Are all bats chaotic?

[Alex]

27 minutes ago, svensson said:

So the Steve Jackson Games HeroQuest titles are canon?

Definitely not, but we can still discuss them, spirits of reprisal permitting.  Though they were Issaries/Moon Designs products that just happened to have SJG sales and distributions.

27 minutes ago, svensson said:

I'm looking at the index of my copy of SJG's 'Imperial Lunar Handbook vol. 1' [2003, Issaries Inc. and SJG] and see no reference to Hurvaran or Blaskarth. Checking in the Rinliddi pages [pgs. 22-23], there's no mention of those beings either.

Huvaran and Blaskarth are mentioned in ILH2. I think Simon fenceposted a little.

On 12/4/2021 at 10:49 PM, Joerg said:

Do any Rinliddi have magic to shape-change themselves into birds, or to take on bird characteristics other than superior sight (a general fire rune trait)?

Interesting question.  They seemed likely a long way away from the "mandatory" hsunchen lifestyle.  But then again, after some humming and hawing we we have hsunchenesque Heortling magic, although particular to their hunter types...

[svensson]

OK, so we're back to the question 'Is there an ancestral spirit-god for bats?' then.

I've noticed a slow creep of selected pieces HQ and RQ2 info being validated, so it's obviously being juried and cherry-picked. Assuming that the Rinliddi information is no longer valid, I think I like my Anilla - Bat association as an explanation.

To summarize:

- No, bats are not Chaotic.

- Yes, there is a Hsunchen Grandmother Bat [1d6, odds male, evens female, roll = 4].

- Unlike some Hsunchen totem spirits, she does have Runic associations precisely because she is a creature that 'doesn't fit' the normal associations... a mammal that flies, that lives in Darkness but eats insects, etc. etc.

- Grandmother Bat gains access to the Runes through and from Annila, a 'strange magic' goddess if ever there was one.

- The Runes associated with bats are Moon, Darkness, Beast, and Air [although I don't know if there's a limitation on Elemental Runes -- I'm just using logic, and that doesn't always work in Glorantha]

- Sedenya usurped much of Grandmother Bat's Power with the foundation of the Cult of the Crimson Bat, a creature that is highly offensive to Grandmother Bat. However Grandmother Bat isn't powerful enough to anything about it.

- Never a large cult, Grandmother Bat's worship is so undercut by the Crimson Bat that even intelligent bats are worshiping it, stealing a major source of worshiper Power.

- Because of this, the cult of Grandmother Bat is dangerously close to becoming just a spirit society, or going dormant altogether.

Edited December 6, 2021 by svensson

[simonh]

5 hours ago, Alex said:

Huvaran and Blaskarth are mentioned in ILH2. I think Simon fenceposted a little.

On 12/4/2021 at 10:49 PM, Joerg said:

Yep, got the wrong ILH volume. Off-by-one errors, one of the two hardest problems in CS.

Edited December 6, 2021 by simonh

[Joerg]

The Bat Hsunchen live in places far from Peloria - Teshnos and northern Pamaltela. Knowledge of the Crimson Bat arrived there only with the Opening, if at all.

Peloria has lions, but no Basmol. It has deer, but no Pralor. It has bears, with Arakang or Odayla as the deities, but no Rathor.

The only significant Hsunchen presence in Peloria appear to be the Telmori were-wolves. (Unless you want to make Harrek's presence in 1607 significant for his role in enforcing a new mask for Takenegi.)

The western Hykimi don't seem to have included Bat folk at any time, but then the three major Hsunchen habitats don't usually share the same beasts.

[simonh]

4 minutes ago, Joerg said:

The only significant Hsunchen presence in Peloria appear to be the Telmori were-wolves. (Unless you want to make Harrek's presence in 1607 significant for his role in enforcing a new mask for Takenegi.)

And they're from Ralios and Fronela respectively. Are there Hsunchen in Balazar?

Edited December 6, 2021 by simonh

[jajagappa]

2 hours ago, simonh said:

Are there Hsunchen in Balazar?

No there are not (at least not per the Guide or Griffin Mountain).

[Eff]

There are also hsunchen reindeer herders in northern Fronela, but on the other side of Erigia, the reindeer herders are the non-hsunchen Eolians. An interesting puzzle. 

[dumuzid]

Whatever is going on with that I blame Yelm

[scott-martin]

4 hours ago, Joerg said:

The only significant Hsunchen presence in Peloria appear to be the Telmori were-wolves. (Unless you want to make Harrek's presence in 1607 significant for his role in enforcing a new mask for Takenegi.)

