Eff

This is heretical, but... perhaps Humakti honor codes are the main thing which keeps them socially tolerated. Death is indifferent and often cruel, but there are a lot more non-Humakti and if you actually kill indifferently or cruelly, that ends with you rushing to meet Humakt personally, but a lot of the non-Humakti probably preceded you in the process. So the non-Humakti push for restrictive codes which make it very hard for Humakti to actually kill anybody they care about, and the Humakti push for codes which make them important, and this meets in the middle with a system of honor that requires people treat Humakti with respect or flirt with death but also keeps Humakti predictable and easily outmaneuvered, because they've got the power of death on their side. Now, textually, this just isn't there. Honor in-game is entirely a list of things PCs shouldn't do or get slapped for, with minimal aspect where honor can be insulted or infringed upon, where it can drive someone to behave very disruptively indeed. I think this is entirely because of the fear that Humakti PCs will produce all manner of difficult, explosive situations and prove hard to write prewritten scenarios around.

"Every six hundred years you have come" is Gbaji's second-greatest trick. The greatest, of course, is when he tells you he can take the blame for your own actions.

I think that the spider woman will always be there blowing kisses as long as things don't get damnatio memoriae enough to erase her presence. The elevation and centralization of Ernalda is of course easily psychoanalyzed- if you've gotten hierogamized to the notions of active and passive principles, all bursting with gender, then what better way to avoid the contradictions of making Ernalda permanently play catcher when you can clearly see her pitching in this grainy video of a 1977 Red Sox game than to make her the world itself? She can't act on anything because there is nothing to act on which is not her. That this process makes star pitcher Orlanth the rightful lord of the universe and resolves the agonizing tensions of that board game with the Androgeus and the free dinosaurs for the taking, the possibility of getting your perfect doomstack wiped out by something as asinine as a good roll taking out Ethilrist, triggering a Doom Run, and then Keener Than is entirely out of position; well, that's a benefit (never mind the hazard). From all of this, the fear of entropy is obvious in origin, and so entropy becomes the great enemy that all acknowledge as such, except for that powergamer in the cheap seats with the red hair who keeps making out with her latest girlfriend. With all of that said, the spider accepted the powergamer, and her hand (or her pedipalp) holds back any assertion of "rocks fall, everyone dies". So it goes. What does Ernalda think about all this? The last time I asked her she just started laughing.

I made that up on the spot, because Zorak Zoran and Nontraya are parts of the myth of Babeester Gor's emergence and Ernalda's death/slumber, so if you want a Babeester myth cycle where her creation takes place earlier, you need to displace them back earlier into myth-time. There is nothing from "canon" or existing texts that it is referring to beyond that.

I would ask the player what they wanted from this request, what their intent was. How I play it *in general* is that time is stretchy and normally long periods can pass on the Otherside without much time at all passing on This Side, because that's a very basic motif for spending time in fairyland or other supernatural worlds, and doing the Taro Urashima or Rip Van Winkle thing without any context or setup first is pointless. So if their answer is "I want to speedrun becoming a Rune Lord or Rune Priest", that's not a thing we can discuss entirely in the context of the game and we need to zoom out and talk about why they want to speedrun it and whether that's a good idea, what the consequences of it might be. And if their answer is "I want to know what happens if I do this," then that's potentially interesting, I certainly don't know, not even in my own mind, what the consequences would be, so I might well say, "I need time to prepare what this interaction should be like mechanically, so if you want to go ahead and do this, your character's interactions stop right there and are held until next session." Or maybe I have a general sense of what these kind of interactions should be like in mechanical terms and I say, "Go ahead and roll it." And then from the mechanical interaction, whatever shape that takes, there are obviously consequences to this. It's not a normal activity, and there's clearly some reason why that's the case. Maybe what happens is that learning from the Second Son doesn't increase your skills beyond a normal training roll, it just moves them around and you've had other things drained to make you eloquent in Stormspeech, because you've forgotten some things of the paltry material world. That's an interesting potential consequence! Or maybe things you learn from demigods directly aren't stable in your head and the skill fluctuates somehow. Or maybe I think that this isn't going to go anywhere interesting with the consequences and the player agrees and we drop it, the Second Son says, "I have a life, you know," and we move on.

