Animism in RQG

[Yazurkial]

One of the interesting things in HeroQuest rules was its treatment of animism. It extended the concepts of worshiping spirits all the way up in power. So your magic from belonging to the cult of a great spirit was powered by spirits. And it was just as powerful as any other big deal out there.

RQG goes back to the approach of old RuneQuest (with lots of great improvements), which I enjoy enormously. But. Your magic there is either spirit magic or rune magic. Perhaps the label of "spirit" magic doesn't matter. We could just call it battle magic or whatever. But you do learn spirit magic from spirits, and you learn rune magic from the gods. Huh. As a born-again animist, that kinda rubs me the wrong way. It means that gods are big and spirits are small. It kind of breaks the notion of the four worlds.

Maybe one way to deal with it is to abstract a little. "Gods" like the Praxian ones aren't gods. They are great spirits. The difference between spirit magic and rune magic isn't spirits vs. gods -- its little vs. big. Great spirits grant rune magic, not because they are divine, but because that's the powerful stuff. We've got a game mechanism to describe powerful magic and weaker magic, but both work for divine stuff and spirit stuff. In game play, you just put the right chrome on the machine.

But ... sorcery. It works a different way. And it runs all the way from little to big, depending on what you pump into it. That makes it all asymmetric. Perhaps that's not a flaw and it's just my OCD. But if you are worshiping a saint through sorcery, surely you ought to be worshiping a great spirit through an approach that works for spirits and not for gods. And we don't use sorcery generically across cultures. (Though now I want to play a native Praxian wizard, whatever that would be.)

Perhaps mysticism isn't really a magic system, so we don't have to address it. But if it's a thing, then it would present the same issue as sorcery.

Someone thought about this, at least a little, in putting RQG together. What were the thoughts then? What have others thought?

[Akhôrahil]

5 hours ago, Yazurkial said:

Maybe one way to deal with it is to abstract a little. "Gods" like the Praxian ones aren't gods. They are great spirits.

This is how HeroQuest handled it. It makes every sense to me that you can make a spirit journey to find Waha or Storm Bull without going into the Gods World.

(There were also crossover cases like Storm Bull being a great Spirit and Urox being a god, but clearly the same transcendent entity.)

Edited August 19, 2023 by Akhôrahil

[radmonger]

As a one-line sketch, magic is power plus knowledge.

• Sorcerors take knowledge from books and combine it with raw power from any available source.
• A theist picks one entity that has useful quantities of both and organizes a cult around it.
• Animism recognizes that entities with little power can still have useful knowledge.

Worshipping the god of a river might allow you to build a city on it,. But  you don't want to found a city, you just want to find some water. So you contact the ghost of a stream and find out where to dig.

Almost all gloranthan societies have some level of hybridisation between at least two of these approaches. Hsunchen cultures have 1 cult plus shamanism, tribal cultures one per gender plus shamanism, urban cultures a wide variety of cults plus shamanism and sometimes sorcery

Contrary to the 3 worlds model of HQ, these days there isn't a strong metaphysical distinction between the Waha worshiped at a tribal temple and the Waha met on the spirit plane.

If there remains any, it would be that the latter is the Waha of now, who may know the current strength, position and plans of all the tribes, but rarely plays favorites. Wheras the divine Waha is that of some point pre-time.. They will tell you everything you ask about the flamingo tribe; it is just they were wiped out 700 years ago

 

 

[Darius West]

10 hours ago, Yazurkial said:

One of the interesting things in HeroQuest rules was its treatment of animism. It extended the concepts of worshiping spirits all the way up in power. So your magic from belonging to the cult of a great spirit was powered by spirits. And it was just as powerful as any other big deal out there.

RQG goes back to the approach of old RuneQuest (with lots of great improvements), which I enjoy enormously. But. Your magic there is either spirit magic or rune magic. Perhaps the label of "spirit" magic doesn't matter. We could just call it battle magic or whatever. But you do learn spirit magic from spirits, and you learn rune magic from the gods. Huh. As a born-again animist, that kinda rubs me the wrong way. It means that gods are big and spirits are small. It kind of breaks the notion of the four worlds.

Maybe one way to deal with it is to abstract a little. "Gods" like the Praxian ones aren't gods. They are great spirits. The difference between spirit magic and rune magic isn't spirits vs. gods -- its little vs. big. Great spirits grant rune magic, not because they are divine, but because that's the powerful stuff. We've got a game mechanism to describe powerful magic and weaker magic, but both work for divine stuff and spirit stuff. In game play, you just put the right chrome on the machine.

