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JonBolds posted:I've got a hankering to play in this world, as I've casually read a lot about it and enjoyed that reading. We're going to try RQG, but I think the Fate Core system would be extremely easy to deploy in a Gloranthan context. I believe I made a few posts in the old thread about how to adapt it.
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Sep 7, 2018 00:24
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Tulip posted:The site I used for glorantha lore died a few years ago (RIP), but included a bunch of Stafford replying to fanmail, and when he got some questions about Mostali he opened his answer with roughly "GOD I hate dwarfs I do not want to think about them any more, anyway here's like 5 pages." Ducks should be the sort of thing that, if encountered briefly, evoke laughter and ridicule. But if you work or fight alongside them and observe them and get to know them, they are fierce and generous and honorable and brilliant. That’s frankly how encountering all the races should go for new players. Assumptions, followed by a slow realization.
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Jun 6, 2020 05:35
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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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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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Josef bugman posted:The entekosiad is fully up there in terms of "poo poo that I have read but cannot understand". I felt like I understood just enough of the Entekosiad to recognize that I was being trolled. And not the Uz kind, either. Definitely requires you be steeped in Gloranthan lore in advance.
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Nov 29, 2020 00:46
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Mimir posted:I'm going to do a nice, long writeup of my ongoing game when we're through a full year, but long story short - It's 1624, my players are members of a Lismelder clan. They bring gifts to a lunar mining operation in the Starfire Ridges (trying to excavate the ruins under there or free some of the cinder pits demons) and are greeted peacefully. They poison the lunars with rotten fish (given as a gift) and free the mining slaves in the confusion. The slaves at this installation aren't locals - they're captives from the White Moon rebellion. Ask rather who you want as potential antagonist for the PCs. Option 1: Some minor to intermediate Lunar official with responsibility over those mines gets tasked with the follow up. Either he subcontracts the task, or he's stuck stumping off to deal with the problem himself. Aside from whatever forces were detailed to him, he has little or no pull with the military and even troops assigned to him might consider him an idiot. If he gets into trouble, sensible Lunar leaders blame him for making a bad situation worse and only intervene if things collapse. Option 2: Assuming Temertain is still alive, the Lunars inform him and tell him to keep his drat clans in line. He might send an agent, or send for the clan leaders, or employ reprisals of various sorts. Option 3: The situation gets escalated to the occupying forces, and the Lunars send a small detachment. Probably too small to get the job done if the Lismelder clan rises up, either as a deliberate provocation or as simple incompetence, depending upon who you think is behind the decision. You'd want an arrogant troop commander who enjoys throwing his authority around, but competent troops to support her. Did the PCs nab anyone important from the rebellion? If so, perhaps there's a covert operation to assassinate that person and blame the Orlanthi, or perhaps somebody in the army detachment is secretly a White Moon follower. In any event, this scenario balances the tensions raised by having a provoking force in place with the force's weakness, tempting hotheads in the clan to rise up, at which point the Lunars can identify this as a serious problem and not as a one-off raid, and respond with more meaningful force. Each option emphasizes a different aspect of the region and the potential goings-on, and directs the PC attention to different places.
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Dec 31, 2020 01:24
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Do the Godlearners have any named characters or Heroes? Like their automated loot and XP grinding hero questing still required heroes, right? All heroes are interchangeable, so just use whichever one is convenient. (/Godlearner) I ran a campaign where the Clanking City/Zistor cult was motivated largely by the desire to genuinely automate Godlearner questing using the Machine God as the mechanism. So I certainly think that, absent that, powerful Godlearners had to hero quest and undergo a certain amount of risk in the process. But by definition, few or none of them would have actually been heroes, and they'd either have been using existing paths which they ought not to have been able to access, or short-cuts and short-circuits they deliberately engineered. For example, say I'm a Godlearner and I want to run the Hill of Gold quest, but I don't like that Yelmalio gets the poo poo kicked out of him. I posit the existence of another Son of Yelm named Elmal, and substitute him for Yelmalio, and then run the Hill of Gold as Elmal. My lifestyle, decision-making, and place in the world are no more defined by Elmal's characteristics than they would have been by Yelmalio. That is the antithesis of how heroes usually function, where a Yelmalian hero would be shaping himself around Yelmalio and likewise for Elmal. (Also, for those infuriated by my choice of example, imagine a Godlearner wants to run the Hill of Gold but wants to pick up self-resurrection powers, so he overwrites Elmal with Yelmalio. There, that should feel better, for "Godlearners desecrating the Hero Realm" levels of better.) But I figure the best way to imagine a Godlearner hero quest is that they're like speed runners: they figure out all the bugs and glitches they can exploit to get what they want as rapidly and accurately as possible and skip everything else.
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Feb 10, 2021 20:29
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Bullbar posted:So for my first dip into Glorantha I'm gonna be running Griffin Mountain online for like six people using the newest Runequest Glorantha. Any advice, admonitions, suggestions, etc? Griffin Mountain has plenty of conversation-powered plotlines and lots of mini-adventure areas. Start off small and relatively not dangerous until everyone gets a handle on the situation, and let things that can be extremely dangerous (like the kidnapping plot) simmer until everyone gets tougher. Prioritize going places, meeting cultural or political milestones, and smaller-stakes combat events like hunting for a good while, too. Balazar is the back end of nowhere. If new PCs are starting with bronze armor and weapons they’re already looking like potential power players, so focus on acclimation and exploration and situate the campaign before firing off the plotlines. This area in particular lends itself to slower development and interwoven story threads. Don’t approach it as “now we’ll play through the kidnapping subplot” but rather as there being multiple simultaneous story-lines developing and the PCs keep crossing into them again and again as they travel. By the later stages of the campaign, it’s all that travel and exploration providing a wider perspective that should make the PCs effective, at least as much as their stat development and treasures.
