Thanatar ecological slot?

[Beoferret]

I could see a whole mini-campaign that revolves around the efforts of a Thanatari initiate or rune priest to predate upon a small or middling-sized knowledge temple (Jonstown perhaps?). The Thanatar worshipper hides in the wilds, while making heavy use of a Renly-type in town (to provide information on the movement of scholars, expected shipments of rare books, and/or to find a student who - due to gambling debts, for instance - can be pressured into stealing books or getting someone drunk enough to be kidnapped) and a couple of broo for muscle. The adventurers have about a season to catch the Thanatari before moving they've on to their next target or returned to a distant homebase.

3 hours ago, Jeff said:

This is like a professor kidnapping another professor, chaining them to the basement wall, and forcing them to produce for you. 

Why didn't I think of this when I was an adjunct! I could have gone so much further in academia. I coulda been a contender! 

[EricW]

8 hours ago, Jeff said:

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. 

Ah but devour book might not be noticed for a long time in a very large library full of crumbling, ancient texts, especially if the cultist made an effort afterwards to disguise the damage as say damp destroying the ink. Devour book is like, it's only a book - think of it as drug enhanced cramming before an exam. Create head would represent an extreme of corruption, but what better way for a jealous hater to avenge themselves on rival academics, than to torment their enslaved soul whenever they have a quiet moment? Consume mind would also represent an extreme of corruption. Once the cultist gets tired of devouring books, devouring the mind of a master who contains many books worth of knowledge, someone admired by others - what better way to avenge all the imagined slights, than for the cultist to help themself to the very essence of that mastery?

What I am describing isn't cannon and I'm not pretending it is, but I think there is room to consider a sub-cult of Thanatar which represents academic rivalry taken to its ultimate extreme, in which obsession drives the academic to steal and deny advantages to others, and as they progress down their descent into madness, to even become a serial killer of fellow academics, stealing the very essence of what makes them great. The insanity is still there, but tightly corseted under a facade of respectability - until the facade ultimately breaks down and the monster can no longer hide their crimes. 

Edited November 19 by EricW

[radmonger]

17 hours ago, Aurelius said:

there is no Dark One sending you dreams where you swear your soul to evil.

For that example, I think there kind of is. Cults provide access to the Other Side. They have a lot of infrastructure. Enchantments, rituals, experience and communities aimed at guiding an initiate along a path.

But sill, what happens when you get to the Other Side is never entirely safe. Say you perhaps have some distant ogre ancestry. On your adulthood ordeal, or a holy day ceremony. you get to the point where you are supposed to fight the Devil.

He tells you 'Heortar. I am your father'...

 

 

[Zebraman1]

Bare in mind also that it is a Chaos cult. Nothing about it needs to be long term  sustainable or sane. The flaws the OP has noted can exist in-Universe and narratively be a feature not a bug. In other words a trail of decapitated bodies is a good hook to put the PCs on the trail of the newly established Thanatar cult in the city.

Which isn't to say there can't be more established and longer term Thanatar cults that have found ways of existing.  But equally there's nothing wrong with portraying chaos cults and their adherents as brief and horrible flash in the pan events. There to spread, in the final analysis, ultimately mindless terror and destruction. 

[Aurelius]

On 11/17/2024 at 7:30 PM, Joerg said:

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.

Thinking of the Thanatari in the Empire I realized two added complications. 

Even if you are illuminated, your heads reek of chaos, so you are not safe in Lunar Pavis, or anywhere else where uroxi might get stupid. 

...except if you stick to head of illuminates which do not stink, and that little-known factoid might make the cult even less welcome in the Empire.

Even so, I'd say Moonson retains a thanatari adviser, perhaps gifted by Ralzakark, but such unique individuals have nothing to do with the larger ecology of the cult. 

(In my view, cults like Thed are not technically illegal, but are practically illegal, in the Empire. Worship of the goddess of rape is dogmatically fine, but everyone knows that you have to be a felon to do so. But this is a bit regional and contextual, as a good lawyer can argue that its (disgustingly) maybe not illegal to rape one's own slaves in some parts of the empire.) 

[mfbrandi]

10 hours ago, EricW said:

Devour book is like, it’s only a book …
Consume mind would … represent an extreme of corruption.

A word from the Atyar PR department:

• These are acts of charity, reverence, and devotion —
  we are archivists and enablers valued by the more enlightened members of the academy:
   
  • we devour books past repair and transcription:
    we are the last best hope to preserve their contents;
     
  • we provide a service to academics on their deathbeds or facing mandatory retirement:
    we can continue their work when they cannot;
     
  • we offer fast-track excommunication to Lhankor Mhy sages keen to take advantage of our premium services:
    a full menu of acts guaranteed to lose you tenure is available,
    but we look forward to a more civilised time when debearding will prove unnecessary.

