Eff

For an immediate example of the last, here is Maimonides on angels: (A Guide to the Perplexed, 2:6) Now for Maimonides, God is directly present in pregnancy, through the sending of angels, but he concludes that the force of heredity and reproduction, as he knew of it, (or in modern terms, DNA, meiosis, gametogenesis, and fertilization) was the angel, rather than there being a separate malakh/entity which manipulates the process. This is tangible, accessible divinity, but it is not a divinity which serves as a substitute for life.

So we come to understand ourselves better through what, in this version, is realizing that merely suppressing the "gods" is insufficient, we must kill them/feed them to the devil instead, which is how we come to understand ourselves better? Because we've snuffed out portions of ourselves, or permanently cut their tongues out? I would say that it is not presented as something which obviates any need for labor, nor is it presented as a unique source of dependency, since hypothetically, spirit magic and sorcery and mystical magic/worldviews also allow people to live and survive as well as users of divine magic. Or to put it another way, methods other than submission to the gods allow you to live and thrive in the world. Why does the possible "tangibility" or "accessibility" of the divine necessarily obviate human effort for you? I don't actually see where the two things come together- it only barely makes sense in the context of Christianity and Islam, in that if you take statements about divine omnipotence literally (which is philosophically a minority position, the more common one historically has been to understand the power of God as constrained or limited by other aspects of God) then you could say that obviously prayer could provide for all your needs and no effort is needed. But there are many other possibilities beyond that, which do not suggest that this is possible, let alone desirable.

Do Gloranthans in the present of the setting not have to "shift for themselves"? And that's not true of "IRL religions" generally. It's true for some contexts, most of which are very historically contingent.

I think my problem with that reading is that it is coming after a long period of imprisonment and incarceration of the gods, rather than their running free and causing problems. This sort of dampens any kind of metaphor about growing up by abandoning the gods, because it's not just abandoning them, it's very specifically destroying them in this reading, I think. Almost a fusion of an Oedipus and Electra complex together at that point, understanding gods as "parental" figures who humanity must move beyond to reach childhood's end. (I also don't think this reading can be fully sustained given the whole "But it's still here, and now it's invisible instead!" passage in King of Sartar, but in the event I suppose it could be interpreted as the everpresent threat of Mommy Sedenya coming to revert humanity to dependent childhood?)

And because Middle-Earth's history is significantly sparser and less sociological than Glorantha's, I think putting together a serious timeline like the RQG family history would involve significantly more invention. If you're making someone from Bree in a game set during the time period of TOR (between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), what events would they reasonably have been involved with in Eriador that could be found in the appendix timelines? Let alone for someone from a much less detailed area like the Woodmen or Rohan or dwarf communities not under the Lonely Mountain? If I wanted to have that kind of feel, I think I'd adapt it much more abstractly- a set of questions which are more about the outlook your character has from interacting with Middle-Earth. Perhaps a brief lifepath system that asks whether your Bree character interacts more with the Shire, with Rangers, "with elves" (probably via book-learning more than via going out and gatecrashing dinners at the Grey Havens), with dwarves, with trolls and giants, with orcs (i.e. via traveling in dangerous territory!), or mostly with Bree itself. Maybe with options for "the land" as well, to emphasize the almost animistic landscape of Middle-Earth. And then from there you have the kinds of plot points and worldview options that RQG family history gives you.

Something that's genuinely fascinating to me is the extent to which the interpretation of the Great Compromise is that it requires the negation of agency on the part of spiritual beings, (which I am using to minimize any dispute of whether something is a god or a great spirit or an ascended master) and the assertion of agency is seen as cosmologically threatening, something which could destroy the world. Existence in this interpretation seems to be built on- well, there are words to describe states of compromised or near-eliminated agency in the context of the real world, but they're intrinsically inflammatory, I think. So I'll say that Glorantha's existence in this interpretation seems to be a gigantic Omelas machine, or a kind of inverse gnosticism where it's the demiurge's archons who are truly the ones imprisoned in materiality. I'll own up to finding this distasteful, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding it.

