The cycle of killing someone and discovering you needed them for Glorantha to function?

[Eff]

28 minutes ago, Memestream said:

Maybe Hamlet's actually the source of the problem? Perhaps if we stopped telling this Hamlet story, this tendency of reality would get rippled out by the other narratives and allow us to do something other than kill ourselves in the name of vindication?

Well, there's always the Scottish play.

[Nick Brooke]

From Hamlet to RATM in one easy leap.

 

[Nick Brooke]

(I reckon it was a photocopier, FWIW.)

[mfbrandi]

12 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Somebody loaded the gun before hanging it on the setting wall.

Now you have me thinking of the Tunguska event as (a middle-world echo of) the fall of the Red Moon.

Spoiler

Never read it, but I have this nagging feeling it was reviewed in White Dwarf.

[Joerg]

On 5/9/2024 at 4:12 PM, Eff said:

Well, Yelm could go behind the skydome instead, which is impermeable to light where a star hasn't been punched into it. I'm fairly certain (YGWV) that this is how most people experienced the Sun in Godtime- the Sun came through Dawngate and left through Duskgate and spent night behind the sky, in the higher heavens.

Some sort of Sun Disk or a portion of the celestial Fire better had been doing this, or something similar (e.g. White Sedenya turning in the sky, sending her cone of light around the world below her) in order to have the deities of the days serving at Yelm's Court.

Sadly the God Learners (and possibly the Theyalans before them, not so sure about the ancestors of the modern Pentans, thought of the Evil Emperor sitting on an unmoving throne in the center of the heavens, and that is how Godtime days are described to us as an (almost) neverending Sunstop.

There is a possibility that young usurpator Brightface Yelm did change an earlier routine, but to my knowledge the first time Yelm emerged from Theya's gate was at the Dawn of History.

On 5/9/2024 at 4:12 PM, Eff said:

I think the descent into the Underworld is because the entity the Lightbringers Quest calls "Maggotliege" lit up parts of the Underworld, and so everyone native to the place knew the Sun passed, if diminished and dim, through the Underworld, and so that was part of the deal- Yelm goes down so that the Underworld continues to get light.

So that Yelm continues to spread Death to the Underworld?

[Joerg]

14 hours ago, soltakss said:

Nothing is needed for Glorantha to function.

  Hide contents

Argrath and his Trickster killed most of the Deities in Hell, so even they are not needed for Glorantha to function.

 

That was of course an elaborate ruse by the Trickster, an illusion to make the Evil Empire (Argrath's?) think they got rid of their old foils.

[mfbrandi]

11 hours ago, Memestream said:

Maybe Hamlet’s actually the source of the problem? Perhaps if we stopped telling this Hamlet story, this tendency of reality would get rippled out by the other narratives and allow us to do something other

Maybe there are at least two problems (ours, not the play’s):

• take a story
  pretend it is history
  violent metaphor turns to literal bloodspilling
   and the death of the ego
    leaves a nasty stain
     on the carpet
   
• the idea that going off script is an activity for dangerous lunatics
  — but consider music:
  it was said of Miles’ second great quintet at their peak that it didn’t matter what tunes they were playing
  
  and think of all the musicians who start each performance with
   no head
    no key
     no nothing
  they are not inscribing new stories for others to follow:
   it is a one-time thing
    so very un-Gloranthan

Edited May 11 by mfbrandi
formatting

[scott-martin]

8 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Now you have me thinking of the Tunguska event as (a middle-world echo of) the fall of the Red Moon.

We know that Gloranthan "moons" (temporary or dying planets) need to fall somewhere, leaving weird wreckage in their wake. I wonder if suns do too. Maybe that's why the luathans have had it after getting hit with yelm after yelm. If I thought the altinelans did it, I'd be angry too. Or maybe parts get hurled east . . . the blast could theoretically be big enough to reverse the polarity so perceived east and west flip. And if suns don't leave that kind of cosmological junk behind, what if anything does remain when a brightface dissolves? The souls fly in their various directions from the Dara Happan Book of the Dead of course but what does all the debris from the disintegrating body do to Gloranthan weather? 

