Your Dumbest Theory

[Joerg]

Speaking of Crimson Bats, isn't the Lunar iconography of the Goddess wrong? When Teelo Estara returned from her Goddess Quest, her faithful followers saw her riding a giant hummingbird, not a Chaos bat.

[Jape_Vicho]

In the most remote high valleys of the Shan Shans live the people of the stray son of Rathor, Osho the Bear-Cat. Unlike his Fronelan bretheren, the Oshoi are pacifists, and they always deal with threats by hiding. That's why the Godlearners of the New Dragon's Ring never managed to get a hold of one, and deemed them mere folk legends. 

[mfbrandi]

On 9/26/2023 at 5:56 PM, scott-martin said:

A close reading of his nativity narrative and the fact that his signature spell is Suppress “Aether” tell me a lot about his unacknowledged paternity.

The stories may not all agree, and that is how it should be.

In the story in which the three friends are maybe out and about before the birth of Aether, Aether makes an unlikely literal father for any of them. It might also suggest Fire–Light–Sky enwombed in Darkness. It might — if your imagination runs as mine does — suggest that any manifestation of Darkness is already entangled with its opposite. Each of the three friends embodies a different relationship:

• XU = amity: “it is friendship from afar”
• ZZ = agon/y: “it is an enemy, and I shall eat it to hide it away from us”
• AA = dominance (diminishment, dismissal): “it is just another godling”

Three Curious Spirits seems to present the friends’ relationships with as acquired post-natally, not something there from conception, and one might even see Aether as their sibling. However, if the story is not to be taken literally — the point being to contrast the three friends’ attitudes and to underscore the intimate – connection, even in the early universe — then we might say that their connection to is inborn, “in their DNA.” And if Nakala/ is AA’s “first mother,” then who is his father but /Aether, however poorly that fits with this narrative? But equally, we could say that of XU and ZZ, but we don’t.°

My personal take: & were always entangled; it is a brute fact of the universe, and “fire genes” were not acquired by Nakala’s marrying out. YG will certainly V. (Hmm … “W V” — are we being sent up, or given even more licence than we thought?)

But if we give AA a renaissance — this time with Xentha as mother — we can run some kind of Oedipal story, with the death of the sun (= the forcing of Lodril underground) enabling Darkness’ takeover of the sky and the overrun of the surface by KL’s brood. (Measures of desperation recast as famous victories?) There sits somewhat more happily as a father. I suspect that on Airstrip One, we are more resistant to making everything “about Daddy” — rightly or wrongly, we see that as an American obsession. But these are American myths for an American game.

There is an irony to all this: ZZ’s agon/y and XU’s amity seem stable — constant — but Darkness’ dominance as night can only be maintained for a few hours at a time. Of AA’s sets of runes over the years, perhaps these were most appropriate: — Darkness can achieve dominance over Fire, but it cannot hold onto it: it must be exchanged for an equal period of submission (and regular torching of the underworld). — In Times Square, now, people do the polka … — XU and ZZ, rejecting a Top–Bottom relationship for an Inside–Outside conception, have more the measure of the thing (although each handles it differently).°°

Perhaps … perhaps … perhaps — interminable waffle terminates.
 

—————————————————
° Although some might like to see ZZ as introjecting the father. This could be following Freud or subverting him: does it enable superego formation, does it cement his position as the id of Darkness (of us all), or something else? Think of Norman Bates at the end of Psycho.

°° The Dead, perhaps, propose a synthesis of AA and XU/ZZ. 😉

[mfbrandi]

Quote

The Devil himself was considered a southpaw, and he and other evil spirits were always conjured up by left-handed gestures. — TIME, 10 January, 1969

You all know the picture: his club in his right hand; gesturing with his left. Always watch what the left hand is doing.

Imagine the lyrics of Cole Porter sung oh-so-sweetly by Uncle ZZ (Lee Wiley, Ella, June Christy, Helen Merrill — you get the idea).