Harrek is always a significant exception! But like the wolves is an immigrant.

My current working model of Beast in Peloria is that any indigenous shapeshifters died out or otherwise left too early to show up in the records we have. I think they were part of korgatsu so we would look for their surviving cousins in the Shan Shan. What remains are descendants of rider peoples and so we might find bird riders and bat riders or their traces. Any lycanthropic urges they had was probably largely exhausted in the Sun [Dragon] complex where among other things horse and bird were consolidated into a once-useful and now-extinct chimerical cult. (And then the rider heritage was consolidated into the Seleran Empire and is no longer with us either.)

Maybe "bat" is only Old Pelorian for what we call "dragon." A kind of lycanthropic shamanic path with wings. Hon-Eel depicted as married to a green "bat." The crimson "dragon," funny but also endlessly sad in its current perpetual mutant agony. A black "bat" that betrayed the sun . . . buried Pelorian wyrm traditions banished by Nysalor and now awkwardly stitched together into the modern lunar way.

But nothing really dies even in a hero war. And as the Kralorelans will once again learn, nothing lives forever. 

 

Edited December 6, 2021 by scott-martin
sheng took the riders . . . is that why the hungry plateau is hungry?

[Sir_Godspeed]

What if the bat is a holdover from the (putative) pre-Brightface takeover. The Green Age, when the sky had a day-night cycle? It was already present when Yelm (or even Aether) usurped the sky from the White Queen. And then it was marginalized until the Storm Age. 

Wild speculation, just for fun.

[Alex]

14 minutes ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

What if the bat is a holdover from the (putative) pre-Brightface takeover. The Green Age, when the sky had a day-night cycle? It was already present when Yelm (or even Aether) usurped the sky from the White Queen. And then it was marginalized until the Storm Age. 

Dunno if there was a day and night cycle in the Green Age.  Unless you want to go full-spectrum "Dayzatari mystical materialist" and posit that the sky was the same then as now, and the myths are all just state-of-consciousness stuff.  Pass the hookah sultan, as someone once put it.   But it certainly seems like we get a Lunar cycle of some kind pretty early on.  

[Joerg]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

My current working model of Beast in Peloria is that any indigenous shapeshifters died out or otherwise left too early to show up in the records we have.

I think there might be an alternative explanation, derived from the "Collision of Worlds" concept. It is possible that the Hsunchen would occupy an X-shaped zone separating the Four Worlds, except maybe for the southern world which would have been their home world. If that observation is true, then there would be no Hsunchen in Peloria.

But then Yelm probably would have been annoyed by shape-shifting entities, and command them to stop irritating his sensibilities.

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

I think they were part of korgatsu so we would look for their surviving cousins in the Shan Shan. What remains are descendants of rider peoples and so we might find bird riders and bat riders or their traces.

Comparatively few Hsunchen are riders, but then few totemic beasts are of a size that would carry humans easily. The Storm pastoralists and the horsebreakers generally were from different traditions, and their beasts probably too.

(There are some problems with air-rune related beasts - mammals - in early Dara Happa and Wendaria, before the recorded birth of Umath.)

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Any lycanthropic urges they had was probably largely exhausted in the Sun [Dragon] complex where among other things horse and bird were consolidated into a once-useful and now-extinct chimerical cult. (And then the rider heritage was consolidated into the Seleran Empire and is no longer with us either.)

Unless you bring on six-limbed birds, I refuse to group griffins, hippogriffs and horses as birds. Sky creatures, yes, but not birds.

There might be a chimerical cult, but IMO the six-limbed biology is a different class of creature, possibly a different class of divinity.

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Maybe "bat" is only Old Pelorian for what we call "dragon." A kind of lycanthropic shamanic path with wings.

A bat is just a four-limbed creature, and lacking a tail, making it less than a wyvern, and different from a wyrm, too.

A tail-less dragon would be a weird creature, as far as I am concerned. The tail is an integral part of dragonhood to me.

Let's talk about the limbs involved in leathery (or furred) wings on a skeleton. There are three models found in our world's nature - the index finger-born wing of pterodactyls, the full hand wings of bats - both continuing the wing to the hind limbs - and the weird flexible ribs for some gliding lizard.

Dragon (and demon) wings are different in that they don't usually connect to the hind limbs but at best go to the root of the arm, usually they are similar to bats' wings (chiroptera). But to call standard demon or dragon wings "bat wings" is wrong because of the lack of the flight skin connecting to the hind legs.

(One exception to this may be the dragons in Avatar.)