But ... sorcery. It works a different way. And it runs all the way from little to big, depending on what you pump into it. That makes it all asymmetric. Perhaps that's not a flaw and it's just my OCD. But if you are worshiping a saint through sorcery, surely you ought to be worshiping a great spirit through an approach that works for spirits and not for gods. And we don't use sorcery generically across cultures. (Though now I want to play a native Praxian wizard, whatever that would be.)

Perhaps mysticism isn't really a magic system, so we don't have to address it. But if it's a thing, then it would present the same issue as sorcery.

Someone thought about this, at least a little, in putting RQG together. What were the thoughts then? What have others thought?

There is a lot packed in here Yazurkial.

The first thing is, Spirits are finite and tied to the Spirit Rune, while all Gods are tied to the Infinity Rune, making them immortal and to their other descriptor runes through which, along with the myths that describe them, they draw their power.  There are certainly large and powerful spirits out there, but none can truly threaten a God.  That is not true of spirit magic and divine magic and the respective users of the traditions when facing each other however.  The transmigration of the spirits of the dead travel thru the spirit world on their way to the underworld, but Gods don't live there.  Gods live outside of Time while Spirits live within Time like humans and the other sentients, even if spirits often seem immortal and live in a "non-mundane" realm by Gloranthan standards.

In terms of Praxian gods, Waha, Stormbull and Eiritha are all Gods.  They share a divine lineage and they dwell outside of Time.  They do have a lot to do with spirits however, as Prax is replete with them and has a strong Shamanic tradition.  The Gods of Prax can trace their ancestry to the entities that formed Glorantha.  Spirits can take many forms, and some of them are even splinters of gods, but they are a different class of being, and not merely a case of big and little.  This is not to suggest that some spirits are not on the verge of becoming fully fledged gods either.  Oakfed is a Lowfire of Prax, and some would call him a great spirit, while others would call him a lesser god.  Oakfed is also able to claim a divine lineage and he provides divine magic.  So is Oakfed a powerful salamander or a god of Salamanders?  Perhaps he is an ancestor of salamanders?  These grey areas allow room for speculation and interpretation, which is good as YGWV.

As to sorcery... Weak sorcery spells are a lot like Spirit magic only weaker.  It is as if someone asked "What if we could simply find a way to amp up spirit magic with more raw magical energy from ourselves and our crystal power receptacles and no spirits?".  The answer is, it will work, but the spells will take longer to cast, require loads of study to internalize, and will require forming a connection with some very strange and abstract magical runes to work, but the magic will often last longer  and might even be stronger.  As to your Praxian wizard, he is probably a Pavic follower of the Iffinbix tradition.

Mysticism is described as a magic of refutation.  If you can refute your hunger, you need not eat.  If you refute gravity, you can fly.  This is performed via meditation.  Mysticism is also something of a magic of philosophy as well.  A classic real world example of this might be the classic arguments between the Jains and Buddhists about Spiritual Materialism for example, or when Shankara the Brahmin defeated the Buddhists in debate and reinstated the primacy of Hinduism in India.  Mysticism in Glorantha largely derives from the Dragonewts btw.

[soltakss]

Here is how I play it.

A Shaman can access any deity's power by setting up a Spirit Cult to worship the deity. Any deity. A Shaman can also approach the Deity directly and gain a Rune Spell from the deity by directly bargaining with it.

Shamans can incorporate some of a Deity's magic into a personal, or cultural Tradition, which gives the Tradition one of the Deity's Rune Spells.

So, to a Shaman, everything is a Spirit Lord, or Great Spirit, no matter what other people say.

Rune Cults might treat Spirit Cults with suspicion, or they might allow members of Spirit Cults to initiate to the Rune Cult without penalty, to gain access to all Runespells.

We really need to move away from ideas that everything is either Animist, Theistic or Sorcerous, instead most things are a mixture of everything.

[g33k]

On 8/19/2023 at 2:05 AM, radmonger said:

As a one-line sketch, magic is power plus knowledge.

• Sorcerors take knowledge from books and combine it with raw power from any available source.
• A theist picks one entity that has useful quantities of both and organizes a cult around it.
• Animism recognizes that entities with little power can still have useful knowledge.

YGWV.

IMG, Sorcery is power plus knowledge; it is unusual, in Glorantha.

Rune Magic is faith & sacrifice -- nobody "knows" their Rune-Magic spells, they're channeling their deity.

