Meeting Wakboth

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

The god world and the herorealms have a timeless quality to them, where you can encounter entities before they get destroyed …
Wakboth in a heroworld heroquest, yes

I have no problem with this — the more views the merrier — but I wonder how it fits with the modern orthodoxy (which I can be imagined to regard with a degree of [complete to taste]). If an encounter is contact, consider:

• Now remember there is no cult of Wakboth. You can’t contact him as he is dead (killed by Storm Bull) and buried beneath that Block of Truestone. Now I tend to subscribe to the belief that Wakboth was part of the reconstituted mundane world and the source of moral evil in mundane life. But as long as he is imprisoned beneath the Block, that’s all he can do.
  — Jeff Richard, The Moral Evil of Glorantha

If I read that right — and perhaps I don’t — it seems to be saying that Wakboth has no otherworld presence, or at least that you cannot get to him in an otherworld if you are coming from a time when his body is pinned under the Block.° It is tempting to think that if a Gloranthan can tell a story, they can visit that story made solid in an otherworld theme park — that all the stories ever told are there and accessible in an interactive visitor attraction — but that doesn’t seem to be what we are supposed to conclude. What do you think?

Would you even meet a Wakboth cosplayer on an otherworld quest? If Wakboth has no cult and heroquesting is not time travel (another orthodoxy, IIRC), then that person is unlikely to be a Wakboth cultist. Could be a trickster trying to pull a fast one on the theologically naïve, perhaps, but then one could call them on it.

A sorcerer might regard this supposed unavailability of with a degree of skepticism, “No problem working with or , so it is just a matter of devising the right experiment, determining the appropriate reactions.” Perhaps an atheist would have more luck raising the Devil than a theist lacking a lot of quarrying equipment ever would.

Sometimes there are other difficulties with visiting stories. We can tell the story “Kajabor eats some gods”, but part of the story is supposed to be that they are then gone as if they never existed and no one can even name them — perfectly retconned away. But then Voidmouth K doesn’t get to eat them, because they were never there, so what event exactly are we going to visit? And what do we — can we — say when we get back? Of course, if it were only ever just a metaphor …
 

—————————————————————
° Think of all those fans who have said that Gloranthans know that the gods are real because they have visited them in some otherworld. They cannot say that about the Devil. Suits the Devil just fine. The weight of all that Truestone is kinda comforting … and in time even mountains will move.

[Akhôrahil]

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

If an encounter is contact, consider:

I don't think this matters for heroquests. Vadrus is also annihilated and without a cult, but you can explicitly run into him in heroquests (such as Orlanth Forms the Storm Tribe). He just can't provide magic through worship. Similarly, you will have to defeat Wakboth (using the Net) if you're doing the LBQ - otherwise, how would it even work?

I believe that quote is about what you can do from/into the mundane world.

Edited April 12 by Akhôrahil

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

Similarly, you will have to defeat Wakboth (using the Net) if you're doing the LBQ - otherwise, how would it even work?

I guess — I don’t claim to be any kind of expert — that you do it with proxies, with someone “identifying as” Wakboth, as W his bad self is out of commission. The question then is, who is the proxy if a Wakboth cult is not currently viable? Who plays the rôle of a god besides their cultists? I freely confess that the answer is above my pay grade. (I imagine one meta-reason for a cult of Wakboth being declared impossible is to prevent PC diabolists.)

Argrath’s LBQ — like its prototype — is different because at that point the Devil is loose.

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

when you heroquest you meet the god. or a proxy but for you it should be the god because if you start to doubt that’s not the god, you are in a path where at the end you will remember you are not wearing your god’s aspect but just a wood mask (or tattoo or … any mundane gear) and your quest may fail only because this.

So if I have you right — apologies if not — it might not be Wakboth you meet in the otherworld, but you had better believe it is Wakboth or the whole thing might unravel on you. All fine.

Isn’t the simplest way to take Jeff’s post that unlike the gods — who are pretty much completely in the otherworld, “locked out of Time” (i.e. out of the mundane world as presently constituted) — Wakboth is completely in the mundane world, pinned under the Block and unable to do anything but poison the mundane world with evil. It is not a view of the world I buy into, but isn’t that what’s being offered?

Doesn’t theistic magic go something like this: punch a hole into the timeless otherworld and tap some of that juicy sacrificed POW to produce fireworks? You cannot do that with Wakboth because he isn’t there — you cannot sacrifice the POW, and you cannot reach into the otherworld and let it flow back into this one. Wakboth has no cult, as he is not properly located. A bit like how a living demigod cannot provide rune magic — because they are still of this world? This world is the Devil’s — is the Devil, maybe — so no use trying to work the usual theistic levers to tap Devil magic from some other world.