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Jul 17, 2021 16:20
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Rand Brittain posted:I'm not a super Glorantha lore nerd, but the idea that if the God Learners recognized two gods as being equivalent, they're literally and objectively the same being, sounds... wrong? There were multiple ways for the God Learners to declare two gods as equivalent. Some of them involved convincing the worshippers. If everyone stops worshipping Elmal as a separate deity and recognizes him as an aspect of Yelmalio, then that’s what he will become. It isn’t actually that simple, of course.
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Aug 18, 2023 05:51
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Tias posted:Just chiming in to say the Prosopaedia is great, and I'm really looking forward to reading the cult books. The art is amazing since they got Katrin Dirim on board! One thing I didn't like was identifying Gbaji explicitly as Nysalor and not Arkat. That's not wrong, exactly, but it's disappointing to think that it's right. Something tricky happened on the Heroplane when those two confronted each other and it's not clear whether the survivor of the confrontation was even the same being. Issaries posted:You gotta respect the God learners hustle though. Except that the EWF masterminds understood they were farming the end game content while oriented improperly within Time, meaning they were actually disempowering themselves like complete dopes. You really have to admire the number of people in Glorantha who figured out creative ways to endanger the world. That's part of what makes it such a good adventuring setting.
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Aug 18, 2023 19:05
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Rand Brittain posted:I feel like that kind of summarizes my beef with a lot of recent Glorantha material: that it treats stuff people say about the world as objectively factual rather than reflecting some kind of ideological or political reality, and winds up presenting a complex situation ("the Solar Pantheon followers are trying to fold Storm Pantheon gods into their model") as having a simple solution ("and they're right!") that kind of gives me the impression that they just never noticed the subtext. I was grumpy about the latest Runequest switching Lhankor Mhy's runes from Law and Truth to Truth and Stasis, but maybe it speaks to this broader understanding about how the facts operate in the world. Still grumpy, though, just for a bigger reason. Given that the world is radically different based on something like what you think of the Lunar Empire and the Red Goddess (which aren't exactly the same thing), I'm a bit shocked at this attitude. It isn't a simple matter of saying either the Red Goddess is Gbaji 3.0 and is trying to hurl the entire world into Chaos by exploiting Arkati experimental heroquesting and operating outside the framework of the Great Compromise, OR she's found a way to incorporate Chaos into the world, which is exactly the thing that happened with Air, and with Sky, and with Earth, and with Water, and maybe even with Darkness, and of course the most recent group to immigrate to Glorantha and get integrated is the group most opposed to letting these foreigners in.
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Aug 26, 2023 19:22
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Gorelab posted:The Lhankor Mhy thing bothered me to, but apparently those are the rune's he's always had in Runequest, while the Heroquest era stuff went with Law and Truth instead. RQ 3 (the Avalon Hill joint) has Lhankor Mhy with Truth and Law. (I double-checked my copy of Gods of Glorantha before posting). I don't know about RQ 2 or RQ 1.
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Aug 26, 2023 22:41
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NewMars posted:It can also be difficult to figure out what you can do with a stasis run, to be frank. One of the more common things it's aligned to is actually just building walls and things, which makes sense, but also is far from the first thing to come to mind. Pretty important rune if you want to operate a vault or other secure location where valuables can be kept without going for a walk. If more people had access to dwarf weapons like grenades and other explosives, the stasis rune is the rune of "this thing doesn't spontaneously explode in my pack setting off all the other explosives I was carrying" and probably also features prominently in things like fuses. If you live underground, stasis helps keep your dwelling-place from collapsing. And I expect it's important in resisting Chaos mutations and infestations, which isn't a strength of the Wind pantheon, which is more about killing them off after they develop. And if we're being more Western, the stasis rune is your best bet if you want to live forever.
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Aug 27, 2023 21:41
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Yelmalio does have self-resurrection, so that’s something. Yet another way of considering the situation: the Hill of Gold heroquest is central and important to multiple pantheons, and a locus for questers. When Yelmalio went there, Zorak Zoran bushwacked him and took his fire powers, and bad things happened to him in multiple other encounters, but the world itself would not let him die. When Elmal went there, he fought off most of those encounters and didn’t die or lose his fire powers. A possibility is that either a powerful heroquester tried to save Yelmalio’s powers by winning all the fights and accidentally created a new sun god, OR a powerful heroquester wanted to weaken Elmal or prevent his joining the Storm clan and ended up creating Yelmalio. Another possibility is that this is a Yelm/Orlanth issue. Both stories illustrate things central to the Sun and Storm tribes; from Yelm’s perspective, no son of his could possibly have done what Elmal did, so Elmal is a false god, while from Orlanth’s perspective, the story of Elmal makes perfect sense and even explains how his people survived when he was on the Lightbringer’s quest. The issue here is that the Orlanthi would have no objection to the Yelmalio story either, so both cults can exist in Orlanthi culture while Elmal has no place in Solar worship. That provides a wedge case, and the Lunars would be expected to push Yelmalio worship over Elmal worship because that strengthens them and weakens their enemies. In fiction, then, the Elmal cult should be embattled and the Yelmalians ascendent during the Lunar high tide.
