Monster Empire

[Eff]

3 hours ago, DrGoth said:

And all this is why I see potential in a Lunar campaign. Which way will the characters go? Which way will they be able to make the empire or whatever succeeds it go? You can draw on philosophical themes, politics, extremism. For a group that want's to explore themes like that, leading either to tragedy or redemption or both. There's a vast range.  How about a group that starts out being ruthless manipulators and see the error of theirs ways? Or noble minded ones that travel to hell one step at a time?  Or both in the same group?  Fighting against internal (evil illuminates) and external (Orlanthi/Pentan) enemies. So easy to get to make players feel desperate.

Orlanthi want to make the world free ... for more cattle raiding?

I think the fundamental problem with playing with Lunars as anything more than "defectors from decadence" who see the error of their ways eventually is that it's intrinsically political- the Lunar world is one where politics is immanent and ever-present, and the pretense of playing apolitical "barbarians"/heroic Greeks cannot be maintained. I say problem, but really it's just as much a fundamental potential, so long as you remember to take all the nonsense about how the Lunars/the scientific revolution are simultaneously a threat to the cosmos and poor and feeble, looking with jealousy upon mighty Sartar and place it in the appropriate receptacle. 

[scott-martin]

17 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

What is it for the frog pond to be worth nothing “in the grand scheme of things”? Is it just that “thou shalt admire the croaking” is not written in galaxy-high letters across the sky? Well, if it were, what then? Does HPL’s cosmic horror come from the determination to derive ought from is? Are those who fret about nihilistic illuminism those who were overly impressed by the Death of God?

Well I let myself get pulled into this one so it's clear the puppet still has a string or two attached. It's good to know where they are! This is how a hero war catches its participants in a kind of web of attachment . . . the really clever ones slip out at the act break, "pursued by bear" or whatever. So here we are. Back in the velvet underground. Back to the pond that I love. Might as well play the character as far as it needs to go.

Not everyone in the neighborhood wanted these frogs. First thing the people building on their lot did was plow over their pond. In the grand scheme of things, we don't need frogs and standing water is always conceptually messy. But to me it seemed like a waste of perfectly good frogs so now they live with me. The self is the sky, desire is what writes across it that we want frogs, our cat is named Lulu and there you go. The lunar way is like that. People understand that the self is arbitrary and contingent . . . but have the freedom to identify that contingent incarnation with the sky, with the only reality that matters. 

It's a double consciousness, much like being an earthling dreaming of being a gloranthan dreaming of being a different gloranthan. A constant negotiation and series of code switching behaviors. A planet turning in the sky that isn't there. "You know sometimes words have two meanings." The polyvalent sign was unnerving to the generations who grew up in a world where there was one sign and you conquered in it. Semiotic chaos, schizo analysis. Sure. Yellow sign, red sign. This is what scares Lovecraft, the signs that aren't black or white or even gray in the dark. The collapse of the binary. The carnival that marks the end of time, the monster at the end of the book.

Very little fruit is forbidden. Sometimes we wobble, sometimes we're strong. We have an HOA to protect us from any member succumbing to the temptation to start breeding alpacas, for example. But frogs are neither prohibited nor protected and I would hate to waste these frogs. Participating in the lunar sangha is like that. It's a more complicated experience to convey than these Hal Foster (no not the art critic, the comic book one) hill people with their relatively uncluttered community architecture and almost endless fussin' and feudin'. Building it out requires different effort. Greg kept making run after run on a solution and mysteriously hit his head and recoiled every time, coming back with a Lovecraftian carnival at the end of time. He was still a creature of that old world, in hoc signo. Something in the lunar way just wasn't his bag and so like Moses or John the Baptist he didn't get there. 

Sleep of reason. The body without organs. The planet that wasn't. The empire that never happened. The version of Metropolis I dreamed I read once when I was very sick. MGF.