And lest we forget where we are: can a shaman act as an intermediary for Wakboth? The orthodox view — at least as I understand it — is no, for Wakboth has no otherworld presence.

[EricW]

On 4/13/2024 at 2:43 AM, mfbrandi said:

I guess — I don’t claim to be any kind of expert — that you do it with proxies, with someone “identifying as” Wakboth, as W his bad self is out of commission. The question then is, who is the proxy if a Wakboth cult is not currently viable? Who plays the rôle of a god besides their cultists? I freely confess that the answer is above my pay grade. (I imagine one meta-reason for a cult of Wakboth being declared impossible is to prevent PC diabolists.)

Argrath’s LBQ — like its prototype — is different because at that point the Devil is loose.

What about every 500 years the devil returns?

Given it is still possible for people to be destroyed by chaos, and for powerful chaos gods to arise inside time and threaten the compromise, Wakboth is still influencing the world. But only the most powerful and lucky heroquesters can penetrate the truth which is the fabric of this world, to find the devil at the base of creation?

The manifestation they bring back to the world needn’t look like Wakboth, the embodiment of the chaos rune can present itself in other forms?

[Akhôrahil]

8 hours ago, EricW said:

What about every 500 years the devil returns?

Seems unsupported (also, it’s 600, right?) - when in the Second Age would that have happened?

[EricW]

1 hour ago, Akhôrahil said:

Seems unsupported (also, it’s 600, right?) - when in the Second Age would that have happened?

Yep, I'll withdraw that one, I can't recall the source. 

[Akhôrahil]

49 minutes ago, EricW said:

Yep, I'll withdraw that one, I can't recall the source. 

It's from KoS when Argrath says it to the Devil. It doesn't seem all that supported there either.

Edited April 14 by Akhôrahil

[soltakss]

6 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

15 hours ago, EricW said:

What about every 500 years the devil returns?

Seems unsupported (also, it’s 600, right?) - when in the Second Age would that have happened?

Some say that Zistor was when the Devil returned. The Heortlings needed to perform a LBQ to bring down the God Learners.

[mfbrandi]

15 hours ago, EricW said:

Given it is still possible for people to be destroyed by chaos, and for powerful chaos gods to arise inside time and threaten the compromise, Wakboth is still influencing the world.

The Devil is in the mundane world — oozing evil from under the Block or from every field and particle of temporal reality — so is present in time, sure. Is time or the temporal world, perhaps. It is in the otherworlds that the Devil is — according to this take — absent. To have cult, you need an otherworld presence, right? If you are trapped in this one, no dice.

I am not trying to push this view on anyone. I am just trying to make sense of something Jeff wrote. It might not be what he intended, at all. Seems to work so far, but when the decisive experiment disproves it, we can all go down the pub. 😉

[EricW]

5 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

The Devil is in the mundane world — oozing evil from under the Block or from every field and particle of temporal reality — so is present in time, sure. Is time or the temporal world, perhaps. It is in the otherworlds that the Devil is — according to this take — absent. To have cult, you need an otherworld presence, right? If you are trapped in this one, no dice.

I am not trying to push this view on anyone. I am just trying to make sense of something Jeff wrote. It might not be what he intended, at all. Seems to work so far, but when the decisive experiment disproves it, we can all go down the pub. 😉

Surely the Devil does have otherworld presence in the sense that you can encounter the devil on appropriate heroquests.

My theory has always been that chaotics who successfully heroquest to change the outcome of a key encounter with the devil or other major chaos entity, to try to bring a piece of the devil's power back to the mundane world, they find it difficult to return to time. For them chaos won, and the ultimate outcome of paths where chaos won is destruction. 

Edited April 14 by EricW

[Ynneadwraith]

10 hours ago, EricW said:

For them chaos won, and the ultimate outcome of paths where chaos won is destruction. 

Destruction...or transcendence? Ducks beneath lightning bolts

I suppose the observable effect would be similar: you aren't around anymore. Perhaps that's what's raining down from the holes in the firmament: blended up former chaos cultists. Dayzatarian heresy!

Definitely wavering into 'Your Dumbest Theory' territory at the end there...

[mfbrandi]

13 hours ago, EricW said:

My theory has always been that chaotics who successfully heroquest to change the outcome of a key encounter with the devil or other major chaos entity, to try to bring a piece of the devil’s power back to the mundane world, they find it difficult to return to time. For them chaos won, and the ultimate outcome of paths where chaos won is destruction.

But if we want an explanatory theory, it needs to work for Wakboth, Ragnaglar, and certain other cult-not-currently-possible dead Chaos gods (but not Thed and Nysalor), as some Chaos heroquests do work — take a bow, Sedenya.

