Eff

Hmmm. Well, ostensibly the Red Moon and White Moon are the same entity at different stages on a (hahaha) predetermined teleological pathway (hahahahahaha) and so the one's avatars would be the other's, effectively. But let's set that aside, and consider the white moon as an entity with independent presence. The moon plays time games in any case. 

What does the white moon represent? One answer would be the moon pacified, lobotomized, safely subjugated to the order of the world, insensate or dreaming like the blue sister is currently. I'm not sure this bleak figure has any avatars as such, because that implies activity. Another answer might be a consciously peaceful, even pacifistic moon, one who has triumphed over the demands of the world to engage in constant violence for existence, and I think her avatars probably aren't a major presence in the world, but certainly would exist and be active. 

Yet another answer would be the moon as full of boundless potentiality, no longer bound to a study in scarlet. I think that this paradoxical entity would find her presence strongest in similarly paradoxical individuals, and there are perhaps a few candidates out there in the cast of NPCs.

4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

The above is just a little riff that is probably going nowhere. We have gotten used to:

• prayer-powered gods (the tail wagging the dog)
• stories conformable to our wills for fun and bloody profit (consensus reality)

But aren’t there powerful things no one is feeding POW to out there in the deep end of what was supposed to be subjective reality — nightmares that are no one’s dreams, whose untold stories would stubbornly refuse to be re-written — things so inimical and alien that not even the most self-tortured “chaos fiend” could dream them up or even see them clearly?

 

Why would there be? Einstein's too assimilated to break the fragile brain of a cartoonishly, affectedly bigoted closeted homosexual from Rhode Island nowadays. 

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Mostal is dead.

That's what they all say when their rudimentary heat pump with elementals as the working fluid refuses to function. "Mostal is dead!"

1. There is a reasonably effective identifier for "Lunar converts"/"victims of Lunar corruption" among spiritual beings: 

A splash of red where it typically wouldn't be. 

2. The most important law of magic in some Gloranthas is that if you have an idea that in some way resembles real-world science, Mostal sends an ur-gremlin to render this idea impossible. 

4 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

I think this adds some nice tension to the Hero Wars era Artmali uprising and New Artmali Empire. Yes, it's good if they can escape slavery, but I really don't trust them not to backslide into Chaos stuff (as the Guide makes clear happens).

I don't think "what if slavery is better than freedom because the enslaved people are congenitally evil" adds much tension at all. 

On 8/4/2023 at 9:47 AM, scott-martin said:

Somewhere in the massive and long deferred take on Arachne Solara is a dissection of Greg's ambivalence (even antipathy) toward "mysticism" as we understand it around here, as opposed to this-worldly "paganisms" or "shamanisms." I think that shows up with the Wool Cloaks and other scene dressing. But some day, not yet!

Not a hard antipathy to notice! After all, mysticism quite easily accommodates/accommodated itself to the world of the clapboard churches. It's no great surprise that Arkat's journey involves moving from the mystically churchly towards the directly pagan. Historically suspect to trace the Grail back to Nodens, but emotionally satisfying. 

In that spirit: 

The dire warnings about failed mystics carry no intrinsic metaphysical component. Orthodox or heterodox, the only thing that will assuredly happen to you once you've intervened in the temporal world is the fruition of your actions. The warnings are thus the more valuable. 

On 7/2/2023 at 1:00 AM, Hellhound Havoc said:

EDIT: Oh also, part of what got me wondering about this was a thread from a couple years ago that showed up in my readings where you delineated some of the possibly optimistic outcomes from the Hero Wars. I've read this a couple times now and I thought I could come up with a different 4th Age "ending" so to speak where the races didn't really need to vanish into the woods and "leave the world for the humans", but the more I read in this very thread, the harder it seems for that to happen. Which doesn't bode well for when Wakboth comes.

I think the best way to put this is that the fandom treats Glorantha the way Tolkien treated Middle-Earth: as a kind of imaginary prehistory of the real world (aided and abetted by Greg Stafford being a gnomic cuss). So for a lot of people, of course the nonhumans have to vanish because you don't see any elves around here today, now do you? But if we understand nonhumans as variant consciousnesses, then perhaps there are elves still around in the sense of the variant consciousness that elfhood in Glorantha points at being an observable way of being human in the real world, though not quite with leaves for hair.