As a GM, I would strongly discourage a PC from playing a truly uninitiated character in an RQG game, because they not only won't have access to Rune magic, they will, extrapolating from RAW, have no points of spirit magic except what they can buy with initial cash, can only buy spirit magic at full price, and of course receive none of the benefits of cult membership related to skills. (They would also have no access to sorcery, since even Malkioni sorcerers are members of the Invisible God cult, it looks like. Not that that's as immediately relevant given RQG sorcery.) So as a member of the group or party, they would quite simply have fewer verbs to make use of, those verbs would be weaker, and the overall consequence is that it is hard to see how the fun would outweigh the frustration. But RQG understands initiation very differently from other versions of RQ did and how the various versions of HQ have done so, and one of the consequences of that is that piety/the sense of closeness to a god is not directly related to initiation. If you don't contribute to your cult, that doesn't seem to revoke your initiation, it just would presumably make it very difficult to refill Rune magic. I think that a character who was somewhat indifferent to the gods would be best represented by someone without the Passions associated with the cult, or with reduced Cult Lore and Worship skills, as opposed to someone without any cultic relationship whatsoever.

A third, much shorter post, finally talking about the founding myth of Glorantha- it may be the intended foundation of the setting as of RQ2 (minus embellishments) but it is also clearly inadequate to use this to understand the setting. I'm going to quote the text you used as a summary, @mfbrandi Who and what are the gods manifesting within time, in this understanding? Nysalor, Zistor, the EWF dragons, and the Red Goddess are constructed from within time, and while there's a version of the setting in which all of these are Gbaji, I don't think that's a Glorantha that anyone has ever assembled with red yarn and pushpins. Who is the lowercase eternal champion? Where's Arkatgrath at the fall of the EWF, or at the collapse of the Middle Sea Empire? Agratharkat's quest may have been constructed to Joseph Campbell's instructions, or it may not have been, but in the particulars, the two vary quite dramatically- indeed, if you attempt to read Argrath's life as a reiteration of the Arkat mythos, Argrath is not Arkat, Argrath is Harmast and Sheng Seleris is Arkat! And then Harmast kills Arkat and finishes the job by doing the opposite of what Arkat did historically. So if we take it as given that Argrath is Arkat, it is very dubious that there is a cycle, rather than a new set of events which Arkat-2 understands in light of his past. So here's another myth which is not in any sense a founding myth, because it's a kind of bouillon cube or ramen soup packet: Now let's have that again. And again. What's going on here? My interpretation is a pretty simple one- Orlanth tries to solve the problem of injustice by killing those who behave unjustly, such as his uncle Yelm. But because Orlanth's reign is itself built upon acts of injustice, it can only end in Wakboth, who shall do to Orlanth what Orlanth did to Yelm, with the same relationship between them. The cycle moves forward. But it doesn't. What happens is that Orlanth decides to give up his dominion over the universe, and Yelm gives up his dominion over the universe. They compromise, and strike a deal, and this deal is one that grows big enough to have a place for Wakboth, who is transfigured into Time. They admit the existence of linear time into the world, and in turn, linear time becomes part of the world. And then when anyone attempts to bring back eternity and deny the importance of Now/Time, then the world pushes back against them. But it does not destroy them, it incorporates them and adjusts for them. Arachne Solara is subtle, but malicious she is not. Or so I have concluded. (Or on a metatextual level, these events can be quite easily spun around and reinterpreted so long as we accept what came after RQ2... Even something so strange, so Pocharngo-esque, as misapplied worship, even if we need to transfigure it to find it a place.)