Now was planet Umath a fugitive moon, a failed would-be sun or something entirely different? Who knows, who cares, MGF prevails. But it's tempting to blame the altinelans, who as we know intervened within time to ensure that the red moon rises and why would they do that. The path flips whenever the north jumper wobble turns into precession. The people of the north flip the switch.

Hamlet had a mill after all and it ground exquisite salt. 
 

7 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Maybe there are at least two problems (ours, not the play’s):

These problems seem to converge. Scripts are written and imposed on performers as the limits of their repeatable existence: initiates ritually rehearse the incidents of god and the full record of those performances add up to history, which for Gloranthans is only the sense of how the play is going so far before it reaches the final curtain and the stage resets for tomorrow's matinee.

People who get caught up in the puppet show (माया, ) identify more strongly with various aspects of the performance and insist that those lines must be read as written. If not, might as well tear down the proscenium because there's no boundary any more between the nice box of dramatic reality ( dare I say, spider web marionette opera) and the vertiginous  of everyday life where everybody's rolling dice and we are forced to accept the results.

Whew. That's enough for almost anybody's game. But out there on the grotowskian frontier the lunatics lean as hard as they can on every chord on the charts in order to see where the moment can take us right now. These people are either impossibly decadent, so rich in sacred theater (too many runes) that they can't find a thrill in the cheap seats, or everything else has been taken away from them so they need to seek alternative channels. Or maybe they're just weird. Either way, sometimes you want to twist a point of costuming or staging or the text itself beyond recognition to see what new thing you can liberate from it.

The rote rehearsal turns experimental. Macbeth goes voodoo, Miles Davis' uh "witches" brew gets real. Maybe the gods themselves are summoned onto the stage to resume whatever unfinished business they might have. Or maybe you're just screwing around, drifting from incident to incident like an old-time adventurer to see whatever there is to see and do whatever there is to do. Moving between the scripts like moving between the notes. For riding[,] the gods require[s] a horse. Chivalry. Situationist cowboys. Qaballeros. Dionysus in '69. Prax. Experimental heroquesting is only hard work when you're trying to sacrifice the old script and get into the right head space to write a new one. Mostly it's just riding in the middle.

The Fourth Age is like that. Maybe the Fourth Age, like all science fiction, isn't evenly distributed. But the future is what's coming either way. Sometimes it's murder. Sometimes it's the miracle to come.

Edited May 11 by scott-martin
paragraphing, miles davis, the bacchae, zinger, leonard cohen show up like scenes cut from theatrical release. what do they add? a sense of luxury, redundant fullness (旨味, too many runes) . . . oh and one more thing for the riders

[Nick Brooke]

14 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

was planet Umath a fugitive moon

Fugitive Moon, huh?

(At least you didn't say "rebel moon." That would be insulting.)

15 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

it's tempting to blame the altinelans

[Eff]

49 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

We know that Gloranthan "moons" (temporary or dying planets) need to fall somewhere, leaving weird wreckage in their wake. I wonder if suns do too. Maybe that's why the luathans have had it after getting hit with yelm after yelm. If I thought the altinelans did it, I'd be angry too. Or maybe parts get hurled east . . . the blast could theoretically be big enough to reverse the polarity so perceived east and west flip. And if suns don't leave that kind of cosmological junk behind, what if anything does remain when a brightface dissolves? The souls fly in their various directions from the Dara Happan Book of the Dead of course but what does all the debris from the disintegrating body do to Gloranthan weather? 

Both the Dara Happans and the Esrolians agree that a defeated sun went upward, which suggests a rather grotesque source for the golden color of the old sky dome. But then again, that might simply be a shedding of the regalia. Reversion to Antirius, and when Antirius is forced into that state, reversion to a primordial Manimati. 

Yelm-M's parts splattered across the landscape but seem to have mostly been well-behaved, but what about Yelm-A's parts? 

[jajagappa]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

The rote rehearsal turns experimental. Macbeth goes voodoo, Miles Davis' uh "witches" brew gets real. Maybe the gods themselves are summoned onto the stage to resume whatever unfinished business they might have.

The Tournament of Luck and Death! 

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

And if suns don't leave that kind of cosmological junk behind, what if anything does remain when a brightface dissolves?

Stars, light, burning sky, heaps of golden dust, and the burnt out remains: ashfall.

