Meeting Wakboth

[scott-martin]

On 4/12/2024 at 9:45 AM, mfbrandi said:

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?

Once is always free to read deliberately "wrong" in pursuit of wisdom, power or MGF. With that in mind, I would start by interpreting the Block not so much as a gigantic cube of cosmically hard rock but as the way the astral traveler encounters the reality principle itself, the blockage that insulates the world from truly diabolical desire. Because I lead a nice wholesome lifestyle I don't think I know anyone right now who has even seriously tried to contact the forbidden urge . . . I'm happy to keep the Block between me and them, the situation simply doesn't come up. There are no player character cultists of terror and because I am the game master there are not even any NPC cultists of the real wakboth. 

However, because the return of the repressed is a foundational law of glorantha, there will always be symbolic leakages and other "grisly portions." The primal crime can be abstracted, talked about, even instrumentalized. Someone like a Ralzakark or an Argin Terror works the blasphemous tantra, assigns (cuts up, butchers, "portions") roles in the received drama of the unhappy family. They participate in something like a cult of someone they call the devil.

But even that's a mask (a bolongo) for their own family situation, the situation that really matters. Symbolic devils, abstract "unhappy families." The real devil is elsewhere. When that devil is present, creation is not. You're out there. The game is about things that happen on the inside, where creation is here behind the block. There are some other stories like that where for various mechanical reasons the rules of consciousness are suspended . . . outside the law, before the law (kafka reference), beyond the law.

The block is solidified law. A paradox in the law illuminated arkat.
 

[mfbrandi]

5 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

the blockage that insulates the world from truly diabolical desire.

And there I was thinking that the Block was what prevented the mundane world being rid of “moral evil”. 😉

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Malin said:

the Wakboth you meet on a heroquest is formed from your own inner evil

This I like. The Devil is only found anywhere if you take him with you. I have always hated the Devil — Gloranthan or otherwise — as externalised “moral evil”. An idea as tedious as hell.

[scott-martin]

Just now, mfbrandi said:

And there I was thinking that the Block was what prevented the mundane world being rid of “moral evil”. 😉

He would be gone by now but would probably do something horrible to the ocean on the way out. This way he decathects at a slow enough rate that the Canal isn't overwhelmed, even if it means tolerating his persistence. 

This is also Time.

[mfbrandi]

2 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

This is also Time.

The flip-flop between Devil as entropy/extinction and Devil as evil. Some may try to square this by having “existence failure” — whether by rapid unscheduled disassembly in some Zen monastery or the slow unwinding of time — as the ultimate evil. As you know, that has never sat right with me.

[Tatterdemalion Fox]

The Devil as an urge to flip over the board and wipe it clean. (Bear with me, even if you don’t have shades of Mordred in your Wakboth.) The urge of the Devil as entropic destruction and reveling in it, of reducing everything back down to nothing; if there has been good, let it be perverted and broken to show where it has never been justified, and if there is evil, let it be justification to speed up the dissolution.

The great victory of Orlanth at the end of the world was in saying: the world is broken, but it is still worth saving. In rejecting the void-urge to give up, give in, and put away the chairs before turning off the lights. The Devil is everywhere in the whole broken manifested world, and still we live in it. And every year we tell the story of how the world and the gods were judged by the void, and how they bore up under that judgment and chose to live anyway, just like we do.

And if Argrath isn’t stopped, eventually he’ll wipe the board clean, himself, or so one version of the story goes; he’ll declare that a world that contains the Red Moon and the gods that allowed his suffering are both unworthy in his eyes. And who will be left to say, again: the world is broken, but it is still worth saving?

(And what is under the Block? Metal, like the corpse of any god, only this is metal that makes the world sick. Catch the more literate Storm Bulls putting up signs around the Marsh that say THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR! WHAT IS HERE IS DANGEROUS AND REPULSIVE TO US!)

(I would have said petroleum, instead, but that’s claimed already.)

[Eff]

53 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

However, because the return of the repressed is a foundational law of glorantha, there will always be symbolic leakages and other "grisly portions." The primal crime can be abstracted, talked about, even instrumentalized.

