Eff

Of course, it's an open question whether the gods overcame enlightenment, whether their worshipers rejected the draconic approach and enacted material protections against it, or whether the worshipers mutilated their gods to remove the draconic pathway on a spiritual level.

I think there is an interesting question embedded in the notion of illumination here. Stafford's words use "state of consciousness which is their equivalent to illumination". So what could that mean? When we say "illumination", are we talking about an insight towards transcendent consciousness from a basal, immanent state of being? Or are we talking about a specific family of insights? A human who achieves illumination is able to overcome an automatic fear of the unknown, for example. But does a god have that automatic fear? Another consequence of illumination in humans is the (possibly increased) capacity to engage in critical self-examination and "step outside oneself". Is that something which gods lack by default? Would a god who becomes illuminated become a higher sort of god, or would they gain insights into being a human, or an animal, or a lowly spirit? That is, should we treat this as a convergent set of pathways to an enlightened/buddhalike state of being, or a divergent set of pathways outwards?

Well, there's a distinction between the inciting event and the cosmological order that establishes it, at least in real-world mythology. The Greeks didn't believe that Kore/Persephone was kidnapped annually, but rather that because of the kidnapping and her eating the pomegranate, she was partially a native of the underworld and partially a native of the surface world, and went down at the end of the spring and emerged four months later in the autumn. But she was also queen of the underworld, at all times, because aetiological myths describe transformations. Gloranthan discussions are perhaps overly indebted to Mircea Eliade and taking the "eternal return" in a very literal way. But it is worthwhile to consider whether we should therefore presume that Danfive Xaron perpetually reenacts the actions of the Seven Mothers, knife in hand, or whether his transformation from predator through penitence is meaningful, one which other people can emulate.

Well, thinking about this in a relatively mechanistic way, this spirit is weaker than the median ones a shaman encounters through Spirit Contact. 2d6+6 POW, 3d6 CHA, only 1-3 pts of spirit magic, and only Ernalda cult-related spirit magic, "typically Heal or Demoralize". The Household Guardian also "manifests as a large snake and the spell ends if the snake is is killed", so it may be the case that the spell at most lasts for the natural life of the snake. As it is, though, the spell's most useful component is the ability of the caster to draw upon the guardian's MP while "within the precincts of the household". And there's no mechanism defined for handing this effect off to someone else, so the spell is most useful for the life of the initial caster and then you're left with a snake that can heal well enough to stop bleeding or possibly deter single attackers, but is unlikely to have any means of directly attacking someone beyond dubious physicality. So you could summon another one, and another... but eventually you're facing a substantial cost in worshiping all of them at once. Pragmatically, I would spin out the consequences of the spell as written as suggesting that the current "head of household" summons a guardian when she achieves that position, and that the old guardian and maybe the one before that might remain, and they mostly heal small cuts and try to stare down burglars or unwanted visitors. This perhaps makes sacking Gloranthan cities a bit different, since you'll want to break open each house in a large enough group to avoid being Demoralized out of looting. But at the same time, the average guardian will, on average, be able to Demoralize 3-4 average humans before running out of MP, so thinking in this mode, we're not looking at something which makes cities materially more difficult to take even without considering that societies in this context would likely develop magical attacks to degrade magical defenses- if all else fails, get another tent-group or two and threaten to burn the building down or smoke the people out unless they call off the guardian and cough up their valuables. Taking a broader view, but one still centered in RQG, the Ernalda cult magic has very little in the way of offensive magic beyond the expensive measure of summoning earth elementals. Even summoning a small elemental and commanding it will cost 3 RP minimum, without any additional points of Extension. Most of the cult's defensive magic is also fairly limited in applicability- Inviolable has a 3-meter range laid out in the spell description, which protects you from melee weapons but not someone throwing a rock. Bless Champion allows you to cast defensive spells at range on a specific target who's willing to have their mind modified by you to instill love for you. In that sense, Ernalda-as-written would not seem to be a gigantic factor in this domain- the cult spirits share the lack of offensive magic or simply as described as having X points of it without any details, and like all magic within RQG, the precise degree of defensive power is heavily conditioned on "how many rune points and rune spells does an average person have?" If the answer is "very few", then much of that defensive magic is unlikely to be present. If the answer is a more maximalist one, or one calculated from loose application of POW gain rules, then that defensive magic is much more likely to be present... but then we have to consider that the other side of the arms race will have been keeping pace as well. Dismiss Magic is a common runespell, after all. Pay your local shamans to gather spirits and release them to overwhelm the guardians and wards before you attack. Et cetera. But let's step back even further. If we take the specifics of the spells very loosely and assume Household Guardians are meant to be effective defenses and so on, one consequence that migbt emerge from it is that the relative position of a negotiated surrender would be stronger than it was in our history, because breaking through the accreted magical defenses would damage the city in an enduring way that would require great expense and labor or waiting for the hands of time to repair it. As such, to gain anything from the seizure of land, achieving victory without storming the local administrative center would be ideal. You could go further and have these defenses ebb in times of peace and them receive hasty sacrifices to reactivate them as war approaches, analogous to city walls... but what role would Ernalda be playing in this shaken-out approach? I think that at the most zoomed-out level we're just having to contemplate whether Ernalda is purely domestic-sphere or whether she acts outside of that realm, and then go and define things from there.

