Your Dumbest Theory

[jajagappa]

58 minutes ago, Eff said:

The real questions: orange, purple, grey/neutral/clear. Can we identify these?

Purple is suggestive of the Luathans (unless you subscribe to the Gods War game colorings in which case purple=Chaos). 

Grey is suggestive of Buserian/LM.

As for orange...

[Sir_Godspeed]

2 hours ago, Eff said:

We all know that there are seven colors in the rainbow.

This is an arbitrary distinction made in the RW by one specific culture though, so no real reason that it would be like that in Glorantha (I am particularly thinking of the gotta-make-it-to-seven division of the red-blue intermediate into violet AND indigo.) But then the writers are obviously from this RW culture, so it might still apply.


On the note of Shargash bridling Kargzant:
I have a pet theory (call it dumb) that Shargash is associated with the evening red, the dying of the sun. "Bridled by Shargash" could then be a poetic way (or mythic way) of explaining that Kargzant descended one day off the sunpath, and then rose the next on the sunpath. 

Farfetched? Well, yeah, but that's this thread.

Edited July 30, 2021 by Sir_Godspeed

[Joerg]

3 hours ago, Eff said:

Plentonius insists that Shargash was the one to bridle Kargzant.

There is an interaction between Shargash and Kargzant during Jenarong's reign, where Jenarong aids Kargzant, and Shargash loses accordingly.as per the War in Heaven during Gerruskoger's reign, aka Horse on Table, p.33. The event I am talking about is on p.34, and then on p.35 Plentonius has Antirius replacing Kargzant as the consequence of the Bridling.

 

 

3 hours ago, Eff said:

So, let's take a different tack. We all know that there are seven colors in the rainbow.

Common usage has six - three primary colors and their complementary colors, with indigo being a specific poetic addition in English language tradition, quite useless for understanding additive or substractive color admixture.

3 hours ago, Eff said:

Now add black (or shading), white (or tinting) and gray (or neutral). That's ten. Ten planets in the Perfect Sky.

Eleven - 8 planetary suns hovering above their respective towers, plus Ghelotralas and Zayteneras as representatives of the other two brothers, plus Entekos/Dendara. It isn't quite clear whether Raibamus gets an orb, too - the Copper Tablets show him having one. But then the Copper Tablets may postdate the God Wall, being a Yuthuppan star lore artifact.

3 hours ago, Eff said:

There was a white planet, until she danced with Umath and bled all over herself/had a Carrie moment.

A child resulted, which suggests a little bit more than just the Carrie moment.

I suppose there were more white planets than this one, but Verithurus is special in rising again.

Is Kargzant white or golden (aka yellow)?

I agree that the southern planet re-emerged from ground/Underworld wrestling as a red planet, possibly flayed by the experience, but healed by merging with Shadzor. A combination of black and green, resulting in red. (compare the blue-green filter you get from sending light through a gold foil. Tolat's red might be the complementary effect.)

3 hours ago, Eff said:

There was a red planet, for sure. I suspect that, as there were later blue planets, that there was one at this point as well, and a green one for sure. A yellow planet, absolutely. The real questions: orange, purple, grey/neutral/clear. Can we identify these?

Purple is crimson, taken on by Verithurus(a). Or you could have an actinic white with a violet tint.

Grey is silver, or a dimmer white. Much like brown is orange in a brightness context, grey is white in a brightness context.

 

Given the golden Sun Dome backdrop, I doubt we will find a visible orange planet (as gold is reflective orange, both pure and 24 carat yellow gold).

Unlike real world planets, the bodies in the Perfect Sky don't shine just by their backscatter, but they emit some light on their own - Reladivus/Kargzant/Lightfore for instance enough to rival our world's nearly full moon.

If we have a color scheme in the Perfect Sky combo, I would expect the planetary suns to be weaker in luminosity than the Sun Disk, and mainly white, with just a slight tendency to one of the primary or complementary colors.

