Eff

It is worth pointing out, though, that the Epic of Gilgamesh (and probably the Bilgamesh poems unless they significantly antedate Ur III) postdate this state of affairs- they were composed when lugal, ensi, and en had become hierarchical titles. I think it might be worth looking at this as a "primordial", "green-age" state of affairs which Lunar society may attempt to recreate (pulling out the Entekosiad and expanding the premise of what its T&Js mean) but which must struggle against the Curse of Buseryan, he who babbled the thoughts of humans with writing so that they could never again build a ziggurat tall enough for the Sun to descend herself into the world, but instead could only rest upon it as a footstool. (Note for the unwary reader: that entire "Curse of Buseryan" is something I extemporized just now from a mix of Snow Crash, Symphogear, and the Torah. Please, for the love of Sedenya, don't go haring off looking for Gloranthan sources on this.)

RQ-with-the-lizard-and-lady-on-the-cover has a very specific objective for the game, and a specific intent behind that objective. You play a sword-and-sorcery fucko, who's on a quest to get themselves a Rune or two. Not to mention that the lead on producing RQ was Steve Perrin, with Ray Turney then coming on, and Francis Gregory Stafford taking a less direct role in making the specifics of the game. All of which is to say that there are a couple of reasons why this vision of daily life isn't a part of the Runequest-with-L&L milieu- one, the mode is one where you're playing someone at least partially divorced from everyday life, and two, there are multiple creative voices working here. Now, fast forward to the 1990s, when Hero Wars emerges, and it does validate this view of the setting, with the common magic even children might have, but also there the creative voices had changed in makeup- FGS was decades older, and to my understanding the division of responsibilities between FGS, Robin Laws, and other contributors was significantly different. And Hero Wars in turn has a somewhat different intent and objective. All of this is to say that there are clear limits to this kind of backward reasoning and picking out the envisioned intent of Gre(at)(g)S(is)t(affo)(e)r(d) from it.

A fasces has all the sticks in order, these are more like tumbleweeds. The business end of a broom duplicated over itself.

The vajra or thunderbolt began as a sling bullet, and then mutated spontaneous into a mace or club, with a ribbed head. As Buddhism carried the thunderbolt north and east, the head doubled, the ribs became prongs, and a whole family of thunderbolt types emerged, sometimes merging with the bell to produce bells with prongs on the handle, and Tantric ways proceeded to assign a great deal of symbolism to this shape. To contrast, the Hellenistic thunderbolt is irregular in shape, a bunch of sticks tied together but sticking out at all angles, though a triune profile seems fairly common on coins (along with pentuple ones) and is probably a missile, a javelin or a thrown object. In turn, the western Levantine understanding is that thunder is speech, a voice pronouncing a curse or an exclamation. The vajra is also called a "diamond scepter", so we perhaps must conclude that thunder and thunderbolts are passed around casually and loosely, almost slatternly.

The pattern is that these spirit magic spells come from a variety of implicit understandings of what spirit magic is and from the basic practical aspects of magic. Preserve Herbs would be utterly useless if it followed the basic "grammar" of spirit magic or Rune magic, summoning spells similarly, so they break the "rules" of the system. A cohesive grammar would require a broad reframing of the system- perhaps these kinds of enduring magic should be sorcery, if we're wedded to 2 minutes/15 minutes as the spirit/Rune magic duration, but it would also be quite bizarre for preserving herbs to require literacy and experiences of henosis and divine gnosis, as apparently sorcery is meant to be. This does make it hard to design your own spirit magic spells, just like you could in RQ2, but perhaps that's a feature, not a bug? 🤔

This, I declare, is ideology.

There is absolutely no difference between the two in terms of acceptability, to my mind. Whichever source you draw from, Thunder Rebels or the myths Stafford and others wrote as background for Thunder Rebels and Storm Tribe as collected in The Book of Heortling Mythology, you're still drawing from the well of an older version of the setting with significantly different cosmology and outlook as to how to interact with that setting, and part and parcel of that cosmology and that outlook is a particular "anthropological" way of building out the setting from its base setup which produced Durev, Voudisea the Lance Goddess, Enferalda, and all the rest. So one answer is to try and take those bits and bobs which you enjoy or find intriguing and work them into a shape that fits into the cosmology and outlook of Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. Good luck, have fun, it will almost certainly be an uphill struggle given the formation of RQG as a reaction to Hero Wars and Heroquest, but it's an option. Another answer, of course, is to simply fork Glorantha from that Hero Wars vision and present your own alternate developed vision, whether explicitly or implicitly, in Jonstown Compendium products. This probably won't sell well, but perhaps there are people who feel underserved by the current vision who would appreciate it. And then a third option is to simply do your own thing without selling it, and present it publicly or not, without commercialization. Many choices.