• I’m very mild, I’m very meek
  My will is strong, but my won’t is weak
  So don’t look at me that way
  
  When that strange expression of indiscretion
  Begins to show in your stare
  There’s a hocus-pocus about your focus
  That gives me a terrible scare
  
  I feel a thrill when you arrive
  And while you’re near I simply thrive
  But if you want to get home alive
  Don’t look at me that way
   
• Get out of town
  Before it’s too late my love
  Get out of town
  Be good to me please
  Why wish me harm
  Why not retire to a farm
  And be contented to charm
  The birds off the trees
  Just disappear
  I care for you much too much
  And when you’re near, close to me dear
  We touch too much
  The thrill when we meet is so bittersweet
  That darling, it’s getting me down
  So on your mark get set
  Get out of town

“Night and Day,” “All Through the Night,” “Miss Otis Regrets,” “All of You,” … “Easy to Love.”

Try it.
Shiver.
You’ll like it.

Edited October 6, 2023 by mfbrandi
' —> ’

[mfbrandi]

[T]he immense mismatch between … fragile, mortal lives and their huge and ancient surroundings also inspires feelings of awe and grandeur: the aesthetic which used to be known as ‘the sublime.’ A man bleeding to death in a gutter is pathetic. A man bleeding to death in a gutter in the middle of a pre-human city of mile-high spires combines pathos with sublimity …

[I]f the premise of your set-up is ‘something huge once happened here,’ then why isn’t that the focus of the scenario? Why not … make the PCs as the equals of the world they encounter, … rather than dwarfish outsiders creeping fearfully through its wreckage? …

If PCs can run around the inside of a giant machine pulling levers to see what happens … then that implies the absence of any kind of overarching authority able to control [their] movements … Well-maintained social order is the enemy of free-wheeling adventure, and so the more ruined everything is, the more freedom PCs will have to run around inside it.

— Against the Wicked City, OSR Aesthetics of Ruin

——————————————————————————————

Back when the old school was in no need of reviving, we might have been scufflers in the ruins — of a city built from the remains of a giant magical robot, say — but pace Damon Knight, we were not all In Search of Wonder. It doesn’t do to mistake a venue for an affective response.

So the OSR can have their pathetic bleed-outs among the ruins they like to “gosh! wow!” at, but the venues providing their freedom don’t require those feelings, that aesthetic.

But what has this to do with the price of Gloranthan cabbages? Make-believe encounters with the sublime are sometimes dangled in front of the players: you can play a part in causing/averting an Age-ending catastrophe; you can witness the powers of gods; hell, you can even manifest the power of your god in the world — divine power will flow through you. Frankly, it sounds exhausting … if you insist on feeling all that power, gasping at all that spectacle.

You are a hyena waiting for the flesh of a freshly-killed god you’ve just stumbled upon to ripen. Godskin can be tough. You give no thought to horror, pathos, or the sublime. The hyena is a good Brechtian: Paradise or Hell — it is just a matter of perspective … and the right dentition.

[scott-martin]

"Old" Trade is not an island and is only incidentally a state of mind. What it is: a language.

EDIT: Or rather, "structured like" a language.

Edited October 10, 2023 by scott-martin

[Joerg]

56 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

"Old" Trade is not an island and is only incidentally a state of mind. What it is: a language.

EDIT: Or rather, "structured like" a language.

A port/harbour with a syntax?

[scott-martin]

11 minutes ago, Joerg said:

A port/harbour with a syntax?

Now that you mention it, maybe Waertag's Pier was structured like a language as well, being so close to the original Kachasti territories. A different language. Great interview with Jeff by the way. Nice lore.

[scott-martin]

When a local cult is consolidated into a larger organization, many of the stories are incorporated but the aspects of the god or spirit that were incompatible or just didn't make it into the successor entity are left behind as alienated material: rune metal, crystals, less durable magic item components. This is the Gods War expressed in mythogeological terms: as above, so below.

The fact that so much native bronze, copper and gold is available for mining reveals the relative success of the storm (lightbringer), earth (lifebringer) and solar (starlight ancestors) missionary diasporas, which radiated out across the world and left a handful of world religions and a lot of local ore deposits behind. 

In some cases the diasporic era replaced entire archaic pantheons, leaving metals without much organized mythology behind. Restoring these materials to their original divine narrative is an alchemical mystery of the hero wars.

The immediate mystery is that despite this, rituals for enchanting bronze are rare despite the ubiquity of the lightbringer complex. Not even Orlanth cares enough about hu-metal to teach its intricacies . . . but the ur-metal spell is surprisingly widespread. As below, so above.

[Joerg]

22 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

When a local cult is consolidated into a larger organization, many of the stories are incorporated but the aspects of the god or spirit that were incompatible or just didn't make it into the successor entity are left behind as alienated material: rune metal, crystals, less durable magic item components. This is the Gods War expressed in mythogeological terms: as above, so below.

