Eff

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.

I think that in such an entirely hypothetical situation, it would be better to make a clean cut with a razor that excised entirely, rather than many such cuts, or at least as few cuts as necessary to excise any such needless multiplication of entities. Measure twice, cut once, etc.

Oh, I'm interested in what, if any, "canon" answer there is, because I have my own answer already that I use in my games and my writing, but whenever I get around to producing Jonstown Compendium materials, I want to make sure they don't recklessly reject the canonical metaphysics of the setting and lead to confusion. 🙂

Doesn't this make Chalana Arroy cultists somewhat other than human, devoid of the capacity to be tempted? How would you play such an entity?

It would be very strange if the cosmology of the setting, like the question of where rain comes from, is dependent on matters of popular opinion like cult size. Should we be taking cult size as a deterministic phenomenon, then? People don't generally follow Heler because it's cosmologically true that Heler is an appendage or accoutrement of Orlanth like Lightning Boy, without much if any independence, and the rain effectively comes from Orlanth Thunderous rather than Orlanth having intercessory power with his companion/partner Heler to bring rain, or authority as ruler of the storms, or whatever? These kinds of questions are certainly worth asking, in my opinion, just for a clearer understanding of what plots are possible (within the "canon" Glorantha).

Grammatically, it makes little sense for Heler to give Orlanth the Rain spell if Heler is a component of Orlanth, I must say. The language used with Heler and the Rain spell, unlike the Lightning spell and Yavor-Lightning-Boy, implies independence from Orlanth on some level. But perhaps there's a more Freudian assumption here?

Well, just look at the Assassin and Blue Moon School chits... but maybe the trollishness is simply invisible but still present. Like some other things related to the moon.

Well, keep in mind that you would also make offerings (as a private person) if something good happened to you that you associated with a particular deity. The transactional exchange didn't inherently require any particular temporal order, and what you might well do is scrawl a prayer on some broken pottery (an ostracon), place that at a shrine or temple, and if the prayer is answered you make an offering or sacrifice. And if your prayer isn't answered, maybe you're not pious enough, already "indebted", or maybe the god has other things that draw their attention, or maybe a conflicting deity is interfering and canceling out any divine favor, or the time was inauspicious, or the prayer will be answered in an unexpected or delayed way. The difficulty of this kind of religion is that it was drawn heavily from empirical experiences of correlated and coincidental events, and as such it was built on the recognition that the world is vast, complicated, and we know very little about it. Which perhaps explains a few things about the rise of the mystery cults in the more international Hellenistic and Roman worlds, which offered a personal and social connection with a deity. Maybe the most apropos example is donating blood plasma for cash. Morally suspect in the fiscal context, but on the side of the recipient more than the donor.

Sure, I'm taking it in light of Hellenistic traditional religion, which was fairly explicitly transactional- do ut des, "I give, so that you may give." There are of course many other examples that are not quite so explicit and philosophical about it, but that's where I'm coming from with that.

Well, this is the Runequest forum. I think that it's entirely possible for them to exist in Glorantha conceptually, but within the scope of both Runequest fluff and rules they don't exist in any way that player characters can interact with. (As I put it up above, you can perhaps without too much extrapolation conclude that worship ceremonies renew the basal magic of the world's existence and keep it going- but what's relevant for me is that this isn't a thing PCs would be able to interact with or have an effect, positive or negative, on.) And as I said in a slightly different place up above, I would definitely prefer it if there was some magic associated with communal worship that was distinct from the empowerment of individuals who sacrifice POW. It would give some reason to make material sacrifices beyond boosting an unsteady Worship skill, as a "mechanistic" example alongside the thematic one I outlined.

And the MP does nothing. It vanishes into nowhere. Perhaps it's food for the gods, but I don't think that that's the case. Rune levels can get POW gain chances simply by staying at home without going adventuring, but this offsets the whole "must devote 90% of their time to their cult" aspect- the number of adventures that these PCs should be able to go on by the book/RAW is simply more limited, which gives them fewer opportunities to gain POW normally. But that's subsidiary. My point is that worship ceremonies do not produce magical effects, they, even if we take it as given that enchantment magic is an effect of worship ceremonies, empower individuals to produce magical effects later, on their own time. Worship in RQG is a means for personal self-aggrandizement that can be directed towards community benefit, but there's a missing link there where the effects of worship ceremonies- the fabulous secret powers- are not part of that direction, even by implication. There's no interaction between "you must give 10% of your money to the cult" and the magic you get from the cult, and there's no way to turn money into divine magic directly. That 90% of time on cult business- it does not detract from your RP in any fashion, it's so abstract it might as well just be mundane physical service. (Given the changes to divine magic between RQ2 and RQG, it's likely it was originally intended to be mundane physical service because magic was much harder to replenish and so demanding it be assigned to particular uses would be genuinely cruel. But now it's a renewable resource.) So my thoughts are aimed at bringing the magic back into the loop there where the whole divine immanence means that the gods are a very real presence and Glorantha is intrinsically magical schtick is carried forward to the social life of PCs as the corebook lays it out, and the notions about community involvement get some concrete relationship with the particulars of your character.

