Your Dumbest Theory

[Joerg]

 

5 hours ago, Eff said:

what is outside of creation to be banished to

That's a question the Silmarillion left, too, with Melkor and Ungoliath banished from Eru's Creation.

There is an intellectual realm inhabited by the Invisible God which is outside of Gloranthan Creation. The Prime Mover state. There may be other such non-places.

The furthest reaches of the Spirit Realm might be remote enough.

From Ingolf Dragonfriend's story of failure as an orthodox draconic mystic we know some names for outer draconic realms, soul-rending realms, which IMO lie on the outside of the Sky Dome and the Underworld Bowl, approaching the Source from far out without any Runic taints.

These Outermost Regions might be understood as realms of un-Creation. It takes considerable mystical advancement to withstand that unmaking, or alternatively (in the style of Wolverine facing the class six mutant) a powerful regeneration ability able to counter that unmaking. The Unholy Trio had conquered Rashoran's secret, and might have had either sufficient mystical advancement or acquired chaotic regeneration rivalling that of Walktapuses, maybe both. And their child Wakboth might have been able to destroy that unmaking, or possibly create a Pseudocosmic Egg to shelter its parents.

 

Also, outside of the furthest reach of the Sky Dome and the Underworld Bowl, there may still be an accretion disk of Storm and Sramak's River continuing forever in a flatter and flatter extent, perhaps with lost planets (whether Sky World or Underworld) making their desperate orbits or bobbing above and below that plane.

There is at least one story that had the dragons traverse the Void to sit down and breed in Dragon Pass, but that may predate the dragon origin myth in Wyrm's Footnotes 14. (If they did so even before the Green Age, there may not have been a sky for them to fly through yet.)

[DrGoth]

20 hours ago, radmonger said:

Yeah, as i understand it:

• traditional solar cultures don't make a strong distinction  between disorder and chaos [...]
• orlanthi distinguish between disorder and chaos [...]
• lunars mix  the solar perspective on the lack of distinction between chaos and disorder with the lightbringer views on the necessity of creativity and change [...]

Indeed. Three very different views and I personally find it hard to say that the published material makes definitive choice between their 'rightness' (Personally I like the third but that's no secret). Mixing in with this is the inherent lack of change the Gods brought on themselves by agreeing to the Compromise. It's interesting to me to think about what that means for Sedenya. She had to get into the Compromise to regain her Godhood. She is definitely about change.  is chaos the only way though that she could find. Has she found a loophole in the compromise?

 

20 hours ago, radmonger said:

it's an interesting point that the real-world company name Chaosium matches the lunar perspective of chaos.  

Isn't it just? I like to think it was deliberate on Greg's aprt.

[DrGoth]

18 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

I imagine Nysalorean scholars as chaotic little Wittgensteins garrulously rattling on about what cannot be said.

  Reveal hidden contents

6.522   There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

6.53   The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said … and then, whenever someone wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions …

6.54   My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them — as steps — to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

7   What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

You could simply have a Nysalorean NPC recite that word for word.

[DrGoth]

16 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Not annoying. Clearly, there is no ‘place outside of all places’ — if you find a place where the scary monsters are gathering, you are still inside creation. Try as you might, you cannot get on your bike and pedal out of Cosmos.

I agree.  It is a no place with nothing in it. So accepting that and the quoting from the Sourcebook (p. 123, referring to the destruction of the Spike) "A great vacuum opened in the center of the world, from which stepped the gods of Chaos". That does not automatically mean they stepped from the void into Glorantha.  It could mean they were created by the gaping hole in the world as expressions of chaos in Glorantha.

I don't think Kajabor, Krajlk, etc had an existence in the void prior (and yes, using temporal terms in relation to the God's War is risky at best) to the Spike exploding.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, DrGoth said:

“A great vacuum opened in the center of the world, from which stepped the gods of Chaos.” — The Glorantha Sourcebook, p. 123

That does not automatically mean they stepped from the void into Glorantha.

Quote

Sometimes the world, protesting the violation of its reality, bursts forth in a wild effort to fill that non-hole, and this is expressed as a chaos feature. — Greg Sez

If you want Chaos gods as great stomping kaiju, have them produced by the world — Cosmos, Glorantha, us — “in a wild effort to fill that non-hole” — chaos features on the grand scale. Think sepsis, anaphylaxis, autoimmune disease — the trigger may be innocuous (a peanut), unknown, … or perhaps nothing at all (a non-hole).

