From: RuneQuest-Request@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RQ Digest Maintainer) To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (Daily automated RQ-Digest) Reply-To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RuneQuest Daily) Subject: RuneQuest Daily, Fri, 06 May 1994, part 2 Sender: Henk.Langeveld@Holland.Sun.COM Content-Return: Prohibited Precedence: junk --------------------- From: sandyp@idcube.idsoftware.com (Sandy Petersen) Subject: The Dallas guy Message-ID: <9405051655.AA02644@idcube.idsoftware.com> Date: 5 May 94 04:55:57 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3918 MOB asks: >A question: when the renascent Vadeli arrived off the Pamaltelan >seaboard claiming they were gods (neato trick!), what did they think >of the wretched Blueskins (Veldang) of Fonrit? Or are they the >wrong shade of blue? I'm sure that if there IS any connection between the Blue Vadeli and the blueskins, the Vadeli didn't dare mention it for fear that their new "worshipers" would realize that the Vadeli couldn't possibly be gods (if they're related to the Blues). In general, I think there's a tendency to read too much into blue skin. Blue-skinned individuals show up again and again in Gloranthan history, and I'm not sure there's always a connection between them. There are the blue-skinned folk who overran Peloria in the God Time, there are the Artmali. there are the Blue Vadeli, and there is Heler (the blue-skinned rain god). No doubt it's not ALL coincidence, but though blue skin certainly seems impressive to an Earthling, I imagine few inhabitants of Pamaltela think twice about it. For that matter, there are red-skinned entities that come from the Red Moon, but are not necessarily related to the Red Vadeli. The Blue Vadeli's skin tone might indicate a relationship to the Blue Moon. Or it might indicate a relationship to the sea gods. One intriguing point, though, is the fact that the Artmali Empire is REALLY old (pre-Yelm's demise) and so are the Vadeli. In addition, the Artmali seem to have been pretty much jerks (expelling all non-perfect folk out of their empire), and it's widely believed that the Vadeli are, too. Perhaps they are more closely related than previous study had led us to believe. In fact, perhaps the Brown, Red, and Blue Vadeli are NOT related to one another, but are three separately "evolved" races of man who joined together to form a single society of immortals. Boris asks: >how long is human gestation in Glorantha? I'd say around 270 days, give or take a week or two. While it's clear that the human lifespen is less on Glorantha than Earth (a problem I attribute to the Sunstop, because All Time Changed after it), I don't think that gestation necessarily changed. It makes it simpler to calculate matters for PCs if biological functions are the same, despite the year length. Rich Staats opines: >So, the sorcerer, who may not have the spiritual relationship with >the Earth/Nature the Orlanti does, would probably have a far better >grasp on how the physical universe fits together. This leads into the whole God Learner problem. They undoubtedly understood more about how the laws of Glorantha worked than anyone else before or after. But yet they didn't understand anything. The whole question boils down to: Who knows the forest better? The man who lives there, the talented man who paints its landscape in oils, or the man who lives a hundred leagues away and studies its ecological subsystems? I'm a science guy myself, but it's clear we can learn about something by moving in directions other than towards greater quantitative analysis. >tree shrews' inclusion in the primates seems to depend on when you >went to college. Or WHERE you went to college. Incidentally, I have tried to avoid mentioning tree shrews at any time in my discussion of primates and trolls, because of the debate concerning their placement. I don't think trolls are related to tree shrews, but to the other kind. (And I mean "related" not in any sort of real sense at all other than in psychology and physiognomy.) Pmichaels says: >Makes me wonder if the (admittedly rare) troll Uleria worshipper >would draw the more masochistic type of client While I don't know if trolls "bite" during lovemaking or not, one of my characters (Mad Dog, a horseman from Erigia) visited the Uleria temple in Furthest in Greg's campaign and had an interesting experience. He was going along with another character who really liked elf women, and was boasting of the fact that there were several elf women in this temple. Mad Dog, always contrary, asked, "Do they have a troll?" Turned out they did. When Mad Dog was escorted into her room, she took one look at the little bandy-legged guy, grabbed him by the neck and picked him off the ground, said, "I know what YOU guys want." and batted him clear across the room! The rest of the evening I'll draw a veil over, only to say that in the morning, Mad Dog had two black eyes and several missing teeth. It was his first sexual experience. He wasn't sure if