Syncretism in HQ

[James Holloway]

That is, the Lunars don't conquer in the mundane world to alter myths.

They do a little bit -- they need to build Reaching Moon Temples in order to really get their magical funk on in a particular location. The whole thing in Sartar centers on just that.

[Mike Holmes]

That is, the Lunars don't conquer in the mundane world to alter myths.

They do a little bit -- they need to build Reaching Moon Temples in order to really get their magical funk on in a particular location. The whole thing in Sartar centers on just that.

I don't see how that alters the mythic world at all. It just allows magic to be used better in the mundane world. Like any ritual does.

Mike

[James Holloway]

I don't see how that alters the mythic world at all. It just allows magic to be used better in the mundane world. Like any ritual does.

Mike

Well, I'm not sure about this, but I suspect that in order to destroy Orlanth in the mythic world, you have to take or destroy things in the physical world that support him, like the Old Wind Temple or the Hill of Orlanth Victorious. You could heroquest all you like to kill Orlanth from a base in Raibanth, but Orlanth would smash you flat every time.

And taking out a city full of Wind Lords is a lot less of a problem if your magic doesn't stop working a couple of days of the week.

[contracycle]

Here's the thing: as far as I know, no one has suggested that Orlanth is Doburdun. I could be wrong about this. But my understanding is that they have replaced Orlanth with Doburdun because it does minimal damage to the mythology -- Doburdun is also married to Ernalda, Doburdun is the god of the storm, etc. In some highly technical metaphysical sense, Doburdun may "be" Orlanth, like they both embody the Storm Rune or something, but for practical purposes they are different cults AFAIK.

While its possible to make that argument  about the persons of specific gods, its not possible to make that argument over the lordship of the middle air.


--

While I appreciate the effort put into this post very much, I'm afraid I don't see the point of it.  You have described rather well roughly how I, with my anthropologists hat on, would describe such a process.  And so to me, the fact that these people opportunistically give up their beliefs due to material and psychological pressures imposed by overlords makes sense - but in the real world, I don't have to accomodate really existing gods and magic.  What you have described is how conversion occurs in a non-magical world.

But the question is how it occurs in a magical world where the gods really exist and are free willed; where the practitioners routinely enter the god plane and commune with their deities.  And these gods are conspicuous by their absence in your account.

It also appears that religious devotion, such as it appears in Glorantha, is essentially unimportant.   Faith is not something deep and significant about me as a person - its more like popular fashion.  Despite bronze being the very bones of the gods in the earth, the gods themselves are so wuss and useless that what really matters is who controls the biggest human army.  THAT is the decisive element in conversion.

And that really then begs the question: what is the significance of hero-questing?  It is a fundamentally trivial activity, because it will never be important or have much impact.  Why all the emphasis on this period being the hero wars, some sort of great metaphysical conflict, when none of the deciding elements are metaphysical?

This model of conversions only works if you assume that the gods do NOT exist at all, but are merely imagined to by Gloranthans.  But that cannot be reconciled with the existance of overt magic and direct experience of the gods by worshippers.  So, as an explanation of conversion in Glorantha, this unfortunately fails.

[contracycle]

They learn the myths, they try an islander heroquest, and either

a) they fuck it up. Sorry, guys, Orlanth never passed this way. See if you can use your existing magic to grow taro roots or something. You're not worshipping Jim-Bob.

or

b) they pull it off. Turns out Jim-Bob is the son of so-and-so, which makes him Heler's first cousin and therefore willing to grant them his blessings if they make the appropriate sacrifices, etc., etc.

This sequence seems to imply that the Truth of the relationship between Orlanth and Jim-Bob is DEPENDANT ON THE SUCCESS OF THE HEROQUEST.  And even retroactively, that is it becomes such that it always was this way.

But this is directly contradicted by the model of conversion we have just discussed, in which purely political-economic factors determined the presence of worship, and the truth of the myths, in the eyes of the individual.

