Deities manifesting themselves

[PhilHibbs]

There are two RuneQuest scenarios knocking around that involve gods manifesting apparently of their own volition. Not a worshipper manifesting their god's powers, but it is presented as the god awakening and talking to folks and persuading them to resume worship.

How is this not a violation of the compromise? Or is that exactly what it is, a manifestation of the straining of Arachne Solara's web?

[jajagappa]

1 hour ago, PhilHibbs said:

There are two RuneQuest scenarios knocking around that involve gods manifesting apparently of their own volition. Not a worshipper manifesting their god's powers, but it is presented as the god awakening and talking to folks and persuading them to resume worship.

How is this not a violation of the compromise? Or is that exactly what it is, a manifestation of the straining of Arachne Solara's web?

I don't know which scenarios you're referencing so can't comment on those specifics.  (The Quickstart/Broken Tower or the Dragon of the Thunder Hills maybe?)

But there are several situations that do not violate the compromise.

Worship ceremonies are an obvious case - you bring a portion of the mundane world into synchrony with the Gods World, so you've moved into an environment where the gods exist and can be interacted with directly.  The gods should still act in accord with what they are, which is bound into the compromise. 

There are portions of the God Time that have been trapped within Time.  The Eternal Battle, the Hidden Greens, and Castle Blue are among those sites.  Certain gods can be encountered in those places because you're in the God Time, even within Time.

And then there may be certain minor deities such as Idrima who were effectively bound within Time in some fashion, and can manifest a portion of themselves to ask for worship, at a site associated with their being.  As long as their actions are consistent with their God Time being, then that has not broken the compromise.  Consider that Yelm is manifest in the mortal world as the Sun, Orlanth as the wind and thunderstorm, Ernalda as the earth you walk upon.  Those are their bodies, and they exist in Time, and they can manifest the powers they always do.  Potentially, if you listen closely enough they will speak to you with a whisper of the wind, or a tremble of the earth, or through your dreams.

If we take Idrima as an example, she presumably was one of the Earth goddesses who went to sleep in the Godtime.  Most such goddesses awoke with the Dawn.  The action of Earth going to sleep and waking is part of the Great Compromise - you see it manifest every year in the annual cycles of the Earth. 

She seems to be associated with a particular site, the Broken Tower.  Why she has awoken now and not earlier is a question, but the Dragon's awakening probably has something to do with that - cracking the Earth in some way for the seed to emerge.  So anyone entering that site in some capacity infringes upon a portion of the Godtime released through Idrima's awakening.  If she receives enough of the right worship, then the Broken Tower may become a shrine/temple and a portion of her serves as a goddess within.  If she does not receive enough worship, she will likely go back to sleep.

Likely, you are only seeing a portion of her awareness manifest in the mundane world.  She exists in the Godtime, but like a dryad or elemental or certain other spirits, she can manifest a portion of herself in the mundane world within that specific location.  What she can't do is be fully present as a figure that has free will to roam across the land wherever she feels like going.  She also cannot do things she did not do in the Godtime.  If you were to free her to do so, then at that point the Compromise would break, and there would be some manifestation to "snap" her back into place.

[Akhôrahil]

Demigods and minor godlings aren’t a Compromise break, surely? And Idrima is more like some embodied elemental spirit than even a demigoddess.

[French Desperate WindChild]

my perspecive is changing... a little bit to fast so what I think  today but maybe not tomorrow is :

the compromise is not a clear exclusion from the mundane world.

 

From a god's perspective:

it banned any divine change: the gods  are able to do what they were able to do, but they cannot create anything :

they cannot destroy chaos because they did not succeed before... that is  the god's part of the compromise with the chaos

they cannot do by themselves a lot of thing in the mundane world because :

the mundane world (with the *@!## time god) is always changing (new characters, new situation, ... new days/years) so the gods are inefficient without worshippers adaptability/consciousness .

Then if you meet a goddess (a dryad, an earth goddess, like in our scenarios and the white bull campaign...) you meet "someone" but someone who can do what it has always done. The dryad can bless her elves, but not plan a war again the near new kingdom. She needs elves leaders to plan it. She can marry (temporary) with mortal because she did before but she cannot learn sorcery because she never used it, for example.

From a chaos perspective:

the mundane world is always changing but makes a kind of revolution ( = a cycle):

that means at the end of the cycle, the mundane world is very like the world just before the compromise, nearly destroyed.

So the gods can redo what they did just before the compromise.

We can see their heroes more like the avatar of the god than a mortal with great powers from a god.

that's the chaos part of compromise with the gods: when the world is nearly destroyed, the gods can save it

 

of course what mundane (EWF member, a lunar, a hunshen, etc...) eyes  see are different in a region or another one, in a period or another one, and is not the same that the myth they were told... but myths are rendering and simplification of a too complex thing

 

[GianniVacca]

On 9/16/2021 at 2:54 PM, PhilHibbs said:

There are two RuneQuest scenarios knocking around that involve gods manifesting apparently of their own volition.

