Eff

20 minutes ago, Joerg said:

You are wearing your Lightbringer hat here. Please try the Pelorian hat where the Yelmic Priesthood interacts with a god important to you personally but takes the good stuff away to their jealous emperor god rather than leaving it for you and yours, except for a few breadcrumbs that make you and yours productive for Them.

The Invisible God is the Lawgiver, the source of the laws enacted by the Malkioni castes. You might argue that now the laws are here, you don't need the lawgiver any more, but the same might be applied to Lightbringer deities who excuse their inactivity by the Compromise.

From the Invisible God emanated Malkion, the common ancestor. Even if he became Grandfather Mortal. Malkion's incarnation as son of Storm and Sea still bears that divine ancestry of the Invisible God.

Malkion is The Man, the humanist approach to understanding the world. Divinity was picked up, often by descent, but it is a Man's World, not some Celestial Court descendants'.

 

The Yelmic lower and higher priesthood... imperial solar families... same thing. Nowadays tinted red and mystically overwritten.

 

What does the appropriation of practically all the wealth in Orlanti society by the temple give back to the individuals other than some meat at temple feasts? Orlanthi property conventions are pretty close to "real existing socialism" with the means of production of wealth controlled by the temple "for the people".

 

Next thing you will tell me that Fonritians might figure out there is an alternative to a slavocracy? Caste is all-important as it defines your position in society. (Say among others the Dara Happans and the Teshnans, and other than Hsunchen and Orlanthi probably everyone else, too.) It is the concept of caste that prevents these folk from figuring out. Hrestolism offers the way out of that trap with the men-of-all.

Rokarism butchers the Hrestoli-shaped Malkionism. It is a mafioso take-over of the Enerali lands that belonged to the God Learners in the Tanier valley, claiming the title of a drowned and lost (Hrestoli!) kingdom with a zealous, likely monastic order of sorcerers and a few somewhat Malkionized Enerali nobility failing to connect with the Autarchy and instead recalling their Galanini roots. That unholy alliance overcomes the disorganized Old Way Hrestoli at the Asgolan Fields and declares all Hrestolism as Doubleplusungood. Rokari watchers are placed like the Stasi to report and stamp out all traditional ways, all hopes for reincarnation, etc, except among the Pithdarans who manage to play "good orthodox Rokari" while retaining their lineages, giving any Pithdaran selected to join the Rokari zzabur caste a vast advantage in connections and ancestral magic. While Leplain can try to win over individual Pithdaran sorcerers as zealots for their way, those are likely to meet accidents or other such problems, creating a mafia inside a mafia-turned-gestapo.

 

Jeff is the first to admit that the sorcery rules in RQG cover the abilities of Lhankor Mhytes and similar part time sorcerers rather than professionals with access to greater Invisible God insights. The Rokari zzaburi have accomplices in the pagan-mounted-Horali-elevated-to-Talar caste as their enforcers lavished in luxuries none of the sorcerers gets to enjoy. The peasantry attempted to get some security against these enforcers building walls and ditches, but those were verboten by the enforcers.

 

Other than being inflexibly stratified caste societies?

The "justice" of Yelm or the Esrolian Grandmothers is similar, and Orlanth is the (ever so slightly) reformed successful bully.

Maybe the problem is the emulation of ancient world societies with such social stratification and a vast population accepting the divinity/exceptionalism of the leaders.

 

The history of the Serpent Kings and their fights with the Pendali is a bit more complicated than that. Those struggles were followed by decline of Seshnela and recovery from that decline, with further struggles against exiled Pendali, Enerali, and Pralori conquerors of the lower Tanier valley. Tanisor was joined to Seshnela as on and off as the Serpent crown's influence declined and recovered. The populations assimilated by Seshnela during the Dawn Age were Pendali, Enerali, and possibly indigenous Hykimi.

Yelm is the Sun, and of course I benefit from him because I, as a Pelorian peasant, need light to see and the Sun is so much cheaper than firewood and candles. Maybe I don't quite see what the benefit of sacrifices to Buserian is to me personally, but I know that scribes are very important for making sure that my taxes get recorded properly so I don't get my legs broken by a Shargashi again, and for other things too. There's an overall social order, and I can easily see how the tithes fit in, because there's social integration there. 

The Invisible God is now so depersonalized in the de-Christianized Malkioni that there is no remnant of any sense that he's at all relevant to me. He's almost purely an abstract Prime Mover, a purely philosophical entity. And the social order that is relevant to me is detached from the Invisible God and the zzaburi, because it's ancestor worship and agricultural gods and crafts gods. In fact, not only are the saints now Theosophical Ascended Masters, they're also not accepted by the Rokari, so even the ancestor worship is disconnected from the Invisible God except in the most abstract terms. 

And what happens is that people end up either bringing back in a little bit of that Christianity, to make the Invisible God interventionist enough to send his only beloved son Malkion into the world, or they take up the Indian elements and make zzaburi brahmins outright and suggest that anyone who does religious activities as an authority figure is a zzaburi. I think that says something about how unstable the Rokari as described are, that we either back away from them or slide in another direction entirely. Which is most obvious for the Rokari because the various softenings of the new Malkionism are least present there. 