 

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

Hon-Eel depicted as married to a green "bat." The crimson "dragon," funny but also endlessly sad in its current perpetual mutant agony. A black "bat" that betrayed the sun . . . buried Pelorian wyrm traditions banished by Nysalor and now awkwardly stitched together into the modern lunar way.

Wyrns are an interesting enigma, apparently created in the Dawn Age by the Second Council. So presumably in Dorastor, prior to the God Project, and possibly opposed to the Osentalka project alongside the dragonewts.

 

[PhilHibbs]

Probably going to have to "get my coat" here but Greg at one point maintained that illuminates see (or saw, upon its initial appearance) The Crimson Bat as a hummingbird (presumably implying that that's its "true form", depending on your definition of "true"). Not sure if he formally gave up on that notion or not.

It was that "revelation" that inspired my Glorantha-filk adaptation of "Mmm-mmm-mmm-mmm" sometimes known as "The Humming Song". That went down about as well as the hummingbird revelation itself, as no-one had ever heard the rather quirky original.

Edited December 7, 2021 by PhilHibbs

[Eff]

4 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Probably going to have to "get my coat" here but Greg at one point maintained that illuminates see (or saw, upon its initial appearance) The Crimson Bat as a hummingbird (presumably implying that that's its "true form", depending on your definition of "true"). Not sure if he formally gave up on that notion or not.

It was that "revelation" that inspired my Glorantha-filk adaptation of "Mmm-mmm-mmm-mmm" sometimes known as "The Humming Song". That went down about as well as the hummingbird revelation itself, as no-one had ever heard the rather quirky original.

In contemporary indio Mexico, the hummingbird is sometimes seen as a psychopomp or messenger from the underworld, so I suspect that this is what drove that revelation, (knowing that this would have been around the time he was in Oaxaca). Two different visions of Death.

(The Mexica associated the hummingbird with Huitzilopochtli, the fifth Sun, who famously dismembered the moon goddess, giving her a lunar cycle, but I'm unsure if that has any relevance.)

[scott-martin]

10 hours ago, Joerg said:

There might be a chimerical cult, but IMO the six-limbed biology is a different class of creature, possibly a different class of divinity.

Now I wonder who the Gloranthan scholars were who followed the Hit Location Table approach to Beast Rune taxonomy. Are . . . we . . .  those scholars?

My Elder Secrets is somewhere in the basement so I can't look up the Bat or extrapolate what its anatomy was like before Chaos added a few stray tentacles . . . although I'm another fan of the great hummingbird secret soul hypothesis.

But six limbs make me think of centaurs as a third way between lycanthropic beast people and riders. There are no known "were horses" (although this may be hidden in more prosaic stories) but there are whole civilizations where a biped and a quadruped enter a symbiotic relationship where the biped temporarily surrenders the use of its legs and the quadruped temporarily gains access to arms. With the right magic, this relationship becomes literal and a hexapod emerges. 

Or a dragon. Maybe without the right "lizard brother" or lizard sister partner someone who gets deep into the dragon way will lose legs or arms in order to acquire wings and you get a wyrm or wyvern, much as divergent beast fusions will produce a bipedal goat man or fox woman. You can fall partially off the dragon way and end up with a bizarre hit location table. Maybe if you fall partially off the centaur way you end up walking mostly like a human (except the outrageous dog people of Ralios and others) driven by unbalanced urges like a dinosaur. 

And I'm reminded of the weird redemptive role of the pterodactyl in dinosaur failure. If bat has the same hit locations as a pterodactyl then maybe we can extrapolate some things about wings in Peloria. I don't recall which of the various orders of Dara Happan "angels" have wings but suspect they're feathered and in addition to arms, creating a kind of aerial centaur. Maybe there are intermediate and neotenic forms of bird people as well . . . still a lot we don't know about how and why "wind children" emerge historically much less bee tribe and so on. My suspicion is always that wind children were Made and not so much the product of natural magical evolution.

The hsunchen X is fascinating and I will ponder it. I wonder if "dragon" had a similar distribution at the dawn, but I really do think that dragon forces concentrated in modern Dragon Pass are known elsewhere by other names . . . radically divergent routes to enlightenment, horned serpents of Pamaltela and so on. Six Legs in an empire . . . 

. . . and Pamaltela has bats!

 

[scott-martin]

41 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

a few stray tentacles

"Tentacle" as forbidden Hit Location Magic, a frequently encountered chaos feature trope of course. Weep (acid blood) for the Bat! But then shudder as the dreadful and arcane "tentacle metaplot" flexes across Glorantha. You'll believe even dragons can acquire a chaotic taint . . . or if their Hit Location Table changes, maybe all their limbs turn into extra heads or something.