Your Dumbest Theory

[mfbrandi]

10 hours ago, GnomeGnosis said:

The source of power in fire rune magic is to let go of desire. Dayzatar kept his power by breaking away from the world. Yelmalio’s main power he gives to worshippers revolves around giving up things.

8 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Lodril gives in to [desire] all the way and does fine!

[Bold emphasis mine, of course.]

Hmm … to the extent that Lodril is in a state of … err … release — “lava” everywhere — he is not subject to desire, he has let go. Is that power? Let us call it a (pyroclastic) flow state. Of course, if the volcano is capped and pressure starts to build again, that is another matter — a suitable case for treatment? The hamster wheel.

It seems to me that the ascetics — the uptight, superpowered renunciates, with their austerities and mortifications — have not let go of desire. They hold it tight to them in the surest way — by refusing its satisfaction. Giving up the things you want and giving up wanting them are not the same. If it is not hurting, it is not working. Imprisoning and torturing (exemplary solar monarch) Sheng Seleris is likely the worst idea ever: he won’t let go of his desire, and the frustration seems to make him stronger.

Is Yelmalio (the god, not the cult) a power-seeking renouncer, or is he just mulishly stubborn? I like to think the latter, but I have likely been stood on my head too long. I make no claims about how things really work, of course. That would be to pick a fight with the spirit of this place. 😉

[metcalph]

In an effort to control crime on the streets of Glamour, the authorities have deployed Illuminated Danfive Xaronites.  

Specifically they can ignore the requirement of doing no harm to others (LW p48).

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Also, whatever the heck Ralzakark is.

The bits left on the cutting room floor when Arkat was rebuilt as a “troll” — light without heat.

[mfbrandi]

Prompted by the arguments over counting “knowledge gods”.

I don’t mind Buserian = Lhankor Mhy. LM is dull — Buserian’s beard and the socially acceptable face of Atyar, hoarder of other people’s knowledge.

Glorantha does seem a bit short of gods for intellectuals (rather than accountants, astrologers, and civil servants), though. What are we to make of that? Who is there for the Gloranthan smartarse about town? What are we to say?

• They will always have Nysalor, dead patron of infinite questions.
• They half-seriously profess an affection for Krarsht, the wily outsider and dancer on ignorance.
• They have inconspicuous shrines to a corvid or cephalopod version of Trickster — strictly on the down-low.
• They pay lip service to any god who doesn’t ask much in the way of time or effort, so art and research are largely undisturbed.
• They are dully conventional in their religion but don’t let it get in the way of real life.
• A god is like an animal going mad in its zoo cage — round and round and … — who would worship such an unfortunate creature?
• They are all atheists (or properly hardcore Malkioni, eschewing henotheism and divine revelation).
• No god would have as a worshipper any freethinking ne’er-do-well.

[Akhôrahil]

15 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

• They half-seriously profess an affection for Krarsht, the wily outsider and dancer on ignorance

Arachne Solara, The Red Goddess and Krarsht make up the trinity of the Great Goddess as creator, preserver and destroyer. Milk.

[scott-martin]

32 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Buserian’s beard

What raised my illumination score was the observation (from someone who may prefer to remain in the shadows) that female deity names in the Pelorian basin often take the -eria, -oria suffix and so Bus-eria(n) may have originally been a goddess cult or a kind of portable masculine appendage thereof. In that scenario we can imagine how and where the beard was adopted as gender performance hardened into Dara Happan religion.

I initially wondered if this particular -oria was originally something like a land or grain goddess of Pent who abandoned her original portfolio or had it stripped away in the upheavals, becoming a stargazer and ultimately a maker of signifying marks instead. We can imagine her embroidering sky maps into the hide ceiling of the ritual tent and then ultimately the "characters" get woven into more mundane chronicles and then secular writing.

But then someone else pointed out that the "bu-" or "bos-" may be a cattle term and so "Bus-eria" could have been a herd sister. So I think about the way the Maasai or other people who live intimately with their cows will write on their bodies to show ownership or simply express the relationship. The Pelorian alphabet may be just a system of earmarks and nomad brands that crossed some linguistic frontier. After all, we can probably all point to one alphabet or another that starts with not a cow and not a bull but an "ox."

