Yes, your regular installment of debate, invective, verbiage, pedantry, and such.
That free-willed gods thing again, I'm afraid.
Chris Bell talks about how he dislikes the Lunars, and how to him they seem suspiciously like stock villain Romans...
Chris, as has been pointed out a few times, the 'subjectivists' (including the self-confessed HVOs, like myself) tend to be those who have plowed through GRoY, TFS, Entekosiad.
But furthermore, the most enthusiastic pro-Pelorians on the digest (myself, Nick, Pam) are also people who have read these things. We like the Lunars in part because we know they aren't Romans, and we understand some of the complex depths of their culture.
Now, there have been a few people complaining of late, arguing that they aren't about to shell out the dollars for a couple of books of strange Pelorian ranting. Well, fair enough. No one is going to make you buy them. But if you don't buy them, then you aren't going to know as much about a variety of subjects as the people who buy them and read them. Its as simple as that - often you will be mistaken in your opinions because you are working from incomplete information. Does anyone have a real problem with that?
Anyway, back tp myth
>To say that Gloranthan Myth is but a
>cultural construct is to say that Gloranthan Reality in and of itself is
>to varying degrees false.
Probably demonstrably True, though too a relatively low degree. Ie most Gloranthan cultures have to hear their myths filtered through politics, prejudice, and ignorance. But the original myth was probably quite true, in some meaningful sense, if not literally.
I do think most Orlanthi myths contain a great deal of truth in a meaningful sense, they just aren't history. But if you heroquest assuming those myths are true, you will generally be on the right path, so if you succeed in all the various tests you will get the response you expect.
> As I've stated before in other posts to the digest, I feel that the
>faces that we see of the Gods are partial influenced by the worship of
>their followers, but their fundamental natures and mythic acts remain
>the same. For example, King West Wind in Pent and Orlanth are two ways
>of seeing Primal Storm.
I certainly don't disagree with this. I just want to make it clear that Primal Storm is a power, not a person. And West King Wind and Orlanth can differ greatly in the relationship to the world that they teach their followers, and many other aspects, and that is OK.
>I subscribe to the belief that the events as
>described in the Lightbringer Myths did happen in God Time,
This, then is the big point of disagreement. So close, but then you go and revert to the Orlanthi POV. Taking the subjectivist/ HVO position, in as far as the Lightbringer version disagrees with the Pelorian (or any other), it is not literally correct. In as far as it agrees with others, it probably represents true mythic or historical events - but ones that we can't really understand the full truth of from just a couple of obscured and biased sources.
[Martin says free willed gods are insane]
>The Alternative? Gods are simply impersonal power sources, templates and
>filling stations from which to get spells for going through the right
>motions.
Rubbish. There are numerous possibilities in between. Think about a religion, instead of focusing on the deity. A religion is a pathway, a guide to correct behaviour, a path tothe right afterlife, a guide to obtaining magical power. This is true of the religion whether the 'god' is considered to manifest in the world and actively express its opinions or not. A god is extremely important, but as an example of what is right, not as a big behind the scenes player in their worshippers actions.
When I say gods do not have Free Will, this also doesn't mean they don't have a personality, or desires, or any of that stuff. It just means that these things are set. Zorak Zoran likes to fight, desires blood sacrifice, etc. Those things are all true. But ZZ can't simply decide one day that he wants to wander the earth beating up passers by, even though that would be in his personality, because he doesn't have free will. But it doesn't mean that his worshippers can expect him to suddenly start being pleased with sacrifices of flowers and handcrafted childrens toys.
>To say that the Gods don't have an independent existence of
>their worshippers robs them of their uniqueness and fun potential, IMO.
The gods certainly do have an independent existence from their worshippers, but as they don't act independently, without worshippers there are relatively few ways of interacting with them (basically, running into them on the hero or spirit plane).
>For myself personally, it helps me suspend disbelief when
>I RP and I know that the Gods are real and that the realtionship that my
>Sword of Humakt or 7 Mothers Rune Lord has with his or her deity is a
>real, immediate, and personal one.
Agreed - but consider also that if the gods are not just real, but free willed and with their own agendas, it makes numerous Gloranthan events bizarre in the extreme - explaining why there are any heresies at all, for example, requires a rather two faced deity. This wreaks even greater havoc on my disbelief.
>Oh, BTW, Deities can't fiddle with the universe, directly, anymore.
>It's forbidden by the Compromise!
Which is an Orlanthi way of expressing a universal truth expressed by other cultures in other ways.
>I feel that I've made my points clearly. A subjective universe is in my
>opinion just as illogical, at least for me.
But abandon your naive Orlanthi Objectivism for a subtler Hidden Variable Objectivism, and then you can reconcile the illogicalities of both.