It's not hard to find some resonances of ZZBR's sigil if you look, though it does suggest some fascinating resonances for ZZBR himself. (Is there a way to turn "ZZBR" into "BLVTSKY" or appropriate reduction? Without having to do three impossible things before breakfast?)

Most of the difficulties people are struggling with here are an artifact of presuming that each cult must have one object of worship. But let's say you have subcults, and people can engage with these gods within the structure of the broader Yelmalio or Ernalda or Orlanth cult. This makes it easier to cope with how these blue-collar skills, like carpentry and weaving, can have a continuum between their aspect as everyday tasks and their aspect as specialized trades which require a lot of specialized knowledge. Or, alternately, we can say that these are inherently simple tasks anyone can do, and carry no "magic", no secret power associated with being initiated and learned in the secrets of the task. Which I personally think is a bunch of hooey, but you do you, everyone has their own Glorantha and their own understanding of what "magic" means in it.

The same could be said of "animal stuff", that too is not integrated into our consciousness as a separable quantity. Human consciousness, though it may be partible into components that emerged at different points in our evolutionary history, can only ever be defined in species terms as "human". It is, however, a metaphor of instrumental use.

From the inclusion of fungi and algae (and cyanobacteria) in the umbrella of the Plant rune, indicating that it can't be treated as equivalent to the real-world kingdom of life. So perhaps it's a question of shapes, or perhaps it's a question of general life pattern of "passive feeding", or similar, but the precise details are less important than the problematized nature of "human" once you expand that out beyond . Even in terms of psychology, if we can classify certain things as "beast psychology" for we can surely classify things as "plant psychology" for . It does disrupt those nice paired Traits, though.

So is denoted as a shape, and has been a condition or modifier as recently as the Guide but may instead be a personal rune now, judging by the procedural rhetoric of smiley codes. What that would mean, taken directly and simply, is that is something that can be applied to , , , , , presumably others, and also . You can be a dragon and a hominid, a dragon and an animal, a dragon and a plant, a spirit dragon, a chaos dragon, and of course, a dragonewt dragon. This has some shockingly radical implications, but luckily RQG with its visions of natural essences tamps them down by keeping Dragon well away from the character sheet. Now with that said, I find myself somewhat bemused by the thought that shapes are somehow absolutely mutually exclusive when humans have as well, and if that's because of real-world biology, they should also have because of mitochondria, intestinal flora, etc., because they do have a latent potential to become a bodiless spirit... but that's the trouble of a game mechanic that ostensibly represents pure psychology getting tangled up in metaphysics.

Glorantha is Glorantha. What would it mean for her to use all of her body and there still to be a lozenge at the end of it? Of course, with that Jungian Cosmic Man archetype, there's a straightforward problem that dogs us down to the present day and the realm of scientific cosmology- what is "nothing"? The disassembly of Ymir or Pangu is the culmination of a process that doesn't begin with vacuum or absence, but with formlessness, incoherence. The infinite cold of Niflheimr and the infinite heat of Muspelheimr meet and create Ymir and Audumbla. The formless mass of generic stuff coalesces into an egg, separates into yin and yang, and the interplay of the two generates Pangu. The world was chaotic waters, and the breath/wind/spirit of YHVH moved on the face of the waters and made the earth from them. Izanagi and Izanami, youngest of the generations of primordial gods, churn the gelatinous oil-slick of the earth with a jewelled spear from heaven, and then the salt drying from the brine makes the first island. The universe expands from a singularity to its current state over some time between 10 and 20 billion years. In all of this, there are transformations and transmutations, but the connection to the primordial state of disorganization remains. The aesir have their shameful connection to the autofertilization of Ymir, the Four Heavenly Beasts aid Pangu in growing to encompass the world and remain to this day, the great serpents of the chaotic waters remain in their depths to this day, and the ways of the underworld and of the dead were the way they are before Izanami died. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation glows for those who have eyes to see wavelengths in the single-digit millimeters. So what would death mean in such an exalted context? What kind of transformation is that, if we take it that Glorantha is dead? And a followup question: in all of these mythologies, there is a primordial multiplicity of entities. Even Ein Sof is an unstable state that condenses to produce the separate tzimtzum, the conceptual space of differentiation of selfhood. Who was hanging with Glorantha/AS when she organized herself into the basic lozengitudinal shape?