And there's also the shockingly radical proposition of detaching Glorantha from that position of being imaginary prehistory and making it alien, or parallel, or if you've just finished snorting an entire rail of Gene Wolfe and looking at the art of the medicine bundles in the Nomad Gods rules PDF, perhaps a future.

I don't think Phargenetes Xocoyotltzin integrated the different components of the Red Emperor into a unity at all. That's pretty antithetical to the connection to mama Sedenya. I think a more interesting possibility is that he reincorporated Lunar traditions from outside the mainline red ones (carrying the Sword of Tolat, I mean Shargash, and marching to the aid of Arrolia) and these produced a more active Red Emperor.

It's possible he also purged some elements out of the red emperor system, and these may then go on to join other figures who compete for Lunar legitimacy (Shadow's Good Shadow, Sheng, Ralzakark?).

2 hours ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

One of the few things Greg was very clear on was that "the Lunars are not the bad guys".  You can give them black hats in your game, but then Your Glorantha Has Varied.

For the record, I think your points are questionable, but I'll leave that to others.

Well, you see, when it's entirely fictional people and you're arguing that their fictional genocide is justified because of what is straightforwardly a conspiracy theory, then of course you're not doing anything questionable. It would only become questionable if this hypothetical person were to suggest, say, a series of death marches into inhospitable terrain and then confinement in concentration camps for the dastardly genocidal Lunars and their dastardly genocidal children. 

27 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

But if the celibate labrys-wielding sisters — presumably originally an expression of male insecurity about feminism (they must be monsters, etcetera) — became enforcers for Gilead or accepted pregnancy for themselves to get with the programme, then the hell with canon.

The point is to avoid getting into the weeds of canon arguments, however. 

1 minute ago, mfbrandi said:

Sure, but don’t you think there has been a bit of a tone of “let’s see just how hard we can push up against those physical limits — ’cos why wouldn’t we?” in the discussion here? If I am tone deaf, it wouldn’t be the first time.

As for social limits, I had in mind something more like ethical limits: things one can push past but shouldn’t. (The things that chaotics like me always get accused of ignoring.)

I think that there is straightforwardly a gigantic swamp to wade into when considering this situation from a social perspective because the argument is built on population numbers at two separate dates. While it would be extremely improbable for the outlined situations to happen spontaneously and totally voluntarily for most human societies in the real world, it is of course always possible to argue that Sartarites or Gloranthans are different, that they have a protonationalistic urge to produce children for the nation among women in such numbers as to make this scenario socially possible and ethical. But since it is physically very unlikely, that short-circuits that. 

Besides, I'm not sure if the Babeester Gor of the recent texts actually would intervene in that situation given that she's been subtly redefined to defending "the Earth" rather than "women" generally, and given the whole focus on pregnancy in the recent texts for the Ernalda cult, would it be a transgression against the Earth to pressure people into doing what the Earth cults are apparently built around? Which would bring in the question of canon as well. 

What's perhaps most relevant to using Bless Pregnancy for a babypalooza is that in a world without baby formula, there's a fairly hard limit on the ability to have children who survive past infancy- breast milk production, which in the real world is quite often inadequate for a single infant, let alone large numbers of twins, and which requires lactating women producing to excess to serve as wetnurses, who would be in shorter supply in this hypothetical situation of mass magically-assisted pregnancy. So quite apart from the social limits, there are clear physical limits at work here. 

1 hour ago, DrGoth said:

Thanks All

I'm getting a very much "it depends on the sort of game you want" feeling.

I argument I do see against the "just throw open the birth rate" idea is the cost the clans would incur raising all those children.  Not too easy. Also I'm not sure refugees would head from the countryside the the cities. I would have thought it just as likely to head the other way, with the countryside ceasing to send food tot the cities as supplies ran low. It's that thought that made me wonder in the first place, when i noticed the city populations weren't changing.

The potato famine figure (15%)is also interesting. That crippled Ireland for decades, if not generations.  Sartar does not seem to be hit so hard, so I'm wondering if a lesser figure is more likely.  Taking the possibility of magically supported fertility versus the apparent effect versus something like the potato famine I'm wondering if 5% is unreasonable. Of course, refer to my first comment.