Edited June 6, 2023 by scott-martin
grover

[JRE]

People see teleology when I see teleonomy, even if for many, they are the same. Rather than suppose the exploitative Lunars are an intentional consequence of the Lunar Way, it is the Empire which forces that only those able to adapt and justify imperial exploitation stay among the ruling classes, with the rest being pushed out, darted out, or just leaving it in disgust. I suppose many of those "soft" Lunars will be found all over Glorantha, sharing a doctrine of understanding and compassion before being forgotten by the history books, though I hope not by those that met them.

In the same way, those that remain in the time of the Monster Empire are those adapted and justifying its internal exploitation, its new reality, and the deliberate breaking of physical and moral principles. Those that did not adapt either joined its enemies or were the first on the sacrifice altar. 

But that was not an intrinsic feature of the Lunar way, but a combination of the potential of the way with the strictures of the Solar way, the even harsher pressure of the neo solar Seleris imperialism and the self-reinforcing rebellion of the Storm cultists refusing to change their ways of life, manipulated by a foolish genius or a genial fool into recreating the past to deny the future.

At the end all lose. The Lunar way is lost along the way, unless some portion of it survives somewhere in the Janube valley, replaced by the dog god eats dog god reality of the Monster Empire that empties of content both the Sun and the Moon till they may well be one the same, the Red orb. Sheng is lost again, and probably anything related to him is purged, almost as fully as the God Learners were. And the conservative Storm is forced to change, even if they refuse to acknowledge it, till they are just a parody of their enemies with a storm overtone.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Eff said:

the pretense of playing apolitical "barbarians"/heroic Greeks cannot be maintained

Especially when political Greeks would be so much more fun.

[creativehum]

Hello @Jeff,

It's a small thing, but I wanted to thank you of the thoughtful and nuanced presentation of the Lunar Way you have presented in this thread. Really appreciated!

Edited June 6, 2023 by creativehum

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

This is what scares Lovecraft, the signs that aren't black or white or even grey in the dark. The collapse of the binary. The carnival that marks the end of time, the monster at the end of the book.

First: hooray for Frieda Harris (and Pamela Colman-Smith)! Where would the “magicians” have been without their artists?

The collapse of the binary? p or ¬p is doing just fine. If people are wedded to p or q (where p and q are logically unconnected), that’s their problem. But this is unfair, as you were clear that Howard was unnerved by the polyvalent sign.

Although sometimes I wonder if is not p or ¬p itself that freaks people: if you like, ¬p is the void — the simple failure of p to be true, to be the case — but they would rather oppose p with q — something definite, like “it is a broo with two heads” — but then the void opens up again as p and q fail to exhaust the logical space; they freak again; they become impossible to live with. (The void vs. the chaotic feature … the chaotic creature … the chaotic creature feature — now playing at a cinema near you.)

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

hill people with their relatively uncluttered community architecture and almost endless fussin' and feudin'.

I do sometimes wonder whether Hillfolk wasn’t Robin Laws’ this is how to do Gloranthan soap opera moment.

Right, now I am off to dance the entropy tango. (Oh, alright, to cook.)

[Eff]

1 hour ago, JRE said:

People see teleology when I see teleonomy, even if for many, they are the same. Rather than suppose the exploitative Lunars are an intentional consequence of the Lunar Way, it is the Empire which forces that only those able to adapt and justify imperial exploitation stay among the ruling classes, with the rest being pushed out, darted out, or just leaving it in disgust. I suppose many of those "soft" Lunars will be found all over Glorantha, sharing a doctrine of understanding and compassion before being forgotten by the history books, though I hope not by those that met them.

I think that this response is a fairly characteristic one in assuming that the Lunars by some method end up being a fairly purely antagonistic entity, such that the entirety of the ruling classes are people who are varying degrees of actively exploitative and the objectors having left the Lunar Empire entirely. I would question the assumption that the Lunars need to be antagonistic on this kind of broad level. 

I think, for example, it's fairly easy to look at Rome and the process by which Roman citizenship expanded, until the high point of the Edict of Caracalla, and look at this as a process by which the specific Roman method of exploiting the subjugated socii transformed over time into an ostensible principle of equality. Or at how Cicero's theories of the natural law carried implications about justice and human rights which have been used for millennia for popular causes that would have horrified him. 

