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Eff

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Everything posted by Eff

  1. The thing with the snark there, "it's great to see someone working through their issues and really growing", is that the only alternative to it is violence. If you're confronted with a Bartleby the Scrivener, who would simply prefer not to leave the building he's squatting in, you must violently remove him from the premises. There's a wide range of possibilities for peaceful resolutions depending on tolerance, of course, but the two endpoints, of non-interventionist psychobabble and drawing a knife, remain a palpable presence. And what Illumination does is remove a psychic prophylactic against recognizing the violence as violence. Because you can always displace the siccing of retributive spirits as the god's decision, not your own. When someone falls behind on their tithes and refuses to make good, when someone refuses the marriage contract their family negotiated for them, it is not you, the priest, who shreds their lungs apart from the inside or incinerates them with lightning, it's Orlanth, who knows better, despite the belief in the setting and the fandom that the gods are incapable of acting on their own. Because Illuminates are immune to a particular subset of techniques for enforcing control here, they are thus a terrifying presence even if they do nothing but live out their lives humbly and peacefully. They are beyond indirect authority, and if it is necessary to bring them into line, it must be done via force that is more naked and less justifiable on its face. The problems become pettier, less about defying the will of the gods and more about sassing the priest. It is thus that Illumination comes alongside Chaos, not because they do anything to positively bring it, but because they throw the justice or injustice of the society into sharp relief. And it is then that the demons of Chaos emerge to force confrontations with injustice. Of course, what you can do is operate at a level beyond this, and rigidly control the means of freedom, inculcating everyone who achieves the liberation of enlightenment in your own ideological beliefs, preventing them from ever challenging the order of the society that you think is just and correct. This requires you to be omnipresent, to murder ruthlessly and without thought for what anyone has done in moral terms, and to discipline any shirkers or rivals. But in this way, you can keep the Chaos monsters to the bad places where we don't go. (In all of this, it's worth asking whether the plague the Riddling Priests "spread" was a communicable disease common in Peloria or Kethaela that spread as a virgin-soil epidemic in Seshnela and Tanisor. Clearly, canonically this is false and the Nysalor priests were running a false-flag operation of literal well-poisoning, but if we ignore the facade of canon, what might come from probing this possibility?)
  2. Or to put it another way, Arkati defend against the prospect of people accumulating vast quantities of power with which to dominate others through radical freedom via accumulating vast quantities of power with which to dominate others through radical freedom. But they do it for good/with the right elemental affiliations.
  3. Of course, it would be almost disappointing if Arkat cultists weren't engaged in some ends-justifying-the-means behavior around Chaos, wouldn't it? After all, somebody needs to be the Gbaji for any given petty squabble, and you can't rely entirely on random Lunar encounters or "wild" Nysalor illuminates...
  4. Brithini never eat green beans outside of a casserole covered with breaded and fried bits of onion.
  5. Let's go metatextual for a moment. These two groups represent different things. The original Brithini are part of the Arkat-Hrestol stories, and there they serve related functions- Arkat's spiritual journey begins with his departure from the Brithini, and Hrestol speaks against the Brithini and offers a mystical understanding of their religion. The Brithini, who believe in eternal life if you remain obedient to a set of rigid laws and never step outside them or inquire beyond them, are a fantasy representation of American mainline Protestant Christianity in the 20th century, exaggerated to the point where they don't really believe in God. Arkat's journey is thus from spiritually dead Christianity to mystical and spiritual Christianity to paganism, but he finds enlightenment and peace when he integrates all of them together. (Pause for a moment and note that Greg Stafford called himself an Arkati and also had a personal journey from what I am told was a fairly repressed upbringing to a wild, earthy pagan life.) Mostali, to contrast, are simply a representation of mechanization and the act of making and manufacturing, with, like their counterpart elves and trolls, strong potential to run amok. Because of these metaphors, the Brithini and other Malkioni have a difficult relationship with the dwarves, one which goes back and forth, because of the neopagan perspective that Christianity robs the world of spiritual life and renders it dead matter, but also the recognition that Christianity, too, is suspicious of mechanization and the mechanical world. Oh, right, this is the dumb theory thread. So here's my dumb theory: Brithini temples to the Invisible God are made very simply, with barely any internal decoration, with sides made of clapboarded wood, covered with a simple coat of whitewash and little else. There are potlucks twice per season.
