Eff

A couple of other potential factors you can use here: -Argrath seems to have a number of Storm Bull cultists in his army, so it may be a way to keep their firm support by offering them violence against a "Chaotic"/"Chaos-tainted" target, in particular if he doesn't want to pillage Alda-Chur or deeper in Tarsh, or can't. -Argrath is aiming to distance himself from the previous princes Kallyr and Salinarg by emphasizing that he's for humans and against non-humans/werewolves. Perhaps around this time the three duck Sartar City Militia chits are dispatched to Delecti and the Ivory Plinth. -The Telmori, with their coincidental Red Moon associations, are a viable, ethnically distinct target for unifying Sartarites against the Lunars without going through the difficulties of purging every 7 Mothers convert. -Argrath believes that as Arkat reborn it is his duty to finish the job Arkat started through violence against the werewolves. -The Telmori refused to join Argrath initially and he takes vengeance against them as backsliders and forms the Wolfrunners as a positive side effect. -The Telmori stand in the way of Argrath clear-cutting their forested lands to fuel a heavily expanded weapons industry, and Argrath can sidestep the power of the oaths and obligations between the werewolves and the principality through mass murder. All of these are of course bleak, but ethnic cleansing and genocide kind of are that way no matter what.

It's mirroring the falling-out between the conspirators against Yelm (Murharzarm edition), (or rather the Glorious Reascent provided a prequel civil war between victorious divine rebels) and Humakt slaying Orlanth in the "Sword Story", so if we take it as true that they're the same entity, it perhaps becomes a mocking puppet-show of the gods' own actions and how they've doomed the world.

The original Sekhmet myth has Ra send Sekhmet as the incarnation of his vengeance/his eye to kill humans conspiring to destroy him, but then Sekhmet continues killing humans indiscriminately, at which point Ra dyes beer red to make it look like blood and gets Sekhmet blackout drunk, and when she wakes up she's not interested in killing anymore. So I think that the healers of Healer Valley would have done nothing wrong, based on the source material used.

There's such a web of Sun Jr. entities- beyond the ones we've discussed, we've also got Yelorna, Sun Daughter, Halamalao, Metsyla, I believe there's an East Isles one, and who knows what's up with Galanin... I think you're just forced to, at some level, invent your own jigsaw pieces to make it all work. Or, alternately, insist the jigsaw pieces are actually all just the same piece... Glorantha isn't real. When you say that "it is never going to be a deep and unanswerable mystery to any inhabitant of Dragon Pass whether Yelmalio and Elmal are the same or not", I can say that it is, and I have interviewed over 4000 Orlanthis as evidence, and we are both on the exact same ground- we are talking about something that is, in conventional definitions, unknowable, because it concerns something that is definitionally untrue. We can talk about the contents of a given book or online essay or whatever and know things in those contents because those contents are a matter of truth, but there is no statement either way on that matter- even the revelation of the Many Suns appears to be a moment of mystical insight rather than a matter of reasoned argumentation, which might well suggest that it is a deep mystery that, within the imagined fictional universe we conjure up, cannot be approached rationally. Or maybe nobody noticed it until Monrogh had a snakes-biting-their-own-tails moment and figured out the structure of benzene. Now, having said all that, what I am pointing to is not whether there is any such disagreement or not. The Greg Stafford quote is instead about how there are two (plus) ways of making Gloranthas, one where the Elmal material of King of Sartar is used and one where it isn't, and that these are both equally true. That is, there are multiple Gloranthas in which each one may or may not have any disputation about this status or not. That's the key factor here- at that unenlightened stage, there was no singular true Glorantha, there were many Gloranthas. There was nothing, to Stafford, higher than that which was produced through play, at that time.

What on Earth are you talking about?