Spirit magic is bargaining and/or binding.  There is a piece of the spirit, or a connection, held within you; feed MPs to that fragment/connection, and the spell comes out.  You don't really "know" the spell, in any intellectual fashion, it's held in what might be called a "pre-verbal" and/or "unconscious" part of your being.

Spirit & Rune magics are similar-ish, in this regard.

[radmonger]

2 hours ago, g33k said:

Rune Magic is faith & sacrifice -- nobody "knows" their Rune-Magic spells, they're channeling their deity.

i don't think anything reasonably called faith is involved. Orlanth initiates have just as much faith in the existence of Ernalda as they do in Orlanth, but that doesn't grant them magic. 

initiates sacrifice to establish a connection to their deity, which knows (i.e. has the capability to perform)  the feat in question. I can't think offhand of any examples of rune magic that correspond to something the deity that grants it couldn't do. Wind Children can fly by their nature (i.e. they 'know' how to fly, though know is a bit of a weak word here, it is not something you could read in a book). Wind Lords can fly because flying is part of Orlanth's nature.

Returning to animism, a sword spirit knows how to cut, and humans know how make use of that. So Bladesharp is a thing.

On the other hand, a bird spirit knows how to fly, but wouldn't know how to fly in a human body. It seems there are no common spirits with that capability,  so there is no widespread  spirit magic flight spell. 

However, by some accounts Sartar has a kite-making tradition, something like that of Afghanistan. The ability to speak to bird spirits, to gain the knowledge of how to fly could then be highly useful. This might well take the form of a currently-undocumented spirit magic spell.

 

 

 

Edited August 21, 2023 by radmonger

[Mark Mohrfield]

On 8/19/2023 at 1:11 PM, soltakss said:

We really need to move away from ideas that everything is either Animist, Theistic or Sorcerous, instead most things are a mixture of everything.

Seconded. One of my favorite bits of Glorantha art is the picture on page 162 of The Guide to Glorantha Vol.1 showing how the same are of Dragon Pass is viewed in each of three other worlds.

[Akhôrahil]

On 8/19/2023 at 7:11 PM, soltakss said:

We really need to move away from ideas that everything is either Animist, Theistic or Sorcerous, instead most things are a mixture of everything.

To be fair, that happened long ago. I can find ”The World Is Made Of Everything” sourced from over 20 years ago. This was never really a thing outside the Otherworlds.

Edited August 21, 2023 by Akhôrahil

[Nevun]

On 8/20/2023 at 3:11 AM, soltakss said:

We really need to move away from ideas that everything is either Animist, Theistic or Sorcerous, instead most things are a mixture of everything.

Good call. Categorisation of things into Animist, Theist & Sorceristic is a very God Learnerish way of looking at it ("not that there's anything wrong with that").

But to put it another way. animists recognise that all creatures not of this world are spirits. Some small, some big and some world-shatteringly huge. But they're all spirits and can be approached (with caution) and bargained with. Theists recognise that Spirits and Gods are two entirely separate things and only occasionally mix. Sorcerers recognise that all things are symbols of the background world processes and can be manipulated with skill and study.  And all are entirely correct.

[Yazurkial]

On 8/19/2023 at 12:11 PM, soltakss said:

Here is how I play it.

A Shaman can access any deity's power by setting up a Spirit Cult to worship the deity. Any deity. A Shaman can also approach the Deity directly and gain a Rune Spell from the deity by directly bargaining with it.

Shamans can incorporate some of a Deity's magic into a personal, or cultural Tradition, which gives the Tradition one of the Deity's Rune Spells.

So, to a Shaman, everything is a Spirit Lord, or Great Spirit, no matter what other people say.

Rune Cults might treat Spirit Cults with suspicion, or they might allow members of Spirit Cults to initiate to the Rune Cult without penalty, to gain access to all Runespells.

We really need to move away from ideas that everything is either Animist, Theistic or Sorcerous, instead most things are a mixture of everything.

Trust Simon to suggest something right and playable, too. (If you have not read his book on heroquesting, go get it from DriveThurRPG! Stop readng this. Go buy it now!) It kind of helps explain why the Praxians refer to Orlanth as both Rain Man and Little Brother: it's two different spirit cults, one for Orlanth Thunderous and one for Orlanth Adventurous.

