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The actual idea behind the malkioni is they're these plato-influenced greek/indian/ancient hebrew culture with variations on a caste system, and established military and wizard classes. They're also monotheistic with sorta saints and messiahs, even if the invisible god wasn't emphasised as an abstract omniprescence of platonic ideals. They didn't really get fleshed out and a lot of the art was pretty western/medieval. The closest analogy was the medieval west, so it stuck in people's minds. Early malkioni art:  recent malkioni art 
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Jun 17, 2020 22:35
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And then when it came time to focus on Kralorela instead of doing what they did with the Malkioni they just doubled down on the Ancient-China-But-Boring thing. Speaking of: I think it would be logical for Kralorela to focus on class and the division between the government and the citizens, considering the fact much of the government is literally in-human dragon monsters who are too busy thinking about how enlightened they are to actually understand the plight of the lower class. Gives it a progressive wuxia feel.
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Jun 18, 2020 07:15
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Wrestlepig posted:The actual idea behind the malkioni is they're these plato-influenced greek/indian/ancient hebrew culture with variations on a caste system, and established military and wizard classes. They're also monotheistic with sorta saints and messiahs, even if the invisible god wasn't emphasised as an abstract omniprescence of platonic ideals. One thing I've always thought about was if the Invisible God had a presence on the God Plane. Obviously the Malkioni faith itself would disavow that possibility, but I personally figure it would exist in syncretic form by people who've had positive contact with the Malkioni, or at least as an ancient enemy deity to be dunked on by local tutelary gods. The question then becomes, can you interact with an abstract series of laws and principles by LARPing really hard at it? Can you gut-stab Mathematics to cause stomach illness in the bordering wizards, so they'll quit casting spells on your cattle? My own answer is "yes" of course. In my Glorantha there's a Hi'iaka-inspired goddess (there's a bit of Al-Khidr and Saint George in the mix too) who scorched the Invisible God's formulas with the Volcano's Bright Hand and severed his corollaries from his theorems with the Lightning-Skirt of Black Glass, as punishment for bringing disasters to her two friends. He bled profusely into the ocean, reviving the magic of sharks and bringing a century of confusion to the Isle of Sorcery. Zzaburites and their ragged ilk deny that this ever occurred, but it is the complete truth. I'm just wondering if something similar ever came up in any published sources or adventures.
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Jun 18, 2020 20:17
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You can change the world by messing with the godplane, but I'm not sure you can mess up wizards that way. Their power comes from understanding how the world works and applying their wills and principles to it. You could probably carve out some kind of myth to give yourself cool wizard killing powers, but that's changing you, not them.
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Jun 18, 2020 20:29
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I'd say you could mess up WIZARDS that way, but you couldn't mess up wizardry itself. All the formulas still work exactly the same as they did, the right heroquest could just make wizards in the appropriate area worse at applying them. But that's not "gut-stabbing-mathematics" it's just performing an appropriate heroquest, same as any other heroquest (to the degree that there's such a thing as any other heroquest.)
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Jun 18, 2020 21:40
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wiegieman posted:Their power comes from understanding how the world works and applying their wills and principles to it. reignonyourparade posted:All the formulas still work exactly the same as they did, the right heroquest could just make wizards in the appropriate area worse at applying them. That's the part I have contention with. To me, the existence of eternal principles unchangeable by the Gods or by Chaos sounds an awful lot like admitting that the Malkioni (or at worst, the God Learners) are correct about the cosmos. Power and the removal of power in every other part of Glorantha is derived from the values of each respective society: for Uz the worst imaginable damage is to the birthing of children, for Orlanthi it is kin-slaying, for Dara Happans it is rebellion, etc. These interact with the values of foreign societies in ways that have fundamentally changed them, like in the traumatic entry of Yelm to the Underworld or the rebellion of the Storm Gods. The Middle Sea Empire noticed this trend and exploited it on purpose to defeat their enemies and wipe out entire peoples. My basic complaint is: if the core principles of shamanic or theistic societies can be traumatically changed or wiped from existence, why would a gaggle of bearded caste-ists be immune to that? Isn't changing the world by messing with the god plane exactly changing "how the world works", affecting biology and the flow of rivers and tangible stuff like that?
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Jun 18, 2020 22:40
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Theistic societies can be traumatically changed or wiped from existence. The existence of theism can't be. The existence of animism can't be. And the existence of wizardry can't be. Wizard societies HAVE been traumatically changed and wiped from existence. Also, the Malkioni objectively are right about the cosmos. Animism and Theism are just also objectively right about the cosmos.