EDIT: What I find most interesting is that not many people are going for the idea that Malkioni are in fact, as a society massively powerful because they have the benefits of large-scale sorcery spread out among the people alongside the benefits of theurgy and spiritism. We can all agree that there's a rough balance of power between the "four ways of doing magic", it seems. 

1 minute ago, Jeff said:

I don't find the Rokari fascist at all. Nor the Lunars. Not even really the New Hrestoli, although certainly a better argument can be given for them. They are certainly theocratic, but then again so are most Gloranthan societies. Certainly the Lunar Empire is a literal theocracy.

Rokari Malkionism posits a hereditary caste system with a semi-meritocratic, non-hereditary "priestly" caste at the top (who doesn't muddy in their hands in the affairs of the world, but need to work with the nobility to maintain their position). I could imagine a Greek philosopher suggesting something like this to Demetrius of Bactria as a way of better governing his domains.

That's an analogy. I am using that analogy to explain why understanding the Rokari doesn't mean thinking that they're a morally neutral society or social order, both absolutely and relatively to Glorantha as a whole. 

I also assumed that you were using metaphorical language when you said "us moderns" were closer to Rokari, because the literal comparison would be nonsense. So in that assumed metaphorical language, the point is that I know, personally, far more people who are ideologically committed to egalitarianism to the point of utopianism (New Hrestoli) and far more people who have unusual, expansive ethical precepts and are willing to embrace what is generally condemned (Lunars) and far more people who have mystical predilections or are friendly to mysticism (both) than people who are hidebound conservatives that believe social mobility leads to apocalypse and that mysticism is a negative thing (Rokari). All of these are, again, metaphorical terms to counter what appeared to be a metaphor about Rokari being more like modern humans. 

3 minutes ago, Jeff said:

Well, to each their own. I find the Rokari easier to understand than the New Hrestoli myself. After all, the Rokari are closer to us moderns than the Lunars or Hrestoli....

Being able to understand the Rokari is not the same thing as finding them palatable or protagonistic. It is fairly easy to understand why some people find fascist ideologies attractive without yourself finding fascism attractive. 

And I mean, I know a lot more Lunars and New Hrestoli, metaphorically, than Rokari. Especially on a social level. 

1 minute ago, Joerg said:

I have a hard time trying to paint Rokari wizards as something palatable. Not so much Marxist, really more "Aryan" in ripping (male only) individuals out of their family environment, robbing them of ancestral benefits, and indoctrinating them very early on, with probably some "waste disposal" as individuals fail to live up to the expectations of their likewise indoctrinated superiors.

Monastic sorcerers have been a thing since long before Rokarism massacred the tenets of Malkioni society and philosophy by cutting off whatever displeased the founder(s), which was mainly any teaching derived from Hrestol despite Hrestolism being the original form of non-Brithini Malkionism (with the Ingareens and the Waertagi rare or rather distant outliers). I don't see evidence for under-age admission to these monastic orders of sorcerers, though, it looks like an alternative for zzabur caste members to pursue a return to henosis. No idea whether there were monastic sorcerer orders that also accepted Men-of-All born to other castes. (At least one of these survives basically unchanged from Makanist Seshnela, in Jonatela.)

The question must be allowed whether caste assigned by parentage or by order of birth basically at birth is any better than ripping out young children from their destiny defined by these castes to become an utterly vulnerable individual bereft of any security net while training for wizardhood, though. The "logic" of the caste system assigned by birth was (successfully) questioned by Siglat and his companions.

I don't really care about making them palatable, I care about making their society look like one that could possibly exist in a material world populated by human beings and interacting with competing societies. The Rokari can be as evil everyone has their own point of view and nobody is evil in Glorantha no matter what they do as you like, I just think that Glorantha is better when it's populated by humans so that there's something to contrast the supernatural beings against. 

4 minutes ago, Joerg said:

How is a sorcerer caste different from other hereditary temple families in Orlanthi lands or Esrolia? Not even Harmast became a chief priest, those roles are fairly firmly in lineages. (Not that Harmast lacked such a lineage, although a defeated one.)

The temple family interacts with a god who is important to you and directly relevant to the world of your society. The zzaburi interact with a god who is not important to you and irrelevant to anyone but the sorcerers, because of how abstract it is. The extraction of wealth to support the temple family gives something back, but the extraction of wealth to support the zzaburi, given the assumptions made in the post up to that point, gives nothing back to anyone, because there's not really even room for people of other castes to have interest in the zzabur philosophy in the current model, especially for Rokari. 

In other words, the former is arguably unjust in a way that requires quite a bit of work to figure out, the latter is unjust in a way that makes it seem incredible no dronari or horali would have figured it out. And of course, in the Runequest Glorantha rules, sorcerers are not really capable of winning a fight against a few dozen people, so even the threat of incineration to repress both the peasantry and the armed populace seems rather ineffectual. 

