Thanatar ecological slot?

[Aurelius]

Out of all the cults of Glorantha, Thanatar is the one I cannot wrap my head around. The problem is somewhat straightforward, but I don't understand what kind of people would end up worshipping Thanatar, and where in Glorantha that would even work out. 

As a civilized knowledge-hunting cult it sort of has to operate in the big cities of the civilized world, but at the same time nothing is as un-subtle as leaving behind a trail of headless bodies. Cannibals and blood-drinkers can take street rabble, but the Thanatari would really prefer the head priest of Buserian. The cult has no magical way of luring worshippers in, and there's no species that would inherently worship Thanatar, like Cacodemon, and as it is not a spirit cult, it has no inherent tribal function like Thed.

They can't lie in their hidey-holes eternally, like certain worshippers of Vivamort, and it's not a force of nature like Primal Chaos. Even the wisest lunari illuminates are likely to take an issue potentially going after their heads, regardless of whether chaos is an inherently evil element or not. 

So ... where are the largest temples of Thanatar, and how large are they? How do they recruit, and why would anyone join? Or the entire cult just a 80s misstep that has hard time fitting in Glorantha -- in a way where it would have been better to leave Tien, Than and Atyar as mythological beings that don't receive much worship anymore. 

[jajagappa]

16 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

Out of all the cults of Glorantha, Thanatar is the one I cannot wrap my head around. The problem is somewhat straightforward, but I don't understand what kind of people would end up worshipping Thanatar, and where in Glorantha that would even work out. 

Tien/Thanatar is something of the antithesis of Lhankor Mhy. In origin, this is the devil that stole, consumed, and ripped away knowledge for its own use - no exchange, no sharing, just taking whatever it wanted. If you didn't offer up your knowledge as an offering, Tien simply took it whether draining your mind and leaving you mindless or seizing your head for its own purposes (leaving your poor soul to watch in horror as it did so). 

The defeat of Tien shattered the being into multiple parts. Atyar is the greedy knowledge seeker - hoarding knowledge by devouring or consuming its source so others cannot have it. Than is the headhunter - taking your knowledge and magic via your head for its own use. 

Regardless of how Atyar survived, I see it as an urban cult, likely hidden amidst those who trade in knowledge. You might think of them as equivalent of some esoteric order of knowledge seekers - a private society that occasionally welcomes in a new member who shows inclination towards obtaining forbidden knowledge at whatever cost. 

Than (and ultimately Thanatar) on the other hand would seem to be a cult of power whose leaders rule (or support the rulers) in certain places through brutal use of knowledge and magic seized from others. (Think along the lines of Vlad the Impaler, perhaps) Small bands of Thanatari are likely near certain Chaos places like Dorastor or Snakepipe Hollow. But I could easily see some local ruler in the Lunar Empire succumb to the easy way to power that Thanatar offers. Maybe you'd find such in Spol in Carmania too. 

[Joerg]

Basically, Thanatari make good elite cadres for some of the nastier Dart Competitions. With their heads taken, the employers can even interview their slain foes.

[soltakss]

3 hours ago, Aurelius said:

Out of all the cults of Glorantha, Thanatar is the one I cannot wrap my head around. The problem is somewhat straightforward, but I don't understand what kind of people would end up worshipping Thanatar, and where in Glorantha that would even work out. 

Nasty, horrible people worship Thanatar, the description mentioned that even other Chaotic people don't like Thanatari.

3 hours ago, Aurelius said:

As a civilized knowledge-hunting cult it sort of has to operate in the big cities of the civilized world, but at the same time nothing is as un-subtle as leaving behind a trail of headless bodies. Cannibals and blood-drinkers can take street rabble, but the Thanatari would really prefer the head priest of Buserian. The cult has no magical way of luring worshippers in, and there's no species that would inherently worship Thanatar, like Cacodemon, and as it is not a spirit cult, it has no inherent tribal function like Thed.

It is the Chaos Knowledge God, and Knowledge is Power. Worshippers of Thanatar hunger for Knowledge, they even devour books and scrolls, removing the Knowledge and consuming it themselves. Potential worshippers of Thanatar are the family members of current worshippers or those who have an insatiable hunger for knowledge, often people who were kicked out of Lhankor Mhy, Irrippi Ontor, or Buserian. So, if a worshipper of Lhankor Mhy or Buserian got a Chaos Feature and were kicked out then they could maybe join Irrippi Ontor but are more likely to join Thanatar. 

Everyone knows about Thanatar, at least on a superficial level. He is the Head Hunter, the Devourer of Knowledge, and is to be avoided. 

3 hours ago, Aurelius said:

They can't lie in their hidey-holes eternally, like certain worshippers of Vivamort, and it's not a force of nature like Primal Chaos. Even the wisest lunari illuminates are likely to take an issue potentially going after their heads, regardless of whether chaos is an inherently evil element or not. 