The taste of the apple, or was it a pomegranate? But of course, there's the big block in the way. Storm Bull put it there. "Couldn't be me!" Acknowledging knowledge means at some point acknowledging capacity, potentiality, culpability. It takes four arms or more to realize that the mask you're facing may be your own. Much simpler to attribute matters to the headache. 

(And what does Ralzakark want? More Oddis?)

[mfbrandi]

33 minutes ago, Tatterdemalion Fox said:

Argrath … eventually he’ll wipe the board clean … he’ll declare … a world that contains the Red Moon and the gods … unworthy

Argrath is not an attractive character, and we could certainly pitch him as some kind of anti-Nietzsche who refuses to say “yes” to the eternal recurrence.

But on the other hand, we could see the gods as unmotivated, stereotyped, destructive behaviour — and our purported excuse for indulging in it: “a big god made me do it and ran away” — and Argrath as the one to break the loops and set “us” free. Remember that in Glorantha everyone is their own worst enemy. Arkat = Nysalor. The Red Moon = Argrath. The point is to cut one’s own head off, and each of us must be our own Argrath. It is OK, you are allowed to put a clothes peg on your nose.

Sure, the world is worthy, but it remains worthy when it has been demystified — the gods fed to the Devil and the Devil diced — the mundane world does not need otherworlds and the promise of eternity to redeem it. It is fine as it is. You come down from the trip and find yourself in Leicester. The only dragons are small and feathery, and that is OK.

Only kidding: he’s awful, just awful! 😉

Edited April 15 by mfbrandi
quote even more egregiously trimmed

[Eff]

3 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Sure, the world is worthy, but it remains worthy when it has been demystified — the gods fed to the Devil and the Devil diced — the mundane world does not need otherworlds and the promise of eternity to redeem it. It is fine as it is. You come down from the trip and find yourself in Leicester. The only dragons are small and feathery, and that is OK.

A mystic sought the Red Moon, and climbed to the top from the bottom, seeking audience with the Great Sedenya. When he got there, he asked the Transcendent One, "Why didn't you take the Young Elementals and make your own world? Why remain in this one?"

The Goddess looked at him with four of her faces. The first said, "All of my records are here," and winked. The second said "Puppet shows are no good without someone watching." The third said, "I'm not clever enough to invent another Etyries, or Valare, or Eserela, or- well, anyways, if I want to ride that train, I have to pay for a ticket." The fourth said "Didn't I?" and laughed. When the mystic woke, he was afflicted with the most horrible delusion, insisting that the world was called "Glorontha" and this one had been edited.

[Tatterdemalion Fox]

Of course, reading the Devil as the urge to say that the world does not deserve to exist lines up neatly with Teelo Estara facing up against him, dried red paint on her throat, and a life of poverty and fear and rootlessness stretching smaller and smaller behind her, and finding that she does not have a justification for any of it, after all. And then down she tumbles until she is caught by a net/web/shawl/goose’s neck.

To say nothing of the Lives of Sedenya account.

1 minute ago, mfbrandi said:

Sure, the world is worthy, but it remains worthy when it has been demystified — the gods fed to the Devil and the Devil diced — the mundane world does not need otherworlds and the promise of eternity to redeem it. It is fine as it is. You come down from the trip and find yourself in Leicester. The only dragons are small and feathery, and that is OK.

Only kidding: he’s awful, just awful! 😉

I’m rather open about my obvious bias for the Theists (or I’d like to think I am); They Are All Us, you might say. Perhaps all the idols should be smashed and the proletariat liberated from recursive self-defeating thought, but I’ll miss all those little shrines from my walking tour of southern Sartar. Especially that moment of looking up at a bronze statue of Sedenya and thinking: oh, so this is what you meant.

[Eff]

What else do I know that was made by an Unholy Trio in a sort of Doom Conjunction, which unleashed all manner of possibilities and changes upon the previous static and perfect eternal world, which existed isolated from any external influence? Which encouraged the young and the old alike to take the raw power of Creation into their hands, heedless of what they might make? 

Which is of uncertain numbering, of internal contradictions and incoherence? Which is blocked off by masks of its more tractable successors? I have seen the face of the Devil, and it is a woman with red hair and a rock lizard dueling. Crushed beneath a block of Law by a bull.