Worse, we have the communication problem again.  Once this hero-quest is performed one way or another, then an individual or small groups of practitioners knows the "truth" about the relationship between Orlanth and Jim-Bob - Ragnar and co. again, say.  But way out on the other side of dragon pass is another community who do not know this "truth".  Or, they also quested but got the opposite result.  Thus, "truth" is geographically variable - what is true depends quite literally on where you are and who you know, and the "propagation rate of Truth" should have an identifiable value at about the velocity of horse and rider running cross country.

This is ALWAYS the problem with the local hero-quest as a solution to the problem.  Unless the god plane has an objective, persistant existance - which is implied by the statement that the gods are real, but undermined by the presentation of exclusively socio-economic conversion - then changes to the god plane imposed through hero-questing are also trivial, unimportant, local and subjective.

In which case, it cannot be that the success of the heroquest determines the truth of the myth in any meaningful sense.  As we saw in the case of conversion, the alleged mystic realm has no meaningful impact.

[contracycle]

Well, I'm not sure about this, but I suspect that in order to destroy Orlanth in the mythic world, you have to take or destroy things in the physical world that support him, like the Old Wind Temple or the Hill of Orlanth Victorious. You could heroquest all you like to kill Orlanth from a base in Raibanth, but Orlanth would smash you flat every time.

Why?

If I can rationalise the taro-root god to have a history that suits me, why can't I rationalise Orlanth similarly?  All I have to do is decide to "discover" that Orlanth 'ain't all that' after all.

[contracycle]

No, they don't believe that hey change it, only that they discover new myths.

No, they DO change it.  That is quite clear in the taro-root god example.

Yes this is cloaked bybthe language of discovery, but if te outcome is dependant on the success of the quest, asd James gives in his example, then the QUEST creates the REALITY of the hero plane.

For that observer.

Again, this is your belief in rationality as the only source of truth. As long as you maintain that, and don't realize that many people, including allmost all of them in Glorantha, don't feel that way, then you'll never understand their mindset.

This is a totally unacceptable response.  

First of all, I have said nothing about sources of truth in the real world.  All I want is a clear understand of THIS GAMING PRODUCT.  I do feel it is incumbent for a producer of a product sold for commercial sale to explain it, its ointernal logic, and how I the end-user am to actually use the product I have purchased.

It is NOT good enough to make spurious allegations about my thinking, or allege there is something I "just don't get".  This product does not come with a warning sticker that indicates it can only be played by those with academic training in anthropology.

It's like you're saying that before people knew that the world was round, that they were crazy for thinking that it was flat. Worse, you haven't proven in the analogy that the world isn't flat.

No its not like that at all.  Concluding the world is flat is fairly reasonable from casual observation.  But Glorantha goes further and says that NOBODY in the entirety of Glorarantha ever uses rational thought for anything - they act exculsively through the denial of their own motivations and its transposition into religious mumbo-jumbo.

Quite incorrect. Again, you assume that faith is based on "seeing" which it simply is not.

No, thats the central QUESTION: Do gloranthans act on faith, or do they act on knowledge?

The books say the gods really exist; the worshippers can do magic; can quest on the hero plane.  It just turns out, none of it MATTERS.

I didn't think that it did. At least they don't think that it does. That is, the Lunars don't conquer in the mundane world to alter myths. They conquer because their gods say that they should.

No, the glowline and Yanafil Tarnils temples are clearly "magical engineering" that is geographically specific.  

They don't. They see the same things. Whether or not they choose to accept what they're seeing is a different matter.

If that were true, questing to "discover" new myths or stations would not work, becuase the True versions would be objectively fixed to all observers, and we know this is not the case.

Any change to a myth is, in fact, just a change in your understanding of it.

No thats not true as you altready concdeded; its not that Goranthans are not changing the hero plane, its merely that they THINK they are not.  So this "understanding" stuff is just a rationalisation of an imposed change that I desired.

To actually find a deeper truth about a god, you'd have to go to the god plane to do it. Making it way tougher to do. I mean you practically have to be a god yourself to do it. Only superhumans like JarEel or huge organizations working together can have any chance of learning deeper truths on the god plane.