A lot of them do hide away in their Temples, hoarding Knowledge. Some travel into the world to corrupt members of Knowledge Deities or to steal Knowledge. They also look for likely candidates to capture to take their heads. Some Thanatari are Alchemists and sell their potions to those who would buy them.

3 hours ago, Aurelius said:

So ... where are the largest temples of Thanatar, and how large are they? How do they recruit, and why would anyone join? Or the entire cult just a 80s misstep that has hard time fitting in Glorantha -- in a way where it would have been better to leave Tien, Than and Atyar as mythological beings that don't receive much worship anymore. 

The Temple of Heads in Dorastor has been written up and is available on the Jonstown Compendium. It is a nasty temple in Dorastor where cultists can move about openly and without fear. It also has a groovy HeroQuest that allows Knowledge Cultists to use a Magic Road through Other Side Temples to rescue a stolen book. I ran it at Continuum and it was glorious.

Other Temples are more secretive, hidden away in underground lairs, ruins, and secret caves. Than Ulbar, in the Tunnelled Hills, has a Thanatar Temple, I think.

Chaos Creatures who desire Knowledge can join Thanatar. Other Knowledge Cultists can be seduced to the ways of Thanatar, for secret or hard to find Knowledge, or for shortcuts in gaining Knowledge.

The cult is a bit of a mishmash, of course, but that is because it stole a lot of its organisation from Lhankor Mhy and the Mistress of Inspiration in the God Time. Some people don't like its organised structure, but that is part of its appeal to me. It is a twisted, civilised, bureaucratic cult unlike any other. The God Learners created Thanatar from Than and Atyar in my Glorantha. 

 

 

 

[svensson]

Thanatar exists for the greedy, the impatient, the anti-social, and, to some extent, the lazy. He is the 'knowledge bandit', the complete antithesis of Lhankor Mhy and Irripi Ontor. Instead of study and the search for knowledge, Thanatar's cults steal it. Instead of building a knowledge base, they subvert the knowledge of others for the sake of their own quest for power and secrets.

Some organizations with powerful leaders who are able to control them, Thanatari cultists form an elite corps of... 'intelligence officers', I guess, in that their job is to ferret out secrets for their master using whatever means necessary.

There are likely few large temple complexes for Thanatar, the nature of the average Thanatari cultist being a significant bar to forming large groups. The group in 'Shadows on the Borderlands' would be a pretty large cult given the difficulties they have to work with. There are Thanatar temples in known Chaos regions [Dorastor, SPH] and it appears that the Lunars tolerate them to some extent. It appears that Lunar intelligence and propaganda services [Spoken Word, etc.] may be penetrated to a fare thee well by Thanatar and Krarsht cultists. We also learn in 'Shadows' that there's at least one large temple complex in Carmania as well.

Remember, however, that just like with all things Glorantha Thanatar is how you as the referee wants to portray them. YGMV. When I last ran a Glorantha game, my players were terrified of Thanatari after seeing one of their leaders decapitated at a distance and not being able to do anything about it.

 

Edited November 18 by svensson

[metcalph]

I think a good background for a particular headhunting cult might be a large family group or small clan.  Because then the cultists could have an invisible line against the taking of heads within the group and direct their murderous energies outside.  

[mfbrandi]

Knowledge and power are not the same. If I teach you something, you gain knowledge but I don’t lose it — I may even come to know the subject better. But if I give you some of my power (or POW), I have less. Different conservation laws (if knowledge has any).

So how are Thanatari lusts distributed between that for power and that for knowledge? Perhaps they are a power-seeking cult first, with knowledge merely a means to that end. Perhaps they started out as knowledge-seekers but strayed from the straight and narrow path. (I don’t claim to know.)

[scott-martin]

To piggyback on the great contributions already on the thread, every chaos cult IMG defies or perverts normative spiritual ecology in some way. The math simply doesn't add up in a way that supports their long-term persistence: sometimes the mechanical rewards are so trivial that it's hard to imagine why any healthy person would sign up, sometimes it's the opposite scenario and we have to wonder why this thing hasn't taken over the world.

My hot take on this cult in particular is that it might have once been a viable alternative knowledge storage system in the Dawn Age that atrophied into its current vestigial role sometime between the fall of the Bright Empire and the fall of the Stygians. As we know, knowledge is normally stored temporarily in living human "heads" (specifically the sorb gland of course) and when they die it rolls into the spirit library of the ancestors for the long term. And there is a third way in the middle: grimoire "magic," which revolves around writing it down one way or another where it can then circulate outside human transmission, neither really living nor dead. 

