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To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (Daily automated RQ-Digest)
Reply-To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RuneQuest Daily)
Subject: RuneQuest Daily, Tue, 24 May 1994, part 2
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From: DevinC@aol.com
Subject: Re: RuneQuest Daily, Mon, 23 May 1994, part 3
Message-ID: <9405230817.tn388627@aol.com>
Date: 23 May 94 12:17:38 GMT
X-RQ-ID: 4112
Devin Cutler here again:
Alex writes regharding my Gamers/Scholar post:
"Nor does a game: at least, certainly not for the characters in the game as
a "public""
The characters within the game are not the public I was referring to, or do
you consider Frodo to be part of the consuming public of the Lord of the
Rings?
"and not necessarily the players, either. Should the GMly
public be given a nice, simple, set-in-concrete wind-up Glorantha, with
no need, or scope, for significant creative or editorly input? Many GMs
would, and indeed already have, complained about this."
Why do I need to be creative about the rules? Why do I need to be creative
about cults even? I prefer to concentrate my creativity on scenarios and the
role-playing session.
In any case, does creativity require inconsistency and multiplicity? It might
be easier to create from a tabula rasa , but I do not find that postulating
certain absolutes within Glorantha stifles creativity. Perhaps it merely
redirects it.
But really, even though we might not have any absolutes in real life either,
we do have a large body of truths or almost truths that we accept, yet we
seem, as a people, to be creative enough within this absolutist environment,
to invent or imagine some very neat things (Glorantha among them).
"How many
people who write, or post, about Glorantha aren't also players (or refs)
of the game?"
I wonder that myself sometimes, given the level of unconsideration to gaming
issues on this Daily. Perhaps an informal poll is in order?
"but I think you'll
find "God Learnerisms" in this context are more precisely using the RQ
rules to "deduce" things about Glorantha. As rules, well, they're just
rules, really."
The point I keep trying to make is this: Glorantha is a made up world where
magic occurs. Therefore, when you really get down to it, ANYTHING can be
rationalized for Glorantha. Obviously, some things get so ridiculous that our
suspension of disbelief becomes difficult or impossible, but the fact is, you
CAN, in one sense, allow the RQ rules to deduce things about Glorantha. Why
not? How is this any less valid than using Earth to deduce things about
Glorantha? Why can't Glorantha be rules friendly?
> The gamers tend to focus on the game mechanics.
> [...] We simply put entertainment value first and foremost.
"Games mechanics as entertainment? Whatever turns you on, I suppose. The
whole "entertainment" line of thought seems to be very much a matter of
personal taste."
Are you a journalism major? You have misquoted me. In my quote above, I never
directly equated game mechanics with entertainment. That ellipse you inserted
represents words separating the two concepts, which are in completely
different sentences.
In any case, I do not get off over game mechanics. I get off over
role-playing.
In one sense you are right of course, entertainment is a matter of personal
taste. Nevertheless, to many of us Gamers, the Scholarly direction that
Glorantha sometimes takes seems an awful lot like school or work.
"Leaving aside whether this is yet Holy Writ, how exactly would this fact
involve itself in the scenario, and how would the players ever discover
that said fact was false? "
If I can figure out a way to explain the particular scenario (it was a
practice run heroquest) without divulging info to my players, I will do so if
interest is there. Suffice to say that certain parts of the scenario woud be
implausible were Kolat to be a godlearner construct.
I can give another example, however. What if I had set up an ancient ruined
temple to Kolat that was supposedly sacked in the First Age (before the God
Learners). Voila! Despite any rationalizations that it only matters what PC's
believe, etc, my scenario is screwed.
"Or are you talking about _belief_ in one version
or the other, which is a rather different business?
Kolat's "Umbrol" hat is certainly redolent of that certain GLish je ne sais
quoi, but how could it ever be proved, either way?"
Belief is one thing. Sometimes, facts assert themselves. See my example of
the Kolat Temple above. No amount of Heroquesting is going to retroactively
create a First Age Temple for a god created in a later age.