I'm the GM.  I twist JarEel around my little finger and eat Orlanth for lunch.
These questions come from me, the real human player, about the really existing game - not from a character about a nebulous world.  I just want the straight dope so I can make judgements.

[James Holloway]

While its possible to make that argument  about the persons of specific gods, its not possible to make that argument over the lordship of the middle air.

I'm not familiar with the quest that made Sedenya lord of the Middle Air, but as far as I can tell two things happen here:

1) following this quest, Sedenya is victorious for a long time, crushing the Orlanthi religion and driving all before her, up to the point of "killing" Orlanth.  So she does seem to be dominant, maybe even "lord of the middle air." In fact, the signs point to Orlanth's eventual sort-of victory coming through the power of the Seventh Wind, which suggests that his power is not rooted in the middle air.

2) Sedenya is present in the material plane as the Red Moon, and her quest to dominate central Genertela is brought to an abrupt end when she is physically killed. So it could be that "Sedenya was lord of the middle air. But now she's dead."

It also appears that religious devotion, such as it appears in Glorantha, is essentially unimportant.   Faith is not something deep and significant about me as a person - its more like popular fashion.  Despite bronze being the very bones of the gods in the earth, the gods themselves are so wuss and useless that what really matters is who controls the biggest human army.  THAT is the decisive element in conversion.

Not necessarily. But I do agree that "faith" as such is not a big deal in theistic Glorantha at least -- what's important are relationships. Initiates don't have faith in their god -- how could they, since they've seen him face to face? They know for a fact that he or she exists. The question is how strong a bond they feel, what kind of relationship they have with the god. And that relationship can come under strain in a lot of ways, some of which are indeed based on who's got the biggest army.

On the other hand, the power of the Lunar army comes at least partially from the Red Goddess.

Something that I keep stressing is that the existence of the gods, their verifiable existence, is not the decisive, magic-bullet argument here. The relationship with Orlanth can be anything from "he's like a very good friend" for an initiate to "he's like my father and mother, but so much more" for a disciple. But Sedenya is real too, and she's tempting. People do abandon their loved ones under times of great stress. Others don't. Most Wind Lords are not going to convert, because their relationship with Orlanth is that strong -- his breath fills their being, and they would think it better to die than abandon him. But I don't see how the fact that this is not religious "faith" as it operates in the modern world doesn't make it important.

Next post: heroquesting!

[James Holloway]

But this is directly contradicted by the model of conversion we have just discussed, in which purely political-economic factors determined the presence of worship, and the truth of the myths, in the eyes of the individual.

The truth of the myth doesn't change when you convert. Orlanthi who know the myth of Yelmalio and the Hill of Gold don't doubt that it happened. They just don't venerate Yelmalio. Orlanthi who decide to worship Yelmalio, like Monrogh, don't think that Elmal never Guarded the Stead. They just consider Yelmalio to be the greater god, the more worthy of veneration.

But about heroquesting.

The thing is that the hero plane and the god plane are mutable, a bit. So there's certainly a sense in which the heroquester alters them when he quests. There's an amount of "play" in the myths.

Let's take an example from King of Dragon Pass. In a very early heroquest in this game, we enact the myth of Orlanth and Aroka, in which Orlanth slays the dragon Aroka to free Heler, whom Aroka has imprisoned. At one point, you're questing along, doing your thing, and this weird Uroxi (in the myth, Urox himself) turns up -- but Urox is not in this myth! However, he's really helpful to have along, because on the way you are attacked by chaos creatures. Urox wasn't in the myth because the slaying of Aroka happened before the Darkness, so there was no chaos. When you reenacted the myth, therefore, you didn't get it quite right, but it works anyway, because it's close enough. You got the gist of it.

So there we see some flexibility in the system. As long as you respect the  point of the myth, which is really about something rather different, you can futz around with the details a bit and nobody will mind.

