Sorcery

[davecake]

On 12/10/2022 at 8:52 PM, Joerg said:

But how much is Leonardo a sorcerer?

Why would he be a sorcerer? His creations are created by mundane science. He is the most astonishing Dronar in the world - in caste he is a mere artificer, but he has been able to achieve more from his mundane creations than anyone thought possible. Perhaps because no one else would put so much effort into things that are much easier performed by sorcery. But as they are within caste law, he is unaging and has been able to push his skills to an astonishing degree. 

[Joerg]

5 hours ago, davecake said:

Why would he be a sorcerer? His creations are created by mundane science.

What is mundane science but another word for understanding nature and imposing your will on it through knowledge -  which is the definition of sorcery compared to the other magical systems.

His Pedalcopter for instance requires an insight into the nature of Storm that equals a sorcerer's mastery of that rune.

 

5 hours ago, davecake said:

He is the most astonishing Dronar in the world -

I thought that title went to the two individuals in Akem?

The God Forgotten aren't Brithini, even though the individuals we know about appear to be extremely long-lived (the Talar, Belintar's sorcerer advisor, and as far as I can make out also Leonardo). They do copy some of the Brithini system, but how successful are they in that? Sorcerers will find other ways to ensure longevity.

If Leonardo is a flawless dronar, that should mean he would be illiterate. I somehow have a problem to imagine a Leonardo who doesn't create lots of notes and doodles... or an Archimedes who doesn't.

 

5 hours ago, davecake said:

in caste he is a mere artificer, but he has been able to achieve more from his mundane creations than anyone thought possible.

At least IMG, elaborate mechanisms or alchemical products are a form of sorcery. The Mostali appear to agree.

 

5 hours ago, davecake said:

Perhaps because no one else would put so much effort into things that are much easier performed by sorcery. But as they are within caste law, he is unaging and has been able to push his skills to an astonishing degree. 

If he was a Brithini and not just part of a society imitating the Brithini ways, I would accept that, but word of Jeff has it that while you can stop being a Brithini immortal, you cannot become one (as I understand, other than through birth to Brithini parents, reproducing under order of a Talar, and presumably with blessings by a Zzaburi).

The God Forgotten (is that identical to Ingareens, or are those only a specific portion of the population) aren't actual Brithini. I doubt their 17 ancestors surviving the Gods War were.

[JRE]

My own take is that they are not Brithini, but Belintar's benefit to God Forgot was that they would not age while behaving in caste approved ways, because he must have offered them some benefit, and interacting with the divine is not fitting. So all those long aged people remember Belintar washing to the coast, but no risk of anyone knowing the GL secret.

Now that is breaking down after Belintar's death, and I am sure they are looking for alternative solutions. I have no problem with the variant God Forgot caste rules allowing Dronars literacy, or maybe he is not literate in the Western sense, as he does not write or read the Western speech, just drawings and his own self-developed language that only he can read after all, though many try. Translate does not work as it is a crafted symbolic system with a user pool of one.

In my Glorantha high skill allows you to manifest minor magical effects, because magic is everywhere and this is not Earth. So Leonardo does not use deliberate magic to fly, but a pedalcopter that would not work in Earth can work in Glorantha, because the air runes on the hull balance out the love of the earth for the wood and metal, and even the pilot.

[mfbrandi]

15 hours ago, Joerg said:

What is mundane science but another word for understanding nature and imposing your will on it through knowledge -  which is the definition of sorcery compared to the other magical systems.

Has all that nonsense about sorcery being an otherworld magic with its own ‘sorcery plane’ been dropped, then? I hope so, but if not sorcery = mundane science rings a little oddly — although it wouldn’t invalidate its being an approach to magic [a] concerned with laws and formulae inclusive or [b] highly experimental/empirical.

Or the sorcerers could maintain that all the planes are ‘mundane’, which I quite like, too.

