Your Dumbest Theory

[Eff]

[RHW]

On 8/26/2024 at 8:19 AM, Eff said:

Dye indigo is blue, but pigment indigo is purple. There could be something there with how royal purple and royal blue (and tekhelet blue) have very similar dye sources. 

Luathans are just Blue Vadeli moving toward you very very fast.

Run!

Too late.

[John Biles]

17 hours ago, RHW said:

Luathans are just Blue Vadeli moving toward you very very fast.

Run!

Too late.

Moving away from you very fast. 

[RHW]

2 hours ago, John Biles said:

Moving away from you very fast. 

According the Malkioni sorcerer Roy G. Biv, blue-shifting blue gives indigo, yes? Or did I misinterpret the text?

[John Biles]

6 minutes ago, RHW said:

According the Malkioni sorcerer Roy G. Biv, blue-shifting blue gives indigo, yes? Or did I misinterpret the text?

I was thinking red + Blue = purple, but you're right.

 

[Eff]

The worship of the Seven Mothers, which thoroughly rejects the teachings of the Red Goddess to such a degree as to make them register as free from Chaos, is fundamentally parasitic on the Lunar Way and in danger of killing the host.

[John Biles]

1 hour ago, Eff said:

The worship of the Seven Mothers, which thoroughly rejects the teachings of the Red Goddess to such a degree as to make them register as free from Chaos, is fundamentally parasitic on the Lunar Way and in danger of killing the host.

So the Red Moon becomes the White Moon via throwing off the worship of the Seven Mothers?  Given Jeff said in another thread that 99% of lunars don't ever initiate to the Red Goddess, but most of those are Seven Mothers, she essentially becomes a figurehead for a group of people who made her in order to win a war.

A war that has basically never ended.

 

[mfbrandi]

10 hours ago, Eff said:

The … Seven Mothers … [reject] the teachings of the Red Goddess to such a degree as to make them register as free from Chaos

9 hours ago, John Biles said:

[The Red Goddess] essentially becomes a figurehead for a group of people who made her in order to win a war.

• I’m guided by a signal in the heavens
  I’m guided by this birthmark on my skin
  I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons
  First we take Peloria, then we take Berlin

Perhaps not listening to the whisperings of your Bomb is the truest path to enlightenment and the transcendence of petty detection magicks. Perhaps. I would say that we should consult the crew of Dark Star, but …

[mfbrandi]

Irrippi Ontor sages have been searching other realities for Lunar propaganda. They acquired this fragment through one of their unstable dimensional breaches. They offered a glossary, but really none is necessary.

• Chaos is an essential component of reality … [C]lerics operate under the delusion that their deities actually exist (they do not!). In truth, clerics are merely a distinct variety of magic-user, devoted to one or more of the ten thousand Gods of Order. Clerics manipulate chaos to achieve their results through the mental constructs of their religious practices, rather than rote memorization of arcane mummery.
  — Jason Sholtis, Completely Unfathomable (S&W Edition PDF, p. 9)

Spoiler

An Eurmali suggested a more succinct alternative — “in any war there is only one side (and it doesn’t exist)” — but got a boot in the arse for their trouble and cried “everything is tapping” as they fled.

Edited September 24 by mfbrandi
trimmed whitespace

[Eff]

46 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

• I’m guided by a signal in the heavens
  I’m guided by this birthmark on my skin
  I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons
  First we take Peloria, then we take Berlin

Perhaps not listening to the whisperings of your Bomb is the truest path to enlightenment and the transcendence of petty detection magicks. Perhaps. I would say that we should consult the crew of Dark Star, but …

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Brian Duguid said:

Snakes as daughters of the Earth goddesses. Reptiles more generally as animals of the earth … Dinosaurs as failed dragons

Volant birds are successful dinosaurs, ascending as dragons to the sky.
’s birth was necessary to provide the medium of ascent: no pain, no gain; per ardua ad astra.

Meanwhile, back in the maelstrom, anurognathid pterosaurs — “moonbats”  — fight mammalian true bats (surely coded ) for an ecological niche in the middle air.

Spoiler

A priest told me this, so take with the salt your physician will allow.

[Alex]

18 hours ago, John Biles said:

So the Red Moon becomes the White Moon via throwing off the worship of the Seven Mothers?

Prolly has to throw off a lot more than that.  The entire Lunisolar empire surely has to go, as that's what's emboding its "redness".

18 hours ago, John Biles said:

Given Jeff said in another thread that 99% of lunars don't ever initiate to the Red Goddess, but most of those are Seven Mothers, she essentially becomes a figurehead for a group of people who made her in order to win a war.

Most "Lunars" aren't even "Lunars" in that sense at all.  They're initiates of Yelm, Lodril, Shargash, Dendara, Oria, etc.  IMG the 7M is an artifact of the Provincial Church, but there are certainly a range of explicitly "Lunar Way" cults that bear more-or-less the same relation.