"Only one ("official", and not even a RQ) publication has alluded to Elmal,
so if it's such a stinker, why worry about it? Those of us who like the
Gregged Yelmalio now have an interesting extra bit of Orlanthi mythology,
and an explanation for the cult that makes a lot more sense than the load
of twaddle in CoP. What, exactly, has everyone else "lost"?"
Because first, GroY (which I don't yet have) seems to now postulate a bunch
of other Yelmalio clones, so the trend is growing. Also, I presume that if RQ
survives the year, other supplements etc are going to mention and use Elmal.
I am worried more about the future than about the current state.
The point is, when a major change like that is made, as time passes, it
becomes harder and harder to GM in Glorantha, because more and more
supplements and the like begin to use and build upon the changed item. The
pressure to be consistent with supplements and the like becomes greater and
therefore, more annoying.
"I'm not wild about comparisons which stress the alleged differences in the
nature of religion and deity between Glorantha and Earth. Particularly the
ones on the lines of "Earthly religions are mere ad hoc superstition,
Gloranthan ones are based on Obvious True Facts." "
Does this mean you see no difference between real life religions and
Gloranthan religions!?
Also, I was careful not to state that Earthly religions are superstitions or
untrue. Again, you are assuming an intent that I never made.
All I stated was that Gloranthan deities tend to be more physically active
and manifest themselves and their power more directly than do Terran deities
in modern times.
"Earthly religions may
not be an ideal starting point for extrapolation, but it is rather the
only one. We could of course start from scratch, and dream up a nice, neat
no-muss no-fuss solution, but one thing I find that makes for unsatisfactory
gaming is something that jumps up, tweaks my nose vigorousdly, and yells:
"Artificial construct introduced for Your Gaming Convenience!""
What's wrong with making something up from scratch? Do you really mean to say
that anything that is not originated from a Terran analogue is unworthy for
inclusion? Frankly, I find that this attitude tends to stifle the imagination
far more than asking for some world consistency.
"It's fairly unreasonable, given such details as the Compromise. Given that
Humakt is essentially the personification of Death, just how fussy is he
likely to be about minor matters like the exact pointiness of the High
Priest's hat, just so long as they keep 'em dying? I think cults are
substantially social institutions, and to make them undifferentiated
minions of a god who makes regular spot-checks of his various regional
franchises would be much less satisfying to me, as a gamer, and as an
(alleged) "`scholar'"."
I never stated that I thought that minor variations couldn't exist. As Sandy
pointed out earlier, I am more concerned with major cultic points, like
gifts, geasa, spells, Priestly requirements, initiate requirements, etc.
Local colour is a Good Thing IMO, as long as we don't end up with an ENTIRELY
different cult for every town or province.
"If
Glorantha is just a vehicle for Runequest to trundle along in, and must
adapt itself to suit every idio[syn]c[hras]y of the RQ rules, how "real",
how convincing, how likely to inspire creative endeavour, is it going to
end up?"
Um...if Glorantha is not a vehicle to play RQ in, then what exactly is it?
Maybe this is what our difference boils down to.
"Why, if we "dry scholars" are so irrelevant to good gaming, not just
ignore these Dangerous Revisions, and play in _your_ (RuneQuest-friendly)
Glorantha?"
Because I would like to see my RQ-friendly Glorantha grow and thrive along
with the RQ game. Unfortunately for the Scholars, this requires new blood.
New people who are not going to be completely put off and intimidated by the
game and its practitioners.
I hope that, even if you find my views invalid, you will at least acknowledge
that, from the responses of some people on the net, and from the fact that
there are others who have not responded publicly but have responded privately
to me, there is a PERCEIVED problem. Enough people have complained and
agreed with my position such that, even if my position is not entirely valid,
there is the perception that it is valid out there. And the Scholars and the
game designers need to respect that and attempt to deal with it.