Yanafal Tarnils has a lot of Orlanth associations as well. Bears Death with him on the quest, is called a "ram"... but Yanafal is the squeaky-clean member of the (adult) Seven Mothers, and so interpretations that pitch the 7M and their quest as oppositional to the conventional Lightbringers look more towards suspicious Danfive.

"Could" is significantly different from "is", though. Regiments are left to the play group to define and develop, so if they make one that is as restrictive as Danfive Xaron, then that's a decision that's been made as part of preparing for play, and we can assume that they're not going to make such characters run through the Rainbow Mounds. Whereas Danfive Xaron is already defined in this highly restrictive way, which limits the potential scope of play without rewriting the cult in some fashion. And especially given the expressed ideal way of playing RQG, with runespells a-flying, Danfive Xaron is simply a poor fit. Which is fine. It's strange to have all the condemned prisoners be 21 years old and have been sentenced to life terms at the age of 18.

So, I was replying to a specific person, @Rodney Dangerduck's post and making an analogy where being in Danfive Xaron is equivalent to being in prison, and noted that being an ex-con, by analogy, would mean being a former member of Danfive Xaron. Which has no real exits except by transferring to Red Goddess via Illumination. Thus, starting as an illuminate would seem to be necessary for starting as an ex-con trying to restart their life on the outside, if you were trying to use Danfive Xaron in that way.

Ever since the obliteration of year-king sacrifices, Ernaldans who learned their trade in Esrolia-influenced circles have started to occasionally experience a mysterious hunger and thirst that nothing can quite sate.

Playing a character who begins play enlightened, necessary to be a former Danfive Xaron who served their sentence, is well out of scope with the starting assumptions of play for RQG.

Ah, another source of that pesky 500-year cycle emerges...

I think I agree with you. Playing a DX (as-currently-constituted) is like playing someone on a constantly monitored parole, which is certainly a viable character to play in the abstract but doesn't synchronize well with the default assumptions of play at work for Runequests. Now, playing an ex-con trying to "go bent" (as the Lunars might put it) is a lot more synchronizable with those assumptions, but as things stand you never leave the cult without becoming enlightened, so DX as a background option is also problematic for play.

"People who gain chaotic features do so by being part of the participation in the Conspiracy of the Unholy Trio whose original participants were Broos." This would not apply to anyone who had Chaos Gift cast upon them, which is a source that is not related to Thed, Ragnaglar, or Mallia. So this fails on its own terms. In any case, I am asking from an out-of-universe perspective- why is it the case that chaos mutation only works in this way, as a creative decision? Especially given the context of the multiple Stafford statements about what, in his opinion, does turn you into a broo?

That simply pushes the question back to "why exactly is it only the metaphor for rapists that Chaos can mutate you into?", leaving aside your insistence that said metaphor isn't there. There is an immediately relevant NPC, one General Roan-Ur, who seems like a fairly easy case for another kind of chaotic mutation, becoming a literal cannibal ogre from being a metaphorical ogre devouring the lives of his troops. And many other Chaotic entities that would seem like even more natural things to mutate into, like gorp. So- why broos and only broos?

Let's spin Queen Deezola around in my mind, along seven axes, and see what comes out... I think that on the actual important question, yes, of course there's room for a woman to hold power in her own right in Peloria even before the Lunars. All one has to do is look at the Glorious Reascent of Yelm and the Fortunate Succession and consider that, within those texts, the Dara Happan view of history is one that is clearly shown again and again to be selective, self-contradictory, and full of hints as to what was "really going on". The vicious sarcasm concerning Dendara on the Gods Wall is very apparent even before you start nosing around the more obscure sources. Then there's all those maps in the Fortunate Succession which make it clear that, within those texts, "Dara Happa" refers to a fairly small area of Peloria which has been able to historically dominate Peloria at times and at other times has been one of many small states or a subjugated client of a larger, more powerful one. All of which is to say, a contemporary Plentonius in an alternate early 14th century ST would be sweating furiously as he attempted to find a way to explain away Deezola's historical presence, but he would have been doing the same for other historical women of authority. So let's turn up the speed on the gyroscope. Spinning wildly, some narrative features that fall out of Deezola's pockets become readily apparent to me- All of the boys are either exiles or criminals or both, Teelo N. is a street urchin, and Jakaleel is another outsider. So when it comes to providing physical spaces, and the majority of capital outlays, that has to be on Queen D. She's obviously very committed from the getgo, because she's the knowing conspirator with the most to lose at the beginning. So in my mind, her motivation has to be very strong indeed. Add this to the fact that it's her, Teelo, and maybe Danfive as actual natives of Rinliddi, and her as the only representative of a politically enfranchised class, and the motivation that emerges for me is pride, in the intermingled sense of personal and group-collective that plays a clear role in protonationalist political causes. That is, Deezola begins with the desire to see her domain free from Carmanian rule and from regular raids from Velthil, which leads her to hear out the crackpot sage and the hobo hazar, and then accept the woman with slate-blue skin and clear signs of tusks... And then that leads her to the decision to sacrifice a child from the streets, because the cause is worth it. What's one urchin, more or less? One crook from the hills who'd be left out for the vroks to feed on otherwise? And so then we come to Teelo Estara's lessons, and what Deezola has to learn from her. About rulership and statecraft. And this could be remnant Lesilla and Cerullia memories, and it could simply be the kind of lessons a street girl might have for a queen who thought she was expendable. Certainly, if you trust that dangerous Life of Sedenya, Deezola had learned her lesson by the First Battle of Chaos, and gave her life alongside the common and ordinary faithful, and was returned to it. So what did Deezola learn from all this and teach to her disciples? I have a pretty good idea of what kind of magic is offered IMD, of course, but that's not really what this thread is about, now is it?