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Sep 1, 2023 05:13
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reignonyourparade posted:The lifebringer's quest is "Orlanth went down to the underworld to rescue Ernalda and I guess he ran into The Bad Emperor along the way and went 'eh i guess having the sun around was actually kinda nice too' also." Or from another perspective, Ernalda went down to Hell to fix everything in the World. In the Lifebringer's Quest, Orlanth stumbled into the middle of things and made her job harder because he didn't really want to admit he was wrong or that Yelm was a necessary part of the fix, plus he keeps getting in Ernalda's way. In the Lightbringer's Quest, Orlanth is focused on Yelm and thus doesn't interfere with all the things Ernalda is doing with other goddesses that actually fix everything, plus his encounter with Yelm goes more smoothly and both of them can safely pretend they saved the world. As for the god time stuff, since it all happened before Time existed, it isn't really fixed in the same way as events within Time.
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Sep 2, 2023 00:52
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I love the claim this is an unanswerable question when, in actual gameplay, some Elmal PC is going to want to recover Rune magic and the only shrine handy will be a Yemalian shrine. What determines the answer? The absolute state of the deity or deities in question? The cultural beliefs of the people who live near the shrine? The beliefs of the people who maintain and worship at the shrine? The belief of whoever is high priest at the shrine? The belief of the temple spirit? The beliefs of whoever founded the shrine? The belief of the worshiping PC? What if this specific shrine started out as an Elmal shrine until some Yelmalians came along and converted it? Does it matter if the Yelmalians converted it by slaughtering the original Elmali and reconsecrating it or if they convinced the Elmali that they were actually worshipping Elmal? Does getting rune points back (in the new system) come with the restriction that you can’t use your fire spell? Maybe in practice, as GM, you just decide. But Glorantha as a world operates in a way that raises the stakes for that decision, because a PC might try to take advantage of that interoperability later and understanding the why of it could be vitally important. That cosmology matters a lot to the setting is cool, and saying “your game will vary” doesn’t help individual GMs make grounded decisions about such things, while unilaterally defining Elmal as Yelmalio seems against the spirit of Gloranthan reality.
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Sep 15, 2023 15:05
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radmonger posted:The Elmal subcult of Yelmalio, when it’s published, will very likely be associated with Yu-Kargzant or someone, and so have Firespear (which is in the Red Book of Magic, but not taught by any published cult write up). I'd be happier accepting that if I didn't own multiple paper books that took the opposite approach. Just like I'd be happier if the latest game materials didn't nail down Gbaji as Nysalor, not Arkat. Obviously Nysalor is the good that does evil, and Arkat is the evil that does good, and Gbaji is an ultimate betrayal deity. But while Illumination certainly represents a form of betrayal and is closely associated with Nysalor, Arkat is not only clearly Illuminated himself, he betrays every single cult he joins. And it's relatively clear that Arkat "defeating" Nysalor may have been less "matter and anti-matter explosion and Arkat is what was left" and more "two sides of the same being merge and what's left opts to call itself Arkat." The whole point of the story is that it's open to interpretation and that attempting to objectively identify which "really was" Gbaji misses the whole point while also disarming the uneasy aspect of what Gbaji represents. It's the Chaos that hides within and looks like you. Only the sort of person who sees the ending of John Carpenter's The Thing and insists that if only one of these two characters survives to be rescued, he by definition cannot be The Thing, would want the Arkat who walks away from that conflict to objectively have triumphed over Gbaji. To return to the questions I asked: if I were running a campaign either under the old rules, or by ignoring the bits I don't like of the new rules, the answer of "can this Elmal worshiper recover rune spells/points at a Yelmalian Sun Temple" would be conditional. From a meta-game perspective, I'm probably inclined to allow it so the PC has more capability to deal with whatever is coming next. But it's the ways in which the in-game implications can add complications or tell interesting stories that matters to me, too, from that meta-game perspective. Elmal worshiper is part of cult that sees Elmal as subcult of Yelmalio: Obviously the prayers will work, and there's no dilemma to begin with. Elmal worshiper is part of Elmal-separate cult that vehemently opposes the Sun Temple as outsiders and interlopers: Either they'd never make the attempt to begin with, or doing so will succeed and the worshiper may be called an apostate unless he stays extremely quiet about it happening and nobody else finds out. Middle-of-the-road outcome: The prayers work, and the whole thing is justified as an accommodation of sorts, but the PC may become a lever the Sun Templars use to try to bring Elmal under the big Dome with them. If the players are interested, that could become a big campaign thing which eventually results in something ranging from a holy war between the two factions and a compromise of some sort that brings them together. (Obviously the campaign could start with these issues already settled and the Sun Domers being one big happy cult, but that disarms all of the story-making potential.) In practice, the question may also have to do with cultural relationships as well as personal relationships. Maybe the head of this Sun Temple refuses to allow an Elmali to enter. Maybe the Elmal PC in question is related to the head of the Sun Temple and the attempt working gets spun as based on their relationship and not on a relationship between the gods. There's lots of options. I understand why rules designers might tend towards writing rules that take esoteric cosmological questions that also happen to be deeply relevant to actual play and make definitions to keep GMs and players on the same page and answer as many of these questions as possible. I just think doing so means taking away interesting tools that Glorantha is especially good at handing to GMs and players, in the name of making things easier and consistent. Asking "will this work in game" is important, and being able to answer that question is important. But I don't agree that it necessarily limits or determines in-game behavior. If you look at people's beliefs about vaccination, for instance, the established fact that the polio vaccine not only works extremely well, but that it has virtually eradicated polio, isn't necessarily offering much force against anti-vaxxer rhetoric. Partly that's because other vaccines aren't as effective as the polio vaccine; partly that's because a claim about the trade-offs between potential risk of the vaccine versus risk of the disease doesn't care about effectiveness (indeed, arguing that polio or measles have almost been wiped out can justify opposition to those specific vaccinations, and when polio or measles reappear that doesn't prove the vaccines are good, it proves that they failed to wipe those diseases out). At least in my Glorantha, thinking that you can prove something about Yelmalio and Elmal by testing to see if they can