Each of these systems shines in various contexts in normal conditions. However, than-y-ATYAR(k) [read: "autarch," autarchy] represents an effort to manage information across systems by using heads (sorbs) as knowledge storage long after physical death would have released that memory to the spirit world where conventional DKF-shunning sages can no longer access it unless you decide to bend the forensic spells in that direction. On one hand, this makes the head a kind of book that anybody can consult in something like perpetuity. Heads and their contents can be bought, sold and stolen. They are property. Needless to say, this becomes an incentive for these people to covet living heads that might contain exotic knowledge or simply high-grade storage. It becomes tempting to murder people who put the hard work into learning things you don't know.

And that's where the other hand drops. Their process of preserving heads is imperfect, trapping aspects of the personality in there with the information. The soul is robbed of its natural outlet and eventually goes "mad" in there. The recordings degrade like a Nigel Kneale VHS under pressure of "ghosts." As your library deteriorates, you need to harvest more heads just to keep what you have. Sometimes these people get so jealous of the "normal" hard work channels that they get really good at cursing texts to read-and-wipe the information. This eliminates a competing source of this knowledge, making their lore more valuable (they need it to be valuable to justify the math) because now all the work that went into that painstakingly lettered scroll is gone just as surely as you'd lit it on fire . . . and nobody can ever get skill checks from that copy again. The downside, of course, is that this only makes your personal head more tempting as a target.

What initially looked like an easy way to ace your midterms now becomes a nightmare and so on. There is no free lunch but lazy students will be with us always so as long as LKM and its associates exist, versions of this cult will operate on the fringe as a kind of visible shadow. They don't want communities. They don't like people. They only gather under rare and ritualized circumstances to achieve mythological goals. (IMG material components for the preservation process are so hard to fabricate that they have to cooperate at least a little bit in order to get everything they need.)

I think the cult persists within Time as a reservoir of dank magical formulae, a kind of black market of the mind or "dark web." While they differ from real markets in terms of refusing to trade what they have, that's really kind of a blessing. Get in there, smash the heads, release the skill points and spells back into the spirit world. The healthy lore will come back around. The rest probably comes back too but why are we worrying about that? Maybe it comes back clean, fresh start. Anyway all of this gives the beards a little righteous cardio, which frankly given their lifestyle they could use. Gets them out of their uh heads.

Edited November 17 by scott-martin
added flavor + added clarity, "Stone Tape" reference

[jajagappa]

2 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

If I teach you something, you gain knowledge but I don’t lose it — I may even come to know the subject better.

That's the normative situation. And that's where Thanatar differs. Effectively Thanatar "taps" knowledge. He takes it, you lose it (and perhaps your head too). It is Unequal Exchange to use some old lingo, or Theft, of a very special kind. In a world where knowledge can be gained or lost, that becomes a power currency.

[metcalph]

I agree that the classic thanatari temple as depicted in the sources is unsustainable.  The priests would be at each other's throats and all it takes is a would-be loser in a factional dispute to either collaborate with a rival chaotic power or to leak the temple's location to outsiders for their reign of terror to end.  That's not to say that classic temples to not exist - they do and are the result of otherwise longstanding Thanatari communities acquiring a critical mass of power and arrogance.

Long-standing Thanatari communities persist, I think, because of two factors: 1) the community adopts strict limits on where they may take heads (eg "no headhunting from those who have paid us tribute") that go well beyond what Thanatar demands and/or 2) the community is fearfully subservient to more powerful people (eg unscrupulous Arkati, corrupt Kralori officials, Ralzakark or another chaotic demigod etc)

[Darius West]

17 hours ago, Aurelius said:

Out of all the cults of Glorantha, Thanatar is the one I cannot wrap my head around. The problem is somewhat straightforward, but I don't understand what kind of people would end up worshipping Thanatar, and where in Glorantha that would even work out. 

As a civilized knowledge-hunting cult it sort of has to operate in the big cities of the civilized world, but at the same time nothing is as un-subtle as leaving behind a trail of headless bodies. Cannibals and blood-drinkers can take street rabble, but the Thanatari would really prefer the head priest of Buserian. The cult has no magical way of luring worshippers in, and there's no species that would inherently worship Thanatar, like Cacodemon, and as it is not a spirit cult, it has no inherent tribal function like Thed.

They can't lie in their hidey-holes eternally, like certain worshippers of Vivamort, and it's not a force of nature like Primal Chaos. Even the wisest lunari illuminates are likely to take an issue potentially going after their heads, regardless of whether chaos is an inherently evil element or not. 

So ... where are the largest temples of Thanatar, and how large are they? How do they recruit, and why would anyone join? Or the entire cult just a 80s misstep that has hard time fitting in Glorantha -- in a way where it would have been better to leave Tien, Than and Atyar as mythological beings that don't receive much worship anymore. 

The primary cult center for Thanatar is in Than Ulbar in the Chaos Wastes, which is essentially a Thanatar theocracy, and very well defended.  It is a super efficient hydraulic empire of extreme cruelty, that is well suited to war against the nomads of the wastes.  They are on friendly terms with the sorcerers of Orathorn, and primarily wage their secret war against the Kralori and Teshnans.  Nominally, all Thanatari tug the forelock to the High Priest at Than Ulbar.

They are all about stealing knowledge, and as such, they actually maintain temples to other deities whom they initiate their slaves into and then ritually garotte, after having them spend most of their POW as RP.  This is disguised as initiation into Thanatar, which is seen as a high honor by their ignorant victims.

The cult is represented in most major Chaos nests such as Dorastor, Larnste's Footprint, and Snakepipe Hollow, where they offer their assassination services to the local potentate but remain otherwise apolitical.  Thnanatari often pay particular attention to Gbaji worship, as they seek the ability to avoid detection as chaotics.

The cult spreads by sending out scouting parties to locate new potential sites and converts, generally preferring remote and defensible temple bases.  Once these are discovered, they send members in dribs and drabs into the area until they are well established.

Thanatari also have good reasons for using plenty of slaves.  Many slaves are captured warriors who can be sacrificed to obtain their skills and RP.  Slaves can also be dragged off to remote areas without raising any concerns.  Slaves can also largely be kept ignorant of what the cult is really up to, and those who figure it out can be turned into minor heads to become Insane Head Ghosts who defend the temple.  As a result, any place which is low in Uroxi/Stormbulls. and has a thriving slave market, like Slave Wall in Tarsh (which is notably close to Snakepipe Hollow) will have well established Thanatari infiltrators.

Much is made of the power hungry treachery of the Thanatari against other Thanatari, and while this is always potentially a problem for the cult, they have reason not to operate in this fashion too.  The killing of fellow Thanatari is punished unless it falls within the constraints of a code of byzantine complexity, quite similar to the Lunar Darts competitions.  This is because killing fellow Thanatari makes the cult weaker, and while the Severed God himself may not care, his religious hierarchy certainly do.

[Aurelius]

6 hours ago, metcalph said:

I agree that the classic thanatari temple as depicted in the sources is unsustainable.  The priests would be at each other's throats and all it takes is a would-be loser in a factional dispute to either collaborate with a rival chaotic power or to leak the temple's location to outsiders for their reign of terror to end.  That's not to say that classic temples to not exist - they do and are the result of otherwise longstanding Thanatari communities acquiring a critical mass of power and arrogance.

If I go even more brutally to the barebone ecology: To sustain itself in the survival of the fittest, all cults requires food, shelter, and recruits. 

Thanatar has hard time with all three. As thanatari are not producing food or services, they must enjoy patronage (Ralzakark or extremely depraved lunari dart war generals) or oppress some other group (some random gaggle of broos?)

Shelter is hard too, because basically everyone is out to get them. Sure, a livrary of heads can be extremely powerful magical force until it runs out of rune points it cannot replenish, but unless you have patronage or masses of minions, once you pull out the heads you must run: a thanatar temple is mighty in a battle but sucks in a war. 

Recruits are hard to come by. Unless you are lurking in a metropolis, its hard to find the material. Tribal illiterate broos and savage Dorastor monsters are not ideal for a god of knowledge. Sure, yes for one interested in education, but not for one interested in exploitation.

The contradiction is … 

- Too hideous to thrive in civilization

- Too civilized to thrive in wilderness

- Too organized to build a sustainable terrorist cell structure

- Too selfish to sacrifice for the greater good of the cult

The only configuration I can see for a functioning a greater temple requires a leeching relationship where the temple is in wilderness protected by minions or patronage, but close enough to a metropolis to leech recruits and knowledge from the city. 

But even for that I have hard time finding the ideology and inner motivation for going through all that trouble. 

[metcalph]

15 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

The only configuration I can see for a functioning a greater temple requires a leeching relationship where the temple is in wilderness protected by minions or patronage, but close enough to a metropolis to leech recruits and knowledge from the city. 

Which is why I don't think Great (or even Major) Temples exist unless there's a sudden power vacuum shortly before.  Then they offer a quick path to immense power and receive an influx of two-bit losers hoping to become big.  Before long, the temple become all too powerful and arrogant and everybody else around them unites in a few years to take them down hard.

 

15 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

But even for that I have hard time finding the ideology and inner motivation for going through all that trouble. 

I don't think Thanatari have an ideology other than taking heads or consuming minds.  They are highly unlikely to carry out a lengthy ritual as they are so focused on the quickest path to acquiring power.  They won't make good sorcerers unless they have a steady supply of sorcerer brain.  They become powerful despite their inability to look ahead at the long term and they get hammered in a few short years because of their inability to look ahead at the long term.

[mfbrandi]

8 hours ago, jajagappa said:

In a world where knowledge can be gained or lost, that becomes a power currency.

