Eff

21 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Otherwise, why haven't all the big brains fixed Yelmalio yet? Maybe they have, but the story remains unconvincing and so the consensus view persists. This is an especially visible problem for Gloranthans, whose mythic reality is often portrayed as one step farther from earthly experience (more "magical," less empirical, closer to the root engines of desire or the transcendental) than the layer of the RQ experience that concerns itself with how durable your pants are and who has some for sale. Something is protecting that layer where all the pants sellers live. I would hate to give the shadowy but theoretically indefatiguable Arkat Cult credit for this (like buttonholing Eco about the Knights Templar) but maybe the Arkat Cult is itself a metaphor for something deeper going on.

I have a deeply heretical answer here, but there is a simpler, only lightly heretical one- the Yelmalio people are the only people who would care about putting Yelmalio in order, and they're within the structure of abusive myths that render them passive rather than active. Maybe Monrogh Lantern's real contribution to the Hero Wars will be to inject Elmal into the Yelmalio world. 

As for the overall topic of this thread... I think an overly psychological interpretation runs the problem of collapsing the hopes of any objective world, ironically enough. Dr. Samuel Johnson refuting Berkeley with the stone is formally a fallacy, but informally, kicking a rock can save you from kicking yourself in the axioms. But what we often have is Fantasieshreck. That objective world has a duck with a cigar in his beak in it, who tells you you don't know the meaning of the word absurdity. Repugnant enough, and then there's those distasteful glowing energy beams and neon-red véves, the Steel General in a temporal fugue, four arms spread wide, Woody Guthrie's guitar dangling from one, as his horse prances in the background and shatters mountains with each hoof. Cu Chúlainn turns his muscles inside out. The real Saint-Germain manifests before the pendulum. One of the heads of St. John the Baptist was real- when it mattered. Wally Sage confronts his creation, who stubbornly refuses to conform to good semiotics. In the face of such madness, what meaning can be had? 

18 hours ago, meridian said:

I presume becoming a Leader will involve a big ceremony and a Worship (Bloody Tusk) roll. The skill roll doesn’t seem to be required, but I figure putting on a big show could gain Xiombalg prestige among his fellow Tusk Riders, as well as edifying his own ego (and restoring the Rune Points he spent sacking Apple Lane).

Yes, this seems very reasonable to me- although Xiombalg would know he was a Leader of Bloody Tusk, tuskriders aren't psychic, so showing that off with a big flashy ceremony of thanks to the Bloody Tusk makes sense. 

Quote

These are some big numbers.

They sure are! It's a shame that the only thing Worship can ever do by the rules-as-intended is restore Rune Points, because the wide array of bonuses available make it so that achieving gigantic upfront numbers that could then be used to counter more modestly sized maluses is quite doable with effort and thought. To me, that suggests that there ought to be ways to use this worship-roll system to achieve other effects on the world. 

Granted, when it comes to what we might call broad-scope social/geographical effects, there's just not that much for these big numbers to even conceivably hook onto- a harvest roll which is similarly limited in scope, and that's about it. 

But perhaps you could set up a conversion chart where the benefits of attribute training, Rune magic, or the like can be converted into a malus applied to the roll, along with extending it outwards in scope. Xiombalg's ceremony might bless his gang's tuskers with greater strength, ferocity (increased attack %s), or bless his gang themselves in similar ways, or make their personal belongings stronger (more HP on weapons, eg). 

6 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

A question by the way

why / how is there a lunar magic ?

I mean, not a « irl why »,  designers do what they want, but from a gloranthan perspective, what is the power behind ?. Is it just « moon is the rune of magic, and when moon is powerful , magic is powerful » ? Something like our irl moon impacting the tides. Or is it something more complex and … interesting I have not seen ?