Edited November 19 by mfbrandi

[Aurelius]

21 hours ago, Jeff said:

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 guess from this angle we should treat stuff like the complex temple hierarchy (of CoT) as either an aspirational pipe dream thanatari tell their initiates pretending there is a bigger glorious future for them somewhere, a blueprint of how Than Ulbar temple works, or a historical curiosity of how it worked Way Back When, when being sorted to House Thanatar wasn’t about drawing a really short straw for your lot in life. 

21 hours ago, Jeff said:

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

On that note, whats the current take on books in Glorantha? I suppose Sartarite thanatari, if any, have to satisfy thenselves devouring scrolls, except if they dare try their magic on runes carved by trolls and such? But are books going away together with scimitars, or are they still in?

Or going with something like an early Roman codex, which I believe was basically a couple of sheets of papyros (?) between wooden covers?

[mfbrandi]

40 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

But are books going away together with scimitars, or are they still in?

• Lhankor Mhy … Temples compete with one another to collect information. Most temples have several hundred or even a few thousand books and scrolls, but the greatest temples have tens of thousands — even hundreds of thousands — of books and scrolls.
  — RQG (PDF, p. 285)

Although Weapons & Equipment doesn’t mention books and mentions scrolls only once. So much for Andrew Logan Montgomery’s book of material culture. Unless you are right and the book is going the way of the dodo and the puma person.

But who wants to play a game that has a Library Use skill but no books? There must surely be something considered valuable which has high information density via writing. I am not learning a rune spell to devour two scrawled sides of A4. A History of My Black Horse Troop — as well as being crushingly dull — is surely very long. Devour book was made for it: no hell would make a sinner read it. A world which holds Ethilrist must also contain Atyari, else who would discuss his favourite work of literature with him?

[scott-martin]

11 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

I am not learning a rune spell to devour two scrawled sides of A4. A History of My Black Horse Troop

Now I can't shake the conviction Ethilrist committing his memoirs to spoken word vinyl would sound simultaneously plummy and potted like Richard Harris or, better, John Betjeman. Imagine the fanatic collectors who encounter what they're told is an unreleased one-off-pressing single complete with rhythm backing and horn section! How far will they go? And does reproducing the song devalue the artifact's value in secondary markets?

But while "grimoire magic" in its trippiest phases hasn't been a real focus in the publishing lately (pushed back to the nebulous sorcery world along with unicorns) they still have as much text as players and their rivals want to obsess over. Library use is just one of the many minigames of glorantha. Some players care a lot about it so the minor differences are more than petty narcissism. Others do not care one bit.

However groovy, a "Fields of Pontefract" reference might not be enough to justify intercepting a perfectly good thread! So as penance I really liked this bit:

5 hours ago, radmonger said:

you are supposed to fight the Devil

I wonder today if this is where the strange ecology of all adversary cults comes from, "chaos" included: the world continues to make space (and mechanical allowances) for them as long as the soul wants somebody like that to fight. The game literally requires at least their theoretical appearance in order to appear challenging and even a little scary. Of course they have no real power of their own to really hurt the soul in any way that permanently matters, but the important thing is that the threat motivates the soul to engage in the struggle that literally reveals "character," the struggle the world actually does care about enough to relax what would otherwise be clear rules and make space in the web of being. So like a lot of people are saying here, Thanatar is both trivial and something so important that the beards and others invest a lot of personal resources reinventing. Bad Man is just Horned Man in a skeleton costume.

What this means for the red goddess might be interesting.

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

10 hours ago, radmonger said:

you are supposed to fight the Devil

     … as the soul wants somebody like that to fight.

But the Devil has no cult and is nowhere to be found, so you stand in front of the mirror pulling fierce faces and sticking out your liquorice-stained tongue.

Pontefract cakes with Wakboth’s image stamped on them — there’s a bit of RQ merch we can all get behind.

 

Edited November 19 by mfbrandi

[mfbrandi]

4 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Now I can’t shake the conviction Ethilrist committing his memoirs to spoken word vinyl would sound … like … John Betjeman.

I am finding it increasingly difficult to shake the conviction that Consume Mind and Create Audio Book are in fact the same terrifying spell.

Edited November 19 by mfbrandi

[scott-martin]

4 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

I am finding it increasingly difficult to shake the conviction that Consume Mind and Create Audio Book are in fact the same terrifying spell.

