Bright Empire Interlude

[scott-martin]

We don’t know exactly what Nysalor did. None of the changes were concrete: no great art, architecture, cities, or families were initiated. Everything disappeared, as prophesied, when the god was killed, leaving only vague nostalgia and deep-rooted resentment against the killer.

Much talk of Arkat sends me back to the fragments to understand how these interpretations evolve and get ahead of where it will go. To celebrate this venture, Storm Bulls get free ransom over on any of the other threads. Just contact me to receive you drink tickets and have fun, boys and girls. You've earned it.

Now that we can talk here, what do you know of the Bright Empire beyond what we're all told? What do the specific patterns of erasure tell us about "the pinnacle of First Age history" that held three generations before they finally woke up? What components of the dawn world went in for a blessing and came out bearing a curse, leaving modern chaos garbage behind?

I am only peripherally interested here about Arkat, Nysalor, the fine print of illumination and the gbaji phenomenon. 

Some of you have participated in Broken Council reenactments and can share your experiences. And they say all illuminates were there when the cosmic egg cracked and the light invaded the world.

We know they had cities. That elf nations now lost were avid participants, as the Talking Grove prevented miscommunication as long as it lived. Issaries is already present. Lines of fracture persist within the Dara Happa / Dorastor condominium where highness and brightness dominate and in the west, where shadow teachings proliferate to spawn their own enemies. 

They had magic that could both engineer a kind of sickness and bring the cure. To me this is always psychoanalysis; the early accounts of illumination with its dark side are always mysticism transmitted through Jung. But your Glorantha may vary. Missionary priests in the west are called alternatively riddlers and healers. Perhaps these are separate orders or currents within the imperial system. Only Mallia in modern Glorantha has this ability and she is ambivalently cursed and allowed, sometimes chaotic but open to debate. Chalana Arroy, on the other hand, holds her own secrets because nobody cares enough. Rashorana lives in the Hospital.

They were open to the east as well but these interactions have been more perfectly erased, leaving only confused accounts of gbaji veneration in Kralorela, whatever is going on with Atyar (the empire supported "the Thanatar complex in Ralios") and a strange but detailed history of [a] gbaji exterminating the people of genert. A dragon emperor dies in the sunstop and some say he comes back afterward, but who knows? There are bright gods and elves in the far southeast, blue magic too. Arkat and sons never made it out that far and it's beyond troll reach as well. 

The western chroniclers "from every age" do refer to trolls and dragonewts as krjalki but aldryami and mostali remain a separate and less pejorative class in all but the most conservative eras. Contemporaneous arkatsagas use "krjalk" to describe the true monsters the empire spawns in its decadence. I think this is actually a reference to the chaos feature but that's a separate argument. What is clear is that the bright empire in its desperation resorted to chaos feature and other dark side temptations, becoming the abominations gloomy Arkat saw everywhere. Whatever this magical technology originally did or how it changed is irrelevant. Tentacle outbreaks now can be tracked back to this era.

Other aspects of their medical magic may well persist in the undead rites. Look closely at the dark side note in Cults of Terror. When you cut yourself off from the natural cycle you doom yourself to unnatural prolongations.

Separately I note that while Arkat himself was indeed secretly illuminated (by elves!) the surviving RQ2 manuscript version does not extend this to his secular third age cult. But this is an entirely different ball game, the true tale of the "Dark" Empire behind what we think we know today.

 

 

[soltakss]

Osentalka was inherently both good and evil. he was split into Nysalor and Gbaji. Nysalor was inherently good, Gbaji was inherently evil.

Nysalor tried to bright illumination and light to the world, in an Empire full of harmony and peace.

Gbaji tried to bring evil to the world.

When people attacked the empire, Nysalor tried to defend it the best that he could, but Gbaji whispered into people's ears and they turned to darker powers to strengthen the Empire.

Gbaji was the Darkness Within and Nysalor was the Light Within. Unfortunately, they were both within each other.

Edited July 18, 2020 by soltakss

[Nevermet]

And old Spolite who lives in a bog told me that Nysalor was the embodiment of imbalance.  "Big, bright, arrogant imbalance" was their exact phrase, if I remember correctly.  They then started ranting about how balance can only be restored when the surface falls back into the underworld.  I quietly but quickly left when they started to skin a rabbit made of flame.