[talk about why there isn't a cult of Rebellus Terminus among the Orlanthi]
>I can actuall envision a Cult of Wakboth amongst
>Chaos Creatures! Wakboth may hold the position withing Chaos that Yelm
>holds as ruler of the Solar Pantheon.
Well, Wakboth is dead, defeated, mostly destroyed. If he had a cult, it would be weak, with access to magic only partial and incomplete. And if he had a cult, we would have heard about it, I think. Besides, the path of Wakboth is to gather a powerful chaos horde and attempt to destroy the universe - not really a survival path.
> Also, Orlanth's enemy, Yelm has
>organised worship.
Not in Orlanthi Lands. Remember, Orlanths enemy wasn't called 'Yelm' until they met the Dara Happans at the First Council. The Orlanthi who have no contact with the Pelorians any more probably do not call Orlanths enemy Yelm at all.
[Orlanth Rebellus]
>Such a subcult could perhaps find purchase in the vast slave-farms of
>Peloria, methinks.
The farms of Peloria are primarily peasant tilled, not slaves. Slaves are more of an urban luxury rather than the foundations of the economy. Certainly this is the case in southern Peloria, the only place where there is a decent enough number of Orlanthi to support such a cult. And the peasants have their own gods of rebellion - Monster Man and Gorgorma.
A God is not a Person I said, and Chris said
> In this, I fundamentally disagree. Please see my comments to Martin
>Laurie in my last post, especially about how I feel about God Masks.
Your comments to Martin where about how you feel this helps your game and your suspension of disbelief. Apart from the obvious (well, as far as all the heroquest ideas go, you're just wrong), how about trying to actually explain how your point of view can be reconciled with the known facts. Explain the Goddess Switch, for example, in terms of two goddess with agendas presumably greatly at odds with the God Learners. Explain how the one goddess (Entekos) can be two (Dendara and Entekos) in Dara Happa.
Until you can actually explain all the Gloranthan facts in terms of your beliefs, you are just promoting some combination of 'it would be nice if...' and 'In My Glorantha, its different...'.
[the moon vs the power of Moon]
> Then, did, historically, was it a woman who heaved a big chunk of earth
>into her back, and flew up into the sky, or was it something else?
A spell was performed, and the chunk of earth flew into the sky - thats objective. But does this represent a new element, or just a chaotic poisoning of the earth? Was the woman just a magical creation of the Seven Mothers, or an ancient goddess from the earliest days of creation returned to the heavens from which she once fell? Does being able to fly a chunk of rock into the sky mean you have a legitimate claim to the Middle Air, and are a bona fide elemental power? And how is this interpreted by people who aren't even aware of the goddess?
Just because part of the event is objective, doesn't mean that everyone agrees. It also doesn't mean that a single interpretation is correct, either.
>> >I'm confused by this. How can Orlanth be 'well disposed' to the Red
>> >Goddess for doing one thing, and still be at odds for her actions in
>> >annother case?
>>
>> Because Gods are Not People.
>
> Again, I disagree.
But you need to offer something up, not just disagree. If you are confused by the facts, then your theory needs work!
>Where does Divine Intervention come from?
Gods are sources of power, and have a consciousness, and in extremis worshippers can call to their gods. Its kind of like a powerful Rune Spell, improvised on the moment.
In any case, its wise not to base too much on Divine Intervention - its primarily a game mechanic, not a genuine Gloranthan phenomenon, at least on the scales implied. The general populace does not DI to safety 10% of the time - though player characters do, because that keeps the game going.
>Spirits
>of reprisal?
Are spirits - who serve the deity, same the worshippers do, but their duty is to test the worshippers for misdeeds. (Hint - think about why the Spirits of Reprisal don't come to Illuminates - is it really that easy to fool a god, or is the worshippers guilt more important than the gods direction?)
Gods
> They have quirks, vendettas, good points, and bad
>habits!
And no free will. Gods cannot carry out their vendettas personally. They cannot try and lose their bad habits, they cannot learn new skills, they cannot change their mind - unless a worshipper does it for them.
(And note that the Red Moon generally features in Orlanthi history, not Myth - the moon is not one of Orlanths great mythic opponents, like Yelm, or the rebel air gods).
> Even though Greg and the other writers of works like Cults of Terror
>use the words Free Will, I think the term Freedom of Action serves
>better.
Its a semantic quibble. 'The gods never manifest free will because they can't.' 'Rubbish, its because they don't.' As you can never tell the difference, it amounts to semantic sophistry.
>This is the reason why
>the Red Goddess presents such a threat to the Lightbringers... Her
>side-stepping of the Compromise and flirtations with Chaos threaten the
>very safety of the world, which was barely saved from Chaos.