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

But it's tempting to blame the altinelans, who as we know intervened within time to ensure that the red moon rises and why would they do that. The path flips whenever the north jumper wobble turns into precession. The people of the north flip the switch.

The Long-bearded Measurer and the White Lady, our Sister of Mercy. Cunningly hidden behind masks of Wisdom, Innocence, and Harmony and protected by walls of Ice. 

[Eff]

Quote

altinelans

Probably some kind of star-lore here with the jumpers. In the west, Rausa rules the Luathans, and if you speak the right languages natively, you can equate the two. The northern pillar got broken, and that might be why the northern leaper is Kalikos... though if you're operating with the right materials her star rose within recent centuries. But what she has to do with Altinela or the prospective Altina, friend/foe/reincarnation/frenemy/studiously neutral, probably requires expeditions to the north. The east is Theya, but the Theyalans are elsewhere. At her feet are the Vithelans proper. 

And the south just has the One Night Wish, and whether that was known as Promalt or Bomono I haven't the foggiest. I suppose I know who to ask for stories of wandering and irregular stars. Might have to dye my hair white first. 

Edited May 11 by Eff
Y. T., Yelorna

[jajagappa]

13 minutes ago, Eff said:

The northern pillar got broken, and that might be why the northern leaper is Kalikos... though if you're operating with the right materials her star rose within recent centuries. But what she has to do with Altinela or the prospective Altina, friend/foe/reincarnation/frenemy/studiously neutral, probably requires expeditions to the north.

Kalikos is just the journeyer to the north. The real secret lies in the Winter Palace and what is that but the secret bastion of the North where the true rulers lurk behind the cold frigid winds of their Champion Valind.

15 minutes ago, Eff said:

And the south just has the One Night Wish, and whether that was known as Promalt or Bomono I haven't the foggiest.

The Southern Jumper, the Dog Star, who regularly leaps up with joy at his master's passage, and then descends into Hell to keep up with his master's descent. 

But there too we have the Firefall which dumps the liquid burning Sky upon the sands where once the Red Camp and later Artmal's Blue Palace stood. Pamalt and his immortal Agitorani still guard the place and keep the Bad Moons from Rising again.

 

[Memestream]

11 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

Maybe there are at least two problems (ours, not the play’s):

5 hours ago, scott-martin said:

These problems seem to converge.

Holy smokes, talk about blood from a turnip! I was only attempting to make the relatively pedestrian point that life might imitate art more often than art imitates life(doubly so in Glorantha I would say), but yeah that all seems to fit as well. What follows is perhaps more tangential than convergent, but perhaps it will afford more to riff on in this vein.

 

That said, Clint Eastwood has always fascinated me. Initially because his films are at face value tales of derring-do which exalt the power of an individual who lives in the moment and does what needs be to make right in the world. Later, because I discovered that many of these same stories drew on an apparent classical(Homeric even) basis of story telling which was considerably more nuanced, and which presented a subtext wherein the tragic qualities of these übermenschen were apparent, and perhaps in a degree which exceeded their supposed heroic agency. I thus came to be informed of the impression that Clint Eastwood himself must be a very thoughtful person with a privileged insight into the human condition, a figure capable of deconstructing the notion of heroism itself, and furthermore in a way that was eminently watchable by hoi polloi and calloused intelligentsia alike. A Hero of the Gloranthan sense here in our very own world, who had ventured into the mythic space to retread this complicated archetype so many times that he had enabled some part of himself to transcend his mortal coil and become enmeshed in the world of the logos itself.

Then I saw him talking to a chair, and worse yet, in a context which was absolutely sordid with hysterical pathos toward the end of banal instruments of control. To be clear, I refer to the whole arena in such terms, not the team he played for on that day.

At first I reasoned there must be some hidden nuance to this bizarre performance much as there was clearly, inarguably, nuance in his other work. This was the same man who made Flags of Our Fathers, and released it virtually concurrently with Letters from Iwojima after all. A man who had demonstrated that humanity and heroism transcend nation, geography, and political affiliation, the proof was right there in his work for crying out loud! Naturally, I began to probe others about the content of his work and how it compared to this recent outburst. What I found was that people tended to only agree with my interpretation of his work when we shared a common base of media outside of his work, and those who did not share that common base of media drew something entirely different from it, with the only clear majority being that his films had some sense of layering and nuance to them, but what that nuance suggested was as varied as the people I spoke to about it.