Why would intelligent, curious people believe that magic works, or that by performing a ceremonial invocation of rain and pleading with an intangible person who dictates the clouds and makes the hail fill out forms in triplicate they can actually make it rain? There's a substantial quantity of theoretical work done on this, but let me use another practical example. Have you ever struck a computer and had that fix a problem you were having with it? Have you ever done so hoping that it might fix the problem without knowing why it might possibly do so? You have performed magic, and you believed in it. You thought that an action performed with inadequate reason for it to do what it's meant to do would work, but you did so because it had worked in the past. Or you learned about it from another folk magician who had it work for them. This is not to say that thumping a computer is inherently incapable of fixing problems, there are certainly potential mechanisms that can do so. After all, Claude Levi-Strauss reported secondhand the findings of a man named Quesalid, a traditional medical and magical practitioner of the Kwakwaka'wakw people, who had become a "shaman" (as Levi-Strauss uses the term) intending to expose the fraudulent nature of traditional medicine, but in the process of doing so, learned to his shock that it worked- that when he hid cotton in his mouth and bit the inside of his cheek to stain it with blood, spitting out the blood-soaked cotton to show he had pulled the disease out of a sick patient- there was clearly a medicinal effect from this ceremony. You could call it the placebo effect, which I think really undersells the full range of bizarre effects that sociopsychological context has on medicine (not least of which is that it is quite possible to administer an emetic to patients to treat nausea and it will reduce their nausea rather than inducing vomiting) but the point is that magic can turn out to have rational cause-and-effect buried within. More importantly, when it comes to complex systems like computers, cars, and the human body, it is very difficult to understand the precise chains of cause and effect and doing folk magic works often enough to become folk magic. Rituals justify themselves. And perhaps this is mostly psychology (it can't actually be all psychology because there are physical mechanisms involved), but we are talking about why intelligent, curious people thought that their religion worked. And the simple answer is that, like thumping a computer, it did work. It didn't work in the direct, simple way of push button-rain falls, but they would have seen rituals performed and results happen. And to continue with this analogy, if you have a problem with your computer, if you're like me, you have a ritualized set of responses you go through, some of which are rational (pressing ctrl-alt-del or alt-f4), some of which are semi-rational (continuing to press alt-f4 multiple times when it fails to work the first time) and some of which are nonrational or irrational (swearing at the computer). And if you have a dry spell, perhaps you have a series of rational responses (slaughter the safety margin in the livestock to reduce the need for grazing) and you have your religious/magical ones, but they have a particular order. And you start with the small interventions and move up to the bigger ones. (And recursion to the mean and the law of averages mean that statistically, big rituals are likely to "work" because they're more likely to come towards the tail end of dry spells.) But maybe the rituals all fail. Maybe your computer seems bricked. And then you start trying to improvise. Maybe nothing you try works. You fall back on mythology- sometimes, there are long droughts, because Ba'al and Mot are fighting again. And Athtar/irrigation isn't enough to make up for the lack of rain. He just can't stretch enough to reach the edge of Ba'al's throne. Maybe if you get the layabouts and the braggarts, like Anat who keeps talking about how she beat up Fire until Fire cried like a little baby, to pitch in, you can get enough of a harvest to keep people going. Or maybe you send the violent Anat off to fight and secure food elsewhere, through force or through service. And maybe you just have to wait it out. Seven years passed before Anat fought Mot herself and threshed him, winnowed him, ground him into flour, and burned his chaff. And maybe you start looking around to see what the people in wetter areas know. The other aspect that Wittgenstein understandably missed is that these techniques were traditions, they were built on the weight of a long stretch of observed correlations, but if they stopped working, or if a technique proved to "bring rain", the old could be pushed aside or the lineup expanded. In all of this, there's a clear theoretical basis for these techniques, and it is one that does not underlie all of religion everywhere, but it is a common one- namely, that humans are not unique beings, but are rather ordinary and representative. We have minds, we have a social order. Other things must have minds and a social order. See, dogs have a clear social order. Bees have a clear social order. Dogs have minds, even if they're not going to be doing the accounting anytime soon. It makes sense that this is general. That the natural world has minds and a social order, and because of this, appeals to that mind through knowing that social order work as well as doing so with humans does. It is worth pointing out here that the question of why consciousness and minds exist and how they emerge from things which do not have minds is still one that there's no clear answers to, and where panpsychism (mind is universal) is at least as credible as claiming that consciousness is an illusion or does not exist, because they are both the same answer in an important- there is no distinction between matter without mind and matter with minds, and no emergence, just increasing complexity, perhaps. But you can also categorize this theoretical basis as a kind of pareidolia for the mirror neurons, or something- the projection of things that don't actually exist into the universe through seeing resemblances that our brain assembles. I am not really a secularist, but the secular, or atheistic, or however you want to phrase it, these explanations are not facile ones, even if I don't accept them. They have clear credibility. I think the final summary, the conclusion here, is this: people believed magic worked despite being intelligent because of the following factors: 1) they lived among many complex systems which they knew could be manipulated in potent ways by seemingly small things, 2) they needed these complex systems to cooperate in order to live and thrive, 3) they were willing to abandon methods that failed to work and try new methods, 4) they generally understood magic as working in an analog fashion where success and failure are not cleanly divided, and 5) they understood nonhuman things as human enough to have relationships with. And so that's why people believed that magic worked, and that's why people believe that magic works today, even though it's only academics and jackasses like me who'd call thumping a computer or swearing at a car a magical practice.

