Eff

A mystic sought the Red Moon, and climbed to the top from the bottom, seeking audience with the Great Sedenya. When he got there, he asked the Transcendent One, "Why didn't you take the Young Elementals and make your own world? Why remain in this one?" The Goddess looked at him with four of her faces. The first said, "All of my records are here," and winked. The second said "Puppet shows are no good without someone watching." The third said, "I'm not clever enough to invent another Etyries, or Valare, or Eserela, or- well, anyways, if I want to ride that train, I have to pay for a ticket." The fourth said "Didn't I?" and laughed. When the mystic woke, he was afflicted with the most horrible delusion, insisting that the world was called "Glorontha" and this one had been edited.

The taste of the apple, or was it a pomegranate? But of course, there's the big block in the way. Storm Bull put it there. "Couldn't be me!" Acknowledging knowledge means at some point acknowledging capacity, potentiality, culpability. It takes four arms or more to realize that the mask you're facing may be your own. Much simpler to attribute matters to the headache. (And what does Ralzakark want? More Oddis?)

The hummingbird is a symbol of ferocity and rebirth in Mexican contexts, which Stafford had recently had a transformative experience with. The faithful seeing a hummingbird is a symbol for them seeing the rebirth of Teelo Estara as Teelo Imara, the fierce protector goddess rising into the sky and swooping down on their oppressors. But the unfaithful see only death, Maha Quata. What would it say that people see a bat today? That requires thinking symbolically.

I mean, the line in Heroquest: Glorantha is very plainly and unsubtly about calling the Red Goddess the devil. Any reading which offers any degree of redemptive potential is directly contrary to the intent and thus is resistive in some fashion.

Looking at the real world for a bit- (always a dangerous thing with Glorantha) shamanic religious practices that I am personally familiar with tend to rely on who or what you know, spiritually. An oungan or manbo must know the proper veve to call a particular lwa for a ceremony and invite them into a participant's body. A miko can be expected to deal with a kami that's enshrined in the jinja she works at, and familiar gods and spirits, but an unusual or foreign one requires some preparation and careful ritual work to understand them. But foreign kami and previously unknown lwa (perhaps most notoriously, Mademoiselle Charlotte) still find their way in regardless, and so the practitioners have to be able to learn their ways and record their veves, subject to the willingness of the god to be part of the system. If the god isn't willing to play ball (Mademoiselle Charlotte can be summoned, but she only helps people she takes a fancy to), there's not much you can do. Try again next year.

Did they? I thought they sentenced him to hard labor for life with a veneer of mystical teaching to assuage any guilt at the sheer disproportionality of their actions. Strange how the mind wanders.

A punter asked Great Sister one day, "How can one achieve liberation from the world and still live within it? Do not the Sevened still eat and drink and breathe, such that Oria and Oslira and still hold them in subjugation, chains wrapped around their necks, strangling them should they ever attempt to act on their liberation? How can anyone be liberated without total annihilation, of themselves or of the gods?" Great Sister asked, "When my mother proclaimed the First Manumission, did those who were freed by it burn down all of Torang, slaying the people who had traded in human flesh?" The punter said, "Stick to the point," and then he saw Great Sister's face, and then he mumbled, "No." "And yet they were free to do so! They had been fully armed and regimented, brigaded and accompanied, and yet they decided that, though it was in their power to kill and burn, they would choose not to do so generally, and so it was only the grandees who were flogged to death with their own whips. So, too, does the decision to eat and drink and maintain the functions of the body say nothing about whether the spirit is free to leave it or not by itself." Great Sister folded her arms. "Any more questions?" she asked.

In good ol' RQ2, any time a shaman went looking for spirits, there was a 1% chance they would encounter a deity on the Spirit Contact table, with "Deity" POW and "Unlimited" INT, and the notes indicate that deities normally ignore spirits unless they "actively intrude on their sphere of activity". Now, the shaman obviously couldn't make such a deity a controlled spirit, without at least "Deity" POW of their own, 1 POW left over for their body, and 1 POW in the spirit world. But the deity could potentially reverse the equation, offering POW for service in the same way shamans do to spirits and with similar termination conditions on the contract. Within RQ2, this would come down to the referee's decision about what the deity thinks of shamans, of course. But it seems to me very relevant to the Arcane Lore thoughts on "integration" and "rejection".

