Eff

5 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

In the version where Wakboth comes at stations 2 (empty victory of the RG) and 6 (full victory of the RG), he may stand for nothing more than entering the otherworld (easy — any fool can ‘die’) and coming back (with the goodies = hard).

EDIT: Although coming back with the Bat may make the “full victory” over chaos-as-evil ironic and make the “I am the Devil, now” reading tempting. Maybe.

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.

17 minutes ago, John Biles said:

The biggest difference between Sheng is that he takes 'none of this is real' as an excuse to unleash his ID and slaughter people for pleasure, break everything, and generally be an asshole casual mass genocider of people, while the laughing mystic simply seeks more enlightenment and escape.

It's pretty clear that if only fear of consequences holds you back before enlightenment, it will only make you a monster.  The Kralorelans didn't understand that or they would have never tried to enlighten Sheng. 

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.

5 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

There is a nasty whiff of power tripping, certainly, and yet it may be that casual mass deicide is a metaphor for spiritual liberation.

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".

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Second, Thed's association with the Crack spell is poignant in light of both Dorasta's ruined cleft and the "breaking of the vessels" that seeds creation in the zohar or wherever. She knows how to break everything. 

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. 

2 hours ago, Tatterdemalion Fox said:

Instead, since you have more resources and experience than I do, let me ask: where do you think the association with Thed and goats came from, from a Doylist standpoint? It’s nowhere in evidence in Nomad Gods, and BoHM saves all of its goat imagery for Ragnaglar and Eurmal, but it’s a very popular fandom association despite that.

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. 

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

On the contrary, Orlanth could have had Thed slain for her attempted sexual deception.  Instead he showed her mercy, and instead sought to educate her in why sex thru deception is not nice, by using his trickster aspect to come up with an educational counter plot.

Remember also that as a beast goddess, Thed is likely promised to wed to Stormbull,  like many other livestock Beast Goddesses (Uralda, Nevala etc), but she covets Orlanth, and hopes to get a powerful child by him via deception.  Instead goats become rejected among the Orlanthi for good reason.

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."

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

In what way is the world a better place because of the Unholy Trio?  Thed tried to use disguise and subterfuge to obtain sex from Orlanth, and that is sexual assault.  That is a sexual attack on Ernalda's main husband.  Not all of us buy into the illuminated nonsense that up is down, purple is orange, evil is good, and Thed is a victim.  You know a tree by its fruit, and there are exactly 2 broos who deserve to live, and I'm not entirely sure about 1 of them.

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...

20 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

This is not really a goofy tangent. What I like about it in the context of this thread is the fact that Greg got super inflamed by it initially. A bear who was god! But then he wanders off to make his own bear god man, a more satisfying execution. All our gloranthas are like that. "Take only what you need from it."
 

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

3 hours ago, Grivenger said:

I've been reading the Lightbringer's book, the Earth Goddesses's book, and even the Glorantha Sourcebook, but I still struggle mildly with getting a grip on all its metaphysical splendour. Are there any real life religions from which some ideas are in Glorantha are taken? I believe Glorantha took some inspiration from proto-indo european religion, and therefore perhaps Vedic, and Sumerian/Akkadian gods are a good place to start?

Orlanth, however, makes me think that I should look closer at Greek Mythology and Norse Mythology, perhaps.

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.

25 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Can you under all circumstances? If you drop your hand into supra-cooled distilled water (say at -4°C, no idea whether that is around 20°F or somewhere) and the water almost instantly freezes, when will you know the difference? if you give a cold water surface a very flat tangential slap, are you sure you know the difference?

Our sensory impression of water ice usually is that of the water film on the surface, of the not quite crystalline border region. It is what makes ice slippery. Your haptic impression of an icicle actually is that of liquid (or at least semi-liquid) water on the surface of a solid.

(You can of course cool water ice down to the temperature which makes your tongue stuck on it for a bit, that's when you will know the exact difference.)

For all of this pedantry, the comparison to your haptic impression of ice might an excellent comparison to identifying Chaos against some other form of unease or even fear. There are situations where your impression can be misleading or not as binary as your cognition might suggest to you.

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. 

On 3/5/2024 at 7:51 PM, John Biles said:

Bat-whispering is a pretty good description for what the Bat-handlers do and I can totally see that basically being how it works.

 

Going back to the original topic of this - Illumination is a cheat code that lets you abuse divine power.  Nothing could be more in the spirit of illumination than being illuminated, initiating to Storm Bull, then using chaos detection to have sexy hookups with Chaos creatures.

Sure, this means you're occulted and doing wrong, but doing wrong seems much more common than doing it right.

 

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.

On 3/4/2024 at 11:44 PM, EricW said:

If illumination teaches that law and chaos are interchangeable, yet Storm Bull's sense chaos implies that chaos is something separate and different which can be sensed, how can an illuminated Storm Bull believe law and chaos are the same thing, yet still be able to sense chaos?

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.

42 minutes ago, Darius West said:

In short, Socrates was far from a saint.

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

2 hours ago, Zac said:

I am just trying to wrap my head around some descriptions of the Arkat Cult from the Cult Compemdium.

And

If they are Illuminated they should have lost their fear of Chaos. So why are they trying to destroy Chaos? Is it some form of false Illumination?

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

Lunar documentation uses euphemisms to refer to Sheng Seleris, of course, but one of the most arcane seems to translate as "poor little aum aum"...

Revealed Mythologies notes that dragons in accounts of draconic mysticism are to be equated with Kundalini. 

Following from this, it is fairly easy to imagine that the Path of Immanent Mastery is disdained as a "parody of dragonhood", "trying to recruit our children", etc., that practicing draconists practice seclusion simply because of the many "chasers" who wish to see a demonstration of their draconic powers, and that the differentiation between orthodox and immanent schools is less relevant than whether they require you to practice the austerities for three years on your own before joining, require a letter lr two from a recognized spiritual practitioner, or allow you to begin on the principle of informed consent. 

This is Humakt: