Gloranthan Genre conventions / tropes

[RaconteurX]

Are there any problems with the situation as I've set it up?

Other than the fact that the Gift Carriers of the Avenging Gods allegedly appear to disappear any individual who delves too deeply into the secrets of the God Learners (plus anyone he or she knows, and anyone those persons may know, etc., until any and all possibility of transmission has been obliterated), not in the least. :D

[Brand_Robins]

Other than the fact that the Gift Carriers of the Avenging Gods allegedly appear to disappear any individual who delves too deeply into the secrets of the God Learners (plus anyone he or she knows, and anyone those persons may know, etc., until any and all possibility of transmission has been obliterated), not in the least. :D

Cool, maybe that would be usable. Who are the Gift Carriers of the Avenging Gods? Where can I find out more about them? Are the infallible? Would the PCs (we'll say they're Heortlings from Dragon Pass) know about them ICly? Could the PCs use them to sucker the Lunars in then have the Gift Carriers nail the Lunars for them?

[soru]

[quote="Brand_Robins]
What would I need to know, canonaically, about the God Learners to run this? Are there any problems with the situation as I've set it up? Any specific references you think might be helpful towards me and my players playing with the fire and unavoidable doom of God Learners?[/quote]

Your take on the God Learners is basically right, and the setup seems fine. Admittedly, everyone knows all the God Learners are dead, but that strictly means 'except for all the exceptions'.

Basic info on the God Learners is at http://www.glorantha.com/greg/seshnelanKings2.html.

Specifically:

In 718 the brave and foolish Free Men of the Sea put their little wooden fleet to sea against ocean itself. Their only cargo was of sorcerer wizards and their new, and sometimes untested, exotic apparatus. They faced nearly all the fifty Waertagi dragon ship cities, who came to concentrate their curse and scorn. And they had awakened all of their waves so they say on a long ridge of water overlooking the little ships, ready to drown the whole huge island of Jrustela. They had their whirlpools and waterspouts, and schools of whales, sharks, and the kraken. About the ships swam seven races of mermen ready to kill their food. All the forces of the sea were ready.

The wizards then summoned a another sea god, who was not present yet. They called it as if it was just a spirit, and they made that god call his father, forcing it to act as in an act of demonology. The father was Tanian, who is the water of the sky world. The sky world, including its water, is made of fire. Upon the command of the sorcerers, at the will of the clergy, the sky opened and burning seas cascaded upon the Waertagi. The flames could not be quenched. Ships, mermen, waves and waterspouts all impossibly caught fire and were destroyed. The burning even flowed down under the water, so there was no escape for anything in its path. The Jrusteli called this the Battle of Tanien's Victory. Many ships were destroyed too, or their crews were killed thought the wood remained, but it was a tremendous victory against Nature itself.

In 849 the God Learners performed their infamous Goddess Switch. Also, about 845 the God Learners Collective was formed. Many like-minded sorcerous orders (including some from the Church) formally joined forces and begin their Explorations of Magic. Such had been done before informally, but now united, the God Learners' power increased dramatically.

They thereby "proved" that their sorcery was superior to pagan worship, and that pagan deities were interchangeable. Seemingly successful at first, it subsequently wrought terrible havoc to the lands where the goddesses had come from

soru

[Brand_Robins]

[quote="Brand_Robins]
Basic info on the God Learners is at [url="http://www.glorantha.com/greg/seshnelanKings2.html"]http://www.glorantha.com/greg/seshnelanKings2.html[/url].

Specifically:

Snip

That stuff was perfect for the setup I'd introduced, and would (I think) be very usable to start a campaign with. I'd feel comfortable enough running it, and you were able to give me good info. Maybe this thing will work out.

[RaconteurX]

Brand:

Think of the Gift Carriers as Glorantha's immune system, activated by the Gods who are her organs. They are "agents" of the Cosmic Compromise, upon which existence itself hinges. The God Learners, in their hubris, put Creation in jeopardy and it struck back... hard. The Heortling Gods were among those threatened, so the Gift Carriers should be known to any having sufficient knowledge (two masteries in Heortling Mythology ought to do). If the Heortlings could avoid contamination by God Learner blasphemy themselves, I'd say destroying a group of Lunars in the manner you conjecture would be possible. As for the infallibility of the Gift Carriers, that would seem to be the case except as noted below.