If all knowledge is public — common knowledge — you cannot steal it. But if knowledge is not universal, you can rig the market. You don’t do that because you want knowledge for its own sake; you do that because what you really want is power. (No thieves in a post-scarcity economy, but artificial scarcity can be created. Utopias may be fragile.)

“Knowledge” — i.e. teaching, books, and the like — is a commodity, something traded, but we cannot blame the Thanatari for that: they are a symptom of the market, not its originators.
 

 

• There’s a far-off land I want to go to
  Where the slender palm trees soar
  In Brazil, on the Rio Grande
  They want sack slingers by the score
  There’s too much coffee around
  Making too little money per pound
  And so the world seems to agree
  Dump half the harvest in the sea
  
  — Julian Arendt, Ballade von den Säckeschmeißern (trans. Dagmar Krause)

[French Desperate WindChild]

22 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

If I go even more brutally to the barebone ecology: To sustain itself in the survival of the fittest, all cults requires food, shelter, and recruits. 

yes, of course

22 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

Thanatar has hard time with all three. As thanatari are not producing food or services, they must enjoy patronage (Ralzakark or extremely depraved lunari dart war generals) or oppress some other group (some random gaggle of broos?)

Shelter is hard too, because basically everyone is out to get them. Sure, a livrary of heads can be extremely powerful magical force until it runs out of rune points it cannot replenish, but unless you have patronage or masses of minions, once you pull out the heads you must run: a thanatar temple is mighty in a battle but sucks in a war. 

I disagree 🙂 they just need to think how they can obtain it. Of course it is not for everyone, and not the easiest way. But motivated and/or lucky people can obtain so "simple" things

25 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

The contradiction is … 

- Too hideous to thrive in civilization

- Too civilized to thrive in wilderness

- Too organized to build a sustainable terrorist cell structure

- Too selfish to sacrifice for the greater good of the cult

I think you miss one important point : priests can be smart, both afraid and courageous, both prudent and ambitious. What I mean :

Jon Dontdoit is a young only son of a widowed noble lunar in a big city in the empire. He wanted to join one of the greatest school of the college of magic. He succeeded to enter, but for any reason (his personality, some political ennemy of his father, someone jealous..)  he suffered harassment from his fellow students and teachers. It was so hard that, although the risk of his father disappointment, he left the school. He did not say his failure to his father, he even continued to tell him his "progress", how he made good friendship and network with other powerful famlies heirs.. Few weeks after, he was contacted by some professor who told him there was a way to continue his studies, to not deceive his father.

Lost, without any other perspective, he decided to follow this guy. He started to learn a lot of "reasonable" knowledge, (rw, sorcery, etc...) even if sometimes, some weird requirement surprised him. But his ambitious, his will to be a good son, let him accept to keep secret some information he had about other "students", to not tell anything about his new school, to drink crying living human's blood, to kill a cat after some torture. Season after season, his progress satisfied him. He even enjoy to do these "weird" activities in the best way, obtaining his teacher's approvation. He was a zealos student. After two years, he was ready to learn more, to learn where he was, to understand that all these "weird" and "weirder" things he did put him in a situation with no possible return. And it was not a problem. He learnt the same things that he would have in the official school. And somewhere, he found pleasure to see others fears, to hear slaves cries, to see pets dying under his power... his own power. his wonderful power.

Then he was ready to join the cult. And he learnt the secrets, he learnt that he was now able to get power from those who harassed him years ago. Le learnt that there were horrible things hidden deep under his room. In addition to his knowledge, he get revenge and power. He gained what they learnt and he did not. He gained secrets usefull to obtain wealth and political power. He just gained.

Once enough powerful to be a strong initiate, but not yet enough  to take his "teacher" position, he was sent in Pavis county to infiltrate the city and to build a new temple. Now that his father was unfortunatly murdered by one of his rebellious slave, he had a great wealth. He sold everything and started his new life.

With all the secrets from his poor comrades, he succeed to create a solid and not too big network, in Peloria, in Tarsh and in Pavis. He obtained from the governor his help to create and protect a manor, in the county, outside of the rubble. He hired farmers and guards. He contracted with an issaries merchant and two caravans per year sold his products. He get a lot of slaves from Morokanths. He obtained help from ogres in the rubble to get some protection. Ten slaves worked every season to dig deeper and build rooms. Every season, ten salves were eaten by his new ogres friends, once they had extracted the rocks of the new room in the rubble. So secrets have no time to be told.  First levels were dedicated to mushroom cultures. Lower for some sercret rooms (library, books, heads, material), and deepest for his god's minions.