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Jun 18, 2020 22:46
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reignonyourparade posted:Also, the Malkioni objectively are right about the cosmos. Animism and Theism are just also objectively right about the cosmos. I would agree with that, but to go back to the idea of "formulas". I would argue that the formulas can change (though there will always be formulas of some kind), and it would be more Gloranthan to say that the transition from say, Newtonian physics to the Theory of Relativity might be a case of the first one being true before, and the second one being true afterwards. Or that a competition between adherents to those two formulas would be no less a cosmic conflict than that between the Sun gods and the Storm gods, and may never be resolved to a conclusion! And yeah, there's the question of personifications/pseudo-deities of sorcery like Zzabur. If we assume Zzabur "exists" in the way Barntar or a Praxian Great Spirit does, it follows that other deities, heroes, spirits, etc. can interact or mess with him in some way. So if going to the God Plane and kicking Barntar in the nads would observably cause plows to work less well and irrigation to dry up, would kicking Zzabur in the nads not affect at least a subset of sorcerors who live by his principles and effectively worship him?
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Jun 18, 2020 23:36
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Bendigeidfran posted:I would agree with that, but to go back to the idea of "formulas". I would argue that the formulas can change (though there will always be formulas of some kind), and it would be more Gloranthan to say that the transition from say, Newtonian physics to the Theory of Relativity might be a case of the first one being true before, and the second one being true afterwards. Or that a competition between adherents to those two formulas would be no less a cosmic conflict than that between the Sun gods and the Storm gods, and may never be resolved to a conclusion! Platonic forms, more than formulas. And that poses a problem on the God Plane. Even Zzabur probably wouldn't claim to have invented the triangle. Rather, he'd say that he identified and codified the characteristics of the form underlying all observable objects falling under the general classification. (Clearly, only someone of his incomparable genius could reason backward from the individual object to the underlying ideal form.) Then he spread the idea. You can't track down the form of a triangle on the God Plane, at least not without so radically changing your own nature that you're unlikely to be able to act freely when you arrive at it. You could track down and interact with Zzabur, but not even he claims that he is the origin of the triangle, he merely proved its existence. You would have to track down every entity on the God Plane whose understanding of "triangle" conforms meaningfully to the underlying characteristics as Zzabur defined them, including potentially individual thinkers who don't even know who Zzabur is. You can't embody the form of a triangle on the God Plane and then mess with it, because by doing so you by definition have altered the unalterable form. Embodying and then messing with the Dara Happan "triangle" would only effect Dara Happans, not the underlying form. So long as the belief-value of the form of a triangle maintains its independence from direct manipulation, you can't manipulate it. You either have to manipulate the belief via the believers, or project yourself into the world of forms, at which case you stop being an independent entity and become part of a system which would by definition be incapable of doing what you wanted to do. In my understanding, this also accounts for what happened to the Godlearners. No truly effective resistance to their ascent was posed initially because killing Godlearners doesn't help, you have to attack them conceptually (which is all but impossible) or you have to simultaneously attack every single being who conceptualizes something in the same way. That, of course, is what ended up happening. In the same way, you can't go beat up the Invisible God. If you found him and beat him up, by definition that wasn't the Invisible God. The trade-off for that mythic isolation is that believers have no direct line of access.
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Jun 19, 2020 00:20
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One of the upsides of having a god your enemies can pick a fight with is the ability to basically become that god in the mortal world. Theist magic and Feats in particular are incredibly versatile and powerful. A sorcery spell does one thing, the same way every time. "I worship Orlanth" comes with a crapton of benefits.
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Jun 19, 2020 00:39
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Narsham posted:In the same way, you can't go beat up the Invisible God. If you found him and beat him up, by definition that wasn't the Invisible God. The trade-off for that mythic isolation is that believers have no direct line of access. Eh, there was still interaction between what i'm just going to vaguely describe as Malkion poo poo and gods during the gods wars. Maybe you aren't technically interacting with Zzabur himself*, but you can still go through a heroquest that has effects quite alike to if you went through a heroquest that interacted with Zzabur himself. The difference between going into a heroquest and kicking Zzabur in the nads to weaken the capabilities of local Malkioni and going into a heroquest and kicking a theistic memory of the-time-your-god-kicked-Zzabur-in-the-nads in the nads to weaken the capabilities of local Malkioni, is a difference that's very real, but you still can end up with the local Malkioni being worse at magic for a while either way. *Maybe you are though, to the degree that heroquesting involves literally traveling through not-technically-time to interact with the actual full on gods war, if you travel to an event that involved Zzabur then yes you might very well be interacting with zzabur himself.