Against me with my pretend-Jeff hat on, I was reading HeroQuest Glorantha, yesterday, and that seems to suggest Sedenya did encounter Wakboth on her quest, even going so far as to have her say, “I defeated Wakboth and exchanged places with him” (p. 182).

(IIRC, Wyrm’s Footnotes #10 doesn’t identify the demon as Wakboth and has its defeat before she binds Gbaji — which makes sense, I think: dismiss/defeat your demons first, then push on to the emptiness of Nirvana.)

Although …

One way to take the exchange of places is that it reverses her defeat early in the quest, but another might be that she claims her place in the otherworlds by confining Wakboth to this one — that is we have an alternative explanation as to why Wakboth cannot have cult: Storm Bull doesn’t get the credit, Sedenya does, as she stole Wakboth’s seat on the bus. This shouldn’t upset the Storm Tribe too much, as it fits with their narrative that the Red Goddess is the Devil. 😉

Edited April 15 by mfbrandi
otherwords -> otherworlds

[Ynneadwraith]

5 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

even going so far as to have her say, “I defeated Wakboth and exchanged places with him” (p. 182).

If you want to be persnickety, just because a god says they did something doesn't necessarily mean they actually did it. Especially if it's self-aggrandising...

Though equally it could well be true!

[mfbrandi]

3 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

just because a god says they did something doesn't necessarily mean they actually did it.

And maybe it was only said that she said it.

And things done in heroquests may be smaller than they seem — how many ZZ questers have beaten up Yelmalio and stolen his fire powers? It is not so much that they didn’t really do it, more what does it mean for them to have done it, no? A bit like IFWW: did pretty much everyone save the universe alone? But it is not “we formed a massive army we won”. Even the real deal is not as fancypants as people like to make out after they have had the “visitor experience”.

To me, it is binding Gbaji — a mere empty shadow of a dead god — that looks like bragging. But maybe it plays better with the punters than “After realising that the demons I fought and ‘beat’ were mere illusions, I realised that I was an illusion too, and I vanished.”

[Joerg]

48 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

But if we want an explanatory theory, it needs to work for Wakboth, Ragnaglar, and certain other cult-not-currently-possible dead Chaos gods (but not Thed and Nysalor), as some Chaos heroquests do work — take a bow, Sedenya.

Against me with my pretend-Jeff hat on, I was reading HeroQuest Glorantha, yesterday, and that seems to suggest Sedenya did encounter Wakboth on her quest, even going so far as to have her say, “I defeated Wakboth and exchanged places with him” (p. 182).

(IIRC, Wyrm’s Footnotes #10 doesn’t identify the demon as Wakboth and has its defeat before she binds Gbaji — which makes sense, I think: dismiss/defeat your demons first, then push on to the emptiness of Nirvana.)

In "The Lives of Sedenya", this Chaos entity is not identified with the Devil, but rather with primordial Chaos. The coded script is fairly crucial to understanding the difference between say Vivamort accepting Chaos and the Red Goddess accepting or rather embracing Chaos. It also is different from how Arachne Solara embraces Chaos, although there are more similarities there than with Vivamort's conversion.

Wakboth is a convenient label for Moral Evil Chaos, and thereby a convenient label to pronounce a particular expression of Chaos as moral evil.

The Lunar Way recognizes the seduction into moral evil for those Illuminates who become Chaotic by choice, and the almost unfailing depravity that follows from non-Illuminates who become Chaotic by choice. The examples are plentiful - Parg Ilisi, Tatius the Bright, his Spolite replacement as Dean of the Imperial College...

Shamans can (and will) conduct propitiatory services to chaotic entities (like e.g. Thed) and even contract them for magical tasks without (necessarily) becoming chaotic themselves. The typical caveats about deals with the devil remain, and there is always a risk when approaching Chaos.

[mfbrandi]

49 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

If you want to be persnickety, just because a god says they did something doesn't necessarily mean they actually did it. Especially if it's self-aggrandising...

Another reading would be: I exchanged places with Wakboth, and now I am the moral evil of the mundane world [empire, slavery, etc.] and “pinned under the Block” [will soon be reduced to a lump of rock in the middle air].

Then Argrath’s tearing down the Red Moon is liberating Sedenya by an act equivalent to lifting the Block from the Devil. Sedenya’s own illumination was occluded, which is why it yielded power in the middle world. (No, none of this is original, of course — but it seems to fit with both RG as Devil and Red Moon destruction as her liberation.)

[mfbrandi]

14 minutes ago, Joerg said:

The coded script is fairly crucial

In the version where Wakboth comes at stations 2 (empty victory of the RG) and 6 (full victory of the RG), he may stand for nothing more than entering the otherworld (easy — any fool can ‘die’) and coming back (with the goodies = hard).

EDIT: Although coming back with the Bat may make the “full victory” over chaos-as-evil ironic and make the “I am the Devil, now” reading tempting. Maybe.