The fact that so much native bronze, copper and gold is available for mining reveals the relative success of the storm (lightbringer), earth (lifebringer) and solar (starlight ancestors) missionary diasporas, which radiated out across the world and left a handful of world religions and a lot of local ore deposits behind. 

In some cases the diasporic era replaced entire archaic pantheons, leaving metals without much organized mythology behind. Restoring these materials to their original divine narrative is an alchemical mystery of the hero wars.

The immediate mystery is that despite this, rituals for enchanting bronze are rare despite the ubiquity of the lightbringer complex. Not even Orlanth cares enough about hu-metal to teach its intricacies . . . but the ur-metal spell is surprisingly widespread. As below, so above.

You make this sound as if worship of a type of elemental deity will - over time . generate the metal deposits associated with that type of deity?

This seems to go against Bertalor's logic that the metals you find are those of the victims of such battles. (Victors rarely leave their corpses lying around).

Or are you talking about extracting the metals, crystals etc. out of the living body of the deity, say mining for copper in the Eiritha Hills?

[scott-martin]

18 minutes ago, Joerg said:

This seems to go against Bertalor's logic that the metals you find are those of the victims of such battles. (Victors rarely leave their corpses lying around).

I'm saying the process of religious consolidation itself is the battle. When an expanding storm cult comes into an area and absorbs the local storm entities, the "living" parts of the local storm system ultimately become part of Orlanth. The "dead" parts that do not continue drop out of the system and we dig them up later as inert hu-metal and unpowered crystals.

When scattered horse tribes fight over which sun will rule the sky, you get a battle of suns within the religious community. The winners continue to receive worship. The part of the losers that is compatible with subordinate status continue as "planets" or "stars." The part that is incompatible drops out of the system and gold becomes available. This is of course one of the secrets of the Lokarnos system. And sometimes an entire cult is incompatible so we say that god who was acknowledged within mythic memory is dead.

Missionary earth movements leave copper behind. Missionary shadow movements leave lead. And so on.

[Joerg]

So the real reason the Lunars invaded Sartar was that gold rush in the wake of Monrogh's conversion of the Locaem Elmali? 😉

[jajagappa]

5 hours ago, Joerg said:

This seems to go against Bertalor's logic that the metals you find are those of the victims of such battles. (Victors rarely leave their corpses lying around).

Interestingly by Bertalor's logic there should be very large deposits of gold (or tin) around as the solar deities fell, or aluminum (on land) as the sea deities were driven back and slain by the storm gods. 

[Akhôrahil]

On 10/10/2023 at 7:13 PM, Joerg said:

This seems to go against Bertalor's logic that the metals you find are those of the victims of such battles. (Victors rarely leave their corpses lying around).

Storm gods love fighting each other though, and then you get bronze either way.

[mfbrandi]

On 10/10/2023 at 6:32 PM, scott-martin said:

I'm saying the process of religious consolidation itself is the battle.

I think the “as above, so below” may have been confusing. I know you caught me out (not hard). Here above is human/ground level (cultic goings on) and below is underground (where the mines are), right? Not heaven and earth but on the earth and under the earth. Love it!

On 10/10/2023 at 6:32 PM, scott-martin said:

When scattered horse tribes fight over which sun will rule the sky, you get a battle of suns within the religious community.

They are horse archers. Too many suns? Shoot some down. (Don’t get carried away, though. That way madness — — lies.)

On 10/10/2023 at 6:32 PM, scott-martin said:

And sometimes an entire cult is incompatible so we say that god who was acknowledged within mythic memory is dead.

Is this the heart of the Nysalorean mystery? Our god is dead, so you’d think we’d be left in peace. Our god is dead, but we have killed him — “I am Arkat, and so is my wife” — and some of us just cannot get over that, so we persecute ourselves and our sub-crustal co-religionists … or something/nothing like that.

[mfbrandi]

19 hours ago, soltakss said:

Iron was invented by the Mostali to kill Aldryami and Uz, so comes later than Death.

18 hours ago, g33k said:

Death-metal derives so much from the Death Rune that Humakt knows its secrets

Hmm … maybe. I mean I wouldn’t want to disagree, but it is my nature to wonder.