My argument is that Malkioni societies should be adjusted such that they are unjust in a way that requires quite a bit of work to figure out. Entirely so that I don't feel vaguely unclean at the kind of implicit degradation-kink roleplay necessary to play Malkioni characters who are intended to be non-zzaburi and thus too stupid to see what should be obvious given what has been laid out, and not for any reason such as thinking it would make these societies stronger, more interesting, and more fun to play in and interact with. 

Quote

Why not European colonialism in the Caribbean or on the American mainland?

(WIth a repeat performance of the combination of Koryonos conquest following the plague...)

They don't appear to have physically exterminated the indigenous population to replace them with settlers, but instead use them as a perpetual source of labor (in the grim layout I've put together). Not really enough genocide going on for that to be the appropriate analogy. 

11 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

Yeah, that’s how I wrote them. Structurally, I used Persian chrome for Carmanians because it gave us:

1) a very different feel for a monotheistic(ish) chivalrous(ish) society than we saw in the “modern” mediæval Malkioni West (Jeff’s bathwater incident was still decades in the future when I wrote this stuff): I was exploring how far pre-GL Malkionism could deviate from the modern mainstream, playing with Manichaeans and dualism, etc..

2) an initially ancient-world model (“Persians”) that could interact with “Greeks,” “Romans,” “Babylonians,” “Byzantines,” “Ottomans” etc. (that is, the then-common analogies for various Pelorian cultures) in ways that make sense and have some historical and literary depth; again, this is before the Glorious ReAscent inspired the faux-archaic “Babylonian Lunar” mistake that blighted the Hero Wars / HeroQuest era.

3) a neat twist on the Arkat vs. Nysalor, truth in Darkness vs. deceiving Light angle to the Gbaji Wars, which preyed on loose words used by Greg in the Zero Wane History (you’ll find them on a re-read: look for Truth, Light and Darkness, then make them core) to give them more depth and significance.

My scrappy old notes from the Before the Moon era are here; the stuff in ILH-1 and the Guide was derived from them by Greg Stafford and others.

And building on this, Invisible Orlanth would seem to be in line with something like Zurvanism, as an alternate, possibly dubious tendency within the broader Zoroastrian-esque Carmanian religion. Of course, Zurvanism was fatalistic and that doesn't seem much like Orlanth, so perhaps it's somewhat closer in effect to the "Mazdaist" reaction to Zurvanism of firmly reasserting free will and denying the importance of any transcendent time-controlling deities. (With the Chariot of Lightning as the even more syncretic Manichaeism?) At least, in a Glorantha where it's not yet another anti-Lunar response. 

19 minutes ago, radmonger said:

I think we have been reading the same soources, but it seems reading them differently.

As I see it, malkioni society can be divided into 5 groups. 4 of them are Brithini, Vadeli, Rokari and Hrestoli.  

Brithini society works stably for them, Vadeli are ther own thing. Rokari and Hrestoli both have aspirations to bascially become Brithini. Neither is a stable society, they will either succeed or collapse.

It is all the others who are  'most Malkioni'. Almost all Malkioni accept Rune Lords of approved gods as Horali, and God Talkers as Dronals. Most Malkioni accept Rune Priests of farming gods as (socially, but not magically)  Zzaburi. Fewer accept Heros of ruling gods as Talars. There are enough options to thoroughly paint the map of Western-Central Glorarantha with direrent interpretions of who society can afford to be Right.

A Rune Priest acting socially as a Zzaburi has low Rightness, and so cannot benifit from the magical support of more othodox Zzaburi. But if the local Talar merely turns a blind eye to them, the caste transgression may be recoverable, and not contagious. It may not be perfectly Right, but everyone gets to eat.

All right. My interpretation is that the Rokari and "Hrestoli" represent clear majorities of Malkioni together, followed by Safelster's Arkatisms. Groups who are outside of this, like the Castle Coast, Arolanit, the Trader Princes, etc. are minor, based on Chaosium staff saying directly that they are minor when asked. 

I'm focusing entirely on Rokari because the non-Loskalmic Malkionism in Fronela is very tenuous and intermingled with Orlanthi practices- they may be almost "Aeolian" or they may be something quite different, but we don't know. Loskalm is explicitly a utopian state that does not work and must change when in contact with the outside world- it doesn't have to make perfect sense because the conditions which allowed it to exist no longer are in force. Arkatism is also explicitly "henotheistic", which in the previous mode of Malkionism would mean allowing the worship of "pagan" entities and in this mode remains undefined- does it reference whether zzaburi caste restrictions are looser, or something very abstract and nearly meaningless? Who can say? 

But the Rokari are well-defined and their caste lines are firmly drawn. We know that for sure. And the answers that have been given to explain the new mode of Malkionism indicate that the ancestor worship and theistic worship are performed within the non-zzaburi castes. So zzaburi are defined not by being religious specialists, but by being sorcerers (who use sorcery to worship the Invisible God etc. etc.) A Rune Priest is not acting as a zzaburi unless they're a Lhankor Mhy or Chalana Arroy one who's casting sorcery. 

Would it be more sensible for zzaburi to be "religious specialists"? Sure. That's, as I posted previously, a valid Glorantha. But it does not appear to be what is intended in the recent sources, where the intent seems to be a 1:1 relationship of zzaburi to sorcery and sorcery to zzaburi and of men-of-all as having sorcery through being able to be zzaburi. 

