Your Dumbest Theory

[JayLay]

ArtMal = ArtiaMal = Batman

 

[scott-martin]

I'll get back to the griffinewts shortly but as part of that I just learned in a terrible fever dream that the really interesting divergence wasn't between "horses" and "birds" but earlier up the evolutionary tree . . . at one stage there was a vegetable component. The dream explicitly called this the "onion" and there were two types of bulbs you had to sort in order to make sure the onions bred true on their side of creation and the horse birds stayed in their eggs as it were. Keeping them separate was important because left to their own devices traits would cross again and the creatures that sprout or hatch in your garden might come out unintended hybrids.

The ramifications of this vision for hippophagic cultures and the aldryamic uh roots of sun worship are obvious. What lingers with me is the notion that the sun itself is one of these onion bulbs that maybe failed to sprout so far. Or hatch. Anyway be careful with your horses and your bulbs and your "onions."

[Nevermet]

10 hours ago, JayLay said:

ArtMal = ArtiaMal = Batman

 

I mean, thats just science

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, scott-martin said:

but earlier up the evolutionary tree … at one stage there was a vegetable component.

Shades of Aldiss … run backwards?

[jajagappa]

On 5/23/2024 at 5:45 PM, Nevermet said:

You know who did? Malkion.  Malkion is Daka Fal.

You've skipped the interim step: Malkion is Flesh Man, and Flesh Man becomes Daka Fal!

[Tindalos]

The Crimson Bat doesn't want to be worshipped, or be in the world at all.

The whole sacrifice of sentients is a result of the use of the Bat Mastery skill, forcing it to accept others in place of its own cultists, which is what it's really trying to devour. The 1% of candidates for initiation into its cult who get "rejected" is just because of the Bat Mastery skill being fumbled, and the Bat being able to act naturally for a moment.

This is why, in times of peace, the Bat only hungers for 25 sacrifices per week. In peacetime that's the number of Bat cultists. When war comes, and people join the Bat's cult to avoid being eaten themselves... they directly cause the Bat's hunger to increase.

Arkat's great victory over the beast in the first age was understanding it, destroying all who would worship it, and allowing it to go home. It still misses him for that reason.

[Joerg]

10 hours ago, jajagappa said:

You've skipped the interim step: Malkion is Flesh Man, and Flesh Man becomes Daka Fal!

And/Or: Eurmal is Malkion the Sacrifice, and Orlanth and his companions are the bad things interrupting his mortality play (trick) in that dismal western city.

Flesh Man is the entity who witnessed the death of Gramps and got mad from that. Not that that prevents him from becoming or joining Daka Fal.

And of course, Malkion is the Evil Emperor who needs to be brought back by the Lightbringers. Solar attributes optional.

There might even be Malkion in Ginna Jar.

[Nevermet]

13 hours ago, Joerg said:

And/Or: Eurmal is Malkion the Sacrifice, and Orlanth and his companions are the bad things interrupting his mortality play (trick) in that dismal western city.

 

That would definitely explain the Trickster College in Slontos

[John Biles]

16 hours ago, Joerg said:

And/Or: Eurmal is Malkion the Sacrifice, and Orlanth and his companions are the bad things interrupting his mortality play (trick) in that dismal western city.

Flesh Man is the entity who witnessed the death of Gramps and got mad from that. Not that that prevents him from becoming or joining Daka Fal.

And of course, Malkion is the Evil Emperor who needs to be brought back by the Lightbringers. Solar attributes optional.

There might even be Malkion in Ginna Jar.

So what you are saying is that Malkion is actually Rasputin.

[Nevermet]

40 minutes ago, John Biles said:

So what you are saying is that Malkion is actually Rasputin.

The Vadeli in the back are screaming, "WE TOLD YOU!!!!"

[jajagappa]

11 hours ago, Nevermet said:

The Vadeli in the back are screaming, "WE TOLD YOU!!!!"

Nah, the Vadeli are in the back laughing at all the foolish mortals who believed all the crap that they spread about.

[Akhôrahil]

On 5/27/2024 at 5:33 AM, John Biles said:

So what you are saying is that Malkion is actually Rasputin.

Brithos's greatest love machine.

Edited May 28 by Akhôrahil

[Ali the Helering]

There was an alynx who really was gone...

[mfbrandi]

  Refugee from the YA spider thread:

1 hour ago, Joerg said:

Lodril used to be up high, pure, and nothing special, until he did the dive

Or ZZ takes a bite out of the primordial Fire — clearly an intruder from the Outside into the previously perfect Cosmos — and two portions fall from his chops: one, Dayzatar, is without heat and flees back to the Outside; the other, Lodril, burrows into this new world like an over-sexed Krarsht — filling his tunnels with “lava” — and some say he has more heat than light. The swallowed portion was perhaps more balanced than the escapees, but not all of it was to stay swallowed. Never mind, one can swallow it again tomorrow.

Yelm — the swallowed portion — is carried to the surface in the “yarrow” of my Uncle. ZZ, like Prometheus, comes from an earlier generation of gods than the current self-appointed King.

Does Yelm in his night journey enjoy a temporary melding with underground farmers’ god Lodril? As Egypt’s sun does with agricultural Osiris? Perhaps Lodril didn’t truly escape but burrowed into the body of the “son” of Darkness and only spurts the odd bit of “himself” from cracks in our favourite demon — yuck! 😉

[svensson]

There is literally no point to diet whipped cream. If you're eating something that requires whipped cream, you're already screwing up. And there's no such thing as 'half a sin'...

