Does anyone else read/play this setting this way?

[Joerg]

6 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Given Jeff's postings that show equivalencies in looking back from our real-world time into the past and Gloranthans looking similarly back in time, I think for most Gloranthans the God-learners might be on par with the Vikings - a great invading scourge that eventually was defeated and destroyed and wielded evil and forbidden magics. 

European history has fewer recent Dark Ages and cataclysms, although the Black Death might be our Fall of the Previous Age hallmark - about as long ago as the Machine Wars. Elsewhere, we get the depopulation of the Americas caused by the Columbian "Exchange", about as long ago as the Dragonkill War, followed by an Inhuman Occupation.

The Viking Age and the Middle Sea Empire each lasted a bit under 300 years. The crusades as in attempted reconquest of Outremer (the Holy Country) lasted shorter, but on par with the Slontan interactions with the Gloranthan Holy Country. Subsequent "crusades" closer to home lasted longer, with only the Templars suffering the fate of the God Learners. The Teutonic knights lost their meaning along with the Hanseatic League, but the orders of St. John and its successor the Maltese knights still are active (being two of a few NGOs running ambulance services over here in Germany) - in comparison, the Rokari and the New Idealist Hrestoli are closer to (some semblance with parts of) their predecessors.

A massive difference between the Age of VIkings and the God Learner era is the much greater amount of written sources surviving from that era. For the Viking Age we get some contemporary reports by their victims (in the Frankish and British kingdoms) and some visitors from the Islamic world, and records about the Varangian Guard in Byzantium. In their own voice we only get a few fragments of staved poetry collected by their Christianized descendants in Iceland - about as genuine as the Rokari accounts on the Hrestoli/Makanist and Malkioneranist philosophies, or the nostalgic romances sung on the Castle Coast.

The Gloranthans have less contemporary literature from the EWF, despite its strong levels of literacy (compared to our histories). The loss of comprehension of Auld Wyrmish plays a role in this, as do the purges enactedby the vengeful Pelorians (Sairdite and Talastari Orlanthi, Dara Happans, Carmanians) (and to a lesser degree, in Ralios).

Perhaps a better parallel might be the temporary loss of the classical Greek knowledge in the successor states of the Western Roman Empire - even with the marriage of Theophanu to Otto II, little of the body of Greek literature made it back into these Dark Age-founded kingdoms. The Crusaders re-discovered some of the philosophers, especially the fourth "crusade" which captured Byzantium. For the EWF, the parallel event would have been the Dragonewts Dream lifting the seal on the Big Rubble.

 

Another major difference to any period of our history is the longevity of major figures in Glorantha (and less major ones like Hofstaring Treeleaper as well): the Red Emperor, Great Sister, Godunya, Sir Ethilrist, Sheng Seleris, Belintar, Gaiseron, Theoblanc all provide personal continuity for more than a century of activity.

[French Desperate WindChild]

I don't know what is magic in glorantha. I mean... from a gloranthan perspective..

To answer, the first thing should be to define what is "magic" ?

cambridge dictionary -tell me if it is a good resource for those who speak so much better than me 😛 -

Quote

the use of special powers to make things happen that would usually be impossible, such as in stories for children

usually impossible...

well, as anyone is able to cast a spirit spell I would not say that gloranthan would say they practice magic. They "just"  use a spiritual energy from another plan. In the same way that they walk, run, speak, read. It needs effort, of course, but that's just usual.

 

I would say the same with casting a rune spell. Everyone knows that you just have to "learn" some secret from your god to be able to obtain some divine effect. Nothing incredible, just normal. So that's not magic too

 

What about sorcery then ? now that we know that scholars, anywhere in the world (even LM) can learn some weird secrets and manipulate the energy of the world, that is just more difficult than learning a spell from a spirit, you must read (pouah !) but that's just... normal like a physician today.

 

So no there is no magic in glorantha. Or maybe if you meet a hero (Argrath, Red emperor, ...) you may consider that they make magic as hero stuff is usually impossible.

 

What we call magic in glorantha is only effect that, in our real world, would be usually impossible to obtain

 

that doesn't mean there is no spectacular effect, no color, sound, etc... just that very powerful casters are in the same way that very great artist, very strong fighter, very smart searcher, etc...

 

 

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

I don't know what is magic in Glorantha.