 

Anyway, their point when they were still talking in a coherent language seemed to be that Nysalor's perfection was an inherently imbalancing thing, and therefore destined to failure.  I think.

Edited July 18, 2020 by Nevermet

[Nevermet]

Also, back to being fully OOC, there is so much I don't know about the Gbaji Wars.  I wish there was a Stafford Library tome just on it.

[scott-martin]

32 minutes ago, Nevermet said:

rabbit made of flame

Love it! Be vewwy vewwy quiet.

There is probably enough underpublished material to fill a Stafford Library Gbaji Wars installment but I don't think it's a high priority right now. Maybe in a few years.

But back to the lexical gaps for a moment, it strikes me that 

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Atyar

AT(Y)AR = AR(Y)AT, where the central character is something like the ayin in Hebrew or KH in the plentonian alphabet, unrecognized and elided in some parts of the lozenge. Shadows and shadows.

[M Helsdon]

To understand the Bright Empire, you have to know something of the Feldichi, and the ruins and mechanisms they left behind, mysterious, wondrous magical devices, which became the basis of the Bright Empire. Of course in the Third Age no one knows much about the Feldichi, but it is likely their devices cursed both them and ultimately those who used their knowledge. One of their devices, from which Nysalor was born, was the Pseudocosmic Egg - and its name should serve as a warning of what it really was...

[metcalph]

14 hours ago, scott-martin said:

They had magic that could both engineer a kind of sickness and bring the cure.

Given recent events, my guess is that the authorities in Arolanti refused to do anything about the plague and when the Bright Empire healers intervened, blamed them for causing it.

 

14 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Separately I note that while Arkat himself was indeed secretly illuminated (by elves!) the surviving RQ2 manuscript version does not extend this to his secular third age cult.

I dunno what you mean by a secular cult but Cults of Terror p87 does maintain that the Arkati are illuminated.

[John Biles]

36 minutes ago, metcalph said:

Given recent events, my guess is that the authorities in Arolanti refused to do anything about the plague and when the Bright Empire healers intervened, blamed them for causing it.

While I know you're being sarcastic, I think there's actually an interesting way to develop this idea.

The Nysalor cult comes from a society which is outside the western caste system.  Riddlers taught illumination without regard for social status, possibly even for whether or not you wanted to be illuminated.  There was social status in the Bright Empire... there's always social status in human groups... but it was *different* and had different rules.  And Nysalor had been created to unify the nations of the Council.  

Arolanit is especially a place where the locals have straight-jacketed themselves into a rigid set of caste rules, but in return, they are *immortal*.  In the never get old and die sense.

So when the plague spreads to Arolanit, Arolanit can't cure it because it's not part of the body of tradition passed to them, their old methods don't work on it, and so they reject what the Nysaloreans offer because it would in some way require breaking caste. Indeed, it may just come down to 'accepting magic from someone outside the caste system breaks caste'.  Further, these guys spread Illumination, which lets you get away with breaking caste.  The Zzaburs, who are used to being high up the food chain take it badly and either correctly determine the Nysaloreans are spreading it or *just lie*.

 

A second thought, which could go with that or could be seperate - This could be something like the Kingdom of War, where the Bright Kingdom basically is banishing everyone's shadow and the shadows are being pushed before the Empire's spread like surfers on a wave.  When Nysalor died, all the banished shadow came back and everything made possible by banishing it dissolved away.

So the plague was created accidentally by the Nysaloreans, who were engaged in the magical equivalent of toxic waste dumping.  

 

 

[Jeff]

15 hours ago, scott-martin said:

We don’t know exactly what Nysalor did. None of the changes were concrete: no great art, architecture, cities, or families were initiated. Everything disappeared, as prophesied, when the god was killed, leaving only vague nostalgia and deep-rooted resentment against the killer.

Much talk of Arkat sends me back to the fragments to understand how these interpretations evolve and get ahead of where it will go. To celebrate this venture, Storm Bulls get free ransom over on any of the other threads. Just contact me to receive you drink tickets and have fun, boys and girls. You've earned it.