 

which ones? (scenarios, not gods)

[PhilHibbs]

42 minutes ago, GianniVacca said:

which ones? (scenarios, not gods)

Broken Tower, Dragon of Thunder Hills

[skulldixon]

Mind you with the Dragon of Thunder Hills, a God/Goddess doesn't physically manifest in the way you are thinking. Its more like how Zeus appeared to speak to young Hercules in the Disney animated movie. There is a Vessel and its a once in a life time occurrence/special circumstances. 

 

[Squaredeal Sten]

As i understand the Dragon of Thunder Hills and the Glorantha Bestiary,  it's a dream dragon.  A dragon is not a god, and has an undefined relationship with the Great Compromise.   A dream dragon is even more not-a-god.  As a lesser and temporary being the dream dragon gets to exist in Time.  And then at some point it "fades". 

[AndrewTBP]

11 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

As i understand the Dragon of Thunder Hills and the Glorantha Bestiary,  it's a dream dragon.  A dragon is not a god, and has an undefined relationship with the Great Compromise.   A dream dragon is even more not-a-god.  As a lesser and temporary being the dream dragon gets to exist in Time.  And then at some point it "fades". 

Orgorvale Summer is the goddess. She's a demigod, granddaughter of Orlanth and Ernalda.

In my 13th Age Glorantha game, she emerged from the Queens Tomb like Janet Webb at the end of The Morecambe & Wise Show to thank her liberators in person. 

😉

[JonL]

Gods can violate the Compromise, it's just risky. Too much of that and the world starts to fall apart and more Chaos seeps in. Typically, when one crosses the line other gods step in to bring them to heel. If the violation is relatively minor though, the others might hold back - seeing an escalation of interventions as potentially more damaging than the initial transgression.

[Akhôrahil]

32 minutes ago, JonL said:

Gods can violate the Compromise, it's just risky. Too much of that and the world starts to fall apart and more Chaos seeps in. Typically, when one crosses the line other gods step in to bring them to heel.

I'm not convinced it works like that. Rather, once the Compromise has started to break down for other reasons, then the gods are no longer as restricted.

I think all breaches of the Compromise (Nysalor, Red Goddess, Zistor...) have been initiated from the mortal side of things?

[JonL]

Waha challenged Pavis without Zistor-level provocation, and there was no divine pile-on. Sedenya continues to play fast and loose with the Great Compromise whenever she pleases (and wasn't ever a party to it in the first place).

[Sir_Godspeed]

53 minutes ago, JonL said:

and wasn't ever a party to it in the first place).

That's partly why she can do it, I think.

Plus, you know, Castle Blue.

[Jeff]

I get the impression that people are confused about what the Great Compromise is. 

The eternal gods themselves would have ceased to exist but for the Cosmic Compromise, whereby the gods that still existed abdicated their free will within the temporal world voluntarily, rather than lose their All into the maw of nonexistence. The gods remained eternal, at the cost of being restricted henceforth to only the deeds they had performed during the God Time, which are now fixed and unchanging in the world of Time. If the gods were ever to transgress their fixed and allocated positions in the Cosmos, they would enter the shifting world of Time and would be destroyed by Death and entropy. 

So when a god acts within the temporal world it does what it always has done. Orlanth is a great World Storm and sends storms and thunders, only to part for the Sun, but then return again. The gods exist as they did in the Gods War, Death co-existing with Life. Within the bounds of their Gods Time actions, the gods exist eternally. That is for the good and the bad. Disease cannot be completely banished, mortals are doomed to die (unless an individual mortal becomes something else), and each dusk the Sun shall descend into the Underworld. There is a set pattern to the cosmos.

The gods' worshipers are not so bound and they can wield the god's power. Whenever someone casts Rune magic, that is the god in action. That does not violate the Compromise (unless those mortals manage to change the pattern of the world by their actions).

The Red Goddess was a new greater god appearing in Time. Her deeds changed the pattern of the world. Some consider the battle of Castle Blue an amendment to the Great Compromise, and now even the Red Goddess is bound by Time. But her worshipers are most definitely not.

[Jose]

1 hour ago, Jeff said:

I get the impression that people are confused about what the Great Compromise is. 

The eternal gods themselves would have ceased to exist but for the Cosmic Compromise, whereby the gods that still existed abdicated their free will within the temporal world voluntarily, rather than lose their All into the maw of nonexistence. The gods remained eternal, at the cost of being restricted henceforth to only the deeds they had performed during the God Time, which are now fixed and unchanging in the world of Time. If the gods were ever to transgress their fixed and allocated positions in the Cosmos, they would enter the shifting world of Time and would be destroyed by Death and entropy. 