[David Scott]

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Has all that nonsense about sorcery being an otherworld magic with its own ‘sorcery plane’ been dropped, then? I hope so, but if not sorcery = mundane science rings a little oddly — although it wouldn’t invalidate its being an approach to magic [a] concerned with laws and formulae inclusive or [b] highly experimental/empirical.

Or the sorcerers could maintain that all the planes are ‘mundane’, which I quite like, too.

You can read the current thoughts here. Perhaps each memory palace is its own plane. With a school providing crosslinking

[French Desperate WindChild]

19 hours ago, Joerg said:

What is mundane science but another word for understanding nature and imposing your will on it through knowledge -  which is the definition of sorcery compared to the other magical systems.

His Pedalcopter for instance requires an insight into the nature of Storm that equals a sorcerer's mastery of that rune.

not sure :

I agree that  [background] people would call sorcery (or magic) what they don't understand or can explain by their own "knowledge"

However from a design perspective, sorcery and sorcerers use magic points.

And I have no evidence (maybe there are I don't know) that the Pedalcopter requires magic points.

Maybe some physical energy (no mp, just fatigue) is enough to move it.

After all a lot of gloranthan are able to move on the ground without any mp. You don't need to be a  [design] sorcerer to walk

Windchilds, even if they don't speak french (or especially if they don't) are able to fly without any mp. You don't need to be a [design] sorcerer to fly

 

So there are two options :

Leornardo is a sorcerer and the proof is his Pedalcopter  requires MP (or he is  using spirits ? 😛 or a storm worshipper ? 😛  but I would choose the sorcerer way imo)

Leornardo is a scholar who discovered some physical laws, and is able to create flying machine using his body (or anyone's) to move this engine

 

 

[Nick Brooke]

In the nineties, Greg Stafford clearly thought Sorcery was the magic of the mundane, material, measurable world, predictable and repeatable… which is to say, Science.
 

I’m sure there are exciting new ideas waiting to be discovered, and possibly even a few Issaries-era novelties that haven’t yet been repudiated, but I really enjoyed collaborating with him back in the day, so that’s still where I pitch my tent. YGWV.

[metcalph]

I do have the idea that instead of casting spells, Dronars of whatever school (okay, the mainsteam ones) would have knowledge of a Philosophical Form, such as a sword..  With the knowledge in mind, they can create the object repeatedly to the same level of craftsmanship with very little variation compared to other crafters (e.g. Orlanthi and Pelorians).  In addition, when other Malkioni use these Ideal Weapons, they get a bonus.  Thus the westerners use archaic weapon and armour styles that distinguish them from their neighbours who do not care for such things.  

Malkioni crafters acquire their knowledge with the help of a friendly wizard (probably goes on the to hero plane and sees such things being made).  For complicated pieces of equipment, like say a Turtle Barge, crafters learn a specific part of shaping that when put together becomes a coherent whole.

The crafters of God Forgot are a bit more magical in their crafts.  Not for them the tilling of the soil or the gathering of fish.  Instead, they make a variety of magical servants that do those jobs for them.  Such servants are temporary and wear out within a season to a year so their whole life is one of making servants, supervising them, cursing them when they stop working, gathering the raws to make new servants etc.  There's no stockpile of magical servants and artifacts for outsiders to loot.

Leonardo is unique in that he does make enduring artifacts.  But for them to endure, he only makes one of them. Thereafter he visits the hero planes, accessible from within Howl's Moving Castle his laboratory, to find a new invention to make.

 

[Jeff]

As we all know, magic is the result of drawing upon the timeless and eternal "God Time" to affect the material world of Time. And so sorcery as a magic system is a logical and materialist approach towards doing that.

But the sorcerous mindset is of the mundane, measurable, material world - as Nick correctly observes, a "science". Not all "sorcery" is expressed as magic spells, of course.