Ehhhh... sure, but I'm thinking more in terms of magic as a kind of action that can be performed. The MP offered at worship ceremonies doesn't translate to any magic that has representation in either the rules or the background "fluff". Even if it does "keep the world together" or operate the basal social level of keeping Harvest rolls good or whatever, as an embedded assumption within the writing, PCs are incapable of engaging with that by the rules. (With the specific exception of the Worship Invisible God spell, which does turn those MPs into a resource that the wizard/zzabur can use... but Malkioni zzaburi are explicitly intended to be unplayable. And because this is held up as a peculiarly Malkioni thing, we can assume that the MP used in other worship ceremonies essentially does nothing from the mortal perspective.) And cultic POW sacrifices aren't mandatory past the first required for initiation, and what they produce is magic in the hands of the sacrificing individual, rather than a repository of power that the priest can direct. Wyter POW sacrifices are abstracted out of the rules as presented by the core book, and would presumably only become relevant if you were making your own community from scratch. So if we're talking about divine worship as producing material effects that benefit the community, in RQ rules the only magic that emerges from this is the Rune Magic PCs have and the Rune Points they add, and it would make sense on a story level for the members of the cult to owe some of that magic back to the cult to use it in the cult's service (which for OrlanthanandErnalda would be directly back on the clan, etc.) and there being a tension between divine worship granting the worshiper individualized power and divine worship being for the benefit of the whole of the people. RQ also isn't balanced or fair or whatever, so if you really want to brush aside the objection that it's not all that fun to have to use your sweet badass magic in the service of others, there's that, but I think it's pretty easy to slide that into a standard gameplay loop. Maybe you owe X number of RP-equivalent per year. A starting PC can be assumed (given the assumption that RPs refill between adventures, adventures are once per season, etc.) to have 18 RP available per year, so perhaps they owe 2-3 RP annually, 1/6-1/9th ("All of your magic is yours to use" in an Orlanthi All sense) and if you just keep track of how much is used, that's only violated if they use more than 15-16 RP over the course of a year's worth of play, and if that's the case, then perhaps they just need a brief little scenario, like a Pendragon Winter Phase one, to play through to make it all good, which can be as bucolic and quaint as feels appropriate. Or perhaps this means they go into "debt" which can be made up for by injecting a new plot point involving the cult offering a chance to reduce that debt. (And if they don't go into debt, they get some free stuff from the cult so that there's reasons not to go immediately into RP-debt.) Keep it a source of plot or character momentum, etc. (Now, if I had my druthers, I would make it so that there are direct magical effects from worship ceremonies and other forms of communal religious activity, and reshape the tension into "divine worship benefits the community but also empowers the individual to act against the community, what happens next?" But that's me, and I'm not writing EffyQuest or Effyworlds.)

Indeed. Income alone (whether in cash money or in kind) works under the assumption that sacrifices of things other than POW have direct magical effects, as opposed to expediting the restoration of divine connections/RP. But without that connection, which might be assumed but certainly isn't present, it's rather fascinating that cults don't directly engage with magical power, and only focus on controlling time and money, rather than requiring PCs to earmark a certain chunk of their magic/RPs for cult use, which of course they can be tempted to break and thus have to do penance and further the cycle of plot points. Perhaps this would be a good basis for an RQ hack...

Hmmm. Are they looking to do so for more mechanical reasons or more purely story reasons? Are they an ascetic Humakti, more focused on combat, or do they dip their finger in the well of Truth magic? Because one option (apart from homebrewing up your own Star Captain that synchs up with Humakt easily) is Lodril. Not particularly ascetic, but Lodril's volcanic fury is similarly built around control and repression leading up to outbursts of fury (as in the Smoldering Rebellion spell) and so there's some overlap you might not expect from a surface reading. And of course, Lodril does have a role as an intermediary via his position as a source of overwhelming might that can force people to stop fighting and settle down.

I mean, that text is clearly not a Lunar perspective, and it is also clearly a metaphorical statement about what many people in Glorantha think about the meaning of the Red Goddess- in between Devil and savior, product of destruction and creation. In other Hero Wars-era products and writing, and from the period right after, "Rufelza" refers specifically to the big red orb in the sky. I think that broadly, I don't quite get why the Mostali ought to be malevolent, and since I've already gone in on sympathizing with Aldryami and Triolini (and Vadeli) I might as well go in on sympathizing and empathizing with Mostali.

Rufelza is a name that only is used for the Moon that rose in 1247 ST. There's an entity called "Sedenya" in the Glorious ReAscent of Yelm, which is one of the false suns, associated with the city of Mernita, but the celestial entity that hung over Mernita is the Blue Moon, with power over water, shattered by the Bow of Lukarius, etc. There was the Verithurusa planet, which was originally white and turned red after an encounter with Umath/a descent into the Underworld, which was also true of the Shargash planet, though that planet may have originally been green. But this planet is called a planet in the celestial lore and fell from the sky very quickly. There is also the dark red Artia planet, which you might think would be a moon given that the Dara Happan name is feminine... but the Artia planet was not understood as a planet/moon/mobile celestial body until after the Sunstop, so it also would not have been a Godtime moon even if it is technically a moon. The Red Moon that hangs in the sky is associated with Natha, who has no known celestial body otherwise, and this seems like an extension of the red-and-black pattern used to depict Natha in artwork. That aside, I think that there are very clear limits on how well we can understand any given Mostali group's goals, ambitions, and beliefs simply because the Mostali have been seen primarily as a repository for a complex of ideas Greg Stafford disliked in the world which he associated with the mechanistic/clockwork dwarves he began with. Extant texts on the Mostali editorialize on their perversity and on how any dwarf you encounter who seems personable or like a human being must be a heretical if not broken dwarf, defining Mostali orthodoxy as anti-human. However, critically reading the sources, Mostali do not behave in a purely antihuman fashion. This creates a tension between the assumptions of the text about Mostali and the raw facts of what the text is reporting. So with that in mind, I think that in order to understand you need to invent, and you would first need to invent an understanding of the World Machine that doesn't leave Mostali as an impending apocalyptic threat to all existence, in the same way that Uz have had enough work done to prevent them from becoming a purely eschatological threat of being devoured completely in the future. I have not done that, personally, but in vague terms, I think that the World Machine is presumably more of a worldview than a physical arrangement, such that new things may be built or added or accepted if they move the world closer to the world-machine-state, whatever that is.

Stasis is associated with alchemy and construction, so Stasis as a rune presumably doesn't signify total immobility, as alchemy necessarily involves transmutations and buildings are stable because they are not static, but move to counter the forces acting on them. Arches, the shape of Stasis, are an exemplary example of this. (Also, on the pragmatic observational level, Mostali claim involvement with the Red Moon's construction and that's clearly a new thing in Glorantha which could not have been part of the World Machine.)

I think that this depends fairly strongly on what Tapping is metaphorically connected to, though, in terms of whether it is as metaphysically evil as it's generally assumed to be. Tapping as environmental destruction is one metaphor, but Tapping as a return to raw firmament or whatever, a kind of primordial substance full of possibility, is another metaphor entirely. There are of course Malkioni sects that have various thoughts about Tapping, some of which are very hard to instantly reject as self-serving. Which of course gets us to the ethical considerations around sorcery generally, and to cut that short, it's why "lore" justifications are somewhat frail compared to "this spell allows you to do things well outside the scope of what the rest of the party can do, let's tone it down and limit the benefits" or a similar kind of "mechanical" answer.

Read this in concert with Fazzur being the architect of the Duck Hunt, and it seems rather interesting for him to end up so exalted, doesn't it?

I don't really see the connection between Arachne Solara and uz here, because, uh, Cragspider's contact with Arachne Solara is what gives her the transcendence necessary to command the Pillar of Fire. So even if we take it as granted that the encounter in the Great Net was sexual and non-consensual, I'm not sure of the chain of reasoning that goes from there to uz approving of rape. (Quite apart from asking why we would invent a culture that approves of rape given the existence and symbolism of broos in the setting.)

Side note: the interchangeability of Basmol and Basmola in myth is strongly suggestive of these pairs being single entities reproducing via parthenogenesis or hermaphroditic autofertilization to produce kinds of animals.