The key point to me isn't whether stuff is animist, theistic, or sorcerous, but whether the method of accessing power is. When we talk about an animist society, we know how they interact with power -- dancing, drumming, sweat lodges, summoning, medicine bundles, totems, possession, and so on. Theism has its tropes -- sacrifice, prayer, and so on. As does sorcery -- books, diagrams, incantations, material components, etc. We know of first age heroes whose heroic act was discovering how to worship. For example, Borabo nightmare was Waha's first shaman; he discovered how to contact the great spirits. I think Hantrafel, the first Orlanthi god-talker, was the one who discovered how to contact the Orlanthi gods. I dunno about sorcery; I guess it was Zzabur (for Birthini) or Hrestol (for pretty much the rest of the west). Perhaps mysticism's equivalent hasn't come along yet; or they immediately transcended and didn't pass it on.

What I was looking for is the way for the game engine to match the Gloranthan chrome. I don't want the animist method to be systematically inferior to the theistic and sorcerous methods. A different path to roughly the same point is fine.

8 hours ago, radmonger said:

 

initiates sacrifice to establish a connection to their deity, which knows (i.e. has the capability to perform)  the feat in question. I can't think offhand of any examples of rune magic that correspond to something the deity that grants it couldn't do. Wind Children can fly by their nature (i.e. they 'know' how to fly, though know is a bit of a weak word here, it is not something you could read in a book). Wind Lords can fly because flying is part of Orlanth's nature.

This doesn't really work as strictly as you are saying it (though maybe that's just words). Orlanth is not the Thunderbolt he grants: lightning is a fire thing that he took from the fire tribe. It's not part of his nature. But I'd agree with something right next door to that. A worshiper can find a rune spell that corresponds to anything that the god did in god time. (Perhaps that's what you meant by "nature.")

8 hours ago, radmonger said:

On the other hand, a bird spirit knows how to fly, but wouldn't know how to fly in a human body. It seems there are no common spirits with that capability,  so there is no widespread  spirit magic flight spell. 

Humbug. You'd summon a flying spirit and have it carry you. Just like you have a sharp spirit inhabit the edge of your sword. But the best flying spirits are air spirits, which is why you see flying Kolatings. Bird spirits are a good second, but there aren't many bird cults (other than ones that don't fly, like Ostrich).

On 8/19/2023 at 8:52 AM, Darius West said:

In terms of Praxian gods, Waha, Stormbull and Eiritha are all Gods.  They share a divine lineage and they dwell outside of Time.  They do have a lot to do with spirits however, as Prax is replete with them and has a strong Shamanic tradition.  The Gods of Prax can trace their ancestry to the entities that formed Glorantha.  Spirits can take many forms, and some of them are even splinters of gods, but they are a different class of being, and not merely a case of big and little.  This is not to suggest that some spirits are not on the verge of becoming fully fledged gods either.  Oakfed is a Lowfire of Prax, and some would call him a great spirit, while others would call him a lesser god.  Oakfed is also able to claim a divine lineage and he provides divine magic.  So is Oakfed a powerful salamander or a god of Salamanders?  Perhaps he is an ancestor of salamanders?  These grey areas allow room for speculation and interpretation, which is good as YGWV.

I only see this as description, not explanation. It puts the rabbit in the hat. For example, you say Waha is a god. Why? I assume it's because the current RQ rules say so. But the Heroquest rules said otherwise. And that gets back to my original question. Maybe I'm misreading you there.

On 8/19/2023 at 8:52 AM, Darius West said:

Spirits are finite and tied to the Spirit Rune, while all Gods are tied to the Infinity Rune

This seems more meaningful. The implication to me is that the infinity rune is a form rune, not a condition rune; or that spirit is a condition rune, not a form rune. So the spirit rune means spirit, the infinity rune means god (huh, or superhero in White Bear Red Moon -- suggestive). Mastery rune is pretty much the hero rune. Law is pretty much the sorcerous rune, describing the magical essence of creation. Switching the spirit rune to be a condition rune probably be true in IMG, but I was hoping for something that conflicts less with the RuneQuest rule book. And I can't endorse spirits being a "mere" form while heroes, sorcerers, and gods get condition runes.

Also, as an aside, there used to be a lot of speculation that, in the collision of the four worlds, the mystic world kinda lost (or transcended) and became the unexceptional stuff the material world. But as the text for the magic rune says, this rune is almost redundant in this magic-rich world. So ... maybe, whatever.

Also, boo to demoting the luck and fate runes from the powers to conditions and the trade (Issaries) and theft runes from powers to nothing. My Glorantha varies! But I get why leaving them out of the powers makes for a better game product.

[SDLeary]

Animism -> Theism is a road that has many stops (combinations) along it, a progression. Wizardry (Gloranthan Sorcery*) is a humanist practice/aqusition and expansion of those methods that fits within the social and faith structures of The West and is diaspora.

