The Little Suns

[Ian Cooper]

16 hours ago, Tindalos said:

IMG, this comes down to a matter of perspective.

Different nations, peoples, families, and tribes will have gods with differing names but similar attributes.

Are these the same gods wearing different masks, or different gods fulfilling the same archetype?

Ultimately, it makes little difference. Knowledge priests will debate it, perform Truth contests, and find evidence for both sides. And still life goes on.

The crops get harvested the same, no matter the name they use.

There is the All.

And the All is divided into the abstract runic powers.

And the abstract runic powers are divided into the great gods.

And the great gods are divided into the lesser gods.

And the lesser gods are divided into the demi-gods.

And so on.

Glorantha is a Platonic universe, in the sense that mortals see the shadows on the wall of the cave, not the fire.

So whlilst Elmal is not Yelmalio, both are just shadows of cast by the All, and the shadows may reflect many of the same parts of the All, but also other unique parts.

Illumination is seeing the All, gazing at the fire not the shadows, and if the experience does not drive you mad, realising that the world is just shadows.

God Learnerism is trying to manipulate the shadows that the All casts. (And as you can imagine, that comes with great risks).

 

 

 

[g33k]

15 hours ago, Corvantir said:

... it allows me to keep my sanity...

Just don't import the SAN rules from CoC and you'll be golden!

Oh, and stay away from the Block & associated swamp.

[JonL]

There's a PBF over on rpg.net where a group of questers take a seriously Arkatic run at the Hill of Gold, in which Elmal intervenes after Orlanth attacks Yelmalio and brokers a truce between his lord and his half-brother, leading to Yelmalio facing Zorak Zoran fully armed and armored - and offering ZZ mercy in defeat on the condition that he help fight the Chaos horde assailing the mountain.  Meanwhile Orlanth and his wingman Yinkin are off seducing the snow queen, and then they all meet up at the end to fight Chaos together.  

Edited February 11, 2017 by JonL

[Pentallion]

6 hours ago, Ian Cooper said:

There is the All.

And the All is divided into the abstract runic powers.

And the abstract runic powers are divided into the great gods.

And the great gods are divided into the lesser gods.

And the lesser gods are divided into the demi-gods.

And so on.

Glorantha is a Platonic universe, in the sense that mortals see the shadows on the wall of the cave, not the fire.

So whlilst Elmal is not Yelmalio, both are just shadows of cast by the All, and the shadows may reflect many of the same parts of the All, but also other unique parts.

Illumination is seeing the All, gazing at the fire not the shadows, and if the experience does not drive you mad, realising that the world is just shadows.

God Learnerism is trying to manipulate the shadows that the All casts. (And as you can imagine, that comes with great risks).

 

 

 

In my campaign, at the end of the world, our duck shaman looked into the spirit plane to see all the souls of the world, waiting for the End of the World so they could come back and repopulate and live their next incarnation in the next Age.  At that moment he saw The All.  The Invisible God.  Whatever you want to call it.  They were calling for the world to be remade and at the completion of the seven games sky quest, it would be. 

So in MY Glorantha, the opposite is true.  There is no All that divides into the Many.  There are the Many that join to become the All.  Elmal is not Yelmalio is not etc.  But together, joined as one, they become Lightfore, or Yelm. 

and both your way and mine can happily coexist in the same universe at the same time.  For in the end, it matters not if they divide or if they join.  It is the same.  We are all the All and we are all unique.

 

Just like everybody else

Edited February 11, 2017 by Pentallion

[Noita]

4 hours ago, JonL said:

There's a PBF over on rpg.net where a group of questers take a seriously Arkatic run at the Hill of Gold, in which Elmal intervenes after Orlanth attacks Yelmalio and brokers a truce between his lord and his half-brother, leading to Yelmalio facing Zorak Zoran fully armed and armored - and offering ZZ mercy in defeat on the condition that he help fight the Chaos horde assailing the mountain.  Meanwhile Orlanth and his wingman Yinkin are off seducing the snow queen, and then they all meet up at the end to fight Chaos together.  

That was a game I ran. Lots of fun. It was a Troll heroquest with the pcs dragged in.

[Byll]

Wot about Yamsur then? I always hoped he was a different little sun from Yelmalio/Deumalos / Reladivus/Kargzant. and he ought to be because unlike them he's sort of eaten by chaos (but not completely or we would not remember that he had been splendid or associated with Hippogriff). I'd like to think he was closer to Derndurnus. You could also say Sedenya was a little sun for a while before Antirius fell out with her.