Welcome to the "weird corner", then! On that weird end of things, of course, we have the thirty-year-old essay on Elmal: "I am not dismayed by disagreements since then. (I am dismayed, instead, by people’s hurt over this change.) I am glad that the Yelmalions insist that their god, Yelmalio, is ancient with history stretching from before the Dragonkill War. They insist that we brought back Elmal by our heroquesting. I expect them to swear by this, and to proffer artifacts and tales to prove that it is Yelmalio who was the original sun god for us. To them Monro, perhaps the most honorable man I have ever met, preserved the original form of our Godtime worship and maneuvered to remove the last of his True Believers from among our corrupting influence. I do not disagree with this, and am proud of my little part in liberating them from us." Or to put it another way, in 1993, Francis Gregory Stafford seemed to believe in some kind of compatibilist vision- the Gloranthas without Elmal and those with Elmal were in some sense equally "true", equally grammatical statements in the Glorantha-language. I am sure he recanted this later, and revealed that there was, in truth, a true Glorantha that mere mortal players varied from in their weakness, rather than the disturbing grim vision of Glorantha as a series of objects constructed by playing games. But in the weakness of compatibilist anarchy, a deeper trap lies- if the "discoverer" could be wrong- why should we give his words and thoughts particular credence? The hierarchy of source credibility, the vision of the holy canon assembled, trembles like a house of cards. Elmal is only the beginning- look into the origins of Caladra and Aurelion, and you might well go blind. Look long upon Balazar, and you might begin to hear a shrill whistling at the edge of perception. What was I talking about again?

That is an arguable interpretation, but of course other possibilities exist, here in this thread where we can speak idly and casually. I think there's some interesting work that could be done with the Bat being a Hero by boardgame rules. But I think that CA-of-Cults-of-Terror probably wouldn't turn Bat cultists away if they needed medical care. Chalana-of-the-recent-incarnations? Who can say? Perhaps she's indifferent to the continuation of existence, or perhaps her cultists are consistent enough to yank IVs out and unplug equipment if they identify a Bat cultist in the ward.

Don't be ridiculous, the gods have always had the same relationship to Chaos unless they were Lunar or Chaotic (but I repeat myself! Bazinga!): seeing chaos as inimical to all life and engaged in perpetual struggles against it but not necessarily violence please don't take the things that we've said as implying that massacring Telmori babies is justified by their Chaotic taint sorry, don't know what that was, but yes. Constantly fighting Chaos. Uniform opinions on the subject, no matter what those satanic verses may tell you in your "textual sources". Next you'll be saying there was a time when we weren't at war with Eastasia.

Ah, my oh my, I forgot Daka Fal, associated with Thed, friendly to Seven Mothers. Satan-Wakboth must have been whispering hard that day, to think that the judge of the dead might have a strong connection with Chaos, despite Chaos always having been planned as purely an unraveling or disintegrating force.

There's a kind of interesting logic to the compatibility table as it exists as a textual object in Cults of Terror, rather than with the intent as perfectly and flawlessly transmitted by the holy prophet GS more than thirty years later. The "cults" all seem to have logical, consistent worldviews... that aren't all that compatible with the further revelations that all of Glorantha was a grand Manichean-but-sexless struggle against Chaos that was simultaneously totally amoral. Seven Mothers are studiously neutral to the potential targets of conversion, with the exception of Krarsht and Thanatar, and the only entity they really are enemies with is Mallia. They're associated with Primal Chaos, but fortunately the prophet GS didn't put that horned rune into their panoply before everything calcified on the runic symbology front, so we can have the delightful specter of Orlanth, Ernalda, etc. being too stupid to understand that the Lunar way is an ideology and that the Seven Mothers are not separable from the Red Goddess, the one leads into the other. Bat cultists appear to be friendly to Eiritha and Daka Fal, but this surely must be a misprint, it contradicts the received authorial intent of GS. Kyger Litor despises Chalana Arroy- I'll have to check Trollpak to see if this is contempt for wussy "healing" and "medicine" or what, but it's fascinating to think of KL as a "hateful" cult that might be hurtful to a White Lady. Studiously contrary to the eternal GSian intent, to be fair.