Why was Theya important enough to those crazy folks living in the time after Time began to call themselves her people? Why did she stop being important, and when? When does the "Lightbringers Quest" become standardized as 7(+) specific people, with those names? Perhaps it is this- Theya appeared to people to explain to them that the gods were back, to reawaken the connections. But this must have been news for many people, who were sure that gods like Humakt and Elmal or Orlanth had remained alive and in the world. They had to invent stories, like the one where Orlanth went to the underworld carrying Elmal's shield and Elmal ruled the stead with Orlanth's shield, so that you couldn't tell who was whom, to straighten it all out. But Theya herself would be an intermediary, an interpreter of who had done what and gone where. Such would be intolerable- the direct mystical revelation against the body of established knowledge. Thus, the Lightbringers were woven together out of a body of myth that put them together already, producing a mostly-coherent mythic complex which could challenge Theya and displace her position. It only worked partway. Theya lost relevance even as they took the name of her devotees, the mystic speakers to the morning star, those that climbed toward heaven, and made it their own. But what remained? Contact with the stars. The Lightbringer mythplex had to be bent out of shape. And because they had to retain that myth where Orlanth and Elmal traded places, there would always be some confusion, some uncertainty, an essential crack in the wall for the dawn's early light to seep in, or perhaps a gap in the wall's crenelations for a high-jumping star to vault over.

At 130% Spirit Combat on the shaman-to-be, the most likely outcome in each round is the Bad Man winning, with a majority of outcomes by a narrow margin (52%), followed by a tie (36%), followed by shaman victory (12%), and then both losing (2%). On average, the shaman will get between 0-1 abilities and 1-2 taboos. If they fight it out to the last possible round, it is 7,057 times more likely they will have the maximum possible number of taboos than the maximum possible number of abilities, and they will on average have 0-1 abilities still but 3-4 taboos. But let's bump this up to 150% Spirit Combat on the assistant shaman. What does that change? They still come out, on average, with 0-1 abilities and 1-2 taboos, but pushing their luck to the last round means 0-1 abilities but only 2-3 taboos! Wowza! Taking things up to 175% Spirit Combat does finally get you to a point where on average you get 0-1 abilities and 0-1 taboos, and if you push your luck to 6 rounds, you get 1-2 abilities and 1-2 taboos. So in conclusion, if the math for this system was worked out intentionally, the idea appears to be that shamans should have 1 or at most 2 abilities at most to start with, and with 0-2 more taboos than abilities. But with an additional slot-machine-jackpot chance of getting something more. Sucker's bet, imo, but you also have to just sit there and let the Bad Man do whatever he wants to you because you can't disengage until the random roll says.

This is heretical, but... perhaps Humakti honor codes are the main thing which keeps them socially tolerated. Death is indifferent and often cruel, but there are a lot more non-Humakti and if you actually kill indifferently or cruelly, that ends with you rushing to meet Humakt personally, but a lot of the non-Humakti probably preceded you in the process. So the non-Humakti push for restrictive codes which make it very hard for Humakti to actually kill anybody they care about, and the Humakti push for codes which make them important, and this meets in the middle with a system of honor that requires people treat Humakti with respect or flirt with death but also keeps Humakti predictable and easily outmaneuvered, because they've got the power of death on their side. Now, textually, this just isn't there. Honor in-game is entirely a list of things PCs shouldn't do or get slapped for, with minimal aspect where honor can be insulted or infringed upon, where it can drive someone to behave very disruptively indeed. I think this is entirely because of the fear that Humakti PCs will produce all manner of difficult, explosive situations and prove hard to write prewritten scenarios around.

"Every six hundred years you have come" is Gbaji's second-greatest trick. The greatest, of course, is when he tells you he can take the blame for your own actions.

I think that the spider woman will always be there blowing kisses as long as things don't get damnatio memoriae enough to erase her presence. The elevation and centralization of Ernalda is of course easily psychoanalyzed- if you've gotten hierogamized to the notions of active and passive principles, all bursting with gender, then what better way to avoid the contradictions of making Ernalda permanently play catcher when you can clearly see her pitching in this grainy video of a 1977 Red Sox game than to make her the world itself? She can't act on anything because there is nothing to act on which is not her. That this process makes star pitcher Orlanth the rightful lord of the universe and resolves the agonizing tensions of that board game with the Androgeus and the free dinosaurs for the taking, the possibility of getting your perfect doomstack wiped out by something as asinine as a good roll taking out Ethilrist, triggering a Doom Run, and then Keener Than is entirely out of position; well, that's a benefit (never mind the hazard). From all of this, the fear of entropy is obvious in origin, and so entropy becomes the great enemy that all acknowledge as such, except for that powergamer in the cheap seats with the red hair who keeps making out with her latest girlfriend. With all of that said, the spider accepted the powergamer, and her hand (or her pedipalp) holds back any assertion of "rocks fall, everyone dies". So it goes. What does Ernalda think about all this? The last time I asked her she just started laughing.