Of course, a ghost is partially synonymous with a spirit, and there is a little phrase called "the ghost in the machine". Keeping entirely within linear time and ignoring a certain topic which was quite hastily chopped out of this thread, there is still quite some uncertainty here. Then again, if Ernalda's body is the earth and the soil and the rock, such that the cleft of the Ezel temple is the gap of her vulva, her wandering spirit, her ginna-jar, is what she probably uses to interact with the world the vast majority of the time.

I think it's entirely aimed at trying to gussy up "you get 1-5 taboos and 1-x abilities" from pure rolling on tables. How I might do it is to swap the assumptions- the Bad Man isn't strong (modest spirit combat damage, spirit combat skill that's similar to a prospective shaman's, but is very durable (buckets of MP) and can easily disengage, doing so after taking spirit combat damage. Challenging him requires accepting a taboo, damaging him gets you a shamanic ability, and then you can hold him in place by accepting a taboo to prevent him from running. So you can take your chances on pressing your luck and pushing for more abilities, taking more taboos with them. Or you can get lucky (high damage rolls, he fails to break off) or unlucky (he's still quite capable of fucking you up) and get extra abilities or fewer, to keep the basic principle of semi-randomized quantities but also giving players the choice on whether to keep gambling or not.

Uneasy sits the head that wears the Weltgeist-y crown! I suspect that such a situation proves unstable. There might be some rather entertaining wavefunction collapses that come out of it, deeply maternal in their own fashions, but the benefit of AS is that the kiss of the spider woman usually only comes if you draw her attention. You can typically opt in and maybe opt out, assuming you've got a trip attendant and maybe a good excuse to tell poison control. Can the jolly green giantess keep that aloof face?

Just as we must imagine Sisyphus a happy man... A crackpot belief I have here is that there's a subconscious hope that by buttering her up she will bless us, or a subconscious sense that if we define her as benevolent, we will find a Glorantha that has a gentle or benevolent metaphysics. Like blowing on the dice for luck, in a way. For my part, of course, I have personal experience to guide me in a similar but not identical direction.

When you think about the function of pedipalps for a spider, doesn't that make Gorgorma and Arachne S clearly deeply connected, simpatico on a primal level? Anyways, given the origin of the A. Solara imagery, I can't help but feel much about her, appearance or otherwise, is a prank. On whom by whom, I don't know.

I assume she dies sometime during the Greater Darkness and comes back to life with the rest of the gods at the Dawn, or perhaps a little earlier. Yes, Babeester Gor does appear before this, but that's myth, etc. (If you want a naturalistic timeline, perhaps there's a Young Ernalda Adventures where she has her first confrontations with Nontraya and Zorak Zoran where Babeester Gor first appears.)

I, for my part, am using "nature spirit" as a structural role that's played in folklore rather than a strict category that requires a Spirit Rune or whatever. Not least because, say, a nymph or genius loci has a body that consists of their entire associated location, because they are the place.

Setting aside the "plot" reasons, here are some of the subtextual or background factors going into this- the very early batches of Gloranthan mythology are being put together from the stuff that was available in a popular context and a little bit of more academic material. Some of the stuff that's going into this mix is Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and the story structure he puts forth in that book which involves a journey into the underworld and a confrontation with a father-figure. Another bit of stuff that's going into this mix, I'm sure, is an outdated theory of comparative religion that was common in the 19th century, which understood religion as following a course of evolution with the progress of society, and part of that theory of teleological religious development was the idea that solar worship was succeeded by worship of storm or weather gods. This was in turn built on looking at Egypt (where the understanding many non-Egyptologists have even today would be that the sun god Ra or Amun-Ra was the head of the pantheon of gods universally) and Greece (where the solar figures Helios, Hyperion, and Apollo are clearly subordinate to the storm/weather god Zeus) and seeing this as a historical evolution. Or to put it another way, the storm gods displace the solar gods. The solar gods are older figures of authority. So the Lightbringers Quest combines these factors- the Sun is the father figure that the Storm must confront, which Campbell calls "Atonement". What does the Storm have to atone for? Displacing the Sun. And then from there you have mythological motifs like the story of Persephone where something is taken into the world of the dead and the world of the living begins to die as a consequence, and it becomes "kill the sun, go to the underworld, apologize to the sun, the sun returns, life goes on". (Note that Glorantha largely discards the actual teleological evolution aspect- Yelm and Orlanth establish a mutual peace rather than Yelm submitting to Orlanth- but pieces of it remain and occasionally come to the forefront.) I hope this "background" material is also helpful.