Of course, that crazy old sourcebook has some weird stuff in that cult compatibility table, doesn't it? Crimson Bat cultists are neutral towards Orlanth, while Orlanth cultists are enemies of Crimson Bat cultists. They're hostile towards only four other cults in that wild book, in fact: Storm Bull, Zorak Zoran, Thanatar, and Vivamort. Imagine, if you will, a situation where you have one group of people who are studiedly neutral towards a second group and another group are frothing-at-the-mouth hostile towards them- which would you think was likely to be in the right? In fact, the first group is only hostile towards berserk murderers, vampires, and people who secretly murder other people to eat their brains, metaphorically speaking. Of course we know that in Glorantha it's simply a matter of perspective, and there's no way to step back and consider the actual situation that is happening here and what it might mean and how we might think of the people involved. Furthermore, even if you do that impossible action, you can't pull back yet further and consider if you want to mold or change that situation, adjust the entries on the sacred chart in the holy books, such that perhaps the situation is less ambiguous or has more room for the second, totally nameless group of people to be less rabid. There's simply no way to do this. If Glorantha varies, that happens without any intent or thought or consideration from anyone. The easiest and simplest solution, I think, in the absence of holding property rights by law, is to simply declare that mischievous entries like Humakt being neutral to Primal Chaos, Pavis being friendly to Seven Mothers, and the like, well, they were simply whispered into the author's ear by Satan. Or Wakboth. Or whatever you call it.

To be fair, back in Cults of Terror, Chalana Arroy was also hostile to Zorak Zoran. But you're right! Unless you take a level of extremely cartoonish moral relativism, puffing on a bubble-pipe and declaiming "who can say whether healing the sick is good or not?", positioning the Chalana Arroy that in Cults of Terror had a clear line drawn between "chaos gods with actual mortal adherents" like Bagog, Krarsht, Thed, Nysalor, the Bat and "gods who deliberately work to undermine me" like Mallia, Thanatar, Vivamort and Primal Chaos as hostile to the Red Goddess despite her mortal adherents indicates either that Chalana Arroy has gone all problematical on us when we weren't looking... or that the Red Goddess is worse by far than any of those, such that Chalana Arroy's beliefs about healing and mercy are overridden.

Yeah, it is a puzzle, isn't it? Some of this is because the neutrality is from Cults of Terror's cult compatibility chart, of course, and Gods of Glorantha was written later. But if you want to take my little idea seriously, then go ahead and work out a reconciliation! (In that chart, Chalana Arroy is neutral to Bagog, Krarsht, Thed, and Nysalor as well, while being hostile to Zorak Zoran and Thanatar and an enemy towards Primal Chaos, Mallia, and Vivamort. It's fairly easy to see a pattern here- Chalana Arroy in Cults of Terror will heal scorpionfolk, krarshtkids, and broo in need, along with illuminates, but disdain the two murder cults and oppose vampires, sickness, and primal chaos. The outlier is the recent revelation that CA is hostile to Red Goddess.)

So there's this word "animism", derived from Latin anima, which refers to the quality of being alive, or of breathing. It is typically used to refer to a set of religious beliefs that assign qualities of life and animation to inanimate or even incorporeal, abstract entities, along with qualities of personhood to those entities and to animate beings that are not human. This word is also applied to "spirits" and the religious practices around said beings in Glorantha. So it's a little strange to argue that animism means precisely the opposite of its common definition here- that it means interacting with entities that are not alive, not truly animate. But that's a metatextual observation. Within the illusive realm of treating Glorantha as a concrete thing, it is worth pointing out that gods don't have "a body and a soul", they have multiple bodies and none. Some gods are even spirits explicitly, like Kolat. And gods very much can die, and the whole Lightbringers Quest revolves around this fact. And maybe you can die without being alive, but it seems like a difficult ontological position! So that's why I question the idea that spirits are clearly not alive, because if they aren't alive, we are faced with some interesting problems.