Of course, wootz steel requires the crucible be cracked to extract the smelted metal. There is a well-understood way in which a good solid shattering is essential to further creation. Even if we have foundries now. They don't have many broos Oop North, where we find the Steel Sword Legion and the Third Eye Blue, who stole the secret of iron, now do they? Dorastor*, sure, but north of Old Wolf Fort? The witch hat may be passed off to other figures elsewhere, the flayed woman Thed haunting Prax, the Waste(s) Land(s), and maybe the people around Heort's country. But elsewhere, perhaps, there's a woman with a goat's skin for a mantle, or maybe a hat, vaping on the balcony at all the best psychic flashes of divine parties. *Of course, when I went there, Ralzakark was a Hellwood or possibly Poisonwood elf with a unicorn horn tied on with a headband.

Without any direct insight, I think that there are several major factors at work in that association. One of them is that content-wise, Ragnaglar has never had a cult, but anyone rolling up broo for their latest expedition into the Big Rubble or fending off Muriah's revenge will see that Thed cult and the Curse of Thed table. So there's a definite priming there of "broos usually have goat heads, Thed is the broo goddess," to produce Thed the Nannygoat Goddess. But the other side of it, well, that's where we start getting into the game of blaming the victim. Which isn't hard to see in the textual Thed cult of Cults of Terror (1981) - female broo are supposedly extremely rare, tormented by Thed, and so on. The broo are not responsible for Ragnaglar's deeds, but Thed takes it out on them regardless. (But in Borderlands (1982), Muriah's broo are not all that much like the Thed cult- they have a 50/50 gender ratio of male and female, or close to it, and relationships close enough to love the text uses the word "lover". This renders it an unspeakably Chaotic text before we get into its depiction of Lunar attitudes in Prax!) And then we ordinary players, now, we also blame the victim, the survivor, the one who's still around and bleeding on us. And so, the evil goats of Ragnaglar get transferred onto Thed. The randy billygoat symbology of Ragnaglar the Primordial Rapist, Eurmal the Horny Trickster, (and Gerendetho, Lodril's son) is lost, and instead we have the nympho goat slut Thed. Some truly wretched text has fallen out of this understanding in its fullest form, of course. But what can we see by setting the wretched stuff in a corner? Not all that much! She's still Chaotic, and therefore still "evil-adjacent". She still has that spaded devil tail in William Church's counter art. Who could possibly look at her and see someone worthy of compassion? To stretch their empathy out and say, "This was wrong, to summon the Devil was wrong, but what happened to you was wrong too"? To reject the dualistic opposition, the absolutes pointed directly at each other? Certainly not those Chaos-hating Praxians who... are fully capable of allying Thed in that old board game from the year Star Wars came out. Maybe they're just "making use" of her. Maybe we could stop and think about that phrasing. But maybe there's something different going on.

What exactly are you talking about?

The Imperial Bodyguard typically accompanying the Red Emperor/proxies, they have a well-developed body of work around crowd control, ensuring orderly autograph queues, and methods of safe restraint, which have spread far and wide among thief-takers and more activist juridical magistrates within the Lunar Empire. A plate from a popular manual, showing a method developed by the Bloodspillers, is attached. The studious viewer will note the classical symbology on the illustrated Bloodspiller's helmet.

"And Thed looked at the faces all around her, those closed off in anger and in fear and in indifference and in shock and those which remained open, but whose voice did not speak up for her. And she spoke: 'You have cursed yourself, Orlanth. You have damned yourself, Ernalda. Because you have failed to offer redress, but simply offer up your brutish brother as if he were the whole of the matter, this wickedness shall redound upon you and your kin again and again, until that day that you can make that redress. But you could indeed protect the perpetrators, and refuse to accept that the curse is a curse of your own hands and words and deeds.' 'Now I offer my own curse, so that you shall not do this. You have offered me Ragnaglar, to do as I please with him, and so I shall take him. He is mine, and all who follow in his footsteps are mine, and as they take the worst between man and beast, so too shall they become man and beast, between either, and they shall become so repugnant to you that you shall cast them out and think them prey to take at your leisure, monsters to slaughter for glory, and you shall use them as tools, though you deny you do so, and so too will you be drawn down Ragnaglar's path in your own way. That is the curse of Thed that falls upon you. I am a weak and frail being, and perhaps my curse shall only fall upon the weakest-' and here she looked at Vadrus- 'and perhaps you might even resist it, and live lives without ever stepping down that path. So much the better. But my curse has been added to the web, and you shan't break it without breaking the other. I have spoken.' And she departed the hall, and Ernalda buried her face in her hands, and Chalana Arroy departed after her, and Orlanth fell down into a still breeze that only lightly swirled in the hall."