This amused me:

• French sociologist … Marcel Mauss … set forth his conception of magic in a 1902 essay, “A General Theory of Magic”. Mauss used the term magic in reference to “any rite that is not part of an organized cult: a rite that is private, secret, mysterious, and ultimately tending towards one that is forbidden”. Conversely, he associated religion with organised cult.
  — Wikipedia: Magic (supernatural)

Think what a boon that would be in game design terms! No faffing about running the annual crop blessing through the magic system, as magic is something done by sociopaths like Argrath and not nice religious people like us. Basically just for chaotic NPCs, hardly warranting player-facing rules, at all. 😉

[Darius West]

On 5/6/2024 at 2:04 PM, Memestream said:

Yet not perfectly! Their story is a delightfully brilliant illustration of the inherent philosophical absurdity that challenges us incessantly, among other things. They did all the math and lined up all their ducks, yet their conviction that they resided within a clockwork universe bound by deterministic rules ultimately proved incomplete!

Nah, they just didn't understand their clockwork universe to enough decimal places. 😄

[mfbrandi]

On 5/6/2024 at 5:04 AM, Memestream said:

They did all the math and lined up all their ducks, yet their conviction that they resided within a clockwork universe bound by deterministic rules ultimately proved incomplete!

Perhaps the deterministic clockwork universe is just what post-God Learner Gloranthans take to be the God Learner Weltanschauung. But perhaps that is a bastardised take on them and their research programme — that was all the benighted barbarians could make of GL subtlety, but they put the crude caricature to their own use and it kinda works for them. It is not that “we are all God Learners, now”, more that we are all parody God Learners, now, taking what we think they learned (output) and neglecting their methodology.

So what were they like? Experimentalists and empiricists, surely. I like to think of them as operationalists who were not seduced by their own operationalizations — they knew they were sidling up to reality, not meeting it head on — their definitions might be wrong, there might be other operationalizations as good, there might be things they don’t know how to measure or model, but still there is a virtue in working with what can be measured and modelled, now. But did they think they had a hotline to the truth, or did they just think they had useful tools which they might make yet more useful?

Since the lab blew up long ago, we can afford a bit of charity to the enablers of empire. 😉

[Memestream]

 Okay, unfortunately this is going to draw me into providing a summary for my unified theory of Gloranthan (meta)physics. Namely because we've invoked such an esoteric definition of 'illusion' that I am practically compelled to do so in an attempt to enunciate some of the stickiness therein.

On 5/5/2024 at 6:12 PM, Ormi Phengaria said:

this post

 

I would start by positing a structure roughly analogous to what follows:

Spoiler

Chaos-Infinite Potential-Void-Primary Mover- Invisible God-Thing Itself-Whatever You Wanna Call It

v

[

Runes-"Atoms of Concepts"-"Platonic" Primitives

v

Gods

v

"Gods' Time" - The "Fetal Glorantha"

v

"Time" - "Mundane" Reality

v

Mortals

] = Glorantha - The Living Moment - Unfolding Consequence - The Tao that Tao Not Tao

 

Now, there's causality in both directions up and down that "hierarchy"(for lack of a better term), but in the way that there's causality between both directions between one's central and peripheral nervous system, it's circuitous.

Now, as far as I'm concerned, the only thing that can be argued as truly "real" are the parts outside of the brackets, both of which are impossible to define or comprehend regardless of the amount of effort or skill put in, because their essential nature, should they have any such thing, is predicated on being beyond category. Categories are something that follow from, and are contained within Glorantha and/or Chaos, not something that can contain them. The best we can hope to muster in describing either of them is something like "It is what it is" if we're being even a little intellectually honest. Even all of the stuff within the brackets is subject to categorization owing to *subjective* or *illusionary* discretion. "Objectively" it's all Chaos and/or "Glorantha," and we(and the entities residing within the setting for that matter) simply have a subjective/mortal experience of these ineffable...somethings...everythings...whatevers.

 

When mortals embark on Heroquests, they don't "go" anywhere as I see it, their perspective aligns with a region of being that grants them far greater "mechanical advantage" in this hypothetical network of circuitous causality. In such a state, their actions are no longer localized in effect to their one little tiny part of the peripheral nervous system, the strange nerve in the toe of Glorantha that they are, but instead hold signaling effects relevant to much broader portions of the system. Regardless, it's all an "illusion" under the esoteric definition we're working with, because nothing about the truly objective nature of Glorantha/Chaos changed. It's all still firmly in the 'it is what it is' camp.

Rune spells, spirit magic, all that stuff, same thing but to a lesser degree. "Mundane" feats use the exact same infrastructure, but even more pared down.  It's all figurative intercellular signaling, or Chaos/Glorantha talking to itself(The Dream of Brahma as it were), as I see it obviously, YGWV, and frankly mine varies between itself fairly often.