Verithurus appears to have been black and white, or light and dark grey. The white phase may have rivaled the luminosity of the Sun Disk, but the dark phase might have been less than the background reflection from the Sun Dome.

 

Let's speculate about RBG saturation:

The Sun Disk emits golden light, which means a lack in blue frequencies, while red is at the max and RBG green (the yellow of technology) is fairly high, say 90-05%, and blue in the 80% range. In substractive print, that would mean hardly any cyan, a bit of magenta and slightly more yellow filter (aka ink).

Pre-descent Verithurus would have all three channels at the same strength, but that strength oscillating. Possibly from a roving searchlight effect.

Reladivus Kargzant appears to have been quite golden, too, so all Sun Disk brightness values multiplied by say 0.9.

Alkor would have started at all 85% with some addition to green, so maybe a 90 for green. Later on, I would give red Shargash less luminosity than the other planetary suns, but a greater diameter later on, compensating by that.

The other five planetary suns don't really have much of a story of their own, and my guess is a mostly balanced 90% saturation with slight variations lending them tints.

 

Apparent size is another deal. Assuming the same angular size for Glorantha's sun as our own perspective on that open fusion reactor about 8 light minutes away. The Red Moon varies in apparent size depending on where in Gloantha you view it, with the maximum size near the Crater probably equaling that of the Sun Disk.

Next in apparent size is Tolat. Maybe a third of the Sun Disk?

Lightfore might be next in diameter, perhaps a quarter of the Sun Disk. This planet possibly grew from the Bridling of Kargzant and might be larger than the original planetary suns. That might put those at one fifth of the sun disk diameter.

Artia the Bat was instrumental in blinding Yelm somewhat, using her wings - she might be trailed by a shaped shadow.

The Twin Stars appear bigger than they are from sharing their (cyclical) luminosity..

[Akhôrahil]

25 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Next in apparent size is Tolat. Maybe a third of the Sun Disk?

Lightfore might be next in diameter, perhaps a quarter of the Sun Disk.

This is interesting - if we think of the planets Earth-style, they would be absolutely miniscule compared to the Sun or the Moon, basically just luminous dots (Tolat and Lightfore kinda map to Mars and Venus respectively?). Do we have sources that say that in Glorantha they are large enough to register with a geometry, and at a considerable angular size?

I always thought of the stars and planets in Glorantha as basically dot sources of light like in our world (only Venus at its largest exceed one arc second in angular size, but that's still something like 1/20th of the Sun), but maybe that's wrong?

If Lightfore shines with its own bright light and at 1/4th the subjective size of the sun, it's going to be a significant source of light in the night sky. 

[Joerg]

28 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

This is interesting - if we think of the planets Earth-style, they would be absolutely miniscule compared to the Sun or the Moon, basically just luminous dots (Tolat and Lightfore kinda map to Mars and Venus respectively?). Do we have sources that say that in Glorantha they are large enough to register with a geometry, and at a considerable angular size?

The celestial cults have sight-enhancing magics (already a strong Farsee will duplicate the feats of Galileo's telescope).

Planetary bodies are perceived as circles, mostly.

 

28 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

I always thought of the stars and planets in Glorantha as basically dot sources of light like in our world (only Venus at its largest exceed one arc second in angular size, but that's still something like 1/20th of the Sun), but maybe that's wrong?

I think so. I can't find it at the moment without going through my old paper editions, but there was a passage in the 1994 body of published Glorantha which mentioned that the triple orbs of the Dara Happan tripolis shone again - presumably above their ziggurats, viewed from below as celestial bodies in their appropriate part of the Sky.

 

28 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

If Lightfore shines with its own bright light and at 1/4th the subjective size of the sun, it's going to be a significant source of light in the night sky. 

Yes. IMO Lightfore was the sun  before the sun, who was a guarantor for life and light during the Gray or Silver Age between the Greater Darkness singularity (Ritual of the Net, the Block crushing Wakboth, I Fought We Won, other such events) and the Dawn.