The Fourth Age (of Mechanical Reproduction)

Which again gets at the notion that "book" is itself an innovation that estranges teacher from taught by making the teaching portable, living outside anybody's head in its para-necromantic script . . . as in the story Socrates tells, the creation of writing is a direct assault on living memory because when you have a book you stop relying so much on conversation. In Glorantha the professional heads control access to literacy but once they teach you, their importance is diminished. 

(Ironically IMG it was actually proto-Issaries who invented theyalan "writing" by creating tattoos and then maps, setting up the archaic rivalry with proto-beards holding their knowledge in mnemonic knots hung like auxiliary heads, but this is unlikely to be anybody's MGF but mine.)

The Scroll Table in RQ1 is really interesting here. Unlike D&D or the later grimoire culture of CoC/HQ/HW it is impossible to really learn magic by simply studying the words . . . there are no "spell books" or "spell scrolls." Even if we assume a spell is unlocked through a mantra there are keys to the transmission that nobody has figured out how to set down on paper, wood or clay. Instead, texts tend to provide skill / attribute coaching or information that you can leverage in some way to make money. It's all self help.  When you can't figure out how to exploit it, it's "seemingly useless and/or unreadable."

I wonder if Thanatar can render even garbage books "useful" or whether the information simply gets wiped and added to bulk mental storage like unorganized PDFs nobody will ever read.

[mfbrandi]

6 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

as in the story Socrates tells, the creation of writing is a direct assault on living memory because when you have a book you stop relying so much on conversation.

Well, writing may have eaten into our memories, but it didn’t kill working through ideas via conversation. Shifting parts of our minds onto paper has enabled us to work at a level of complexity we probably hadn’t managed before. Maybe Atyar is trying to close the gap — why bother to devour a book if that means it no longer functions with the advantages of a book? (Glorantha variation will include whether they can do what they aspire to or whether a swallowed book is just so much disintegrating mind mush.)
 

14 minutes ago, scott-martin said:

I wonder if … the information simply gets wiped and added to bulk mental storage like unorganized PDFs nobody will ever read.

The Thanatar and Krarsht cults are “friendly” (i.e. a three/three), and one can imagine a closer collaboration between the more “enlightened” of the Atyari and the more “tech-savvy” of the Krarshtites. The truly pious Atyari consumes, devours, and ingests — Our Toothy Mother loves those metaphors! — as much quality information as she can before the law starts to close in and then volunteers to be sacrificed/uploaded to the Waiting Mouth. Slowly, slowly information is wiped from the material world and unreliable wetware and stored in the only memory location that matters, K-Space. (Sceptics say “k-hole.”)

• Krarsht promises that every loyal follower of her in life shall become her in death … It is believed that Krarsht plans a special use, perhaps thousands of years in the future, for the myriad worshipper identities she has stored, but no one has guessed its meaning.
  — Natzke/Willis/Krank, Cults of Terror: Krarsht (ClassicPDF, p. 76)
   
• I’ll be doing time in the universal mind — ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d. In the end, isn’t one mystic much like another, and whether the Many become the One or simply the None — the Unread — who can say? The Goddess dreams she is a net — the Net dreams she is a goddess — round and round she goes; where she stops, nobody knows. Row, row, row your boat … Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
  — Nervous “morsel” entering the (rather sticky) upload suite
   
• New kick, new game, new theory
  The rest reduced to nought:
  It only takes a moment
  One clear and lucid thought
  Once the process has been triggered
  All previous process disappears …
  I don’t know what it is you fear
  I don’t know what it is you fear —
  Oh, the shift is nothing to be afraid of
  — Peter Hammill, Seven Wonders

[EricW]

12 hours ago, mfbrandi said:

A word from the Atyar PR department:

• These are acts of charity, reverence, and devotion —
  we are archivists and enablers valued by the more enlightened members of the academy:
   
  • we devour books past repair and transcription:
    we are the last best hope to preserve their contents;
     
  • we provide a service to academics on their deathbeds or facing mandatory retirement:
    we can continue their work when they cannot;
     
  • we offer fast-track excommunication to Lhankor Mhy sages keen to take advantage of our premium services:
    a full menu of acts guaranteed to lose you tenure is available,
    but we look forward to a more civilised time when debearding will prove unnecessary.

Welcome to our exclusive academic student club for high achievers. We teach sage magic which helps you cram study material, but sometimes the spells damage the study material. Some of what we do isn't strictly approved by the masters, but you do want to do well in the exam don't you?