regain rune magic at each others' shrines is just a slight variation on how the Godlearners functioned. The truth is that it'd probably work, and if it doesn't you can definitely find reasons external to the "same deity" claim you want to test, but it wouldn't work 100% of the time and if it did work, it might or might not bear on the question you're actually testing, because magic and myth are real in Glorantha, and both the Law and Truth rune are visibly associated with the Illusion rune. Worse, if you could conclusively prove the two deities are the same god, you might have been wrong until you did that and then made yourself right because everyone believed you. (I'd expect the fissures to take longer to display themselves than with the God Swap, but frankly I'd never expect consensus on the issue in the first place.) The cosmological implications of that resonate through the setting, IMO, and raise the stakes on questions like whether the Lunar enterprise to incorporate Chaos into the world would indeed have the effect of bringing new beings peaceably into Glorantha and thus breaking a cycle of violent admission last seen with the Storm deities, or whether it would actually break down reality and turn everything back into Chaos. Based on all the available evidence, BOTH possibilities are plausible, but obviously an Orlanthi hearing a Lunar mystic ask whether everything realizing it's actually Chaos would be destructive, or a freeing revelation, is likely to lead to the Orlanthi launching an attack. "I'll prove this isn't poisonous by feeding it to you" isn't an experiment most people are going to be confident about when they don't trust the experimenter in the first place. And all this isn't even anti-science. The college physics lab I was in had lousy equipment: the wooden planes we used for testing were visibly warped, for example. That meant that our results were accurate to the equipment we had, and also wrong, because that inclined plane wasn't at a consistent incline plus the warping meant the surface was deformed in every direction. The lab assistant had us "adjust" our numbers to fit the actual, established scientific results. Had we been able to accurately measure the equipment we were using (which frankly would have taken more math than the class expected, as well as equipment we obviously didn't have if they couldn't even spend the money to replace what we did have), we may potentially have been able to measure what was actually going on. In Glorantha, though, that expectation of objectivity is itself called into question by constant experience, because someone can go back into the source code of reality and make changes to it outside of Time. I happen to think that also makes it a great setting for an RPG.
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Sep 16, 2023 16:36
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Tias posted:I know when I have been outgrog'd, my bad. I can't afford the guide, but I got to BoHM which cleared it up. Depends. A Sun County Yelmalian is going to be very different from a Sun Dome Yelmalian from Sartar, who is different again from a Dara Happan Yelmalian. That's part of why I've been staying out of the debate here ITT, because I think the claims being made (on both sides) are prioritizing things I find mostly unimportant and not considering things I find to be central. A Yelmalian from one culture or location who become such at a specific date is not easily comparable to a Yelmalian from a different culture or location who joined the cult 30 years prior. Fixity is, in theory, a specific characteristics of a small subset of faiths in Glorantha, and frankly, it's largely a falsehood even under those circumstances. The followers of Mostal or of the Invisible God turn out to have splintered into a bunch of different groups with different values and interpretations and practices of their faiths. Heck, a portion of the followers of the Invisible God gave up immortality in favor of a different approach to their lives and faith! Strength, much less "my god can beat up your god," is only important within a narrow subfield of faiths in Glorantha. The idea that Yelmalio can defeat Elmal in battle is weird anyway, given that the Yelmalians are trying to convince the Elmali that the god they worship IS Yelmalio. As for granted powers, multiple cults in the system grant specific powers or rune magics unique to them that are very effective in combat, but despite being important deities and especially significant to adventuring bands, they are generally not as important as other deities. Humakt is vitally important but worshiped by a tiny number of people, while deities like Barntar or Ernalda are going to have a lot more worshipers and are objectively "powerful" culturally even if they aren't granting reusable access to Sever Spirit, or combat-related oaths, or other such goodies. The earth cults are some of the most powerful within most Gloranthan cultures, and they are generally not that interested in combat to begin with. Nessus posted:Looks like I made the right call with Humakt Well, there's one or two sources painting Humakt as a Chaos deity because death opened the wound in Glorantha that allowed Chaos in. Almost certainly, that's both unfair and accurate; Chaos got in partly because of Death, but that doesn't mean Humakt is a massive traitor to the universe, it's a matter of consequences. But don't get fooled: Humakt really depends upon his cult to maintain standards of honor because he's a terrifying monstrosity to most people already, and would be even moreso without that balancing factor in place. Those Chaos cultists who worship Humakt as a Chaos deity and get magic back don't prove Humakt is a Chaos god, but that might be a future risk. ZeroCount posted:Elmal might have once been more widely worshipped in the Empire but his worship may have been banned or subsumed into Yelmalio after Manarlavus cursed Elmal to irrelevance. This would explain why the Hyalorings and Samnalings are Elmali but nobody else from the Empire is. And indeed, considering the current state of Elmal that everyone is discoursing about, it seems like the Emperor's curse was wholly effective in the end. For me, this is the stuff right here. It's not meaningful to stand in the world (or outside of the game system) and say "this deity objectively exists, has these objective strengths, and if you don't believe me you can go to the God Plane to see for yourself" because objectivity is, like the monomyth, untrue in Glorantha. Take a specific deity in a specific culture and location at a specific time and try to prove or disprove objective characteristics of that deity, and what you're really doing is either making poo poo up, or actively changing the deity in question. This is "I set up an objective experiment to try to prove a claim" in a setting where the objectivity is largely an illusion and your results are contingent on what you and the experimenters expect to find, though not entirely determined by that. The Godlearners succeeded for so long because they had ways to push lots of power behind their expectations and force things to work out in the ways they claimed were "objectively true." I suspect the association between Truth cultists and independence from political authority (either as mercenaries or as independent agents like librarians) is tied to the idea that within the realm of politics, the truth is malleable and the politicians are always trying to reshape it. But even within Truth cults, there's going to be disagreement. Unless you're Truth/Stasis, you have to expect that Truths can change, just like the claim "The sun is up" is contingent and therefore changeable, even though at some point in the past the answer was not contingent.