  6. The creation of the Orlanth Rex cult was a necessary but not sufficient precondition for the emergence of the Red Goddess.
  7. Based on Cults of Terror, yes, Storm Bulls are encouraged to be murderous unthinking fanatics and it's only enlightenment/illumination which grants them the capacity to not be that. Which is interestingly like how Chaotic entities and their subjective perspective are described.
  8. Brangbane is an adaptation of the Bluebeard legend, so giving him a Lunar wife would make her one of his victims and present Lunars as capable of being victimized. I'm not sure that's the road most players are interested in going down.
  9. They're both characteristic shapes animals have. They even share some key relationships in their physical structure. If you're looking for a classification system divorced from our primary reality, it doesn't work, but Glorantha has never been so divorced and it's not worth acting as if it is.
  10. I think that, on the contrary, form and shape are very closely related. Plants are things that look plantlike, beasts are things that look animal-like, spirits are things that you can't see, chaos things have inconsistent and mutable, even chaotic shapes. Dragonewt in this scheme probably refers to things that look "like dinosaurs", or "like dragons"- dragonewts, dinosaurs, magisaurs, wyrms, etc. Which would almost seem to make Dragon redundant, unless it's pointing to something that's not contingent on specific shapes.
  11. I think that if we want an ecologically appropriate source for domesticated potatoes, a product of the Andean altiplano, we have two of them in the Blue Moon and Hungry Plateaus right next door to the Lunars proper. Or we could place them further afield, in hilly eastern Ralios, or somewhere off near Teshnos, and make them a product of diffusion through Dorastor/via the Celestial Empire. The options are plentiful for making them as innocuous as the flooded fields of domesticated wild rice or stands of maize plowed by ox-teams. However, as with the cities themselves, it is still an aesthetic decision. It is certainly possible to read Gloranthan cities as operating under the reconstructed distributive economy of very early Sumeria, or the hierarchical and extractive temple-state, or a city with a large agora and open marketplace. There are of course discordant elements that need to be pared back whichever you choose, whether you make it global or local. The main consideration is- what do you think cities should "look" like? What kinds of situations would PCs be enmeshed within, and how would the situation react to their decisions? (Much of this in turn has the potential to take on its own political character: heartless communal Lunars versus free, market-oriented Sartarites; the raw brutality of the Etyries commodification magic versus simple, primitive communist Issaries "merchants", Orlanth forbid, a political character where the Lunars are more ambivalent- but that's a table matter.)
  12. Trying to find a rational reason why potatoes should have vanished but maize remained is a fool's errand- maize was embedded too deeply to be winkled out with other New World crops and plants.
  13. I mean, yes, the Dragonfight rules allow for a flawless defeat of the Bat, assuming the Bat doesn't make its Heroic Escape roll. Same thing for the Doom Run, which is what I was thinking of as "guy and his dog versus giant monster bat" for the smallest quantity of people that could no-sell the Bat.
  14. To my recollection, the Bat is a relatively strong but far from invincible unit when it's a cardboard wargaming chit. Ethilrist + the Hound stand a good chance of instantly killing the Bat off, for example, let alone massed missile fire + a substantial melee presence. You lose a unit, of course, to that pesky Chaotic magic but sending the Bat alone against the Lunar Empire doesn't end well for the chiropteran Hero.
  15. You could even go further and allow for spells to be cast according to an "affinity" that's detached from specific Runes, allowing for Orlanth cultists to use Rain from Heler based on a shared weather affinity, while making it somewhat more difficult to access water magic that's not about the weather. Just as a hypothetical.
