Why is learning god learner magic bad?

[g33k]

15 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

... i mean sure, I think it could happen, but ...

<looks at the players>

<looks at it could happen>

...

"Oh, it'll happen."    😇

 

15 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

... but Kyger Litor doing something with fertility that isn't about restoring the uzuz fertility? gonna hafta say no.

With a sufficient application of Mytho-Handwavium, we might surmise that KL is looking to regain what She lost via some reverse application of Arkat's "Troll Adoption" whereby She gains an uninjured ability to reproduce.  This calls for certain crossbreeds, to study the process and work out the problems...  Add more Mytho-Handwavium, as needed, to create the needed background.

 

16 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

tI guess you could be Kitori-blooded, but that's not really how you get your runes.

I'm gonna go with "yes and no" on this one.  Neither breeding nor bearing is 100% responsible for Rune Affinities; at least, not in all cases.  Mostly, I expect, it's both.  But one or the other might be much the larger influence in some cases; and in a few, only "Nature" OR "Nurture" is detectable in the character that formed.   YGMV (mine does!)

 

[Sir_Godspeed]

2 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

This probably explains why they seem so out of place compared to the rest of the world. When Argrath et consortes turn up in Red Cow, you can't help but go "these guys are weirdos!" It's like they come from a different Glorantha than everyone else.

It's a bit like when in Vanilla World of Warcraft, when you were leveling up a human warrior in Elwynn Forest, hacking at goblins and murlocs with your crappy iron sword, but then suddenly a lvl. 60 toon swoops by on an epic amored charger mount with glowing eyes, armor that glows golden, and a freakin Windfury epic blade, and shoulderpads that shouldn't even be physically possible.

Gives you something to strive towards, if nothing else.

[Akhôrahil]

7 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

It's a bit like when in Vanilla World of Warcraft, when you were leveling up a human warrior in Elwynn Forest, hacking at goblins and murlocs with your crappy iron sword, but then suddenly a lvl. 60 toon swoops by on an epic amored charger mount with glowing eyes, armor that glows golden, and a freakin Windfury epic blade, and shoulderpads that shouldn't even be physically possible.

Gives you something to strive towards, if nothing else.

[JonL]

If the Uz parent were strong enough in the Man rune, they could breed with a human. 

[seneschal]

Ooooh!  Where can I get a snuggly giant kitty?  😻

[soltakss]

10 hours ago, seneschal said:

Ooooh!  Where can I get a snuggly giant kitty?  😻

On a HeroQuest.

One of our PCs had a BattleCat, which was basically a tiger that he could ride. It was an allied spirit as well, which was handy.

[Sir_Godspeed]

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

On a HeroQuest.

One of our PCs had a BattleCat, which was basically a tiger that he could ride. It was an allied spirit as well, which was handy.

I don't know if there's anything in the already existing material about this, but personally I'd imagine some kind of giant demigod-like Alynx could make for a cool mount for a Yinkin/Orlanth-worshipping Orlanthi hero or whatnot. We have flying bulls and giant flying rams, so I mean, why not.

[davecake]

Mularik being both a sorcerer and a warrior just tells us he is not bound caste restrictions, and has the resources to train as both. Many sorcerers aren’t bound by caste restrictions, we already know he is Arkati and so likely to be from a Hrestoli tradition not conservative Rokari. being a sorcerer and a warrior is the norm for Loskalm, for example.

The iron eye that sees into the other world is pretty special, though.

[davecake]

On 10/12/2019 at 12:07 AM, Qizilbashwoman said:

well as in the same era the spontaneous crossbreeding of Dwarf, Elf and Human in Pavis (which was EWF)

Spontaneous? I always thought it was a deliberate magical effect (and Pavis cult has a grimoire to make it happen).

[Qizilbashwoman]

3 hours ago, davecake said:

Spontaneous? I always thought it was a deliberate magical effect (and Pavis cult has a grimoire to make it happen).

AFAIK they just... married. You might know more than I do.

[scott-martin]

RUMOR TABLE

Mularik is ostentatiously weird but remember he is also a cautionary tale. Reflect on his post-Argrath character drift and ultimate fate in King of Sartar. 

Whatever dark blood he was born with or acquired isn't intense enough for the iron in the eye to give him problems.