Today he is well settled. His mushrooms are exotic and fashion food everywhere in the empire, even among trolls ! He is well known. He is appreciated even by lightbringers as he never betrayed the issaries merchant. He even hid a windlord few seasons ago. Of course not in the secret places, just in his manor, and no lunar authority tried to search the orlanthi there. And there is no reason, as the governor is so happy to sometimes ask Jon to solve some of his problems. How this guy can obtain secrets his a big question, but he had so many time the opportunity to betray the governor and did not. Jon is trustable. Authority loves Jon. Resistance loves Jon. Chaos loves Jon

But he knows that one day, his god will require more than victim sacrifices. He will require his personal sacrifice. Not his life, but his shape. One time he will have to join the minion in the deepest rooms of his manor. So now, he is looking for someone to initiate, someone who will believe the official face of the manor. But someone who have some secret, someone who will never have the idea to betray him

 

[mfbrandi]

10 hours ago, scott-martin said:

every chaos cult IMG defies or perverts normative spiritual ecology in some way. The math simply doesn’t add up in a way that supports their long-term persistence

I suspect that short-termism and the denial of unsustainability are not distinguishing traits of Chaos cults. Likely there is a lot of it about in cults with the rubber stamp of ideological normality — “You are officially not those guys.”

At its best, Chaos says, “This cannot go on.” The ideology of the Compromise is eternity for the gods and who really cares about the little people; it may be callous, but that is not to say it is realistic. IMG, anyway.° 😉
 

———————————————
° Actually, I hate the expression “in my Glorantha” — it is not as if I own even a square inch of Glorantha.

[EricW]

I want to see Thanatar as the great temptation for knowledge cultists. Thanatar can help a student who is struggling with an exam, a sorcerer struggling with the weight of their responsibility for saving their community, a knowledge cultist whose pride has been hurt by losing a debate, who wants to be really, really prepared for the next intellectual confrontation. The cult of cheating at exams, of plagiarising the work of others, of unearned mastery.

But there is no point yielding to that temptation if embracing the dark light means immediate exposure and expulsion or death.

I think that is the missing piece from the cult, the path for corrupt knowledge seekers to maintain a facade of decency, to continue participating in temple life and rituals, while nurturing their secret treachery. Of course the people they are trying to deceive are truth cultists, so the facade of deceit inevitably crumbles in the end, and the monster within is revealed. 

 

[svensson]

Knowledge is three things: Growth, Power, and an economic asset.

And Thanatar attacks ALL THREE aspects... just like there are three aspects to Thanatar's cult [although there is no direct correlation between any of those aspects]. Active Thanatari inhibit the growth of order, gain power for themselves, and remove economic assets from lawful society for their own use. This is why I call him the 'knowledge bandit'... everything a Thanatari takes is lost to lawful society permanently.

[radmonger]

Thanatar is to Lhankhor Mhy, Buserian and Irripi Ontor as Vivamort is to Chalana Arroy and Errisa.You can only cheat at an exam if someone else is studying for it.

So It is not primarily a cult with it's own internal ecology. It is the shadow of an existing form of mass worship. It is parasitical off that worship. It is perhaps where all the magic points go when someone fails their worshiip roll.

As such, that shadow has power, a power that can be accessed by the unscruplous. Initially, access to that power requires sorcerous knowledge, or perhaps desparation. But you can then personify it, tell stories about it, and recruit followers. Establish a shrine, grow it to a temple, and now you have a cult.

Such secretive Rune Cults don't stay secret for generations; they rarely last a decade. But a generation after the Storm Bulls smashed the alter, someone will start another.

 

 

[mfbrandi]

2 hours ago, EricW said:

The cult of cheating at exams, of plagiarising the work of others, of unearned mastery.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. The real-world exam cheat or plagiarist is unlikely to understand the work they submit as their own. They have no mastery, so the question of earned or unearned doesn’t come up. The focuses of the Than and Atyar cults are different: Than is more about using others’ magic and knowledge (like the real-world cheat); Atyar is more about learning stuff, albeit by unorthodox methods.° Right? I reckon Atyar cultists and Than cultists don’t really get on — probably some are attempting a desyncretism: “our god was never a part of your god.” Thanatar cultists probably make poor marriage counsellors. The joint enterprise may fly apart like a stressed sun god.
 

15 hours ago, scott-martin said:

lazy students will be with us always

My experience of real-life exam cheats and wannabe cheats was not that they were lazy but that they were insecure to the point of irrationality — they were caught or they would have been if they had done what they proposed to do. Hating exams and assessment myself, I found it impossible not to pity them.
 