[scott-martin]

23 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

exemplary solar monarch

While rummaging around in GRoY to refresh my sense of whether Lokarnos is a writing god (not really) I found a page I don't recall seeing before. It's a good one.

I think this is the initiatory truth of the Yelm system . . . their version of IFWW or the 7 Steps or whatever, something deep and spiritually satisfying. Every "Emperor," every would-be sun (locus solus) must extend to the limit and then engage with the missing half of creation, which in light-oriented practice we might consider the "shadow." The version Greg cites here ends with the subservient Dendara enshrined as the Other of record. We could just as easily imagine versions where an orlanth has the most compelling argument and so the Contest of Weapons boils down to that inflamed ego engineering its own relief / overthrow / disintegration / death. However, these versions are incompatible with the yelmism they teach in the schools these days. 

[mfbrandi]

14 hours ago, scott-martin said:

people who live intimately with their cows will write on their bodies … “ox.”

They are relieving the boredom inherent in their lifestyle by playing tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses over here).

[mfbrandi]

14 hours ago, scott-martin said:

I initially wondered if this particular -oria was originally something like a land or grain goddess of Pent who abandoned her original portfolio … becoming a stargazer

Maybe the two functions were linked — Rudolf Steiner, biodynamics, moon gardening! It is enough to drive anyone indoors to the relatively sane life of a clerk or accountant.

Grain goddess is maybe not the most secure of jobs, anyway. What happened to Pelora when Hon-eel got promoted from “special goddess of maize” (RQ3 GoG: Cults Book, p. 40) to the RG’s grain goddess? “When I were a nipper, it were all fields round here, and Ernalda were the Barley Mother.” A grain goddess has always got to be ready for a new career in a new town.

[mfbrandi]

21 hours ago, scott-martin said:

[E]very would-be sun … must extend to the limit and then engage with the missing half of creation, which in light-oriented practice we might consider the “shadow.” The version Greg cites here ends with the subservient Dendara enshrined as the Other of record.

The scribe of the Patriarchy — gripped by his fear — was in error, of course. We have nothing, then — fiat lux — a single source of light: what is there to cast a shadow? There is the sun (cosmos) and nothing else (the void, chaos). Dendara is the complement of the primal light as she does not exist — for the male afraid of the female other this does make her the perfect wife: ever present, silent, and untouchable. The text coming down to us has:

• Dendara, his wife, “for while you are sure, I am not …”
  — GRoY (PDF, p. 77)

But perhaps it should have said:

• For while you are, I am not. I give. I supply.

For are we not told that chaos, the void, is the Mother of All?
 

Spoiler

For the avoidance of doubt: I do not endorse any vision of the divine, especially not a gendered one. In particular not woman = womb = void = chaos = evil. But the temptation to spin the material for my amusement is irresistible.

I do approve of the idea of the fundamental binary being something vs. nothing (no punch can be landed), rather than something vs. some other thing (much butting of heads). Confusing these two leads to pointless arguments.

Edited June 19 by mfbrandi
This is a rather overelaborate response to my initial misreading of Dendara’s pitch.

[mfbrandi]

12 hours ago, theconfusingeel said:

Random peasants wouldn’t be able to restrain themselves from becoming chaos monsters.

I am sure our slippery friend only means that the Red Emperor and his benighted servants take this attitude to illumination, but they have put their finger on a common attitude, I think.

If illumination really is PyrE, we should all be more Gully and trust the people with it.

With all the dragons and swirling oppositions in Glorantha, why do we seem to have so little emphasis on tigers? They are there all right — “Tiger formed from the fangs of Korgatsu the World Dragon” (Anaxial’s Roster, p. 94) — but as that quote indicates, not given equal dignity. Selective plundering? To what end?

Is Yinkin perhaps Storm’s domesticated “tiger” and Danfive Xaron Moon’s domesticated “dragon” (Orlanth the rain god)? No, probably not.
 

Edited June 19 by mfbrandi
unneeded definite article

[mfbrandi]

On 6/17/2024 at 6:46 PM, Joerg said:

They need to defend against proof that the Moon and its Goddess(es) were killed in the Greater Darkness.

Who are “they” here, Jörg?

The Lunars don’t need to defend against proof that the moon/s (and other ingredients) were killed in God Time. That is their starting point: “Yes, and we built a new one from the bits in ‘proper’ time. God Time deaths are baked in. ‘Proving’ them makes us stronger.”