His brightness is less than that of the Sun Disk, and he has 1/16th of luminous area. Hence my assumption that Lightfore would shed about as much light as a generous half-moon.

 

[Tindalos]

13 hours ago, Eff said:

So, let's take a different tack. We all know that there are seven colors in the rainbow. Now add black (or shading), white (or tinting) and gray (or neutral).

Of course, I'm pretty convinced Dara Happa may divide the colour Red into two: a bright shining Red "Ruf" and a dull bloody Red "Shar". 

(Which isn't unheard of. Orange and Brown are essentially just light and dark versions of each other.)

Edited July 30, 2021 by Tindalos

[Sir_Godspeed]

Any idea if Shargash would still have been Red in the Golden Age, or whether he would have been Green before he went to the underworld? Or does he already transition to Red before Yelm dies, during the confrontation with Umath? 

 

Some of y'all might actually know this, I don't have access to GRoY right now.

[Eff]

20 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

This is an arbitrary distinction made in the RW by one specific culture though, so no real reason that it would be like that in Glorantha (I am particularly thinking of the gotta-make-it-to-seven division of the red-blue intermediate into violet AND indigo.) But then the writers are obviously from this RW culture, so it might still apply.

 

Well, for that matter, there's a definite order in the discovery of colors and their distinguishing into different color terms within a language and it goes like this:

Light and dark -> White, red, and black -> White, red, green/blue or yellow, black -> White, red, green/blue, yellow, black -> White, red, green, blue, yellow, black. (And then brown, then orange, pink, purple, and grey in any order, followed by the arrival of relativized color words). 

So perhaps there is still some evolution yet to happen. We're currently in stage III, moonswise... 

[Joerg]

23 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Any idea if Shargash would still have been Red in the Golden Age, or whether he would have been Green before he went to the underworld? Or does he already transition to Red before Yelm dies, during the confrontation with Umath? 

According to Plentonius, Shargash has never been anything but red - it's already in the name, "shar", which also is the color of the southern direction in the gradual darkening of the four Guardians of the Cardinals (white - yellow - red - black).

That's a very convenient argument, but doesn't really explain the green city, or Alkor the Green.

Plentonius loves convenient arguments, and may have adjusted the dates of reigns of previous emperors to fit his schematic, making the Ten Tests of Khordavu a convenient change of age. And the arrival of Teelo Estara adds another appropriate 1000 years - coincidence, or an opportunity to legitimize their coup discovered by Irrippi Ontor to lend them some extra sympathetic effect?

Or perhaps they were pre-empting some "Yelm is really Idovanus" stunt some Carmanian cabal had prepared for 1221?

[Tindalos]

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

According to Plentonius, Shargash has never been anything but red - it's already in the name, "shar", which also is the color of the southern direction in the gradual darkening of the four Guardians of the Cardinals (white - yellow - red - black).

That's a very convenient argument, but doesn't really explain the green city, or Alkor the Green.

While this may fit more into the Heretical Glorantha thread, Dara Happa Stirs for Mongoose RuneQuest had an interestingly different origin myth for Shargash, where he was originally named Sentin, and was an eater of the garbage of the sky. 

It's possible Sentin the Green became Shargash the Red as disruption came to the skies. 

[coffeemancer]

gonna derail for some Shargash lore: I seem to believe that shargash suplex'd a chaos god so hard they both went to hell and when he came back he had become demonic. Not sure why I think this though.

[Joerg]

2 minutes ago, coffeemancer said:

gonna derail for some Shargash lore: I seem to believe that shargash suplex'd a chaos god so hard they both went to hell and when he came back he had become demonic. Not sure why I think this though.

Some of the deeper Darkness deities (like e.g. Zorak Zoran) require a choir of Storm Bulls and Illuminates each to ascertain that they or their followers are not Chaos entities or hiding that with illumination.

In case of Shargash, we know about the Shadzoring hell demons who ravaged the lands around the Green City during the worst part of the Greater Darkness, the Gray Age, and much of the reign of the horse warlord emperors in Dara Happa.