(You can obviously pull out many more examples from human history, but Rome is a subject where common knowledge makes it easy to point to.) 

So with that in mind, you could look at the Lunars as an entity that is multipartite and has different forces acting within and without, rather than one which is one thing or has conveniently become one thing. You might even, without taking any horrifyingly radical steps, produce a kind of synthesis where the conflicts are resolved through all parties changing and adapting. 

But my brain may have been ruined by reading Fanon at an impressionable age. It is rather light on the sturm-und-drang apocalypticism that you can't actually interact with or affect, to be sure, but I also read Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness at impressionable ages too. Zelazny's fantasies feel truer to the Glorantha of not-yet and cor.flu and duckburg point, from my end of things. 

[Jeff]

I posted this on Facebook but it seems appropriate here as well:

Let's talk a little about the cosmic buildup to the Hero Wars.

It really all starts with the Seven Mothers, a desperate conspiracy that gathered to perform the most incredible ritual ever attempted by mortals. They searched the planes and worlds of the spirits to locate the shattered pieces of an obscure, long-broken goddess and inside the living wall of Time, they managed to reconstruct her into a living entity.

This was Chaotic by definition. Although the Seven Mothers are not Chaotic nor tainted by it, the product of the ritual, the Red Goddess, most certainly is. The rise of the Red Moon - the visible manifestation of her apotheosis - signaled to all that Glorantha had changed. She left behind her "son," a strange demigod that was given custody of her mundane affairs and became the Dara Happan emperor, her "daughter," another strange demigod who was there to advise her son, and her steed - the mighty Chaotic demon called the Crimson Bat. This was the birth of the Lunar Empire.

Despite much opposition, the Lunar Empire quickly conquered Peloria and survived its greatest challenge - the celestial demigod Sheng Seleris and his nomad hordes. Moonson died repeatedly, but he returned every time in a new incarnation. Tricks were performed, cosmic loopholes exploited, and Chaos repeatedly used as a catalyst to perform the impossible.This is stuff far beyond what the God Learners even dared to experiment with.

You want to use fire from the Moon to burn down a Great Aldryami Forest - use Chaos to make it possible. You want to destroy a far larger nomad army backed up by immortal magicians? Loose alien worlds upon them by summoning the powers of Chaos. You want to kill one of the Greater Gods of Glorantha? You are going to need Chaos to do that. And where there is Chaos, there is the potentiality of Wakboth and the Lords of Terror. The Lunar Way does not condone the moral evils of Wakboth (and indeed many Lunars fight heroically against it), but they accept its presence as part of the Lunar Way. And Nysalor - the Source of the Red Goddess' Illumination - is the Deceiver after all, the Seductive Chaos.

This set up a cosmic struggle with those gods that define themselves at least in part by their conflict with Chaos - the Storm Gods, the Darkness Gods, and to a lesser extent the Elder Races. In particular, the Red Goddess has created two very dangerous and determined enemies - Orlanth and Kyger Litor.

Orlanth is a turbulent and unpredictable deity, an untamed destroyer who is also the preserver of the cosmos. He is the patron of heroquesting and his cult considers it a religious virtue to find a way to work with Strange Gods and gain new powers through heroic questing. His cult is large and numerous - normally quite fractious and disorganized, The Red Goddess has given them something they can all agree upon and rally around - and something that brings in his family and companions.

Kyger Litor is a patient and cold goddess, who nurses ancient grievances against the very core of the Red Goddess' being. She would sacrifice all of her children and ally even with the Bright God to avenge that wrong - she just waits for her moment for the Darkness to engulf all and so that the Spider's Promise can be fulfilled.

And into this, Heroes have come or been made. Sir Ethilrist. Harrek the Berserk. Gunda the Guilty. Jar-eel. Jaldon Goldentooth. Jar-eel. Beatpot Aelwrin. Androgeus. And many others. And of course, Argrath. All have walked secret paths and undergone terrible ordeals to become what they are.

This is the context of the Hero Wars. For better or for worse, the Red Goddess and the Lunar Empire have brought the world to this point. This is why the Hero Wars are going to be so terrible and destructive, and will radically change Glorantha.