A lot of any deeper analysis would have to look at agricultural productivity per person, because I think with a large-scale die-off you're looking at the potential for population decline and slow recovery, if ever, as overall agricultural production dips in the generation that died in large numbers and thus the population stabilizes at a lower level, increasing very slowly overall. Ireland, for example, continued to decline in population for a century after the Great Famine ended, even as agriculture mechanized further, and only in 2016 did the population of the island increase past the point it was at immediately post-Great Famine. 

Now, we could say that magic would make up for the loss of production, but I'm skeptical. Why wouldn't that magic be used to maintain a higher equilibrium to begin with? What makes it more of an option after famines? Is it simply that the gods maintain certain population targets and shift magic to meet them? 

7 hours ago, DrGoth said:

We also have this note from the last reference "“The total population has recovered since the Great Winter three years ago, although the population is disproportionately made up
of young children and adults, with fewer than normal elders.”

So in the real world, what happened during famines or prolonged loss of agricultural productivity is that peasant families would feed young and middle-aged adult men and women first, followed by teenagers, and would essentially leave young children and the elderly to die from malnutrition or starvation. Supposedly, the "Great Winter" in 1622-23 is followed by unproductive years in 1623-24 and 1624-25, only regressing to the mean after the Dragonrise. 

So these "young children", assuming that this means less than eight years old (halfway to initiation for boys), would have been five years old and younger in the Great Winter, meaning at vulnerable ages for dying in real-world famine scenarios, and a number of them would have been born in the lean years. If they are present in great numbers, it therefore must follow that the Great Winter could not have been very bad, much less bad than a lean year in the real world. And so it's only the elderly that died disproportionately. 

But perhaps by "young children", what was intended was the very natural reading of "three years and younger, disproportionately less than a year old", and we are meant to assume that there's a large gap wherein children too young to contribute to meager agriculture died off in 1622-23, along with the elderly. But from the straightforward English, the Great Winter seems like it might well be nearly demographically invisible in the medium term, whacking the tip off the population pyramid but not massively slimming the population down. 

1 hour ago, JRE said:

People see teleology when I see teleonomy, even if for many, they are the same. Rather than suppose the exploitative Lunars are an intentional consequence of the Lunar Way, it is the Empire which forces that only those able to adapt and justify imperial exploitation stay among the ruling classes, with the rest being pushed out, darted out, or just leaving it in disgust. I suppose many of those "soft" Lunars will be found all over Glorantha, sharing a doctrine of understanding and compassion before being forgotten by the history books, though I hope not by those that met them.

I think that this response is a fairly characteristic one in assuming that the Lunars by some method end up being a fairly purely antagonistic entity, such that the entirety of the ruling classes are people who are varying degrees of actively exploitative and the objectors having left the Lunar Empire entirely. I would question the assumption that the Lunars need to be antagonistic on this kind of broad level. 

I think, for example, it's fairly easy to look at Rome and the process by which Roman citizenship expanded, until the high point of the Edict of Caracalla, and look at this as a process by which the specific Roman method of exploiting the subjugated socii transformed over time into an ostensible principle of equality. Or at how Cicero's theories of the natural law carried implications about justice and human rights which have been used for millennia for popular causes that would have horrified him. 

(You can obviously pull out many more examples from human history, but Rome is a subject where common knowledge makes it easy to point to.) 

So with that in mind, you could look at the Lunars as an entity that is multipartite and has different forces acting within and without, rather than one which is one thing or has conveniently become one thing. You might even, without taking any horrifyingly radical steps, produce a kind of synthesis where the conflicts are resolved through all parties changing and adapting. 

But my brain may have been ruined by reading Fanon at an impressionable age. It is rather light on the sturm-und-drang apocalypticism that you can't actually interact with or affect, to be sure, but I also read Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness at impressionable ages too. Zelazny's fantasies feel truer to the Glorantha of not-yet and cor.flu and duckburg point, from my end of things. 