I don't think there's much practical effect. I suspect that the initial intent was to play with Dumezil's trifunctional hypothesis of Proto-Indo-European society, with Orlanth Rex as the sovereignty function, Orlanth Adventurous as the military/force function, and Orlanth Thunderous as the productive function. For Dumezil, of course, the sovereignty function was split between a juridical side and a mystical side, and while there are nascent examples of this with Orlanth Lightbringer or Orlanth Dragonwise/draconic Orlanth as the "mystical sovereign", they are not particularly articulated. (Dumezil's examples from Norse mythology were that Odin was the mystical sovereign, Tyr the juridical sovereign, Thor the military/force, and Freyr or Njord the producer/fecund.) Now, what does it say that Vinga is purely associated with the use of force but not productivity or sovereignty? Probably that Vinga was called "Vinga Adventuress" by some people. 😆

I'm gonna offer a little bit of a counterpoint- this can be said, to be sure, but for representational purposes (in one sense), you do need some degree of representation (in another sense). Not to say that Orlanth needs to be regularly depicted with conventional androgyne symbols like one flat and one rounded breast or what have you, but certainly weaving the visual reality of this equation within your Glorantha is helpful. (It also offers opportunity for playfulness- draw Orlanth like Maitreya Bodhisattva and then put some striped stockings or a shark that looks suspiciously stuffed or a hairstyle that looks remarkably like cat ears in proximity and I'm already cackling. Granted, the symbolic languages are arcane to the uninitiated...)

Every single character you could create in Glorantha, even one that has portal fantasied into Glorantha from the modern world, has an outlook different from my own, because they are in Glorantha and I am not. Now, broadly speaking, I was raised in a sexist, patriarchal society, like we all were, and I absorbed a degree of the cultural assumptions of that, and so every character I can create has some level of that cultural assumption influencing how I conceive of them and play them and understand them. So I am certainly not creating characters with perfectly enlightened views, because my own are not perfectly enlightened either. With all of that being said, I have no desire to play any kind of man in a role-playing context. Several decades of experience has proved that I don't enjoy it. If I were acting to a predefined role, perhaps... but that is not the usual context of roleplay. Similarly, I'm terrible at pretending to be straight and so don't try to playact attraction to men, so I have no real desire to play out the courtly-love-but-in-antiquity fantasy of an Ernaldan who exerts dominion over men but in a way where nobody's getting to enjoy riding crops, bonds of leather and chain, suspiciously glossy full-body garments, etc.. There's a kind of feminist critique you could make of that exalted position of passivity on a pedestal, but it's secondary to it not being a fun exercise for me when there are far more invented people who are not in that position than I could ever play if I lived to be a hundred and twenty. This is secondary, of course, because there's no particular reason to pick Prax over anywhere else in Glorantha as a place to play even if I did suddenly experience an urge to put on a hair shirt and adopt the role of a flagellant in a meta-roleplay above the roleplay. Which is the fundamental weakness of "You can alter your Glorantha" as a response- sure, I could, but I'd normally have to have some reason why I want to do so, and there's plenty appealing in the Lunars, the Sartarites and Heortlings, the Esrolians, Caladralanders, Safelstrans, Loskalmi, even to a degree Pentans which motivates any effort on my part- but I don't have anything beyond, perhaps, cultivating megalomania to devote attention to Prax, or the Grazelands, in part because I know that I would have to directly contradict the existing text. Thus it would have to be a truly personal endeavor, as opposed to ones that can be shared with others for them to freely take things from without having to reinvent their Glorantha in the image of my Gloranthas.

I say "redemptive elements" here because the way in which the Vinga cult-gender complex has been presented frequently crosses the border into offensiveness, as Vinga is described (by Chaosium employees) as a goddess of trans men or transmasculine people more generally, via "men in women's bodies" as shorthand. But Vinga is always "she/her" and associated with warrior women and Vasana is supposedly a Vinga initiate who is also referred to as a woman and with she/her pronouns. So are vingans just consistently misgendered by the narration and the cultures they live in? Now, thankfully, we do not have an explicit textual statement that this is what's happening, and so we have the nonbinary identity of "vingan" in The Six Paths as a counterexample that is explicit though not official. But certainly, the way in which the extant text around Vinga (and Nandan, but Nandan is a relative nonentity in fan discourses because the assumed modes of gameplay for most Gloranthan gaming keeps Nandan from being relevant and picking up substantial fan interpretation) is written creates a very strong implication that these are representations of trans men and trans women in Glorantha. This was also Greg Stafford's intent for Nandan, at least, but Stafford was very clear that the cult of Nandan consisted of "women with dicks", as he put it, and so would embrace pre-op and non-op trans women and transfeminine people, some cis women, some intersex people, some additional complicated gender categories, etc. I don't think that that's a road worth traveling back down, because I do think that folding transness explicitly into the general society and understanding of gender is simply better, but it's worth keeping in mind when we discuss these topics as far as "creator's intent" is concerned.