[Jeff]

Just now, Jeff said:

I posted this on Facebook but it seems appropriate here as well:

Let's talk a little about the cosmic buildup to the Hero Wars.

It really all starts with the Seven Mothers, a desperate conspiracy that gathered to perform the most incredible ritual ever attempted by mortals. They searched the planes and worlds of the spirits to locate the shattered pieces of an obscure, long-broken goddess and inside the living wall of Time, they managed to reconstruct her into a living entity.

This was Chaotic by definition. Although the Seven Mothers are not Chaotic nor tainted by it, the product of the ritual, the Red Goddess, most certainly is. The rise of the Red Moon - the visible manifestation of her apotheosis - signaled to all that Glorantha had changed. She left behind her "son," a strange demigod that was given custody of her mundane affairs and became the Dara Happan emperor, her "daughter," another strange demigod who was there to advise her son, and her steed - the mighty Chaotic demon called the Crimson Bat. This was the birth of the Lunar Empire.

Despite much opposition, the Lunar Empire quickly conquered Peloria and survived its greatest challenge - the celestial demigod Sheng Seleris and his nomad hordes. Moonson died repeatedly, but he returned every time in a new incarnation. Tricks were performed, cosmic loopholes exploited, and Chaos repeatedly used as a catalyst to perform the impossible.This is stuff far beyond what the God Learners even dared to experiment with.

You want to use fire from the Moon to burn down a Great Aldryami Forest - use Chaos to make it possible. You want to destroy a far larger nomad army backed up by immortal magicians? Loose alien worlds upon them by summoning the powers of Chaos. You want to kill one of the Greater Gods of Glorantha? You are going to need Chaos to do that. And where there is Chaos, there is the potentiality of Wakboth and the Lords of Terror. The Lunar Way does not condone the moral evils of Wakboth (and indeed many Lunars fight heroically against it), but they accept its presence as part of the Lunar Way. And Nysalor - the Source of the Red Goddess' Illumination - is the Deceiver after all, the Seductive Chaos.

This set up a cosmic struggle with those gods that define themselves at least in part by their conflict with Chaos - the Storm Gods, the Darkness Gods, and to a lesser extent the Elder Races. In particular, the Red Goddess has created two very dangerous and determined enemies - Orlanth and Kyger Litor.

Orlanth is a turbulent and unpredictable deity, an untamed destroyer who is also the preserver of the cosmos. He is the patron of heroquesting and his cult considers it a religious virtue to find a way to work with Strange Gods and gain new powers through heroic questing. His cult is large and numerous - normally quite fractious and disorganized, The Red Goddess has given them something they can all agree upon and rally around - and something that brings in his family and companions.

Kyger Litor is a patient and cold goddess, who nurses ancient grievances against the very core of the Red Goddess' being. She would sacrifice all of her children and ally even with the Bright God to avenge that wrong - she just waits for her moment for the Darkness to engulf all and so that the Spider's Promise can be fulfilled.

And into this, Heroes have come or been made. Sir Ethilrist. Harrek the Berserk. Gunda the Guilty. Jar-eel. Jaldon Goldentooth. Jar-eel. Beatpot Aelwrin. Androgeus. And many others. And of course, Argrath. All have walked secret paths and undergone terrible ordeals to become what they are.

This is the context of the Hero Wars. For better or for worse, the Red Goddess and the Lunar Empire have brought the world to this point. This is why the Hero Wars are going to be so terrible and destructive, and will radically change Glorantha.

Castle Blue is at the center of all of this. There the Red Goddess and her followers fought a magical, physical, and spiritual battle against the "Old Gods" - which included Orlanth, Storm Bull, Argan Argar, Humakt, and many others - and their followers. In the end, the Red Goddess was victorious and the Old Gods were forced to accept her existence. Some swore allegiance as well, but many others did not. The Natural Order had been torn by the fighting at Castle Blue, and after peace came again the universe could be made whole once more by including the Red Goddess and her powers.

And maybe if it had ended here, peace would have remained. But it didn't. And although the gods might have been forced to accept the existence of the Red Goddess, their cults often did not. 