3 hours ago, DrGoth said:

And all this is why I see potential in a Lunar campaign. Which way will the characters go? Which way will they be able to make the empire or whatever succeeds it go? You can draw on philosophical themes, politics, extremism. For a group that want's to explore themes like that, leading either to tragedy or redemption or both. There's a vast range.  How about a group that starts out being ruthless manipulators and see the error of theirs ways? Or noble minded ones that travel to hell one step at a time?  Or both in the same group?  Fighting against internal (evil illuminates) and external (Orlanthi/Pentan) enemies. So easy to get to make players feel desperate.

Orlanthi want to make the world free ... for more cattle raiding?

I think the fundamental problem with playing with Lunars as anything more than "defectors from decadence" who see the error of their ways eventually is that it's intrinsically political- the Lunar world is one where politics is immanent and ever-present, and the pretense of playing apolitical "barbarians"/heroic Greeks cannot be maintained. I say problem, but really it's just as much a fundamental potential, so long as you remember to take all the nonsense about how the Lunars/the scientific revolution are simultaneously a threat to the cosmos and poor and feeble, looking with jealousy upon mighty Sartar and place it in the appropriate receptacle. 

2 hours ago, g33k said:

This, of course, is the crux of the "Problem with Chaos" that's inherent to Sedenya's Lunar Way.

The "all differences are illusory" POV, taken to its radical extreme, posits that the "difference" between life-as-we-know-it, -vs- the complete destruction of the world and the death of everyone and everything that anyone has ever loved  is also illusory... and not actually a difference at all.

Now, there may be a problem or two -- or thirty-seven -- with "life as we know it."  It's far from perfect!  First Council era... Empire of Light era... there's some times & places in the Gloranthan historical record that look objectively "better" & "closer to ideal" than 3rd Age leading up to the Hero Wars.

But Sedenya's form of "Illuminated Wisdom" is a fundamental mistake. 

I think that unless you want to posit a Glorantha where Lunar mystics regularly commit suicide because the difference between death and life is an illusion, this line of thinking is fairly out of keeping with what has been presented. It is of course fairly easy to posit examples of how you could take the things which have been presented as parts of Lunar philosophy and produce coherent reasons why ideas of the reconciliation of opposites don't lead to indifference to death and mass destruction. You could, for example, draw analogies to how Christianity, despite "my kingdom is not of this world", has not died out due to the entire Christian population embracing breatharianism. Or how ritual suicide followed by mummification is a feature of some Buddhist groups but not all of them, and is typically not done via violent means. 

Because if we took this proposition as a given... we would have to wonder how the Lunars accomplished anything at all, because clearly the distinction between accomplishment and failure is an illusion too. 

38 minutes ago, g33k said:

That's certainly a... uh... noteworthy perspective.

IMG, there's lots of Good Guys & Bad Guys (and Gals of both persuasions (and some non-binaries)).
There are vast numbers of both the Goods & the Bads, on both sides of the Lunar/Lightbringer conflict.

Nick here has brought into sharp relief why Sedenya is the most-bad of the Bad ones in this particular conflict.

Isn't it mortals who summon the Bat? 

----

In any case, an obvious reason why the Red Goddess would be understood as worse than the Bat by divine cults is that the Bat merely destroys ephemeral mortal humans in a way that might even be helpful in the right circumstances, but the Red Goddess, by being a liminal entity between divine and mortal, an entity who has embraced time and entropy, an entity who introduces the possibility of voluntary changes to the gods and the gods' world, is a threat to eternity and the eternal by disproving them as meaningful. 

1 hour ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

My argument is that everybody except Nick considers The Bat a chaotic abomination, and it's a primary reason to oppose the Red Goddess.  Even Humakt and Chakana Arroy, two of the most neutral and forgiving gods, hate the Red Goddess.

If Praxians (and your PCs) sink to the same moral level as the Bat, that's a fine campaign, I might enjoy it, but its more Joe Abercrombie than Glorantha.

Well, I do think that broo mercenaries aren't at the level of the Bat, morally... but that does speak to the underlying question of whether Chaos should be understood as having a moral valence outside of the beliefs of Gloranthans- i.e. is the most salient factor the use of Chaos or Chaotic beings, or is it what the Chaotic (or non-Chaotic) beings do? 