  16. The green crown from Six Ages resembles an articulated chitinous shell to me, so it may represent an Underworld being Shargash fought and defeated in the course of becoming the Sun of Hell, but with the vibrant color of life. Or a patron, friend, or lover, of course. Just like with the phoenix crown, with fenghuangs and dragons adorning the sides and top.
  17. To my (limited, so very limited) understanding, there's a distinction made between the early zāhid ascetics and later Sufis by Sufi practitioners on the basis that the former practiced asceticism from fear of God or expectation of paradise, while the latter practice their asceticism from love of God. Which gets right at the beautiful ambiguity of "submission", doesn't it?
  18. One of the genuinely fascinating things about Ompalam as a concept is that the "official" position is that Ompalam is not Chaotic, which carries a wide range of potential implications. But I have rarely seen anyone give this more than a passing nod before diving right into the older conception of Ompalam and slavery as Chaotic, like the Roman rote definition of slavery as "the state that is recognized by the ius gentium in which someone is subject to the dominion of another person, contrary to nature." With that said, I don't generally spend much time exploring slavery in Glorantha in play because of how bleak the subject is and the way in which the existing backdrop material is facially rigged such that slavery is presented as inevitable, necessitating a great deal of preparatory work, even before touching on the racialized aspects. So, like Ikadz, Ompalam's Chaotic-or-not status is irrelevant, as both of them are banished to my Glorantha-4 anew whenever I'm reminded of their existence. So here's my dumb theory: Ompalam is equated with the Invisible God because Ompalam represents a collapse of the dichotomy of Chaotic/not-Chaotic. If Ompalam is Chaotic, then what is thrall-taking? What is debt-peonage? What does that say about those dancing girls in the royal palace? Do they have a 401(k)? What are the terms of their employment contract? But if Ompalam is not Chaotic, then does that not imply that slavery is natural, inevitable, and eternal within Glorantha? That the gods looked upon the sight of human beings stripped of humanity, then waved away Alter Creature and focused on those who were reduced to property, and smiled? How might we abolish slavery within Glorantha if this sleazy motherfucker has his place there? So Ompalam remains too terrible to approach, much like the Invisible God, while retaining selfhood and individuality. To get within the Ompalam palace, you need to, well, you need to discard those things, don't you? Whew.
  19. Death is a sword. Death cuts things apart and cuts them off. Death carries connotations of asceticism and isolation. Food preservation requires isolating the food from the forces of spoilage and waste- vermin that eat it, parasites that grow in it, the invisible spirits of rot and decay. So- + together, which is Babeester Gor, as a way to preserve the products of . Mythological thinking, and also the recognition that there's more to Babs than just "stacking corpses".
  20. That's certainly one interpretation, one which might be difficult to avoid if you spend too long looking at old Grazelander chits. My own interpretation swerves off in an entirely different direction, though, because I interpret the relationships with the terrain as necessarily bilateral social ones in Glorantha, through nymphs, genii loci, dryads, dragons and giants also being mountains, and so on.
  21. I feel like the "Grain Goddesses" probably do teach their own unarticulated version of Food Song, or many such versions, for properly preparing food for consumption. I go back and forth on whether they or Babeester Gor teach the Food Song that stabilizes food for long-term storage. Soaking acorns to make them edible, properly shucking maize ears, tapping rice off of a wild rice plant (though perhaps it's Shargash/Tolat who shows you that specific rhythm), knowing what proportions of wheat to barley to use for what type of flour, and what kinds of either... all of that is, in its own way, arcane knowledge if you're not in a community where it's done regularly. Just look at the question of whether to wash rice or not! Is this something that's interestingly gameable? Well... yes, I think so, I've contemplated basic scenarios where it would be relevant, (Ernalda priestess attempts to raise rice for Lunars caught in Handra by the Dragonrise, for one) but it's also better to keep in the background for the kind of play most people are interested in.
