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Vinga in Pavis


Shiningbrow

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43 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

Second, that heroquesting can actually change myth or the accepted version of a myth. There is a lot of that in discussion about what the God Learners did.  And if you also accept that heroquesting is easier to do with community support.  then  the larger community has more ability to change a myth or to make its own version the dominant version.

Yes, but that just means belief affects reality to the same extent it does do in the real world. Someone believes a thing to be possible, so they do it, and that means it has been done. There isn't a shortcut that skips the middle part.

Having a working temple magically sustaining a long-lasting community is a bit like having a power plant successfully providing electricity to the grid. It does prove something about the underlying laws of physics/mythology it relies on not being completely made up. But fission remains fission whether or not you actually build a nuclear reactor. And trying to build a perpetual motion machine will always fail, no matter how hard you believe in it.

Canonically, it is not clear that there are operating Vinga temples in Glorantha, with the known examples being possibly just shrines. Even if so, that doesn't mean you couldn't build such a temple. There isn't even any canon examples of someone trying and failing.

All that means is that there isn't a demonstrated market for that product, at least outside Esrolia.

 

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1 minute ago, radmonger said:

a demonstrated market for that product, at least outside Esrolia.

I love the economic orientation here. The thing about Esrolia is there is already a competing brand on the shelf . . . if you identify female there's probably someone within the Gor complex who fits your rage. But maybe not. The thing about the axe women in particular is that you get to be a girl kicking ass among girls. That's what makes you intimidating, that's who you are and you like it. 

Wind ladies don't seek each other out for cooperative worship. They want to sit with the (other) dudes and when there's a dude thing to be done they want to lend their talents to that task. I wouldn't be surprised if they want nothing to do with getting boozy and bruisy with a bunch of women. Glorantha is still a land of 1000 dances but no matter how that dance ends (you get your own unicorn, Tolat hands you a Baby Bubble, whatever) it is just not your thing.

Meanwhile there is always an outlet for women who view the company of both men and women as a distraction from professional violence. We call it Humakt and all it really wants from you is that you sever yourself from attachment.

But as a thought experiment, say you have a girl who would obviously gravitate toward Vinga in Orlanth country and transplant her to Prax. Presumably she ends up kicking enough ass (sorry but that's how you do it) to impress the examiners . . . but Waha is not open to "women," so what happens to her?

I guess in theory you could kick more ass and go straight to Storm Bull if you're frustrated enough, or sublimate your lack of interest in girl stuff enough to grab that unicorn. Or IMG MGF the Paps will take enough of a special interest in you that you go down and come back a ritually male person . . . or don't come back at all, you just stay there in some specialized role they've come up with for you.

Maybe somebody like Red-Headed Orlanth is a form of that specialized role that escaped the Paps and found a niche among the walking people. And this, the lecturer concluded with a rising "secret punchline" tone, is what the empire coopted when they made the Red Hair Tribe.

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singer sing me a given

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Pretty sure Praxians are no more hung up on female-type-people in trad. masc roles / male-type-people in trad. fem roles than the Orlanthi are. The two cultures are closely related ("Sons of the Storm Bull!"); everyday survival in the Wastes is about competence, not niceties; and if the gods aren't complaining, why should the tribes? YGWV, of course, but mine has kick-ass Praxian women in it, so I win.

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2 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

YGWV, of course, but mine has kick-ass Praxian women in it, so I win.

No doubt, but the current RQ:G cult write-ups for Waha and Eiritha do specify men/women only. Dropping that would lose much of the justification for Praxian women to leave the tribe and join Yelorna.

So the current canon does have kick-ass Praxian women *riding unicorns* as an argument in its favour.

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So: some people enjoy closing down options for player characters. (Which is fine, and if your group enjoys that, more power to you). Greg Stafford enjoyed opening them up. That’s where ideas like Vinga and Nandan and the “Orlanthi All” came from. Me, I stand with Greg. Adventurers can be exceptional, norms aren’t binding, and gender essentialism is far from essential.

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3 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

Pretty sure Praxians are no more hung up on female-type-people in trad. masc roles / male-type-people in trad. fem roles than the Orlanthi are … YGWV, of course, but mine has kick-ass Praxian women in it, so I win.

[Emphasis above mine.]

I did a double-take. I mean the Orlanthi do seem pretty hung-up.

So I am in two minds about this. If the alternatives are [a] women will get back in the kitchen and like it, or [b] we wave a magic wand and despite all the Sky Fathers, Earth Mothers, and adolescent Stormboys acting out, down on the ground sexism was never there — if those are all we have to pick between — then I choose Team Brooke.

But what about the anarcho-vegetarian, cat-loving sisterhood kicking against the patriarchal pricks of Waha’s miserable band of butchers? How about the women from Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast books turning up on horseback in Prax and causing some trouble? You are “stealing” my enemies by de-fanging the traditionalists.