[Mark Mohrfield]

On ‎2‎/‎11‎/‎2017 at 4:01 PM, Iskallor said:

That was a game I ran. Lots of fun. It was a Troll heroquest with the pcs dragged in.

Could we have a link to that?

[Jon Hunter]

On 11/02/2017 at 2:18 PM, Ian Cooper said:

There is the All.

And the All is divided into the abstract runic powers.

And the abstract runic powers are divided into the great gods.

And the great gods are divided into the lesser gods.

And the lesser gods are divided into the demi-gods.

And so on.

Glorantha is a Platonic universe, in the sense that mortals see the shadows on the wall of the cave, not the fire.

So whlilst Elmal is not Yelmalio, both are just shadows of cast by the All, and the shadows may reflect many of the same parts of the All, but also other unique parts.

Illumination is seeing the All, gazing at the fire not the shadows, and if the experience does not drive you mad, realising that the world is just shadows.

God Learnerism is trying to manipulate the shadows that the All casts. (And as you can imagine, that comes with great risks).

 

 

 

A really succinct and useful description, is that canon or your own work? 

[Noita]

5 hours ago, Mark Mohrfield said:

Could we have a link to that?

https://forum.rpg.net/archive/index.php/t-572321.html

A lot of the behind the scenes stuff was done in OOC thread. 

Gort is an enlo character.

Zorak Zoran was Blackeye, White eyes brother from the Rainbow mounds.

The HQ  was set in the Apple Lane area with trolls trying to implement an eternal winter.

YGWV.

Long story.

Tridents are from the Newtlings as is Yallaballo.

Shuffle was an Enlo hero...

[Ali the Helering]

With respect to the meaning of the word element Yu-, I think it depends on where & when you are.  The meaning in Dawn Age Dara Happa cannot be expected to be the same in 'present day' Grazelands.  Or, indeed, in 'present day' Dara Happa.  Over 1600 years or so, words evolve.  As to the root meaning in the pre-Darkness Solar Tongue or Firespeech, I would suggest a meaning of 'Majestic' which could easily become either 'Divine' or 'Imperial' as the language partitions & develops.

[M Helsdon]

19 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

With respect to the meaning of the word element Yu-, I think it depends on where & when you are.  The meaning in Dawn Age Dara Happa cannot be expected to be the same in 'present day' Grazelands.  Or, indeed, in 'present day' Dara Happa.  Over 1600 years or so, words evolve.  As to the root meaning in the pre-Darkness Solar Tongue or Firespeech, I would suggest a meaning of 'Majestic' which could easily become either 'Divine' or 'Imperial' as the language partitions & develops.

All true, except that in highly conservative cultures, especially if they have a written script, language drift can be minimal.

Even for non-conservative cultures, some languages undergo minimal change; an example would be Greek, where Linear B was deciphered, in part, by Michael Ventris, by attempting to assign Greek words to groups of the syllables. Mycenaean Greek isn't exactly the same as Classical Greek, but sufficiently close that many thousands of tablets have been successfully translated (though most, sadly, are administrative records). 

I'm also not certain how subject to drift Gloranthan cultures and languages are, given that their deities are mostly 'timeless'. There's some evidence that god names do vary over distance even in the same cultural group, but as the non-literate Hsunchen languages don't vary between widely distributed but related groups, there are non-Earth-like factors at play.

[Ali the Helering]

2 hours ago, M Helsdon said:

All true, except that in highly conservative cultures, especially if they have a written script, language drift can be minimal.

Even for non-conservative cultures, some languages undergo minimal change; an example would be Greek, where Linear B was deciphered, in part, by Michael Ventris, by attempting to assign Greek words to groups of the syllables. Mycenaean Greek isn't exactly the same as Classical Greek, but sufficiently close that many thousands of tablets have been successfully translated (though most, sadly, are administrative records). 

I'm also not certain how subject to drift Gloranthan cultures and languages are, given that their deities are mostly 'timeless'. There's some evidence that god names do vary over distance even in the same cultural group, but as the non-literate Hsunchen languages don't vary between widely distributed but related groups, there are non-Earth-like factors at play.