Well, indulging in texts from the verboten period between 1999 and 2007, for Greg Stafford at that point, magic was something you got from the Otherworld. The Lunars have their own magic because they have their own Otherworld, and they have their own Otherworld for reasons not directly articulated but which are pretty easy to pull out of the subtext- one is that the Lunars for Greg were postmodernist, and so were aware of the fact that magic is socially constructed through rituals, and so a shaman and a sorcerer aren't working with fundamentally different things. So they have an Otherworld that provides a unique magic that appears to be the other kinds of magic to outsiders at different times and with different perspectives. 

Another is that for Greg the Lunars were feminists, and so they have a separate Otherworld for the same reason that feminist retellings of mythology exist- the project of creating a new world requires a new, critical Otherworld. 

Yet another is that the Lunars for Greg were a universalist religion, believing that the Lunar Way is for everyone, and that is new to Glorantha, so Glorantha physically expands with a new part of the material world and a new Otherworld to accommodate this, and the magic that comes from that universalist place is universalizing- it can interact with other forms of particularist magic. 

Some of this thinking probably dates back to the mid-1980s, because RQ3 Lunar Magic consists of RQ3 sorcery rules being applied to RQ3 spirit magic, which you called Battle Magic when used in Glorantha, like in RQ2. That is to say, RQ3 Lunar Magic allows you to mix different types of magic together by applying procedures from one to procedures for another.

I suppose the question is whether we want to treat the Sisterhood of New Consciousness primarily as a roughly comprehensible religious apparatus around the experience of Illumination, as an entity that player characters can interact with, as an object that exists to be renderable in some form of the Runequest rules, or whatever Darius is going on about by invoking the Old Man of the Mountain and the explicitly countercultural Nizari Ismailis in this context. It also depends on whether we want to admit we understood the very obvious subtext of The Fortunate Succession on this topic. 

So my thoughts about the Sisterhood of New Consciousness point to the first objective as the primary one for their starting point. Illumination rules are fundamentally procedures to represent something, and not the thing itself. My thinking here is that a school of Illumination forms around a specific context in which someone achieves Illumination, multiple other people then  achieve Illumination through that context, and a set of teachings and techniques develop which are taught to new members, including teachings around the order in which to introduce people. 

The Nysalor cult of Cults of Terror has fragmentary teachings, the Riddles, but no other techniques and few other teachings to put these fragments into a context. (Since it's derived from pop-Zen, this is of course exceptionally appropriate. Regular Zen involves a number of techniques and a prolonged period of studying Buddhist philosophy before a Zen practitioner is believed to be primed and ready for the moments of kenshō and satori that are encoded in koan stories, though koans are introduced as part of studying.) But an actual school would, to my mind, be significantly more than just riddles, even if it's fraudulent or straightforwardly incorrect. 

In this model I'm putting together as I type it, the Sisterhood of New Consciousness is directly tied with the older statements about Great Sister approving schools of Illumination- it's an organization which accepts representatives from any school of Illumination which can win Great Sister's approval, and thus has the authority to teach. I would assume the Sisterhood of New Consciousness also maintains facilities across the Lunar Empire which approved schools can use (and maybe must use, depending- I suspect the Dolathi would be required to teach where Great Sister can have eyes on them!) And similarly, the Sisterhood would also approve Lunar Examiners, and licenses you to perform the Sevening Rites, and whatever other factors of Lunar mystical practice demand some kind of regulation. 

Would Great Sister have some personal school of Illumination? I don't know. I doubt it's one with a large public presence, because that would be contrary to my understanding of the Lunar religion as pluralistic- her personal school would likely be seen as the school of Illumination, and so would weaken any others. And I think unapproved schools certainly exist, some out in the open because they were rejected due to their methods being seen as unreliable or frivolous, and others in various degrees of secrecy because they were seen as a scam, actively dangerous to the practitioner, or incompatible with the Lunar Way. 

I think the Church of Immortality would likely be in that latter category, although they promise profane immortality only in most Gloranthas- I suspect they make use of mystical techniques for their Ponzi schemes, though I haven't had a chance to interrogate any senior members. 