And yes, they might all be 'wrong' in this sort of sense.  Bear in mind that the RG is very much a transcendent entity:  pretty much the peak example of such, she's a rune-owner. with her own weird-arse kind of magic, who can only be worshipped by 'mystics'.  Proving how to worship her 'correctly' is way above the Monrogh-Lantern pay HQ grade.  So all these cults might be 'wrong', as far as they know, or perhaps more plausibly given their apparent encouragement by those that are Illuminated, simply a means to an end.

[radmonger]

All editions of games eet in Glorantha are broadly compatible, they just describe different default protagonsts.

RQ:G is set in 1625 Dragon Pass, which is dominated by networks of clans, tribes. guilds and other rune cults who organise the path by which young people develop the Otherside magic that is most useful for their role in their community.

KoDP is set pre-Sartar, when clans were pretty much the only form of rune cult. Such a clan would contain many different magical specialists with different runic affiliations, but all guided on their Otherside path by the clan priests or shamans.

For RQ2, the assumed default PC is a 16-21 year old orphan whose clan and community was destroyed, leading to trheir exile in Pavis. They scavange in the dengeropus ruins of the Big Rubble, seeking the wealth or reputation that would allow them to forge a new llfe as a settled initate or Rune Lord. While they remain an semi-trusted outsider to their new community, unable to properly participate in worship ceremonies, their Rune magic is effectively one use.

For HW/QW, the default setting is during the Great Winder. With  Orlanth and Ernalda dead, your clan priest has nothign to teach you. Lightbringer temples in the city stop recognising  clan memebrs as associates. So organised religion stops being a route by which anyone  can access magic. Instead, each devotee must find their individual path through the Otherside, largely based on a revival of pre-Sartar Orlanthi muthology. This was massively dangerous; many died in the process.

This shouldn;t be taken too literally, it's more a framework for adapting campaigns between editions.

[mfbrandi]

19 hours ago, Ian A. Thomson said:

CULTS OF THE EWF … Any ideas for cults that would have been popular back then but don’t exist anymore

We are all familiar with the idea of Orlanth’s “dragon slaying” as utuma/enlightenment through self-decapitation, but as we are talking Orlanth, something must go badly awry. Ladies and gentlemen, the resolutely unilluminated but oh-so-severed god, Mike McGonagall:

• Mike, the headless dragon
  Full of pep and pratfalls and just as graceful as an integrated Orlanth
   
• McGonagall, the bodiless poet
  Orpheus-like still singing and every bit as well as an articulated Orlanth

It is hard to see how such a cult could fail, but there is no trace of it in the 1620s.

Spoiler

I know what you are thinking, but “Orlanthanatar” was just too on the nose for an already very dumb idea.

[mfbrandi]

Gloranthan Karaoke

We are used to thinking of as Sir Nose, but perhaps you can help him find the funk.

• Now I lay me down to sleep
  I guess I’ll go count the sheep
  Oh, ’cause I will never dance …
  Everybody’s got a little light under the sun

Edited October 1 by mfbrandi

[jajagappa]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

We are all familiar with the idea of Orlanth’s “dragon slaying” as utuma/enlightenment through self-decapitation, but as we are talking Orlanth, something must go badly awry.

Orlanth walking around with a dragon's head - clearly this is Orlanth Thanatar....

[Eff]

A little fragment, found within the depths of an isolated library, recovered at swordpoint and with the aid of a quart of perry.

[soltakss]

12 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Mike, the headless dragon
Full of pep and pratfalls and just as graceful as an integrated Orlanth

Don't forget Puff, the Magic Dragon, who lives by the sea. 

[mfbrandi]

12 hours ago, jajagappa said:

clearly this is Orlanth Thanatar

Well, I did say I knew what you were thinking. 😉

[mfbrandi]

• the ephemeral, changeable god
  working in secret,
  moving this way and that,
  obscurely through the clouds
  — Euripides, Ino

Is this the battle for the Middle Air captured in a fragment of papyrus?

[mfbrandi]

If the floor of the earth and the ceiling of the sky are one Goddess, what of the air?°

• Is it an attack of gas
  waiting to be farted into the Void/Chaos
  taking all of us gut bacteria with it?
   
• Is it a kind of attenuated amniotic fluid
  and every one of us an embryo
  waiting to be born?

Either way, there are exciting times ahead.

 

————————————————
° Thanks to @None’s thread on Solar Esrolia for inspiration.

[mfbrandi]

This is How You Lose the Gods War

• It seemed there were mortals native to the God Time,
  but this was an illusion brought about by heroquesting
  — they were all just visitors,
  like you.
   
• But then you started to wonder whether the gods
  were all just cosplaying visitors,
  like you.
   
• A pristine emptiness
  turned into a filthy palimpsest
  by powertrippers,
  like you.
   
• This is how the World ends.
  This is how the Void ends.
  Mana leaks from the one into the other,
  due to adventure holidaymakers,
  … like us.

Spoiler

I fought, we lost.