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Sep 21, 2023 20:40
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NewMars posted:I'm reading up on the pamaltan materials by greg and... they're actually really good? And extremely different from the dragon pass and greater genertelan perspective we get. Particularly interesting is that they hate sacrifice to gods, but are fine with a person pursuing absolute dedication to one. They also have a very interesting perspective on spirits. Interesting! I wonder if part of that isn't Pamalt surviving, and thus providing a pattern for their shamans to pursue immortality because Pamalt survived? That would imply that the nature of spirits and their connection to the natural world in Genertelia was largely shaped by Genert's death. Tias posted:I suppose. However, direct confrontation between deities in debate has been a thing in the RL world as well. While christianizing Scandinavia, missionaries had to convince the heathens living there that A) Jesus could best Thor in a fight and B) Jesus was a strong, mail-wearing tribal lord, not unlike the visage of Odin. On the first point, I'd say, exactly. Except that it isn't so much "here's a story of how my god can beat your god," because it's possible to exhibit your god's power in the real world and even embody your god to at least some degree. And I'd say the key point if you're trying to prove, say, that Elmal is actually Yelmalio, isn't to set up a fight between them because if they are the same god, how in the hell can they fight? The real argument is that "you have lost your way to the true Yelmalio, and your rituals and rites are thus less effective," probably with some blame aimed at the locals' enemies politically or culturally. Then your champion draws upon the power of Yelmalio to perform some great task and demonstrates that, truly, your rites and rituals access the god more powerfully. All of this is potentially proving something objective, but it is as likely or more likely that what's really happening is contingent on the "real-world" status of those contending over the issue and how well they can sway the people around them. It's as likely that Elmal starts out as a useful accommodation/legend to explain the merging of Dara Happan refugees during the Darknesses with the local Orlanthi, and that this arrangement worked fine so long as each group had a viable path to rulership. Then things broke down in multiple ways, partly with the rise of the Orlanthi over the Elmali, partly with the marriage into the Horse Tribe complicating the positioning of one sun cult against another, and partly with other cults taking the forefront as war leaders (Orlanth, of course, but also increasingly Urox and Humakt as darkness became less of a threat as compared to chaos). When Elmal's incorporation into proto-Sartarite society involves equal status, that's very different from Elmal becoming increasingly subordinated culturally as Orlanth's portfolio expands. Yelmalio offers an alternative model that gets the sun cult out from under the heel of the local air cultists, and that's going to appeal regardless of the truth or falsity of Yelmalio being Elmal or one deity being stronger than the other: one is demonstrably more efficacious at this place and time, and the idea that you're not changing cults but rather correcting rituals that were corrupted or weakened due to the desire of the air cults to be supreme helps avoid potential issues like being killed by Elmal's Spirits of Vengeance. That the underlying mythic and mystic maneuverings may have more in common with Arkati-style manipulations of deific portfolios or with Godlearner experiments than with more traditional "discovery through heroquesting" really doesn't matter if you're not in a position to tell the difference, and frankly, almost nobody would be. As for chaos-gods, I think there's a clear implication that EVERY wave of incoming deities represent the potential to either destroy the world or reshape it. Darkness maybe came closer to destroying the pre-dark world, and Umath's arrival is probably next-most destructive, with the difference between most of the Storm gods and the Chaos gods who came in at about the same "time" being that Umath wanted to lay claim to a place in the world where Chaos wants to revert the entire world back into Chaos. But this isn't something safe to discuss culturally as there's actual situations where this kind of intellectual exercise leads to people in town transforming into Chaos monsters; the Illumination path might make conversations safer, but only if you don't think Illumination is an even worse form of Chaos. The Lunars are curious because the Red Goddess is either the newest interloper attempting to integrate into the world, or a well-established part of the world attempting to integrate Chaos more broadly into the world. That the Lunars are hypocritical about what they're doing--for example, apparently leaving the Crimson Bat unintegrated while freely "converting" broos and the like--needn't necessarily prove that their ideas are bad, and their primary conflict with the Storm cultists matches every other stage where it's the latest "invaders" who become dominant and then challenged by the next group. The key question "can we trust her" is obviously ambiguous at this point in its answer, and the extent to which the problem might be solved not by the Red Goddess but by the moon to come just further complicates everything. Deptfordx posted:That's been a thing since RQ1. Just letting healing magic bring people back within a minute or so of injury solves many of those issues, but I agree that the ruleset has not aged well and the official alternatives have their own problems. I think a 4E modification would work well: I ran heroquests in a 4E game and granting hero powers in-system is extremely easy. The problem, as with most 4E hacks, is that it'd take a tremendous amount of time and effort to generate the powers necessary to support RQ in 4E. Years back I thought the FATE system would adapt very well to Glorantha and to heroquesting, in particular, using Hero Points and compels as the central questing mechanism. I still think that would work. The problem with such conversions is that because Glorantha as a setting is so rich, the immediate instinct is to complicate mechanics. For example, you could have the various rune affinities give you a set number of "starting" rune points in every affinity, that could be spent like fate points to operate related powers or rune magic, or even to do things that match with that rune. Instead of tracking castings or points of rune magic, you'd power such things out of your affinities and recover rune points through participating in rituals or holy days or events. Heroquesting requires that you're spending lots of these points, though you may get some or all back at the end of the quest; your ritual support and other such elements might give you a refresh, plus on most quests you'll want to accept compels to earn even more, but encountering someone doing a counter-quest could suddenly cost a lot of resources unexpectedly. I don't know if it's worth the work involved, though, because even FATE is getting long in the tooth. Maybe one of the simple "failure/succeed at cost/total success" systems would work better.