One of my friends who is a diehard consequentialist, an operationalist even one might say, promptly pointed out that his films were more popular among people who didn't hold my view than among those who did. He then further went on to point out that most of those people were under the impression that his films only further edified the spectacle of public pathos that I was finding myself so distressed by, and that there was no apparent discontinuity in his character. I felt convinced that they were simply mistaken, searched high and low for authorial statements of intent, and came up empty-handed in spite of the fact that scholarly literature is replete with comparisons between his work and classic Greek tragedy. This only lent further credence to my anecdotal experience that only people "like me" felt the same way about his work. 

We can point out similarities between plots all day, and we can even look at the similarities of content such as violence, catharsis, redemption, etc, but it seems that what all of this 'adds up to' in theme is subject to a process which is far more nebulous. As a million hands have carried the Iliad from antiquity to modernity in the form of Unforgiven, the meaning, and even the intent of the teller, has changed substantially, and has indeed become so mutable and nebulous that it is itself no more than a smoking mirror which reflects the energetic currents some dub ethos and pathos back into the world around it. There is no true meaning of the story, just as there is no single image which appears in a mirror(smoking or otherwise), but what remains steady is the consequence of human instrumentalisation of media to amplify their perspective at that moment.

 

In Glorantha, we see the same stories told over and over again(Like somebody killing somebody they actually needed, just to make clear that I know the topic of the thread and care about it!). Perhaps it's not the stories that matter though, but the shuffling of the actors, sets, props, and directors which bloom into the thousand petaled lotus of creation. A sort of fuzzy relay system which allows for novelty to grow from a fixed set of axioms as everyone attempts(and fails!) to reproduce them in the greatest game of broken telephone ever. A way to cheat out myriad multitudes from singularity. Perhaps Argrath slaying the Red Moon is 'just' the broken telephone's rendition of Orlanth slaying Yelm.

Edited May 11 by Memestream

[mfbrandi]

36 minutes ago, Memestream said:

Perhaps Argrath slaying the Red Moon is ‘just’ the broken telephone’s rendition of Orlanth slaying Yelm.

Perhaps they are all just Ahab vs. Moby-Dick: angry man wants to kill god.

[Darius West]

On 5/9/2024 at 4:11 PM, XcessiveNinja17 said:

If the Red Moon is the embodiment of the Moon Rune and Wakboth is the embodiment of the Chaos Rune, then would this not be removing two things that Glorantha really needs to function? Without Moon Magic there might no longer the regular maintenance of the Mortal Realm and its laws of reality by connecting it to the God Time. Without Chaos there might no longer be a source of energy and mass for Glorantha itself - since all originated from Chaos in the first place.

The world worked just fine during the first and second ages when there was no Red Moon.

As to the removal of Wakboth, that is just the Goddess Glorantha finding out her cancer treatment has worked.

The great problem in the 4th Age is that a lot of Gods were "sacred utuma-ed" during the failed Arachne Solara's Net hero questand are no longer ossified, and might be considered dead.  This took a lot of the magic out of the world.  Of course gods don't really die, because they are immortal, so they will eventually re-form.  The biggest problem was the loss of Lhankor Mhy and literacy, as a lot of magic was tied up in knowledge.

[Darius West]

On 5/11/2024 at 7:56 AM, Memestream said:

Maybe Hamlet's actually the source of the problem? Perhaps if we stopped telling this Hamlet story, this tendency of reality would get rippled out by the other narratives and allow us to do something other than kill ourselves in the name of vindication?

Except that isn't what happened in Hamlet.  Hamlet was the victim of an assassination plot, but he has time to take revenge before the poison in his system takes effect.  Of course Hamlet IRL, Prince Amleth feigned madness, killed his stepfather and dumped him in a pig trough during a palace coup, and Amleth simply took the throne thereafter.  I do think Shakespeare's retelling adds depth to a simple Norse revenge saga though.