That's fine, but what about totally new heroquests? Well, there also there is a little bit of play in the system. The Helerings in the Jim-Bob example can't just make up a totally new myth from scratch. That stuff doesn't fly. What they have to do is find a myth they can use: "How Jim Bob Taught People to Grow Taro" or whatever. Now, Jim Bob really did teach these people to grow taro. That's not at issue. The play in the system is, are these guys eligible to learn the secret? They're using the argument "well, Jim Bob, we think you're related to our pantheon and therefore we can worship you" to try and argue that they are. To do this they're using the Storm Pantheon's powers of weather and fertility and its connection with the deep in the person of Heler, the Blue God, who is (as Helerings) their personal patron. The connection is real, Jim Bob is real, and though no Helering has ever acted out the myth before, it is close enough to what Helerings do to work in principle. Whether they carry out the quest well enough to convince Jim Bob is, of course, another matter. Their quest experience will probably be a bit different from the way the islanders do it, because some of that stuff is just surface dictated by the specifics of the islanders' relationship with Jim Bob, rather than the nature of Jim Bob specifically.

You asked about Orlanthi back in Dragon Pass trying to use this quest to grow taro root. The answer, I think, is yes, even if they hadn't heard of the victory of the Helerings in the Jim Bob Teaches the People to Grow Taro quest, if they somehow managed to hear the myth and decide to quest it, it would be easier for them once someone had established the relationship, because Jim Bob would be predisposed to listen to them more closely, having already been told that Helerings -- and by extension maybe other Orlanthi -- were OK  guys. This is similar to how it became easier to perform the Lightbringer's Quest once Harmast showed the way -- this happens both in the material plane, where the knowledge of how to perform the quest correctly is spread, and in the Otherworld, where the path is opened up a bit. It might still be difficult, because heroquests often are. Even relatively well known quests like Orlanth and Aroka often wind up with failures. But it works because it plays to the general nature of Jim Bob. It's not as important that you pierce the Scudding Cloud with the Ancestral Harpoon to release the Warm Rains of Joy as that you do something that expresses the nature of Jim Bob's struggle to make the fertile earth yield taro.

I think it would be instructive to look here at a quest that would not be likely to work. Let's say for the sake of example that a Humakti decided to try to get him some Sandals of Darkness by taking on the role of Humakt in a quest similar to the one where Orlanth, as Desemborth, steals the sandals from the trolls. This would not work worth a crap, because it is totally contrary to Humakt's nature. Humakt does not, would never, steal, and even if he just killed the guy and took the sandals, he would never use them because he  would  never hide his Deathlight. So no matter how hard the Humakti quester tries, he'll never get this quest to work -- all he will do is piss off Humakt. So there's some play in the system, but it's not totally free-for-all.

Let's talk about some guys who thought it was totally free-for-all: the God Learners. The God Learners thought that myths were essentially replicable, and that they could isolate each one into a series of discrete elements, so that all they had to do was learn the myth of, say, the Hill of Gold, and then say "aha, that's a Testing of the Hero, subtype b, with, uh, sun and fire, and let's see ... ooh! Trolls!" And up to a point, that works. Yelmalio's quest shares elements with similarly-themed quests from similarly-themed deities; how could it not. But their big mistake was that they got "there are some similarities" confused with "liberty hall! Let's fuck around!"

Now, here's the thing. A sufficiently superhumanly powerful badass can use heroquesting on the God Plane to, you betcha, change the fabric of reality. With powerful magic and lots of community support (lots, like God Project lots) you can, in fact, go into the God Plane and say "hey Urox! Yeah, you, you pussy! I'm here to tame you and stop you being so wild!" And in the absurdly unlikely event that you calm Urox (because you have eight million masteries in Make People Think  Tranquil Thoughts or whatever) you will change the nature of the deity, change the nature of his heroquests, change the nature of his affinities and feats. There will be a lot of styrmen with big axes and helpful new Look at the Pretty Flowers feats.

This is because, once you're in the god plane, all bets are off. Remember, Urox isn't all - powerful, he's just really, really powerful. You can change his nature if you're tough enough, not because his nature is inherently subjective or mutable or anything like that, but because you went in there and whupped on him until it changed. It was definitely like this and now it is definitely like that. Obviously, most people don't even bother thinking about this because it happens so rarely, but it can and does happen.