In the Second Age, the God Learners tried to understand the world through observation, analysis, and reason. One group of God Learners tried to duplicate the result of magic through material devices and machines. They settled in the area called God Forgot (which was part of the Middle Sea Empire) and founded the so called Machine City. They built war machines (including a giant harpoon firing crossbow now in Sun County), armoured self-propelled vehicles, and developed techniques of mass assembly of parts and even of magic weapons. This is all "sorcery" - or at least the product of the sorcerous "scientific" approach. Ultimately, they constructed their own "god machine". But the gods found this intolerable and the Empire of the Wyrms Friends and the Old Way Traditionalists worked together to destroy the Machine City.

Leonardo is a local of God Forgot who has rediscovered some of this. Likely a genius in his own right, he's built an Ornithopter, and various other devices. He's likely already come up with the plans for countless others. If he could get enough financing and support, who knows what he could build - or even worse, what devices within the Machine Ruins he could restore to working order!

[Joerg]

20 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Has all that nonsense about sorcery being an otherworld magic with its own ‘sorcery plane’ been dropped, then? I hope so, but if not sorcery = mundane science rings a little oddly — although it wouldn’t invalidate its being an approach to magic [a] concerned with laws and formulae inclusive or [b] highly experimental/empirical.

The Essence Plane etc. might be more of a perception category than an otherworld you visit. A realm of knowledge and data, including spells. 

All magic is bringing energy from beyond the mundane plane into the mundane plane to achieve modifications of the mundane plane, or at least that's how sorcerers would see that. But sorcery may also include the application of knowledge to modify mundane reality. Skills are a form of knowledge.

[JRE]

I disagree a bit with the above. I consider magic is inherent in Glorantha, a consequence of being built with runes, platonic ideals and archetypes, rather than atoms, chemical bonds and the interplay of enthalpy and enthropy.

Repeating myself, someone with high Death affinity makes swords that are sharper than his high Life neighbour. And a high skilled artisan may make something magical without using magic (though I consider that as unconscious mysticism, something usually linked with skill mastery).

You can get more magic by going to more magical places, it is true but the middle world is not mundane, as shown by all the magic wonders still there. So for me, even if he also knows Dronar magic, Leonardo is also able to adjust the amount of air and earth in his pedalcopter, by simple skill, so it can escape the Earth's embrace. Is it magic? Yes. Is it magic according to the rulebook? No.

It is something I also apply when rolling skills. In crafting you may require a special to do something well, special, and a critical or several to make something unique. He just criticals a lot those skill rolls, so nonmagical metal legs prosthesis can bend and move as desired by the Giant crab. Or je just adds a high Fire nozzle to the Flamethrowing turtle tank so the oil self ignites when it goes through. But it still needs that special mix of petrol ether and soap to work well.

[Joerg]

Any physical/enbodied entity or object in Glorantha has a physical body available for mundane interaction, a spirit available for animistic interaction and a body of knowledge available for sorcerous interaction. With few exceptions, it will be part of a divine manifestation or several, too, potentially owning/consisting of a set of souls. Runes are involved in all of these.

Magic as per my definition is not an energy potential, but a flow of energies, a transaction.

Magic energy available for casting such as personal POW or temporary stored in matrices or crystals might be closed loops of magical flow, almost like somethíng stationary. When casting a spell using MP, the caster diverts off some of their internal flow of life force into whichever shape the magical exchange takes (Battle Magic, Sorcery, boosting any kind of spell including rune magic).

1 hour ago, JRE said:

Leonardo is also able to adjust the amount of air and earth in his pedalcopter, by simple skill, so it can escape the Earth's embrace. Is it magic? Yes. Is it magic according to the rulebook? No.

We aren't that far from the runic or skill augmentation rules here. Are those a form of magic?

While there is no transaction of any magical currency (such as MP, rune points) there is some form of magic going on.

Which sort of logically extends into skill rolls.

 

Reducing Leonardo's inventions into convenient accumulations of crits and specials doesn't quite fit my impression. If they do, where are the creations that accumulate his failures and fumbles? And how would people (including the creator) interact with those?

