Eff

"People who gain chaotic features do so by being part of the participation in the Conspiracy of the Unholy Trio whose original participants were Broos." This would not apply to anyone who had Chaos Gift cast upon them, which is a source that is not related to Thed, Ragnaglar, or Mallia. So this fails on its own terms. In any case, I am asking from an out-of-universe perspective- why is it the case that chaos mutation only works in this way, as a creative decision? Especially given the context of the multiple Stafford statements about what, in his opinion, does turn you into a broo?

That simply pushes the question back to "why exactly is it only the metaphor for rapists that Chaos can mutate you into?", leaving aside your insistence that said metaphor isn't there. There is an immediately relevant NPC, one General Roan-Ur, who seems like a fairly easy case for another kind of chaotic mutation, becoming a literal cannibal ogre from being a metaphorical ogre devouring the lives of his troops. And many other Chaotic entities that would seem like even more natural things to mutate into, like gorp. So- why broos and only broos?

Let's spin Queen Deezola around in my mind, along seven axes, and see what comes out... I think that on the actual important question, yes, of course there's room for a woman to hold power in her own right in Peloria even before the Lunars. All one has to do is look at the Glorious Reascent of Yelm and the Fortunate Succession and consider that, within those texts, the Dara Happan view of history is one that is clearly shown again and again to be selective, self-contradictory, and full of hints as to what was "really going on". The vicious sarcasm concerning Dendara on the Gods Wall is very apparent even before you start nosing around the more obscure sources. Then there's all those maps in the Fortunate Succession which make it clear that, within those texts, "Dara Happa" refers to a fairly small area of Peloria which has been able to historically dominate Peloria at times and at other times has been one of many small states or a subjugated client of a larger, more powerful one. All of which is to say, a contemporary Plentonius in an alternate early 14th century ST would be sweating furiously as he attempted to find a way to explain away Deezola's historical presence, but he would have been doing the same for other historical women of authority. So let's turn up the speed on the gyroscope. Spinning wildly, some narrative features that fall out of Deezola's pockets become readily apparent to me- All of the boys are either exiles or criminals or both, Teelo N. is a street urchin, and Jakaleel is another outsider. So when it comes to providing physical spaces, and the majority of capital outlays, that has to be on Queen D. She's obviously very committed from the getgo, because she's the knowing conspirator with the most to lose at the beginning. So in my mind, her motivation has to be very strong indeed. Add this to the fact that it's her, Teelo, and maybe Danfive as actual natives of Rinliddi, and her as the only representative of a politically enfranchised class, and the motivation that emerges for me is pride, in the intermingled sense of personal and group-collective that plays a clear role in protonationalist political causes. That is, Deezola begins with the desire to see her domain free from Carmanian rule and from regular raids from Velthil, which leads her to hear out the crackpot sage and the hobo hazar, and then accept the woman with slate-blue skin and clear signs of tusks... And then that leads her to the decision to sacrifice a child from the streets, because the cause is worth it. What's one urchin, more or less? One crook from the hills who'd be left out for the vroks to feed on otherwise? And so then we come to Teelo Estara's lessons, and what Deezola has to learn from her. About rulership and statecraft. And this could be remnant Lesilla and Cerullia memories, and it could simply be the kind of lessons a street girl might have for a queen who thought she was expendable. Certainly, if you trust that dangerous Life of Sedenya, Deezola had learned her lesson by the First Battle of Chaos, and gave her life alongside the common and ordinary faithful, and was returned to it. So what did Deezola learn from all this and teach to her disciples? I have a pretty good idea of what kind of magic is offered IMD, of course, but that's not really what this thread is about, now is it?

Why are the Yanafal Tarnils cultists becoming broos, specifically? If they're undergoing chaotic mutation, why is it only into the form of a metaphor for being a rapist?

I'm not sure why any of the options you've presented would be pursued.

Of course, there is a third option here.

You could indeed choose to engage in that interpretation. That would be an interesting choice given the consistent use of "Queen Deezola" in previous texts, as if her status as a queen was somehow relevant to her involvement in the Seven Mothers' deeds. It would also be a choice that very deliberately decides to remove an instance of a woman having political authority from the setting, and so I would personally question the point of making that choice. But I suspect that simply saying that last sentence is another instance of "gratuitous personal slurs", as you put it.

Afidisa is Artmal, and Artmal is "wounded" because this knowledge is kept hidden by various people who know better.