What do I think these schools of Illumination would teach and practice? This thread's about Great Sister, isn't it?

1 hour ago, theconfusingeel said:

Is the blood sun really Sedenya?
I remember it has some cultists in the Lunar empire, so I can't imagine it's just a regional identification.
Plus I assume both of these cults existed before the red moon rose

One answer: people look up in the sky,  see a big red ball, and they know the Blood Sun so they assume a connection. This assigns agency to Gloranthans and the capacity to think about the world to them, so it's automatically suspicious. It's also possible that they can read old Glorantha Digest posts that asserted that Sedenya was the Blood Sun across the barrier between fiction and reality and take them as sacred truth from a higher plane. Who can say?

1 hour ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

I have been told by someone who has been in a marching band, that our drill as American Civil War reenactors (Hardee's manual) is actually more complex.  And certainly I am familiar with combining the elements to make bigger maneuvers up through brigade.

But that doesn't actually tell me the specific secrets of choreography or of marching bands.  

Well, here's a primer on how the physical notation for mass movements works: https://www.indstate.edu/cas/sycamorebands/ensembles/athletic-bands/marching-sycamores/drill-primer

If you reenact under Hardee's manual, the step, quick, double-quick, and run are all shared, and the evolutions of the line are also relevant for thinking about these kinds of maneuvers. (Along with basics like forming and breaking line, wheeling left and right, etc.)

And then there's Labannotation and Benesh Movement Notation to describe the movements of individual dancers, which is helpful because large-scale choreography is, in the contemporary world, typically reliant on a significant degree of improvisation within boundaries. You can also look at examples designed to teach people how to perform ballroom or folk dances. 

On 4/29/2024 at 10:38 PM, Squaredeal Sten said:

I wish I knew something about choreography.  How does one train and maneuver an "army" of 500 ceremonial dancers?  Presumably they are accomplished in magic, and the ceremonies are merely a very visible application of that.  

I have an urge to write a scene with dialogue, words of command, a chorus, and catastrophic magical effects several kilometers away.  Would that be how Great Sister protects against the Pentan nomads during  the interregnum?

I would look at American-style marching bands, which are at about that size for large universities with an emphasis on the program, but which carry out complicated maneuvers on the field and in parade, frequently with colorful, even outlandish uniforms. 

https://youtu.be/6O7916boCa8 

9 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

Although it’s interesting that Lunars only get to experience the full power of the full moon if they go outside the Glowline.

There, of course, has never been a released Gloranthan game in which Lunar Rune magic was more powerful during the Full Moon, only increasing in duration if the spell has a duration without any additional effects on the spell. And in the games where Lunar magic was boosted in some fashion by 50% under the Full Moon, there was no Rune magic and that benefit only existed within the Glowline for dedicated Lunar magicians who pursued some deeper insight. Otherwise it was always at "normal". 

(Furthermore, increasing or decreasing a target number within those games doesn't alter the effect of an ability, but does affect its reliability, and doing the same to APs only increases its power via second-order effects. It's probably more accurate to say it increases the endurance of the ability as a median statement, if anything.) But it is, of course, strange. Much could be spun from that effect... but I go back to the table from White Bear and Red Moon and the description of the Major and Minor Class chits, where they learn the magic of "the different phases", which has never been represented in roleplaying, and I conclude that the Lunar Cycle is complicated and ripe for expansion and investigation through play.

3 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

Sharpen those needles ladies, there's a scarecrow that needs letting out. "This too is Great Sister."


 

6 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

As luck would have it my recent revelations about The Lady Of Graclodont fit nicely here. A symbolic army for symbolic warfare.




 

It takes a General Jinjur to, ah, put some ginger into those sparklingly pretty and perfectly choreographed Berkeleyan types.