Well, religion is not a theory about how the world works, but of necessity it is built on such a theory. Or you could say that it is built on a number of theory-fragments, or assumptions, the theory itself being an unarticulated assemblage or superposition of them. This is also true of lack of religion or non-religion, and there it is easier perhaps to see- agnosticism is generally founded upon a belief akin to "I don't have enough information to treat a defined belief in the truth of religions or existence of gods in the abstract as if it were factual", which is of course founded itself upon a theory about the workings of the world, which you might sum up as this: "Personal experience and reasoning cannot produce answers about the truth of religion in the abstract." This feels mostly like a statement of the obvious to me, though. So to get to Herr Wittgenstein, I think that in a real sense he is making an error there in the passages you quote, though he's doing better than Frazer. Wittgenstein is, to use the last of these passages, taking an example of a ritual associated with adoption where the adoptee undergoes a reenactment of birth with their new adoptive mother, and takes the position that the new mother must not believe that she has given birth to the person, as this would be false. And it is in the last clause there that Wittgenstein's error falls, because he is taking it as given that "birth" can and must only refer to the process of expelling a developed fetus from the womb through the vaginal canal via muscular contractions, as assisted or enabled through surgical intervention. And this perhaps feels like an intuitive perception. This is not René Magritte's 1929 painting "The Treachery of Images", it is a digitized photograph of that famous Surrealist painting, which in turn depicts what is merely an image of a pipe with a caption reminding us that une pipe, she is not present. As David Byrne never put it, this is not my beautiful art, this is not my beautiful wife! But through the tangled thickets of metafiction, it is also straightforwardly the case that this level of literalism is playful. A digitized photograph stands in for the painting, and the painting of a pipe only is not a pipe because it is captioned to tell us that it isn't so. The connection here is clearly real but not literal, and it is true in some senses and false in some other senses. So when an adoption requires a ritual reenactment of birth, that is a birth in the very important sense that it means that your adoptive mother has given birth to you and established the maternal relationship through the figurative birth. It is not a birth in the sense that you have not just been forced through a vaginal canal. And for our purposes, it is precisely as literal a form of transferring parenthood as contemporaneous adoption paperwork, which is also not literal. Of course, you can say that adoption paperwork is only meaningful in the legal context of the state and doesn't inherently carry any weight, that all that really needs to be done to change parents is a matter of words. That could be a very long discussion about the power of ritual to create meaning and all that jazz, but my point here is that Wittgenstein's approach is to assume that the religious practice, because it cannot be true literally, could not be "believed in", could not be really understood as truth. And yet we understand in other contexts that rituals do not have to be literal to have power. But that's for what is, facially, a secular rite in either case. How does this relate to, to use one of Wittgenstein's other examples, stabbing an image of someone to do them harm? (Around here, the preferred technique is to take a photograph and run water over the face of the target so that it's slowly obliterated.) This post is already a massive wall of textual bricks, so I'll continue in a separate one.