IRL the links between myth, religion, and the facts on the ground are complex and maybe pretty loose, but aren’t we asked in Glorantha to buy into a much tighter as above, so below (albeit with a mechanism for tinkering with the above from below)? And, yeah, the creators — I have no inside scoop, I am just guessing — were probably way too into what we might think of as the problematic aspects of their creation, but rather than subjecting it to an audit from the Ministry of Truth — Waha for men only: down the memory hole — I kinda want to blow it up and watch the pieces rain down on the plains, annoying the already fractious rhinos.

Of course, there could be mischief to be had in explaining to the youth of Prax, Sartar, or wherever that despite what the gods did and what the priests say, we don’t do it like that, we never have done, and we never will.

I just don’t know.

lutte continue.jpg

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NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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You’ve read RQG, and The Six Paths, and you still think the Orlanthi are heavily into gender restrictions? Sorry, I can’t help you.

Anyone can choose to play in Sexist Asshole Glorantha, just like anyone can choose to play in Bronze Age War Crime Sim Glorantha. YGWV, and we celebrate that! But it’s a choice, and it’s certainly not the choice Greg Stafford would have made.

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7 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

You’ve read RQG, and The Six Paths, and you still think the Orlanthi are heavily into gender restrictions? Sorry, I can’t help you.

I think the "other side" somehow got into Praxians, specifically Waha / Eiritha.  Yes, I'm shocked, shocked that a discussion has gone off the original topic of Vinga 🙂.  And I agree with them.  Praxians, in general, are much more "traditional" about gender roles than Sartarites.  (I agree that Sartarites are very flexible)

Cults of Prax, (c) 1979, about Waha: "The cult is not open to women."

RQG, (c) 2018, about Waha initiates: "Must be a male tribal member"

I personally like some small limitations on PCs, but won't argue against Nick and Greg's desire for opening up options.  To each their own.  And, in this example, I'd be fine with Waha being open to women.

However, Chaosium had 40 years to "open up" opportunities for Praxians, and chose not to do so.

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10 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

However, Chaosium had 40 years to "open up" opportunities for Praxians, and chose not to do so.

Fuck those guys.

Look, this discussion began because (a) old farts were annoyed that “Vinga” turned up out of nowhere, and (b) new farts seemed to be closing down the possibilities re: what “Vinga” could do/be/do.

Which all begs the question: Why is anyone listening to farts?

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And to engage more directly with what @mfbrandi asked: sure, if you want to play in “kicking against the pricks” Glorantha, where female adventurers are constantly reminded that they’re weird aberrations and everyone else thinks they belong in the kitchen, then sure: that’s an option. Some players want to get away from all that bollocks, though. I enjoy empowering them.

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32 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

Anyone can choose to play in Sexist Asshole Glorantha, just like anyone can choose to play in Bronze Age War Crime Sim Glorantha.

Just for the record, I am not saying that because there seem to be societies with gender rôles in Glorantha, we should all play sexist arseholes in Glorantha (not your wording, I know) and revel in it. No — yuck!

I am saying that just as there is colonialism in Glorantha and some people like throwing off its yoke in play, some people might like to play to throw off the yoke of the patriarchy in the PCs’ own society. That is OK, isn’t it?

To allow something into the fiction is not necessarily to endorse that thing. And to be able to overcome in the fiction what one cannot overcome IRL may be fun and even therapeutic, no?

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NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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Sure. If that’s your group’s idea of fun, have fun with it. And if that’s your player’s idea of no fun at all, ignore it and do something that’s fun, instead. That’s all I’m saying.

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37 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

....And I agree with them.  Praxians, in general, are much more "traditional" about gender roles than Sartarites. ....

Cults of Prax, (c) 1979, about Waha: "The cult is not open to women."

RQG, (c) 2018, about Waha initiates: "Must be a male tribal member"....

IMHO that should motivate players who don't like that tradition to take up some of the other cults in Prax.  The whole population is not Waha and Eiritha cultists.

Edited by Squaredeal Sten
Spelling "whole"
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5 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

IMHO that should motivate players who don't like that tradition to take up some of the other cults in Prax.  The wh[ol]e population is not Waha and Eiritha cultists.

But as in the discussion of Vinga, there is surely always room for another take on those gods’ worship alongside the traditional one.

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NOTORIOUS VØID CULTIST

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30 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

IMHO that should motivate players who don't like that tradition to take up some of the other cults in Prax.  The whole population is not Waha and Eiritha cultists.

Waha and Eiritha are intended to be the backbone of Animal Nomad society in the way that Orlanth and Ernalda are of Sartarite society, however. I think that the implications from the text as given are that Animal Nomad society has more restrictive gender roles in RQG than Sartar has ever had in any set of game rules, because even when Orlanth and Ernalda were more strongly gender-restrictive cults, this was accompanied by Vinga and Nandan emerging as alternate pathways. 