Regardless of what we might say about the Great Sister's cult or lack thereof given the Crimson Bat, Red Emperor, and Teelo Norri cults and their presence, as a mystic who hasn't been dismembered and torn apart yet, preaching freedom and liberation, it is unsurprising that she would prove difficult to pin down and confine to one place. I might almost credit her with pluripresence, the scamp!

3 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

But Great Sister's Army is listed with battlefield armies on page 143 of The Lunar Way.  So what is it?  It seems to me that this contrast vs. what you just wrote indicates that the Great Sister's Army could stand some more definition. 

The context indicates to me that it is not equivalent to the Salvation Army.  But it appears not to have participated in the Imperial adventure in Sartar either.   So we have some of what it is not but not much of what it is.

One possibility, which is not what I personally discovered in play, but which is a viable interpretation- as Great Sister is concerned with the common people of the Lunar Empire, she only deploys the Sister's Army when they are directly threatened, and not on external forays and adventures. 

7 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

It looks as though you have already used Great Sister in a Lunar campaign.  Fascinating!  Do you feel like publishing it?

Not a Lunar campaign, but rather a campaign with mostly Holy Country PCs, moving to the Lunar Empire in the later stages of the game, following a grand cosmological shift that opened up opportunities for a mythological peace. I am starting to convert notes and memories and cogitation into something that might be useful for other people to pick up for play, but it definitely won't take the form of a "campaign" as that term is used for published role-playing game products.

Given the Great Sister's origins, it's perhaps no surprise she's present in The Lunar Way as a ghostly presence, GS rendered symbolically powerless at last. But you can't keep a good demigoddess down. After all, surely she should be very important to the Lunar religious environment, overseeing approved and disfavored schools of mysticism, let alone the implications she has for Lunar politics. How should she be used? How could she be used? I don't know the first and the second is too big to encompass. 

But after all, she, Sedenya, did say to speak of yourself first, before speaking of her, and the Great Sister is a part of her; so it is most appropriate to talk about the DenEskErVa I encountered and developed through play. This Great Sister I encountered in the one thousand six hundred and twenty-second year of the Sun, when she turned up at Torang for a meeting with the PCs, who had been adopted into the Taran-il noble family by the decree of the family head, Flower Poem, she proved to be quite amoral, concerned first and foremost with the protection and well-being of the Lunar faithful and those under the rule and protection of the Lunars, but not particularly attached to the specific Lunar system. As such, she was willing to hear the proposals of the PCs out, but she took a backseat to Jar-eel as the game continued. 

Nothing about her magic, though the Sister's Army grew archer.

31 minutes ago, theconfusingeel said:

So what are lunar heroquests anyways? I remember reading somewhere that lunars tend to do new heroquests, but I don't really understand what that means.
Plus are there non-godtime heroquests? Or is that just the mortal world type?
 

One thing that Greg Stafford put out there is Lunars finding ways to move through lost areas of myths or leap between seemingly different mythical events as if they were connected, allowing them to trace new heroquests above, within, and between the old ones. 

For an example of this, you can look at the Entekosiad if you happen to have it, or The Life of Sedenya, Part 3, which is freely available online. 

2 minutes ago, theconfusingeel said:

And what is the official story exactly?

On that specific question, absolutely nothing.

26 minutes ago, theconfusingeel said:

If events in time don't translate to myth, In what way can you interact with these gods on heroquests? Is it that you can interact with the mythich reflection of them doing heroquests?
Reading other sources apperantly if somebody has a hero soul you can meet them on the hero plane, and Arkat encountered himself.
Edit:sorry if I'm asking a lot of question, I'm just curious about this stuff. It helps that I don't exactly know the limitations of heroquesting

That is a very good question, and it's one that probably has to be answered through play if you take the official story as definitive.

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Do cultists seek to do the will of their god? The Crimson Bat cult exists to have the BatGodDemon do the will of the cult. Is it anomalous or just more honest than other cults?