And of course there is the question of what role if any the mysterious inhabitants of the magical city of Castle Blue played in what developed. As we all know, they accepted a single migration of strangers to enter, and then shut their gates to all but the most determined of seekers. But within Castle Blue there are many of the immortals who survived the War of Castle Blue, and it is unknown whether they seek vengeance - or have already set it in motion.

[Jeff]

It is important to keep in mind that the Lunar Way made this possible, but did not condone this, prohibit it, or mandate it. It provides tools for spiritual liberation - but what people did with those tools and their liberation was their choice.

And it is possible that the Red Goddess was perfectly aware that mortals would collectively screw spiritual liberation up. That they would take the gifts and tools she gave them and use it for land acquisition, for grabbing trade monopolies, and for personal aggrandisement. That is pretty much inevitable with human beings, after all.

But perhaps the possibility of spiritual liberation is so important that it is worth a Hero Wars.

[Nick Brooke]

4 hours ago, JRE said:

I suppose many of those "soft" Lunars will be found all over Glorantha, sharing a doctrine of understanding and compassion before being forgotten by the history books, though I hope not by those that met them.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Glamour.

[Eagle Talon]

3 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

The Ones Who Walk Away From Glamour.

I have always been curious about the futur of the Lunar Way vs the Lunar empire. 

If I can quote some sources:

Illumination is practiced within the Lunar Empire but the authorities prefer the more orthodox approach (while often called Illumination) of Sevening. And Illumination is monitored in the Empire by Examiners to prevent Occlusion. 

Sevening involves recognition of the All and how, as the Red Goddess teaches "We are all Us". Lunars are vulnerable to Occlusion; the false awareness that the Lunar is All.

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, Eff said:

I also read Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness at impressionable ages too. Zelazny's fantasies feel truer to the Glorantha of not-yet and cor.flu and duckburg point, from my end of things. 

Sure, Zelazny and Glorantha are a good fit, but if Zelazny is too into his heroes, Glorantha seems often to lack even Zelazny’s level of skepticism.

Spoiler

To a greater extent than any of his colleagues, Zelazny expressed this shift by using mythological structures – some traditional, some new-minted – in his work. It has been argued that in true Mythology the voyage into Conceptual Breakthrough of the Hero with a Thousand Faces always climaxes in an Eternal Return, so that any twentieth-century sf tale which retells a myth incorporates, by so doing, ironies and metaphors highly corrosive of any rhetoric of outward thrust, and mockingly dismissive of the reality of breakthroughs; if this was a conscious insight on his part, which seems highly likely, his career as a whole, with its shifts and longueurs and startling epiphanies, makes more sense: for he was a visitor (though a highly honoured visitor) to sf …

Nomikos is clearly both the Hero with a Thousand Faces and the Trickster who mocks the high road of myth; he is redeemer and road-runner and magus and Superman and Secret Master. Under various names, this basic figure crops up in most of Zelazny's later books: wisecracking, melancholic, romantic, sentimental, lonely, metamorphosing into higher states whenever necessary to cope with the plot, and in almost every sense an astonishingly sophisticated wish-fulfilment …

The plummets into Inner Space, the sensitized baroque intricacy of his rendering of the immortal longings of heroes who all too easily slip into secret-guardian routines, the rush into metamorphosis: all had their cost.

— John Clute, Roger Zelazny

[JRE]

Indeed Omelas is a great reference for those followers of the Lunar way that leave the Empire, disgusted. That was really my message, that most of the horrors of the Lunar Empire are not intrinsic or foreordained in the new way, only enabled by it, and the real pushing force is the Empire and its requirement, as all empires, for resource extraction from the periphery to the center.

Created as a reaction to an empire, coopting an ancestral imperial culture, and facing a man whose ambition made him a demigod, ambition to become emperor of Kralorela, and of anything else he can reach, it is not a big surprise than rather than breaking up the Old Carmanian Empire, they doubled down on it.

I find it meaningful that one of the pregenerated characters in RQG is just such, a true believer of the Lunar way, disaffected with the way it is irregularly distributed, how the Empire acts.