I think that broadly, I take it more in the sense the Greeks used it- even Zeus Horkios, Zeus-we-swear-by, is bound by oaths by the River Styx, because of reasons that feel like they're probably retrojective explanations of the existing oath by later individuals. So it's meaningful in the King of Sartar original because of that subtitle: "how one man became a god". Argrath is already doing what gods would do, foreshadowing his apotheosis. And then this is queasy and spooky because it's tantamount to declaring yourself a god, and it also speaks to the tangle of Argrath between cynicism and idealism. Does it bind Argrath any more than any regular oath would? Well, perhaps his apotheosis is preconditioned on his fulfillment of the oath. Or perhaps it keeps him out of the cycle of death and rebirth and renders him an undead monstrosity until he fulfills it. But Fate, like Luck, doesn't seem to be extraordinarily powerful here.

None of that was a justification of Argrath, which is itself a separate matter, it's a way of interpreting Argrath as a person, a character, rather than as a plot function. In this specific instance, someone who's deeply unpleasant as a person, has reasons for being that way, and perhaps can be made to have reasons to be a different way. One other option, of course, is to use Argrath (or Jar-Eel or Jaldon or whoever) as a fiction suit to project into and experience vicarious enjoyment, which is an orthogonal approach, but one that probably does require more editing to cut down on the grim aspects that I assume aren't in anyone's fantasies. But if you stick to the board game and making swordfighting sounds while moving Argrath and the Sword Brothers in a stack down the Royal Roads...

Hold on, though. Who says that this must be the case, that Argrath is required to be this object because of a rule that's straightforwardly an exaggeration from "oaths must be abided by, lest the being you swore by bring their wrath down" to "oaths turn you into a deterministic piece of clockwork if you swear them on the right object"? That, too, is also a choice.

You can do similar kinds of analysis for Argrath too. However, Argrath carries symbolic importance Harrek doesn't, as an avatar of the orange/brown side of the wargame board. Pulling at the threads of Argrath means pulling at the threads of Sartar/Orlanthi/Orlanth, because he's been made into this figurehead of one "side" in the factional struggle. Argrath is a bastard, a sociopath, an inhuman monster, for many people talking about Glorantha, in part because his function to them is to blow up the setting. To take all that loving anthropological material about the Orlanthi, the gorgeous lozenge in an infinite pool, and smash it into pieces and then let the pieces reconstitute themselves. For another set of people, Argrath is monstrous because fandom discourses around the Lunars from the Orlanthi perspective frequently appear monstrous, and so Argrath is a means to condense this perspective into a figurehead to attack. For some people, Argrath is a force that keeps the setting on a predetermined critical path towards its inevitable end, and they seem to see this as a positive. In all of this, of course, Argrath is not really a person at any point. Argrath moves in a unilateral way, operating without doubts or concerns or introspection. Argrath is an object, and there's a limit as to how interesting a pure object can be without some anthropomorphism. So what I think about Argrath is- he's a fraud and knows it. Argrath is a guy who's suffered. At the hands of the Lunars when young, and then for an extended period at the hands of the Bison People. Like certain other figures in Glorantha, he psychologically displaces his righteous anger at the people who are currently keeping him in the degraded state of a slave but who he also depends upon onto other figures who have hurt him but that he isn't dependent on. So much so good. In the approach of the boring master planner Argrath, I might then go on to say that the White Bull is simply a means for bloody revenge against his tormentors, extended out to all the Animal Nomads- the eschaton is upon you, follow me and be my cannon (cult) fodder. I think it is probably better to understand Argrath as someone who has internalized some of these conditions, such that when he has an encounter with the sacred world of Prax and is treated by the White Bull as if he were Praxian, he can't believe it. He assumes, perhaps, that he's managed to trick this spirit, and that even the transcendent beings are fools, gullible, easily led by the nose, and from there he becomes a conspicuous liar, deceiver... trickster. Not that he's a Trickster, oh no, that's displaced onto the recurrent elusive Elusu. So Argrath "tricks" Harrek, "tricks" Mularik, "tricks" Leika, "tricks" Annstad and Onjur... but he isn't, really. People can see who and what Argrath is off of the bat, right down to the very obvious damage. (My Argrath probably has a limp or an unusual gait from having been hobbled at some point early in life.) Maybe some of them even care about Argrath. And maybe there's a certain desire in all of this to gain control over the situation through "acting out", as a coping mechanism for having spent so much time with nearly no control over any situation. Which in turns makes it pretty easy to manipulate this Argrath, though not always predictably so. Of course, all of this does somewhat diminish the power fantasy of Argrath as super-GM, planning all of future history out in advance, but phooey on that power fantasy and its inverse. Anyways, healing this Argrath would be a tricky proposition, but I think there are multiple angles and approaches to doing so. Now, a word of caution here- this does, I think, require some fairly careful work at the table to avoid racializing things such that Argrath becomes an angry white guy stereotype, or having Argrath be a victim of white slavery or what have you. But that's work that Glorantha always needs to be done at the table.