Before there was Life or Death, there was the Machine. The World Machine is not alive, not dead, and not undead either. Let us say that the Machine was always there — just not always ticking down to Doomsday.°

What is the Machine made of in its pristine state? I would warrant it contains many metals. Certainly iron, tungsten, and all the radioactive lovelies. Bronze is likely a symptom of malfunction.

Every Mostali “invention” is a revelation of something already contained in the Machine. Inventing new stuff is the sort of thing Our Blessed Mother of the Healthy Appetite does — it is not something for battery-operated garden gnomes: they are too much chips off the old mechanism.

The “purpose” of iron weapons? To render early (pre-human versions) down to legitimate ingredients of construction projects, untainted by ? (Like the druids of our imaginations cutting mistletoe only with a sickle of an appropriate metal. Is it mere ritual, or is it magic?) If it seems not to work so well on humans, is that because they already carry the poison in their blood — because they are already in some liminal state?

(I could blame this farrago on my own stupidity, but my pitiful excuse is that my Mostali and dwarfish informants need so much high-grade lubricant to get them to talk that they are never both forthcoming and coherent.)

—————————————————————————————
° “Always” to be taken with an amount of NaCl.

Edited October 16, 2023 by mfbrandi
spelling

[Joerg]

52 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Before there was Life or Death, there was the Machine. The World Machine is not alive, not dead, and not undead either. Let us say that the Machine was always there — just not always ticking down to Doomsday.°

The Mostali claim that the first matter created, Stone, was alive and vibrant. Just not Growing.

 

52 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

What is the Machine made of in its pristine state? I would warrant it contains many metals. Certainly iron, tungsten, and all the radioactive lovelies. Bronze is likely a symptom of malfunction.

The core parts of the Machine were made of living Stone - the Spike, containing the Chaosium from which the new matter and new metals were called forth by each new generation of Mostali. (That's IMG the Mostali explanation of the sequence of Metals, and thereby elemental matter.)

These periodic table elements you mention have no place in Glorantha other than as weird variations of rock. Metals are a plasma emanation of the (Gloranthan) element on a solid crystalline matrix, and thus all are of Mostal's stasis. (Our world only has an electron plasma in metals and to some extent in semi-metals.)

 

52 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Every Mostali “invention” is a revelation of something already contained in the Machine.

In my description, the Spike is inscribed with The Blueprint which includes the operation manual for the Chaosium matter generator.

Self-construction of Mostal ended a bit after 10,000 YS (Lodril's dive into the earth as part of tablet 3 of the Copper Tablets), with the separated Aether derivates taking up their positions and elemental metal (brass for Lodril, gold for Yelm, silver for Dayzatar) simultaneously emerging from the previous Tin. (Basically, Mostal and his earlier Elder Mostali had three vessels cooking at once for finishing the World Machine, brass, silver and gold.) What was left was detail work on the features inside the Machine.

Then Umath was born (not made), a different expression of the tin-copper alloy which was not part of the extraction process from the Chaosium in The Blueprint. Mostal was unhinged and stopped communicating. Later the brute smashed into the North Pillar that had been erected to manage the unhinged dome, starting the tilting business which made deciphering The Blueprint even harder.

But basically, that's my way of agreeing with that statement.

 

52 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

The “purpose” of iron weapons? To render early (pre-human versions) down to legitimate ingredients of construction projects, untainted by ?

IMG the Iron Crucible was the Mostali invention (the horror) of refining Stone into something counteracting both the Grower and the Taker whose interferences had make the Mostali miss the Umath development at the Chaosium when there were hardly any Mostali down there maintaining it - after all the building material was already in place. The primer material might have been taken from the barrier to the Void, which the assembled Elder Mostali may have regarded as the lesser risk to the Machine than the boundless Growth and unregulated Taking. Also, a makeshift border had to be created around the rim of the Machine which now was bleeding stuff outside of the snowball globe in an equatorial belt - stuff replenished by Growth, but a misuse of energy and the Chaosium nonetheless.

 

52 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

(Like the druids of our imaginations cutting mistletoe only with a sickle of an appropriate metal. Is it mere ritual, or is it magic?) If it seems not to work so well on humans, is that because they already carry the poison in their blood — because they are already in some liminal state?

Humans - especially those westerners who the Mostali of Tharkarn interacted with most, the useful Vadeli and the thieving Brithini - refused to bind themselves to any of these matters, which took them out of the targeting specifics at first. But then Trickster observed Mostali taking the border stuff from downbelow for some other purpose and wanted some for himself. The rest is the Sword Story.