Soru:

Actually, if the rumors presented in Dorastor: Land of Doom are to be believed, Ralzakark has a pair of God Learners in his possession that he is willing to sell if the price is right. As Chaos is anathema to Cosmos, I imagine it is within the realm of (im)possibility that a being as powerful as Ralzakark could shield one or two God Learners from the weight of all Creation dropping on their heads. Perhaps the Lunars are counting on their Chaos connection to shield them from the Gift Carriers, in which case, Brand's Heortlings are screwed... imperially!

[RaconteurX]

Sandy Petersen talks about the Gift Carriers here. Peter Metcalfe mentions them here, but Sandy corrects him on the extent of Gift Carrier "operations" here.

[contracycle]

Think of the Gift Carriers as Glorantha's immune system, activated by the Gods who are her organs. They are "agents" of the Cosmic Compromise, upon which existence itself hinges. The God Learners, in their hubris, put Creation in jeopardy and it struck back... hard. The Heortling Gods were among those threatened, so the Gift Carriers should be known to any having sufficient knowledge (two masteries in Heortling Mythology ought to do). If the Heortlings could avoid contamination by God Learner blasphemy themselves, I'd say destroying a group of Lunars in the manner you conjecture would be possible. As for the infallibility of the Gift Carriers, that would seem to be the case except as noted below.

The whole god-learners business presents me with several major problems.  

Firstly, the above seems to suggest that there IS an underlying metaphysics of Glorantha, suggests that these things, like the gloranthan immune system, are objectively extant, and operate in particular ways.  Now, I feel I need to understand what this is and how it works so that I understand Gloranthan metaphysics and can understand what is going on in the divine.

But, problem 2, information about the god-learners appears to be streng verboten, more or less  I've even been told that I should not ask about the god learners, and that they are essentially being written out of cannon; that the god learners are anathematic to glorantha both within the game world and within the metagame.

But, problem 3, the god learners ARE referenced in the texts in such a way, as above, to suggest that their knowledge is somehow quite significant to the world.

So I'm confused by the whole thing.  It feels to me like, say, we are playing mage: the ascension except without understanding Prime; as if the discussion of Prime has been ommitted ands we are just expected to like use our kewl powerz and not ask any penetrating questions.

Soru says:

I think another minor genre rule is 'whenever a God Learner states something with absolute confidence, he will turn out to be disastrously and messily wrong'

Whereas my rading would be, clearly not, otherwise the attewntion given to them makes no sense.  If they were wrong, ineffective, they would not have had the scarring effect they appear to have on the world, for whatever reason.  As you start drilling down through myths, the god-learners crop up more and more as fundamental aspects of gloranthan history.

Mundane Magic:
I feel that magic in Glorantha is essentially mundane. My earliest encounter with Glorantha was via the Dragon Pass boardgame; in this game, there were no bones about the fact that magic was artillery.  The Bat appears to me to be a "nuclear option".  Magic is clearly a functional, systematic propblem solving tool that the Lunar army uses carefully, deliberately, and with malice aforethought.

[pete_darby]

How to address the Godlearners without looking needlessly "Gregger than thou..."

AFAICS, the second age stuff was plotted while Greg was in a deep and meaningful relationship with the Monomyth. So he had one of his super-empires using campbellian notions to do what a lot of readers of Glorantha do, set in stone "What's really going on with the other side." And, obviously, if simplistic versions of the campbelian monomyth can be actualised in Gloranthan otherworlds, you can wrench around the various othersides pretty much as you want. And as he explored what the GL would be doing, he didn't like it. The curse of the godlearners, the gift bringers, is Greg using his disenchantment with the abuse of campbellian notions in the service of one of the themes of Glorantha, Power Costs.

I'm of the opinion that the secret of the GL is a battered copy of Hero with a Thousand Faces, with numerous hand written notes in the margin, many signed GS...