But if “they” means the tricksy Orlanthi heroquesters nouveaux, that might just work: if the old moon goddesses survived and made it through the Darkness to the Half-life of the Gods under the Compromise, then their corpse parts wouldn’t be available to the Seven Mothers. No RG — but a bunch of previously-thought-lost OG deities freshly retconned into the New Dispensation. Perhaps worries about dealing with them led to the “just trash the big red rock” plan?

[Joerg]

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Who are “they” here, Jörg?

The Lunars don’t need to defend against proof that the moon/s (and other ingredients) were killed in God Time. That is their starting point: “Yes, and we built a new one from the bits in ‘proper’ time. God Time deaths are baked in. ‘Proving’ them makes us stronger.”

But if “they” means the tricksy Orlanthi heroquesters nouveaux, that might just work: if the old moon goddesses survived and made it through the Darkness to the Half-life of the Gods under the Compromise, then their corpse parts wouldn’t be available to the Seven Mothers. No RG — but a bunch of previously-thought-lost OG deities freshly retconned into the New Dispensation. Perhaps worries about dealing with them led to the “just trash the big red rock” plan?

By "they" I do mean the Lunar heroquesters. If you do the identification of the enemy game, it might be rather easy to cast them as the current Godtime moon which is usually about to suffer a defeat. While suffering that defeat might be beneficial for the overall purpose of the Lunar quest (go through a cycle of adversity and emerge on the high note of the cycle), the opposing Orlanthi or Pentan or Malkioni/other questers may take advantage from that association.

I wonder how Lunar questers carry their cyclical benefits/penalties through their quests when putting this in RuneQuest rules.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

No idea yet where Golden Bow and Hastatus are going to land between Yelm and Yelmalio, but then Yelmalio is a fragment of Yelm.

The Many are all fragments of the One …

• By the time we got to Torang
  We were half a million strong
  And everywhere there was song and celebration
   
  And I dreamed I saw the bat priests
  Riding shotgun in the sky
  And they were turning into hummingbirds
  Above our nation
  
  We are stardust
  Billion year old carbon
  We are golden
  Caught in the Devil’s bargain
  And we’ve got to get ourselves
  Back to the garden

[scott-martin]

6 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

why do we seem to have so little emphasis on tigers?

It's a great question.

IMG it's as simple as the ancient distribution of ruling totems in proto-kralorela. The archaic sources suggest that "dragon style" people (the original "hykimites") dominated the part of Eest the imperialists cared about and so most of our foreigner's understanding of the hsunchara system is heavily filtered through that totemic lens. 

But in the northern highlands the vrimak people once dominated and the "fralar" people were their counterparts in the south. These are probably the mystic tiger people who caused a lot of trouble for the central system at the blurry edge of history.

Dragon apologists would never concede that these people were important but as we try to reconstruct the historical east from fragmentary sources I would not be surprised to see a strong tiger influence surviving down in the totemic layer of Teshnos to this day. In these communities, the great cat is the apex predator and they avoid talking much about "dragons" except maybe to emphasize the feline characteristics. (See also: griffon.) And there were the other great tribes, the eagle people of the north, the turtle people, deer and sheep. Each might've had their own mystic exalted forms: phoenix, "unicorn," magic pony / high llama, big turtle and so on .

If I were in a sassy mood I'd wonder whether the totemic breakdown and initial rise of the "dragon" (some say the historical "Kralor" was both prince of the vrimak people and son-in-law of the damal deer king) is the way the Gbaji revolution played out in the continental east. In this scenario, someone could argue that the bad guys won . . . but I'm not in that kind of mood. It is interesting, though, that the fralarites drop out of the fragmentary chronicles around 350 and afterward make an appearance propping up what becomes the False Dragons Ring. Heavy magic. Who has time?

[Memestream]

On 6/17/2024 at 4:58 PM, mfbrandi said:

Hmm … to the extent that Lodril is in a state of … err … release — “lava” everywhere — he is not subject to desire, he has let go. Is that power? Let us call it a (pyroclastic) flow state. 

I had expected Arnold Schwarzenegger would find his way into my setting as an Orlanthi, but it seems fate had other plans.