The reason Chalana Arroy is Neutral towards the Crimson Bat, it is said, is because the Bat is capable of being healed. Chalana Arroy is Hostile towards the Red Goddess. This, some might say, is because the Red Goddess is beyond any healing, irredeemable, CA has muttered "unforgivable" in Japanese in response to some Red Goddess antics before, etc., but there is another answer. The Red Goddess is incapable of being healed because she has a clean bill of health. Chalana Arroy hates healthy people who have no need for her services. All the gods CA has good or neutral relationships with are perpetually injured, and those she disdains are hale and hearty.

Why not, apart from it being inconvenient for the argument?

Are spirits not alive?

Back in 1980, it was still possible to believe that Thed and the Crimson Bat were wounded beings in need of treatment. Of course, nowadays that's unthinkable in a literal sense- even writing that sentence caused a rain of frogs to patter down outside just now.

I mean, it seems very obviously the case that this is just getting the protagonistic ducks in a row. Yelmalio, like Orlanth and Ernalda, hates Red Goddess, like all the right-thinking gods and goddesses do. The orange side of the board game, opposed to the pink side. You can get some interesting questions out of carrying forward the 1980 text- why are people neutral to the Seven Mothers when they proselytize the Lunar religion that the Red Goddess is at the center of, if these are on the level of gods and not the convolutions of human beliefs? But that questioning has no answer when I ask it, it's aimed at thinking about how to play with these bits of textual statements in the context of a game.

I don't see anything in the RQ2018 rules that indicates that a cult needs more than god-talkers or explicitly needs temples in order to exist. As far as population goes, you only need a few hundred people for cult ceremonies, in those few instances where that's been specified, and there are hundreds of thousands of people in Dragon Pass. It seems like population isn't a problem either. I dunno, it seems to me that it might be easier to use an out-of-universe answer.

One of the more interesting implications here is that Yelmalio is/was N towards Nysalor but is H towards Red Goddess. Clearly that Rune Nysalor sports wasn't a deal-breaker in the past, so what might be the reason for the hostility towards Big S?

Fertility as gendered feminine is interesting because it's a kind of inversion of certain RW historical beliefs about reproduction- where there they understood women to contribute nothing to the child but a place for them to grow, here we have the semen as unrelated to fertility except perhaps as a food source for the embryo. Intriguing.

There's a pretty interesting metaphysical question underlying this one- ''What does the Cult Compatibility Table represent?" That is, does it represent the relationship between gods, the opinions of the cult membership, the opinions of the cult leadership, the opinions of the broader community, some combination of these? If we take it the first option, which is certainly how we tend to talk about matters- Orlanth is opposed to the Red Goddess, not the Orlanth cult leadership to the Red Goddess cult leadership, Orlanth cult membership to the Red Goddess cult membership, or Sartar's population to the population of the Lunar Empire, is how we tend to talk about that H in the table. But if we accept that Yelmalio and Elmal are the same entity, and Yelmalio is N on the table and Elmal was F with regards to Orlanth, how does that work? Did the gods, residents of the Godtime that supposedly only changes when Lunars are using their salacious Lunar Ways to alter it, change with Monrogh's revelations? Weren't these revelations an attempt to salvage the relationship of Elmal worshipers to the dominion of Orlanth? So why would they make Yelmalio less friendly to Orlanth? Should we assume that Elmal also was N on that table? Doesn't that require significantly reinterpreting or Xing out the Elmal mythology that actually exists? Maybe we should understand this as a social phenomenon instead. After all, isn't it meant to be a method for shaping the initial interactions between members of different cults? But then we must ask "Which society?" and "Should these initial interactions dictate the ability of cults to interact with one another period? Shouldn't there be room for differences of opinion?" Many questions.

In the real world practice of Zen, "austerities" like sitting zazen or monastic life generally are an important component. In fact, typically the process of achieving "enlightening moments" of kensho as recorded in koans only comes after a prolonged period of preparation through austerity and study of sutras and so on. Gloranthan mysticism is much more occult-tinged, in large part because Greg Stafford both was in that crowd and also was getting his cultural knowledge of Buddhism from a very mid-20th-century Californian filter. But it's fairly easy to understand its mysticism in the terminology of mystic traditions in Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism... without even dipping into the Thelema or Theosophy wells.