[Nick Brooke]

“By bull” is also an acceptable translation. (The four asterisks are unspoken.)

[scott-martin]

1 hour ago, Eff said:

what does Ralzakark want?

I am not his dungeon master and do not have his strict analytic records. However, looking at the fragmented NPC notes discarded in the wreckage of modern Dorastor I think that whatever he thought he wanted wasn't actually it. He tried that already. It didn't take. If he's looking for company, they are not it. Whoever interests him now is whoever is up there in the castle. Maybe they're it, maybe not. It's a work in progress.

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

you are allowed to put a clothes peg on your nose

The pulmonologists let me keep it. It looks like an IUD on a plastic hinge. Supposedly its only function is to force stronger bellows breathing for the tests . . . the opposite of what you actually want when you're asleep and need to clear the nose for deeper dreaming, so it's funny.

51 minutes ago, Tatterdemalion Fox said:

down she tumbles until she is caught by a

We only hear about the ones who come back, who get caught. The world didn't end because some stupid big brother somewhere got so pissed off that his rage called an unbreakable space rock down from heaven. As the line goes, "the ones who return are the ones who suffer" or struggle, the agonists. The challenge is to "live as if you've never lived before."

I think of the bite of apple or pomegranate seed becoming uneaten, coughed up in some heimlich hugging maneuver. I think of my favorite line from Kristeva, there is a kind of problem in eating the fruit too soon . . . but maybe it always comes as a shock and the fall is always a shove. What I still enjoy about the two devils collision hypothesis is that you can see the transition in Greg from innocence to experience captured on the wall for all time like a nuclear shadow. Before the moment, everything bad in the world was an abstraction, something thermodynamic ("angels are mathematical") and agnostic in its moral architecture like your answers to a Hesiod reading quiz. After the moment, formerly good people make bad choices and lives are ruined. Greg has thickened. We have wakboth now and nobody talks about kajabor.

The puppet show ends with harlequin harrowing hell.

What a marvelous thread.

 

Edited April 15 by scott-martin

[Eff]

31 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

I am not his dungeon master and do not have his strict analytic records. However, looking at the fragmented NPC notes discarded in the wreckage of modern Dorastor I think that whatever he thought he wanted wasn't actually it. He tried that already. It didn't take. If he's looking for company, they are not it. Whoever interests him now is whoever is up there in the castle. Maybe they're it, maybe not. It's a work in progress.

Poor creature! Someone should invent stamps for him to collect.

[scott-martin]

6 minutes ago, Eff said:

stamps

Yeah, his overt satanism only incidentally interests me so I'll let people who do more work with the unicorn king weigh in on his motivations and his plan . . . but the flip side of the abjected identity is the collector's urge to recover the full set (and setting). If stamps do not exist in his glorontha he will be forced to invent NFTs.

[Eff]

4 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

forced to invent NFTs.

I had underestimated the degree of work I'd already been doing with the unicorn king. Though in another guise. Tricky how many of those Ralzakark has!

[Malin]

10 hours ago, Tatterdemalion Fox said:

(And what is under the Block? Metal, like the corpse of any god, only this is metal that makes the world sick. Catch the more literate Storm Bulls putting up signs around the Marsh that say THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR! WHAT IS HERE IS DANGEROUS AND REPULSIVE TO US!)

I love this and I am stealing the hell out of it!

Divert a river goddess to try to dilute the taint, but wouldn't it be better to speed things up and use all the gods and goddesses? Put them in a filter (net) and dump the devil in it and hope it all evens out. Whatever survives can be something new, reset the cycle and perform this mortal utuma where we have balanced both sides of our selves. That we first had to live through decades of horrors as we confronted our own best and worst inner decision doesn't matter. What does is the Right Action at the end.

(I genuinely love Argrath as a character and myth, maybe I should change my name to Argrath Apologist)

Edited April 16 by Malin

[svensson]

Responding to the top post...

Since heroquesting has a temporal and Godtime components, those should be addressed separately.

No living mortal [at least none that I've heard of] has encountered a portion of Wakboth the Devil and returned to tell the tale. That covers the temporal aspect.

