are known as the Core Top (left), Core Base (right), and Neo Core Fighter (central). It is said that the "firing" of ZZ's third eye (presumably a ceremony of kindling associated with ZZ's High Mega Holy Day) can disintegrate the unprepared.
  9. I think it's a valuable exercise here to imagine for a moment that this struggle took place on a removed metaphysical or metaphorical plane, and ask what the material/middle world results were: Pavis built his city. Here's an interpretation building on that, then, as an example. The struggle was over whether Pavis could build a city, and Pavis's victory meant he hobbled Waha, that is, he reduced Waha to the status of slave in Praxian terms, and also reduced his mobility. Pavis then healed Waha, giving him some of his mobility back and restoring some of his status, but rendering him subordinate to Pavis. Or to put it another way, Pavis threatened to destroy the freedom of the Animal Nomads with his city, but settled on simply subordinating them through subordinating their god. This subordination was so potent that the Praxians had to summon a power outside of Waha, Jaldon Goldentooth, to change the relationship between them and the city. So I think that in physical terms, the conflict between Pavis and Waha probably occurred in such a way as to make it credible that this was over the status of the Animal Nomads and the shape of Prax, meaning that however Waha manifested, it probably involved all of the big five and some of the independents participating in that manifestation.
  10. This has to be one of the more interesting forms of in-character posting I've witnessed on a webforum.
  11. The most consistent answer is that while they're liberated from any kind of automatic fear, that doesn't preclude an intellectualized hatred.
  12. Lunar documentation uses euphemisms to refer to Sheng Seleris, of course, but one of the most arcane seems to translate as "poor little aum aum"...
  13. Revealed Mythologies notes that dragons in accounts of draconic mysticism are to be equated with Kundalini. Following from this, it is fairly easy to imagine that the Path of Immanent Mastery is disdained as a "parody of dragonhood", "trying to recruit our children", etc., that practicing draconists practice seclusion simply because of the many "chasers" who wish to see a demonstration of their draconic powers, and that the differentiation between orthodox and immanent schools is less relevant than whether they require you to practice the austerities for three years on your own before joining, require a letter lr two from a recognized spiritual practitioner, or allow you to begin on the principle of informed consent.
  14. Hmmm. Well, ostensibly the Red Moon and White Moon are the same entity at different stages on a (hahaha) predetermined teleological pathway (hahahahahaha) and so the one's avatars would be the other's, effectively. But let's set that aside, and consider the white moon as an entity with independent presence. The moon plays time games in any case. What does the white moon represent? One answer would be the moon pacified, lobotomized, safely subjugated to the order of the world, insensate or dreaming like the blue sister is currently. I'm not sure this bleak figure has any avatars as such, because that implies activity. Another answer might be a consciously peaceful, even pacifistic moon, one who has triumphed over the demands of the world to engage in constant violence for existence, and I think her avatars probably aren't a major presence in the world, but certainly would exist and be active. Yet another answer would be the moon as full of boundless potentiality, no longer bound to a study in scarlet. I think that this paradoxical entity would find her presence strongest in similarly paradoxical individuals, and there are perhaps a few candidates out there in the cast of NPCs.
  15. Why would there be? Einstein's too assimilated to break the fragile brain of a cartoonishly, affectedly bigoted closeted homosexual from Rhode Island nowadays.
  16. That's what they all say when their rudimentary heat pump with elementals as the working fluid refuses to function. "Mostal is dead!"
  17. 1. There is a reasonably effective identifier for "Lunar converts"/"victims of Lunar corruption" among spiritual beings: A splash of red where it typically wouldn't be. 2. The most important law of magic in some Gloranthas is that if you have an idea that in some way resembles real-world science, Mostal sends an ur-gremlin to render this idea impossible.
  18. I don't think "what if slavery is better than freedom because the enslaved people are congenitally evil" adds much tension at all.
  19. Not a hard antipathy to notice! After all, mysticism quite easily accommodates/accommodated itself to the world of the clapboard churches. It's no great surprise that Arkat's journey involves moving from the mystically churchly towards the directly pagan. Historically suspect to trace the Grail back to Nodens, but emotionally satisfying. In that spirit: The dire warnings about failed mystics carry no intrinsic metaphysical component. Orthodox or heterodox, the only thing that will assuredly happen to you once you've intervened in the temporal world is the fruition of your actions. The warnings are thus the more valuable.
  20. I think the best way to put this is that the fandom treats Glorantha the way Tolkien treated Middle-Earth: as a kind of imaginary prehistory of the real world (aided and abetted by Greg Stafford being a gnomic cuss). So for a lot of people, of course the nonhumans have to vanish because you don't see any elves around here today, now do you? But if we understand nonhumans as variant consciousnesses, then perhaps there are elves still around in the sense of the variant consciousness that elfhood in Glorantha points at being an observable way of being human in the real world, though not quite with leaves for hair. And there's also the shockingly radical proposition of detaching Glorantha from that position of being imaginary prehistory and making it alien, or parallel, or if you've just finished snorting an entire rail of Gene Wolfe and looking at the art of the medicine bundles in the Nomad Gods rules PDF, perhaps a future.
  21. I don't think Phargenetes Xocoyotltzin integrated the different components of the Red Emperor into a unity at all. That's pretty antithetical to the connection to mama Sedenya. I think a more interesting possibility is that he reincorporated Lunar traditions from outside the mainline red ones (carrying the Sword of Tolat, I mean Shargash, and marching to the aid of Arrolia) and these produced a more active Red Emperor. It's possible he also purged some elements out of the red emperor system, and these may then go on to join other figures who compete for Lunar legitimacy (Shadow's Good Shadow, Sheng, Ralzakark?).
  22. Eff

    Monster Empire

    Well, you see, when it's entirely fictional people and you're arguing that their fictional genocide is justified because of what is straightforwardly a conspiracy theory, then of course you're not doing anything questionable. It would only become questionable if this hypothetical person were to suggest, say, a series of death marches into inhospitable terrain and then confinement in concentration camps for the dastardly genocidal Lunars and their dastardly genocidal children.
  23. Eff

    The Great Winter

    The point is to avoid getting into the weeds of canon arguments, however.
  24. Eff

    The Great Winter

    I think that there is straightforwardly a gigantic swamp to wade into when considering this situation from a social perspective because the argument is built on population numbers at two separate dates. While it would be extremely improbable for the outlined situations to happen spontaneously and totally voluntarily for most human societies in the real world, it is of course always possible to argue that Sartarites or Gloranthans are different, that they have a protonationalistic urge to produce children for the nation among women in such numbers as to make this scenario socially possible and ethical. But since it is physically very unlikely, that short-circuits that. Besides, I'm not sure if the Babeester Gor of the recent texts actually would intervene in that situation given that she's been subtly redefined to defending "the Earth" rather than "women" generally, and given the whole focus on pregnancy in the recent texts for the Ernalda cult, would it be a transgression against the Earth to pressure people into doing what the Earth cults are apparently built around? Which would bring in the question of canon as well.
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