It's a line of reasoning that could be applied quite easily to Orlanth, of course: "the cult of Orlanth won't give its members the weird personal magic Orlanth used," that's why there's no weather magic provided, and so on. So with Hon-eel we could point to the decision to make her sole spells ones to bless corn and to make herself more sexually desirable and ask whether she should have a third spell related to her actions in some fashion- perhaps breaking a barrier, or disguising herself an anonymous individual, or whatever. But another alternative would be to assume that the goddess herself understands her cult primarily as a kind of harem, and thus provides maize blessings grudgingly and spells to make the maize dancers all pretty for her.

"A color that had been torn out of the rainbow was returned as a peace offering."

That's a good question. A fruitful one for provoking further thoughts.

Another thing you might have expected to see in Deezola is some kind of magic associated with ruling and rulership, as even though she may have been a Dendaran prior to her newly revealed extended torture session, she was still a queen regnant afterwards. You might even expect that kind of experience and event to produce a magical differentiation from Dendara which would make worship of her attractive, as offering a slightly different path. I suppose the torture survival content is meaningful too.

Her cult isn't anything, because Glorantha is a fictional setting. It's not a question of what I want, it's a question (to me) of whether her mythological actions (breaching the barriers of the Lunar Sacred Time rituals, befriending the dragon and sending him away from Doblian, turning the Telmori into wolves to break their curse, bringing back maize through ritually slaughtering the Blood Sun, the long and complicated mythological actions necessary to produce the twin deities Nightlight and Twilight, and proving that She-Who-Waits was Ernalda to the people of Tarsh) are indeed represented fairly by those two runespells and only those two runespells. And that's something which invoking a dead man as a shield does not concern- if Greg agreed that what was more important than having a cult which reflected the mythology of the deity, even in confounding or seemingly incompatible ways was fitting Hon-eel into a predetermined box of Grain Goddesses, then that was his decision and it does not change the problems that I see with that approach in light of the existing, previous Gloranthan texts. So what I want in all this is, well, nothing at all, because I could quite easily write my own Hon-eel cult and use that. But there are other people who do want to talk about these matters. I really don't see where you see ad hominem attacks in what I posted. I commented that the answer provided by a Chaosium representative would represent a casual and drastic revision of long-standing statements about Glorantha and thus that it was not a sensible answer in light of those statements without a further clarification that, yes, that revision was in place, and runespells are detached from mythology now. I also indicated a pattern which can certainly be identified in things Greg Stafford was writing twenty years ago, and before then, and which is, in and of itself, not an argument about any people who would be contributing to that pattern. Hmmm, when did that get in there? Anyways, there is a very clear distinction between arguing about the "facts" of a setting which, by its primary creative voice for the majority of the last 50 years, does not have firm facts, YGWV; and discussing published texts and what we think about them, which is part of the process by which Our Gloranthas Start Varying. The former can be useful in its own right when kept in a strictly playful ground, but in the end, all fiction is mutable in a way that the real world is not.

@theconfusingeel was asking about Hon-eel in that section of their post. All of the Lunar cults are lacking in magic compared to what you might expect from previous texts. You're also not going to get a sensible answer out of Chaosium, I suspect- "the cult isn't that important" suggests that runespells are dependent on how many fans you have, rather than mythological acts the god performed. Which would be a drastic revision of long-standing assumptions about the setting in several different respects. I think that Hon-eel is ill-served in part because of gendered assumptions that appear to apply to any new cults that are being formatted for Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. Babeester Gor gets grandmothered in, but the Artess is more or less new, so her cult is a girl's cult that's about passivity etc.

"All of Veldara’s first descendants lived upon her broad surface. All of the things that look like specs of light and that we call stars and planets are more than you think. They are called planets, palaces, and cities of the gods, and so on. In fact, each is a world, with its own rivers and mountains and wild life where the Great Gods and Planetary Forces reside." - Revealed Mythologies, p. 47

They have access to it at double cost, and I really, really don't find it plausible to treat RQG spirit magic as an expression of the material productive power of the gods of a cult, otherwise Daka Fal and Waha would be the centers of proto-industrial civilizations with their even greater access to spirit magic than 7M through the integration of shamanism.