So I think that the broader question here is "why play a Praxian/in Prax, then?" I mean, you could play a cultist of Storm Bull who's... challenging gender restrictions, an intellectual activity, which Storm Bull and his cultists are known for. You could also play various Lightbringer cultists, or Yelorna, or Yelmalio, or Seven Mothers (unless you've been paying attention to the previews of future Praxian material). But by default, the assumption from the text is that Prax is a restrictive place when it comes to gender. 

It is of course always possible to go beyond the text, and in some circumstances encouraged, but I think it's a very open question as to why I, say, should do the work of making a less sexist Animal Nomad society and cult structure, rather than playing somewhere where the sexism is more sublimated (Sartar, Balazar, Esrolia, Heortland, etc.) or somewhere that's supposedly ruled by feminists (Lunar country). And you could apply this to the Grazelanders as well, since they also have gendered restrictions on Yelm. 

Even if I wanted to play in a pastoral/nomadic setting, and I'm already going to the work of making things up to define the setting to my standards of fun and playable, there's always Pent, which is almost completely undefined, meaning I could conceivably share my creations without them running orthogonally or counter to official materials. 

That really is the major question around both where the conversation has moved to and where it began with Vinga- although we always have personal editorial power, and are encouraged to wield it, there still has to be a reason to point that red-inked pen at a particular part of the setting over another. And in the case of Prax, the game I run with my partner has a running joke about Prax not being real because neither of us feel strongly that there's something redemptive in Prax that a bit of editorial work will bring to light, as opposed to having to invent a fresh Prax from scratch. 

To contrast, there's plenty of redemptive elements close to the surface of Vinga for us, even though they are firmly orthogonal to the official materials.  

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Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

"I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban," -Greg Stafford, January 7th, 2010

Eight Arms and the Mask

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28 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

Sure. If that’s your group’s idea of fun, have fun with it. And if that’s your player’s idea of no fun at all, ignore it and do something that’s fun, instead. That’s all I’m saying.

Yeah.  Only that's really not all you're saying.  Farts aside, you've been trivialising opinions and assigning a lot of motive to people who're trying to make sense of contradictory messages about cult membership.

!i!

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8 minutes ago, Eff said:

To contrast, there's plenty of redemptive elements close to the surface of Vinga for us, even though they are firmly orthogonal to the official materials.  

I say "redemptive elements" here because the way in which the Vinga cult-gender complex has been presented frequently crosses the border into offensiveness, as Vinga is described (by Chaosium employees) as a goddess of trans men or transmasculine people more generally, via "men in women's bodies" as shorthand. But Vinga is always "she/her" and associated with warrior women and Vasana is supposedly a Vinga initiate who is also referred to as a woman and with she/her pronouns. So are vingans just consistently misgendered by the narration and the cultures they live in? 

Now, thankfully, we do not have an explicit textual statement that this is what's happening, and so we have the nonbinary identity of "vingan" in The Six Paths as a counterexample that is explicit though not official. But certainly, the way in which the extant text around Vinga (and Nandan, but Nandan is a relative nonentity in fan discourses because the assumed modes of gameplay for most Gloranthan gaming keeps Nandan from being relevant and picking up substantial fan interpretation) is written creates a very strong implication that these are representations of trans men and trans women in Glorantha. This was also Greg Stafford's intent for Nandan, at least, but Stafford was very clear that the cult of Nandan consisted of "women with dicks", as he put it, and so would embrace pre-op and non-op trans women and transfeminine people, some cis women, some intersex people, some additional complicated gender categories, etc. I don't think that that's a road worth traveling back down, because I do think that folding transness explicitly into the general society and understanding of gender is simply better, but it's worth keeping in mind when we discuss these topics as far as "creator's intent" is concerned. 

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Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

"I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban," -Greg Stafford, January 7th, 2010

Eight Arms and the Mask

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1 hour ago, Eff said:

So I think that the broader question here is "why play a Praxian/in Prax, then?"

Isn't the idea of replaying to play a character whose outlook is different than your own?

Don't play a sexist arsehole for sure.  @Nick Brooke is correct about that.

Do try a slightly chauvinist "traditional" guy who, over time, may adjust his views.  Or an Esrolian Ernaldan who perhaps expects the men to protect and coddle her.

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10 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

  Or an Esrolian Ernaldan who perhaps expects the men to protect and coddle her.

A different take on Esrolian Ernaldans:  Who expect to boss men, "for their own good,"  using persuasion and culture and yes, sex - rather than force.   As a different sex role expectation, matriarchalism instead of patiarchalism.    But when the times require it they are perfectly willing to use force also.