I, of course, am a radical on this issue, and believe fairly firmly that the text is only even marginally consistent if we assume that Chaos doesn't have a moral valence. 

10 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

the disease situation is far more acute

I don't see how being carriers for diseases makes them intrinsically less trustworthy, though. (They're also probably not that much worse than some historical armies in that regard.)

56 minutes ago, Darius West said:

Because Broos are disease carrying, rapey and murderous, and offering them pay means getting up close to them?

So, they're like historical real-world mercenaries except they engage in somewhat more bestiality? 

17 hours ago, Leingod said:

Thing is, as @Eff said before, "Dara Happan intellectuals can reconcile just about anything." They're a lot like the imperial Chinese literati that way, in that they can contrive some tortured interpretation by which any novelty or innovation we want to or have to support is really an ancient thing that has merely been brought back after all these years to bring us back to the original purity of ancient times. No matter how much Dara Happan religion changes, they'll never admit to it, and they'll always find some way of proving that it was actually something ancient that was just hidden from them (which is probably a big part of why they were able to accept the Red Goddess at all; once she proved that she was always there, there was nothing further to discuss).

To diverge just slightly, the historical timeline of the spread of the pre-Moon and early post-Moon "Lunar Way" is also fairly unclear. There are seven years between the downfall of the Carmanian Empire and the rise of the Red Moon, and a further three before the Red Emperor becomes sole emperor of Dara Happa. It's entirely possible that the river valleys weren't eager to adopt the teachings of Living Goddess Teelo Imara and Lunar religious dominion took hold gradually there and more quickly in the flatlands, Pelanda, etc.

56 minutes ago, Ian Absentia said:

Inviting the fox to the henhouse?  Only it's not going to eat your hens...

!i!

Well, looking at it from another direction, broo are a despised minority without any hope of blending into local communities, so taking the chance of switching sides would probably be influenced by whether they'd be cutting themselves off from safe ground. And as far as morality goes, broo as they're presented aren't significantly worse in effect than most professional and semi-professional armies have been throughout history, especially mercenary bands. It would seem strange to presume that they're therefore significantly less trustworthy without some underlying assumption that they're motivelessly malevolent.

48 minutes ago, Darius West said:

I suspect hiring broos as mercenaries is an extremely stupid thing to do unless they are extremely cheap to hire.

Why would you suspect that? 

6 hours ago, DrGoth said:

Re-reading the guide and the sourcebook I was struck by the distinction between Verithurus(male) and Verithurusa(female). See, for example guide p. 114 and sourcebook p96.

I know there has been discussion of this on this forum before, for example, that these are male and female aspects of the same deity, that 'son' is used very loosely in the copper tablets and even that the Red Goddess was made from parts of several dead deities, not one.  But there are still some things about this that interest me.

The sourcebook, on. p96, has the female Verithurusa in the Solar pantheon.  The Red Goddess claims to be Verithurusa, so that makes sense in itself.  But the Gods Wall definitively shows Verithurus as male.  There are more aspects to the issue, if we step outside canon to the GRoY.  Verithurus is identified there as the overseer of Mernita.  But in the description of the reign of Lukarius, Sedenya is identified as the Goddess of Mernita.  This could be interpreted as:

a) Verithurus/Verithurusa has/had both male and female aspects

b) Sedenya supplanted Verithurus as the deity of Mernita

c) Verithurusa was always female and the Dara Happans just couldn't cope with a female planet so labelled it as male

There's probably other explanations as well.

There is one question that I really don't know how to answer though.  The God's Wall is, as I understand it, the rock on which Dara Happan religious understanding is built.  It shows Verithurus.  But the sourcebook shows Verithurusa, which implies that is the accepted interpretation as of 1625. Is the contemporary (ie 1625) Dara Happan understanding that the Gods wall is wrong, and Verithurusa is female or that the deity has male and female aspects?  

Either answer is interesting to me. Because of what it says about how thoroughly the Lunars have penetrated Yelmic tradition.  There is no way, at least to my understanding, that the pre-Lunar Yelmic religion would have tolerated either answer.  They appear to me to be so patriarchal that, as shown in the guide, as far as they were concerned, all Yelm's sons where sons.  None of them were 'sons'.

