Who were the God Learners' Heroes?

[Brootse]

7 hours ago, Joerg said:

The history of the conquest of Ralios tells us otherwise. The conquest of Safelster occurred in the reign of Annmak Peacemaker, and the documents on heroquesting made it to Jrustela less than a decade before the fall of Paslac.

It isn't clear when and how the God Learners blocked all paths to Arkat, but they did so only after the fall of the AUtarchy.

 

Arkat and his followers blocked them.

[davecake]

On 9/30/2018 at 1:37 AM, Darius West said:

No doubt a bit of Arkati illumination would have been a must as well.

Not so much via Arkat, but the description of malkioneranism in MSE makes it seem very likely that they were an Illuminated sect within the God Learners, at least that is my assumption. Of course, some other sects of the God Learners viewed this with extreme suspicion. 

[Pentallion]

On 9/29/2018 at 11:03 AM, womble said:

Maybe they decamped en masse to the GodTime/Hero Plane and became the nightmares known as Demons. Or even the very Gods themselves, shaped by the myths they were trying to shape, as much as they did any shaping themselves. 'S a bit recursive, perhaps.

That is exactly what I think happened.  They became the gods.  They are Orlanth, Yelm, even Chalana Arroy and Mallia.

All the myths are God Learner constructs.  

Perhaps even the story that Time was created by Arachne Solara isnt true and time always existed but the God Learners created that myth.  

Perhaps this is the Truth Harrek and Argrath discovered at Jrustela that set Argrath on his path to destroy the gods.

[Pentallion]

On 10/1/2018 at 5:53 AM, Darius West said:

Ah yes, the Gift Carriers of the Sending Gods.  This somewhat begs the question of "What was the gift?" and who were the "Sending Gods", and indeed who the gift carriers were?  Were they mortals, or some sort of creature made for the occasion?  As to how one hunts down a person with the runequest sight, especially when they are potentially greater hero questers than Arkat, well, it is a very deus ex machina fix, but how was it achieved? 

Well, if the "Sending Gods" are themselves God Learners then the secret they are trying to hide is that they've supplanted the gods and shaped the pantheons and myths to thier own liking.  

Again, making it necessary for Argrath to lift up sunken lands in Jrustela and question the souls of those who knew the truth.

I mean seriously, didnt anyone ever stop to ask why Wolf Pirates raised a whole section of Jrustela just to talk to dead God Learners?

Consider they had to have brought magics just for that purpose cuz Ygg and Orlanthi spells arent gonna cut it.

What was SO important they went to all that trouble?

Edited October 4, 2018 by Pentallion

[Steve]

2 hours ago, Pentallion said:

All the myths are God Learner constructs.  

Constructs based on actual events from the God Time, right? Or are you suggested they never happened? Because acting out the myths in heroquests and worship ceremonies seems to tap into the God Time successfully enough.

[Pentallion]

2 minutes ago, Steve said:

Constructs based on actual events from the God Time, right? Or are you suggested they never happened? Because acting out the myths in heroquests and worship ceremonies seems to tap into the God Time successfully enough.

Being as the god learners could reshape the myths I am saying the myths of the 3td Age may have little resemblance to the myths of the 1st Age or be complete fabrications.  The Hyaloring myth of Rendaler could have been used to construct a Lightbringer myth and create Arachne Solara.  Time obviously DID exist in the God Time because one of Rendalofs 7 parts splits into 3 parts - old, adult and young.

Not only is this representative of Arachne Solara as Fate it clearly indicates aging, hence before and after, hence Time.

So Time always existed and the God Learners who became Orlanth, Yelm, etc. Constucted the current mythological landscape!!!

[Steve]

50 minutes ago, Pentallion said:

Time obviously DID exist in the God Time because one of Rendalofs 7 parts splits into 3 parts - old, adult and young.

Not only is this representative of Arachne Solara as Fate it clearly indicates aging, hence before and after, hence Time.

The presence of aging doesn't prove that Time existed as such, at least not in terms of the linear time that later exists. Otherwise you could argue that because one event appeared to happen in the God Time "before" another, related event, then that also proves that Time existed then. It's surely far more complicated than that, like a being in three dimensional space trying to understand existence in, say, seven dimensions.