Insofar as the Godtime component is concerned, unless you're questing specifically to confront Evil Itself encountering Wakboth means that your plan has gone horribly horribly wrong. Your survival is seriously in question at that point, and even if you survive you may have to make a literal deal with the Devil and may end up tainted by Chaos for your trouble.

You have been warned.

[EricW]

57 minutes ago, svensson said:

Responding to the top post...

Since heroquesting has a temporal and Godtime components, those should be addressed separately.

No living mortal [at least none that I've heard of] has encountered a portion of Wakboth the Devil and returned to tell the tale. That covers the temporal aspect.

Insofar as the Godtime component is concerned, unless you're questing specifically to confront Evil Itself encountering Wakboth means that your plan has gone horribly horribly wrong. Your survival is seriously in question at that point, and even if you survive you may have to make a literal deal with the Devil and may end up tainted by Chaos for your trouble.

You have been warned.

Is that absolutely true? 

Quote: King of Sartar

 

Argrath and the Devil

Without the facade of the Red Goddess and the Lunar Empire, the true nature of the enemy was revealed when Wakboth, the God of the Ultimate End, came forth to rule humankind.

He ascended to the throne of the North.

The righteous citizens and deities of Peloria rose in opposition to the growing evil. When they assembled they were like the Sun and burned away the polluted lives of the masses of worthless citizenry that dared to oppose them. The Army of the Emperor assembled and they marched to the Fields of Distain to fight. There, they stood as they had stood since before the start of Time, and the nation defied the Devil. Wakboth smeared the people like jelly, and after the Battle of Distain, even the gods were just food.

Then Wakboth took the crown, which was decorated with the living bodies of a thousand high priests and priestesses, each which served a god of some unthinkable vice, corruption, perversion, or mutation. The Unholy Trio were given empires to rule.

 

Perhaps Wakboth was able for a while to grant horrifying magic to a thousand high priests of unthinkable vice, corrupt, perversion or mutation and their followers? 

[mfbrandi]

3 hours ago, Malin said:

I genuinely love Argrath as a character and myth, maybe I should change my name to Argrath Apologist

Well, Argrath is a bit like the Devil: he comes in ≥ two versions giving ≥ three flavours. Is he Kajabor or Wakboth? How do we feel about Kajabor? (Wakboth is set up so as to prevent that question being asked in polite society.) What was it Bazarov said, “at the present time, negation is the most useful action”?

12 hours ago, scott-martin said:

We have wakboth now and nobody talks about kajabor.

Well, we can (I guess) introject Wakboth and carry him around with us, but you cannot swallow Kajabor, you can only let Kajabor swallow you. Kajabor cannot introject anything as the Hollow K is the perfect memory hole — poof! it is gone. Kajabor was in the end able to master self-swallowing, so now no one can talk about him/her/it. I miss the empty fellow. It is like I have this … void inside. 😉

Defining the Devil as evil is a cheap trick. Defining the Devil in non-moral terms and then asking your audience to accept that he is a wholly bad thing is a high-risk strategy and may get you laughed out of town. The Devil as pure destruction … has applications.

Edited April 16 by mfbrandi
≥

[Ynneadwraith]

On 4/12/2024 at 2:45 PM, 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?

I've always squared it that it's not enough just to tell a story, you need to actually believe it as Truth. And because 'Truth' in Glorantha is transitive rather than fundamental, Godtime obligingly distorts.

The issue being that as Godtime is outside of time it has no concept of 'this is what is believed now', so it tries its best to synthesise the believed Truths of everyone everywhere all at once.

Pity poor Godtime. It's got the worst customer service job in the world. Every customer, everywhere, throughout all of time...is always right.

[svensson]

31 minutes ago, EricW said:

Is that absolutely true?

Insofar as my reading tells me. YGMV and all, but I should think that if someone had encountered Wakboth and lived to tell about it that person would be famous somewhere.

I've got a pretty extensive RQ2 and 3 collection and nothing I have says anything about the Devil after the Spike, well, 'spiked' him. There are references to parts of Wakboth [the Eye of Wakboth mostly], but nothing about Wakboth taking any actions of his own will and accord since Time began.

I should probably also say that the RQ apocrypha continually surprises me. My collection isn't complete and the occasional 'Stafford-ism' pops up get me every now and again.