4 minutes ago, metcalph said:

I disagree that we have been told that the Rokari society (edit: other than the Zzaburi) is entirely non-sorcerous and I disagree that the Zzaburi are layered on top of it.  There are other ways to construe the statements made in the Guide and elsewhere about the Rokari that do not require us to assume the absolute worst about them.

Again that's a claim with which I disagree.  They are one of the centres of civilization and they once managed to conquer the whole world.  

A much better way of phrasing this might be, whereas in other societies, magical power resides in the temples, Seshnelan magical power resides in the wizards.  That way, one doesn't have to tie oneself in knots by having to claim that the average seshnegi sucks at spirit or rune magics if their wizards are powerful.  Because that's really confusing two different things.

Parasitic means they give absolutely nothing in return, which is not supported by the sources.  You can make the same claim about Esrolia in that magical power flows into the Temples (and Esrolia is a high unequal society).  But it does not follow that the temples provide nothing in return and so it should not follow that the Wizards provide nothing in returm,.

 

The peasants do not have their own entirely independent source of beneficial magic.  They worship the gods at the direction of the nobility - Seshna Likita for example is an ancestor of the Kings of Seshnela and so her priestesshoods would be restricted to women of noble rank for example.  Both the peasants and the nobles also receive Caste Magic through the guidance of the Wizards and so on, thereby creating an interlocking society.  Yes, the situation is unequal in the favour of the Nobles and Wizards but pretty much every civilized society in glorantha is similarly unequal.  As for solving the dilemma, I think the first step would have been to avoid making cartoonishly sweeping statements about Seshnegi society.

 

Well, let me respond to the section that's at least a coherent reply rather than an absurd line-by-line which ignores that sentences build upon each other.

"The peasants do not have their own entirely independent source of beneficial magic". "Both the peasants and the nobles also receive Caste Magic through the guidance of the Wizards (sic) and so on, thereby creating an interlocking society."

Both of those things are false, or rather, not evident at all in what we are being told about Rokari society by Chaosium. Peasant worship of earth goddesses for agriculture is led by clerical figures from the dronar caste, just like horal worship of totemic spirits for combat is led by horali. Talar ancestor worship is led by either dronar shamans or talars themselves. Zzaburi seem to have no role. The dronars and talars and horals receive caste magic through adherence to the strictures of the Invisible God cult, not via zzaburi intervention. We are indeed repeatedly told by Chaosium that zzaburi dedicate themselves to sorcery and nothing else, that they need all of a human lifetime to become accomplished at it. So in terms of reading the public-facing sources, the sources simply do not support that these proposals you have made are part of the Chaosium understanding of the setting.

But reading them as additions to the setting, what they're doing is moving the zzaburi more towards being brahmins, in that they oversee all areas of religious activity and the most important aspects of it are their exclusive province. They are responsible for holding the collective memory of civilization by maintaining the religious code, with the Abiding Book and whatever other scriptures you want to retain or invent serving for the Vedas and so on. That's certainly a workable editing of the setting! It makes Rokari and Malkioni society make more sense. I have my qualms about it personally, just because I think there are some really unfortunate resonances between Teshnos, the extent to which Malkioni castes are modeled on the varnas, and the extent to which Seshnelans continue to be depicted and read as white. But it's a perfectly good Glorantha. It's just not the one that is being provided to us by Chaosium at the moment.

What's also kind of funny is that the problem isn't that the society is unequal, it's that the inequality would be exceptionally visible to every member of it and the masses would be alienated from the ideology of rule! It's not about moral condemnation of the Malkioni or Rokari, it's about whether their society is plausible. Now, the Chaosium answer seems to be that Malkioni are not really human and don't behave like humans do, but I'm currently striking that as an obvious error mentally.

Anyways, the point of my posts has been to try and develop Rokari and by extension Malkioni society under the Chaosium model by pushing and pulling it. "Cartoonishly sweeping statements about Seshnegi society" is just baffling- Seshnela isn't real, there's no Tanisorians who would be deeply offended by my reductive interpretation of the culture. Seshnela isn't real, so we can talk about it without having to pretend that it is real and that there must be inarticulated depths to it when we want to articulate some of those depths.

Just now, metcalph said:

That's quite claim which I don't think is true.

It's nice that you don't think it's true. But the dilemma here is simply that we are told that Rokari society, like all Malkioni societies, has an entire non-sorcerous society within itself, on top of which is layered zzaburi sorcerers. But the Rokari are not massively stronger or wealthier than non-Malkioni societies. 

So either Malkioni spiritism and theism are ineffectual compared to the spiritism and theism of other peoples, or zzaburi sorcery is an ineffectual, marginal addition onto their spiritism and theism. And if we assume the zzaburi take significant resources- that there is a meaningful upward flow in Rokari society from drones and horals and talars to zzaburs- then they would be parasitic. And the first term there is broadly accepted. 