While uz can theoretically breed with especially robust un-Adopted humans it is shameful to talk about. The question in reply tends to be "why would any sensible female (or self-respecting male if that isn't an oxymoron) want to do that?"

Important to flip the nature/nurture discussion at all times: it's not exclusively elemental cultures producing compatible elemental people as much as how cultures created + sustained by elemental people naturally evolve along elemental lines. People without the right runes will leave, get kicked out or discover their own compatible lives in the uh shadow of the parent culture. The parent culture usually has mechanisms for absorbing elemental outcasts from elsewhere. (See also: troll adoption, "kitorism.")

Ethilrist resembles fanfic because he is before the rules we have. This opens up other questions about how dreams work. Mularik comes from a different layer.

Pavis was not spontaneous . . . his parents were married before they had him. It's unclear how long the marriage ceremony took, perhaps years or even generations but at least a little planning was involved. Probably at least as complicated as a modern Hindu wedding so you be the judge.

Kyger Litor is big momma but her job is not to mate with anything. Her job is to mate with Man Rune. Trolls who forget that eventually get too far out to stay uz.

BattleCats are cool but spend a lot of time being Cringer.

I love Charles' line about how fear of the Doom Guardians is the universal constant in modern traditionalist Glorantha. The process of overcoming that taboo necessarily creates absolute weirdos. Some of them also get funky rule-breaking powers.

Learning God Learner magic is "bad" because it challenges the entrenched authorities who got where they are in a more conventional way. They have a lot of ego wrapped up in doing everything in the right order. Some authorities enshrine God Learnerism as a useful scapegoat for discrediting everything they don't like.

There are a lot of God Learnerisms.

 

Edited October 13, 2019 by scott-martin
clarity, so while we're here let's have a few more jokes

[soltakss]

7 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

11 hours ago, davecake said:

Spontaneous? I always thought it was a deliberate magical effect (and Pavis cult has a grimoire to make it happen).

AFAIK they just... married. You might know more than I do.

I thought that Pavis himself was the result of HeroQuesting to create a human-elf hybrid. However, Pavis had 7 Daughters, one was a Half-Dwarf, the others being mainly Humahn and a but Elfy. As far as I know, those were the result of normal breeding, not HeroQuesting. The Half-Dwarf might have been the result of HeroQuesting, where Pavis got to ground his mortar in someone's pestle.

[Qizilbashwoman]

3 hours ago, soltakss said:

where Pavis got to ground his mortar in someone's pestle.

Dwarves don't have gender so this one is a question. They're chipped out of mineral.

[Joerg]

16 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Dwarves don't have gender so this one is a question. They're chipped out of mineral.

No, that's Ancestral Mostali, and they have all the appendages and cavities they need for their projects.

Clay dwarves were molded in a new way, and designed to be self-replicating without oversight by Ancestral Mostali. Their mortar and pestle dilemma is a well-kept public secret, and embarrasses those units selected to participate in those activities to no end, at least until the proto-dwarf module gets extracted and transfered into a ripening jar (alembic, whatever) before receiving some first work orders.

Note that the creation of the Clay Mostali is little different from the creation myths of the Agimori or the Dara Happans, and the results have similar properties. The Mostali product is superior, of course, than those of some dabbling deities.

Edited October 13, 2019 by Joerg

[Qizilbashwoman]

18 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Note that the creation of the Clay Mostali is little different from the creation myths of the Agimori or the Dara Happans, and the results have similar properties. The Mostali product is superior, of course, than those of some dabbling deities.

Oh!

Is Pavis' daughter of a Clay Mostali?

[Joerg]

Just now, Qizilbashwoman said:

Oh!

Is Pavis' daughter of a Clay Mostali?

That's a different question, really. Flintnail is usually refered to as a dwarf, not an Ancestral Mostali. But then, Isidilian (an Ancestral Mostali) is better known as the Dwarf of Dwarf Mine.

[Sir_Godspeed]

Yeah, the distinction between True/Ancestral Mostali and Clay Mostali/Dwarfs is really murky, especially in older material (assumedly because that hadn't been quite worked out yet).

To the best of my knowledge (possibly gleamed from this very forum, or some kind of message thread elsewhere), Pavis' parentage was the product of some kind of movement that looked either to the World Friends' Council of the Dawn Age, and (possibly by extension) back into the Green Age. Something something refining the Man Rune. But then people here tell me that the Dwarfs don't have the man Rune (sounds like a game convention rather than actual worldbuilding sense, but who am I to say) so maybe that's overreaching Pavis' and his forebears motives.