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Sep 23, 2023 19:53
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radmonger posted:Then you are in luck, because I’ve not see any attempt to establish that. I really don't want to restart an argument here with this observation, but as I understand it, there's a huge difference between "two rival cults with deities situated predominantly in different pantheons that are constantly at odds for largely political reasons but where individual temples or even priests may end up taking sides that differ from the majority" and "one cult that's a subcult of another cult" and that appears more nuanced than what the latest Runequest has done. It's especially significant in this instance, where many Orlanthi worshipers in Dragon Pass and Prax had strong reasons to want to undermine the Elmal cult and were happy enough using the "newer" Yelmalian cult to do so, but then it turned out that a substantial subset of the Yelmalian cult (as part of the Sky pantheon and loyal to Yelm) were actually supportive of the Lunar Empire that was trying to displace the Orlanthi. Oops! Even better, if you're playing as rebel Orlanthi you can quickly find out that Yelmalians have radically differing opinions of the Lunar Empire and you can quite possibly work with some against them if you pick the right ones. But if you do that, are you alienating the few Elmali still around? Ending that story with "Monrough proved Elmal was just a subcult of Yelmalio, the end" completely eliminates any interesting stories that would otherwise inevitably come of the Elmal cult being threatened. I mean, on some level it's a microcosmic version of doing "Orlanth is Dead!" and declaring that the only way Orlanthi can get any magic from that point through to the end of Time is through the Lunars. You had a great opportunity for an adventure or even a whole campaign and you just wrote that possibility away instead. Cults of Runequest: The Prosopaedia, writes of Elmal quote:Elmal was worshiped by the Orlanthi at the Dawn, until contact with solar cultures revealed him to be another name for Yelmalio. I should probably be more upset at the suggestion that the Orlanthi had no contact with solar cultures before the Dawn, which is just laughably wrong, but this retcons a really interesting political dynamic and subthread in favor of, uh, being more boring, I guess? And it doesn't seem as nuanced as you're suggesting. I admit I'm less eager to get the Sky and Storm books after seeing what the Prosopaedia is doing in terms of flattening complexity. Keep the complex cultural and political Glorantha and simplify the rules, instead!
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Sep 24, 2023 19:24
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White Coke posted:The Orlanthi civilization at the Dawn was a post-apocalyptic society. There wasn't even much of a society beyond individual families and small tribes. They had lost most of their knowledge of their gods and their Storm Age civilization, let alone other peoples' gods and civilizations and as they spread they learned more about their own past first. Plus given the weirdness of Godtime the solar cultures they had had contact with weren't quite the solar cultures they would go on to make contact with after the Dawn. In the Godtime Yelm was The Bad Emperor while to the Dara Happans Orlanth was Rebellus Terminus. Elmal wasn't the son of Yelm he was the son of the dead Emperor. "After the Dawn" is radically distinct from "early in the Third Age" in my mind and my understanding of Glorantha is that not everyone accepts Elmal is Yelmalio even in the Third Age, but this is all nitpicking. This isn't precisely "nobody has any gods or rituals left" Dawn era, because if you want to get that granular, "I Fought, We Won" is a complete breakdown of society even past the level of the family. But the POINT of it is that everyone is alone and everyone is together. But that doesn't matter, because also nobody has very good records from back then and there's no way to know whether Elmal as understood in a specific part of Dragon Pass early in the Third Age bears much resemblance to Elmal immediately after the Dawn, or to Elmal during the Darknesses. Separate son of Yelm, or total miscommunication? The point is that trying to define away that ambiguity is poisonous to game-play. Worse, it's thinking that nailing down what should be nailed down on the rules-side of things actually means nailing down in-game concepts. Even there, I'd prefer to see guidance on how to handle someone worshiping God X who tries to participate in rituals or recover rune magic in a temple to God Y, which admits to more complexities and choices than "Elmal is a subcult of Yelmalio, so you can do it." Glorantha is full of these kinds of cases and the answers depend heavily on the story you're all telling in the setting. Allowing a Humakti to recover magic in a temple to Yanafal Tarnils could be a minor RP point in one campaign, a huge clue in a second campaign, and the trigger for a complete disaster in a third. Trying to manage these choices on the design end of things is the opposite of what Glorantha should be about. Glorantha isn't about information, it's about stories.