[scott-martin]

48 minutes ago, mfbrandi said:

it didn’t kill working through ideas via conversation

Clearly we are here goofing around to see what MGF drops out of the third mind like truth out of a Socrates session. Who will claim this baby? And it would be interesting to imagine a socratic magical system as the publishing maps out how "philosophers" (as opposed to scribes, pedants, bearded private investigators and Indiana Jones) operate in the terminal third age . . . Steve Marsh had a philosopher class once upon a very long time ago, we could start from that. This would probably require a beard intensive game though, maybe this thread feeds into that.
 

1 hour ago, mfbrandi said:

“k-hole.”

This was going to be my go-to analogy on the relationship between Bad and Horned Man but I figured it was too eccentric. Basically like some Alan Watts dream my experience (ambulance) was that everything was terrifying going into the hole and then suddenly everything was fantastic, the monsters weren't scary any more and what I initially thought was the devil incarnate was just the oxygen monitor and we were going to be great friends . . . like how Robby the Robot started out as a terrifying vehicle for monsters from the id but ended his career as a put-upon sort of St. Bernard dog ministering to stranded space children and trotted out for comedy callback cameos. Turns out the basilisk was friendly after all! "Because it would be so great when you woke up."

But on thread this Krarsht relationship ensures that every book eater with the right connections will never go hungry except by choice and this is a plot seed for more forensic beard games. With someone on side who can eat the incriminating records, the killer goes free. And killers with the right connections have all the lucre they need, even if it's all filthy.

INSPECTOR BEARDY OF BASKERVILLE: Get me the orphanage records from 1619 through 1622.
ADSO THE INTERN: Sorry boss, that whole shelf is wiped. They should've laid off the fluorescent inks I guess.
BEARDY: Impossible! Those scrolls were just checked out two days ago and nobody complained. I think we have a book eater among us, chum.
ADSO: Audible Sigh, I guess this means--
BOTH TOGETHER: "A visit to the inviolate akashic record accompanied with old-fashioned footwork!"

[Darius West]

On 11/19/2024 at 4:00 AM, Jeff said:

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.

If that were always the case, Than Ulbar simply wouldn't be able to exist either.  You'd have to come up with special rules to justify how it could.

The success of a Thanatar temple is built on a series of bases that include:

(a) The cult depends upon its existence being kept secret.

(b) The cult hierarchy need to keep their subordinates too scared to attack them.

(c) the cult hierarchy needs to channel the aggression of subordinates against the many enemies they have in the world instead of internally.

(d) It is hard to recruit people into Thanatar

You can solve most of these problems with slavery.  Slaves provide a workforce that can be ruled by terror.  Slaves are denied access to the outside world, unless they escape, and so they are easier to control for clandestine purposes.  Slaves who are Prisoners of War with decent RP can be turned into greater heads.  Appropriately psychologically malleable slaves can be Stockholm syndromed into becoming recruits.  People don't ask questions about dead slaves.  

 

 

 

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, Darius West said:

You can solve most of these problems with slavery.

In my experience, that is never a promising start to a project planning meeting. But managers being managers …

[mfbrandi]

10 hours ago, scott-martin said:

This was going to be my go-to analogy … but I figured it was too eccentric.

TheanimalsoverthereseemtobehavinganinterestingconversationandnowthatmyfacehashingedopenIcanstepoutofitandjointhembuttheworldseemstohavebeenreducedtoslidingsheetsofhammeritedmetalwhereamIexactly?

[Malin]

6 hours ago, Darius West said:

If that were always the case, Than Ulbar simply wouldn't be able to exist either.  You'd have to come up with special rules to justify how it could.

One day we'll get around to publishing our Wastes campaign which culminates with Than Ulbar. We have too many thoughts about that place, and how to make it work.

[Aurelius]

6 hours ago, Darius West said:

If that were always the case, Than Ulbar simply wouldn't be able to exist either.  You'd have to come up with special rules to justify how it could.

7 minutes ago, Malin said:

One day we'll get around to publishing our Wastes campaign which culminates with Than Ulbar. We have too many thoughts about that place, and how to make it work.

I haven't read source materials about Than Ulbar, but I don't think that's even a difficult problem in the context of Glorantha -- just add some Cragspider. 

By that I mean Glorantha is jam-packed with heroic individuals, unique phenomena and weird ancient aberrations that explain all sorts of craziness ranging from individuals conquering lands basically alone to walls separating kingdoms for generations to giant cradles floating on rivers to weird stone wheels just rolling around because.

If we don't know how Than Ulbar came to exist, its basically just a matter of adding one exemplary hero. If we don't know why it hasn't been mowed down, just keep that hero's head around and have it blast whomever tries to get in. 