Let me use more precise terminology. The multiversal entropy-eating world-destroying Messiah of the Age of Science Jerry Cornelius that you encounter in Final Programme through English Assassin I will call "the English Assassin" and the one in the "real-world"/mundane sections of The Condition of Muzak I will call "Muzak Jerry" and when referring to the multilayered combination of assorted JCs, I'll say "Jerry Cornelius". So, there is a sense in which the English Assassin is a fantasy that Muzak Jerry is having. This fantasy is something Muzak Jerry believes is cool, supercool, ultracool, especially as opposed to the rather deadbeat teen Muzak Jerry. Over the course of the quartet, the unified Jerry Cornelius as this metafictional entity comes to understand a couple of things, and wrapped up in this is the recognition that Una Persson, who unlike Jerry Cornelius doesn't condition her style on allegiance to a particular moment of mass culture, is cooler. So when reading Harrek as a Jerry Cornelius-like entity (to go with Harrek as a partially inverted Elric), we have The Berserk as a fantasy, we have Muzak Harrek as a constructed entity fantasizing, and so on. Now, Muzak Harrek doesn't seem to like The Berserk or think The Berserk is cool. Whereas Muzak Jerry imagines himself having kinky genderbending sex, Muzak Harrek sees The Berserk as only able to sublimate sex into violence (eg the story about Harrek going to a brothel and just tearing the place apart and then paying for all the damages afterwards). Muzak Harrek emphasizes the lonely nature of The Berserk, disconnected from all other human beings except Gunda. And then to really throw a curveball here, Muzak Harrek (and Muzak Jerry) aren't inherently metafictional disconnected entities at all, they're interpretable parts of the overall Harrek the Berserk/Jerry Cornelius that are dissociated from the public personae they use, and for Jerry as a combined being, his adoption of Pierrot as an identity is a way of accepting that the world has moved on from the years of his youth without having to abandon the selfhood he likes and enjoys inhabiting. Harrek doesn't seem to like the selfhood he inhabits. Maybe he does, maybe you can frame him that way, but as far as getting out of that selfhood, well. I can certainly think of many people of my acquaintance or friendship that had a similar understanding of themselves as necessarily brutish, destructive, violent, and animalistic, as needing to put on a mask of hypermasculinity to distract. But as far as voicing how they got out of it, well... it's pretty radical.

A Cornelius-like entity, certainly. But a different internal tension- Jerry the eternal teddyboy is unreservedly cool, the kind of cool entropy monster you can admire, and Harrek's Condition of Muzak-self doesn't seem to think Harrek's all that cool. But at least there's an Una, though said slightly differently.

The Anaxial's Rooster text seems to imply that nymphs can take on the form of a creature like the one the one they're speaking to, rather than must, to me. Presumably with some kind of "tell", but it's the same thing as the sexiness/antisexiness stuff- nymphs are close enough to people to understand how we tick, what turns us on. Maybe even better than we ourselves do. Of course, for the Greeks, nymphs were ambiguous figures who sometimes killed or took people away. The hedgehog's dilemma again.