[mfbrandi]

10 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Chaos destroys all information

Kajabor the Destroyer, an all-purpose bedtime story:

• Kajabor will eat you, little one.
  We won’t miss you.
  You won’t even get an empty-casket funeral.
  No one will remember you ever existed.

As a bedtime story, it is great, but as an hypothesis, you wonder how the Gloranthans would come to form it and how they would collect evidence for it. (“I saw Kajabor eat a god, but I just cannot remember that god’s name” is too weak a version of gone-as-if-never-there to entertain us or to frighten small children.)

Spoiler

One version of the cosmic cycle (no spider vomit, this time): History is the Void scabbing over; Kajabor eats the scab, leaving nothing — not even Kajabor; da capo. “… needs time for what it kills to grow in …”

[jajagappa]

17 hours ago, scott-martin said:

I would not be surprised to see a strong tiger influence surviving down in the totemic layer of Teshnos to this day. In these communities, the great cat is the apex predator and they avoid talking much about "dragons" except maybe to emphasize the feline characteristics. (See also: griffon.)

Tolat was a Tiger. 🐯 (You can see it in his division between Sky and Underworld as reflected in its stripes)

Edited June 20 by jajagappa

[mfbrandi]

22 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Tolat was a Tiger. 🐯

Spoiler

Did he advertise breakfast cereal? Sugar-coated maize flakes are clearly some kind of Lunar plot.

Tolat -> Shargash -> Vorthan -> Zolan -> my dear old uncle.

Obviously, I like our fierce omi palone as a Yin figure. Perhaps we can see Annilla–Xiola Umbar–Zorak Zoran as some kind of triple goddess of liminality.

• She contained the paradoxes of dead and not-dead, of eternal dying, and unattained rebirth.
  — Prosopaedia: Annilla (PDF, p. 7)

Of course, XU is patron of midwives to a species who sees most of its children as “us-but-not-us.”

[jajagappa]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

Did he advertise breakfast cereal? Sugar-coated maize flakes are clearly some kind of Lunar plot.

Obviously! For the nobles of Tarsh it's clearly become the Breakfast of Champions. (Displacing prior wheat-based breakfast in the process.)

[scott-martin]

Love the tiger grain goddesses. Frog Woman was once the patron of rice but has come down hard in the world.

---

Burned a point of blue divination:
Ezkankekko is back, hiding in plain sight.

[Akhôrahil]

[jajagappa]

Having just watched Godzilla Minus One, I realize that Harrek is a kaiju and that whenever he comes to the Mirrorsea Bay/Nochet, that story can be played as a Godzilla movie. 😱🦖

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, jajagappa said:

Having just watched Godzilla Minus One, I realize that Harrek is a kaiju

I always figured he was the guy in the rubber suit — the actor in the skin playing the pantomime horse bear.

I was saddened to learn that Godzilla Minus One was not Hamlet without the prince.

[mfbrandi]

We have touched on how esotericism and new religions — not real bronze-age religion — are the key to Glorantha. We have had Crowley and Hubbard. We have wondered why we have Brithini and Mostali. Still, we need more “flying saucer” religions in our Glorantha(s).

I give you … the Nation of Mostal.

The prophet revealed that evil — growth — was inherent even to the original mechanical man. Grower was in Maker but no one had ever made an attempt to bring it out. In his scientific experiments, Zzabur wrestled the principle of growth out of Maker–Malkion killing him and producing the Devil — biological man!

• Glorantha is far older than 1,600 years — it was made trillions of years ago by Mostali scientists.
• A scientist separated Moon from Earth using high explosives.
• Who is the original man? Maker, cream of Earth, god of the universe, and father of civilization.
• No metaphysics, only physics; no spirit, only matter.
• Eating wrongly and too often causes short lives, so eat dwarf food once a week. (You really wouldn’t want to eat it any more often.)
• The Mother Wheel — Juggernaut — will bring the apocalypse, purifying Glorantha by purging all trace of growth from it. (How else to fix the World Machine?)
• Dwarf bodies and minds will be restored to their natural, scientific, mechanical state.

This was folded, spindled, and mutilated from Edward E. Curtis IV’s (rather more temperate and respectful) Science and Technology in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam.

Edited Saturday at 09:46 PM by mfbrandi