"Exactly which "scholars" should be fired? The ones who invented it,
wrote award-winning material about it, and are responsible for what
most of us enjoy about it?"
Well, at least one designer of RQ has privately agreed with my views.
Another has expressed similar views on the Daily.
The other reasons you cite for the potential coming demise of RQ are
certainly valid, but so is the Scholarly intimidation factor, as I hope some
of the replies in support of me are showing.
Regards,
Devin Cutler
devinc@aol.com
---------------------
From: ECZ5RAR@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU (Anthony Ragan)
Subject: Non-gloranthan material
Message-ID: <9405231543.AA08325@Sun.COM>
Date: 23 May 94 15:43:00 GMT
X-RQ-ID: 4114
Hi all,
In response to Peter Whitelaw's question whether any of us would like
to see some non-Gloranthan material: yes! :) By all means, please post it.
--Anthony
ecz5rar@mvs.oac.ucla -OR- IrishSpy@aol.com
Rune Chia Pet of Ernalda, Snotling in Chief
---------------------
From: sandyp@idcube.idsoftware.com (Sandy Petersen)
Subject: God Learnerism
Message-ID: <9405231730.AA14741@idcube.idsoftware.com>
Date: 23 May 94 05:30:34 GMT
X-RQ-ID: 4115
Gary Newton submits: A Modest Proposal For Safelster
Sounds good to me. I would further add that the known
shortage of peasants at the end of the Gbaji wars would have further
led to emancipation of the worst-oppressed (as nobles and rulers
tried to hang onto their ever-more-valuable workers). Who knows to
what state they would have degenerated by the 1600s, though.
Devin said:
>>I do not enjoy setting up an entire scenario around the fact that
>>Kolat existed in Godtime, and then finding out that he was a God
>>Learner construct.
Alex replied:
>how exactly would this fact involve itself in the scenario, and how
>would the players ever discover that said fact was false?
If the scenario depended on, say, a First Age Kolat temple to
be explored, or a millenia-old gbaji-worshiper who was a shaman of
Kolat, or any of a number of other things.
There has been a general assumption on the daily that "God
Learner Construction" = "abominable falsehood". This, combined with
the many other attacks and jabs at the God Learners, means that many
folks writing here on the Daily are as hostile to the poor dead
Second-Age bastards as are the superstitious and barbaric
Gloranthans!
When something is a "God Learner Construct", that doesn't
necessarily mean it's wrong! Quite the reverse. Obviously the GLs
invented deities out of whole cloth (at least once), and they also
managed to alter the worship of other deities. But Caladra &
Aurelion, for instance, were both worshiped entities before the GLs
ever came along. The GLs simply managed to combine their theology and
cults, by looking through their mythologies and discovering that the
two cults shared lots of features in common.
The GLs "discovered" Kolat's importance, but it's probably a
result of their realization that Umath must have somehow spawned all
the sylphs and storms of the world. The GLs then discovered that
Umath did so by spawning one giant sylph-thing, which broke up into
sylphs and storms. The GLs called this briefly-existing entity Kolat.
It doesn't mean there's a personality-possessing entity called Kolat
alive today, or ever alive (except for that brief moment during
Godtime before he fragmented). But the GLs feat in discovering this
fact doesn't mean that there was never any Kolat. Just that they
found out about him.
The GL effort to make sense out of the varied mythology of
Glorantha, and their subsequent creation of the Monomyth should be
highly appreciated by all Gloranthan scholars. Though the Monomyth
teems with minor flaws, I submit that the various warts and lesions
on it are trivial compared to the great advantage in having it to
work with. The Monomyth is a _useful_ construction.
On occasion the GLs have been attacked because of their
"unscientific" nature. I submit that they were highly scientific.
They created hypotheses, tested them using the scientific method,
discarded theories based upon their tests, and so forth. Certainly
the results of their experiments were abused by power-hungry peers,
and certainly they sometimes blinded themselves to unwelcome
information (just like any modern scientist or researcher), and in
the end they were all destroyed.