15 hours ago, scott-martin said:

The math simply doesn’t add up in a way that supports their long-term persistence

I wonder. Predators can take a certain amount of prey without causing the prey stocks to diminish over time. For example, I might be able to take 25% of the fish in a sea each year without reducing the fish population below what it would have been if I had taken none. There are other pressures on fish population than predation. But if I take 26% or 30% or whatever, the fish stocks may spiral into extinction.°°

Perhaps the Lhankor Mhy cult likes Thanatar to take just enough sages annually — and to do it ostentatiously enough — that they can justify their prices to the punters. Academic politics being what they are, I can see lists of targets with helpful maps and routines being handed to the local headhunters with complimentary flowers and fruit baskets. This is also worthy of note:

• Lhankor Mhy’s ability to resist the Consume Mind spell was passed on to all Priests and Rune Lords of Lhankor Mhy. It is an inner secret of the cult and may not be taught to outsiders, lay members, or even cult Initiates. — Jennell Jaquays, Cults of Terror: Thanatar (Classic PDF, p. 54)

That is not very public spirited, is it? Once again, it is the undergraduates and the great unwashed who get thrown under the bus. The LM cult, one speculates, is not a patron of the Free Software Foundation and never publishes using a Creative Commons licence.

——————————————————
° Last time I looked, the Atyar cult didn’t have an ethics committee, and the philosophers keep quibbling about this use of “learning”.

°° Atyaris harvesting knowledge are like piscivores getting their omega−3 by eating fish. Even the fish “stole” theirs from the algae they ate. Who has really earned their fatty acids? It is proving hard to schedule a debate between Aldrya and the eaters. The sticking point seems to be that the eater representative keeps insisting that elves are eaters.

Edited November 18 by mfbrandi
planned -> proposed

[Aurelius]

2 hours ago, EricW said:

I want to see Thanatar as the great temptation for knowledge cultists. Thanatar can help a student who is struggling with an exam, a sorcerer struggling with the weight of their responsibility for saving their community, a knowledge cultist whose pride has been hurt by losing a debate, who wants to be really, really prepared for the next intellectual confrontation. The cult of cheating at exams, of plagiarising the work of others, of unearned mastery.

But there is no point yielding to that temptation if embracing the dark light means immediate exposure and expulsion or death.

Also... as described for Runequest, the temptation is not there -- I have very hard time seeing the Thanatari approach a random students on the knowledge temple campus like they were recruiting informers for the Soviet Union. And there are no quick and easy and skulking ways in which Thanatar could even help that new recruit to swallow the bait, it tends to go into the ritual end of rune magic. 

1 hour ago, radmonger said:

Such secretive Rune Cults don't stay secret for generations; they rarely last a decade. But a generation after the Storm Bulls smashed the alter, someone will start another.

...and when they get smashed, it's extremely hard to start a new one. As far as I understand, burning bushes don't really entice aspiring occultists to found new Cults, there's no Necronomicon making readers lose their sanity and start worshipping Cthulhu, there is no Dark One sending you dreams where you swear your soul to evil. In Glorantha, the way almost everyone joins a cult is by being initiated by a priest and sacrificing a point of POW in a ceremony. 

So, in practice the new sect must be founded by a missionary, probably a missionary whose condition for priesthood is leaving the previous temple and founding a new one somewhere. And even then that will be a lonely dark windowless cavern where you run your rites with a tiny congregation, spending most of your time chatting with severed heads of people who hate you more than anything. 

And that's an angle on Thanatar I do like: the miserable side where you are already too deep to quit, and then they send you to Pavis to found a sect, but live in constant fear that some random uroxi will smell your heads. You have to grow the congregation to get your shrine to function the way you want, but every new initiate increases the risk of being found out. At least you don't have to navigate the complicated hierarchy of the bigger temple that sent you out, as risk of losing your head is always present in there.

But even that missionary almost has to be an illuminate -- as pretty much everyone has a cult affiliation, you have to have one too. And outside the Lunar pantheon its very hard to obtain one that would not conflict with your nighttime practices.

[scott-martin]

3 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

At its best, Chaos says, “This cannot go on.”

Some rhetorical talking head figure like a GK Chesterton could be produced to ponder whether people turn to chaos because the "math" of normative life fails them or they have failed to live up to the math. When the math fails, the cults available just don't solve your problem, which could mean a quest for vengeance despite priestly interference or they won't let you eat the lucky shamrock that sprouts on the vestead every year on day 201 or anything in between. For these people, the rules that add up to the world are not enough and your soul starts fielding overtures from alien powers. Communities with active Trickster have a place to put these challenging personalities. Others are in real trouble.

Most of the time IMG people drift into the chaotic fringe less out of any faustian ambition and more because they don't live up to some standard the community sets for itself. These are people who don't impress the examiner, maybe they don't bother to learn the skills on the test or are so actively unpleasant that nobody wants to sponsor them or they don't have the money or pull to buy the initiation dress. Whatever the failure is, the community wants you to know that it's not their fault. Rules exist for a reason, you didn't live up, no magic for you. You are truly the problem because now you need to figure out what to do with your life. 