 

[metcalph]

Storm Bull worship in the Monster Empire.

The worshippers of Storm Bull within the Empire believe, like their Praxian colleagues, that Chaos is evil.  Where the Monstrous differ is that they believe that Chaos is everywhere and threatens their souls.  Only through regular manifesting the Rage of the Bull can they keep their souls free.  They fight for that glorious time where their rage will turn into the Eternal Battle and they would never fear Chaos every again.

The Storm Bullmen of the Monster Empire do not attack chaotics on sight for they know everything they kill just comes back again.  Instead they willingly submit themselves to the authority of Ralzakark and he is return offers them a place with the Empire where they can regularly bask in the Rage of the Bull.  They know that Ralzakark is one of the worst but in the hell they dwell in, obedience to him is the best choice they have.  They are his personal bodyguards, they fight against the chaotics that do not recognize Ralzakark and they act as agents of discipline for the chaotic armies that Ralzakark sends against the outside world.

Asked why he employed the warriors of Storm Bull men, Ralzakark replied "They defeated my Humakti and *I* deserve the best."

 

[EricW]

16 hours ago, Eff said:

I think the fundamental problem with playing with Lunars as anything more than "defectors from decadence" who see the error of their ways eventually is that it's intrinsically political- the Lunar world is one where politics is immanent and ever-present, and the pretense of playing apolitical "barbarians"/heroic Greeks cannot be maintained. I say problem, but really it's just as much a fundamental potential, so long as you remember to take all the nonsense about how the Lunars/the scientific revolution are simultaneously a threat to the cosmos and poor and feeble, looking with jealousy upon mighty Sartar and place it in the appropriate receptacle. 

Wouldn't Lunars who saw error be more likely to try to correct the error?

I mean, look at all the good the Lunars have done - tamed the barbarians, stopped the worst ravages of winter, even tamed chaos, by providing a path for beings touched by the primal forces of creation to set aside their destructive natures and live as productive members of society.

Let's not forget, the Lunar Way is the only path which offers hope of creating a better world. The alternative path, championed by the barbarians, would deliver us a world of barbarism and suffering without end, without hope that the suffering might one day be alleviated through the healing touch of the goddess.

If some occluded sometimes appear to drag the empire into directions many might consider selfish or corrupt, surely that risk is a small price to pay for following a path which offers the possibility of salvation, of making the world a better place.

What more noble purpose could there be, than honouring those who risked everything to bring the goddess into our lives, by dedicating every fibre of our being to the fulfilment of their great vision?

Edited June 7, 2023 by EricW

[DrGoth]

19 hours ago, JRE said:

At the end all lose. The Lunar way is lost along the way

You're assuming the 'timeline' holds.  I would actually find it odd if for any actual playing of Glorantha it did. As I mentioned earlier, I take the timeline to be "what happens if there are no PCs and the Orlanthi win".  It's a point of departure, not a map to the future. So if the 'official' timeline in your world I'd be asking "so your Pcs affected nothing of consequence?" Maybe that's what you want to play.  The only way I'd expect to see the Monster Empire was if your departure point was way after 1625. Maybe battling it is the the point of that campaign. Okay then. But in 1625 start campaigns, not so much.

[JRE]

Of course, this is more philosophical speculation than actual game affecting ideas. Changing KoS needs players of demigod status, and that is not the kind of game I enjoy, except as a one off.

There are periods of peace, and periods of dominance of one or the other factions, extending decades. And the Monster Empire may be a century or more in the future, depending on which chronology Chaosium decides to support. Counting from RQG publication, we are 5 years later and we just have some non-official modules discussing 2027-2028. We still do not have an official date for the Battle of the Queens / Kallyr's death, though we have it for Argrath's lighting the Flame of Sartar.

More practical for games, mainly because we can expect to see parts of this in our lives...

We "know" Argenteus will be sacrificed in 1628 and after that there will be a false emperor that is unable to pass the ten tests, and loses Tarsh, Holay and Saird to Sartar. The West Marches break up from the Empire at some point and I suppose become Carmania once again. This Lunar weakness lasts a decade.