 

52 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

(I could blame this farrago on my own stupidity, but my pitiful excuse is that my Mostali and Dwarvish informants need so much high-grade lubricant to get them to talk that they are never both forthcoming and coherent.)

—————————————————————————————
° “Always” to be taken with an amount of NaCl.

Applying non-solid lubricant is a fallacy. Gold beaten to extremely thin leaves, mixed between the mess the Mostali call food, is the intoxicant which triggers originality (=heresy) in the Mostali. Most clay dwarfs are kept on a stupidity diet to avoid any new ideas, with the gold caste carefully dosed to allow some intellectual oversight.

[mfbrandi]

On 10/16/2023 at 9:00 AM, Joerg said:

The Mostali claim that …

A lot of things are claimed by or on behalf of the Mostali or the dwarfs. It is probably impossible to believe all of them at once:

• Maker is a primal dwarf concept …
  He assigned the world’s natural laws and built the Spike. He is sometimes confused with Mostal or the World Machine by non-dwarfs.
  — GoR Prosopaedia, p. 80
   
• Utriam is one of the names for the Spike, the Cosmic Mountain built by Acos and his son Mostal.
  — GoR Prosopaedia, p. 127
   
• Pre-Creation …
  Dwarf — the World Machine
  Before creation the World Machine, personified as Mostal by the ignorant, is set into motion. This event, which dwarfs alone still remember, begins all the impersonal processes which make the world.
  — GoG Cults Book, p. 6
   
• Creation of Elder Races
  Dwarfs — creation by Mostal
  The World Machine, as part of its designated function, manufactures a race of beings to oversee and tend to it. These are the first dwarfs.
  — GoG Cults Book, p. 7
   
• Dwarf Array
  Dwarf mythology begins with Mostal and Stone, primeval brothers. Mostal made crude images of himself, thus forming the Stone Mostali who helped make better living images … and so on until the octagony of Ancient Metals was formed. The eight Mostali races together made the World Machine. When other gods’ recklessness broke the machine, the Clay Mostali, or dwarfs, were created to swarm about and fix it.
  — GoG Cults Book, p. 13
   
• The Foreman’s Words
  Where do we come from?
  You were made like other tools. Like the World Machine itself. All true life comes thus.
  
  Maker
  Maker is the name of those laws of the ancient universe which formed the World Machine. Once the World Machine was finished, Maker was subsumed by its operation.
  
  Mostal
  Mostal is the World Machine, now dead. One day it shall live again. Ignorant outsiders personalise Mostal and equate him with their own simple-minded religions. It is well that our foes do not understand us.
  — GoG Read Me First (handout sheet)

It seems to me — with my feeble mind — that what the dwarfish theologians are grappling with is the supposed problem of a watch without a watchmaker: by calling it a “watch” they are implying agency behind its creation; they are talking themselves into a chicken and egg argument — if it is a tool, there must be a toolmaker. But at the same time, they want to believe in an impersonal universe: the World Machine arises from natural law, not anyone’s intention. I would say that they need to make up their minds, but likely not every dwarf believes all these things: two people, three opinions, and an argument — that is how we like the world.

For those who object, I guess the problem with growth is that it just happens, impersonally, messily — not neatly, according to a master builder’s blueprint. The dwarfish internal disputes get projected onto the Aldryami with unfortunate consequences. “Was alive, now dead” equates (roughly?) to “was orderly and planned, now messy and spontaneous” — so they misunderstand life, growth, and the “mechanisms” of the world. Natural laws are not legislated and require no legislator.

Alternatively — of course — whenever one sees agency or purpose in accounts of dwarf belief, this indicates a failure of the humans writing it down to grasp the perfectly coherent and impersonal dwarfish cosmology. It was all lost in translation, replaced by talk of gods, personalities, genealogies, and plans.

Alternatively again, the old-time Mostali knew what they were about, but the degenerate modern dwarfs are benighted “cargo cultists.” This seems a rather cruel vision — let’s bin it.

Of all the quotes above, the one which most resonates is the vision of the uncreated “machine” preceding all else which begins to tick. I am even charmed by the dwarfish fantasy — a poetic fancy, not a lie — of remembering being there for the first tick: “We understand the world, even if you do not. We know where it all went wrong!”