[Sir_Godspeed]

12 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Learning God Learner magic is "bad" because it challenges the entrenched authorities who got where they are in a more conventional way. They have a lot of ego wrapped up in doing everything in the right order. Some authorities enshrine God Learnerism as a useful scapegoat for discrediting everything they don't like.

 

As I understand it, God Learnerism is in a sense relativizing what various cultures hold as gospel, allowing people to radically question what are held to be profound truths. Suddenly your storm god isn't THE storm god, but just another expression of a pattern of interacting runic ideals. That kind of relativism is not very popular with people who hold those ideas to be the truth, and the truth to be the basis of their very existence and survival.

Not AS relativizing as, say, certain forms of mysticism, I bet, but intolerably abstracting for your average theist or whoever.

EDIT: For a real-life example, I grew up with some very devout relatives who found the idea that members of other religions could make just as strong a case that *their* religion was true to be patently absurd, and honestly pretty offensive. The idea that my relatives' god and the god of some other people might both be equally plausible was unthinkable. Basically, "relativizing" their own worldview and trying to see something from another religionist's point of view was not only undesireable, but practically impossible.

Edited October 14, 2019 by Sir_Godspeed

[Qizilbashwoman]

6 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

As I understand it, God Learnerism is in a sense relativizing what various cultures hold as gospel, allowing people to radically question what are held to be profound truths. Suddenly your storm god isn't THE storm god, but just another expression of a pattern of interacting runic ideals. That kind of relativism is not very popular with people who hold those ideas to be the truth, and the truth to be the basis of their very existence and survival.

Well, and to their credit, it was the first attempt to systematically examine the religious practices of various peoples and compare them. This work is admittedly pretty important to Glorantha, at least theoretically. It's comparative religion, except, of course, that magic exists, so a little more complicated. The GL generally agree that the gods are not, like, really gods, adhering outwardly to the Jrusteli Abiding Book. They applied rigorous scholarly discussion to the situation and to be honest here on this board and elsewhere throughout Gloranthaland you'll see nerds using terms God Learner terms like burtae (a God descended from more than one rune, like Umath, son of Primolt and Ga) and srvuali (a God descended from one rune, like the Three Brothers Dayzatar, Arraz, and Lodril, who emanated from Primolt) and the like to talk about the Gods, and the Monomyth is explicitly their reconstruction of the underlying mythos common to all savage (non-Malkioni) Glorantha. (The Zzaburi had strong opinions on these mortal Jrusteli assertions, leading to several extremely unpleasant events such as the Luathan Quake).

The real problem with the God Leaners was a familiar one. They just ... got carried away and got besmoted. Which seems to happen repeatedly to accelerationists: Bright Empire, EWF, God Learners, Lunar Empire: y'all get good and interesting ideas and just take it too faaaar.

The God Learners actually Took It Too Far in Many Different Ways, which is sort of interestingly different from the Gbajid debacle, the Dragon Drama, and the Lunar Lunacy: they sort of went in every single direction possible all at the same time, and half the GL were apostasising the other half as devils. The Clanking City Heresy was a God Learner cult. I like to think of God Learnerism as "Protestantism", because it's all splinter movements of splinter movements. The Zistorites of the Clanking City were extremist Reconstructionalist Hadmalists, for example; Hadmal theorised on the idea of the core runes and then extremists splintered his followers; then the Reconstructionalists came up with a new paradigm of a "missing" rune and the extremist core of that group, the Zistorites, decided to make it. The entire Middle Sea Empire is like a fantasy version of reading about the weird religious movements of North America.

[David Scott]

One of the interesting problems that the God Learners present to "modern" Gloranthans is the distance in time away from the events: if we use the Dragon Kill in 1120 as a line for the overall end of the the Second Age, this all took place (1627-1120) roughly 500 years ago or roughly 20 generations of humans (using 25 years as a generation). Glorantha has some remnants of this history - there are beings still alive from that time and the gods hold some rules, and from events at that time tales, but mostly it's unknown to most people. Ironically the people who can actually delve into that past, the followers of Lhankor Mhy are those that can also use that knowledge and even have factions within the cult that want to assimilate that knowledge.