I think there's room for a redemptive reading of Harrek, but it's fairly radical and dives into the extent to which Harrek is a sharply critical presentation of the alienated sword-and-sorcery hero. He's Elric seen from the outside- a terrifying killer, equipped with a horrifying, demonic magical object that seems to possess a will of its own, he betrayed his own people, he has only one or two friends at a time and he ends up fighting with most of them- but he's also an anti-Elric, big and muscular and described as animalistic. That's not the redemptive reading though, the redemptive reading asks if we should understand Harrek as someone trapped in this inverse Elric shell and struggling to break out, to articulate authentic desires rather than passing performative enactment of whims.

The boundaries between natural and artificial are some of the few things you can say are definitely artificial! When we think about "nature spirits" as encounters with a world that works according to alien purposes, it's worth pointing out that there are many gregarious peoples who would understand urban or constructed environments as "nature" in that sense, with "nature spirits" more akin to Fritz Leiber's paramentals/Our Lady of Darkness, or the demon in the telephone system in Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol, or the implications of the lyrics of the Talking Heads song "And She Was". Which opens the door up for two-way "encounters with nature spirits" where the PC is on both sides of the structural relationship. Which is, like the homoerotic desires encoded in Pelorian interactions with Luxites and Lowfires, only natural.

What this implies is that Arachne Solara's will determines the gender balance of "nature spirits". It all makes perfect sense when you put it like that...

Elves and Beast Men are also "nature spirits" in the sense that they are in the same roles as other nature spirits from the real world- a nature spirit doesn't have to be ethereal. And they certainly tend more masculine in their description and definition. River gods tend to be described as masculine also, though really we should expect they're fluid of gender and presentation. But those are some immediate examples that aren't obscure, but are obscured by how the tendency is to assume nature spirits can't be touched. (An obvious aspect of all of these things is that the gender balance of nature spirits in Glorantha and Glorantha's primary real-world inspirations is driven by the assumption that it's men who are coming into contact with them, and thus the interaction can play upon a variety of fears, anxieties, fantasies, and social obligations related to interactions between men and women. But of course, this is Glorantha and it would be more in the spirit of things to also have homoerotic encounters and encounters where adventuring women encounter passive male figures of nature Or to put it another way, perhaps some of these oreads and water nymphs are actually just femboys?)

It's worth pointing out that in Pendragon Passions are very specifically emotions the PK has, and, for example, Love (family) is very much not reciprocal- eldest sons and daughters start with 15, but for younger sons they get a randomized value: between 7 and 17 (average 12) for the second son, 6 and 16 (average 11) for the third, and so on. Even though your siblings have a 75% chance of feeling inspired by their love for you, as a third son, likely to be sent for Holy Orders if you're lucky, you might only have a 45% chance of feeling inspired by your love for them Loyalty (Lord) is 15 for a landed knight, 2d6+6 for a household knight, 2d6 for a landless knight bachelor, 3d6 for a new lord acquired through play... but Loyalty (vassals) starts at 2d6+6. Not only is it non-reciprocal, it's quite possible for a PK who knights a serjeant for valor to end up feeling more loyal to them than they to the PK. Pendragon, of course, is Arthurian and derived most principally from Thomas Malory, and Malory himself was a knight in the Wars of the Roses and the questions of mixed and mercurial loyalties lurk under the surface of the Morte. This is a very appropriate system for inspiring dramatic tensions between PKs, as a consequence! Of course, Runequest's own initial inspirations were sword-and-sorcery fiction most strongly, and while these characters tend to be very loyal to their friends and companions (I'm sure Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser have a suitably platonic Love for one another in a Pendragon-like system of Passions, as would Elric and Moonglum. Or perhaps less platonic.) they tend to be fairly mercenary towards superiors, in part because they are generally paid mercenaries. In that sense, perhaps what makes more sense would be for the default Passions to be primarily horizontal ones, bonds between "equals", (even if not actually equals) and the game were aware of the player character group being some kind of, well, nascent Hero Band. Or perhaps RQG was reframed to put the player characters in the position of companions and servants to a heroic leader type, but even then, making that loyalty reciprocal by default is, well, an interesting choice.