"Bad" acts versus "Chaos" acts

[Qizilbashwoman]

7 hours ago, Kloster said:

Slavery is clearly not chaotic, as lot of non chaotic cults and areas have slaves. In fact, Hendriki are the only Orlanthi that forbid slavery, iirc.

Yeah, and I understand better about Ompalam.

It makes sense to me too because the Hendriki/Dragon Pass peeps object to it out of cultural mores: no one can make you do anything is something they take real seriously. I think of these traditionalists (non-city folk) as being the "outlawry or death, not imprisonment" folk. Prisons are for savages like the Lunars, besides, nobody has time for this. There's no prison guards outside of maybe the city. Only you can make amends for offense by offering your body as labor; foreigners taken in battle can be forced to work, but not their children.

This is the most radical vision of the Orlanthi Three Rules, kinda, and it's sensible due to the lifeways of Dragon Pass: scrabbly, deeply clannish, agro-pastoralist, unsettled and constantly upending who is in power, idealising individual liberty and egalitarian but also struggling for individual power, and deeply fluctuating. This is not a world of stable social classes! Interlocking rings always moving up and down, and with the endless "me against my sister, my sister and I against my cousins, my cousins and us against the next kin, them and us against the distant Hendriki" plus the madness of Lunar v. Traditionalist and under it all, the need to survive against Chaos, monsters, and spirit attacks.

 

Edited February 16, 2020 by Qizilbashwoman

[Darius West]

On 2/16/2020 at 7:06 AM, lordabdul said:

Maybe instead of treating that as a "problem", we could treat that as an opportunity for world-building and adventure seeds? Think about it: consider that Chaos is something that seeps into the world through societal taboos and cultural no-noes. This means that agents of Chaos will actually want to make sure more cultures around Glorantha become more "strict" and have more taboos, so that when people break them, this will give more chance for Chaos to come in. So agents of Chaos might be manipulating politics and cults to make societies more conservative and with less freedom, maybe even going so far as to make it all sound like these were divine laws to begin with (maybe heroquesting to that effect?). Although that's one aspect that does interestingly reflect modern real-world topics, there are other threads in this idea that end up in fairly awkward places, but I think with a bit of polish and care there's a potentially nice campaign theme somewhere there.

I like this idea and in fact I think there is good evidence to support it.  Famously the chaos deity Arrquong said of Western sorcerers that they did much to aid chaos and nothing of importance to hinder it.  In Glorantha, also famously it is said that the greatest enemies of Chaos are not the people of Law, but the people of Disorder i.e. Trolls and Stormbulls.  You would certainly be hard pressed to create civilizations more hidebound and repressive than the Brithini or the Dwarves.

While I have always understood the importance of breaking taboo in terms of chaos, my own paradigm for dealing with it is probably more tinged with "Chaos=C'thulhu", "it's like radiation in the Marvel Universe, except it's gooey and makes you psychopathic" tropes.  Before the Unholy Trio, it is likely that the Primal Plasma was a source of pure life energy, but they polluted it, and now it is a threat to everything. You have changed my perspective a little.

I guess when an Orlanthi sees kinslaying, and knows it is against the natural order, and there is no redress for it within Orlanthi society save for purging the damage with the Summons of Evil ritual, part of them begins to question the reality of the natural order, and wonders whether they too can get away with such crimes.  If the natural order is disrupted too often then people begin to see the natural order as something else.  It's a bit like the taoist saying:  

"When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder."

(Hmm... I wonder where virtue signalling fits in this picture?  Somewhere between Right Conduct and Expediency I think.)

[davecake]

13 hours ago, Darius West said:

also famously it is said that the greatest enemies of Chaos are not the people of Law, but the people of Disorder i.e. Trolls and Stormbulls.

Only said by people who would fail their Runic Philosophy exam... Law in this sense isn’t human law, it’s natural law, and nature is quite frequently Disorderly. Especially natural phenomena beloved of gods like Orlanth (storms) or Lodril.

As far as human law goes, if the fundamental principles underlying your legal philosophy are ‘ no one can make you do anything’ and ‘violence is always an option’ and ‘there is always another way’* then your law is hardly hostile to Disorder, rather it assumes it will happen and just tries to tidy up the mess. Many cultures, but especially the Orlanthi, don’t necessarily associate the law with direct opposition to Disorder. 