The problem with the God Learners is that arsing around with the divine like this is like juggling grenades: it'll create a spectacular effect no matter what, but it's not always the one you want, and there are no do-overs. So when the God Learners pulled off their big super-ass powerful experimental reality-altering heroquest, it totally fucked everything up. They changed the nature of supernatural reality, sure, but in an unpredictable and catastrophic way that led to them being wiped out. People who use carefully thought-out strategic heroquesting to make permanent alterations in the fabric of reality have kind of a bad name in Glorantha. It never seems to end well; just look at the Lunars.

To sum up: heroquests are not a point-for-point ritual repetition of the god's acts, but they are also not a free-for-all of symbol creation and  interpretation. The  nature of the gods is not precisely what their worshippers think it is, but it is not so very different either. There's some wiggle room without it being all adrift in an endless sea of signification.

I hope that helps.

[James Holloway]

These questions come from me, the real human player, about the really existing game - not from a character about a nebulous world.  I just want the straight dope so I can make judgements.

I'm right here with you on this point; I actually found that answering your questions helped me understand heroquesting much better than I ever had, because in some ways the evidence presented on it in the books is confusing and apparently contradictory. I haven't read Arcane Lore yet; maybe it'll clear things up for me. But Gloranthan products (and I think Mike has raised this point too) tend to present everything in terms of generalities rather than rules, which can be frustrating for literal-minded Narrators like me. In the end, I think that the way I've explained heroquesting is only one  of a few ways to do it consistent with how it's expressed in the books, but it's the one that makes the most sense to me and therefore the one I use.

[soru]

But the question is how it occurs in a magical world where the gods really exist and are free willed; where the practitioners routinely enter the god plane and commune with their deities.  And these gods are conspicuous by their absence in your account.

The guys with that level of relationship are the ones rounded up and killed, exiled, or, in the Lunar case, seduced by the personal attentions of a missionary.

Crude analogy:  country 'X' has massive underground oil reserves, but special forces sneak in and blow up all the oil wells. Objectively the oil still exists, politically and miltarily it is of no immediate use. Once the country is conquered, new oil wells can be built with new owners.

soru

[James Holloway]

The guys with that level of relationship are the ones rounded up and killed, exiled, or, in the Lunar case, seduced by the personal attentions of a missionary.

Or the guys who take to the hills and form the resistance -- what they don't do is stick around in the stead. At least, the ones who do don't last long.

In general, the higher your devotion to your deity, the less likely you are to convert ... probably.

[Mike Holmes]

No, they don't believe that hey change it, only that they discover new myths.

No, they DO change it.  That is quite clear in the taro-root god example.

I disagree. I think that's just an incorrect POV. This is where the problems begin and end. If you take your POV, then you're correct, the Gloranthan's are all silly fools. If you take my POV then it's all internally consistent.

It is NOT good enough to make spurious allegations about my thinking, or allege there is something I "just don't get".  This product does not come with a warning sticker that indicates it can only be played by those with academic training in anthropology.

That's silly. I'm don't have such academic training, and I don't find it hard at all. It's only your insistence on certain axioms that start this argument that make these things problematic.

Which is fine. I don't see why the product needs to cater to you specifically. Let's say that there was a game about sewing quilts, and you found it boring, but others liked it. Would that make the game flawed? Then every game is flawed this way.

You'd have to argue that every player will have problems in understanding these issues. Odd thing is that you seem to be one of the only people I know who have this issue. So if HQ has a flaw of not appealing to everyone because of these issues, then it's not a very large one. In fact, I'd say that most games have much worse issues of this sort.

No its not like that at all.  Concluding the world is flat is fairly reasonable from casual observation.  But Glorantha goes further and says that NOBODY in the entirety of Glorarantha ever uses rational thought for anything - they act exculsively through the denial of their own motivations and its transposition into religious mumbo-jumbo.

Except for those that do use rational thought. I've given you the example of the people that do.