Now that we can talk here, what do you know of the Bright Empire beyond what we're all told? What do the specific patterns of erasure tell us about "the pinnacle of First Age history" that held three generations before they finally woke up? What components of the dawn world went in for a blessing and came out bearing a curse, leaving modern chaos garbage behind?

I am only peripherally interested here about Arkat, Nysalor, the fine print of illumination and the gbaji phenomenon. 

Some of you have participated in Broken Council reenactments and can share your experiences. And they say all illuminates were there when the cosmic egg cracked and the light invaded the world.

We know they had cities. That elf nations now lost were avid participants, as the Talking Grove prevented miscommunication as long as it lived. Issaries is already present. Lines of fracture persist within the Dara Happa / Dorastor condominium where highness and brightness dominate and in the west, where shadow teachings proliferate to spawn their own enemies. 

They had magic that could both engineer a kind of sickness and bring the cure. To me this is always psychoanalysis; the early accounts of illumination with its dark side are always mysticism transmitted through Jung. But your Glorantha may vary. Missionary priests in the west are called alternatively riddlers and healers. Perhaps these are separate orders or currents within the imperial system. Only Mallia in modern Glorantha has this ability and she is ambivalently cursed and allowed, sometimes chaotic but open to debate. Chalana Arroy, on the other hand, holds her own secrets because nobody cares enough. Rashorana lives in the Hospital.

They were open to the east as well but these interactions have been more perfectly erased, leaving only confused accounts of gbaji veneration in Kralorela, whatever is going on with Atyar (the empire supported "the Thanatar complex in Ralios") and a strange but detailed history of [a] gbaji exterminating the people of genert. A dragon emperor dies in the sunstop and some say he comes back afterward, but who knows? There are bright gods and elves in the far southeast, blue magic too. Arkat and sons never made it out that far and it's beyond troll reach as well. 

The western chroniclers "from every age" do refer to trolls and dragonewts as krjalki but aldryami and mostali remain a separate and less pejorative class in all but the most conservative eras. Contemporaneous arkatsagas use "krjalk" to describe the true monsters the empire spawns in its decadence. I think this is actually a reference to the chaos feature but that's a separate argument. What is clear is that the bright empire in its desperation resorted to chaos feature and other dark side temptations, becoming the abominations gloomy Arkat saw everywhere. Whatever this magical technology originally did or how it changed is irrelevant. Tentacle outbreaks now can be tracked back to this era.

Other aspects of their medical magic may well persist in the undead rites. Look closely at the dark side note in Cults of Terror. When you cut yourself off from the natural cycle you doom yourself to unnatural prolongations.

Separately I note that while Arkat himself was indeed secretly illuminated (by elves!) the surviving RQ2 manuscript version does not extend this to his secular third age cult. But this is an entirely different ball game, the true tale of the "Dark" Empire behind what we think we know today.

 

 

More precisely it is a secret known only to the higher members of the cult - the true elect, 

[metcalph]

The core element of the Bright Empire that made everything go bad IMO wasn't Illumination as such but rather suspension of the Great Compromise (cf the Battle of Night and Day).  This allows the Nysalorans to act as Gods (ie Super Rune Magic for the vulgar among you) with the unfortunate side-effect of weakening the Cosmos in the vicinity and allowing Chaos in.  The Nysalorans were unafraid of Chaos because of their god's teachings and sought to use it for good purposes leading to the omnishambles of the Gbaji Wars.  

The most advanced parts of the Empire were literally in the Gods World and removed themselves in order to save themselves from Arkat.  Isolated from the mortal world, they soon became forgotten like a dream.  The manner of their leaving in addition, weakened the Cosmos even further creating creating lots and lots of chao.s   

Likewise the Telmori sought to turn into wolves at will by suspending the Compromise).  Talor found a way to reimpose the Compromise against them which forced them to transform and in doing so become chaos-tainted.

[soltakss]

2 hours ago, John Biles said:

3 hours ago, metcalph said:

Given recent events, my guess is that the authorities in Arolanti refused to do anything about the plague and when the Bright Empire healers intervened, blamed them for causing it.

While I know you're being sarcastic, I think there's actually an interesting way to develop this idea.