Enjoy strawberry and cherry season folks!

[scott-martin]

The red goddess is dianetics. 
The empire is scientology.
The arrolian gospels are psychocybernetics.

[Muwatallis]

Probably been noticed before by someone else, but anyway:

 

Every time the full lightbringer's guest is repeated the results are progressively worse for Glorantha...

#1. Orlanth brings back Yelm, world saved

#2. Harmast seeks help against Nysalor and brings back Arkat. Nysalor dead, but Arkat becomes a troll and puts them in charge of everything.

#3. The Seven mothers seek help against the Carmanian Empire. Carmanians defeated at the price of a chaos goddess on a demon bat operating within time.

#4. Argrath seeks help against the Lunar empire and brings back Sheng Seleris (and really, if Sheng Seleris is the answer then you might want to consider if you're asking the right question)

 

 

[Joerg]

8 hours ago, Muwatallis said:

Probably been noticed before by someone else, but anyway:

 

Every time the full lightbringer's guest is repeated the results are progressively worse for Glorantha...

#1. Orlanth brings back Yelm, world saved

#2. Harmast seeks help against Nysalor and brings back Arkat. Nysalor dead, but Arkat becomes a troll and puts them in charge of everything.

Arkat curses Dorastor, making it a lingering chaotic danger.

Putting the trolls in charge is not what happened if the Orlanthi were honest. While the trolls hacked their way through chaotic foes without much in the way of plunder but a lot in the way of harm, the Orlanthi took the war to Dara Happa and plundered city upon city, then installing one of theirs as the governor of the conquered land, and extracting great annual tribute from the Dara Happans.

Arkat's command was only re-instating the Only Old One's (rather just) Shadow Tribute (which was a mutual aid treaty with some exchange of goods) with some of that Dara Happan tribute redistributed to the trolls as their fair share for what they did in the Gbaji Wars. Nobody minded much while the Dara Happan tribute was coming, but as the Dara Happan rebellion succeeded, the tribute dried up, but the obligations to the trolls remained, things escalated. And were escalated by the Shadowlords, true, over a course of a century before the Tax Slaughter ended these tributes in a spectacularly bloody way.

#2a. Harmast brings back Talor, who turns the Telmori werewolf gift into a curse, contributing greatly to finish Nysalor by mopping up his Pelorian and Fronelan allies in the west.

 

But as a rule, a full LBQ is undertaken only when the shit already hit the fan, badly at that. It takes a good measure of desperation to wager it all on a full LBQ.

[mfbrandi]

16 hours ago, scott-martin said:

The arrolian gospels are psychocybernetics.

• You can always find the moon within yourself if you will only search.
• If you make friends with yourself you will never be alone (but don’t let that put you off).
  — Smackswell Schmaltz

[Ali the Helering]

9 hours ago, Muwatallis said:

if Sheng Seleris is the answer then you might want to consider if you're asking the right question)

Or, if Sheng Seleris isn't the right answer, the question wasn't that important in the first place!  🤪

[Akhôrahil]

11 hours ago, Muwatallis said:

Every time the full lightbringer's guest is repeated the results are progressively worse for Glorantha...

#1. Orlanth brings back Yelm, world saved

#2. Harmast seeks help against Nysalor and brings back Arkat. Nysalor dead, but Arkat becomes a troll and puts them in charge of everything.

#3. The Seven mothers seek help against the Carmanian Empire. Carmanians defeated at the price of a chaos goddess on a demon bat operating within time.

#4. Argrath seeks help against the Lunar empire and brings back Sheng Seleris (and really, if Sheng Seleris is the answer then you might want to consider if you're asking the right question)

It's definitely a trend that the person you bring back becomes trouble later. This seems inherent in the LBQ.

[mfbrandi]

59 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

the person you bring back becomes trouble later. This seems inherent in the LBQ.

Hmm … was Yelm’s (re-)spawning Nysalor his troublemaking, or was it something else? Was the quest to bring back Yelm or just to fetch a fiery ball to light the surface world? What about all the other dead gods that returned at the same time? What if the thing fetched is never quite something that was here before? A new improved devil.

If the OG LBQ gave us compromise, we should expect copycat LBQs to give us things that aren’t quite what we thought we wanted before resorting to desperate measures? Orlanth goes to fetch his greatest enemy, it seems.

If the OG LBQ gave us cyclical and linear time, perhaps everything will come back and bite us in the arse, over and over till the world machine grinds to its final halt.

I am undecided whether there is an odd one out. Yelm (sun), Sedenya (‘daughter’ of the sun), Sheng (solar monarch), and … Arkat (darkness-coded but the ‘light side’ of Nysalor). Arkat is the sun in a wrapper of darkness, a deceiver?

Unfortunately, I am not sitting on a stack of dazzling answers I can reveal with infuriating smugness.

[Akhôrahil]

20 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Hmm … was Yelm’s (re-)spawning Nysalor his troublemaking, or was it something else?

Could be as simple as the hostile cult and culture.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

Could be as simple as the hostile cult and culture.

Must summer always be at war with winter, rather than slow-dancing with it?

[mfbrandi]

I sometimes think the Bat is Orlanth: a bear flapping its cloak — flayed skin? — of stars/eyes.

If the Bat and Harrek meet, do we get a little skit like the mirror scene from Duck Soup?