There are no known links between the Shadzorings and the offspring of Kyger Litor, but then the uz are a special case of Underworld demons in that they were forced to emigrate to the surface. The Shadzorings appear to have more in common with the Andinni of the East Isles.

Zorak Zoran has a reputation as a chaos fighter, but he appears to make exceptions for certain types of chaos contamination. Vamargic Eye-Necklace, a Great Troll born to cave troll parents (or at least a cave troll mother and a Dehori spirit taking over the father) who somehow succeeded in performing Cragspider's rites, would have had to inherit his mother's chaos taint, even if he did not inherit (the full extent of) her regeneration abilities.

 

There is one disorderly god who was suplexed so hard by Shargash that both he and the planetary god went to Hell - Umatum aka Umath, the Storm King who invaded the Sky Dome. Was that invader chaotic? Did he still have raw Creation to wield?

[UnlikelyLass]

Two quick dumb theories.

#1: The Godtime and Gods are orthogonal to the “real” world of the Lozenge.  The “Godtime” myths everybody knows and believes *creates* an echo of those characters and events in the orthogonal Godtime world which everybody knows of and worships as Gods.  At the same time, the historical events which lead to the myths of Godtime are just another one of the history cycles, and there were more before it that “we” in the Third Age just don’t know about.

#2: The historical cycle — slowly developing civilization leading to an outcast group creating a “new god” which in turn causes a collapse of civilization and mass warfare and death — is an actual destruction and recreation of the world.  And every time the universe gets destroyed and rebuilt, slightly less of it comes back, so the world is slowly winding down.  It will just take many repetitions before the destruction is complete.

[Sir_Godspeed]

1 hour ago, UnlikelyLass said:

Two quick dumb theories.

#1: The Godtime and Gods are orthogonal to the “real” world of the Lozenge.  The “Godtime” myths everybody knows and believes *creates* an echo of those characters and events in the orthogonal Godtime world which everybody knows of and worships as Gods.  At the same time, the historical events which lead to the myths of Godtime are just another one of the history cycles, and there were more before it that “we” in the Third Age just don’t know about.

#2: The historical cycle — slowly developing civilization leading to an outcast group creating a “new god” which in turn causes a collapse of civilization and mass warfare and death — is an actual destruction and recreation of the world.  And every time the universe gets destroyed and rebuilt, slightly less of it comes back, so the world is slowly winding down.  It will just take many repetitions before the destruction is complete.

Qwizil is going to be so disappointed, none of these are dumb enough!

[Qizilbashwoman]

5 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

Qwizil is going to be so disappointed, none of these are dumb enough!

no, they are interesting in the wrong way

And also, Alkor was clearly green because the land was lush from slash-and-burn crops, because Shargath was originally the god of slash-and-burn agriculture who is now just a mortuary cult because that's deprecated tech

uh, so where do unicorns come from? because, like, griffons don't have horns.

don't say "lesbians mount their dildos on their horses to confuse stupid Praxians" because I'll mock you

[scott-martin]

29 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

don't say "lesbians mount their dildos on their horses to confuse stupid Praxians" because I'll mock you

That is pretty good though.

Dumb theory: person rune is to horned serpent rune (shaman) as horse is to unicorn. Pretty ponies of Ralios who initiated into the spirit path came out the other side different. The practice spread throughout surviving pony communities until a violent first contact situation with the griffon tradition forced ponies to pick sides: develop your shamanic pony "organ" into your wings or your horn but only rarely both.

[Sir_Godspeed]

41 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

no, they are interesting in the wrong way

And also, Alkor was clearly green because the land was lush from slash-and-burn crops, because Shargath was originally the god of slash-and-burn agriculture who is now just a mortuary cult because that's deprecated tech

uh, so where do unicorns come from? because, like, griffons don't have horns.

don't say "lesbians mount their dildos on their horses to confuse stupid Praxians" because I'll mock you

Hm, okay, not really dildos, but still feel free to make fun of me:

Female-centric horse-riding Celestial society defeats and emasculates (Storm?) barbarian invaders, symbolically adding their horns to their mounts. 