We cannot fight Nothing — or nothing — so we create something to fight. Scapegoats. Broos have those heads for a reason, right? But they are still us. We all are.

Of course, no one has to follow me in this, at all, and why not have some things labelled “Chaos” be quite unconnected (to this notion and each other)?

Finally, I don’t say that this is how Stafford meant to be taken, but it is how it struck my perverted brain.

[Akhôrahil]

14 hours ago, Joerg said:

That's a question the Silmarillion left, too, with Melkor and Ungoliath banished from Eru's Creation.

And also where Tom Bombadil banishes the Barrow-Wight.

Lost and forgotten be, darker than the darkness,

Where gates stand for ever shut, till the world is mended.

[Eff]

The other option I was contemplating is that there is indeed nothing outside of creation, and so the gods annihilated Thed, Mallia, Ragnaglar, and the bouncing baby newborns Wakboth and Kajabor, destroying them completely, exiling them to nothingness... but then they came back.

[Akhôrahil]

7 hours ago, DrGoth said:

I don't think Kajabor, Krajlk, etc had an existence in the void prior (and yes, using temporal terms in relation to the God's War is risky at best) to the Spike exploding.

You probably could make the argument that the Lords of Chaos are not fundamentally evil, and merely driven mad by being forcibly incorporated into the physical world (this is much how the Z'bri work in the Tribe 8 RPG - while they are horrendously evil to the recipients of their vile actions, they are in fact merely spirits driven mad by the sensations of inhabiting flesh).

This could mesh with how Chaos is both regarded as anti-existence and as a moral evil.

Edited March 25, 2023 by Akhôrahil

[mfbrandi]

55 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

they are in fact merely spirits driven mad by the sensations of inhabiting flesh

Spoken like a true Puritan — flesh and the devil!

[mfbrandi]

1. How intimate is the connection between the Red Goddess and the Crimson Bat? “The one rides on the back of the other,” you say, but the Goddess is a moon — how does that work?
    
2. A hawk from a handsaw, fine, but would you trust a Gloranthan to know a bat from pterosaur? Take a look at Anurognathus. Would you still?
    
3. Pterosaurs are archosaurs, dino-relatives, … dragons. And as every schoolgirl knows, a dragon invented being torn apart to create the world.
    
4. Dragons have been mistaken for parts of the landscape till they rise up into the air. What is that you say about the Red Moon? Yes …
    
5. “So you are telling me that the Red Moon is really a dragon?” No, keep up, the Crimson Bat is a dragon.
    
6. “You are supposed to be telling me how moons ride around on bats … or dragons … or something.” Sorry. Have you met my friend Tupandactylus? So you see the Bat is a dragon, the dragon is Sedenya, and the Red Moon is merely her crest — as her head turns relative to you, the Moon phases.
    
7. Did the Great Compromise prohibit waking dragons? Do we need to distinguish between the destruction of the Red Moon and Argrath’s dicing of Wakboth? Is it the same dragon that dies at the end of every age to create the world anew for the next? Is ever-reincarnating Sedenya the Cosmic Dragon? Surely, that cannot be right …

Hedges against link rot:

Spoiler

Spoiler

Spoiler

Edited March 25, 2023 by mfbrandi
added link to pteros.com

[Eff]

4 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

1. How intimate is the connection between the Red Goddess and the Crimson Bat? “The one rides on the back of the other,” you say, but the Goddess is a moon — how does that work?

It's her wings. 

You know, her wings. 

 

Like that. 

[Joerg]

8 hours ago, Eff said:

The other option I was contemplating is that there is indeed nothing outside of creation, and so the gods annihilated Thed, Mallia, Ragnaglar, and the bouncing baby newborns Wakboth and Kajabor, destroying them completely, exiling them to nothingness... but then they came back.

That total annihilation would require the application of Chaos... in the flavor of Kajabor.

What are you saying about Kajabor being a newborn baby? Kajabor, Krjalk, and probably Pocharngo as well are Outer Gods (in Cthulhu parlance), impersonal forces preceding eternity.

IMG Kajabor has only one relation to the Unholy Trio - he/it manifested inside the Chaos Rift that replaced the Spike due to their invasion of the Spike, and then went on a rampage through the world on his own, with a host of chaotic followers along his wave-front of annihilation, that finally brought him/it into confrontation with Wakboth after most other serious forces had been killed or annihilated, which sent one of the pair into Hell (to be trapped in the Ritual of the Net) while the other one would face off with the Storm Bull in Prax, and be squashed beneath the Block.