And of course, behind the scenes, all of this is derived from the Malkioni developing as a "purely sorcerous" society in a system where that was an equally capable worldview and magical methodology to theism and animism/spiritism for forming social structures upon and then having sorcery be redefined to the inherent province of a tiny elite. And then systematically closing off various attempts to syncretize old system and nascent new system by emphasizing that Malkioni worship the exact same gods and brutalize very similar spirits to what Sartarites do. 

So if we want the Rokari wizards to be anything other than an instrument for proto-Marxist propaganda, we kind of have to solve this dilemma and answer just what it is that they do, what social function they have, without falling back on "they cast sorceries on the peasants for the benefit of all", which is now absurd when peasants have their own, entirely independent source of beneficial magic, which is just as good as the Sartarite kind. It makes them look ineffectual. 

4 hours ago, Joerg said:

Malkioni society doesn't have to be better than Theyalan theism, but the fact that it is still around unlike e.g. the Serpent Brotherhood or the Pendali/Enjoreli speaks for the usefulness of the sorcerers.

Using the Rokari aberration against the Hrestoli who believe in reincarnation isn't quite fair.

The parasitic character of the elites is debatable, but it is a feature of the "Bronze Age" and Ancient societies that Glorantha seeks to mirror that there are ostentatious elites for magical benefits. Zzaburi "ostentation" is different from Talar ostentation (which is similar to theist elites and their ostentation).

Well, that's the thing, right? Malkioni societies are roughly on par with non-sorcerous societies in terms of agrarians pushing non-agrarians to the fringe, while supposedly fully containing an entire non-sorcerous society within themselves and ostensibly gaining benefit from their sorcerers by concentrating resources on them. So if XsubMalkioni is approximately equal to XsubOrlanthi, and XsubOrlanthi is (Theism+Animism) and XsubMalkioni is (Theism+Animism + Zzaburi), either their Theism+Animism has to be worse or their Zzaburi ineffectual. 

Which is what I mean by parasitism- Zzaburi suck in resources but, unlike a warrior aristocracy or temple hierarchy, would give approximately nothing back. Which is also a consequence of how Malkioni societies post-bathwater incident have become increasingly less "Malkioni"- the laws of Malkion no longer applying to the peon drones and horals, etc. Because if you had some kind of social order where every class was integrated into it, you could at least envision the worthlessness of the zzaburi being difficult to grasp for people within the system. 

But post-bathwater incident, talars and zzaburi sit atop a mass of conquered subjects who have had "dronar" and "horal" applied to them after the fact, and this is used to describe Malkioni societies right down to the Gloranthan contemporary. There is no social integration, supposedly, and the Malkioni would seem to most closely resemble European colonialism in Africa in their social order. 

I think that's not good, as awful as we agree the Rokari to be. 

27 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Brithini and by extension also Malkioni society is designed to provide ideal support to the sorcerers, who in return provide magic to protect and enhance society.

Well, to unpack this argument a little bit more, Malkioni societies are not massively more successful than other forms of social organization. There has never been a time when God Forgot had an empire dominating all of Kethaela. Umathela hasn't expanded wildly out of the initial settlements, and so on, and so forth. Indeed, examples like Hrestol, the Serpent Kings, and the God Learners suggest that it is stepping outside of the assumptions of the default social order which is necessary to achieve an enduring advantage over other societies (temporarily). What you might even call "heroism". 

So the "protect and enhance society" part would seem to have close to nil effect, because Malkioni society also practices the same kind of theistic and spiritistic magic that their competitors do, but have minimal advantage over them. Which would suggest zzaburi are, in practical terms, parasitic- they take and give nothing of value back. (And I mean, they can't even give philosophy back, because the Rokari philosophy would only be relevant to the congenital elect of the zzaburi. If Malkioni had a stronger belief in reincarnation, that would at least be understandable, but that's not quite evident in the existing sources.) 

Another alternative might be that Malkioni theism and spiritism are simply less effective and sorcery makes up the gap. That when they perform their ceremonies and rituals, they get worse results than members of other societies do. Almost as if their worship was, in some fashion, misapplied... 

EDIT: As far as Brithini go, well, Brithini are consistently depicted as inhuman monsters, and it's entirely believable that inhuman monstrous entities that pretend to be vaguely humanish would be socially strange and implausible. And if for some sick, demented reason you thought the Brithini ought to be basically human, the Brithini caste system is one that ensures kinship between members of the castes and so softens the hierarchical nature of it- there are reciprocal bonds there which weaken hegemonic power. 

13 hours ago, davecake said:

But the zzaburi are also necessary for society to function.

I think the crux of Rokari and New Hrestol Idealist societies is the question "Why are zzaburi necessary for society to function?" That is, if we have a social order which contains within itself an entire "theistic" or "animistic" society in waiting, why would that fail to function if the zzaburi were removed? And if it would continue to function, why do zzaburi continue to exist? It's easy to see ways that New Hrestol Idealism, with its vision of caste mobility, would be able to preserve zzaburi as long as its social order exists, but for Rokarism, where it's explicit that zzaburi focus exclusively on an abstract religious practice that is not just irrelevant to the lives of the majority of the populace but explicitly hostile to them, it raises the question of why this order has been stable for the past few centuries. 