A couple of thoughts here: My preference is always going to be Option 1 on that list, because I think that I disagree with the idea that there is a story to be messed with in the sense you seem to be using the word- if the PKs kill Agravain or Mordred, what's happened is that you've ended up in a different branch of Arthurian possibilities... but there are a lot of those out there. It would take a lot more than that to even get close to Camelot 3000, Seven Soldiers: Shining Knight, King Arthur and the Knights of Justice, etc. So with that in mind, I think there are also a couple of interesting points to talk about. The first one, which has already been lightly invoked, is that murdering either of the two problematic ones among the Orkneys is going to mean that the surviving brothers will be forced to pursue some combination of justice or vengeance against the murderers, and if it's not done very carefully and stage-managed to reveal some unutterable perfidy from the victim, Arthur is also going to be forced to act against the murderers. Now, to play out some of the implications of a Malory subplot, the Orkney brothers do manage to survive their group murder of Lamorak de Gales and Gaheris's matricide, but they are also extraordinarily important political figures, and in the former case they are pursuing the apparent murderer of their mother, and in the latter case, the truth is effectively concealed. That said, player characters could try to get the protection of a major noble or petty king or round table knight first. Perhaps Mark of Cornwall. Who, in the later medieval traditions, frequently was the actual destroyer of Camelot after Mordred and Arthur kill each other. Which is to say, this action very straightforwardly and directly could be a proximate cause of the fall of Camelot and death of Arthur and destruction of Britain in civil strife. You maybe lose Camlann, but the Italians (in La Tavola Ritonda) had Mordred survive Camlann and end up killed by Lancelot later. You're well within the skein of tradition there. The tragic rise and fall of Arthur is still there, though the causes and the meaning are different. So the second point here- what's the player intent with this proposed action? Why do they want to kill Mordred, Agravain, or both? I'm not asking in a character-knowledge/out-of-character-knowledge sense, to be clear. If their intent is to protect/preserve Camelot, or to try and break Arthuriana, there's actually nothing wrong with that! But it does require having a conversation as a group about why, and what the premise of the game is meant to be, and whether Camelot's eventual destruction is a fixed aspect of that premise or not. And then from that conversation, everyone can have a better idea of where they want to go from there. I'm not even talking about ceding authority over backstory and setting to the other players, although that's an option. I'm just saying- talk about it, make it clear where everyone is and then move forward from there. Maybe they agree that, yeah, they want to see how long they can hold Camelot together even though it's impossible for it to last. The Last Temptation of Christ it up. Or maybe they just want to throw some bombs and make things happen, and they decide that they're going to pick a different direction to throw the bombs in. Third point- Agravain and Mordred are, of course, scummy villains, and part and parcel of that (being only mildly tongue in cheek) is that they might well have a cool head in the midst of battle and be able to throw down their weapons and beg mercy. (And in the Welsh Triads, Mordred is associated with calmness, clever speech, and the ability to get his way through talking, though usually positively.) This is mostly an option for players explaining that they want to whip Agravain's little ass because he's a jerk or whatever- there's a way for them to get that victory, that concession, without seriously risking Agravain becoming the Franz Ferdinand of Camelot. But it's just hanging out there- this opportunity for these two to win the sympathy of the crowd by working the refs- if you want to play the culture of Camelot that way. Fourth point- there's some weird parallels between Mordred and Jesus in the Post-Vulgate and then in Malory. Whether these are to be read as Mordred being divinely blessed (which is consonant with his Vulgate depiction and earlier) or as Mordred being an Antichrist figure or as a sign of Arthur's corruption under Merlin's baleful influence or as a strange rhyme with the New Testament without much meaning is mostly up to the reader, but if you have a fairly "magical" game, it's entirely possible for Mordred to be miraculously (or diabolically) resurrected after death. This can push things well into spooky apocalyptica if you let it. Caveant lusores. But I do think it might be fun.