Well, to answer these questions thoroughly and precisely: the question is how do you define "god"? This is a very difficult question- are gods immortal? (Devas and asuras in Buddhism aren't, though they have lifespans which may be longer than the duration of the observed universe. The Norse gods weren't, the Ugaritic ones may or may not have been. But the Greek ones were.) Do gods have absolute power? (Answering this question leads you down a rabbit hole in defining "absolute".) There are certainly people who will tell you that they had no concept of a god before Christianity and Christian missionaries came, but their mythological stories and their public-facing ritual practices would seem to suggest that they believed in entities or presences that did the kind of things gods do for other cultures. And maybe the other end is important too- how small can a spiritual being be before it no longer counts as a god? Lares and penates were certainly gods to the Romans, but domovoi, hobs, brownies, pucks, and the like are in the liminal categories of fairies- but they exist in a Christian context. Even in the non-Christian context of Japan, though, zashiki-wariki and zashiki-bokko are typically considered to be part of the liminal category of youkai. And then next door in Korea, the Gasin/Gashin are clearly gods, though they have formalized names even as they fulfill very similar functions to a brownie. But setting that aside, the question of "interventionist" in relation to gods (whatever they are) is perhaps a bit confusing to me. What's a non-interventionist god? Would interventionism mean a god that responds to human appeal in a way that explicitly contradicts the laws of physics, or that does so on their own? That is, there seems to be a kind of assumption that gods and spirits are cleanly separable from natural processes, such that you can distinguish natural lighting from the unnatural lightning of an interventionist weather god. To a very real extent, this begins by defining gods as clearly parasitic or perhaps commensal organisms, ones which are uninvolved with the actual processes but just sit there and perhaps redirect some lightning bolts every once in a while. But as far as whether gods or other spiritual entities are good or not... I think that this is possibly the wrong way to think about it, because the more important factor would be that they exist, or that you have a strong belief that they exist. The question of whether they fit into a dualist structure of good and evil is secondary and from a descriptive level, not all that common. To look at contemporary Shinto, which has some degree of developed philosophy on this topic, kami have at a bare minimum an assertive or fierce aspect (ara-mitama) and a gentle or kind aspect (nigi-mitama), which is to say they are neither good nor evil, but more like humans, capable of either. As far as ontological commitments go, I would say that all sincere religion at least has the ontological commitment that the religion has meaning beyond the simply personal. This is obviously not necessary and sufficient definition of religion, but it is something that covers the very loose kind of spirituality associated with pantheists, some Buddhists (especially in Europe, the US, Canada, etc.), and some Quakers and Unitarian Universalists, in that they still define themselves to the rest of the world as this, and not an atheist, agnostic, or secularist, or any of the other associations we use to signify that we are not religious, and thus that this has some kind of external meaning. This is of course a long answer. I think a short one is that I don't really think that it's likely that someone who sincerely thought that spiritual beings were real, attempted to consult them or ask their aid, and also thought their aid or influence was purely malignant in effect would exist as such, or call themselves a shaman if they did, and that it's not that much more likely that an arbitrary distinction between benign spirits and malignant gods would be central to their worldview but not be evident in this fictional motif (as it's being presented here and in the linked post and in general in these kinds of discussions), which seems to straightforwardly be a kind of disenchantment-of-reality one where all the magic vanishes, not one where one specific kind of magic vanishes but the other three are unaffected or only minorly so.

Of course, we should probably remember that Greg Stafford attempted to be a practicing shaman and, if my secondhand understanding is correct, was perfectly sincere in that belief. So I'm not sure that the idea that the spiritual and the human are distant and separated in the (real world/post-Hero Wars Glorantha he compared to our world) is one that he intended. But much of this does come down to personal religious and spiritual beliefs at this level.

As a force of transformative destruction and creation, desire is very potent. All the Lupin characters are some degree of tricksterish, in that they're constantly transforming the situations they end up in, they frequently cause problems for themselves with their desires, but in the end they're able to achieve great deeds.

a) "Tom smokes a lot of hazia and sometimes talks funny when he's under the influence? Perhaps he's besieged by spirits, let's find a shaman to take a look at him." b) (post-Dragonrise) "Tom's hanging around with a Lunar sorcerer? You sure you're not having a visionary experience? Didn't we drive out all the Lunar sorcerers and their talk of 'sign and signified' and 'simulacra' and 'patriarchy' and whatnot?" (pre-Dragonrise) "Ah. Let's keep Tom away from Tammy the loudmouth, then. Don't want her catching trouble for her loose talk." c) "Well, bright side is the Praxians only want cattle for meat, can't keep cows out on the plaines! Downside is if the Praxians take any of our cattle we're never seeing any of them again." d) "Folks, I'm starting to think that Tom... may be a protagonist." More generally, I don't tend to run cultures in Glorantha as inherently xenophobic, so my focus is more on the immediate "what does this activity represent physically" more than "is Tom bringing in some foreign gods?"