One answer might be that zzaburi are functionally irrelevant- they have no social cost to their existence, and they offer no social benefit. But that's hardly satisfying, of course. So I think the likely answers probably exist in the space between "zzaburi are beneficiently fundamental to the social structure in an inarticulate way" and "zzaburi are malevolently fundamental to the social structure because the Rokari social structure exists to exploit the other castes, so it's stable in the same way that warrior aristocracies are stable." But maybe I'm missing something, of course. 

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Parts of the Genertela box feel a little scamlike to sophisticated modern readers because they tried so hard to create plots that connect new regions into the central Dragon Pass conflict (the "core game") that the results feel somewhere between ingenuous and inauthentic. It's a trap, a naked adventure seed for the GM to crunch down on when the players ask what's interesting to our characters over on this map over here. We're wise to that tempting maguffin now, won't get fooled again until we take a peek below the text and digest what's really going on.

I think Invisible Orlanth on one side of the empire and Storm Pent on the other appear a little too convenient as ways to broaden the storm-centered storyline far from Dragon Pass and provide a sense that the spiritual conflict is at least continental in scope, more "epic." Bracketing the empire with natural antagonists Sartar-aligned characters can discover and enlist as allies created a natural gasp in those George Lucas days . . . 

 

Encountering Invisible Orlanth in the Guide, outside of its proper context, I came to an entirely opposite conclusion, that here was something that threw the few acres of hill country and its conflicts into a different light. After all, I reasoned, if Invisible Orlanth is debatably acceptable in Carmania, which to me clearly seemed one of the ideological centers of the Lunar way in modern Glorantha, and regular Orlanth is noted as a common cult in the same section, then clearly we have a region where the supposed eternal opposition between Red Goddess and Orlanth didn't exist, or was present in some fashion that didn't mean constant violence.

That sort of naive accommodationism is now, if not dead, at the very least firmly staked to its coffin, of course. That was back when you could believe that the Lunar Provinces weren't essentially under perpetual military occupation and ready to explode all over again in an orgy of bloodshed at any major setback! As things stand now, Invisible Orlanth is mostly interesting because of the storm-god genealogy for Malkion/the primordial Malkioni. The "aeolian" tendency. 

At the time I had such naivete, I also failed to grasp the other side of this coin- Invisible Orlanth and Storm Pentans as potentially radical democratizing forces in their cultural context, and thus as inevitably "frauds" in the sense that they offer the potential of liberation. Thus, they are consequences of the Lunar Way, and possibly even "adjuncts" to it, and so inevitably Chaotic in some fashion. It's no wonder that Charg is just full of obvious Storm Bulls and yet treated with such terrible premonitions- even the "opposition" are still Chaos-tainted by their belief in dangerously emancipatory nonsense! 

1 hour ago, AlHazred said:

I remember getting a poster map of the Lunar Empire when it first came out; it was about 3 feet by 4 feet or so. Lovely thing. Then I printed out Sartar to scale; it was a tiny square about an inch and a half by two inches. I pasted it to the bottom of the Lunar Empire map, to the accompaniment of my (Sartarite) players' groans and gnashing teeth.

Good times!

I've been working on a square map of the Lunar Empire and extending it to the southern border of Sartar means that there's a tiny corner of Dragon Pass and then a lot of Arstola and far eastern Ralios along the bottom. 😆

19 minutes ago, hipsterinspace said:

I think the big difference is that Arkat wasn't a Malkioni, he was a Brithini. When you contextualize it with his Hrestolism I think it makes sense, ultimately he was a Hrestoli acting in the service of justice.

As for the bigger question of the pagan gods, they probably contextualize their relationship with the gods differently. Maybe their relationship with the god is more instrumental than it would be for a non-Malkioni, but the big difference seems to be in the understanding of the gods as an emanation of the runes. I'd imagine that for them Humakt isn't a literal divine personage who owns the Death rune, but rather an emanation of the Death rune from primordial Law (Invisible God), which has been mythically personified into the archetype of Humakt.

See: Zistor.

By the time Arkat joined the Humakt cult, he was already no longer abiding by Brithini restrictions as a Hrestoli man-of-all/knight. So although there's an easy way to avoid the convolutions of trying to retrofit the Arkat backstory into a model of the Malkioni where there's no objection to non-zzaburi doing some theurgy- just say that the Brithini, who are already no longer a factor in modern Glorantha, all practiced appropriate forms of sorcery and rejected even the accommodation of the mortal Malkioni- this way does not explain why Arkat joining the Humakt cult offended his Seshnelan allies so. Certainly we can perform additional corkscrew maneuvers to make this backstory consistent, but I think at that point it's worth reminding ourselves that Arkat's backstory as we now know it was written when devout Hrestoli and Brithini alike refused to engage in theistic worship, and that if that component has been removed entirely as a Malkioni aspect, we probably need to invent a new backstory for Arkat which takes the new version into account. 