he liked it or not, but he's never experimented with sex again. >I think you lost a lot of the duckish mystery. I think you're reading too much into the ducks. I think they primarily exist at the Roleplaying level of Gloranthan Reality, which is why they have so little existence in the mythology or history. If you need to give them an impressive background, psychology, and mythology in order to feel comfortable with them, that's fine, but I'm perfectly happy without any duck "mystery" at all. Dave Dunham corrects: >While it's natural to link "chaos" and "swamp," Genertela Book says >the Sodal Marsh is "now one of the richest regions of the region." My mistake. Though it also does say that "rumors say that monsters exist there" and that only the ruling family knows the "Secret tracks" through the marsh. It's clear that the monsters don't issue forth from it anymore though. --------------------- From: jacobus@sonata.cc.purdue.edu (Bryan J. Maloney) Subject: The Godlearners Message-ID: <9405051638.AA04002@sonata.cc.purdue.edu> Date: 5 May 94 06:38:12 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3919 I would classify the GLs as SCIENTISTIC rather than scientific in their thinking. They were deductionists rather than inductionists, and, practiced a pseudo-science because they never appreciated or tested the limits of Falsification. (Of course, since my model of SPOT ON! Give that man the anatomically correct Vanna White doll! As a working scientist, I get so damned irked when people point to the Godlearners as being "scientific" in their approach to the world. They were technocratic, they were scientistic, but they were certainly not scientific. To quote an English biochemist: "I got into science because I wanted to discover absolute truth, to seek perfect knowledge, and to determine the underlying system of reality. This is like becoming an Archbishop to meet girls." It is UNCERTAINTY that drives science. It is technocracy that posits that our current knowledge can "solve everything". The Godlearners had an _a priori_ "system" and they tried to shove all Glorantha into it. For real scientists, all systems are provisional and temporary. The systems used thirty years ago are not today. The scientific truth of today will be regarded as quaint tomorrow. I believe the GLs were more like Christian theologians than inductivist empiricists: theologians compiling and comparing their sometimes contradictory proof texts, arriving at some kind of untestable synthesis, and then suddenly being confronted with the wider discourses of other world religious systems. We all know what a crock the GL cult write ups are. Of course, I accept that on the literary level (see above) the GLs are an ironic sendup/criticism of modernist empirical thinking and its dangers. Except that the Godlearners were NOT empirical thinkers, they were Platonic realists, which is about as far away from empiricism as you can get. Perhaps most tellingly, I think Greg's attitude to the GLs comes pretty directly from Joseph Campbell, and is intended as a lesson in what happens if you try to manipulate myths scientistically rather than from an involved cultural perspective. (Prospective Heroquesters take note! - "no questing without respect and humility".) To quote Big Jo: This is interesting, since I consider Joseph Campbell to be the prototypic Godlearner with his "all heroes are one" and like crap. --------------------- From: f6ri@midway.uchicago.edu (charles gregory fried) Subject: e-Glorantha Message-ID:Date: 5 May 94 16:59:50 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3920 Greg Fried here again. MOB: Yep. They are (were!) called Shakers. But I doubt that, as a matter of their relgious faith, they all actually did not have sexual feelings (though some of them may have attained this state). Nor did they achieve immmortality (on this side of the Great Divide, anyhoo) for their sacrifice. John: I thought of something else -- something which in my experience has blurred the buffer between levels 2 and 3 in my campaign: e-gaming. I run a VERY intermittent campaign. Months may go by between gaming sessions, since my players live all over the US Midwest. But in the interim, I try to keep things going by what I call e-gaming. I send the players stories about what is going on for them. I send individual players background material appropriate to them, and interact in e-mail privacy with individual players who have their own singular reactions to the on-going narrative and wish to do something on their own. Depending on the workload in RL of everyone, this can work VERY well, giving the players a much richer feel for their characters, since they get to react at their leisure (more or less) to a literary depiction of the narrative, which they can then engage with -- almost always without dice-rolling. GF out. --------------------- From: jesper.wahrner@hts.ct.se (Jesper Wahrner) Subject: Voria/Voriof as children's gods Message-ID: <2dc8f172@hts.ct.se> Date: 5 May 94 11:15:00 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3921 