Mysticism Rune

[GianniVacca]

I was re-reading the Cult Compendium and I noticed the following under 'Sun Dragon':

Text:

The Runes of the Sun Dragon are Dragon, Sun, and Mysticism.

Yet only the Dragon and Sun runes illustrate the article. I was wondering what the original author thought the Mysticism rune should look like. I know there was one in Hero Wars, but I reckon this article predates HW.

 

 

[David Scott]

The Hero Wars rune is clearly a godlearner label denoting the mystical world. Otherwise there is no rune for mysticism. Those on the outside expect there to be one as runes mark everything, but all mystics know there is no rune. My understanding of this comes from listening to some of our greatest modern mystical teachers: Oogway, Shufu and of course there is no spoon.

[Jeff]

This was during the period that Greg created a Rune for everything. Although that is certainly defensible as part of the God Learners repertoire of symbols for magical concepts, it was a terrible dud for game design (and for writing about the setting) - so when HQ2 came around we paired things down to the core runes again.

[Tindalos]

Well mostly. The Eternal Battle Rune stayed around, and it's one of those highly personal very specific runes typical of HW/HQ1.

[jongjom]

33 minutes ago, Tindalos said:

Well mostly. The Eternal Battle Rune stayed around, and it's one of those highly personal very specific runes typical of HW/HQ1.

Well that was one that was so cool that it deserved to stay! 

[jeffjerwin]

And Yinkin!

[jeffjerwin]

"And the gods looked around and saw a small, new rune wandering around." "Whose rune is that?" "No one could recall the rune as being one of the main runes, but because Yinkin was already asleep in Ernalda's earth-box rune, they shrugged." "We have an alynx rune now, it looks like." "Why is it that he gets a rune - along with that snorting bull-man, when I have to share one?", said Vrimak. "Because there is something about the universe that loves cats," said Uleria, "and no one will tell the bull to leave."

[davecake]

I’m with @Jeff. It makes sense that the West in general, and the God Learners in particular, would have a lot of Runes for things, and it makes sense that other cultures won’t rigorously stick to the God Learners core runic ontology and will create their own symbolism and iconography (much as human cultures do). But for game design, we are much better off with a restricted core set - and this should be understood as a game design artifactory not taken too seriously as a statement about Gloranthan use of Runes (though the core set will be familiar to everybody)

[GianniVacca]

I'm not advocating the fact that there should be zillions of Runes (I am definitely in favour of a restricted set*, as I have written several times on my blog). I was wondering whether the missing rune in the Cult Compendium was a typo of sorts.

 

*even though I do miss the 'Issaries' rune in RQ:G

[kaydet]

10 hours ago, davecake said:

I’m with @Jeff. It makes sense that the West in general, and the God Learners in particular, would have a lot of Runes for things, and it makes sense that other cultures won’t rigorously stick to the God Learners core runic ontology and will create their own symbolism and iconography (much as human cultures do). But for game design, we are much better off with a restricted core set - and this should be understood as a game design artifactory not taken too seriously as a statement about Gloranthan use of Runes (though the core set will be familiar to everybody)

I don't necessarily disagree, but I think that it is less easy to disentangle "the rules" of the game from the way Glorantha works than is implied here.

[Roko Joko]

Yeah, with runes it's always tricky to draw a clear line between flavor and cosmological fact.

I will be interested to see what they do in RQG with runes that are pretty core, like Communication, but are not on the character sheet. Looking at the quickstart I see they did the Harmony + Movement shoehorn for Issaries, but that's an easy one.  In general it will be interesting to see if and how they shoehorn everything.

Edited January 25, 2018 by Roko Joko

[davecake]

Yes, and some consistency between game systems would be very useful too. I don’t think we are going to get it.