So when a god acts within the temporal world it does what it always has done. Orlanth is a great World Storm and sends storms and thunders, only to part for the Sun, but then return again. The gods exist as they did in the Gods War, Death co-existing with Life. Within the bounds of their Gods Time actions, the gods exist eternally. That is for the good and the bad. Disease cannot be completely banished, mortals are doomed to die (unless an individual mortal becomes something else), and each dusk the Sun shall descend into the Underworld. There is a set pattern to the cosmos.

The gods' worshipers are not so bound and they can wield the god's power. Whenever someone casts Rune magic, that is the god in action. That does not violate the Compromise (unless those mortals manage to change the pattern of the world by their actions).

The Red Goddess was a new greater god appearing in Time. Her deeds changed the pattern of the world. Some consider the battle of Castle Blue an amendment to the Great Compromise, and now even the Red Goddess is bound by Time. But her worshipers are most definitely not.

So Jeff, if a heroquester change something about a God, he is not changing the God himself, only our perception of him, because he can't change. He is protected by the Compromise. Right? Or wrong? 

[Jeff]

17 minutes ago, Jose said:

So Jeff, if a heroquester change something about a God, he is not changing the God himself, only our perception of him, because he can't change. He is protected by the Compromise. Right? Or wrong? 

All mythology is experienced. The myths are eternal and the pattern set, but our experience of that is what we actually experienced. Hope that helps!

[Eff]

The Compromise, essentially, restricts cosmogonic acts. Waha fighting Pavis was not a cosmogonic act, it didn't carry the potential to define the universe. It was an extension of what Waha had done before time (and when Pavis won, Pavis became part of Prax metaphysically, and Waha couldn't be invoked against him. Jaldon Goldentooth was thus necessary to actually sack Old Pavis). The Red Moon rising did require a reworking of the Compromise to happen, because the Red Moon was a new part of the cosmos. (The Red Goddess walking around as Teelo Estara and Teelo Imara didn't violate the Compromise by itself, though.) But a god sitting and chatting isn't a cosmogonic act, unless they're Malkion, perhaps. So that can happen. 

[Nick Brooke]

7 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

I think all breaches of the Compromise (Nysalor, Red Goddess, Zistor...) have been initiated from the mortal side of things?

Excuse me? The Red Goddess categorically demonstrated at Castle Blue that she wasn’t in breach of the Great Compromise. The only people wanting to break the Compromise are those Orlanthi fanatics who have sworn, for whatever benighted reason,* to annihilate her. To the rest of us, they sound like Trumpist dead-enders, attempting to re-litigate a comprehensive defeat with lots of windy rhetoric but absolutely no facts on their side.

* (Yes, we killed Orlanth. He died in Godtime, too. What’s the issue, barbarian?)

[Akhôrahil]

1 hour ago, Nick Brooke said:

Excuse me? The Red Goddess categorically demonstrated at Castle Blue that she wasn’t in breach of the Great Compromise. The only people wanting to break the Compromise are those Orlanthi fanatics who have sworn, for whatever benighted reason,* to annihilate her. To the rest of us, they sound like Trumpist dead-enders, attempting to re-litigate a comprehensive defeat with lots of windy rhetoric but absolutely no facts on their side.

* (Yes, we killed Orlanth. He died in Godtime, too. What’s the issue, barbarian?)

No-one ever rushes in to defend Zistor.

How is this fair?

[jajagappa]

10 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

No-one ever rushes in to defend Zistor.

That's because after the events their god always gets forgotten.  Part of the Great Compromise! 😉

[Eff]

27 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

No-one ever rushes in to defend Zistor.

How is this fair?

Who's to say they aren't? I seem to recall an artifact from the Clanking City that has some kind of relationship to the Moon Rune... *regards my nails in a silver mirror and buffs them thoughtfully*

[JonL]

37 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

No-one ever rushes in to defend Zistor.

How is this fair?

That's alright. I probably would not have made a very worthwhile god anyway.

 

On a more serious note, I think that the reason Zistor can no longer be contacted by worshippers while Pavis and Sedenya can is that the latter defeated their divine foes who extruded God Time within Time to come put them down. Ironically, Waha inadvertently established Pavis's presence in God Time with his failed attack.

[Squaredeal Sten]

16 hours ago, AndrewTBP said:

Orgorvale Summer is the goddess. She's a demigod, granddaughter of Orlanth and Ernalda.

In my 13th Age Glorantha game, she emerged from the Queens Tomb like Janet Webb at the end of The Morecambe & Wise Show to thank her liberators in person. 

😉

it's my impression that the dream dragon THINKS it is the goddess / demigoddess.

[scott-martin]

4 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

it's my impression that the dream dragon THINKS it is the goddess / demigoddess.

Now that you mention it, I guess there's nothing that says dream dragons have to be scaly and serpentine. I wonder how many "god sightings" this resolves . . . in these scenarios, it's good to carry a mirror to catch the eye of the entity and see if you can shake its self image.

[Bill the barbarian]

16 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

it's my impression that the dream dragon THINKS it is the goddess / demigoddess.

And you wish to argue this point?
<hoo boy>