Some less phallic ideas: 

- Horse riding Celestial society quests to get herd beasts accepted by Eirithia. Horns are part of the result (not like horns are even inherently masculine in most horned mammals anyway).

- Horse riding Celestial society preserves the radiance of stars in a single ray, turning it into a shimmering horn.

I think the last one is my favorite, tbh.

[Eff]

Unicorns have horns because they are only distantly related to horses (also why they are part of the Survival Covenant) and are indeed descended from the horse/griffin's natural predator, which resembled a griffin in basic body plan but retained the horns in lieu of some other draconic feature. This nameless creature (perhaps one could call it a lammasu, a creature/goddess akin to a griffin from Mesopotamian beliefs) was exiled from the Celestial City and became a wandering star in an epic that is snorted out, in biased form, by horses and unicorns both, but remains almost entirely untranslated from the Beastspeech. As such, further details on the history and relationships of unicorns and horses to one another are obscure and difficult.

(Now you would want to tie this into the apparent lack of a unicorn hsunchen people even as legendary figures, now extinct...)

[UnlikelyLass]

I figured the ancestors of unicorns broke into two tribes at one point, both of which had two horns. One of the tribes, however, lost their horns -- either someone stole them, or they wagered them in a game of chance. 

The next time the two tribes got together, the two-horns felt sorry for the no-horns since they kept getting mistaken for horses. They each donated one of their own horns so everybody could have at least one.

 

[Joerg]

Aren't unicorns cloven-hoofed creatures? RQ2 Companion p.26 has a boxed article on them. That text also talks about a lion-like tail... None of that is present in Loic Muzy's image of the Yelornan, though.

 

3 hours ago, Eff said:

Unicorns have horns because they are only distantly related to horses (also why they are part of the Survival Covenant) and are indeed descended from the horse/griffin's natural predator, which resembled a griffin in basic body plan but retained the horns in lieu of some other draconic feature. This nameless creature (perhaps one could call it a lammasu, a creature/goddess akin to a griffin from Mesopotamian beliefs) was exiled from the Celestial City and became a wandering star in an epic that is snorted out, in biased form, by horses and unicorns both, but remains almost entirely untranslated from the Beastspeech. As such, further details on the history and relationships of unicorns and horses to one another are obscure and difficult.

One of the reason the horse was not allowed in the Survival Covenant is that it was originally a carnivorous sky creature. (There is a reason why the Char-un have bred a carnivorous stallion...)

Unicorns are obsessed with notions of purity, and that would translate into their myths. They have been presented as one of the male-only species of Glorantha, a parallel to the satyrs and the other horned near-humanoids.

Unicorns only mate with virgin beasts - Praxian herd beasts as well as horses, from what I can see, and probably willing to take does and cattle as well if sufficiently pure and pretty. Their standards may vary, and I wouldn't be surprised if the growth of the Rhinoceros tribe has been hampered by predation of their heifers by unicorns.

It has been speculated that the mother of a unicorn calf (or, if you insist, foal) won't have any other offspring.

 

The majority of the Praxian unicorns are summoned from Godtime. It is possible that a herd beast giving birth to a baby unicorn does so on the Other Side, and remains there for the time it needs to provide milk.

A cow of whichever species having given birth to a unicorn could still be a sacred beast, even though it is barren and dry. They would rarely be found in unicorn rider herds, as those beasts will be uncomfortable in their presence.

But then, there is a possibility that such a beast won't return from the Other Side. But that would take away the disappointed faces of the rhino riders when another of their cows delivers a skinny unicorn....

 

3 hours ago, Eff said:

(Now you would want to tie this into the apparent lack of a unicorn hsunchen people even as legendary figures, now extinct...)

There is a distinct lack of bison, sable, impala, tapir and high llama Hsunchen, too. One might see a pattern, there.

[metcalph]

8 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

uh, so where do unicorns come from? because, like, griffons don't have horns.