Now, onto more "mundane"(or simply not crackpot?) ideas that jumped out at me:

On 5/6/2024 at 5:26 AM, mfbrandi said:

How do we deliver blurred lines and adequate levels of FUD if the rules deliver clear and unambiguous results? (Giving the GM — and only the GM — the authority to say “I lied earlier: that is not really what happened” doesn’t sound like it would make for a satisfying game.)

This bothers me a lot too. It seems that there is an as of yet unresolved dilemma in systems design which leaves us with one of two options, you can adequately gamify physics or you can adequately gamify narrative input, but you can't have both. I suspect this is one of many reasons that there's been so much resistance to formalizing rules around heroquesting, because keeping it loosey goosey lets you create a space where people can interact with narrative on a game level if you want that to be part of your thing.

On 5/7/2024 at 7:18 AM, mfbrandi said:

So what were they like? Experimentalists and empiricists, surely. I like to think of them as operationalists who were not seduced by their own operationalizations — they knew they were sidling up to reality, not meeting it head on — their definitions might be wrong, there might be other operationalizations as good, there might be things they don’t know how to measure or model, but still there is a virtue in working with what can be measured and modelled, now. But did they think they had a hotline to the truth, or did they just think they had useful tools which they might make yet more useful?

I tend to look upon them as philosophical pragmatists of the "it works so it must be right" variety of empiricist. I wasn't aware of Operationalism as a formal term until this discussion, but a cursory look into how it compares and contrasts with Pragmatism is uh, evidently a rather academic subject to say the least. Still, I always tended to assume that a God Learner wouldn't distinguish between improving agency and knowing more of the truth, and would see there being a natural continuity between the two in sort of an arete(the real world version, not the Mage one!)-like concept.

Edited May 8 by Memestream
Readability

[Nick Brooke]

You might enjoy Andrew Logan Montgomery’s blog post about The Sin of the God Learners. He expanded on those ideas in a later Facebook post. Which I’ve copied into the spoiler section because I know some of you don’t do social media.

Spoiler

This was a response in another thread, but at Nick Brooke’s request I am making it a new post.

As a preface; there is a perception out there that Theists “think this” and Animists “think that” and sorcerers “think something else” and that is the end of it. But that is not really the full picture, and you are never going to get what the Lunars are actually driving at (or other mystics) without stepping back and looking at the picture as a whole.

To get us there, let me turn away from Glorantha just a moment. Let me drag in Kabbalism.

Kabbalism proposes four levels of reality. Atziluth is the highest level of reality. It is commonly called “Nothingness” because it is undifferentiated and beyond definition. It can’t be described. This is what the Buddhists mean when they talk about nirvana, or what the Tao Te Ching is describing;

“The tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be spoken is not the eternal Name…
…mystery and reality emerge from the same source. This source is called darkness.
Darkness born from darkness.
The beginning of all understanding.”

This darkness, this void, think of it as Zero. Technically Zero is “nothing,” but Zero also contains every single possible number within it. n + -n is Zero. Zero contains all the infinite positive numbers and the infinite negative ones. In Glorantha, we call this is the Primordial Chaos—the Chaosium—that the Runes emerged from.

On the next level, Briah, ideas and archetypes form. Zero becomes 1 and -1, darkness and light, hot and cold. In the Bible, it is by separating the Void (Zero) into opposites that Yahweh creates. In Glorantha, these are the Runes that emerge from Chaos and form unique identities.

Yetzirah is the next level. Here, the separated ideas and concepts interact with each other to form myriad combinations. In Glorantha, this is the Gods Age. 

Finally we have Assiah, the world that we perceive. It is the lowest world and the product of the interactions in Yetzirah. This is the Mundane World of Glorantha.

These worlds, or levels, all co-exist simultaneously. And this is where magic comes into play.

Shamans draw their magic from Assiah. The spirits and the energies they command exist there in the Mundane World.

Theists draw their magic from Yetziah, the stories were the gods interact with each other. 

Sorcerers draw their magic from Briah, the Pure Forms or Runes.

Mystics…and Illuminates…are trying to reach Atziluth, that perfect transcendent nothingness.

Now understand that all of these levels co-exist. They are all “true.” But they can seem to be different things. It is raining. That is water falling from the sky. But on another level that is Orlanth freeing Heler. On another, the interaction of Air and Water and Earth. On another, the rain is a illusion…there is no difference between the rain, the sky, the earth, and you.

Discuss children discuss.

 

Edited May 8 by Nick Brooke

[Nick Brooke]

A couple of my comments under that post may deserve a broader audience:

Spoiler

I think part of the problem you're having is that you want there to be a "right answer," not several tiers of increasing complexity.