 

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37 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Isn't the idea of replaying to play a character whose outlook is different than your own?

Don't play a sexist arsehole for sure.  @Nick Brooke is correct about that.

Do try a slightly chauvinist "traditional" guy who, over time, may adjust his views.  Or an Esrolian Ernaldan who perhaps expects the men to protect and coddle her.

Every single character you could create in Glorantha, even one that has portal fantasied into Glorantha from the modern world, has an outlook different from my own, because they are in Glorantha and I am not.

Now, broadly speaking, I was raised in a sexist, patriarchal society, like we all were, and I absorbed a degree of the cultural assumptions of that, and so every character I can create has some level of that cultural assumption influencing how I conceive of them and play them and understand them. So I am certainly not creating characters with perfectly enlightened views, because my own are not perfectly enlightened either.

With all of that being said, I have no desire to play any kind of man in a role-playing context. Several decades of experience has proved that I don't enjoy it. If I were acting to a predefined role, perhaps... but that is not the usual context of roleplay. Similarly, I'm terrible at pretending to be straight and so don't try to playact attraction to men, so I have no real desire to play out the courtly-love-but-in-antiquity fantasy of an Ernaldan who exerts dominion over men but in a way where nobody's getting to enjoy riding crops, bonds of leather and chain, suspiciously glossy full-body garments, etc.. There's a kind of feminist critique you could make of that exalted position of passivity on a pedestal, but it's secondary to it not being a fun exercise for me when there are far more invented people who are not in that position than I could ever play if I lived to be a hundred and twenty.

This is secondary, of course, because there's no particular reason to pick Prax over anywhere else in Glorantha as a place to play even if I did suddenly experience an urge to put on a hair shirt and adopt the role of a flagellant in a meta-roleplay above the roleplay. Which is the fundamental weakness of "You can alter your Glorantha" as a response- sure, I could, but I'd normally have to have some reason why I want to do so, and there's plenty appealing in the Lunars, the Sartarites and Heortlings, the Esrolians, Caladralanders, Safelstrans, Loskalmi, even to a degree Pentans which motivates any effort on my part- but I don't have anything beyond, perhaps, cultivating megalomania to devote attention to Prax, or the Grazelands, in part because I know that I would have to directly contradict the existing text. Thus it would have to be a truly personal endeavor, as opposed to ones that can be shared with others for them to freely take things from without having to reinvent their Glorantha in the image of my Gloranthas.

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Though a Lunar through and through, she is also a human being.

"I just read an article in The Economist by a guy who was riding around with the Sartar rebels, I mean Taliban," -Greg Stafford, January 7th, 2010

Eight Arms and the Mask

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56 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Isn't the idea of replaying to play a character whose outlook is different than your own?

Don't play a sexist arsehole for sure.  @Nick Brooke is correct about that.

Do try a slightly chauvinist "traditional" guy who, over time, may adjust his views.  Or an Esrolian Ernaldan who perhaps expects the men to protect and coddle her.

Heh, well. Eff and I play an open-ended game where we each often portray several characters a session. There's almost no combat, and so much of the intrigue is derived from different outlooks (political, theological, geographic, etc.) interacting, clashing, and hopefully finding a productive synthesis by the end. We spend a good amount of time thinking up interesting, often magically inflected perspectives to inhabit.

But I don't find the kinds of examples you cite interesting. You implicitly acknowledge in your phrasing that they would definitely be proven wrong in a Glorantha like Eff's and mine, and that's part of the problem. An interesting viewpoint character, for us, is one that could have a point, and we'll play and find out how much point they have. Characters like those in our Glorantha would be seen a a rehash of already-decided issues of our parents' generation, and would just need to go to therapy (helpfully provided, in our game, by the local Chalana Arroy in Rhigos, where they might run into a gradually healing Gunda in the waiting room and risk having their perspectives reoriented a little less gently.)

So, really, we don't think about those types of people in-game. Basically, they don't exist in our Glorantha because it's more fun to address debates we find more relevant to our own peer group - war vs. peace, how authority justifies itself, and things of that nature.

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On the topic of Waha/Eiritha in Prax, Waha is not the equivalent of Kyger Litor or Orlanth in their societies.  Cults of Prax does state about Waha "The cult of Waha has survived intact since the Darkness.  Occasionally less popular than some religions among the peoples, it never has been extinct in Prax." CoP p23.

The population of Praxians that worship Waha ranges varies among the tribes but is never larger than a third (Bison and Rhino tribes - Appendix C of Cults of Prax p110).  Eiritha's figures are pretty similar.  So while their worship is necessary for survival in the wastes *and* requires rigid gender roles, the Praxians themselves are not obliged or even expected to worship them in order to be valued members of their tribe.  At the most, they just don't get to be Khan or Queen.

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