Does Leonardo have a trash pile with unique blunders that may activate when encountered? Do some of these escape occasionally, or get liberated by nearby tricksters?

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, Joerg said:

All magic is bringing energy from beyond the mundane plane into the mundane plane to achieve modifications of the mundane plane

All magic? I thought that mysticism was explicitly not an otherworld magic. (Which fits well enough with IRL non-magical mysticism: find union with god in this world, because there is no other.) Of course, one could maintain that the mystics effects are not magical at all, but …

(I am probably decades behind on my Gloranthan meta/physics.)

The mystics: there is Cosmos and the Void — i.e. something and nothing — i.e. something. They end up looking more “modern” than the atheistic, scientistic sorcerers.

In defence of the sorcerers, I don’t buy the party line that the west is spiritually stunted because it figures out its own magical effects, rather than getting them readymade from the “gods” — as if buying rather than making or ignorance rather than knowledge were in themselves spiritual advances. The theists are not spiritually advanced because they get their magic pret-a-porter — religion is not conjuring tricks with bones (although Delecti may disagree).

[Joerg]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

All magic? I thought that mysticism was explicitly not an otherworld magic.

The mystical refutation might be just an inversion of the vector, dissipating the energy into the beyond or the absolute. Powers gained as temptations or mystical tools may require expenditure of some magical currency, or may be always on, but in that case they were probably carried in from the Other Side.

 

[davecake]

On 12/15/2022 at 2:56 AM, Joerg said:

What is mundane science but another word for understanding nature and imposing your will on it through knowledge -  which is the definition of sorcery compared to the other magical systems.

And by that definition, all the Malkioni castes practice sorcery. Quite likely they think of it that way. But only the zzaburi specialise in magical sorcery, and the other castes strive to understand different aspects of nature and impose their will on it in different ways. I am quite prepared to jump into Ancient Greek distinctions between the different types of knowledge and how different cases understand each - but I think the point is made, that declaring physical construction of crafted objects to be just a different kind of sorcery is just a language game that in no way makes physical construction of crafted objects the domain of the zzaburi caste. 

 

On 12/16/2022 at 2:44 AM, Nick Brooke said:

Sorcery was the magic of the mundane, material, measurable world, predictable and repeatable… which is to say, Science.

Sorcery is the 'science' of an intrinsically magical world. Sorcery believes the world is full of spirits, that the underworld exists and can be visited, and that spells and rituals produce definite measurable, predictable and repeatable effects. Because they can use the scientific method to prove that these things are true. If Gloranthan sorcerers only believed in the mundane and the material (apart from the face we know that they really don't eg the New Hrestoli being Gnostics who think all that stuff is the work of the demiurge), they wouldn't be 'scientists', they'd wouldn't even be idiots, they'd be implausible contradictions. 

On 12/15/2022 at 2:56 AM, Joerg said:

The God Forgotten aren't Brithini, even though the individuals we know about appear to be extremely long-lived (the Talar, Belintar's sorcerer advisor, and as far as I can make out also Leonardo). They do copy some of the Brithini system, but how successful are they in that? Sorcerers will find other ways to ensure longevity.

Indeed. The interesting question about Leonardo is whether he is someone who has managed to rediscover lost knowledge of the Machine City.. or whether he is the person that designed them in the first place. 

[most astonishing dronar?]

On 12/15/2022 at 2:56 AM, Joerg said:

I thought that title went to the two individuals in Akem?

They are the most skilled, but they are also conservative Brithini who probably haven't had an original thought in centuries. Leonardo is more astonishing. 

On 12/16/2022 at 7:54 PM, mfbrandi said:

All magic? I thought that mysticism was explicitly not an otherworld magic.

Well, sometimes great mystics interact with the otherworlds because after they are done transcending the physical, they next step is transcending the metaphysical. But sometimes they can do that without leaving home.