This isn't like Plato's Cave, where only the Philosopher who walks in daylight seeing things as they really are experiences TRUTH and everyone else (the ones blinded by the light, the ones aware they're only seeing shadows cast by real objects, and least of all the ones content to watch shadows in the dark) is to a lesser or greater degree removed from TRUTH.

Atziluth, Briah, Yetziah, Assiah are all real. You can interact with any of them to access power and magic. It gets harder the higher up the pyramid you climb: so Spirit Magic is easy and weak, Rune Magic is routine and more powerful, Sorcery is complex and still more powerful (just look at the Range and Duration of the Closing, if you doubt this), while true Mystics are incredibly rare, but can fundamentally change the world.

But these approaches all *work*. They don't necessarily all work for YOU: if you're lazy, or don't have specialist training, or fail to attain illumination, you would do better to stay working at the lower levels of the pyramid, with handy Spirit Magic for everyday use and Rune Magic on Sundays. As most Gloranthans evidently do. We can't all be Sedenya Reborn in Flesh, thank goodness!

*

Science nerds might prefer to think of a line from Newtonian Mechanics > Einsteinian Relativity > Quantum Strangeness.

They’re all approaching the unknowable; they all work well enough within their sphere (but leave some currently-unknowable bits dangling); I’m sure they’ll all eventually fit into some Grand Unified Theory of Everything, which will take one brilliant mind to manifest for everyone.

After which the way we look at the world will change, yet again… but the world itself won’t have changed at all. It’s always been that way.

Using sorcery to fight battles is like using quantum mechanical calculations to swat a fly. An idiotic waste of time and effort: Newtonian physics works just fine for that. Sure, once you mallet the fly it could be alive or could be dead… but the odds are strongly in your favour.

 

[mfbrandi]

5 hours ago, Memestream said:

I tend to look upon them as philosophical pragmatists of the “it works so it must be right” variety of empiricist.

“If it works, it works — right, schmight! — and if it stops working, there are other things to try.”

After all, Glorantha is already full of people who think that they are right (with nothing like justification). Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have a faction (even if dead and gone) who weren’t hung up on being right — and through sophistication rather than naïveté?

Supposedly, Hitchcock said, “I didn’t say actors were cattle. I said actors should be treated like cattle.” One might think of God Learner identifications in the same way, but of course nobody has to. The idea charms me, but probably only me.

[Memestream]

5 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Supposedly, Hitchcock said, “I didn’t say actors were cattle. I said actors should be treated like cattle.” One might think of God Learner identifications in the same way, but of course nobody has to. The idea charms me, but probably only me.

No, it's really cool. I'm just personally preoccupied with Absurdity in an unhealthy way, and see it everywhere I look. It would be hypocritical of me to be too hard on the God Learners for a number of reasons, the least of which being that I'm quite an ardent admirer of early geometers who discovered our own runes so to speak.

It's entirely worthwhile to point out that the God Learners very arguably just found the parts which were (by all observable measure)reliable and just decided to see what those parts could teach them. I mean, that's kind of what's at the heart of sorcery. We have these things, we know these inputs lead to these outputs, and we learn about and influence the world on that (at least initially) humble basis free of assumption.

Besides, if I sell them to determinism, what room is left for the Mostali?

10 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

You might enjoy Andrew Logan Montgomery’s blog post about The Sin of the God Learners. He expanded on those ideas in a later Facebook post. Which I’ve copied into the spoiler section because I know some of you don’t do social media.

You know, just as I had hit the reply button and laid my head down on the pillow, the thought came to me, "Maybe the Sefirot would have been a better thing to bring up than some dubiously oblique and possibly confabulated personal reading of Hinduism, oh well the milk is spilled..."

Glad somebody else did it for me! I haven't read a lot of Montgomery's material, but I like everything I've read so far.

[Geoff R Evil]

I think at this point it’s worth summarising that what we are saying, is that RQG blends magic and reality in the game world so completely it’s just….normal.

In many other game systems, artificial limits are placed upon magic users to stop them getting too powerful vs the ‘muggles’. There are no magical limits in RQG because it’s so well blended with the world, offered up in so many interpretations that blends, challenges and explains one another, that we could discuss forever the interpretations. But the use of myth ensures all interpretations remain sufficiently fuzzy and interpretable that we can all happily end up at YGMV, yet easily play in one another’s games and understand everyone’s personal interpretations.

It’s why, once you get to that ah ha moment @Memestream started this thread with, you just cannot play other games and enjoy them so much…well at least I cannot. They are so grey in comparison.