[DrGoth]

17 hours ago, Eff said:

The other option I was contemplating is that there is indeed nothing outside of creation, and so the gods annihilated Thed, Mallia, Ragnaglar, and the bouncing baby newborns Wakboth and Kajabor, destroying them completely, exiling them to nothingness... but then they came back.

It may be an empty nothingness, but it does seem to like to create - witness the young elementals.

[DrGoth]

9 hours ago, Joerg said:

Kajabor, Krjalk, and probably Pocharngo as well are Outer Gods (in Cthulhu parlance), impersonal forces preceding eternity.

I don't see that a no place of nothingness can have forces, even impersonal ones. So I think your conception of the Void and mine may be different.

But, like I said, I suspect the void can't be properly comprehended by mortals - including us.

[davecake]

On 3/26/2023 at 1:38 AM, mfbrandi said:

A hawk from a handsaw, fine, but would you trust a Gloranthan to know a bat from pterosaur?

I see only a hummingbird. 

[Richard S.]

How long's it been since we actually had a dumb theory in here? I think the chaos talk might need to move elsewhere to free up space for us less intelligent folks.

[jajagappa]

7 hours ago, Richard S. said:

How long's it been since we actually had a dumb theory in here? I think the chaos talk

Illuminates are a challenge for Chaos cults to attack - they have to do so with subtlety, and do so by getting the illuminates to debate each other over the origin and nature of Chaos and the Void.

[mfbrandi]

9 hours ago, Richard S. said:

How long’s it been since we actually had a dumb theory in here?

On 6/8/2020 at 2:50 AM, scott-martin said:

I know I've come up with some whoppers over the years but … What convictions do YOU have that you recognize are ridiculous but love them anyway?

I thought this was a safe thread for bits of silliness that don’t pretend to be canon, but I fear that whatever contextual and internal evidence there is of ridiculousness, someone will take it as an attempt to define official Glorantha.

But fair enough, I will shut up.

[scott-martin]

I think everything is good here. This thread is designed to sometimes function as a garbage dump and sometimes it becomes a more extended point-by-point workshop. Sometimes a grave, sometimes a garden.

Some of these theories are ready for prime time and can support their own threads. But I'm not going to say which is which.

 

[scott-martin]

The Earth King is the nitrogen fix. When Genert died, legumes (like clover) shifted to an annual seed-to-soil cycle that liberates  for use by the grain goddesses. Within the Pamalt economy, most of the available circulates within the existing ground cover and except in slash-and-burn experiments is not available for other crops.

We call this system embyli or "the yellow way."

[John Biles]

On 3/28/2023 at 12:19 PM, scott-martin said:

The Earth King is the nitrogen fix.

Barntar's key power is his ability to pull nitrogen out of the air and mix it into the soil through plowing.

(Which is how an Air person affects crops.)

[mfbrandi]

On 4/6/2023 at 11:44 AM, DrGoth said:

"Elmal? Elmal? Never heard of that guy. We worship Yelmalio. Always have. That's what Monrogh said, anyway."

4 hours ago, Darius West said:

Nope.  Hinterland Tovtaros Elmali never converted.  Monrogh was a Lunar agent as far as they are concerned.

The joy of heroquesting as time travel/retcon/change war: only the hardcore Elmali heroquesters who have chopped themselves out of the timeline even “remember” Elmal, and their “erstwhile co-religionists” cannot recognise them or their odd little sun god.

But there is a delegation from Ingsoc outside come to assure me that neither I nor anyone else ever thought of heroquesting that way, nor that the Pharaoh had fallen backward through time.

Edited April 8, 2023 by mfbrandi
whitespace

[mfbrandi]

Blue Moon Assassins — as every schoolgirl knows — pelt their victims to death with potatoes.

Why?

They double as field rations and because they don’t exist in Glorantha, they take up no ENC, are invisible, undetectable, and untraceable. In short, they are the perfect assassin’s weapon.

Spoiler

[Qizilbashwoman]

22 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Blue Moon Assassins — as every schoolgirl knows — pelt their victims to death with potatoes.

Why?

They double as field rations and because they don’t exist in Glorantha, they take up no ENC, are invisible, undetectable, and untraceable. In short, they are the perfect assassin’s weapon.

  Reveal hidden contents

potatos can kill: you just use the "eyes", which contain glycoalkaloids. that's why you have to remove the eyes before you eat them!

[Qizilbashwoman]

On 3/25/2023 at 7:57 PM, Joerg said:

What are you saying about Kajabor being a newborn baby?

squish the baby [with the Block] (don't squish the baby!)