Finally:

• Individualists believe that all dwarfs have, or can have, a soul made in the image of Mostal. The implications of this philosophy shocked dwarf society when many formerly tame dwarfs decided to seek their own destiny and creativity.
  — GoR Prosopaedia, p. 62

Naïvely, one might suppose the attribution of individual souls to dwarfs to be the issue, but surely to the sophisticated dwarf-about-town, the problem is supposing that Mostal has (or had) a soul — that is the true scandal. The good dwarfish “theologian” is a good atheist and does not fear brute facts. The world just is. Reconciliation with the Aldryami is possible, and the future is here right now, if you’re willing to pay the cost. 😉

Edited October 17, 2023 by mfbrandi
fixed quote

[Joerg]

Clay dwarfs are one of those badly diminished Elder Race expressions. Their self-replication mechanic stolen from Grower (or finally implemented from the Man Rune, unlike their elders), they are somewhat expendable repair crew following the Gold foreman exegesis of the available copies of the original blueprint. (Which may be fractal in nature, making each piece of Truestone a fairly complete set of instructions, but requiring some means to actually parse it.)

The article on dwarf food in Elder Secrets (with the recipe for one type of canned food) has the criticism "too much gold". The diamond foremen or masters don't need leaders, they need workers and lower management. Some intra-caste versatility is wanted, and clay dwarfs have a mandatory hobby for downtime maintenance. When too much cogitation leads to heresy, the food may be to blame.

Of course Mostal has souls - at least eight, one for each (original) caste.

 

IMG I solve the "clock without clockmaker" problem with my assumption that each Mostal is made to be a von-Neumann-probe, a self-replicating mechanism sent out to become, and then to make self-extracting copies that do so elsewhere in the Void. There might be a non-clockwork clockmaker generations ago, in a different cosmos, or just out there in the depths of the Void. Or beyond.

Possibly there was a set of instructions for the instance of Mostal that had sent off its copies to rejoin the other Mostals. If so, that has been lost, along with the copy-making instructions and tools. But Time is going to last a fair bit, so there is a chance that the Mostali will get closer to reconstructing those instructions and apparatuses.

[mfbrandi]

4 minutes ago, Joerg said:

IMG I solve the "clock without clockmaker" problem with my assumption that each Mostal is made to be a von-Neumann-probe

It is a non-problem, so it doesn’t need a solution. Machine-built machines are fine (and already part of the story, right?), but they won’t show the dwarfs the way out of the fly bottle — if they are even in it. 😉

[metcalph]

Borists:  the reason that the Borists are called squids is that while conventional means of acquiring chaos features run the risk of turning the chaotic into a broo, the more rational Boristi version can turn the chaotic into an (intelligent) walktapus.

[mfbrandi]

Smoking Mirror
Heard something on the radio this morning about John Dee’s obsidian spirit mirror. This made me think of both Shadow Plateau/shattered palace trade goods and the rôle of the God Learners in the Jrusteli imperial enterprise.

You can make up your own magical uses for an Aztec black glass mirror with all its fire and darkness connotations, but I was struck by how it was polished: rubbed with bat guano — because batshit contains tiny bits of abrasive chitin, IIRC.

You just know that when the Lunars get hold of these mirrors, they are going to polish them with Crimson Batshit. Oh my!

Spoiler

Also this :

Spoiler

Edited October 29, 2023 by mfbrandi
additional reference and image

[mfbrandi]

• O Turba of Philosophers and disciples, now hast thou spoken about making into white, but it yet remains to treat concerning the reddening! Know, all ye seekers after this Art, that unless ye whiten, ye cannot make red, because the two natures are nothing other than red and white. Whiten, therefore, the red, and redden the white!
  — A. E. Waite (trans.), Turba Philosophorum

Black, white, yellow, red — does Glorantha have the stages of its great work in order? Has the rubedo (Sedenya) subsumed the citrinitas (Yelm) — is that the a meaning of the Red Emperor?

Will AEW referee the — nonviolent, one imagines — struggle between the White Moonies and the Nick Drakeys?

[mfbrandi]

Argrath and Harrek as twink and bear. Odds evened as in a glass darkly?

Spoiler

[mfbrandi]

20 hours ago, Agentorange said:

On the other hand … Lions of Yelm (yelmalions) does have a dignified regal ring to it