* yes, even this last principle, usually interpreted as Ernalda offering alternatives to violence, also means that pragmatism and good outcomes are rated more by the Orlanthi than consistency and Yelmic ideas of inflexible Justice. Yelmic culture sees Ernaldan efforts to resolve feuds with weregelds and such as people being able to buy their way out of the appropriate punishment for their crimes. Offering weregeld for a slain Imperial citizen like a Lunar officer is like being offered a bribe for someone to get away with murder,  to a Yelmic noble. Yelmic culture of course, thinks Stasis and Harmony are far better than Disorder and flexible Change. 
 

[davecake]

14 hours ago, Darius West said:

You would certainly be hard pressed to create civilizations more hidebound and repressive than the Brithini or the Dwarves.

While true, remember the dwarves are THE great Stasis rune culture, much more so than the Law rune. And that the same magical fact that makes Brithini society the way it is (immortality if you adhere to the narrow letter of the caste rules) that is also the foundation of Vadeli society, they just have a very different attitude - not noted for their socially conservative nature, rather anything that isn’t forbidden must therefore be permitted is the Vadeli attitude, and they use Lawful sorcery just as freely and effectively as the Mostali or Brithini, frequently to do Disorderly things like deception and murder. 

its helpful to think of the magical effect of Brithini and Vadeli caste laws as something like a lifelong magical ritual that grants an ongoing benefit, or as similar to mystic austerities or gifts and geases. Brithini then use it cautiously to guide their culture, Vadeli treat it like power-gaming PCs and have long since found all the loopholes. 

[Sir_Godspeed]

On 2/15/2020 at 8:14 AM, metcalph said:

 So the gist is that Ikadz is chaotic because he revels in causing pain.  He doesn't care about whether the person he tortures is good or bad or whether they will repent of their error or confess or whatever.  Such considerations are not part of the God.  Others tolerate the existence of Ikadz and control the extent of pain that he and his cultists cause for their own purposes.  

Hm. I wonder if it's possible to argue that Shargash is Chaotic then, or argue a Chaotic angle on Shargash, seeing as he doesn't really seem to care who or what he fights and needs an Emperor to keep him reined in. 

Then again, you could argue that he indeed knows and cares, but that his ideas of who needs to be fought differs from everyone else's.

[Qizilbashwoman]

8 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Hm. I wonder if it's possible to argue that Shargash is Chaotic then, or argue a Chaotic angle on Shargash, seeing as he doesn't really seem to care who or what he fights and needs an Emperor to keep him reined in. 

Then again, you could argue that he indeed knows and cares, but that his ideas of who needs to be fought differs from everyone else's.

I mean, Zorak Zoran is the same and it's just His Disorder rune

[Darius West]

On 2/18/2020 at 4:44 PM, davecake said:

While true, remember the dwarves are THE great Stasis rune culture, much more so than the Law rune. And that the same magical fact that makes Brithini society the way it is (immortality if you adhere to the narrow letter of the caste rules) that is also the foundation of Vadeli society, they just have a very different attitude - not noted for their socially conservative nature, rather anything that isn’t forbidden must therefore be permitted is the Vadeli attitude, and they use Lawful sorcery just as freely and effectively as the Mostali or Brithini, frequently to do Disorderly things like deception and murder. 

I suspect that the Vadeli have gone further than this, and actually tested the rules via experimentation and dominate spells on all the nice Vadeli.  Once you know exactly you can get away with, you can dispense with all the other "laws".  I would say that Vadeli know exactly how far they can push any given rule without losing their immortality, as in, to within fractions of tolerance and every possible legal precedent.  They will do the very barest minimum required to produce the result they want.

On 2/18/2020 at 4:31 PM, davecake said:

Only said by people who would fail their Runic Philosophy exam... Law in this sense isn’t human law, it’s natural law, and nature is quite frequently Disorderly. Especially natural phenomena beloved of gods like Orlanth (storms) or Lodril.

I was actually paraphrasing what Greg Stafford had said on the matter repeatedly.

