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

[Joerg]

2 hours ago, Darius West said:

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.

As with everything, the poison effect comes from how you dose it. When I first met Andrew Bean he was researching the treatment of wool with low energy plasma to make the wool less itchy. If wool survives such a treatment, stuff that survives exposure to the bi-radical of oxygen will be able to cope, too. A sufficiently cool plasma can be little more than an irritant, about as bad as ozone in the air.

2 hours ago, Darius West said:

And what pray tell would that be?  Asbestos lung tissue?  It doesn't work.

Plasma can be hot to the touch, but needn't be able to transfer all that much energy. (That said, I used plasma to sinter silicates for my diploma thesis as one attempt to grow crystals.)

St. Elmo's Fire is a practical example of plasma that does not burn the matter it touches.

 

2 hours ago, Darius West said:

No creature would have ever developed lungs if they weren't breathing air for a very long time.

You are approaching this from evolutionary biology and chemistry. If you think of plasma as a tangible form of light and energy that life could take in before the birth of Air/Storm, as a part of the runic design of Man, Beast, Plant and even Dragonewt, then a paradigm shift would simply unlock a new functionality from parts already present.

Who knows, maybe there was (or still is) some form of organ or organelle able to interact with Moon that simply did not manifest in the majority of Glorantha?

 

2 hours ago, Darius West said:

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?

The Mostali appear to have been willing to stop the progression of elements with the arrival and then diversification of Sky - first Aether (Tin), then the three celestial sons Brass (Lodril), Gold (Yelm) and Silver (Dayzatar). Air was outside of their plans or blueprint, an aberration of sky infused into Earth.

2 hours ago, Darius West said:

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

My experiments with high energy lasers had the unfortunate tendency to turn solid matter directly into plasma, which had several adverse effects.

2 hours ago, Darius West said:

Oops, I nearly missed this one.  Smoke is actually fire deprived of oxygen.

Smoke is flame matter exhausted as a consequence of oxygen deprivation or if cooled below combustion temperature (like the condensing vapor of candle stuff evaporating from the wick after you suppress the flame). It can be used to conserve meat or fish. I have yet to observe ham to combust spontaneously when unpacking it from whichever covering it had, or during the curing process. Same with the malt used for brewing or for whisky mash...

 

2 hours ago, Darius West said:

Contact with smoke in an airless room will burn you, because it is holding explosive energy that simply requires oxygen to be released.

Smoke is small solid particles suspended in the ambient (non-liquid) fluid - usually a gas. Pyroclastic smoke will fry you and leave something like the bodies in Pompei and Herculaneum behind. Low temperature smoke like that unfriendly tobacco consumer puffing in your direction is (mostly) harmless to your skin, less so to mucous membrane.

I suppose you are talking about smoke in a burning building. Even in that case, it is a "can burn you" - most injuries in burning buildings do come from contact with cooled down smoke, and the inhalation of accompanying gases like carbon monoxide and dioxide (or worse by-products). The hot smoke you have been told about probably has to do with the blowback-effect.

Entering a room filled with 200°C air is like putting your hand into the oven with the bread. While it is possible to grab a loaf with your fingers and pull it out with at worst minor burns, that takes speed so your exposure remains short. You should avoid inhaling air that hot as it will cook your mucous membrane. Steam is even worse as it will condense, transferring even more heat. But all of that has to do with heat transfer, not fire or flame.

Gloranthan elements are tangible to a certain degree, like Darkness, Aether's plasma, or moonglow. Magical or alchemical processes can harden and even solidify them, turning them into metals (which, btw, are solids (or liquids) containing plasmas).

 

Back to the question whether a partially realized cosmos makes sense: to a certain degree, yes, as long as it follows a master plan. Glorantha's master plan may well have been different from the Maker's. Or Grower's, for that matter. Maker apparently was surprised by Storm and rendered incapacitated.

Edited May 20 by Joerg

[Darius West]

On 5/21/2024 at 12:39 AM, Joerg said:

As with everything, the poison effect comes from how you dose it. When I first met Andrew Bean he was researching the treatment of wool with low energy plasma to make the wool less itchy. If wool survives such a treatment, stuff that survives exposure to the bi-radical of oxygen will be able to cope, too. A sufficiently cool plasma can be little more than an irritant, about as bad as ozone in the air.