But the crimes of the Middle Sea Empire I feel were
outweighed by their triumphs. Except, of course, for the fact that
they unwittingly almost destroyed the universe. But they didn't
_mean_ to. By the way, in defending the Middle Sea Empire, I do _not_
wish to defend the opportunistic colonialistic carpetbaggers it
spawned that founded the vile New Dragon Ring and the Six-Legged
Empire. I hate those guys.
---------------------
From: mabeyke@batman.b11.ingr.com (boris)
Subject: Pantheon Initiation
Message-ID: <199405231831.AA09904@batman.b11.ingr.com>
Date: 23 May 94 18:31:56 GMT
X-RQ-ID: 4116
In X-RQ-ID: 4101, Alex Ferguson types:
>Martin Crim:
>> Gee, maybe I missed it because I've only been following the
>> Joerg/Alex clash of titans since early March, but no one has
>> mentioned the best counter-example yet to Alex's insistance on
>> one god to a cult: the Tusk Riders. Their cult explicitly
>> worships three different spirits.
>
>Gah, what such insistance? Have I called for the Seven Mothers to be
>abolished? In any case, note that the Tusk Riders claim to worship
>one entity, it's merely them nasty GLers who did the cult writeup who
>say differently.
>
>What I claim is that people don't worship (in a committed way, as opposed
>to in a "lay membership" fashion), all of a pantheon, or anything much
>like all. Rather, I think most people worship one god, or in some cases,
>a "tight group" of local significance. This is why I think the existing
>model of initiation is preferable to Joerg's.
This, I think, is my basic problem with your argument. It seems to me
that, from a cosmological viewpoint, there is less difference between
initiation to three gods (or seven) and initiation to twenty (or even 1000)
than there is between initiation to only one god and initiation to three.
If you can connect to more than one god with a single initiation, then
the exact number more than one is a minor point. And it has been shown
on Glorantha that you *can* connect to more than one deity with a single
initiation. So, q.e.d. pantheon initiation (given my stated assumption)
is possible in a Gloranthan millieu.
This still leaves the secondary question to address, that is, why is it
desired? I can speak only for myself, but the reason I first brought up
this can of wyrms was this. Given what I have read, it seems that there
are two basic ways of participating in worship in Glorantha. One type
is very similar to what worshippers appear to do on Earth; go through some
sort of ritual, chanting, singing, gesturing, etc. at all the right parts,
and fervently (or not) offering your prayers to a transcendant deity. The
other type is familiar (perhaps) only to mystics on Earth; one is actually
transported by the ritual to take part in mythic actions of a very immanent
deity. These are what we respectively call lay worship and initiate
worship.
By all accounts, lay worshippers only see and hear the rituals, but do not
percieve or take part in the magical aspects of the ceremony (though they
do perhaps see that magical events are occuring). However, initiates of
associate religions *do* take part in the magical part of the worship,
filling the roles of their deity in the reenacted myth. Thus, my answer
to Cullen O'Neill's question in X-RQ-ID: 4109 ("So those who have dedicated
their lives to Orlanth worship Ernalda better than the most dedicated
laywoman?") is an unequivocal *yes*! Unless and until the Ernaldan
initiates she will only "see through a glass darkly"; the Orlanthi already
sees "face to face", albeit from a different perspective.
In the current rules, there are *only* two states of initiation, lay and
initiate (lumping all the acolytes/priests/lords in with initiates for this
discussion). This begs the question, what is the iniatory status *relative
to Ernalda* of all of the Orlanthi, Uroxi, etc. taking part in an Ernaldan
High Holy Day service. They are not initiated to Ernalda, neither are they
just lay members, as they participate much more fully. Yes, they are
associates, but unless we call "associate" a third initiatory state, this
is just handwaving. And if we *do* make associate another state of
initiation, well then fine, I'll also call this a low initiate and I am
satisfied. And if Alex (or anyone) asks me to what are they initiated
that is associated with all the rest, well, I have shown above that one
may initiate to many deities with a single initiation; one initiates to the
"gods of my ancestors", i.e. the clan's gods. And if that is still
unsatisfactory, they I suppose the clan wyter will do. It would be
associated to all of the other deities worshipped by the clan, n'est pas?