What do Thed's actions you have taken from a specific source that is not generally available have to do with broo? Why does any guilt that may or may not exist pass on to her distant descendants? What would happen if you set aside the Book of Drastic Resolutions: Chaos and looked at the rest of the published Thed material?

When Mostali cast Summon Ancestor, or other ways of interacting with the ancestry recognition system, what happens is that their pool of ancestors includes all contributors to their individual codebase, arranged by repository and by meticulous version number. Thus, all dwarves have not just the two dwarves that engaged in the protodwarf module production but also the quicksilver decanter as parents, creating a triple string of commits that go all the way back to True Mostali... But sometimes interacting with this system causes a revert to an earlier version, spontaneously. Proper forking and commenting procedures are an eternal struggle within a broken World Machine...

You can taste the exile/escape from his personal Brithos there, wow.

Lot of them. Some sources that are used particularly closely: Arthuriana, particularly the verse and prose romances and especially Malory. The Hebrew and Christian Bibles and source criticism of both. Norse mythology, but also the Icelandic sagas and Beowulf. Hurrian and Hittite mythology get a real workout in the Glorious Reascent and Fortunate Succession- an entire section of the Kumarbi cycle, the "Song of Silver", gets used for the Sun Dragon section in the latter. Greek and Roman mythology are valuable, of course, but especially look at mystery cults and both older, speculative analysis and more recent, soberer analysis. Mexican mythology has some striking parallels, especially Nahuatl and Oaxacan mythology, to later Staffordian Lunar writing. Then there's contemporary religions. Thelema, Theosophy, chaos magick, and a good look at pop-Zen in America in the 60s and 70s are valuable. Contemporaryish efforts at fantasy and mythology in conjunction, like Robert Graves, Michael Moorcock, maybe some Angela Carter, are worth examining too, along with comics. Scholars that I find useful for both playfulness with Glorantha and in "following the trail" are Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumezil, Margaret Clunies Ross, Vladimir Propp, Mark S. Smith, John Day, and Neil Forsyth. If you really want to damage your life and possibly your mind, there's also Jacques Lacan and Ludwig Wittgenstein. All of these are in addition to, or supplementary towards, standard answers.

Yes. A roll of 96-00, in RQ2, means failure. There is always liminality even if by meditating upon the White Princess for 252 weeks straight I have accumulated 100% in my Sense Ice skill.

Why is this "doing [it] wrong"? Consensual hookups with consenting Chaotic critters seem like close to the least harmful thing you could be doing with said beings.

Liquid water and ice are the same thing, dihydrogen monoxide. But I can sense ice without confusing it with liquid water.

A slight amuse-bouche from a recent retranslation of Plentonius: the Firespeech original distinguishes between fixed stars, moving stars, and planets in this fashion: "those who pine/yearn", "those who can drive"/"charioteers", and "butches".

Zorak Zoran's three eyes are known as the Core Top (left), Core Base (right), and Neo Core Fighter (central). It is said that the "firing" of ZZ's third eye (presumably a ceremony of kindling associated with ZZ's High Mega Holy Day) can disintegrate the unprepared.

I think it's a valuable exercise here to imagine for a moment that this struggle took place on a removed metaphysical or metaphorical plane, and ask what the material/middle world results were: Pavis built his city. Here's an interpretation building on that, then, as an example. The struggle was over whether Pavis could build a city, and Pavis's victory meant he hobbled Waha, that is, he reduced Waha to the status of slave in Praxian terms, and also reduced his mobility. Pavis then healed Waha, giving him some of his mobility back and restoring some of his status, but rendering him subordinate to Pavis. Or to put it another way, Pavis threatened to destroy the freedom of the Animal Nomads with his city, but settled on simply subordinating them through subordinating their god. This subordination was so potent that the Praxians had to summon a power outside of Waha, Jaldon Goldentooth, to change the relationship between them and the city. So I think that in physical terms, the conflict between Pavis and Waha probably occurred in such a way as to make it credible that this was over the status of the Animal Nomads and the shape of Prax, meaning that however Waha manifested, it probably involved all of the big five and some of the independents participating in that manifestation.

This has to be one of the more interesting forms of in-character posting I've witnessed on a webforum.

The most consistent answer is that while they're liberated from any kind of automatic fear, that doesn't preclude an intellectualized hatred.