Edited May 19 by Darius West

[Darius West]

On 5/12/2024 at 1:34 AM, scott-martin said:

Now was planet Umath a fugitive moon, a failed would-be sun or something entirely different? Who knows, who cares, MGF prevails.

Just imagine the weirdness of a closed system world with no air.  There is fire/sky, and earth, water and darkness, but the fire consumes nothing and produces no smoke, and the world is effectively a vacuum where nobody breathes.  Is it any wonder the pressure build-up caused a rupture that let air in?  Whoever designed the world machine didn't understand that heat causes entropy.  The true source of evil in the world is poor design, apparently.

Edited May 19 by Darius West

[Joerg]

3 hours ago, Darius West said:

Just imagine the weirdness of a closed system world with no air. 

The space above the Earth (and its creatures) would be filled with plasma, the magical energies emerging from the Source adapted to Aether providing an ambient temperature. Flame is a condensated shape of that environment, as well as aurora effects.

 

3 hours ago, Darius West said:

the world is effectively a vacuum where nobody breathes. 

The creatures of the Green and Early Golden Age must have had some sort of respiratory system able to take in plasma and transmute matter into plasma. With Umath's birth Aether would have yielded that function to his son's new element.

Smoke as in dust levitating above the ground would have resulted from Lodril's impact. They would have crackled with lightning.

 

3 hours ago, Darius West said:

Is it any wonder the pressure build-up caused a rupture that let air in? 

For a pressure build-up, you need a compressible medium (like a gas or fluid). If you mean that this pressure built up in the belly of Gata, ok. That makes Umath the biggest fart in mythology, but essentially this air wanted to be let out rather than in. Alternatively, Gata may have sighed/coughed/sneezed.

 

[Memestream]

13 hours ago, Darius West said:

Except that isn't what happened in Hamlet.  Hamlet was the victim of an assassination plot, but he has time to take revenge before the poison in his system takes effect. 

Wait, are you saying that wasn't a literal ghost that approached him?

I must admit that it has been a long time since I have either read or watched it, and at the time that I did, I wasn't really tuned into that sort of subtext. I was more focused on plot and broad themes. I was convinced that he wasn't poisoned until very near the drawing of the curtain.

I guess I will have to make time for another viewing.

[John Biles]

15 hours ago, Darius West said:

Just imagine the weirdness of a closed system world with no air.  There is fire/sky, and earth, water and darkness, but the fire consumes nothing and produces no smoke, and the world is effectively a vacuum where nobody breathes.  Is it any wonder the pressure build-up caused a rupture that let air in?  Whoever designed the world machine didn't understand that heat causes entropy.  The true source of evil in the world is poor design, apparently.

Earth doesn't exist until darkness and water are already in place.  So the world machine comes into existence... before fire.

On 5/11/2024 at 10:34 AM, scott-martin said:

We know that Gloranthan "moons" (temporary or dying planets) need to fall somewhere, leaving weird wreckage in their wake. I wonder if suns do too. Maybe that's why the luathans have had it after getting hit with yelm after yelm. If I thought the altinelans did it, I'd be angry too. Or maybe parts get hurled east . . . the blast could theoretically be big enough to reverse the polarity so perceived east and west flip. And if suns don't leave that kind of cosmological junk behind, what if anything does remain when a brightface dissolves? The souls fly in their various directions from the Dara Happan Book of the Dead of course but what does all the debris from the disintegrating body do to Gloranthan weather? 

Now was planet Umath a fugitive moon, a failed would-be sun or something entirely different? Who knows, who cares, MGF prevails. But it's tempting to blame the altinelans, who as we know intervened within time to ensure that the red moon rises and why would they do that. The path flips whenever the north jumper wobble turns into precession. The people of the north flip the switch.

Heat matter enough and it turns into gas.

With nothing between Fire and Earth, Fire heated the Earth until some of it turned into Umath (the rest came from the heat). 

Umath's emergence created the space for life to actually exist on Glorantha.

 

[Ynneadwraith]

6 hours ago, John Biles said:

Earth doesn't exist until darkness and water are already in place.  So the world machine comes into existence... before fire.

Building on the transition to time thread, all of this happened before time was a thing. So there was no real 'before' or 'after'. Perhaps it was all happening at once. Like different engine rooms within the world machine, some filled with nothing but darkness and water.