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Sep 25, 2023 18:34
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reignonyourparade posted:Honestly i'm pretty sure the implication is supposed to be "the god learners were like 80% right, if they weren't they would've have been able to get the results they did, but HO BOY were they not willing to accept that 20%, and also they were huge assholes about it." Well, from one perspective, they're passive meta-gamers who figure out loopholes in the system and try to take advantage of them. From another perspective they're applying "scientific" experimentation to poke at a cosmos held together by hard wishing and spiderwebs. The God Swap was an attempt to test a claim and I bet if you talked to the architects afterward they'd insist that the general theory was correct and that they a) may have selected the wrong experimental subjects but b) probably could have made things work by just putting more power into the procedure, because fundamentally grain is grain is grain. (They are "bad" scientists, but anyone who took basic physics in college knows that you're making lots of unrealistic assumptions. Cows that are cubes is actually a more sophisticated level of simplification.) Rand Brittain posted:In retrospect I think the thing about Elmal/Yelmalio is that it lands right smack of the issues I've always had with Glorantha, where it wants everybody to get to be Right but also wants gods to objectively exist and not just be the product of Ascension-style consensual reality. It's never really resolved this inconsistency, so when you ask a question like "were the God-Learners right?" the best answer you can get is "he's right, but he shouldn't have said it." Is it possible that you're wrong when you see an inconsistency there? Let's quickly look at a few cases and see how "reality" can be a mix of objectivity and perspective at the same time and how trying to resolve the question isn't always the wisest move: 1. Our reality. Let's take the statement, "Stephen Hawking is alive." We'd first have to deal with the labeling issue: more than one human being can be named Stephen Hawking. But let's assume we pick the famous physicist. What can we objectively determine? If there's a soul or some other portion of our being that can survive after the death of the body, it might also exist prior to the body. If no such thing exists, then we can rule out the eons prior to Hawking's documented birth, as well as all time subsequent to his death (setting aside the possibility of some reconstruction or resurrection in future). If it does, can we label that thing "Stephen Hawking" accurately, or does that label depend upon a physical body and a specific context within time and space? Then we have edge cases. On the one hand, is Stephen Hawking alive at the moment of conception, and do we trace that moment to sperm and egg, or implantation in the uterine lining? Or is it fetal development or viability? We might guess at a month for "being alive" but we can't drill down to the second. And what about death? Is he dead at the moment listed in his death certificate? Some current research suggests brain activity can continue for far longer than first thought, so we have a period between 1 minute and 1 hour when Hawking might not be brain dead. And the cells in the body don't all instantly die; for that matter, if bacteria in the gut live another few days after the body supporting them dies, is that enough to say "Hawking is alive" or is the brain the only part we care about? That's all setting aside the simulationist model where Stephen Hawking might have been an AI in a virtual world the whole time, and either was never alive, or was "instanced" and could reappear at the push of a button. 2. Glorantha. Let's consider Uleria. Goddess of Love, owner of the Fertility rune, survivor of the Celestial Court. Is Uleria alive? Even Jeff Richard in the Prosopaedia hedges his bets here: Prosopaedia posted:Uleria, once Goddess of Life, may be the only deity of the Celestial Court to have survived the Great Darkness, though some believe that the being worshiped in her name is only a small portion of the whole of Uleria, or is another goddess with identical powers, attributes, and appearance. Let's pause for a moment to consider how we'd treat someone in the real world asserting that Stephen Hawking vanished in 1991 and was replaced by another human being with identical memories, mental capacities, and appearance. But this is objectively a possibility in Glorantha, especially given how the runes work. But it's more complex than that. From the perspective of someone in Time, does Uleria, outside of Time, qualify as "alive"? If it is possible for beings in Time to change Uleria, her aliveness may be conditional, especially as we do know it's possible to bring people (and deities) back to life. And what if Uleria never really existed, but was always an aspect or mask for Glorantha herself? Is Glorantha alive? If Glorantha is alive but taking on the aspect of Arachne Solara, is Uleria alive because Arachne Solara is? Is Uleria only alive when Glorantha expresses her aspect and not alive when she doesn't? Does getting spells or power through ritual worship of Uleria prove that Uleria is alive? Does being able to Heroquest and meet her, especially factoring in that you might meet a Ulerian heroquester and not the goddess herself, and that you can Heroquest to meet dead beings at a point when they weren't yet dead because Time wasn't a thing yet. What if the Godlearners found a place on the Godplane where Uleria is dead, which allows them to use magics that wouldn't work if she were alive? 3. Glorantha. Elmal and Yelmalio. If we go by the Prosopaedia, Elmal became Orlanth's loyal steward and his regent while Orlanth was away, but was later revealed to be another name for Yelmalio. The Yelmalio entry tries to square the circle by saying Yelmalio "even aided Orlanth" in the Great Darkness. Being Orlanth's steward (and presumably swearing an oath to him) is very different from lending him a hand while being head of Yelm's pantheon while he's away, which is different again from being a Son or a Part of Yelm (Antirius, say). If we now "know" that Elmal was Yelmalio all along, is Antirius still not Yelmalio? Not known to be Yelmalio yet? Is that ambiguous--if you go to the Hill of Gold, can you run into Elmal, Yelmalio, and Antirius as separate beings? Can you make them encounter each other? Is that answer determined by what you already expect, and if not, what does determine it? Is there an edge condition, a point where you can meet Elmal on the Hill of Gold and a second point where you can't because it turns out he was always Yelmalio? If you could never meet him there, how did the Elmal cult ever exist? Insisting that you've somehow clarified or solved a problem by stating that Elmal was always Yelmalio under another name doesn't make anything clearer or easier, it complicates matters! And what's worse, if Yelmalio is Lightfore, and Lightfore wandered during the Great Darkness, how can Orlanth have Yelmalio/Lightfore in the guise of Elmal guarding his stead while he's away? That means staying in one spot! Was Orlanth's stead the only thing left by that point? Was Lightfore wandering and staying in one place simultaneously? Personally, I think