I think that this is neglecting the capacity of Gloranthan magic as a major contributor to economic production. A magic-poor society in this context would be worse at growing food, worse at manufacturing goods, worse at managing contagious sicknesses, and more locked up with economic friction due to worse transportation and storage capabilities for their economic output. That is, being magic-poor would seem to make a Gloranthan society materially impoverished as well. So we are stuck with the problem that the Lunars can support a professional army with a number of specialist magicians while having a magical order which would seem to not extract labor and POW, but rather permanently reduce both and deliberately waste it. And to me, that seems very difficult to believe.

I don't mean interpersonal violence there. I mean that the productive capacity of a Gloranthan polity to compete on the Gloranthan international political stage would, based on the majority of statements throughout Gloranthan texts, be related to the magic that is available for that polity. So what does Lunar religion add which not only makes the Lunars resilient, but makes the exclusive and sole worship of the Seven Mothers, who within the current texts are effectively the sole Lunar religious cult with much numerical presence, something which can displace the worship of traditional deities and their traditional magic? Because the Lunars also don't ban the worship of said traditional gods. I think the underlying answer for me, personally, is "The RQG model of religion doesn't work if you treat the magic that flows from Gloranthan religion as part of a social context", but I think that thinking about these questions is valuable for considering what you might add or revise for playing games in Glorantha. I had an epiphany about the pre-Guide Malkioni which made their societies immediately comprehensible to me in this analytical framework, and now I have a much better sense of how I would play a game using them.

That's because runespells, divine affinities, divine feats, are explicitly representations of things the god(s) of the cult did mythologically, the defining events that explain why they're important and why we, the people of the religion, offer worship to them. There's a clear definition of what these things mean there, whereas the little magic called spirit magic in RQ3 (and thus RQG) and battle magic in RQ2 is not so connected.

Going back to the ostensible subject of this thread, what would it say about a society that its divine community is one that's effectively disarmed by relation to its social context? That's the question which lies behind questions about Seven Mothers as a cult, which really come down to questions about what Gloranthan societies look like and whether it is sensible for a society to have a relative position of so-and-so with this neighbor and suchlike with that neighbor given its expressed magical abilities and defined historical trends. For example, if the adoption of the Lunar religion led to a resilient and strong state that was able to unify a fractious Peloria, and part of that religion is the opening up of new magical methods, then does it really make sense for that religion to produce adherents who are, by the available measures, significantly worse off than they would have been before the Lunars, bereft of the magic that other Gloranthan societies enjoy?

Well, that should be pretty simple. As the Vithelan story of Avanapdur suggests, you can make up entities to worship and gain magic from them, at least for as long as they avoid contact with mystics. But if you can't do that for Wakboth or Jotimam, that suggests that something is receiving the worship and telling the worshiper "no".

What does "functioning" mean for these purposes?

To be fair, we cannot help but God Learn, and Gloranthans can't help it, either. Identifications and connections fail, either when the logic becomes too stressed out or when the dice come up 00, but the process continues on with the new knowledge that an unlucky fumble has proven that the Doctor Rock is actually made of plastic, or whatever. As far as this specific topic, might I suggest a handy anticanonical resolution? The lights in the sky are post offices, and they can sort the prayers and sacrifices that are mailed their way.

I'm not sure his position is all that incompatible with yours- there are gods that are part of the communities (from household lar and penat up to Jupiter and Juno), and you participate in communal rituals of worship and celebration as part of being in the community. On top of that, it is also possible, within the bounds of community understanding of this kind of relationship, to approach gods with personal requests as a prospective client and receive personal aid. I think that where it all gets fuzzy is that RQ2/3 cults and HW/HQ pantheons are different phenomena. An initiate to a god in the latter is someone who has established an ongoing patron-client relationship with a god and so has been initiated in the knowledge that other clients share, and an initiate to a god in the former is someone who has been accepted in what is functionally a mystery cult, and the personal relationship only comes for those rune masters. They're clearly similar phenomena, but not identical.

Horse - the sun moves in a line, tirelessly. Eagle - the sun is up in the air. Lion - the sun is surrounded by a golden mane. All are conventionally regal or at least noble animals. The most interesting part to me is that there's myths of saving horses and killing lions all over Genertela. The ancient ones are no matter- I'm sure it won't surprise anyone to hear that Tada, Orlanth, and Oslira are in an exclusive club together. But some are dated to clock-time. What did Hrestol do by skinning Penda? How is that related to the local experience of the Sun?