Syncretism in HQ

[Mike Holmes]

I agree completely with you Gareth that the "non-magical" world POV works perfectly to describe Glorantha. You are quite correct about that.

But this is largely the point that I've been trying to make. What if magic is real in the real world? If so, then the Celt isn't rationalizing, his faith is correct. But that's not neccessary to prove. All I have to prove is that in Glorantha truth is ambiguous enough that a character in that world having faith is not non-sensical. Which I think is quite true.

Is the squinting Celt non-sensical? Or is he merely a product of his environment? I could play a character based on such a real world person, and do play characters like him in Glorantha all the time. Further, it doesn't matter if I personally believe that the magic does or does not exist in Glorantha, the character does, so we play him as though he does. Or he doesn't, and we play him as a godlearner or whatever.

But as was mentioned above, ALL the game text is subjective, every last bit of it. Or at least, there is no way to determine when the text is speaking authoritatively or subjectively. The problem is not only the prevalence of in character monologues by a long way - its endemic to all the text.

I quite agree with this as well. The Glorantha text could be clearer on this by a long-shot. But there is a mitigating factor here, I believe: Few, if any, other texts have ever done this right either. They get away without worrying about it, because they have never tried to approach religion and cosmology in as complex a way as this game has.

That is, in D&D, the gods are just powerful beings who give you power if you worship them, and since we're really only concerned with winning that suffices just fine. Like Gareth says, it's easier just to not look at the ramifications of a cosmology like this.

Here's what you have to imagine to imagine that magic exists in Glorantha (and not that it's just everyone's imagination, or completely subjective). Basically nothing operates without magic. What magic allows is for people to operate on a basic level that looks a lot like our world does. That is, farming magic doesn't make the farmer superior to a real world farmer, mostly it makes him just like a real world farmer. Sans magic, he'd probably starve to death.

Yes, we know from the descriptions that magic can allow you to do some impressive things if its actually happening in the game world. But when you look at them they really don't tend to be the sorts of things that cause all of those debates about what castles would look like. For example, one thing that I always pointed out about D&D magic is that, if people had the ability to cast Continual Light, that all places would be lighted all the time. Just buy your classic Continual Light rock, and use a black cloth to cover it when you don't want it "on." They last forever, and the power doesn't cost anyone anything. The only "cost" is the skill of the caster. Meaning that if the market is allowed to operate, that enough casters of the spell will become available so that everyone will have lighted homes. Actually, given that there's no obsolescence to these lights a developed society will have already gone through it's lighting up phase, and there will only be "maintenance magicians" to keep these things going when one gets randomly dispelled or something.

Then you get all of the secondary effects of indoor lighting like people staying up too late, etc...

There is no Continual Light spell in Glorantha. Period. Any ability which caused something to glow "permenantly" would be considered really impressive magic. Rare to say the least. Most abilities simply make you better at something that you already have to know how to do to have any success with to start. That is, they don't let you know how to farm, they just make you better at it than you would be without it.

Abilities like teleportation, invisibility, shapechanging, etc, are all even more rare because of the "inherent difficulty" rule. Why don't people just go and get teleported each day to where they have to go? Because it's completly impractical to do so.

Basically there are no spells that really would alter the landscape of Glorantha to make it somthing that would not resemble to some extent our world. Rather, where it does vary, you can be specific about it. There just are no long-term ramifications that are not handled in the setting, given the magic that's available.

Which is great. This is what everyone wants. Not some world where everything is taken care of for everyone with magic. In Middle Earth, why doesn't Elrond just teleport to mount doom with the ring and drop it in? Because he can't do that. Does that mean he has no magic? No, it means that magic is just subtle and costly enough that you just can't use it to make the world unrecognizable to real world humans.

Let's look at cost. This is the big one, IMO. The gods and spirits etc don't just allow you their powers for the asking. You have to pay and pay and pay for them with your obedience. Even for sorcerers (hey, another case of atheists outside the God Learners) who flaunt "God's magic,"  they have the restrictions of their orders, which may not only be social, but also just how the magic works. That is, to conduct magic the spells have to be connected to an essence node, and this takes great effort to acheive.