Again, putting it all off as religious mumbo-jumbo indicates to me that this is simply not the game for you. It's about faith and religion, and will probably appeal most to people who think it's interesting to look at issues from that side of the fence.

No, thats the central QUESTION: Do gloranthans act on faith, or do they act on knowledge?

I'd say that they do both. Which I find very reasonable, and realistic.

The books say the gods really exist; the worshippers can do magic; can quest on the hero plane.  It just turns out, none of it MATTERS.

This is a non-sequitur. Why don't they matter? I think that they certainly matter to the characters.

No, the glowline and Yanafil Tarnils temples are clearly "magical engineering" that is geographically specific.  

Can you substantiate that with some evidence? Why clearly? Just because that's how you see it, doesn't mean that everyone does, nor that this is how it's intended to be seen.

If that were true, questing to "discover" new myths or stations would not work, becuase the True versions would be objectively fixed to all observers, and we know this is not the case.

I think that this might be the source of the trouble.

The rules are for the players, not for the characters. It's all metagame. We as players don't actually know the myths of Glorantha most times. Oh, we might know a few that somebody has written down, but when it comes to play, we have to make them up. Yes, the HQ rules allow the players to alter the myths. The players. Not the characters. The character only discovers the "deeper truth" that was always there.

Ironically, Fang Langford's name for this sort of play is "No Myth." That is, nothing is real in the game world at all, until we discover it as players. That doesn't mean that the characters feel that way. When you say, "we go left at the fork" and you find a temple, the characters assume it's been there forever. The players know that the GM just put it there, or may as well have. It was a fiction created by somebody at some point, and entered into the SIS when somebody thought to do it.

Any change to a myth is, in fact, just a change in your understanding of it.

No thats not true as you altready concdeded; its not that Goranthans are not changing the hero plane, its merely that they THINK they are not.  So this "understanding" stuff is just a rationalisation of an imposed change that I desired.

Where did I concede this? Yes, the hero plane itself is simply local to the individual. But they understand this, and don't expect the personal understanding of the truth to match others much. On the God Plane (or Spirit Plane, etc) it's different.

To actually find a deeper truth about a god, you'd have to go to the god plane to do it. Making it way tougher to do. I mean you practically have to be a god yourself to do it. Only superhumans like JarEel or huge organizations working together can have any chance of learning deeper truths on the god plane.

I'm the GM.  I twist JarEel around my little finger and eat Orlanth for lunch.
These questions come from me, the real human player, about the really existing game - not from a character about a nebulous world.  I just want the straight dope so I can make judgements.

The player knows that they can "edit" the reality of Glorantha. That they can have thier character search out certain truths.

Yes, this is how the player has some control over the truth of Glorantha. They become a mini-GM using their character as a tool with which to alter things. The in-game desription of which is that these things existed all the time, and that the characters are just finding them. It's like the game Donjon - the player rolls his "find secret door" and, if successful, the player creates one. The character doesn't think that he's created a secret door out of thin air, he thinks it was there all along. In his reality, it was there all along.

Mike

[James Holloway]

Yes, this is how the player has some control over the truth of Glorantha. They become a mini-GM using their character as a tool with which to alter things. The in-game desription of which is that these things existed all the time, and that the characters are just finding them. It's like the game Donjon - the player rolls his "find secret door" and, if successful, the player creates one. The character doesn't think that he's created a secret door out of thin air, he thinks it was there all along. In his reality, it was there all along.

Mike

Remember when I said there are multiple consistent ways to interpret heroquesting? Well, that's another one.

In practice, I bet this and my approach ("there is some actual wiggle room about questing in the game world") would come out to very much the same thing in terms of the session.

[Mike Holmes]

In practice, I bet this and my approach ("there is some actual wiggle room about questing in the game world") would come out to very much the same thing in terms of the session.

Quite. Basically nobody I've ever seen play the game gives a damn about any of this. That is, they have no problem understanding how their very intelligent characters believe what they believe, because it's not at all an "out there" position no matter how you read it.

Mike