My take is that the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. Nysalor did not know that healers were causing and then healing the plague, that came from Gbaji. The first Nysalor knew about it was when the healers were killed by a jumped-up chap who had started a crusade against them.

Of course, it didn't help when both Nysalor and Gbaji share one physical body. That just blurs any nice clean lines.

[EricW]

3 hours ago, metcalph said:

The core element of the Bright Empire that made everything go bad IMO wasn't Illumination as such but rather suspension of the Great Compromise (cf the Battle of Night and Day).  This allows the Nysalorans to act as Gods (ie Super Rune Magic for the vulgar among you) with the unfortunate side-effect of weakening the Cosmos in the vicinity and allowing Chaos in.  The Nysalorans were unafraid of Chaos because of their god's teachings and sought to use it for good purposes leading to the omnishambles of the Gbaji Wars.  

I like this view, it explains Lokamayadon usurping some of Orlanth's power, appearing in all the Orlanth temples simultaneously, yet still wandering the world as a living hero.

I suspect Nysalor's gift was helping people achieve their goals, so if they wanted some crazy new power or magical victory, Nysalor was happy to provide his insight and maybe the occasional magical boost to help questers understand how to achieve their desired outcome. So Hsunchen want to be able to turn into wolves at will? Nysalor knows just the quest they need to win this power. Want to become a god? Nysalor knows how to get you there. Want a well of wonders? Nysalor will help - but that time the ritual went wrong, and all they got was a gigantic gorp. Want to convert atheists? Nysalor has an idea.

[scott-martin]

6 hours ago, John Biles said:

when the plague spreads to Arolanit, Arolanit can't cure it because it's not part of the body of tradition passed to them, their old methods don't work on it, and so they reject what the Nysaloreans offer because it would in some way require breaking caste . . . A second thought, which could go with that or could be seperate - This could be something like the Kingdom of War, where the Bright Kingdom basically is banishing everyone's shadow and the shadows are being pushed before the Empire's spread like surfers on a wave. 

This "clash of psychic civilizations" model is super interesting. While we might want to bracket caste relief (already available to most of the post-Hrestol west, even unto the island), there might have been other aspects of the teaching that prompted a deep rejection / immune response . . . what Greg sez is that we think Nysalor taught the Ralians (westerners) that "thought is not the only reality, that their Laws were not eternal truths and that instinct was neither good nor evil."

This is a direct insult to the blue way in particular so would have confounded their diagnostics and might have even presented perfectly asymptomatically as we would understand it . . . the bodies seem healthy, maybe healthier than ever, but there is something different about the mind that we aren't prepared to treat. A plague of bad thought that then threatens the perceived foundations of their way of life.

And of course people with a lot invested in caste compliance in particular would suffer more extreme effects. While I mentioned not wanting to talk much about Arkat here in order to make space for the empire itself, it's interesting that he personally struggled with caste boundaries more than most and so would have been unusually sensitive to the missionaries' offer of radical caste relief. I imagine him as a gifted half-outcaste child in the boondocks training to live up to models of horalite performance that were really unrealistic and unattainable. Then when the plague comes in, the only response he sees is to tear everything down in order to protect the caste walls . . . even as the crusade tears them all down, one by one. 

Edited July 19, 2020 by scott-martin
typo creates opportunity for slight softening

[Nick Brooke]

(Trim yer quotes, @Jeff!)

[soltakss]

29 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

(Trim yer quotes, @Jeff!)

 

 

 

 

Whaddya mean?

 

 

[Nick Brooke]

1 hour ago, soltakss said:

Whaddya mean?

I mean that @Jeff quoted @scott-martin's entire post and added a one-sentence comment of his own at the end. That's not necessary. It would be easier to see what he was responding to if he trimmed the material he was quoting to an appropriate length. Thank you for asking, I'm sorry this wasn't obvious to you.

[Sir_Godspeed]

I'm not sure what to say, but my take on it is somewhat mundane. It was a project to recreate the Golden Age. But it was done in Time, and so was doomed to fail. Hubris might be a cliché, but Glorantha needs a trope-codifier for that too, I guess.