Nice try, though

 

[womble]

Without time (no capital) how do the Darra Happans have multiple thousands of years of History?* There must have been sequentiality in the time before Time, or there wouldn't have been any progression between the Ages. HeroPlane stuff muddies the waters in that regared, it seems to me, by letting participants jump about in the flow a bit; I Fought We Won demonstrates non-locality in that medium...

* This is not a rhetorical question: I don't know and would love to be enlightened.

[jeffjerwin]

1 hour ago, womble said:

Without time (no capital) how do the Darra Happans have multiple thousands of years of History?*

Also many people in DH history seem to live for hundreds of years; recall for part of this time the Sun is unmoving and the movements of other planets after the Sun is gone are subject to change.

I suspect exaggeration.

Time may replace narrative continuity: i.e., myths do move forward, but they do so according to the needs of the story. Up till then, 'time' may have passed in a subjective rather than universal fashion. 'One thing after another' rather than 'five hours later'

[scott-martin]

4 hours ago, Pentallion said:

Well, if the "Sending Gods" are themselves God Learners then the secret they are trying to hide is that they've supplanted the gods and shaped the pantheons and myths to thier own liking.  

A lot of great things going on in this thread but I'll throw my two clacks at this one. This may be both the secret "of" the God Learners and the secret "held from" the God Learners until the very end. After all, any sufficiently advanced work built on Arkat's journey will include that moment where you meet yourself on the road, at a mirror stage as it were. "We have met the old gods, the ancestors and the enemy and they were us." - old jrusteli graffito

[Lord High Munchkin]

1 hour ago, scott-martin said:

A lot of great things going on in this thread but I'll throw my two clacks at this one. This may be both the secret "of" the God Learners and the secret "held from" the God Learners until the very end. After all, any sufficiently advanced work built on Arkat's journey will include that moment where you meet yourself on the road, at a mirror stage as it were. "We have met the old gods, the ancestors and the enemy and they were us." - old jrusteli graffito

"We Are All Me"

[Pentallion]

4 hours ago, Steve said:

The presence of aging doesn't prove that Time existed as such, at least not in terms of the linear time that later exists. Otherwise you could argue that because one event appeared to happen in the God Time "before" another, related event, then that also proves that Time existed then. It's surely far more complicated than that, like a being in three dimensional space trying to understand existence in, say, seven dimensions.

Nice try, though

 

Maybe that's what your Zzaburi taught you and maybe he's right, but as the Blue Vadeli told me, "maybe it's canon....and maybe it isn't."    YGMV

[Sir_Godspeed]

This does remind me a bit of a perspective someone espoused on some other site: that Glorantha actually is just as mundane as our real world, but that we play through stories and sagas that involve supernatural elements just as much as RW stories do.

It's not a perspective I'll ever use, because it doesn't sound all that fun to use in-universe (and kind of removes the point of making up fantasy worlds), but that doesn't mean that it's not fun to *think about* every now and then.

This "The God Learners Retconned the Universe"-theory strikes me much the same way. Probably not one I'll ever entertain seriously, but another fun conspiracy or meta-textual perspective to ponder.


As for time in the God Time, I think the general gist is that while linear time as we know it didn't exist - sequential narratives *did*. It's just that you could also have multiple sequences existing side by side, and thus multiple truths and multiple causalities, without mutual exclusivity. This was mostly made impossible by the Compromise. That's how I read it, anyway.

[Roko Joko]

7 hours ago, womble said:

Without time (no capital) how do the Darra Happans have multiple thousands of years of History?*

Glorious Reascent of Yelm and Fortunate Succession don't say anything about time not existing, except before Yelm.

[Grievous]

3 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

This "The God Learners Retconned the Universe"-theory strikes me much the same way. Probably not one I'll ever entertain seriously, but another fun conspiracy or meta-textual perspective to ponder.

Agreed - it is a very cool theory, but it isn't necessarily conducive to the kind of stories I want to tell in Glorantha.

[Darius West]

4 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

This does remind me a bit of a perspective someone espoused on some other site: that Glorantha actually is just as mundane as our real world, but that we play through stories and sagas that involve supernatural elements just as much as RW stories do. 

Hmmm...  In Glorantha it isn't that odd to see people flying with the aid of a sylph or a spell, or breathing water, or ships sailing through the air due to red crystals, or talking humanoid lizards, etc.  Now while Gloranthan magic does go to some lengths to explain some more mundane things, there is a lot of visible magic, it's just most people's access to it is a bit limited.