The point is that magic in Glorantha is not free and easy, and certainly doesn't present the sorts of abilities that would make Glorantha look, well, any different than it does.

Mike

[soru]

Basically there are no spells that really would alter the landscape of Glorantha to make it somthing that would not resemble to some extent our world.

This is me agreeing 100% with Mike.

Well, apart from the minor point that there are spells, like the Skyburn, that do literally alter the landscape of Glorantha. But those are big spells, rare and notable, not routine day to day, repeatable, stuff.

soru

[Christopher Kubasik]

And Mike wrote this:

"That is, farming magic doesn't make the farmer superior to a real world farmer, mostly it makes him just like a real world farmer. Sans magic, he'd probably starve to death."

I think that nails so much.

Everything is magic or religion dependent in Glorantha: the eco-system, the cultural life of all peoples, the history...

The supernatural in Glorantha isn't something extra added to our own world... It's a foundational element for a world alien to our world.

I know others will see it differently.... But thanks Mike, you just crystalized something for me in that statement.

Christopher

[Donald]

Shamanism is not a belief; Shamanism is a magical practice.  This is not a statement of belief, it is a claim of expertise.

It's actually both, however if you're claiming that Greg does not have that expertise can you provide supporting evidence?

We are talking about a game, a published product.  Lets just talk about the damn game, not about our personal religious beleiefs.  They are not germane.

Unfortunatly you are making them so, you appear to believe in a scientific/materialist real world where everything fits together in a coherent form. You then want Glorantha to have a similar degree of certainty. Many people do not share your belief in the real world and see no reason to apply it to Glorantha.

Yes I agree.  That in fact is precisely the charge that I have levelled, and why I expect my £50 will never be claimed.  It is not just that there are conflicting views - it is that nobody knows.  Arguably, not even Greg.  And I have to say I find it exceedingly weird that a game product has survived all this time with a fundamental metaphysical hole and nobody ever addressed it.

It has been addressed at length on the Glorantha digest in the past without coming to any better resolution than we are doing now. Some GMs want to understand the metaphysics, others aren't bothered. So those who want to know have to invent their own. Even if Greg were willing to write it, I can't imagine there'd be much interest in the supplement "The metaphysics of Glorantha".

[Donald]

Which only begs the question: why don't the Lunars solve their problems by heroquesting, instead of with armies?

Because it's almost totally impossible. Heroquesting the overthrow of Orlanth requires overthrowing Orlanth, that guy with the double-digit masteries in "Smite Interfering Mortals With Deadly Thunderbolts." If you do it in the material world, the Cosmic Compromise prevents him from getting up close and personal with you. So you engage in operations in the material world to destroy Orlanth's support system, and then you heroquest to take him out.

In fact the two operate in parallel, alongside the military invasion of Sartar there is a major magical effort to kill or enslave Orlanth. The siege of Whitewall and building the Temple of the Reaching Moon are more to do that than to achieve a military victory over King Broyan and the rebels.

[James Holloway]

In fact the two operate in parallel, alongside the military invasion of Sartar there is a major magical effort to kill or enslave Orlanth. The siege of Whitewall and building the Temple of the Reaching Moon are more to do that than to achieve a military victory over King Broyan and the rebels.

Yeah, that's more or less what I've been trying to get at.

[GB Steve]

If you assume that the only way for characters to make decisions is the way that the rationalist in our world makes decisions, then you'll have trouble understanding the Gloranthan mindset.

I get your point although I'd contend that there is no "Gloranthan mindset" as such. There's an implied mindset of fictional creations which I don't see as being the same thing.

I think part of the issue that Gareth has is that the rules of Glorantha imply a different mindset for him than they do for others. This is inextricably bound up in how everyone concerned in this debate views the real world and how it might be interpreted. Given that we're not about to change that, resolution is difficult.