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Jun 19, 2020 00:53
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God, never thought about how annoying that's gotta be for Zzabur on a personal level that people can just go into your past and be a dick to you.
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Jun 19, 2020 01:13
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Tulip posted:God, never thought about how annoying that's gotta be for Zzabur on a personal level that people can just go into your past and be a dick to you. Absolutely nothing can go wrong when you decide to pick a fight with the greatest wizard ever to wizard.
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Jun 19, 2020 17:48
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wiegieman posted:Absolutely nothing can go wrong when you decide to pick a fight with the greatest wizard ever to wizard. Yeah even accounting for a healthy dose of wizardly self-propagandizing, and the distinct possibility that he own-goaled himself and vanished for good during the Second Age, he was probably around the level of Cragspider. Having looked into the matter a bit, it's ambiguous as to whether he actually found his way to the God Plane or not. The Brithini think so, but they're not sure. And if he did, there's the question of whether he's affected by the Cosmic Compromise and thus limited in his ability to conduct personal vengeance against people who give him swirlies in their myths. I don't think he did because the presence of a new divine patron of sorcery escaping time (a la the Red Goddess) should've had massive effects on sorcerous societies like the Malkioni or the Mostali, and we don't see those. The idea that he's "biding his time until the Hero Wars, I promise" is the kind of unsupportable cop-out claim that Rationalist Zzaburites love, but like many things it's a possibility. -------  Incidentally, I appreciate that while Sorcerors have a complex philosophical relationship with the otherwise-theistic physics of Glorantha, this translated in-setting to "what if we made a giant robot god, like directly after inventing scissors". "What if we got our asses kicked for this and had our graves turned into a dungeon for dipshit adventurers."
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Jun 19, 2020 18:13
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I feel like Glorantha might be a setting where you can punch the concept of a triangle hard enough to add an extra corner. Probably have to punch pretty hard, though.
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Jun 19, 2020 18:29
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I remember one of the secretkeepers (Greg, Sandy, or Jeff - probably Sandy) saying that Zzabur really should be thought of on the same level as Orlanth or Yelm or Ernalda. He's a big fuckin' deal - not just a really high level wizzard, but an incarnation of a fundamental building block of existence.
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Jun 19, 2020 18:34
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Here's a question if Zistor was a big enough breach of the compromise to allow Orlanth to come kill it, why wasn't Nysalor as another incarnated god?
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Jun 19, 2020 22:19
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Gorelab posted:Here's a question if Zistor was a big enough breach of the compromise to allow Orlanth to come kill it, why wasn't Nysalor as another incarnated god? Nysalor was a much more elegant entry into reality than the god learner’s “gently caress Around and find out. Plus a lotta mysticism to smooth it over.
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Jun 19, 2020 22:43
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Illumination seems to let you break a lot of rules.
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Jun 19, 2020 23:12
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Rand Brittain posted:Illumination seems to let you break a lot of rules. Illumination is understanding that those rules aren't really real (and being occluded is deciding that means you don't have to follow any of them, such as "people deserve to be treated like human beings.") wiegieman fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Jun 20, 2020 |
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Jun 19, 2020 23:15
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The Zistor project also wasn't just about making a new god. There were potentially factions among the God-Forgot Godlearners interested in building a replacement god, but their pitch to the rest of the god learners was basically "our mathematical models suggest there's another pair of Forces beyond the 8 forces we know about. Our theory is chaos is one half of it but there's a missing Purification rune that's the other half. We're going to try to create this missing rune." So it may not have actually been the God-Creating itself that brought Orlanth down on the project. The other thing is, the Uz gods had already shown up to try to put down Nyasalor, that's where the trollkin curse comes from. So it could also be a matter of anything from "the Uz gods called dibs, we don't want EVERYONE showing up when someone breaks the compromise because that would cause even more problems than it solves" to in theory even "orlanth saw the Trollkin curse and decided he didn't want any of that. This new Arkat plan sounds like a much better idea."
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Jun 20, 2020 00:19
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Disregard that "Nysalor is a God and not just a chaos demon," it's a bunch of Lunar bullshit.