4 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

It's not a perspective I'll ever use, because it doesn't sound all that fun to use in-universe (and kind of removes the point of making up fantasy worlds), but that doesn't mean that it's not fun to *think about* every now and then.

Speculate for all you're worth.  It is a healthy pastime.  I have certainly used comparatively mundane real world secrets as "divinely inspired magic" in game religious systems.  Given that magic means "what 'magi' do" where 'magi' are Zoroastrian wise men, there is every reason to suppose that a good deal of the actual "magic" may have been science with a dash of religious stage magic panache.  It might also be argued that science is a process of applying mathematical and logical models to natural systems for the purpose of performing more accurate divinations i.e. predicting outcomes.

4 hours ago, Sir_Godspeed said:

This "The God Learners Retconned the Universe"-theory strikes me much the same way. Probably not one I'll ever entertain seriously, but another fun conspiracy or meta-textual perspective to ponder.

I think Greg categorically said that there is no time travel in Glorantha, and that the gift of prophecy is a rare and powerful gift as a result, as few people in Glorantha are called upon to worship Time and gain even a glimpse its powers.  Consider that Time is actually merely a form of Kajaboor, the entropic death of the world, transformed into a slow motion form.  But what is moving in slow motion?  Kajaboor or the World?  Glorantha now exists with a relativistic entropic death of itself.

As to the God Learners retconning the universe, well, they sort of did.  The thing is, hero quests affect the myths that underpin Glorantha's magical reality, and every time you perform those hero quests, they are altered a little.  For example, there might be a trend of Yelmalios doing much better at the Hill of Gold over many hero quests, and thus gradually Zorak Zoran loses his fire powers and Yelmalio gets them back (and can sleep under a red blanket again).  The God Learners simply used statistical analysis to understand a distribution of what the outcomes would look like based on certain actions.  Now when the God Learners understood that there was a monomyth, or a "meta-myth", i.e. an overarching and underpinning structure to the sequences of the myths that made events appear to happen in a timeless environment, they were able to change the world.  The reason for this is that if you change the start conditions, you change the end conditions accordingly with any process (provided you understand the detail of the process you are tweaking to enough decimal places).

[Sir_Godspeed]

3 hours ago, Darius West said:

Hmmm...  In Glorantha it isn't that odd to see people flying with the aid of a sylph or a spell, or breathing water, or ships sailing through the air due to red crystals, or talking humanoid lizards, etc.  Now while Gloranthan magic does go to some lengths to explain some more mundane things, there is a lot of visible magic, it's just most people's access to it is a bit limited.

I agree that it's a position that's pretty hard to hold if you view the adventures as-is, but I believe they viewed the adventures as something more akin to folklore or tall tales.

3 hours ago, Darius West said:

As to the God Learners retconning the universe, well, they sort of did.  The thing is, hero quests affect the myths that underpin Glorantha's magical reality, and every time you perform those hero quests, they are altered a little.  For example, there might be a trend of Yelmalios doing much better at the Hill of Gold over many hero quests, and thus gradually Zorak Zoran loses his fire powers and Yelmalio gets them back (and can sleep under a red blanket again).  The God Learners simply used statistical analysis to understand a distribution of what the outcomes would look like based on certain actions.  Now when the God Learners understood that there was a monomyth, or a "meta-myth", i.e. an overarching and underpinning structure to the sequences of the myths that made events appear to happen in a timeless environment, they were able to change the world.  The reason for this is that if you change the start conditions, you change the end conditions accordingly with any process (provided you understand the detail of the process you are tweaking to enough decimal places).

I don't disagree with this, but I think you clung on to "retcon" in a bit of a too broad manner compared to the context I used it. I specifically used to to refer to the idea that the God Learners became gods and created the God Time stories to begin with, which I'm not too much into.

That the God Learners irrevocably altered the mythical landscape through new insights, revelations, and outright changes I think is a valid and important point. Their alteration of making the "four worlds" directly comparable and putting together western, pamaltelan, vithelan and genertelan-theistic mythical cycles in a common context is a major development, and I would argue is a lot more important than just heroquesting a bit innovatively here and there and adding or removing a rune. Their legacy is the idea and perspective of the monomyth, which makes all stories, all concepts "relative" in the sense of making it possible for them to be put into relation to each other - a feat previously only the Theyalans and Bright Empire seems to have done, and only in central Genertela at that.