Gareth's pov, as I see is that if what I call magical happens all the time in Glorantha, then there is no magic to it. It's just part of what one might do naturally, and without divine interference. Furthermore, given that much of this magic could be said only to appear to those who have faith in it, how is one to convince unbelievers of its existence. Much in the same way that you'd have trouble convincing an atheist such as myself that God exists in the real world because you know it does. All good points.

However, Glorantha is a fiction and not the real world. So if you want something to have objective existence in that world, you can just say that it's so. In my Glorantha there is no ambiguity about the existence of magic although there is ambiguity about what this magic might be.

[soru]

Unfortunatly you are making them so, you appear to believe in a scientific/materialist real world where everything fits together in a coherent form. You then want Glorantha to have a similar degree of certainty. Many people do not share your belief in the real world and see no reason to apply it to Glorantha.

Those people, however many they are, are not the holders of any particularly powerful truth, because glorantha does have a reasonably straightforward and understandable metaphysics that has been presented in the supplements, namely the 4 worlds colliding and interacting model, with magic coming from the interactions between the worlds.

Quest to form an assocation between the ressurected emperor of the God world and the returned sun of the mundane world, and you get the powers of solar rule. The 'hero plane' is not an objective place, but what you subjectively experience while magically exploring and rearranging those connections. Connections made in history and pre-history, but experienced in the present.

Now, I rather expect that, Greg being Greg, once people understand and become complacent about that model, it will be contradicted, requiring it's replacement with something perhaps more complicated, or at least differently simple.

soru

[Kerstin Schmidt]

Shamanism is not a belief; Shamanism is a magical practice.  This is not a statement of belief, it is a claim of expertise.

It's actually both, however if you're claiming that Greg does not have that expertise can you provide supporting evidence?

Donald,

I've said it to Gareth above already and I'll say it again, once more.  If you two need to get into a discussion about the "is" and "is-not" of shamanism, could you please take it elsewhere.  This is not an appropriate place for it, and you should not assume lightly that everyone who reads here will be comfortable with you dragging this kind of topic into a battle between egos.

Thank you.  

(And Gareth:  I'll be grateful if you can hold your breath here and refrain from engaging Donald on this provocation.)

[Kerstin Schmidt]

And Mike wrote this:

"That is, farming magic doesn't make the farmer superior to a real world farmer, mostly it makes him just like a real world farmer. Sans magic, he'd probably starve to death."

I think that nails so much.

Everything is magic or religion dependent in Glorantha: the eco-system, the cultural life of all peoples, the history...

The supernatural in Glorantha isn't something extra added to our own world... It's a foundational element for a world alien to our world.

I agree with all of that, except the word "alien".  I'd say D&D cosmology is alien to our own world - it has no connection to what we experience, nothing to engage with on an emotional level.   Glorantha on the other hand uses systems and metaphors deeply familiar to us from our own cultures and experiences.  

I'm not saying Glorantha mirrors our world, mind you.  What I'm saying is that Glorantha contains enough parallels to our worlds (and twists, both familiar and unfamiliar,  to those parallels) for people to engage with it emotionally, to care passionately about its meaning and get into shouting matches over it even without being in a game together - witness this thread, which is off on a parsec-long tangent from its original topic.  I don't think something alien could do that to us.

[soru]

That is, farming magic doesn't make the farmer superior to a real world farmer, mostly it makes him just like a real world farmer. Sans magic, he'd probably starve to death.

As another aside, I suspect that if you created an elaborate magical warding system, designed to keep out all spirits and beasts and diseases and curses and miasmas and so on, then you probably could farm 'naturally', without any further magic.

I rather suspect a project like that  that wouldnl't end well, though.

soru

[Christopher Kubasik]

And Mike wrote this:

"That is, farming magic doesn't make the farmer superior to a real world farmer, mostly it makes him just like a real world farmer. Sans magic, he'd probably starve to death."