Of course this dichotomy is clever in a Chestertonian quip way but for me when a community is producing people who don't live up to its own standards the ultimate fault is still with the community that writes up the math. Maybe circumstances have changed and the elders' methods are outdated. Maybe the kids no longer need to pass the swim test because the clan has moved into town away from the river and we need to teach parallel parking instead. And maybe the elders are no longer "with it" so they allow petty grudges to work their way up to nightmare court cases and coverups. People fall through the cracks. You tell them they failed the community but sooner or later some of them will decide the community failed them. Chaos seeps into the holes they leave behind in the world.

And when people start telling me the world has failed them, I say we probably can't go on like this, maybe it's time to refresh the world so it works better. Community authorities can take responsibility for the math and embark on one of those world-refreshing quests you hear about. Take some tools, gather some friends, blah blah blah. Bring back those people you lost.

Anyhow this is probably straying too far from the cinematic framework where all the witches fly to Bald Mountain for their annual party and we roll all the dice. If you want that kind of scene, just wiggle your fingers and postulate some form of spiritual magnetism that draws chaotic impulses into patterns, clumps and ultimately "gaggles." Maybe one day every 99 years, the black stars twinkle wrong and all the heads roll their eyes up at once and wheeze out in a sepulchral tone: YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUIRED AT THANULBAR TO TASTE THEE MASTER'S DELICIOUS FREE CAKE. So they have to meet up and the ones who can bear to get along with each other set the cult agenda for the next century. Whatever you need to make the movie you want. And if you want more of a thoughtful, intimate type of game, then you can also wiggle your fingers at the math and say something like the heads count as initiates so it only takes a few actual headhunters in a region to qualify as a reasonable little temple and earn the points you need them to get.

The notion of some chaos cults being "shadow" cults and earning parasitic points from a more normative host cult is theoretically interesting. Imagine a world where some low but real percentage of POW sacrificed on Orlanth holidays actually goes to Gagarth or somebody worse if Trickster doesn't grab it first. Malia gets a slice of CA. (This parasitic economy may be one of the original Malia insights since it is effectively a spiritual "wasting disease" or soul rot.) Thanatar will be with you as long as you have LKM and so on. Community technicians can tune this percentage through diligence or the opposite. In any event, as the LKM shadow you know Thanatar would be loaded with esoteric, arcane and obsolete cult positions that nobody today knows how to fill . . . an anti-university of murder and cruel parody made worse because you might not even have any real colleagues, just those talking heads to get angry at.

 

[Jeff]

The Thanatar cult is tiny. Let's just start there. There might be a few permanent strongholds outside of Than Ulbar, but the cult is simply too mad, too cut-throat (literally!), and too dangerous to be stable. I do not imagine the cult is particularly attractive to other Knowledge cultists - it is attractive to those who simply want to enslave the knowledge and experience of others. Thanatar steals knowledge from the Great Library and then removes all trace. It is the ultimate betrayal of both Lhankor Mhy and Irrippi Ontor. Remember its key spells:

Ingest/Devour Book: Destroys text and transfers it to the caster's mind, removing any trace of it on the page.

Create Head: You decapitate a living victim in a two-day horrific ritual and then bind its now-insane intellect back into his undead head, making it your slave.

Consume Mind: You capture a living victim and in a week-long ritual that must be performed in Disorder Week, you drain the totality of the victim's memories, leaving them a mental vegetable. Doesn't work on Rune Masters of Lhankor Mhy.

These aren't spells that let you "cheat a little bit". This is like a professor kidnapping another professor, chaining them to the basement wall, and forcing them to produce for you. 

[g33k]

It's worth noting that almost everywhere, the Thanatari will de facto operate either as loners or in very-tiny cells (duos, trios).

I think "recruitment" happens only from among the ranks of the most-desperate and/or the least-sane, and the prospective recruits often don't survive the testing/vetting/Initiation process.

Their small size means the "ecologogical role" simile is weak, at best... but if they have such a role, it's that of a parasite.

Edited November 18 by g33k

[Alex]

On 11/17/2024 at 2:19 PM, jajagappa said:

Tien/Thanatar is something of the antithesis of Lhankor Mhy.

I'd quibble slightly with "antithesis" of LM and IO.  I think the theme is "chaotic perversion" of a virtue, taking its dark side to extremes.  (As I was suggesting elsewhere might be a 'conservative extension' of Canon for Urain, to evidently little dice, but TBF it was a digression from the express topic.  How unusual around here!!)  But with something core in common.

Clearly it's indeed much worse than 'cheating a little bit', but perhaps in magical ecology -- setting aside for now how they make a crust, this side of walktapus trail rations -- terms it feeds off the 'cheating a little' and the petty jealousies and spite that legit knowledge cultists are going to be susceptible to.  To the extent that  chaos cults have to bother with temple size rules and such like at all, which one might argue about.

Certainly seems pretty bonkers if a city hosted such a temple on a sustained basis.  Slightly more plausible if they spring up rather suddenly and then implode.