If I seek by magico-religious means to take control of a god, do I thereby partake of its runes? If harmony seeks to control disorder, does it thereby partake of disorder?

I think this theory relies on several even dumber theories, such as "Gods in Glorantha have will", "mortals in Glorantha have will", and "harmony exists in Glorantha." We can't even get melodies there, for Pete's sake!

So let me trump them all with my own dumb theory: the Hero Wars could be averted by providing nu-Arachne Solara with a copy of Progress Quest.

2 hours ago, theconfusingeel said:

NowI'm gionna start this thread with something kinda funny, I thought about asking this earlier today but the forum was down, and while I was waiting I read some things about Sheng seleris, and at some point i went on some forum and midway through reading some thread I realised it was this place so I was like"oh, this is BRP".

Anyways, I wanted to ask if people can go on heroquests for lunar new gods? For example, is it possible to do a heroquest about something one of the seven mothers or Hon-eel did?
I'm asking mostly because I don't know how heroquests about things that happened in time work(and as a additional thing that just popped into my mind right now, could I heroquest Arkat fighting Nysalor?)

The only honest answer is "it depends based on which book you're reading", and flowing from that, based on what you choose to make use of. There are really three different related concepts here- "Can events in time become outright new myths that you can interact with in godtime?", "When people from time interact with godtime in experimental ways, does that then open a stable pathway for other people to follow them and improvise off of?", and "Is it possible to follow the pathway of a previous Heroquester and repeat what they did?" 

The first is the most controversial- the official position is "no, absolutely not!" But once it was "yeah, duh, you can go back to the moments when Godtime and Time made out sloppy style like the First Battle of Chaos or when Arkat quintuple suplexed Nysalor, because the people involved are full-on gods now." And on top of all this, those pesky wizards out west are able to get magic from people who lived and died within regular time, as if they managed to change the godtime and create new myths, so even within the new official sources, there are still big holes you can jump back to. 

What does that "within-time" Heroquesting look like? That's a completely different question that requires a forum for discussion where you won't have to deal with people coming in to deny the premise. I do think that whatever it is, it isn't time travel. 

The second is underarticulated and thus difficult to talk about without explaining its premises in more detail. The third is pretty uncontroversially "yes" among the majority of participants, so there is that at least.

5 hours ago, John Biles said:

Chaos is entropic; many of the potential states it creates simply run things down and make them useless, twisted horrors.  Entropy is the transition of things from a state where they can do work to one where they are useless.  And there's far more useless states than useful ones.

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.

9 minutes ago, Mark Mohrfield said:

I gather that the Glowspot created by the Crimson Bat allows Lunar Magicians to cast magic as though the Red Moon were in it’s Full Phase, while the Glowline only allows them to cast magic as though it were in it’s Half Phase? I’m supposing here that the comment in the RuneQuest Bestiary “The Bat exerts a force which acts in all ways as the Lunar Glowline for Lunar magicians. All Lunar magicians within the Glowspot of the Bat act as if the Red Moon is Full” is a reflect of it’s description from RQ2/3.

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.

50 minutes ago, theconfusingeel said:

I don't think that's a good way of looking at chaos in glorantha. You have to remember that the most basic form of chaos is void, nothingness, that is what chaos leads to.
Plus, stasis is the oposite of movement, while chaos is the oposite of glorantha in general. Chaotic stasis is a thing that can exist(see Krasht)

 Everything in Glorantha comes from the Void. See? 

21 minutes ago, theconfusingeel said:

Glorantha was made from chaos, but it was made to be different from it.
Chaos doesn't mean to change glorantha, but turn it back into chaos, by breaking down distinctions between the various things in it(runes) and turning it into indistinct stuff, and then turning that into nothingness. Chaos isn't change, it's destruction.
Umath didn't destroy anything, he made somthing new(air), chaos doesn't make new things as much as it destroys barriers between things. Undead creatures are the result of the difference between life and death being destroyed, not really something new.

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.