Unicorns were made by the Remakers whose clients wanted a prettier rhinocerous.  The breed was due to be scaled up but the Blue Moon Assassins halted the project.

[Tindalos]

8 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

uh, so where do unicorns come from? because, like, griffons don't have horns.

Unicorn was one of the sons of Storm Bull who followed his family into Prax, fighting against Chaos, and romancing the daughters of Eiritha. 

Unicorn was the most like his father, for Unicorn was a lover and a fighter, who hated Chaos with a passion that his brothers lacked. 

But that passion prevented him from finding a partner. He found no one who shared his pure hatred, and so although he had many lovers, he was never joined with the marriage bond to any of them. 

And so the Unicorn is a half-beast, only males like their father, who romance Eiritha's other beasts to find love for a while, before returning to their lonely vigil. 

 

At least that's how Unicorn tells it. 

His brothers instead tell of their little, lazy brother, who always comes around to mooch off their families, drinking their koumiss, and eating their food. He's a great storyteller and romanticist, and so he's always got a bevy of young bulls and cows who want to go with him, to their parent's displeasure. 

After the contest, Unicorn and his sons were left alone, without protectors. He claimed he needed none, but his brother Waha knew better. 

He went among the tribes, seeking volunteers to guard a beast that produced nothing, and took everything. 

Among the tribes, there were those unsatisfied with Waha's plan for their life. They agreed to leave their homes and protect the Unicorns, in exchange for being able to choose their way of life. 

Waha agreed, knowing there was no way that Unicorn could be protected by people following his way, and introduced them to Unicorn as those who would follow his lonely battle against Chaos, while teaching them how to best trick Unicorn into following their instructions. 

And so the Unicorn Women found a way to live their lives.

And the Unicorns found protectors, while still believing they were perfect. 

And Waha found a way to deal with those who would not be happy with his plan, and appear generous. 

And everyone was happy. 

  -- A myth told by the Bison tribe. 

Edited August 1, 2021 by Tindalos

[Lordabdul]

Did we ever do the most obvious dumb theory about Jar-Eel? That she's really... just... an eel in a jar? Ok so eels are kinda serpentine thingies right? They're obviously draconic in nature. Which means they have powerful dreams. The aforementioned eel in a jar is dreaming of living life out there as Xena Warrior Princess (maybe her jar is sitting on the table near a TV set in the 90s). That's such a powerful dream (I myself had very powerful dreams about Lucy Lawless in my youth) that it becomes reality, just like Dream Dragons. So... there you have it. If you go to the Red Emperor's kitchen and knock over the jar, you can turn around the whole Hero Wars.

[FungusColombicus]

21 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

Did we ever do the most obvious dumb theory about Jar-Eel? That she's really... just... an eel in a jar? Ok so eels are kinda serpentine thingies right? They're obviously draconic in nature. Which means they have powerful dreams. The aforementioned eel in a jar is dreaming of living life out there as Xena Warrior Princess (maybe her jar is sitting on the table near a TV set in the 90s). That's such a powerful dream (I myself had very powerful dreams about Lucy Lawless in my youth) that it becomes reality, just like Dream Dragons. So... there you have it. If you go to the Red Emperor's kitchen and knock over the jar, you can turn around the whole Hero Wars.

as stated before... she is basically 3 ducks one on top of the other inside of a loose armor...

I just wonder what is the fixation of the lunars with eels... eels aparently are important for the empire since a lot of the personalities are eels... a little fishy if you ask me...

[Sir_Godspeed]

2 hours ago, FungusColombicus said:

I just wonder what is the fixation of the lunars with eels... eels aparently are important for the empire since a lot of the personalities are eels... a little fishy if you ask me...

Idea:
"Eel" means something like "seed" or "fruit" in a procreative way.
Berneel Ashagern is the serpent that carries Yelm's seed (his virility, his fecundity).

Eel-Ariash is the "Seed" (ie. descendants) of Ariash.

(I don't think this actually works out, but still)