Edited February 19, 2020 by Darius West

[Sir_Godspeed]

1 hour ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

I mean, Zorak Zoran is the same and it's just His Disorder rune

That's fair, but I wonder what, conceptually, separates wantonly butchering down innocent villagers while rampaging across the countryside high on bloodthirst not caring who you kill or for what reason (*ostensibly* Shargash and ZZ) from wantonly torturing just for the sheer heck of it (ostensibly Ikadz). 

Edited February 19, 2020 by Sir_Godspeed

[Akhôrahil]

14 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

(*ostensibly* Shargash and ZZ)

Or Humakti, for that matter!

It's merely a little less common for them, but slaughtering everyone you meet because they're scared of you (and oddly, doing it doesn't make them any less scared)? Perfectly legitimate Humakti behaviour.

Edited February 19, 2020 by Akhôrahil

[Qizilbashwoman]

2 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

That's fair, but I wonder what, conceptually, separates wantonly butchering down innocent villagers while rampaging across the countryside high on bloodthirst not caring who you kill or for what reason (*ostensibly* Shargash and ZZ) from wantonly torturing just for the sheer heck of it (ostensibly Ikadz). 

Shargash is a death/underworld god. While outsiders view Shargash as madness, he's just the Death aspect. His "death unleashed" role is a fundamental part of the powers of the Sun as much as the Fertility side is. The Chaos Sun is probably the famine god, not Shargash.

Shargash is a powerful patron deity of his city. Sure, everyone around it hates and fears his people, but that's kind of like just being unusually unpleasant as a city-state rather than wildly out of character. When the Ratite Empire was around it was raiding and taking slaves just like the Shargashi or the other cities on the Yelm "central line". It's just that Shargash is big and and full of extra hell. City-states fight and it's ugly.

It's not really similar to the kind of actions Ikadz is after.

[Sir_Godspeed]

3 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Shargash is a death/underworld god. While outsiders view Shargash as madness, he's just the Death aspect. His "death unleashed" role is a fundamental part of the powers of the Sun as much as the Fertility side is. The Chaos Sun is probably the famine god, not Shargash.

Shargash is a powerful patron deity of his city. Sure, everyone around it hates and fears his people, but that's kind of like just being unusually unpleasant as a city-state rather than wildly out of character. When the Ratite Empire was around it was raiding and taking slaves just like the Shargashi or the other cities on the Yelm "central line". It's just that Shargash is big and and full of extra hell. City-states fight and it's ugly.

It's not really similar to the kind of actions Ikadz is after.

I do mostly agree with you, and as a bit of a Shargash-stan myself I believe Shargash's violence and rage has deeper meanings - but from the outside, certainly the mindless rage and indiscriminate slaughter for the delight of it (DH myths credit Shargash with omnicide), a foreign culture (like the God Learners) could feasibly interpret him  as being Chaotic - is my tentative point.

[Glorion]

On 2/16/2020 at 11:20 AM, Qizilbashwoman said:

Yeah, and I understand better about Ompalam.

It makes sense to me too because the Hendriki/Dragon Pass peeps object to it out of cultural mores: no one can make you do anything is something they take real seriously. I think of these traditionalists (non-city folk) as being the "outlawry or death, not imprisonment" folk. Prisons are for savages like the Lunars, besides, nobody has time for this. There's no prison guards outside of maybe the city. Only you can make amends for offense by offering your body as labor; foreigners taken in battle can be forced to work, but not their children.

This is the most radical vision of the Orlanthi Three Rules, kinda, and it's sensible due to the lifeways of Dragon Pass: scrabbly, deeply clannish, agro-pastoralist, unsettled and constantly upending who is in power, idealising individual liberty and egalitarian but also struggling for individual power, and deeply fluctuating. This is not a world of stable social classes! Interlocking rings always moving up and down, and with the endless "me against my sister, my sister and I against my cousins, my cousins and us against the next kin, them and us against the distant Hendriki" plus the madness of Lunar v. Traditionalist and under it all, the need to survive against Chaos, monsters, and spirit attacks.