According to them - but then again, the Red Goddess has been here 300 years, and the universe is still here. The evidence that the Red Goddesses existence threatens the Universe is pretty damn flimsy. Which would tend to support the view that the Compromise as expressed by the Orlanthi may not be strictly speaking correct. And old Orlanth has manifested a few times in history as well, suggesting that this Compromise thing might be a bit of convenient fiction.
>I still think that the 'Masks of
>the Primal Powers' and 'Godtime was Alien and Platonic' models serves
>well for this kind of thing! :)
Bravo indeed. Hope for agreement is in sight.
>Also, its
>been stated several times here on the Digest that GRoY and Entekosiad
>are oftiesm thinly veiled Luanr propaganda, written by humans.
Actually, GRoY, written more than a millenium before the Lunars, is Solar propaganda, and more specifically propaganda for the dynasty at the time. The Entekosiad is a religious work, not really propaganda, but it does attempt to put a Lunar interpretation on religions that seemingly have little to do with it. The Fortunate Succession (probably the most accessible of the three - a good place to start) is, however, largely modern Lunar propaganda, though there are large chunks that are written from a Greg (ie non-Gloranthan) point of view.
The Fortunate Succession is also interesting because it shows the numerous points of view that have existed within the Yelmic religion. Yelm as a person, Yelm as an impersonal distant principle, Yelm the Servant, Yelm as Idovanus, Yelm not as Idovanus, Yelm as the Emperor. And all of them worked! Yes, you can take Yelm any old way, and he still grants magic, and doesn't strike you dead.
>Thus, these two or
>more potentially hostile PC's must quest to make peace in the world, and
>HeroQuest to demonstrate to their people that their Gods no longer wish
>war. Now, wouldn't that be a hoot!
A nice campaign idea - though its already been done in Aggar, Holay, Tarsh. A nice idea for a campaign after Argraths wars, though, otherwise its going to veer wildly from the established chronology (unless you want to do that).
[reconcile Yelm/Kargzant]
>Due to the Compromise, the Primal Sky/Sun that we know as
>Yelm can not directly order his worshippers to stop fighting, or perhaps
>must give magic to those who worship correctly in the right forms for
>that mask, regardless of how they treat other worshippers of the same
>God
Well, we are certainly down to a rather watered down version of the gods personalities if they aren't even able to sort out the confusion of their own worshippers. If you accept that, say, Orlanth can't order his worshippers to hate the Red Goddess (and vice versa), we don't seem to have a lot left to disagree about except unanswerable questions about what the gods could do if things were different.
Oliver
>(I'm not crazy about the label Hidden Variable Objectivist, I prefer in my
>heresy to be called an HCO, Hidden Core Objectivist).
I would speculate that Alex coined the term from Hidden Variable theory in quantum mechanics, which attempted to deny most of the 'observer effect' in QM. For the record, they are pretty much considered wrong....
I agree that the name doesn't really fit that well, but I like to preserve the QM ironies.
Mike Cule offers how he thinks about Free Will in Glorantha. I'd just like to say that his conception is pretty close to what I think early heroquest drafts where like, and probably close enough to the canonical view to be the same for most purposes. But I'd just like to say I think a quantitative view of Free Will(which I think Mike was implying) is a bad place to start if you are looking at mechanics, and I think this was a problem with a lot of early Chaosium HQ drafts, though its perfectly reasonable in idle speculation.
Alex rhetorically suggests
>> The local aspects of Orlanth have been swallowed and
>> subsumed by Lunar magical conquest, God-Learner style.
>
>Please place 10 Imperials in the "gratuitous and inappropriate rhetorical
>use of the term God Learner" Teelo Noori charity box.
The New York Review of Science Fiction, a journal of literary criticism, made every contributor pay a fine every time they used the term 'post-modern'. The God Learner post-modernism comparison is not one to take too far, but I think the comparison holds very true in the desirability of restricting its rhetorical overuse.
Jean Durupt points out, rather reasonably
>IMG, gods have an independant existence of their worshipers, here is why.
>Glorantha is a world where spirits have an objective existence. No one deny
>the existence of ghosts, for example.
Just one of the several good reasons why a hard core subjectivist position that actually doubts the gods independent existence doesn't really hold up, not that I think anyone really advocates it.
But gods are not just big spirits - the connection to the primal power is something over and above its normal spiritual existence. Beings like Thunder Bird stand somewhere near heroes, except they were formerly spirits rather than formerly being normal mortals. Like heroes, they have some divine power, and some restrictions on their will. But like heroes, they are not so distant yet that they can't manifest and interact directly. Think of Thunder Bird as partway to godhood, but not there yet.
Cheers
David
End of Glorantha Digest V4 #510
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