Though of course, it could be that after time became a Thing then it was always a Thing, and everything was forced to sort itself into 'before' and 'after'. I wonder if this is what the dwarves mean by 'broken'.

[Joerg]

7 hours ago, John Biles said:

Earth doesn't exist until darkness and water are already in place.  So the world machine comes into existence... before fire.

I have been working on and off on a mostali text for quite a while now. That text starts with the creation of Rock (and the Spike) before the Making of Darkness alongside the metal lead and the lead caste mostali (and in my story, the lead caste mostali are there before they build the Bowl of Darkness).

Another (even weirder) story has the Spike as a von-Neumann-probe injected into the Void to create a universe.

[Darius West]

10 hours ago, Memestream said:

Wait, are you saying that wasn't a literal ghost that approached him?

Amleth was never approached by a ghost afaik.  Shakespeare added that bit.  In any case, all his ghost dad king did was tell Hamlet that his uncle/stepdad had murdered him (the king, not Hamlet).  The ghost certainly doesn't warn Hamlet that Claudius intends to murder Hamlet, because he doesn't want to yet.

Hamlet doesn't get murdered until he is stabbed during the "friendly" bout with Laertes who has a poisoned blade.  Uncle King Claudius colluded with Laertes because of Hamlet's killing of Polonius, which was semi-accidental.  By then Claudius is very ready to remove Hamlet, but it all goes wrong and nearly everyone gets killed, which was pretty awesome.

Edited May 20 by Darius West

[Darius West]

20 hours ago, Joerg said:

The space above the Earth (and its creatures) would be filled with plasma, the magical energies emerging from the Source adapted to Aether providing an ambient temperature. Flame is a condensated shape of that environment, as well as aurora effects.

Plasma has a horrible tendency to set plants and people on fire, hence plasma weapons.  Even the aurora would be extremely damaging to living tissue if you were caught in it.

20 hours ago, Joerg said:

The creatures of the Green and Early Golden Age must have had some sort of respiratory system able to take in plasma and transmute matter into plasma. With Umath's birth Aether would have yielded that function to his son's new element.

And what pray tell would that be?  Asbestos lung tissue?  It doesn't work.  No creature would have ever developed lungs if they weren't breathing air for a very long time.  There isn't a mention of a myth as to when the living creatures of the world suddenly all develop lungs so they can partake in the power of the air.  There is no deity who goes around specifically making and handing out lungs like morokanth thumbs in the mythology, so it is a safer bet to suggest that people simply didn't know that air was there, and thought it was part of the sky/fire  until it started to move thanks to Umath cracking the Sky Dome and bursting in, less as a fart than as a reverse caesarian section.

9 hours ago, John Biles said:

Earth doesn't exist until darkness and water are already in place.  So the world machine comes into existence... before fire.

 I think the world machine is being formed piece by piece according to a plan, that starts with formations within darkness, then requires water, then earth, then fire.  It is a gradual assembly that requires diverse parts to work.  The Mostali seem to have lost control of the system when they over-pressurized the dome and allowed air into the system via a breach.  Was this deliberate or was it a system breaking down?

9 hours ago, John Biles said:

Heat matter enough and it turns into gas.

 Heat anything enough and it turns into gas, last time I checked (unless it has already reached a plasma state.

21 hours ago, Joerg said:

Smoke as in dust levitating above the ground would have resulted from Lodril's impact. They would have crackled with lightning.

Oops, I nearly missed this one.  Smoke is actually fire deprived of oxygen.  Contact with smoke in an airless room will burn you, because it is holding explosive energy that simply requires oxygen to be released.  I know this because I have a friend in fire research who showed me during an experiment.  It was something of a surprise to me at the time.

9 hours ago, John Biles said:

With nothing between Fire and Earth, Fire heated the Earth until some of it turned into Umath (the rest came from the heat). 

This seems plausible within the myths.  So did Umath burst into or out of the Sky Dome then?

2 hours ago, Joerg said:

I have been working on and off on a mostali text for quite a while now. That text starts with the creation of Rock (and the Spike) before the Making of Darkness

All you need is a lever and a firm place on which to stand, and you can move the world.  The philosopher's stone.