I think that nails so much.

Everything is magic or religion dependent in Glorantha: the eco-system, the cultural life of all peoples, the history...

The supernatural in Glorantha isn't something extra added to our own world... It's a foundational element for a world alien to our world.

I agree with all of that, except the word "alien"...

I'm not saying Glorantha mirrors our world, mind you, for people to engage with it emotionally, to care passionately about its meaning....

Hmmmmmm. Fair enough.

I would argue that AD&D is simply more alien than Glorantha for you and I.  Anyone could come charging in here at any moment and say, "When we played Greyhawk from '87 to '91 we engaged with it all the time and found meaning that mattered!" and that person would be, you know, right. Neither you nor I could say that the person didn't care, wasn't engaged emotionally.  And the person probably was.

Let me clarify what I meant by "alien" though. And it's spun off my Glorantha is Myth...  Right? thread.

When you wrote about emotion and meaning, the systems and metaphores of Glorantha, what I read was, "Yeah, like in a story." And that's what I meant about Glorantha being alien. It's not alien in the sense I don't understand it. It's alien in the sense that in a fundemental, not really my reality way, not the world I know.

Itt seems to me Glorantha is culled from some cauldron we might call The Land of Story. Familiar to us, yes -- if we read stories and respond to events with emotion and metaphore. But also fundementally different than how our model of the universe works. If I were to land there, I would be like Blackthorne in Shogun haveing to learn new rules -- fast.  And not because of the cultural issues... but because a new, fundemental way of thinking would have to be drilled into my head about how EVERYTHING works.  (See Mike's point quoted above.)

That's what I meant by the word "alien" -- a poor choice, on reflection -- though I can't think of what else to use.  And for you I might be overstating the case. But for me, something clicked.

Christopher

[contracycle]

But this is largely the point that I've been trying to make. What if magic is real in the real world? If so, then the Celt isn't rationalizing, his faith is correct. But that's not neccessary to prove. All I have to prove is that in Glorantha truth is ambiguous enough that a character in that world having faith is not non-sensical. Which I think is quite true.

I'd rather not respond to that idea directly.

But I do agree completely with:

"That is, farming magic doesn't make the farmer superior to a real world farmer, mostly it makes him just like a real world farmer. Sans magic, he'd probably starve to death."

In this sense, magic becomes a kind of metaphor for skill and knowledge.  And that is perfectly plausible; for example, I know Chinese traditional medicine uses a belief system about sympathy and chi and whatnot which I do not agree is true, but is also able to produce treatments that are effective.

But where I become less sure again is when I resolve character actions with magic.  If a character has something like "throw lightning" as an ability, or fly, when this ability is used I will be required to narrate causes and effects to that player.

Now, lets say I privately come to the view that Gloranthat is not literally magical; what then do I say to a player who wnats their character to fly to the top of a tower?  It may be reasonable to see the sacred time rituals as a form of ecstatic trance, but the magical powers they imply go further.

For me this means I may not actually have a common social contract with the players.  If they are expecting the game to run as (it appears) writ, and I am applying this second order analysis of the game, we are heading for a collision.  OK sure, we can of course always discuss this.  But my strong feeling is that if there was a section in the GM's books laying this out, and saying before you venture into Glorantha, you need to make a decision on this issue and discuss it with your players, then the product as a game would be much much less confusing to the buyer.

Aside:
I have actually considered a game which would exhibit my own view of historical magic, but I doubt its going to win many fans.  This is a model of magic as deception, no bones about it.

For example, Egyptian priests had a cunning device that exploited the ability of fire to cause liquids to expand in a statue of a god, so that when you made a fire on the plate in front, in worship of the god, a reservoir would be heated, fluid would expand, and pour out of a beaker held by the god, putting out the fire.

Its very clever.  It would also almost certainly be wondrous and magical to most observers.  Even those who knew that it was a device wopuld not really know how or why it worked.  It would indeed be a technology sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from magic.  Of course, like any stage magician, this is not real magic, and works only under very specific conditions.