 

The basic attitude of Sartarite Orlanthis as to how to deal with prisoners and really bad actors is that, if they can't pay ransom, they should not be enslaved, instead they should be killed. I am not sure that is much of an improvement. Be it noted that this is not just an attitude with respect to non-Sartarites. In the histories, it is not uncommon for one clan to exterminate another clan right down to the last man, woman and child. Or at least try to, often unsuccessfully.

[Glorion]

1 minute ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

I do mostly agree with you, and as a bit of a Shargash-stan myself I believe Shargash's violence and rage has deeper meanings - but from the outside, certainly the mindless rage and indiscriminate slaughter for the delight of it (DH myths credit Shargash with omnicide), a foreign culture (like the God Learners) could feasibly interpret him  as being Chaotic - is my tentative point.

Not at all. Indiscriminate slaughter has nothing at all Chaotic about it, it is simply a serious application of the Death rune. Read the histories. Genocide is a frequent event in Glorantha, which hardly anyone except the allies and ghosts of the victims blinks an eye at. Argrath's dropping the Moon on Peloria is merely one of the more extreme examples. Remember, all souls go to hell or heaven or get reincarnated, so death, including megadeath, is not such a big deal. Unless chaos is involved and souls are devoured...

[gochie]

I didn't read the whole thread, but I've been going through the books recently with a fine tooth comb and basically house-ruling everything I don't agree with 100%... Honestly, I don't think there's a logical difference between chaotic and "evil" acts if you just look at the descriptions as written. 

So the way I see it (changed it?) is that when an "evil" or disorderly act becomes uncontrollable--an addiction/obsession--it becomes chaotic. So killing someone in a battle is fine, being a psychopathic serial killer is chaotic. A pirate raping a poor citizen during a pillaging is "fine", but being a rape-obsessed broo is chaotic. Eating a dead person to survive starvation is fine, but murdering and only eating people like ogres is chaotic. Etc. Etc. Etc.

This also let's me use murder, rape, cannibalism, torture, etc. as narrative tools without being limited by "but only chaos does that!". 

[Qizilbashwoman]

3 hours ago, gochie said:

This also let's me use murder, rape, cannibalism, torture, etc. as narrative tools without being limited by "but only chaos does that!". 

the point of Chaos is that only Chaos does that (except murder)

i mean that's kind of the entire point of the thing. if you eat other humans, you're an ogre. the primeval sin that created the Devil was rape and that's the only way broo reproduce. your glorantha may vary but that's pretty far outside of what we consider "vary".

[Glorion]

1 hour ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

the point of Chaos is that only Chaos does that (except murder)

i mean that's kind of the entire point of the thing. if you eat other humans, you're an ogre. the primeval sin that created the Devil was rape and that's the only way broo reproduce. your glorantha may vary but that's pretty far outside of what we consider "vary".

Rape is chaotic, whereas other horrible crimes are not chaotic, for a very simple reason. This is a game, in which various things that would be horrible crimes in the real world are something characters commit on a regular basis, are things that players have their pc's do. A lot of the players are male teenagers. If rape was in the category of being something that players running pc's could get away with, the results could be unfortunate, and not just because it would be embarrassing to Chaosium. Therefore, to hell with logical consistency or anything else, rape *needs* to be a chaotic crime in Glorantha, end of story. This is not a problem with cannibalism, not a problem among people liable to be playing RQG. Nor is it a problem with genocide, which few if any RQG players are ever likely to be able to commit. That torture is also pretty negatively regarded, and restricted to cults PC's are unlikely to ever play, likewise. Besides, TV characters, especially cops, use torture on a regular basis, so a torture prohibition in RQG would not be effective or useful.

Edited February 20, 2020 by Glorion

[gochie]

5 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

the point of Chaos is that only Chaos does that (except murder)

i mean that's kind of the entire point of the thing. if you eat other humans, you're an ogre. the primeval sin that created the Devil was rape and that's the only way broo reproduce. your glorantha may vary but that's pretty far outside of what we consider "vary".

Sure. Yet here we are, discussing how cannibalism and rape is chaotic, yet going on a murder spree and killing children isn't. 

Saying chaos is a sort of psychotic obsession for doing any/all of these "bad" things is a logical way to approach it and makes sense as a blanket statement. 