[mfbrandi]

The Monstrous Figure of Time in Mithraism

• The human-headed ones at Merida and Modena are calm and beautiful, and some of those with beast-heads are gentle and comely enough, for example the one from Castel Gandolfo. The horrific ones can perhaps be explained as representing Time in its menacing aspect; and it is possibly easier to accept many horrific statues of Time than one or two beautiful ones of the Devil. But the matter is clearly a complicated one, and I have no wish to offer an opinion of my own
  — Mary Boyce, Some Reflections on Zurvanism (BSOAS, Vol. 19, No. 2 (1957), p.316)

Time boom de Devil dead? Perhaps not, and Scratch is one miswired toaster.

Spoiler

Before SOAS gained its “African” (in 1938), the Bulletin was BSOS. Likely that amuses only me.

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, scott-martin said:

your life takes you into a Dendara type of place

• If you lose at chess to Dendara, you have to wear the Dendara outfit.
• Yelm never notices (or he likes it).
• You have to win a “return” match to get your life/role/mask back.
• Gorgorma suits are ten-a-penny and foolish challengers plentiful.
• How many Gorgormas have there been, and how many Dendaras?
• In this shell game, does anyone still have their eye on the OG Dendara?

Dendara is not who you are, it is what you do. Beat a “demon” at chess and head for a new career in a new town.

The role of perfect wife is constraining, but it is simple, and no one ever notices who plays it. The wives have contracted the Mostali to build Stepford Dendaras against the day when the chess players wise up. “Easy job, missus. We can churn ’em out by the dozen. The key goes here. Five turns should do it.”

[scott-martin]

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

• You have to win a “return” match to get your life/role/mask back.

I might've come up with something more substantive but somebody spoke and I went into a dream.



That said this "woman as patron of gloranthan chess" approach is A+, not least because assigning D/G (Hebrew: daleth gimel) to manage the solar binary (sun/shadow man/woman i/thou good/evil) gives them a lot more behind-the-scenes agency than they usually get. A real game of "you" as it were. Making this a woman's game also adds MGF to Yelmgatha . . . what other transgressive insights did he have that the emergent lunar/solar establishment cut up and buried?

Of course the dwarves manufacture the body positive chess player as well as the conventionally shapely shill, like Dave in King Bacchus they've fixed it so they can't help but win every game either way and the "emotional female void" remains firmly under control.

Unless there are other women in play relating to each other as subjects. One of my long-held but often debunked Dumb Theories is that D/G came to Dara Happa from the East originally and reflect some sense of archaic Kralorelan feminine spirituality. Alienated from their extended family (many of whom appear on the Wall under various guises) their symbolic load atrophies into a strict good sister / bad sister monad . . . but maybe the careful traveler can reconstruct relationships here and there.

Ourania, for example, is a tempting proposition, since the game is called "our"anekki after all. On one level she is free to be both "she" and "me" since she has opted out of the binary female performance they understand in modern Dara Happa . . . she doesn't play the game. But on another she completes what the Esrolians would consider a defective feminine triad. Of course their functions are not generational. The patriarchy doesn't make room for grandmothers or daughters (unless you're really into Denegeria) so while the roles they play can rotate with the situation there isn't the overwhelming sense of cyclicality that you get in the south.

In this model they might build on a kind of binary logic that we recognize in the south as "fertile" and "malign." D is the only woman allowed to be conventionally fertile within the marital contract. G is always malign. O opts out of both roles, neither. We can posit a fourth corner of this earth square who accepts both roles, maybe some people think this is the Entekos and maybe this is more commonly assimilated into the lunar complex.

What's important is that this logic does not easily translate into the southern trinary . . . O has aspects of southern virgin and crone but subverts their sense of the cycle, D and G are two separate aspects of the ritually adult woman. This is what feeds my belief that D and G at least are foreigners who bring something exotic and alien to the pelando-esrolian understanding of the masks of goddess, but that's a side note. It's attractive because it gives us a 3 x 3 grid to work with, trinity squared.

Of course looking at the women on the Wall it's interesting how cosmopolitan their references were.  You have a classic southern generational triad (II. 2, 4, 5) sometimes led by the Naveria (II. 3) who is superficially a direct competitor to the Dendara who appears much farther down (III. 2). (Gorgorma is banished lower still, down below the fourth hell.) And then you have the Oria (III. 5) flanked by the good / bad girls (III. 4, 6), the ul-Oria (I. 12), finger goddess group, the jar group and so on. A lot of approaches to female religious psychology, often more or less redundant if that's the way you want to go but Plentonious only understands most of them on the most superficial level. 

Maybe only the ul-Oria really has it going on unless you count the lower demons. 

Dumb Theory: To the extent to which the archaic East was a "solar" empire they did this with dudes. You can see vestiges of this in the tiered long-form Yelm write up with its clear nomad influences: every normal dude would rise to his natural level across the phases, from boy (light "son" or yelmalio type) to geezer (light geezer or dayzatar type). But conventional modern Yelm refuses to die so there is no succession except through revolution.
 

Edited October 8 by scott-martin
eastern yelmalio