...and that's why I don't have any issue with individual oddities in Glorantha, but I'm keen to understand the ecology that makes stuff keep on keeping on. 

[jajagappa]

25 minutes ago, Aurelius said:

If we don't know how Than Ulbar came to exist, its basically just a matter of adding one exemplary hero. If we don't know why it hasn't been mowed down, just keep that hero's head around and have it blast whomever tries to get in. 

Maybe it's Genert's head? And the high priest there has knowledge of the Godtime Genert's Garden?

Or alternately, it's Ragnaglar's head, and its madness continues to corrupt the world around.

Edited November 20 by jajagappa

[Jeff]

34 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Maybe it's Genert's head? And the high priest there has knowledge of the Godtime Genert's Garden?

Or alternately, it's Ragnaglar's head, and its madness continues to corrupt the world around.

Who knows? Again this only matters if you are sending your adventurers to Than Ulbar to figure it out. But since Than Ulbar is in the most removed and inhospitable parts of the Genert Wastes, it is pretty much like worrying about the secrets of Barad-dûr. It is good for Glorantha that there are plenty of weird, largely unexplained mysterious evil places like Than Ulbar, Orothorn, Demon Plateau, or the inside of the Crater. 

[radmonger]

I don't think there is that much to explain; Than Ulbar is a city-state run by the Thanatar cult. One of only two human settlements between Pavis and Kralorela, with the other being the immortal sorcerors of Orathorn.

It's normal for same cult in different circumstances to have different manifestations, for example Waha is both the butcher's guiild in Sartar and half the foundation of Praxian tribal life.

It only becomes a problem if you treat the cult descriptions as actual game rules that must be followed to the letter. Rather than a description, following a mechanical template, that tries to avoid spending too many words to say 'this varies depending on circumstances'.

To synthesise the ideas presented in this thread, Than Ulbar is far to weak to go spread it's religion by conquest, the way the Lunar state cult does. And it is not rich or useful enough to openly sponsor temples. So for reasons of state, it instead sends out secretive sorcery-using agents who recruit from initation failures in scholarly cults, parisitising off the magical energy and training those cults give.

Sometimes those agent networks take on a life of their own.

 

Edited November 20 by radmonger

[mfbrandi]

Do we even know for sure that Than-Ulbar is run by the Thanatari?° We know it is rumoured. We seem to know that there is an Atyari sorcerer nearby at Akka. But can we really go beyond “it is nasty and has ‘Than’ in its name”?

• Than-Ulbar: This place is reputedly the largest temple to Thanatar in the World and is rumoured to hold the skull of Atyar deep within its precincts.  — TotRM #15 (p58 — via the Glorantha Digest)
   
• Than-Ulbar: The nearest thing to a city in the Wastes, Than-Ulbar spreads like a cancer in and around an old blown-out volcano in the Tunneled Hills. Lava tubes and chewed-out tunnels criss-cross the area. The volcano, already hollow, has been riddled with crawlways for its Chaotic denizens. The crater holds a bottomless lake and is a great temple to a Chaos god. — GtG (p. 458)
   
• Akka: This small valley is arable and its vile gardens and fields worked by the wretched slaves of Than-Ulbar. It is ruled by an immortal sorcerer-priest of Atyar from Kralorela. — GtG (p. 446)

So if there isn’t more elsewhere, there is plenty of wiggle room for Than-Ulbar not to be a giant Thanatari complex, no? The Guide is presumably deliberately vaguer than Tales.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a Secret Volcano Base™ as much as the next crazed Vøid cultist — I am definitely not in the “why do you even care?” camp — and I can see a bottomless lake as the makings of a great cooling system for my next batch of doomsday devices (which are temperamental things, always prone to overheating), but …

If there is more, someone reading this will know. And how could they resist info-dumping? 😉

 

———————————————————————
° Obviously, we could make it so, but that is another matter.

[metcalph]

I don't think the slaves of Than-Ulbar are human.  It's too far away from sizable human populations across death-march territory.  The slaves are more likely to be broos and scorpionfolk.  Likewise I doubt that Than-Ulbar is organized to be sending agents to spread its religion. Much more likely that any priests are desperate refugees misrepresenting themselves to impress the local bumpkins or raiders seeking the head of a priest or two.

Since there are no more major heads to be had anymore (except for one or two rule breaking exceptions), most of the magics that the priests of Than-Ulbar has are likely to be shitty chaotic trash.  Any potent magic (potent being what a priest of Sartar might know) is one-use and never caste except for the direst of emergencies.  The average thanatari complex elsewhere is likely to have a richer collection of head-magic because their prey is so much closer to the temple.