[gochie]

3 hours ago, Glorion said:

Rape is chaotic, whereas other horrible crimes are not chaotic, for a very simple reason. This is a game, in which various things that would be horrible crimes in the real world are something characters commit on a regular basis, are things that players have their pc's do. A lot of the players are male teenagers. If rape was in the category of being something that players running pc's could get away with, the results could be unfortunate, and not just because it would be embarrassing to Chaosium. Therefore, to hell with logical consistency or anything else, rape *needs* to be a chaotic crime in Glorantha, end of story. This is not a problem with cannibalism, not a problem among people liable to be playing RQG. Nor is it a problem with genocide, which few if any RQG players are ever likely to be able to commit. That torture is also pretty negatively regarded, and restricted to cults PC's are unlikely to ever play, likewise. Besides, TV characters, especially cops, use torture on a regular basis, so a torture prohibition in RQG would not be effective or useful.

What? Rape is chaotic because the majority of the player base is young males? That's not good reasoning at all and a complete fallacy. 

Not only is your argument nearly identical to the whole "video games make kids violent" sentiment, which has been disproven countless times, but murder is less evil than rape? Not sure you want to argue that. 

[Akhôrahil]

4 hours ago, Glorion said:

A lot of the players are male teenagers.

Not these days they're not. 🙂 If you're into Glorantha and under 40, you're a spring chicken!

[Bill the barbarian]

I hate to say this, but I brought this up a while back. To me chaos, plain and simple, is anything that contributes to the unmaking of Glorantha. By definition, the opposite of stasis; much as it was before Glorantha and what it wishes (lusts) to return to (I called it entropy last time, but that caused problems). 

Edited February 20, 2020 by Bill the barbarian

[Jeff]

Chaos is nonexistence, the Howling Void. Since Creation, its place is outside the Cosmos - outside of Glorantha. Within the cosmos, Chaos perverts and corrupts the powers and forms of things - this corruption inverses the meaning of the power. Fertility is corrupted by rape. Death by the undead. Change becomes mutated corruption and stasis becomes mindless servitude. Opposites are conjoined in ways where both are undermined. Through this, the fabric of reality is weakened and the cosmos returns to nonexistence. 

[Austin]

4 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Not these days they're not. 🙂 If you're into Glorantha and under 40, you're a spring chicken!

Squawk?

[Glorion]

6 hours ago, gochie said:

What? Rape is chaotic because the majority of the player base is young males? That's not good reasoning at all and a complete fallacy. 

Not only is your argument nearly identical to the whole "video games make kids violent" sentiment, which has been disproven countless times, but murder is less evil than rape? Not sure you want to argue that. 

Rape is chaotic because *Chaosium decided* to make rape chaotic, not for internal to Glorantha logical reasons. Logic has nothing to do with it. Whether the "video games make kids violent" argument is *objectively valid* if transferred to rape and fantasy games is also irrelevant. Chaosium is not taking any chances.

[Glorion]

7 hours ago, gochie said:

What? Rape is chaotic because the majority of the player base is young males? That's not good reasoning at all and a complete fallacy. 

Not only is your argument nearly identical to the whole "video games make kids violent" sentiment, which has been disproven countless times, but murder is less evil than rape? Not sure you want to argue that. 

Actually, Chaosium has an even stronger reason than the video games make kids violent thing, of which I am doubtful too. The thing about rape, as opposed to murder and other bad stuff, is that it is something that is usually done by men to women (or men to men), rather than the other way around. So women gamers get very uncomfortable about fantasy games including rape fantasies, but not so much of other bad stuff. And Chaosium wants women to feel comfortable playing RQG.

[Bill the barbarian]

5 hours ago, Jeff said:

Chaos is nonexistence, the Howling Void. Since Creation, its place is outside the Cosmos - outside of Glorantha. Within the cosmos, Chaos perverts and corrupts the powers and forms of things - this corruption inverses the meaning of the power. Fertility is corrupted by rape. Death by the undead. Change becomes mutated corruption and stasis becomes mindless servitude. Opposites are conjoined in ways where both are undermined. Through this, the fabric of reality is weakened and the cosmos returns to nonexistence. 

Thanks Jeff, this seems to confirm and expand on my point quite nicely.

Edited February 20, 2020 by Bill the barbarian