Of course, at the same time, even in the older model, there was clearly a great deal of "paganism" in the early Hrestoli societies, because otherwise the Seshna Likita and Serpent Kings materials make little to no sense, and Arkat's worship of Humakt presumably goes well beyond the "tolerable" warrior societies in some fashion. So there are difficulties or gaps whichever version we use, or to put it another way, no model of Malkioni society, old or new, is quite capable of offering a consistent picture of what we know about Malkioni societies. The new model is one where the only Malkioni that matter in description and background materials are frequently zzaburi, because they have the remnants of monotheism, the old model is one where it's exceptionally difficult to understand how the tension between "pagan" and "pious" can remain consistently alive, rather than the one or the other being extinguished- after all, the power structures of society favor "pious" Seshnelans and Loskalmi and Safelstrans, and yet "paganism" remains viable across centuries, and also clearly, "pious" Malkioni have to have some way to avoid reliance on earth goddesses for agriculture or else "pagans" would hold the balance of the power, with the food supply in their near-exclusive control. 

2 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Halleluia brother!  I completely agree with you, which is why I do not agree with you.😇

Sister, actually. But yes.

4 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Everything we work with is a particular interpretation of Glorantha.  Greg alone was infallible.  Until we got Gregged.

I would suggest that it is possible to interpret the texts that exist in such a way that we can talk to each other about Glorantha(s) on some level other than simply holding up a specific interpretation and broadcasting it. 

I would also say that our specific Gloranthas are generally redactions, with material edited out and added in by the redactor(s), but that's actually too pedantic even for me in this context. 

1 minute ago, Ali the Helering said:

Decline is inevitable, because of the Devil's return.  'Improvement is possible' is a narrative of progress, and yet is overturned again and again.  Simply because the apocalypses (sp?) destroy tyrannies doesn't mean that they are anything other than ghastly massacres of innocents and disruptions of society and community interactions.

Decline is inevitable because of an eschatological event that may or may not happen in the future, and which is laid out in some sources as part of a cyclical pattern of destruction and rebirth? 

"Improvement is possible" is a narrative of progress, which is a term typically used to refer to the belief in the teleological nature of progress? 

The problem with Orlanth killing Yelm is that anyone opposed Yelm at all? 

Are those really universal truths about all Gloranthas, or even the core overlapping Gloranthas? Or are they particular interpretations of Glorantha? 

6 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Nonetheless, the effects on society are devastating, and it takes the affected areas centuries to recover.  While a narrative of progress is nice, it doesn't bring the dead back.  Not even the Compromise achieved that, except for the privileged deities.

If they're able to recover, I'm reasonably sure that there's not really a narrative of decline in play, because things would only be able to get worse. And since they're able to recover without devastating other parts of the world, I'm more than "reasonably" sure. I'm completely sure that there, regardless of any intentions on the part of the authors, is not a narrative of decline in play, because improvement is possible. Just like decline is possible. 

I don't know who you're addressing with "narrative of progress" there, though. 

3 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

Glorantha is certainly post-apocalyptic, multiply so.  Fall of Yelm, fall of Mernita, Syndics Ban, Closing, Dragonkill, one could go on and on.  It is clearly written as a descent from a Golden Age. 

Except that the point of the fall of Yelm is that it was also a tyranny. The Syndics Ban leads to declines and improvements in different areas of Fronela. The Closing ends. The Dragonkill comes after the EWF (another tyranny) collapses. I would say that Glorantha is clearly written somewhere between Hesiod and Whig history, where events cannot be consistently and clearly folded into narratives of fall or progress. 

The fall of Mernita is perhaps the best example of this- Mernita is destroyed because of the desire to create a makeshift, shrunken Golden Age under Manarlavus's Dome intersecting with the desire of the goddess of Mernita to reject the absolute authority of that previous time. Where is the Golden Age in this? Does it lie in the past when women didn't talk back or refuse your orders? Is it in an indefinite future in a city which doesn't seem especially better than any other Pelorian city at this time? What's left is a kind of contingent history- because these factors came together here, this tragedy ensued.

4 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

I think I was pretty careful not to claim that. I just said that Stafford was riffing on Hesiod (and a zillion authors since), and that isn’t in dispute, is it? Nor that Gloranthans claim to see a pattern of destruction and remaking of their world.

And I definitely don’t want to tell @John Biles why he picked that phrase. That would just be rude of me, no?

I think it certainly is in dispute to claim that Greg Stafford saw Glorantha as being in line with Hesiod's cosmology of decline, because there are many ways in which it is instead in line with modern historical and anthropological beliefs about the development of human societies. 

Not to mention that for Hesiod, his different ages were marked by different kinds of humans who declined in morals, but what I asked about is the idea that Glorantha is declining as an environment, rather than the people within it. Argrath isn't opening his mouth and spewing out an inexhaustible river of corruption which makes people wickeder in Mr. Biles's understanding, I presume.