So what is the explanation given in Dara Happa in 1625 as to the conflict between the God's Wall and the acceptance of Verithurusa? And what does that tell us about Lunar influence over Yelmic religion?

Or am I wrong, and the pre-Lunar Dara Happans were quite comfortable with a deity with both male and female aspects? I find this hard to believe, but I could be wrong.

As an aside, I think that if you accept a) or c) above, then Red Goddess is pretty clearly wholly or largely the child of Yelm who was the deity of Mernita.  That of course makes her the daughter of Dendara, with all the interesting things that then involves.

Some thoughts here: 

First of all, a general methodological comment. With the Glorious Reascent (never mind the canonicity thing, the Guide and Sourcebook all depend on it) and the Stafford Library books that follow it, we have a historicized narrative- The GR is a nationalistic document like the Enuma Elish, providing a mythological understanding for the victory of Khordavu over the horse emperors, the rejection of the horse culture, the supremacy of the three cities along the Oslira over the other urban settlements and the peasants, and the primacy of Raibanth within the trio. But as a document, it's also intended to be read as if it were made like the Enuma Elish or the Prose Edda, stitching together other sources into a narrative but leaving some of the sewing visible and other edges still ragged. 

And the Gods Wall is, within that imagination, a source that demands interpretation but which we are led to understand has always been interpreted wrongly or incompletely, most succinctly through the millennium-long game of Where's Wally Where's Humakt that ended in an admission of defeat- the Gods Wall doesn't have Humakt on it, so it doesn't have every real or authentic god on it. 

So we should keep in mind that the Gods Wall is a nexus of doublethink- it both represents the correct order of creation and does not represent it, and the intellectual environment of Dara Happa and the Pelorian cultural sphere will be aware of this. We can assume a great deal of mental flexibility about the Gods Wall, (or perhaps the reaction of Poe scholars if you bring up the symbolism of the orangutan in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"- "we don't talk about the Gods Wall".) This is one line of attack on this situation- Dara Happan intellectuals can reconcile just about anything. 

Another line of attack is to look at the Glorious Reascent closely. In the myth of Yelm's wedding contest, Verithurusa appears as one of the defeated participants. So we can infer that there's some pre-Lunar mythological presence of an entity named "Verithurusa". There is also a statement in the same section that Yelm is "not part of all males". Which also offers some mythological presence for entities that are neither male nor female, and entities which are bearded but not male, in Dara Happan mythology. Which makes matters much simpler- however Dara Happans process this statement about Yelm, this can be applied to any identification of Verithurusa with Verithurus. 

A third line of attack is to look at the imaginary linguistics of the Dara Happan writing system- "Verithurus" looks like a masculine name, with a masculine -us ending, but it's really got a null ending, which is only questionably masculine, because the feminine form is "Verithurusa" and not "Verithura". So whatever fine distinction exists between -us/os/as, um/om/am, (silent), and a/ya/ia as grammatical markers of gender, we can attribute to that distinction as many soporific arguments between peevish Yuthuppan scribes as we find necessary. 

A fourth line is to look at the specifically Dara Happan mythology (although Life of Sedenya shouldn't be neglected as a counterpoint). The Verithurus planet descends into the underworld and doesn't come back. There is no Verithurus after this point, and there's a figure "Jernedeus" that seems to stand in for the original Verithurus in parts of the Glorious Reascent. Verithurus descended into the monstrously feminine world, and so it would not be out of keeping with Dara Happan misogyny as a motif for them to understand this contact with femininity as causing a gender change in the fallen god, now goddess. (Of course, going back to Life of Sedenya, it seems that the Red Goddess would say that she was always a she, but we're not talking about her and her postmodernist ways, now are we, etc.)

There's a fifth line of attack here, which is quite simply- Dara Happans are, in the precanonical texts, straightforwardly wrong. Their insistence on a perfectly static mythological world where nothing changed is directly contradicted by the Glorious Reascent and Entekosiad. Maybe Dara Happans, after a long day out on the estate wishing they had more peons and slaves to brutally beat and maim, slink back into the villa, put a blanket over their head in a room that gets absolutely no moonlight whatsoever, and quietly, guiltily, misgender the Red Goddess.