So overall most in Dragon Pass people know:

Bad people upset the Dragons and they ate us. We called them the EWF (yoof). 

Bad people messed with the gods and were destroyed. We called them the God Learners (meldeks)

Some people claim to know more, but clearly they are liars as that sort of thing isn't possible.

What's God Learner magic? Oh it's bad magic. (that's people doing things I don't agree with).

In a bigger picture

The magic still works, but most has been lost, but it can be recreated / rediscovered.

Secrets have been lost but they can be recreated / discovered.

Currently there is a resurgence of these magics, they are just not called GL magic: Argrath and his inner circle are a new group of God Learners, along with the Red Emperor and his inner circle of Demi-gods like Jar-Eel. Both groups are plundering other cultures magics and syncretically creating new powers.

Why do Gloranthans never learn anything from history? Because no one remembers it - they are mostly not literate societies and those that have some form of literacy were the ones who did bad things and were destroyed.

Edited October 15, 2019 by David Scott
erroneous extra zeros removed...

[seneschal]

What about those wonderful pre-literate society memories where a kid proves his manhood by reciting the entirety of his people's sacred texts or names all his ancestors (and we mean all), perhaps with the aid of a carefully carved and preserved memory stick/ceremonial staff? 

[soltakss]

17 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

20 hours ago, soltakss said:

where Pavis got to ground his mortar in someone's pestle.

Dwarves don't have gender so this one is a question. They're chipped out of mineral.

Not according to the hilarious section about Dwarf Reproduction in Elder Secrets.

There is a lot more written about Glorantha than is in HeroQuest or RQG. I tend to use all the sources I have.

[soltakss]

9 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

But then people here tell me that the Dwarfs don't have the man Rune (sounds like a game convention rather than actual worldbuilding sense, but who am I to say) so maybe that's overreaching Pavis' and his forebears motives.

I'm coming round to the idea that the Clay Mostali were made using the Man Rune, so they are "descended" from Grandfather Mortal.

[soltakss]

2 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Well, and to their credit, it was the first attempt to systematically examine the religious practices of various peoples and compare them. This work is admittedly pretty important to Glorantha, at least theoretically. It's comparative religion, except, of course, that magic exists, so a little more complicated. The GL generally agree that the gods are not, like, really gods, adhering outwardly to the Jrusteli Abiding Book. They applied rigorous scholarly discussion to the situation and to be honest here on this board and elsewhere throughout Gloranthaland you'll see nerds using terms God Learner terms like burtae (a God descended from more than one rune, like Umath, son of Primolt and Ga) and srvuali (a God descended from one rune, like the Three Brothers Dayzatar, Arraz, and Lodril, who emanated from Primolt) and the like to talk about the Gods, and the Monomyth is explicitly their reconstruction of the underlying mythos common to all savage (non-Malkioni) Glorantha. (The Zzaburi had strong opinions on these mortal Jrusteli assertions, leading to several extremely unpleasant events such as the Luathan Quake).

Yes, originally, the God Learners took the Malkioni Scriptures and went through them, almost line by line, working out which were true scriptures and which had non-Malkioni influence. They produced the Abiding Book as a result, unless that was the one that write itself out of thin air. 

The tricky bit was when they tried to find new ways to differentiate between true Malkioni and non-Malkioni influences, as some of it looked very similar. So, they used non-Malkioni techniques, probably reasoning that if they could do something using non-Malkioni techniques then it wasn't true Malkioni and could be removed. The deeper they looked, the more they got sucked in, until they mostly concentrated on the non-Malkioni stuff. Eventually, they categorised the non-Malkioni material in the same way as they did Malkioni material.

I like the description of the first God Learner HeroQuestors. They found a way into the Storm Realm and sent experimental HeroQuestors there, but none came back. So, they sent a small party of HeroQuestors and none came back. Then they sent a dozen HeroQuestors and none came back, then twenty, then fifty, then a hundred HeroQuestors and one came back, barely alive, to tell their tale. Success!

[soltakss]

1 hour ago, David Scott said:

2000 generations of humans

I make 2000 generations of humans approximately 60,000 years!

If the Second Age is between the end of Gbaji and the Dragonkill, that is about 600 years, or roughly 20 generations, at 30 years per generation. From the Dragonkill to current Glorantha is 500 years, or around 17 generations. That is still a long time, plenty of time to forget things.