2 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Never mind the tedious Mr. T. — the Society for the Appreciation of the Golden Age didn’t start with him. Surely, Stafford is riffing on Hesiod’s Works and Days, with the Hero Wars roughly corresponding to the Heroic Age (“the godly race of the heroes who are called demigods, our predecessors on the boundless earth”) sitting between the Bronze Age and Hesiod’s own (M. L. West’s translation) :

Plausibly, we are to take Glorantha’s Fourth Age as corresponding to the time of Hesiod’s fifth men, with Hesiod our scribe in the time of Harshax. So someone in Glorantha at the end of its Bronze Age might be expected to look back and see a long period of decline — I don’t say that they are objectively right, but they might well see it that way — and look forward and see war getting into its stride. Tough times coming.

Not mad, IMHO, to see thinning as a theme, but I like to think that Stafford’s KoS can be read as more than a SAGAish “no more pixie dust — innit awful!”, that it also allows a reading of “no more gods digging up my lawn — how restful.”

Where does Greg Stafford refer to the Third Age of Glorantha as a "ruined and declining" age? When was that source written? 

Generally, in the real world, the internal perspective and folkloric memory of slavery focuses on the ability of the enslaved person to trick the slaver into setting them free, rather than through becoming swole enough to bust open a manacle. I would suggest that Gloranthan contexts probably could stand to draw from that as an inspiration. 

On 10/17/2022 at 6:38 PM, John Biles said:

Most Gloranthan cultures don't have the unity, cooperation levels, or ideological coherence to conduct a war of extermination against Chaos. (Also, the history of Glorantha basically demonstrates that trying to go full Arkat on anything is the equivalent of nuking yourself to kill the cockroaches in your house.)

 

Forget a war of extermination against Chaos. Do they lack the unity, cooperation levels, or ideological coherence to kill off local broo or scorpionfolk, who are largely mundane threats without massive supernatural might? Even if, as we are assured, especially recently, that everyone except the Lunars are united in hating Chaos? 

And, no, that's not what the history of Glorantha demonstrates. No grand depopulation occurs as part of Arkat's crusade. 

Quote

But there's a substantial gap between 'Chaos is bad, but if we go alone we die and who can trust those damn Warbles' and 'Chaos is part of society' I think you're ignoring here.  

Especially since, given Glorantha's history, a grand crusade against Chaos would probably trash everything more than Chaos can actually manage.

Wouldn't this imply that anti-Chaos is morally worse than Chaos, then? 

Quote

Glorantha is a place where grand ideological crusading generally ends in you either failing and everything gets trashed, or worse, you succeed and the damage is even higher.

(The second the Lunars decided to spread We are all Us by force, they began the process of setting up to eventually go down in apocalyptic flames.)

Where does this occur, specifically? It would only apply to Arkat if you take the rare position of Nysalor and his groupies being totally innocent of wrongdoing. It wouldn't apply to the God Learners in any fashion, because they were spectacularly non-ideological and divided on what their beliefs ought to be in light of their discoveries. I wouldn't even apply it to the Lunars, because describing them as "spreading We Are All Us by force" in the context of invading Sartar is fairly baffling, let alone it leading to their defeat. Where else would this be, then?  

Quote

(This is how we know Argath killing the Gods won't lead to anything good because that kind of grand gesture by an obsessive man never, ever, ever leads to anything good in Glorantha.  All Argath is doing is setting the stage for the fourth age to be an even more ruined, declining age than the third and for the world to continue its re-enactment of the Godtime myth cycle.)

Is there any reason behind microwaved Tolkien to assume that contemporary Glorantha is "ruined and declining"? 

Firstly, the apocalyptic material in King of Sartar is impressionistic and deliberately contradictory. It needs a heaping helping of salt. 

Secondly, the "illiteracy plague" specifically is probably a play on history and specifically on the discontinuity of scripts that accompanies certain areas in the Late Bronze Age Collapse- Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary vanish, the Indus Valley script falls out of use, and then entirely different forms of writing emerge to write Greek and Indian languages somewhat later. And this in Glorantha, to go with the end of the "Bronze Age", becomes an "illiteracy plague". But it's not universal in the real world, or absolute. Written Ugaritic stops being used, but it clearly is the source of the later abjads and Phoenician alphabet. So there's a great deal of room to interpret the extent and meaning of this reference. 

So, thirdly, Argrath doesn't kill the gods in King of Sartar. There is a source ("Argrath and the Devil"), where Argrath, at an indeterminate date and in a mythologized story, takes actions that may be interpreted as killing off the gods. There is a source ("Argrathsaga") where Argrath, when he causes the Red Moon to fall, changes the way that humans relate to the gods. There is a bit of diegetic interpretation of the first source which places it during a pre-Moonfall event in Argrathsaga, from "GS". These do not add up to a clear and evident picture of what's going on "after Glorantha". What we think is happening in this timeframe largely is a consequence of our interpretation of what we read. (At least until any hypothetical, ghostly "end of the Hero Wars" timeline which sets everything down in precise order emerges.) 

Now, there's a bit of extratextual knowledge, of Greg saying that the post-Hero Wars Glorantha is like our modern, contemporary world. So perhaps that means it's disenchanted and without magic, but of course, Greg was, to my understanding, not someone who believed the contemporary world was disenchanted, so that also doesn't really pin down the fate of Glorantha. Like our world, its fate is still open, and its history hasn't ended.