You might argue that what caused the failure was the exclusion of trolls and others. But I'm not sure if it would have been possible to involve all of them. Intrinsically, the world of Time is one which not all truths can be active at the same time, unlike the God Time. And so it was doomed to fail. 

Not that they didn't try. They retroactively changed the myths of the involved parties. They cast the role of Bad Emperor onto Yelm. They cast the role of Rebellus Terminus onto Orlanth. (EDIT: And I suspect that it was THEY who codified the Compromise as a thing, and turned the Lifebringer Quest into the Lightbringer Quest). They made the Monomyth possible before it existed, or else created some kind of proto-Monomyth. But it was limited in scope, and we also know the Monomyth itself is a flawed construct. And so it was doomed to fail. 

Who knows. If the Bright Empire had stayed west of the Rockwood, or north of Dragon Pass, they might've survived in some form, but I doubt it. They would not, could not, limit themselves. They were going to transform the world. Self-imposed limits is anathema to their very raison d'etre. And so they were doomed to fail. 

I don't think Nysalor and Gbaji are separate entities as such. I think the reality is a lot less high-concept. Those who agreed with the project pronounced him Nysalor or Osentalka. Those who didn't pronounced him Gbaji. Those who followed him received boons. Those who didn't received agony. That's how empires work. And most gods too, come to think of it. 

The question to ask whenever someone proposes utopia is this: who do you need to exterminate or oppress to make it happen? For those that it applies to, the utopia is a dystopia. For those, Nysalor was Gbaji. 

I don't know. The story of the Bright Empire is what you make of it, I guess. 

Edited July 20, 2020 by Sir_Godspeed

[Nevermet]

....Are you the old Spolite who lives in the bog?
I KNEW IT!

 

😅

Edited July 20, 2020 by Nevermet

[dumuzid]

9 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

But I'm not sure if it would have been possible to involve all of them.

There was a way, not to recreate the Golden Age, but a bright part of the Storm Age, that might've succeeded.

According to old, old Tradetalk articles by Shannon Appel "with help from Greg Stafford," the goal at first was not to incarnate a new bright god, but an old, dark, good one: Argan Argar.  In the context of the middle Unity Council, locked into wars with the sun-worshipers of the north, it makes a lot of sense.  Argan Argar and Esrola together ruled a realm in what became Kethaela that was like the Kingdom of Night but moreso, a powerfully Harmonious and friendly neighbor to the south of Orlanth and Ernalda's domain that united a wide array of different peoples and cultures.  The Kingdom of Night that Only Old One and Queen Norinel of Nochet founded in the Greater Darkness can be understood as a successor to Argan Argar and Esrola's domain, re-uniting the surviving fragments of the Storm Age Kethaelan Darkness-Earth kingdom after the departure of the gods and a long, desperate siege of the Palace of Black Glass by chaos monsters cut its constituent parts off from each other.

The same articles that describe this mythic tangent, little known by the Third Age, also talk about the breaking of the Unity Council from the Shadow Plateau perspective.  They describe Only Old One, the dragonewts, the Dragon Pass storm worshipers, and the others elements of the Unity Council that ultimately sided with Arkat in the Gbaji Wars, assenting to a project centered in Dorastor to summon Argan Argar into Time.  If that had occurred, the known effects would've been a drastic increase in the ability of the Unity Council to harmonize and relate across cultural and species lines.  Especially important, considering that the Council's main opposition by this point were the solar emperors of Dara Happa, was Argan Argar's unique ability among Darkness gods to endure and rebuke Sky powers without being burned himself.  The Unity Council's ability to resist and overpower the sun magic of Dara Happa would've been greatly reinforced by all the mythic occasions when Argan Argar bested or negated the sky gods, along with their ability to coordinate the many and varied powers of the Unity Council's other elements.  The unknown effects of incarnating a god into Time are another matter.  Would bringing Argan Argar into the middle world have brought about a sort of Solar Arkat in the east, a First Age Sheng Seleris with the light of the Sun Dragon in his eyes, to counter a Darkness god walking Genertela?  Would the Argan Argar thus summoned have been an Illuminated god, ultimately corrupted by Chaos like Nysalor and the Red Goddess?  Who knows, it didn't happen that way.