SDLeary

* A Sorcerer is really that enemy magician over in the other valley that binds spirits and ancestors rather than negotiating with or revering them, the one who treats with Broos and sends evil spirits against the good folk of your Clan

[radmonger]

4 hours ago, Yazurkial said:

Humbug. You'd summon a flying spirit and have it carry you. Just like you have a sharp spirit inhabit the edge of your sword. But the best flying spirits are air spirits, which is why you see flying Kolatings.

Are you calling humbug on the current presentation of Glorantha, or my understanding of it? Unless i am missing something, there is no flight spirit magic spell in the red book of magic.

A shaman could make a deal with a griffon or wind spirit to be flown somewhere. But it seems to me that that negotiation would be either a one-off exchange of favours, or an explicit summoning and binding (literally objectifying the spirit). i don't think either is what is represented in rules terms by learning a spirit spell.

YGMV of course.

5 hours ago, Yazurkial said:

Bird spirits are a good second, but there aren't many bird cults (other than ones that don't fly, like Ostrich).

The need for a cult is a restriction of theism, not animism. You don't need to organize your whole society around people who want to be a bird in order to use the magical equivalent of a messenger pigeon. Instead, you acknowledge the agency and needs of the pigeon, and teach it that it will get its needs met if it does what you need it to.

 

 

 

[Malin]

9 hours ago, Yazurkial said:

Trust Simon to suggest something right and playable, too. (If you have not read his book on heroquesting, go get it from DriveThurRPG! Stop readng this. Go buy it now!) It kind of helps explain why the Praxians refer to Orlanth as both Rain Man and Little Brother: it's two different spirit cults, one for Orlanth Thunderous and one for Orlanth Adventurous.

Alright, did that; thank you for pointing me in that direction! I had missed that one... 🙂

[Yazurkial]

16 hours ago, radmonger said:

Are you calling humbug on the current presentation of Glorantha, or my understanding of it? Unless i am missing something, there is no flight spirit magic spell in the red book of magic.

A shaman could make a deal with a griffon or wind spirit to be flown somewhere. But it seems to me that that negotiation would be either a one-off exchange of favours, or an explicit summoning and binding (literally objectifying the spirit). i don't think either is what is represented in rules terms by learning a spirit spell.

I'm not sure. My hero, Scrooge McDuck, used it for entire situations without having to figure out hard questions like that. (But I don't think there's anything defective in your description.)

The current rule set actually represents the chrome better than prior versions of RuneQuest. Recall that in prior versions, a shaman would summon spirits to each you spells. The implication was that your own will powered these. Why only spirits could each you spells, instead of some old dude, was a mystery. If you have to defeat the spirit in spirit combat, surely you don't just get knowledge of the spirit -- you get the spirit itself! Anyway, it was ambiguous. The current version solves this nicely: "Spirit magic is the most basic and common magic found in Glorantha. It concerns communication with the spirits that reside in the natural energy currents of the world and is practiced in one form or another by nearly every Gloranthan culture and religion. ... To cast a spirit magic spell, the caster concentrates upon the spirits they have a focus with and temporarily alters the spiritual energy currents to create an effect." So a spirit magic spell is about communicating with embodied spirits in the natural world.

Presumably then, you could have a spirit magic spell that allows flight. You'd be altering the flows of spiritual energy in the winds and birds and such. But, compared to an Orlanthi casting flight, it is going to be way less efficient. An Orlanthi is already attuned to being part of the wind wind. It might take like 1MP per point of SIZ. That would be consistent with the old RQ3 rules for sorcery, which required 1MP per point of SIZ. (Sandy's sorcery rules, which might have informed the current rules, said 1MP per 3 SIZ. That makes a closer 2x comparison to the current theistic flight spell, which covers 6 points of SIZ with 1 rune point.)

It doesn't seem like there is anything about Glorantha saying that the list of spirit magic spells is fixed. The list represents those that someone has invented and passed on. There could be new ones. There could be ones that only some isolated population knows. And now I have to run a duck character whose mission in life is to find the spirit magic spell permitting him and his SIZ 6 buddies to fly for just 6MP.

17 hours ago, radmonger said:

The need for a cult is a restriction of theism, not animism. You don't need to organize your whole society around people who want to be a bird in order to use the magical equivalent of a messenger pigeon. Instead, you acknowledge the agency and needs of the pigeon, and teach it that it will get its needs met if it does what you need it to.

Yeah, you're right. That was a false trail. That's if you summon a pigeon spirit. (A big one, presumably.) If you are using the flying spirit embodied in the birds around you, you don't need to summon it and bargain with it.