Which reminds me,  I need to contact Andrew in the next day or so.

On 5/21/2024 at 12:39 AM, Joerg said:

Plasma can be hot to the touch, but needn't be able to transfer all that much energy. (That said, I used plasma to sinter silicates for my diploma thesis as one attempt to grow crystals.)

St. Elmo's Fire is a practical example of plasma that does not burn the matter it touches.

On the other hand, St Elmo's fire is a great build-up of electrical charge, and you can't really breathe it.  It would also be very bad for plants.

On 5/21/2024 at 12:39 AM, Joerg said:

You are approaching this from evolutionary biology and chemistry. If you think of plasma as a tangible form of light and energy that life could take in before the birth of Air/Storm, as a part of the runic design of Man, Beast, Plant and even Dragonewt, then a paradigm shift would simply unlock a new functionality from parts already present.

Who knows, maybe there was (or still is) some form of organ or organelle able to interact with Moon that simply did not manifest in the majority of Glorantha?

Okay, I can sort of agree that life may have been different in the Green Age, and perhaps people were getting their energy from a sort of battery effect caused by latent magical electricity, but that means we have a different problem.  When Umath ripped Sky and Earth asunder to make room for himself, did that "ripping" somehow make everyone spontaneously grow lungs?  It should have been ecologically catastrophic if this was not the case, unless Air was already present but nobody knew, and they had breath without stopping to consider its use or origin because nobody stayed dead, as Humakt doesn't exist until later in the geography (there being no  time).

On 5/21/2024 at 12:39 AM, Joerg said:

The Mostali appear to have been willing to stop the progression of elements with the arrival and then diversification of Sky - first Aether (Tin), then the three celestial sons Brass (Lodril), Gold (Yelm) and Silver (Dayzatar). Air was outside of their plans or blueprint, an aberration of sky infused into Earth.

I think we should feel free to blame the Mostali for everything that ever went wrong in Glorantha.  They were the

On 5/21/2024 at 12:39 AM, Joerg said:

Smoke is small solid particles suspended in the ambient (non-liquid) fluid - usually a gas. Pyroclastic smoke will fry you and leave something like the bodies in Pompei and Herculaneum behind. Low temperature smoke like that unfriendly tobacco consumer puffing in your direction is (mostly) harmless to your skin, less so to mucous membrane.

I suppose you are talking about smoke in a burning building. Even in that case, it is a "can burn you" - most injuries in burning buildings do come from contact with cooled down smoke, and the inhalation of accompanying gases like carbon monoxide and dioxide (or worse by-products). The hot smoke you have been told about probably has to do with the blowback-effect.

Entering a room filled with 200°C air is like putting your hand into the oven with the bread. While it is possible to grab a loaf with your fingers and pull it out with at worst minor burns, that takes speed so your exposure remains short. You should avoid inhaling air that hot as it will cook your mucous membrane. Steam is even worse as it will condense, transferring even more heat. But all of that has to do with heat transfer, not fire or flame.

Agreed.  Apparently we have both seen this first hand, I suspect.  I certainly wouldn't want to breathe it.

On 5/21/2024 at 12:39 AM, Joerg said:

Gloranthan elements are tangible to a certain degree, like Darkness, Aether's plasma, or moonglow. Magical or alchemical processes can harden and even solidify them, turning them into metals (which, btw, are solids (or liquids) containing plasmas).

Back to the question whether a partially realized cosmos makes sense: to a certain degree, yes, as long as it follows a master plan. Glorantha's master plan may well have been different from the Maker's. Or Grower's, for that matter. Maker apparently was surprised by Storm and rendered incapacitated.

Before Time must have been a very strange place indeed.  The physics of a world without time, and air, and death is very hard to fathom in terms of life as we know it.  I mean, we can solve for time by using space and motion, and death by using a respawn or regeneration model, but the lack of air but the presence of lungs...  That's hard.