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Jun 20, 2020 01:18
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reignonyourparade posted:The Zistor project also wasn't just about making a new god. There were potentially factions among the God-Forgot Godlearners interested in building a replacement god, but their pitch to the rest of the god learners was basically "our mathematical models suggest there's another pair of Forces beyond the 8 forces we know about. Our theory is chaos is one half of it but there's a missing Purification rune that's the other half. We're going to try to create this missing rune." The end result of "there is no such thing as absolute purity" is a cool part of Glorantha's anthropological subtext. I have a dumb personal Glorantha canon that the Law, Chaos, Moon, and Dragon runes are all diametrically opposed runes of the same type- let's call them "cosmic runes"- that are associated with fundamental forces or forms of mysticism beyond the elemental runes or power runes. Law's the most boring since it basically is just cosmic order and cultural ritual and is related to "regular" forms of magic like sorcery and also Arkati mysticism, but it's still a rune in the same category as Chaos. Moon and Dragon both exist outside a Law-Chaos paradigm, but in mutually incompatible ways that aren't easily understood by people who aren't mystics or Illuminated. Under my fan canon, the reason for Arkat's pursuit of Draconic mysticism is because he figures out that it's the 'natural' opposing cosmic force to Moon via the history of Sheng Seleris even if it's not immediately evident.
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Jun 20, 2020 01:39
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FMguru posted:I remember one of the secretkeepers (Greg, Sandy, or Jeff - probably Sandy) saying that Zzabur really should be thought of on the same level as Orlanth or Yelm or Ernalda. He's a big fuckin' deal - not just a really high level wizzard, but an incarnation of a fundamental building block of existence. I've always been partial to the theory that Zzabur isn't totally arrogant, it's rather that he's just accurately reporting what it's like to be the anthropic personification of the magic rune. He might literally have been involved in every act of magic in glorantha's history, just by nature of what he is. It'd be like if magnetism developed an ego and started taking credit for holding all that artwork to refrigerators.
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Jun 20, 2020 11:47
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reignonyourparade posted:
_successful_ wizards, animists and theists are all objectively right about the cosmos. Theists who worship Gods that don’t exist, or that didn’t to the things they tell stories about are, as a rule, not successful. Same for sorcerers who think there is a power node somewhere, but are wrong about it’s strength or nature. Having a false belief doesn’t mean you can’t do magic; the consequences are more subtle than that. For theism, such a false cult takes more from it’s regular worshippers than it gives back, requiring pyramid-style growth that isn’t sustainable in the long run. For false wizardry, or sorcery, the consequences.are born by the environment, which within a generation becomes a desolate wasteland. In both cases, if something has been successful for millennia, it is very likely OK. Whereas if some genius or prophet can come up with an entirely convincing argument and demonstration as to why some new idea is true, they are wrong 99 times out of a hundred.
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Jun 21, 2020 11:34
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There is a fascinating boundary line between the creation of new myths that become retroactively true in the God Plane, and the pointless worship of something that is Not A God which accomplishes nothing but the waste of energy. As a formal setting element I see that as a statement that the God Plane is not "powered" by the belief and sacrifice of any worshippers at any time, but adapts (slowly) to the needs and social circumstances of established theistic communities. Like radmonger said, the key would be if something worked for millennia. A monstrosity like the Crimson Bat does not reach the divine, or even the status of prominent heroes like Harrek or Cragspider, because the massive sacrifices that feed it are fundamentally a slap-dash shortcut to empower a disposable weapon. If the ascension of Sedenya was a genuine miracle of effort and faith, the Bat is one of many of the Lunar Empire's failson attempts to recapture that first revolutionary act.
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Jun 21, 2020 20:55
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since it looks like people are going to leave this site behind i would love to know where all of you sweet people are intending to discuss glorantha lore from now on? regrettably, for me, it'll be da basicroleplaying forums because i don't know of anywhere else. i swear i'm the only one who's under the age of thirty there lmao.