I made that up on the spot, because Zorak Zoran and Nontraya are parts of the myth of Babeester Gor's emergence and Ernalda's death/slumber, so if you want a Babeester myth cycle where her creation takes place earlier, you need to displace them back earlier into myth-time. There is nothing from "canon" or existing texts that it is referring to beyond that.

I would ask the player what they wanted from this request, what their intent was. How I play it *in general* is that time is stretchy and normally long periods can pass on the Otherside without much time at all passing on This Side, because that's a very basic motif for spending time in fairyland or other supernatural worlds, and doing the Taro Urashima or Rip Van Winkle thing without any context or setup first is pointless. So if their answer is "I want to speedrun becoming a Rune Lord or Rune Priest", that's not a thing we can discuss entirely in the context of the game and we need to zoom out and talk about why they want to speedrun it and whether that's a good idea, what the consequences of it might be. And if their answer is "I want to know what happens if I do this," then that's potentially interesting, I certainly don't know, not even in my own mind, what the consequences would be, so I might well say, "I need time to prepare what this interaction should be like mechanically, so if you want to go ahead and do this, your character's interactions stop right there and are held until next session." Or maybe I have a general sense of what these kind of interactions should be like in mechanical terms and I say, "Go ahead and roll it." And then from the mechanical interaction, whatever shape that takes, there are obviously consequences to this. It's not a normal activity, and there's clearly some reason why that's the case. Maybe what happens is that learning from the Second Son doesn't increase your skills beyond a normal training roll, it just moves them around and you've had other things drained to make you eloquent in Stormspeech, because you've forgotten some things of the paltry material world. That's an interesting potential consequence! Or maybe things you learn from demigods directly aren't stable in your head and the skill fluctuates somehow. Or maybe I think that this isn't going to go anywhere interesting with the consequences and the player agrees and we drop it, the Second Son says, "I have a life, you know," and we move on.

Of course, a ghost is partially synonymous with a spirit, and there is a little phrase called "the ghost in the machine". Keeping entirely within linear time and ignoring a certain topic which was quite hastily chopped out of this thread, there is still quite some uncertainty here. Then again, if Ernalda's body is the earth and the soil and the rock, such that the cleft of the Ezel temple is the gap of her vulva, her wandering spirit, her ginna-jar, is what she probably uses to interact with the world the vast majority of the time.

I think it's entirely aimed at trying to gussy up "you get 1-5 taboos and 1-x abilities" from pure rolling on tables. How I might do it is to swap the assumptions- the Bad Man isn't strong (modest spirit combat damage, spirit combat skill that's similar to a prospective shaman's, but is very durable (buckets of MP) and can easily disengage, doing so after taking spirit combat damage. Challenging him requires accepting a taboo, damaging him gets you a shamanic ability, and then you can hold him in place by accepting a taboo to prevent him from running. So you can take your chances on pressing your luck and pushing for more abilities, taking more taboos with them. Or you can get lucky (high damage rolls, he fails to break off) or unlucky (he's still quite capable of fucking you up) and get extra abilities or fewer, to keep the basic principle of semi-randomized quantities but also giving players the choice on whether to keep gambling or not.

Uneasy sits the head that wears the Weltgeist-y crown! I suspect that such a situation proves unstable. There might be some rather entertaining wavefunction collapses that come out of it, deeply maternal in their own fashions, but the benefit of AS is that the kiss of the spider woman usually only comes if you draw her attention. You can typically opt in and maybe opt out, assuming you've got a trip attendant and maybe a good excuse to tell poison control. Can the jolly green giantess keep that aloof face?

Just as we must imagine Sisyphus a happy man... A crackpot belief I have here is that there's a subconscious hope that by buttering her up she will bless us, or a subconscious sense that if we define her as benevolent, we will find a Glorantha that has a gentle or benevolent metaphysics. Like blowing on the dice for luck, in a way. For my part, of course, I have personal experience to guide me in a similar but not identical direction.

When you think about the function of pedipalps for a spider, doesn't that make Gorgorma and Arachne S clearly deeply connected, simpatico on a primal level? Anyways, given the origin of the A. Solara imagery, I can't help but feel much about her, appearance or otherwise, is a prank. On whom by whom, I don't know.