I have to disagree.  Linear B scripted Mycenaean and Classical Greek are significantly different, and it took the joint genius of Ventris and Chadwick to spot the commonalities.  In the present their translations are still subject to debate and, occasionally, revision.  English is an excellent example of flux in written language.  Shakespeare, the King James Bible, the Putney Debates, the letters of John Churchill, the sermons of John Wesley, the speeches of Gladstone, the Times in WW1, the Daily Mail in WW2, the poetry of Dylan Thomas and the drivel of Piers Morgan.  One language? Perhaps.  Continuity of meaning? Hardly. All within 525 years.

[M Helsdon]

6 minutes ago, Ali the Helering said:

I have to disagree.  Linear B scripted Mycenaean and Classical Greek are significantly different, and it took the joint genius of Ventris and Chadwick to spot the commonalities.  In the present their translations are still subject to debate and, occasionally, revision.  English is an excellent example of flux in written language.  Shakespeare, the King James Bible, the Putney Debates, the letters of John Churchill, the sermons of John Wesley, the speeches of Gladstone, the Times in WW1, the Daily Mail in WW2, the poetry of Dylan Thomas and the drivel of Piers Morgan.  One language? Perhaps.  Continuity of meaning? Hardly. All within 525 years.

English drifts by approximately 10% a century, though Shakespeare remains understandable, with a significant continuity of meaning, despite the last five centuries being an almost unprecedented period of change in culture and technology. To render English a different language, in that much of the meaning is not easy to grasp, it is necessary to go back at least to the Middle English of Chaucer; and to render it almost incomprehensible, the Old English of Beowulf.

However, English is not a good model for languages in Glorantha because of the major cultural changes of the last five centuries (during which English has mugged many other languages and run off with their vocabulary). In comparison, whilst not fixed, the languages of the ancient Near East were far more conservative.

The genius of Ventris and Chadwick was determining that the tablets included place names, which were sufficiently unchanged to be identified, and having found the meanings of the characters, then deciphering the language as recognizing the language as Greek, albeit in an earlier form, but sufficiently close to permit translation.

[Yelm's Light]

I just had an image of English holding another language at gunpoint and intoning, "Your diphthongs or your life!"

[Ali the Helering]

Loan-words and 'captive'- words due to imperial endeavour are by no means a modern problem. If you wish a Mycenaean example then look to 'sesame', and a derivation which can be traced back to Akkad. Trade changes language, and always has.

English is by no means so readily understood over the years. Consider Ecclesiastes in the KJV  'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'  

The modern and commonly accepted meaning of vanity makes a nonsense of that rendering. (curiously retained by the NRSV)  'Everything is futile', as the REB states it, makes sense of the Semitic original.

The problem is not simply the vocabulary, but also the usage. "And then our arms, like to a muzzled bear, save in aspect, have all offence seal'd up" (King John) may be understood with a little effort, whereas "Though you and all the rest, so grossly led, that juggling witchcraft with revenue cherish" tasks us a little more.  Shakespeare is NOT easily understood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[soltakss]

I'm not sure how much linguistics can be applied to made-up names.

Some Gloranthan languages are intensely conservative, being religious languages. Firespeech is one such example. Some areas are equally as conservative, such as Dara Happa, so I would expect those languages to be essentially unchanged. New Pelorian was created as a magical/mythic language, based on what is now known as Old Pelorian, but that was a magical change not a normal linguistic one.

I would expect that a lot of the names were made up, then someone saw some patterns and those patterns then drove other naming.

[M Helsdon]

6 hours ago, soltakss said:

I'm not sure how much linguistics can be applied to made-up names.

When Professor M.A.R. Barker reviewed Cults of Prax it was an aspect he took to task. In the next issue, Greg Stafford replied. I believe it was in the Space Gamer.

Barker's creation, and Tolkien's are both linguistics heavy. Glorantha is more a vehicle for mythology.

11 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

Loan-words and 'captive'- words due to imperial endeavour are by no means a modern problem. If you wish a Mycenaean example then look to 'sesame', and a derivation which can be traced back to Akkad. Trade changes language, and always has.

As can some English words. Some words travel far and last a very long time.

11 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

Consider Ecclesiastes in the KJV  'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'  

The modern and commonly accepted meaning of vanity makes a nonsense of that rendering. (curiously retained by the NRSV)  'Everything is futile', as the REB states it, makes sense of the Semitic original.

True: the KJV is full of mistranslations and misinterpretations.

11 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

Shakespeare is NOT easily understood.

Nor is some significantly more recent poetry... But it can be understood.