[svensson]

26 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

Pity poor Godtime. It's got the worst customer service job in the world. Every customer, everywhere, throughout all of time...is always right.

**ring**

"Godtime customer service. This is team member Solana speaking. Please be aware that this call may be recorded for quality assurance and canon ret-con purposes. May I have your name and the name of Heroquest you're calling about, please?"

"Uh, I'm Bob and I wanna know about 'Mostal and the World Machine'."

"Thank you, Bob. May I have your question."

"Sure. How do magnets work?"

"DAMMIT BOB! You may think you're funny but I have a job and..."

**click**

😆😁🤣

[For those of you who don't know about this, the Mormon church has  a program for those youngsters who cannot physically perform their required mission when they turn 18. These are the 'Elders' (and yeah, I'm not gonna an 18 y/o an 'elder' anything) are the ones who man the Q&A phones and on the LDS website. Their job is to put a positive face on the faith and direct the curious to their local temple. Given the LDS' stance on certain issues, there was a period of time where people would troll the kids on the website with off the wall questions that would be difficult to look up. 'How do magnets work' was the classic meme question. That question became so popular among the trolls that the kids manning the website have a cut-and-paste ready to go now]

Edited April 16 by svensson

[Ynneadwraith]

15 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

This I like. The Devil is only found anywhere if you take him with you. I have always hated the Devil — Gloranthan or otherwise — as externalised “moral evil”. An idea as tedious as hell.

14 hours ago, Tatterdemalion Fox said:

The Devil as an urge to flip over the board and wipe it clean.

13 hours ago, Eff said:

What else do I know that was made by an Unholy Trio in a sort of Doom Conjunction, which unleashed all manner of possibilities and changes upon the previous static and perfect eternal world, which existed isolated from any external influence?

55 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

Defining the Devil as evil is a cheap trick. Defining the Devil in non-moral terms and then asking your audience to accept that he is a wholly bad thing is a high-risk strategy and may get you laughed out of town. The Devil as pure destruction … has applications.

What if the Devil is right? What if this world is sick and cannot be healed? What if the slate needs to be wiped clean to make way for a new Dawn? A new cycle in which Death, and Thed, and Mallia, and all those horrible things haven't been found yet. In a cycle of rebirth the old must die before the new can flourish. The Devil isn't murder...it's euthanasia. Whether these things are synonymous is up to you to decide. Orlanth clearly has a view (or perhaps it was just the method he objected to).

Spoiler

See? This is how they get you. 'Let's just wreck everything and be horrible' is a fringe attraction, despite what the doom-moralisers would have you believe.

'The world needs you to wreck everything and be horrible'. Now that is different. Our own history demonstrates just how much more seductive that argument is...

 

13 hours ago, Eff said:

What else do I know that was made by an Unholy Trio in a sort of Doom Conjunction, which unleashed all manner of possibilities and changes upon the previous static and perfect eternal world, which existed isolated from any external influence? Which encouraged the young and the old alike to take the raw power of Creation into their hands, heedless of what they might make? 

Aha! The cycle does repeat, but is stalled by Zeus' refusal to bow to his son, and gaming the system with a daughter. Birth and succession is always a painful thing, as Umath demonstrated, but to turn back partway through is folly. Once the pain's through it's always better*.

Spoiler

*...unless, tragically, it isn't...

 

Edited April 16 by Ynneadwraith

[mfbrandi]

8 minutes ago, Ynneadwraith said:

What if the slate needs to be wiped clean to make way for a new Dawn? A new cycle in which Death, and Thed, and Mallia, and all those horrible things haven't been found yet.

Or we naturalise death and disease and we wipe away the attitude that they are intrusions from “outside” that no morally upstanding person could compromise with. There is a strain in Gloranthan religion that wants to turn every Kajabor into a Wakboth and won’t be happy with anything of the mundane world unless it can be painted with the brush of the gods. What needs to be cleansed, the world or the way we are determined to see it? The progressive disenchantment of the world from Age to Age would seem to be a given, the fight is over whether this is a good thing. (And as the same metaphor can be used to different ends, some of the fights will be pointless. 😉 )