Why are the Yanafal Tarnils cultists becoming broos, specifically? If they're undergoing chaotic mutation, why is it only into the form of a metaphor for being a rapist?

I'm not sure why any of the options you've presented would be pursued.

Of course, there is a third option here.

You could indeed choose to engage in that interpretation. That would be an interesting choice given the consistent use of "Queen Deezola" in previous texts, as if her status as a queen was somehow relevant to her involvement in the Seven Mothers' deeds. It would also be a choice that very deliberately decides to remove an instance of a woman having political authority from the setting, and so I would personally question the point of making that choice. But I suspect that simply saying that last sentence is another instance of "gratuitous personal slurs", as you put it.

Afidisa is Artmal, and Artmal is "wounded" because this knowledge is kept hidden by various people who know better.

It's a line of reasoning that could be applied quite easily to Orlanth, of course: "the cult of Orlanth won't give its members the weird personal magic Orlanth used," that's why there's no weather magic provided, and so on. So with Hon-eel we could point to the decision to make her sole spells ones to bless corn and to make herself more sexually desirable and ask whether she should have a third spell related to her actions in some fashion- perhaps breaking a barrier, or disguising herself an anonymous individual, or whatever. But another alternative would be to assume that the goddess herself understands her cult primarily as a kind of harem, and thus provides maize blessings grudgingly and spells to make the maize dancers all pretty for her.

"A color that had been torn out of the rainbow was returned as a peace offering."

That's a good question. A fruitful one for provoking further thoughts.

Another thing you might have expected to see in Deezola is some kind of magic associated with ruling and rulership, as even though she may have been a Dendaran prior to her newly revealed extended torture session, she was still a queen regnant afterwards. You might even expect that kind of experience and event to produce a magical differentiation from Dendara which would make worship of her attractive, as offering a slightly different path. I suppose the torture survival content is meaningful too.

Her cult isn't anything, because Glorantha is a fictional setting. It's not a question of what I want, it's a question (to me) of whether her mythological actions (breaching the barriers of the Lunar Sacred Time rituals, befriending the dragon and sending him away from Doblian, turning the Telmori into wolves to break their curse, bringing back maize through ritually slaughtering the Blood Sun, the long and complicated mythological actions necessary to produce the twin deities Nightlight and Twilight, and proving that She-Who-Waits was Ernalda to the people of Tarsh) are indeed represented fairly by those two runespells and only those two runespells. And that's something which invoking a dead man as a shield does not concern- if Greg agreed that what was more important than having a cult which reflected the mythology of the deity, even in confounding or seemingly incompatible ways was fitting Hon-eel into a predetermined box of Grain Goddesses, then that was his decision and it does not change the problems that I see with that approach in light of the existing, previous Gloranthan texts. So what I want in all this is, well, nothing at all, because I could quite easily write my own Hon-eel cult and use that. But there are other people who do want to talk about these matters. I really don't see where you see ad hominem attacks in what I posted. I commented that the answer provided by a Chaosium representative would represent a casual and drastic revision of long-standing statements about Glorantha and thus that it was not a sensible answer in light of those statements without a further clarification that, yes, that revision was in place, and runespells are detached from mythology now. I also indicated a pattern which can certainly be identified in things Greg Stafford was writing twenty years ago, and before then, and which is, in and of itself, not an argument about any people who would be contributing to that pattern. Hmmm, when did that get in there? Anyways, there is a very clear distinction between arguing about the "facts" of a setting which, by its primary creative voice for the majority of the last 50 years, does not have firm facts, YGWV; and discussing published texts and what we think about them, which is part of the process by which Our Gloranthas Start Varying. The former can be useful in its own right when kept in a strictly playful ground, but in the end, all fiction is mutable in a way that the real world is not.

@theconfusingeel was asking about Hon-eel in that section of their post. All of the Lunar cults are lacking in magic compared to what you might expect from previous texts. You're also not going to get a sensible answer out of Chaosium, I suspect- "the cult isn't that important" suggests that runespells are dependent on how many fans you have, rather than mythological acts the god performed. Which would be a drastic revision of long-standing assumptions about the setting in several different respects. I think that Hon-eel is ill-served in part because of gendered assumptions that appear to apply to any new cults that are being formatted for Runequest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. Babeester Gor gets grandmothered in, but the Artess is more or less new, so her cult is a girl's cult that's about passivity etc.