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Jun 25, 2020 23:12
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TheNamedSavior posted:since it looks like people are going to leave this site behind i would love to know where all of you sweet people are intending to discuss glorantha lore from now on? regrettably, for me, it'll be da basicroleplaying forums because i don't know of anywhere else. i swear i'm the only one who's under the age of thirty there lmao. We Are All Us in the TG discord, my friend-yet-to-be: https://discord.gg/66Wb5z
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Jun 26, 2020 00:43
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niiiiiiice
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Jun 26, 2020 01:55
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Given recent circumstances, I figure I may as well dip my toes into the foul Chaos of thread necromancy.   So, Glorantha's relative popularity in Japan during the original Runequest era has left a fun trail of nods in the world of JRPGs. Suikoden for instance, has an extremely clear reference with the berserker Hallec/Harrek (on the left) in III, duck men like Sgt Joe (on the right) in III, the "Red Moon Empire" in Suikoden I, and of course its series-wide narrative focus on Runes and the immortal fate-bound heroes who embody them. I'm not aware if I-III's director+writer Yoshitaka Murayama was personally a Runequest fan or if it was other staff, though I'd say it's pretty likely he is. Now that the Suikoden franchise has risen from its grave with the successful backing of Eiyuden Chronicle, I am waiting to see if any Runequest seeps into the revival.   Hidetaka Miyazaki, who directed the Souls franchise, is also on record as being a Runequest fan. The plethora of direct Berserk references in the Souls series should be an indication of how Miyazaki handles his influences, and likewise we have the bloated man-flies in Blighttown named after our friend Cragspider, and an unused boss named Undead King Jar-Eel. The ambiguous way Dark Souls treats time and reality, with characters from ancient history and other playthroughs intruding and overlapping with your own, may also be inspired by Heroquests and the God Time; I have no real evidence for this, I just like to think so.   I'm less certain about the use of the term 'Dragonewt'/ドラゴニュート. I can't find any pre-Glorantha sources or mythology that use the term, nor much outside english-language media that used it either. Not even in The Elder Scrolls, which has its own fair share of Gloranthan heritage. Yet it crops up in an awful lot of Japanese games and fantasy media to refer to dragon-headed humanoids. The above images are from Shining Force and Last Armaggedon (a  1988 game I found out about while looking into this topic, where Demons seize control of the planet again after humanity wipes itself out, and you play as the demons against an army of robotic invaders), and you could look into basically any CCG and find something or other named Dragonewt. If the word really did catch on from Runequest, it's a neat legacy for some of the most memorable residents of the setting.I wouldn't be surprised if there's some obvious cases I'm missing, this is a brief overview of what I've noticed personally. It's nice to see the impacts Glorantha's had on the world.
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Oct 22, 2020 22:30
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Very cool! That is an odd legacy I hadn't really thought too hard about.
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Oct 22, 2020 23:02
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Bendigeidfran posted:Given recent circumstances, I figure I may as well dip my toes into the foul Chaos of thread necromancy. I’m sure this thread has talked about this before, but you can trace a fairly straight line between Ken Rolston’s involvement in Morrowind and the increased weirdness Kirkhope and others felt comfortable putting in that beautiful, beautiful game
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Oct 23, 2020 01:31
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Kind of a side story, but these are some great covers from 1980s Glorantha stuff:  In particular the second one has always stuck with me. I looked up the artist and it's Steve Purcell, who went on to create Sam and Max, and was involved in Ratatouille and Brave with Pixar. I guess Avalon Hill really nailed the right guy to illustrate recognizable human emotions in animal-like nonhumans.
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Nov 13, 2020 04:47
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I didn't know he was involved in that! Thanks for the info!
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Nov 14, 2020 01:30
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Love the art, and strangely enjoy that both the Duck and the Morokanth are Donald Duck-ing it! I can picture either a Lunar or Orlanthi character trying to broach the subject of pants and being met with total disdain.
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Nov 14, 2020 07:08
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Some ducks wear pants, some wear skirts, some wear nothing. It's up to the individual duck. If a duck's gonna go into combat though it should probably have some form of leg armor.
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Nov 16, 2020 00:24
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Looked up morokanth and whoa Apparently they were the only non humans to win the Covenant of Eaters and Eaten and got to domesticate animalistic Herdmen lmao
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Nov 16, 2020 00:28
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Just Dan Again posted:Love the art, and strangely enjoy that both the Duck and the Morokanth are Donald Duck-ing it! I can picture either a Lunar or Orlanthi character trying to broach the subject of pants and being met with total disdain. "Hey, buddy, you don't give me grief about not wearing pants, and I won't bug you about why you don't wear a diaper around that mouth of yours!"
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Nov 16, 2020 00:39
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a fatguy baldspot posted:Looked up morokanth and whoa Morokanth claim the humans all cheated, because why else would only humans have won; whereas the humans claim the Morkanth cheated, because how the hell did an animal win. Both are probably correct, why wouldn't you try to cheat a contest where the loser gets domesticated?
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Nov 16, 2020 00:47
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a fatguy baldspot posted:Looked up morokanth and whoa The domestication of humans thing is SUPER loving HORRIFYING JESUS.
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Nov 16, 2020 01:51
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