Now, to bring this, so to speak, back to earth, and the real reason *why* I
want to do this, is that it enables me to GM better. I have the refugee
survivors of a clan that has just arrived in the Rubble from Sartar; there
are a number of different gods that this clan worships, but with over half
the clan dead (that's why they're refugees), they are too few to provide
any magic to my PCs unless most of the clan members take part in most of
the worship services. Thinking about this, it makes sense for most clans,
and so that's why I speculated on the general case. And now, we (i.e. my
players and myself) can have fun roleplaying the different PCs & NPCs
taking part in each other's worship, which opens up many, many roleplaying
possibilities.
Anyway, that's my view of my Personal Glorantha Heroquest.
----
Boris
---------------------
From: 100270.337@CompuServe.COM (Nick Brooke)
Subject: Campaigns
Message-ID: <940523194853_100270.337_BHL19-2@CompuServe.COM>
Date: 23 May 94 19:48:53 GMT
X-RQ-ID: 4117
_______________
Sandy enquires:
> What kind of campaign are you currently running, Nick? I don't mean
> this as a challenge. I'm curious if you prefer to put the players into
> a small local area (like Pavis or the Grazelands, say) and have them
> caught up in the politics and activities of that tiny microcosm.
I'm not running a campaign, these days. I play in David Hall's irregular
Sartar games, where our player characters are all members of the same
Orlanthi tribe, clan, and household (Lismelder / Greydog / Hodirsons). The
most recent game I ran was last summer: Mike Dawson's wonderful "Gaumata's
Vision", with an all-Yelmalion party making up a half-file of Sun Dome
militia. We also play some odd one-offs and playtests of stuff for future
publication; earlier this year we had an almost-freeform session as the
commanding officers of a Lunar army operating in the Bush Range.
So I guess you're right: the name "Microcosm Man" fits me like a glove!
I greatly enjoy the hierarchies and relationships in close-knit social
groups of player characters; the incestuous nature of Orlanthi clan and
tribal politics has me in fits of cackling glee (whenever I stop cheering
and voting for my relatives to consider it). Life at the top end of the
Lunar army was, if anything, worse: backbiting is one thing, but having my
zealous People's Tribune (a hybrid religious-cum- political morale officer)
'fragged' (as I understand you Colonials have it) by the officers of her
own side was a low-water mark for my faith in the glowing future of the
Lunar Way...
Sadly, with work and other commitments, we don't get to play RQ more than
once a month these days; often less. Snif.
______________
German RQ-Con:
What can I say? Wonderful beer, excellent company, some fine freeforming
(including an unscripted intervention leading a squad of Lunar soldiers to
close down the Sartar High Council), and a practical use for my degree at
last (RQ role-playing in Dark Age Britain, courtesy of Adam Lawrence)! This
was a very convivial and hugely enjoyable event, thanks to the hard work of
our tolerant and amiable hosts from the German RuneQuest-Gesellschaft.
Loads of praise is due to Ingo Tschinke, Helge Reuter, Joerg Baumgartner,
and all the other organisers and referees who contributed to the success of
the weekend. Issaries the Talking God must have been watching over us --
there was no perceptible language barrier, and my Speak German is at
approx. 1%. Even the assembled Storm Bull contingent didn't cause too many
problems for our delegation from the Reaching Moon...
SB: "Death to the Red Goddess!"
7M: "No, no: death and rebirth to the Red Goddess!"
^^^ ^^^^^^^
Yeah, I'll be going again if I can make it (and if they'll take me back,
after what I did to those foolish Welshmen we found wandering along the
Ridgeway...).
====
Nick
====