Edited February 18, 2017 by M Helsdon

[Tindalos]

1 hour ago, M Helsdon said:

Nor is some significantly more recent poetry... But it can be understood.

So presumably something similar to the "defaults to 1/(fraction)" rule for languages within the same family?

With things such as Nysalor's Bight Empire, modern Dara Happan may have picked up a lot of loanwords and developments from Theyalan languages, enough to make modern speakers have trouble with early to predawn documents, which would be written in a form of Dara Happan more akin to the Firespeech.

[M Helsdon]

21 minutes ago, Tindalos said:

With things such as Nysalor's Bight Empire, modern Dara Happan may have picked up a lot of loanwords and developments from Theyalan languages, enough to make modern speakers have trouble with early to predawn documents, which would be written in a form of Dara Happan more akin to the Firespeech.

They might have, but that might be more likely in New Pelorian? Even though the Dara Happans have based their culture in the image of the pre-Time Golden Empire, or what they believe it to have been, their extreme cultural conservatism may have led to a linguistic purge after the fall of Nysalor, much as they purged EWF Solar Draconism from their culture.

Edited February 18, 2017 by M Helsdon

[Yelm's Light]

To expound a bit on M Helsdon's point:

The structure of English is still nearly identical; the differences between the Elizabethan and modern versions are mostly morphing spellings and expanded vocabulary...not just 'muggings' but wholly invented words necessitated by technological advancement.  I'm no expert on Old (Middle?) English, but from my light reading in it the case seems to hold true.  I don't see it as changed very much at all.

Big Shakespeare fan here too, btw.  Part of his genius is that he was able to write poetry for the ages in language that the groundlings could understand.  It was aimed as much at them as at the pillowed-cushion crowd.  Given certain specific vocabulary that's no longer in common usage (hence footnotes), it's really not that difficult to read once you get used to it.  Granted, I have a certain facility with linguistics, but it's not the scary, inscrutable thing that many build it up to be.

[Ian Cooper]

23 hours ago, Yelm's Light said:

To expound a bit on M Helsdon's point:

Big Shakespeare fan here too, btw.  Part of his genius is that he was able to write poetry for the ages in language that the groundlings could understand.  It was aimed as much at them as at the pillowed-cushion crowd.  Given certain specific vocabulary that's no longer in common usage (hence footnotes), it's really not that difficult to read once you get used to it.  Granted, I have a certain facility with linguistics, but it's not the scary, inscrutable thing that many build it up to be.

Off topic: It's also easier to understand when you see it performed, particularly the comedies, when done well. It can also often be easier to understand the comedies with an all-male cast. There is a lot of cross-dressing humor in Shakespeare. (Yelmalions would presumably despire his comedies, hell I'm not sure Yelmalions would not have burnt the second volume of Aristotle's Poetics if they ever came upon it).

[JonL]

2 hours ago, Ian Cooper said:

hell I'm not sure Yelmalions would not have burnt the second volume of Aristotle's Poetics if they ever came upon it).

Now you've got me wanting to transplant The Name of the Rose to Sun County.

[Yelm's Light]

Ian Cooper said:

"Off topic: It's also easier to understand when you see it performed, particularly the comedies, when done well. It can also often be easier to understand the comedies with an all-male cast. There is a lot of cross-dressing humor in Shakespeare. "

Eh, I've always been more into the tragedies, and I know I haven't seen nearly as many of his plays performed as I've read...(theoretically) every one of them.  I find the histories mostly dry as hell and the comedies a bit fluffy for my taste.  There's still a bit of fun in the tragedies (Hamlet and the gravedigger, Portia, etc.), but it seems like the more serious philosophical subjects are there too.  Maybe I'm predisposed to it from all that early Greek reading...I didn't really get into the Bard until college.

Edited February 20, 2017 by Yelm's Light

[Jeff]

Oh, I've enjoyed pretty much every Shakespearean performance I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot (I used to regularly go to the Ashland Shakespearean Festival in southern Oregon). A few tricks I learned over the years:

Always get a little liquored up before hand;

Be disappointed at the lack of bear-baiting before the show (and if you get too liquored up, demand your bear-baiting!);

Remember - don't roll your bottles during the performance!

Root for your favorite character! But do it silently!

Edited February 20, 2017 by Jeff

[metcalph]

In the absence of bear-baiting, there is always a live performance of a Winter's Tale ("Exit, pursued by a bear").