Edited April 15 by mfbrandi
addendum

[Joerg]

11 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

EDIT: Although coming back with the Bat may make the “full victory” over chaos-as-evil ironic and make the “I am the Devil, now” reading tempting. Maybe.

According to the Redline History of the Lunar Empire, only the foes of the Red Goddess perceived her flying steed as the Crimson Bat. The faithful Lunars perceived a purple hummingbird as her steed instead.

Which is why I expect a lot less bat symbology and a lot more hummingbird symbology in Lunar temples serving the faithful.

[Ynneadwraith]

29 minutes ago, Joerg said:

According to the Redline History of the Lunar Empire, only the foes of the Red Goddess perceived her flying steed as the Crimson Bat. The faithful Lunars perceived a purple hummingbird as her steed instead.

Which is why I expect a lot less bat symbology and a lot more hummingbird symbology in Lunar temples serving the faithful.

Amazing what rose-tinted spectacles will do for a chaotic apparition 😉

From now on I'm playing it as Lunars outright calling the crimson bat 'The Hummingbird', despite it fully looking like the horror-demon-bat to everyone else. Is it a euphamism? Does the Bat present itself differently to its enemies compared to its feeders? Who knows?

[Akhôrahil]

3 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

EDIT: Although coming back with the Bat may make the “full victory” over chaos-as-evil ironic and make the “I am the Devil, now” reading tempting. Maybe.

[Malin]

I have always been of the opinion that if Wakboth is the moral evil of the mundane world within time and trapped there, then the Wakboth you meet on a heroquest is formed from your own inner evil, that little shade of darkness at the heart of every mortal. Or, he can be formed by the evils of opposing forces on the quest. In either case, it is the mortal heroquester that brings the fuel that becomes the devil with them.

This is why some can call the Red Goddess, once mortal, the devil, while others call Argrath the same thing. Every mortal can be the devil, if given the opportunity.

Edited April 15 by Malin

[Eff]

5 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

In the version where Wakboth comes at stations 2 (empty victory of the RG) and 6 (full victory of the RG), he may stand for nothing more than entering the otherworld (easy — any fool can ‘die’) and coming back (with the goodies = hard).

EDIT: Although coming back with the Bat may make the “full victory” over chaos-as-evil ironic and make the “I am the Devil, now” reading tempting. Maybe.

I mean, the line in Heroquest: Glorantha is very plainly and unsubtly about calling the Red Goddess the devil. Any reading which offers any degree of redemptive potential is directly contrary to the intent and thus is resistive in some fashion.

[Akhôrahil]

1 hour ago, Malin said:

I have always been of the opinion that if Wakboth is the moral evil of the mundane world within time and trapped there, then the Wakboth you meet on a heroquest is formed from your own inner evil, that little shade of darkness at the heart of every mortal. Or, he can be formed by the evils of opposing forces on the quest. In either case, it is the mortal heroquester that brings the fuel that becomes the devil with them.

This is why some can call the Red Goddess, once mortal, the devil, while others call Argrath the same thing. Every mortal can be the devil, if given the opportunity.

Hell is empty, and all the devils are here?

[Tatterdemalion Fox]

There was, there was not.

3.1: When I descended, I met there the Devil, named Wakboth. 3.2: He overthrew me, and then I overthrew him. 3.3: From his mouths rose the chant: MENE MENE TEKEL WAKBOTHSHIN. 3.4: And by MENE, he meant “I have numbered the days of your kingdoms and brought them to an end.” 3.5: And by TEKEL, he meant “You have been weighed and found wanting.” 3.6: And by WAKBOTHSHIN, he meant “Your kingdoms have been handed over to me to devour as I please.” 3.7: So to you, Death of Empires, I proclaim these words: MENE MENE TEKEL SEDENYASHIN.

- Excerpt from the Castle Blue Sutra

On 4/12/2024 at 7:45 AM, mfbrandi said:

It is tempting to think that if a Gloranthan can tell a story, they can visit that story made solid in an otherworld theme park — that all the stories ever told are there and accessible in an interactive visitor attraction — but that doesn’t seem to be what we are supposed to conclude. What do you think?

We have precedent: the way to the Spike and the Celestial Court is shut. No one can find their way back. (Now some, they find their way to the Court of the Emperor, and it certainly seems to be on some great mountain, but that cannot possibly be the Spike, now can it?)

7 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

To me, it is binding Gbaji — a mere empty shadow of a dead god — that looks like bragging. But maybe it plays better with the punters than “After realising that the demons I fought and ‘beat’ were mere illusions, I realised that I was an illusion too, and I vanished.”

“Who cares for you?” said Teelo Estara, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

Edited April 15 by Tatterdemalion Fox