Fujiko Mine from assorted pieces of Lupin III media. Potent enough to flirt with metafictionality, as mutably flexible as any of the Lupin characters, everyone wants to be her/with her.

I don't think so. I think that Argrath is definitely an ambiguous figure at best (unless you take it as given that he's good) because of how he presents himself as resolutely anti-Lunar and then he goes and picks up some Lunars to keep in his court. Even if you adopt a level of cultural relativism where there's no moral qualities to the struggle between Sartar and the Lunars, then the presentation of that moral valence by Argrath does retain an overt hypocrisy with his embrace of Lunars in other areas. This is distinct from Arkat, also an ambiguous figure, but ambiguous in being genuinely dedicated to the destruction of Nysalor's empire without any of Argrath's ostensible hypocrises. The ambiguity there is whether what Arkat does is worth it, justified, or even in response to anything real, but Argrath's ambiguity centers around what he actually believes and desires, whether he's an actor or acted upon, etc. To contrast, Alexander the Great of Macedonia's war against Persia is not quite so ambiguous- Alexander seems to have been motivated by his father's pan-Hellenic project to crush the Achaemenid Empire, and then his invasions of India and Central Asia were driven by the desire to expand Greek-speaker dominion to the "Outer Sea". But pan-Orlanthi nationalism is not quite a plausible motivating factor for Argrath and obviously looks significantly more dubious in our eyes. Now, Argrath being ambiguous is fine in light of the whole Glorantha cavalcade starting with a two-player board game. I think the difficulties come in for me with the extent to which there's a kind of atrocity arms race in the materials that deal with the future and some previewed materials- Argrath installing a new patriarchal leader of the Sables who exterminates two-fifths of their adult population and forcibly adopts the children in order to eliminate Lunar supporters, Argrath possibly leading a genocidal campaign against the Telmori to equip his Wolfrunner unit- these are things which move beyond ambiguity to me and into monstrosity. Especially when the Lunars are placed in the role of Gbaji-worshipers, because then it begins to seem like these crimes against humanity are perhaps intended to be justifiable, if regrettable, actions against the end of the world.

I'm not sure what positives of Argrath there are, because if we accept his openness to foreign ways as a positive but also those foreign Lunar ways as from Gbaji/the Red Goddess, aren't those a negative? Conversely, if we accept his opposition to Gbaji/the Red Goddess as a positive, his cooperation with the servants and idolators of Gbaji becomes a negative, doesn't it? Perhaps it might be easier to articulate the things Argrath does that are clearly positive, or invent them if they're absent? Even then, we would have to carefully brush over the Sable genocide, whatever happens to create the Wolfrunners, etc. Which is quite doable with a sufficiently critical eye on the sources- but with that level of critical analysis, it becomes more difficult to conceive of any human Argrath beyond the layered propaganda narratives and formal literary structures.

This is perhaps a slight divergence from said divergence, but given the story of Achilles fighting the river Scamander in the Iliad, it's possible Achilles was identified with Zeus or Apollo at some point because both of them have "kaoskampf" myths. But I suspect that by the time of the developed Achilles hero-cult that Greek heroes weren't identified with particular gods except via regional/tutelary associations. Which would suggest that, eg, Theseus would be associated with Athena as the protector of Athens, along with his familial connection to Poseidon, because of his legendary understanding as the "founder" of Athens. Of course, hero-cult in Glorantha is more subordinate.

This is, I think, a weakness of runes representing personality traits, because the sticking point is whether the connection of cult/initiation is primarily from the similarity of personality or from the performance of the god's divine role in the material world, etc. Your BG NPC certainly fits the latter, because she does the intimidation, the unstoppable retribution against transgressors, etc. but because her mental state differs in not being driven by hatred and the desire for violence (which has been part of the extended description of the cult of Babeester Gor ever since the goddess was first presented publicly), she doesn't quite fit the former. (Setting aside the question of homebrewing numbers, because the numbers are very much secondary to this question of whether cult identity is at the level of personality or at the level of representation.) Even though I think the NPC absolutely works as a cultist of Babeester Gor when cutting away mechanics as much as possible and looking at the presented social role. EDIT: I suppose one of the difficulties of the performance/role approach, though, is that it might be too modern, because we only have archaeological records of theater from after the Bronze Age! 😛

Once upon a time, I contemplated making the "Pelandan Ideograms" that sit in the background of the Entekosiad and the Fortunate Succession material on New Pelorian for a page of New Pelorian text, and I did them up as similar to cartouches or zhuwen-type seals: exterior border around the characters. For "Carmania", I made a couple of jumbly characters for Kar Ma N Os and a little sigil- arranged in the order of . But there it was explicitly scriptural rhetoric, like the furigana-esque tiny Khordavan characters above it that spelled out "Western Reaches".