Things turned around in the north.  The Dara Happan emperor made peace, even entered the Council, and the project already at work in Dorastor changed.  I don't know whether the change came before or after the northern peace, but we know what it was a change to: the Argan Argar project radically re-oriented its emphasis, from bringing back the old shadow king to incarnating a new, bright god instead.  Then, as we also all know, the Unity Council fractured into Light and Dark factions, and the Light threw down the Dark in the Battle of Night and Day, when the sun stopped and Nysalor was born at last.  A lot of the how's and why's of the change are uncertain, at least in the sources available to me.  I would speculate that the Dara Happans brought information or techniques to the Unity Council that were then integrated into the project and changed its course.  I would also speculate further than the submission of Dara Happa might have been informed by omens of a rising Darkness power to the south, in order to defeat by co-optation what the solar emperors could not defeat through war and open magical opposition.  I don't know enough about mid-late First Age Dara Happa to speculate on any finer details, but I agree with @Sir_Godspeed emphatically that an attempt to recreate the Golden Age, far more agreeable to the Dara Happans than a return to the Storm Age, could by definition only result in the breaking of the Unity Council, for the simple reason that in the age they were trying to bring back the trolls whose influence founded and sustained the Council were all still underground.  My main question is who or what convinced the Dorastans to embrace the Solar approach despite their history of friendship with the Shadow Plateau and Dagori Inkarth.  That's the root of the schism that broke the Council.

Edited July 20, 2020 by dumuzid
spelling error

[g33k]

12 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

... Intrinsically, the world of Time is one which not all truths can be active at the same time, unlike the God Time. And so it was doomed to fail ... 

Except we see incompatible "truths" simultaneously in different places.

They just cannot both be true in the same time and place...

[Darius West]

On 7/19/2020 at 7:01 AM, M Helsdon said:

 Nysalor was born, was the Pseudocosmic Egg - and its name should serve as a warning of what it really was...

I am in agreement.  It was a trap.  But who laid it?

[Darius West]

There is a simple pattern in Gloranthan history.  Every age, some clowns form an empire and try to create a deity.  This breaks the compromise, and Glorantha's immune system springs into action.  By analogy, chaos before time was akin to a brush with cancer.  Nysalor was a simple virus.  Zistor was all about the early symptoms but the disease was relatively easily fought off once it manifested.  The Red Moon Goddess is a retrovirus.  When every deity comes into existence, it awakens a shadow.  This nemesis starts developing on its path to correcting the outbreak.  Then there is a bloodletting and new borders and myths are created.

[Eff]

A major question to consider is this:

Who were the core of the Bright Empire/Empire of Light? That is, when we describe a polity as an empire, we are saying that it is composed of several different groups of people, and that there is a core and a periphery, and the core takes things from the periphery. For the Bright Empire, we can say that the people of Kerofinela certainly saw themselves as part of the periphery. 

Who made up the core? We know a few names- Lokamayadon, Palangio, others I can't recall offhand. Palangio is from Rinliddi, Lokamayadon from Talastar. Dorastor itself was the geographical core of the Bright Empire. Who lived there before Nysalor was born? Who lived there while Nysalor did? 

One possibility is that the Bright Empire revolved around the creation of a kind of synthetic identity which allowed Dara Happans and Talastari and mostali and aldryami to all be considered part of the elite core of the Empire of Light, but that seems speculative and also kind of an ourobouros: who convinces them to start doing this in time for the Battle of Night and Day in 379 and Lokamayadon revealing his High Storm that same year, given that Nysalor is all of four years old at that time and the God Project 14?

[Sir_Godspeed]

41 minutes ago, Eff said:

For the Bright Empire, we can say that the people of Kerofinela certainly saw themselves as part of the periphery. 

They did?

Heortland certainly saw itself as part of the periphery, but I didn't get the impression that Kerofinela did.

[Sir_Godspeed]

42 minutes ago, Eff said:

Dorastor itself was the geographical core of the Bright Empire. Who lived there before Nysalor was born? Who lived there while Nysalor did? 

History of the Heortling Peoples goes into a little detail about the settling of Dorastor, iirc. The population was mostly Heortling, but with large Elder Races minorities, iirc, and massive influences from the Feldichi(?) ruins there. I don't think we get any hard numbers.