Some people, whose identity unfortunately was devoured by the FIDO-net gate I'm getting the digest through, wrote about Voria/Voriof's roles as childrens deities. (The very same gate seem to eat about half of the messages I write as well. I suspect it must be a tool of Thanatar who uses it to steal the priceless gems of knowledge that passes through it.) As I see the children's cults they are mostly educational institutions whose purpose is to learn children how religion works early in their life. If there is an initiation it is merely a mock thing to teach them the importance of such things. There is a set of "Cult-secrets" that is tought so they may learn what such things is like, without compro- mising the secrets of the main gods. This goes for the participating in clan rituals as well. Its enough to give the kids a taste of the real thing that will be theirs when they grow up to become initiated, but it shouldn't have the magical qualities the rituals has for true initiates. The main non-educational function they have is to make sure that childen get a decent afterlife should they die before initiation. --------------------- From: jesper.wahrner@hts.ct.se (Jesper Wahrner) Subject: Godlearner Question Message-ID: <2dc8f171@hts.ct.se> Date: 5 May 94 11:15:00 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3922 Sandy wrote: > 4) The Vadeli know the God Learner Secret [rare] This makes me wonder one thing. How common is the knowledge ABOUT the GL Secret? Not the secret itself but the knowledge that the secret ever existed, and brought down the God Learners. I've always thought that the Doom Guardians were quite efficient in not only eradicating the secret itself but also the knowledge about the secret. Hmmm... This may possible be a Nysalor riddle: "Is it possible to eradicate a secret by killing everyone who knows it?" Yours, Jesper --------------------- From: NDROBINS@NDROBINS.FIN.GOV.BC.CA Subject: GMing in Glorantha Message-ID: <9405051901.AA1066@NDROBINS.FIN.GOV.BC.CA> Date: 5 May 94 17:40:00 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3923 All this discussion about the many levels of Glorantha relates directly to running games in Glorantha, and the difficulties imposed for both the GM and the players. I have just started to GM, and after a trial run in my own world, have decided to let my players enjoy the richness of Glorantha. Two of them are D&Ders I'm hoping to convert, and the other two are completely new to gaming. I ran my third session last night. It was interesting. Things that came up over the evening varied from Yinkin to the Trollkin curse. It is a real challenge for me as a GM. I am not willing to waste the player's time while I look things up, so I had better have a good handle on not only Pavis, but all of Prax and all the history too. With my Gloranthan Lore hovering around 25%, I am finally feeling confident about running a game in Glorantha. The players were awed by the amount of detail and the flavour. Now I have role-played for about twelve years, and have been addicted to a losenge-shaped world for at least five. RQ was the first game I played, but I moved to AD&D after finding no suppliments in my small town. I only got back into RQ once I got onto the RQ digest mailing list. New GMs will find Glorantha overwhelming, to say the least. I have all the RQ2 suppliments to fall back on, but they won't. To support Glorantha as a closed, fully-functioning world, which I try to, you need access to all the background information, or at least a large chuck of it. Without the information provided on the net, I would be lost. Sure I can wing everything, but then things start to get inconsistent. Neil _______________________________________________________________ Neil Robinson NDROBINS@NDROBINS.FIN.GOV.BC.CA --------------------- From: alex@dcs.gla.ac.uk (Alex Ferguson) Subject: X.ians, M.ions. Message-ID: <9405052217.AA03091@keppel.dcs.gla.ac.uk> Date: 5 May 94 22:17:39 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3925 Prince Martin Crim of Pavis, King of Dragon Pass, Holay, and Saird has typed: > Alex opines: > "It's very unclear what you mean by "Ancient" Christianty here: > your answers (mostly deleted herein) don't seem consistent for > any one period." > I meant roughly A.D. 300 to 500, during the period covered by the > "Credo!" card game. The article isn't to hand, but broadly I'd say the "non-statist" comments apply to an earlier period (and the church elsewhere, subsequently), while other particulars, such as the sacraments, the dating (and possibly existance) of the festivals, doctrines such as the trinity, and dietary customs, are all later. > Alex states the truth: > "Christianity has been a `state' religion (off and on) since its > adoption by the Roman Empire." > Yes, but there has been separation between the ecclesiastical > powers and the temporal powers, as a result of the way > Christianity BECAME a state religion. What do you mean when you say "has been"? Not always, and everywhere, certainly. Frex, the