  22. A potential factor for consideration here is that there's quite a lot of flexibility of interpretation of what forms Orlanthi societies can take. Is a clan a unit of 1-4 villages that take up a contiguous patch of land? Is a clan a collection of a (home)steads with a central "town" area that holds the sacred precincts? Is a clan centered in a single village with outlying (home)steads and urban representatives in towns and cities? Is a clan a group of people spread out across a number of proximate settlements where they live with people from other clans? The assumptions between and within texts vary between the first three, with the fourth not explicitly excluded. And in turn, urban settlement patterns are of course going to be built atop these rural settlement patterns. Is a "market town" specifically a junction point between clans, or is it a concentration of people where it's convenient for access? Does a "natural" city develop from clustering homesteads, from villages merging, or from the construction of particular multi-clan structures and the economic development of certain services? How far does the clan structure reach? Are there bloodlines without clans, or truly clanless people? What's the status of outlaws, or of cultists of Humakt and Babeester Gor who have "severed" their kin ties, if that's still a factor in your Gloranthas? Should we read "house" in Esrolia or the Lunar Empire as license to give them house societies, a la Levi-Strauss? Or nascent class-based societies? Sartar itself feels like it must or ought to be unusual, since the Dragonkill obliterated most of the humanlike relationships to the terrain and then Sartar itself is the product of settlement, of attempting to transform or eliminate the relationships the "nonhumans" of Dragon Pass and the Pony Breeders had. Its cities are all planned ones in origin. I could well imagine a vast gulf once you cross the Deathline between northern Heortland and southern Sartar, or perhaps a borderland between the two settlement patterns. These are mostly food for thought, of course.
  23. Pretty sure I've been to one of those, frequently, and it's nice, you frequently run into Susan Sontag and Christopher Isherwood, and who wouldn't want that in a fantasy roleplaying game, but if there's a serious question up for dispute, things take quite a while to resolve, and it gets really slow if there's more than a bilateral negotiation necessary. Those paired d10s are flawed in some ways, just like those paired d20s and those APs and MPs and HPs and other HPs, but they do have their advantages at times.
  24. It is worth pointing out, though, that the Epic of Gilgamesh (and probably the Bilgamesh poems unless they significantly antedate Ur III) postdate this state of affairs- they were composed when lugal, ensi, and en had become hierarchical titles. I think it might be worth looking at this as a "primordial", "green-age" state of affairs which Lunar society may attempt to recreate (pulling out the Entekosiad and expanding the premise of what its T&Js mean) but which must struggle against the Curse of Buseryan, he who babbled the thoughts of humans with writing so that they could never again build a ziggurat tall enough for the Sun to descend herself into the world, but instead could only rest upon it as a footstool. (Note for the unwary reader: that entire "Curse of Buseryan" is something I extemporized just now from a mix of Snow Crash, Symphogear, and the Torah. Please, for the love of Sedenya, don't go haring off looking for Gloranthan sources on this.)
  25. RQ-with-the-lizard-and-lady-on-the-cover has a very specific objective for the game, and a specific intent behind that objective. You play a sword-and-sorcery fucko, who's on a quest to get themselves a Rune or two. Not to mention that the lead on producing RQ was Steve Perrin, with Ray Turney then coming on, and Francis Gregory Stafford taking a less direct role in making the specifics of the game. All of which is to say that there are a couple of reasons why this vision of daily life isn't a part of the Runequest-with-L&L milieu- one, the mode is one where you're playing someone at least partially divorced from everyday life, and two, there are multiple creative voices working here. Now, fast forward to the 1990s, when Hero Wars emerges, and it does validate this view of the setting, with the common magic even children might have, but also there the creative voices had changed in makeup- FGS was decades older, and to my understanding the division of responsibilities between FGS, Robin Laws, and other contributors was significantly different. And Hero Wars in turn has a somewhat different intent and objective. All of this is to say that there are clear limits to this kind of backward reasoning and picking out the envisioned intent of Gre(at)(g)S(is)t(affo)(e)r(d) from it.
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