It would be quite interesting to play a game like this I think; please note I am not necessarily accusing the priests here of fraud, they may themselves believe this to be magic.  But it would be interesting for a modern to see such "honest deceptive magic" in action as a possible model of historical society.

--
I'm certainly not opposed to conflicting worldviews; I'm not opposed to the characters having a different worldview to that of the players.  My main issue, and this thread has clarified it if only because at least some others can see the way that Glorantha can be thought of as non-magical, is that becuase the game doesn't warn me of these levels of ambiguity or how to use them, my social contract may be based on totally fallacious assumptions.

In the absence of a certain statement as to the nature of the world in the text, I think it needs to be explicitly negotiated.  And I think that needs to be explicitly discussed by the game itself.

--

Aside: Soru, I'm not actually too worried about Skyburn and so forth - because these can be rationalised away as natural disasters that have been rationalised.  Frex, if you read a Chinese text saying that a mighty dragon crossed the sky on certain dates, its plausible to see that as a passing comet.  Similarly, "Skyburn" could be a Tunguska event or similar.

[joshua neff]

Gareth,

If you want to run Glorantha as "fake magic"--that is, what is called "magic" is actually trance states, hallucinations, and "magical" explanations for scientific events (like the Skyburn being a natural disaster explained through myth and magic), but you're worried about player expectations, shouldn't you declare, before characters are created and play has begun, how you want to run Glorantha? I mean, you'll be directly contradicting the text, which states that magic in Glorantha is obvious and flashy. A lot of players, I would think, would expect that the magic in the game, therefore, will be obvious, mythic, with lots of special effects.

You could obviously run your game differently, with the magic subtle for the most part, the flashy bits being hypnosis, hallucinations, and stage magic effects. I guess you'd just have to tone down the feats, spells, and spirits. And again, let the players know before hand how you want to run your game, to avoid the kind of disconnect you mentioned.

[Mike Holmes]

If you assume that the only way for characters to make decisions is the way that the rationalist in our world makes decisions, then you'll have trouble understanding the Gloranthan mindset.

I get your point although I'd contend that there is no "Gloranthan mindset" as such. There's an implied mindset of fictional creations which I don't see as being the same thing.

Well what I meant was what you said. Sorry if I used the wrong words. By Gloranthan Mindset, I mean that fictional mindset that the fictional characters of the obviously very fictional world of Glorantha must have (some of them) in order for them to seem interesting (as opposed to insane or stupid) to we real players.

I think part of the issue that Gareth has is that the rules of Glorantha imply a different mindset for him than they do for others. This is inextricably bound up in how everyone concerned in this debate views the real world and how it might be interpreted. Given that we're not about to change that, resolution is difficult.

I completely and wholeheartedly agree. You've just encapsulated much of my argument.

Gareth's pov, as I see is that if what I call magical happens all the time in Glorantha, then there is no magic to it. It's just part of what one might do naturally, and without divine interference. Furthermore, given that much of this magic could be said only to appear to those who have faith in it, how is one to convince unbelievers of its existence. Much in the same way that you'd have trouble convincing an atheist such as myself that God exists in the real world because you know it does. All good points.

Yes. You've pointed out how in the Real World atheists have problems with magic. But you admit that in the Real World that faithful people exist, despite those doubts, correct? So is it unbelievable to have a Glorantha in which people of faith exist?

The only argument can be that there the constant magic makes that hard to understand. But when you realize that people of faith in the Real World feel that magic is about them all the time, it becomes easier. And for people like me, it becomes believable. For others not, apparently. Or maybe I still misunderstand the disagreement.

However, Glorantha is a fiction and not the real world. So if you want something to have objective existence in that world, you can just say that it's so. In my Glorantha there is no ambiguity about the existence of magic although there is ambiguity about what this magic might be.

This is pretty much how I play with HQ (understanding that I import the cosmology into another setting for actual play).

Mike