it's far easier to say something else: The Orlanthi, culturally, had a dislike of the Sky pantheon, so Elmal, as a solar figure who defected into the air pantheon, provided a way to propitiate and try to survive during the Darkness. After the Darkness, it's a cult associated with Orlanth and subordinate to him, and thus more culturally acceptable than allowing a bunch of Dara Happans to come in and build a bunch of temples to Yelm, who is definitely the Bad Emperor even if an accommodation has been reached. But the political and social forces sustaining the Elmal cult would be under constant pressure, because while Elmal was in a position of delegated authority in Orlanth's absence, Orlanth's kings aren't necessarily putting Elmal worshipers as regents when they have to Heroquest or step away. Enter the Yelmalians, who notice that there's a lot of overlap between Elmal and Yelmalio and suggest to the locals that they're actually worshiping Yelmalio, not Elmal. And there are advantages to that, as Yelmalio isn't a subordinate to Orlanth, and offers a differing kind of power and efficacy. Meanwhile, the Sun Temple can show the Orlanthi leaders that they're useful and effective; with the Elmal cult diminished, it isn't in a good position to compete. A few shrines to Elmal might hang on out of tradition, family associations, or other such local factors; the change may also mean that certain Orlanthi rituals that once involved an Elmali now require a Yelmalian, even though their place in the broader cult structure is very different. Can we conclude that something involving an objective truth has occurred, and Elmal is "dead" or proven never to have existed except as a mask of Yelmalio? What about Yanafal Tarnils being proven to be Humakt? Danfive Xaron proven to be Rebellious Terminus proven to be Orlanth? Is Orlanth dead if the Lunars prove him to be Danfive Xaron, and if so, what does that mean? Glorantha has a lot more edge cases, but the indeterminacy is a crucial part of how people need to relate to the world, just as it is in our world. You can't address questions about abortion, prenatal care, and human rights and responsibilities without acknowledging the edge cases for early life (and what stage an embryo/fetus qualifies as human), and claiming that these questions can't be resolved in the absence of objective proof about when life begins is problematic. (Whether such proof is even possible is problematic.) There is a clear basis upon which one can legislate despite--arguably because of--the indeterminacy. To take a slightly less controversial issue--the death penalty--we know that people later proven to be innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced to death were unjustly or wrongfully sentenced to death. Without knowing whether a given convict is objectively innocent or guilty, we can nevertheless discuss and weigh issues related to the death penalty. If the unjust execution of a single person is unacceptable, then you must oppose the death sentence in all cases, because while a trial and appeals process attempts to establish the objective truth, it does not always do so and there is no remedy should the state execute an innocent person. But if you think certain people represent such an extreme danger to other people's lives that permitting them to live, even in captivity, is too great a risk, then there might be an error threshold you're willing to accept in exchange for the good of preventing someone from killing again. If the indeterminacy did not exist, the controversy wouldn't either: we would always objectively know whether the punishment is just and administered to the right person. But we can't always know the latter, and there's a related argument to be had about whether the state killing someone is ever just--life in solitary confinement is almost certainly a crueler punishment. I love the setting because it refuses to allow for easy resolutions of indeterminacies that should be as central to the setting as real world indeterminacies are to the real world. If you hate that for a game setting, then there's no possible way for both of us to be happy. Personally, I'd rather the setting materials give you the option of resolving indeterminate aspects of the world however you want, than resolving them and forcing me to preserve the indeterminacy in the face of the official published materials my players may be purchasing. But I can see why you wouldn't want to make those resolutions blindly or need to earn a degree in philosophy or comparative religion to feel qualified in doing so.
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Oct 10, 2023 19:58
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Tasoth posted:Godlearners are bad anthropologists. They got it right in that extant cultures in Glorantha have common roots in ancestral myths because they expanded from one population as they became others. What they failed to do is take into account that the people they were loving with were a living culture, so their beliefs and changed myths were also true. Their victims weren't Jrusteli/Godlearners so they didn't matter and were wrong by default. Technically they're not just bad, they're also imperialist. And that can look benevolent: "hey, we noticed your Sun God is the same as this god named Yelm that people somewhere else worship, and we studied that cult and here's a bunch of additional information on Yelm you can use to do all sorts of great new rituals" looks like a free gift. But on one level, it's pushing the Godlearner Monomyth (and their own position of mastery over it), and on another level, it's cultural imperialism even though the monoculture being spread appears, on the surface, to be more diverse than the Godlearner's own culture. The hell of it is that an individual Godlearner can be genuinely well-intentioned, because almost all of them think the point of the ritual is what you get out of performing it, and not the ritual in and of itself. So they're telling people about more efficient ways to gather power or accomplish goals, while casually devaluing anything Godlearner culture doesn't value. That's also how you end up asserting that any grain goddess can get the job done, because Godlearners see deities as either Rune expressions or power sources: they're like natural resources are to an exploiter culture. If you want to strip-mine myth, you probably aren't being very attentive to the actual conditions on the ground because you don't care about them. It's interesting how the Second Age empires that most threatened to destroy the world both represent routes through which people living in Glorantha could deny their connection to it/her and hold themselves aloof. EWF involved non-dragons trying to be dragons, essentially jumping from one classification of created being to another, while the Godlearners held themselves and their own culture aloof from the world. EWF says they aren't this one thing, they're part of this other, parallel system and thus apart from the thing they appear to be; the Godlearners claim to exist in a position of separate objectivity within which they themselves are immune from the kinds of scrutiny and exploitation they unload upon everything else.
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Oct 11, 2023 18:07
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