This does not actually have much to do with those questions. I don't see what copy-pasting this lore information does to clear up the question of whether Chalana Arroy cultists should be indifferent to killing and wounding and purely reactive, or whether they should be proactively attempting to prevent injuries and deaths from taking place. Arroin could be seen as a cautionary tale about the foolishness of attempting to affect the world proactively, except that the story is about trying to heal Chaos, which would not seem to apply to mundane, worldly conflicts. So I must admit bafflement as to the point of this passage in this context.

So the clarification is that the Divination test picks out people who will not engage in violence, but also it doesn't matter because the oaths are enforced by divine sanction. I don't really understand why the Divination test is at all relevant, then, because all it does is create this bizarre implicit assumption that CA cultists or Gloranthans are significantly more static personalities than human beings generally are, such that a single act of divination shows that they're a good fit. (Never mind how a GM should run that for roleplaying joining the cult in play.) That doesn't really answer the questions that I have been bringing up with Bill, which have nothing to do with CA cultists fighting and presume total pacifism on their part. They are about CA cultists presumably believing in peaceful resolutions as part of the ideology of the cult and goddess, which is about healing the world. Perhaps the cult and goddess believe that the world must first be broken to be healed and so don't try to bring about peaceful solutions to conflict? It sure does, doesn't it? You might even get a whole subgenre of someone living in disgrace coming back and trying to redeem themselves out of this concept.

I was responding to the bolded sentence in the following quoted post. Which, to my mind, seems to straightforwardly say that Chalana Arroy cultists are different mentally from human beings, because their vows aren't enforced, they just won't do things which break their vows. But perhaps the person who posted it can clarify if I misunderstood them. I also don't really see where diegetic/in-universe explanations are all that relevant to the out-of-universe questions about accommodating Chalana Arroy player characters in a group playing published scenarios, or how to portray a Chalana Arroy player character or give guidance on how to do so. 🙂 Oh, I clarified that in this post, hah.

Yes, which in a way is why I started posting initially- I tried to make this character with a series of contrasts and tensions- she's a dirt-poor professional fisherwoman inland but a member of a cult of heroism and adventuring, she has strong passions that point her in two different directions- and the idea that Chalana Arroy cultists just... won't engage in violence, as an absolute statement, strikes me poorly simply because I don't really have an idea of how to structure that kind of psychology- all of the pacifists I've known on a personal level are people who are making a choice about pacifism. So I just don't know how I'd play a Chalana Arroy cultist like that, or give players in a game I was running advice on how to play such a cultist. Unless I chose to interpret it as a kind of mind control where CA cultists started acting robotically when the possibility was broached as the cult strictures run their body for them, which is still going a fair bit on a thin reed. But maybe I'm just more suited for OSR murderhobo hexcrawls? 😆

Yes, I think that's very fair. I think CA and Humakt are very possible to make workable, but if you run (or play) CA cultists as ideological pacifists who are serious about it, it can be very hard for them to fit into scenarios or situations that assume violence or armed conflict because the natural way to play a CA cultist in this scenario is to try and negotiate a peaceful resolution that's quite possibly outside the bounds of the scenario, or certainly is outside the expected play of the other characters. Both scenarios are difficult to deal with unless you have some kind of agreement that Chalana Arroy's pacifism doesn't mean taking any action to avoid death and maiming, or that the CA cultist will defer to the party leader, and overall it feels like the easiest way to handle this scenario is to forbid or discourage CA cultists, as compared to making sure every scenario can have peaceful negotiation attempts be made without disruption or writing a softened version of the cult that still keeps the essential features.