Great playing period if you are interested in exploring other parts of Glorantha (Dara Happa? Carmania? The Janube? Imther?) without much Lunar interference, and also interesting playing Lunars in the defensive with plenty of powerful heroes but without Moonson or the Bat.

The following decade the pendulum swings and we have Phargentes the younger rebuilding the Empire and beating everyone, possibly for a decade or more. So strong that a desperate Argrath has to bring back Sheng Seleris in a double hard LBQ to take him out.

A good period to have Lunars travelling all over Glorantha acting like the global policeman. 

Ans I seriously do not see games started in the 1620s going beyond Argrath's LBQ. The world has changed too much. We will need a new baseline.

 

[g33k]

On 6/5/2023 at 11:36 AM, Eff said:

I think that unless you want to posit a Glorantha where Lunar mystics regularly commit suicide because the difference between death and life is an illusion, this line of thinking is fairly out of keeping with what has been presented...

I did say it was "taken to its radical extreme," after all !

But I'd argue that the Monster Empire looks an awful lot as if, under pressure, the Lunars began taking things in radical/extreme directions.

I'm hard-pressed to find anything in Glorantha more horrifying than the Lunar policy of regular/ongoing use of the Crimson Bat.

[Akhôrahil]

On 6/6/2023 at 5:55 PM, JRE said:

I suppose many of those "soft" Lunars will be found all over Glorantha, sharing a doctrine of understanding and compassion before being forgotten by the history books, though I hope not by those that met them.

I picture Lunar Arrolia (at least pre-recontact) as a nicer place than most of the Empire. Likely one of the best places in Glorantha to live (and then comes the KoW).

As the White Moonies would agree, the militaristic, expansionist, Chaos-makes-a-great-tool Empire is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

(Of course, the HeroWars don't exactly reward "nice".)

Edited June 7, 2023 by Akhôrahil

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, JRE said:

Of course, this is more philosophical speculation than actual game affecting ideas. Changing KoS needs players of demigod status, and that is not the kind of game I enjoy, except as a one off.

Although, ironically, it was “A Sound of Thunder” that gave us the butterfly effect — small changes, big consequences?

[mfbrandi]

9 hours ago, EricW said:

I mean, look at all the good the Lunars have done - tamed the barbarians, stopped the worst ravages of winter, even tamed chaos, by providing a path for beings touched by the primal forces of creation to set aside their destructive natures and live as productive members of society.

Yeah, but that’s control, control, control. More imperial jackboot than liberation. That is, everything and everyone is seen as a problem to be solved by the civilized people who know better.

Is it Tim Leary vs. the Merry Pranksters in classical drag?

Who is going to put on the Electric Kool-Aid Illumination Test? Just keep Jim Jones well away from the punch bowl.

[Rodney Dangerduck]

8 hours ago, JRE said:

The following decade the pendulum swings and we have Phargentes the younger rebuilding the Empire and beating everyone, possibly for a decade or more. So strong that a desperate Argrath has to bring back Sheng Seleris in a double hard LBQ to take him out.

Interesting that Argrath brings back Sheng, aptly described by others as "Ghenghis Khan without his good features", before the real rise of the Monster Empire.  Should we blame the Monster Empire on Argrath's actions?

[Akhôrahil]

11 minutes ago, Rodney Dangerduck said:

Interesting that Argrath brings back Sheng, aptly described by others as "Ghenghis Khan without his good features", before the real rise of the Monster Empire.  Should we blame the Monster Empire on Argrath's actions?

Depends on exactly what you mean? I mean, the Monster Empire seems like the likely outcome of the Lunar Empire getting beaten, and Argrath's LBQ is certainly what makes them end up beaten. So the causal connection is there, but it seems slightly harsh (even to Argrath) to blame him for what the Empire does when it's losing.

On the other hand, you can very much blame Argrath for the reasoning "You know what the world needs more of? Someone like Sheng Seleris."

[Manunancy]

Did he really plan on bringing Sheng, or was it more 'let's dive into the worst lynar hells to find something they really fear and drag it out to trhow it in their faces'  - and teh 'something' happens to eb good old Sheng ?