Queen being Supreme Governor of the Church of England, bishops sitting in the House of Lords, to name but one Sturch. The Vatican, after all, is a state. Throughout the middle ages, the clergy exercised powers indistinguishable from that of "secular" persons of comparable rank. > In Islam, there was never this separation. There certainly there is in most modern Islamic states. > "Hmm. Another candidate for the Americanisation Test, > Inquisitor. }B-)" > What? I was referring to Joerg's (Americani(s|z)ed) use of the word "regular". > BTW, it's immanent, not imminent. But I doubt Alex thought I was > saying Aldrya was likely to occur at any moment or threateningly > or menacingly near or at hand. Only for the purposes of (alleged) humour. (And due to being terrorised by (other) pedants after making the converse typo...) Alex. --------------------- From: alex@dcs.gla.ac.uk (Alex Ferguson) Subject: Elf types. Message-ID: <9405052220.AA03100@keppel.dcs.gla.ac.uk> Date: 5 May 94 22:20:21 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3926 Great map of Pamaltela in Tales #11: one unfortunate omision, though, is distinguishing between the different elf types (or types of forest where there are no elves.) Grigdom: brown/green. Other islands in archipeligo: brown? (Forest, no elves.) Vralos: Exclusively brown, or brown/green? Enkloso: why are there two large areas in the north-east marked as being free of both elves and trees? Are these areas human-occupied, or deforested by some natural phenomenon? Where is the "border" between the jungles in the east, and the forest of the west? Perhaps there really isn't one, since the types of trees may be rather similar, there simply being a gradation in the climatic conditions. I don't know if David has many of these left, but The Fall of Boldhome is certainly worth a brief spell in prison for illegally photocopying: gasp in wonderment at the heroic rebels; snicker as Temertain struggles between the distinction between a simile and a hyperbole, much less the political situation; find out what 'Making a fast lunar' _really_ means; pout at Ken and Sandy for not including a report of their shenanigans. Alex. --------------------- From: sschne00@reach.com (Scott Schneider -- HRA - Chicago) Subject: RuneQuest Daily, Mon Message-ID: <9405052249.AA03742@cl1..reach> Date: 5 May 94 22:49:48 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3927 subject: --------------------- Forwarded Message ---------------------- At the risk of offending some and everone, especially worshippers of Little brother who should know better, i was wondering what kind of initiation ceremonies the Vingans would go through. typically, and I understand this has been discussed in these pages before, males typically undergo one or a combination of the following upon becoming a man - tatooing, ritual scarification, circumcision, knocking out a tooth, and, I forget the formal term, the creation of an artificial vagina by slicing a trough on the underside of the penis. Excuse me if I'm incorrect, but the Vingans are the warrior-females of Orlanth, and that they should probably follow the male initiation rituals. Anyone want to speculate on the particular one(s)? *======== Regarding ========* Date: Mon, 2 May 94 10:51:32 EDT --------------------- >From: MOBTOTRM@vaxc.cc.monash.edu.au Subject: Lost Subber --------------------- From: jdegon@vega.iii.com (Jim DeGon) Subject: taxonomy, apes Message-ID: <9405060022.AA11310@enrico> Date: 5 May 94 10:22:54 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3928 I hope that John Hughes' commentary classification has ended the scientific/taxonomic/biologic/natural_process threads rather than stimulated them. Glorantha is absolutely, positively and with no doubt a Creationist world with _no_ evolutionary history as we 20th century "humans" know it. There is no point in classifying families in this manner. Now, the question of whether ducks have teeth is very important, and is being approached in a very useful manner (cigars! yes!) Jim DeGon --------------------- From: thecam@aol.com Subject: Mostali and Biological Classifications Message-ID: <9405060157.tn211054@aol.com> Date: 6 May 94 05:57:54 GMT X-RQ-ID: 3929 > I don't see a strong need [for dwarfs] to > ever develop teeth, unless they have some additional purpose > (e.g. they aid in earthsense). I always thought of dwarfs as eating rock and/or metal. An excellent reason for needing teeth. [lots & lots of stuff about the classifications of various Gloranthan creatures] I believe that Gloranthan creatures defy terran classifications. Humans in Glorantha are NOT homo sapiens. That is a terran classification that does not apply here. Gloranthan scholars (you Lhankor Mhy know who you are) would most likely use runes to classify various species. I always figured that it was called Runequest because runes were intrinsic to the very fabric of Glorantha's universe. Runes would be perfect (Mike of Codex fame - maybe I'll work on this one next.) Dave Camoirano TheCam@aol.com