One of the reasons Greg, amongst others, don't like folk taking on GL in game or looking to deep into their "secret" is that they really are a munchkin's paradise. Also, plainly, they had an understanding of the metaphysic of Glorantha which, for the functioning of the "absolute relativism" of Glorantha, cannot be "true" without breaking other conventions of the setting. The GL secret, to a great extent, is the Man Behind The Curtain to Greg the Great and Terrible.

Finally, GL were, essentially, a Bronze age culture with the mythic equivalent of thermonuclear weapons. It's assumed in the background that they be ringfenced because their introduction into a campaign need to be very carefully considered.

But after all that, what do you need to knwo about the GL in a "modern" (17th C) campaign?

1. They were very powerful, and messed with the fundamental nature of the otherside
2. The whole of creation, mortal world and otherside, co-operated in their destruction, and is still on the lookout for them
3. There really shouldn't be any of them, or their artifacts, left.

I think the convention is that "Anything a GL states is true is absolutely, completely, 100% true, and they really haven't thought the whole thing through."

It feels to me like, say, we are playing mage: the ascension except without understanding Prime; as if the discussion of Prime has been ommitted ands we are just expected to like use our kewl powerz and not ask any penetrating questions.

Contra: if the designers of Mage had made that design decision, it could be the source of many immensely cool stories, IMHO. What is that secret, why is everybody so down on discovering it? In Glorantha, it's because the answer nearly broke the world last time. Ah, but this time, we'll be careful and only do it for the right reasons...

The GL appear everywhere, 'cause they screwed around with everything. Swapping gods for spirits (Ah, Mr Racoon had it coming), winnowing out the multiplicities of sun gods ("I'm the sun!" "I'm the sun, and so is my wife!"). Imagine if every scare story about GM technology and Nanotechnology were not just true, but gross underestimates. So while the GL were techinically right about what they could do, the whether's and why nots kind of eluded them towards the end... when they bit back.

[edit: missed out my point. It's a habit]

Given all that, while I think Brand's story idea is "anomolous" in the extreme, it's the anomolous nature of it that helps make it compelling, and it still feeds the conventions we talked about earlier. Sure, the GL should be dead, or disporporated as a mindless spirit, or mutated into a table-lamp, but he isn't... why not? The "average heortling" would run a mile or beat him to death on finding out what he is. Why don't they? Or maybe they do, and things still get worse for them. Or they all die with their values intact...

They're interesting questions to explore, to me.. to the extent I'm replacing God Learner with EWF throughout and thwacking the idea for my campaign.

[edit end]

Mundane Magic: Of course magic acts like artillery in a wargame, It would be hard to model otherwise. On an RPG scale, things can be modelled very differently, but I'm thinking that even in that, YGWV. Magic is ubiquitous, and "our" everyday uses of it are unremarkable to "us," but still noticably different from non-magical high talent, frex. Most Heortlings would be very suspicious of Malkioni weekly blessings.... "Sounds like brain washing to me, mate..."

[simon_hibbs]

To put it another way: if we can take, say, Keep on the Borderlands, rename the kobolds trollkin, stick a lunar flag on the keep and make one of the NPC's a duck, would that make it Gloranthan? Sure, the tropes are all lined up, but without what Brand or John Hughes' are talking about, it doesn't feel like Glorantha, however varied.

That's because you've only changed what is there in that situation, you haven't 'Gloranthified' the resons why those things are there. Who orriginaly built the keep and why? Why are the lunars interested in the Keep? Are the trollkin renegades or the property of a prominent Troll dignitary? Are they anti-lunar or secretly in league with them? Is it set before or after the Lunars put a price on the head of every duck in Dragon Pass?

Glorantha isn't about objects (be they things or people), it's about characters, motives, relationships and goals. Actualy you could say the same about any setting. AD&D has orcs, rangers and elves yet it isn't Middle Earth because these things are devoid of the characters,  relationships (are orcs realy corrupted elves?), etc that bring that world to life.

I think it's prefectly possible to run a game, or tell a story in MIddle earth that isn't itself mythic or folklorish and it will still be Gloranthan, but any story must have a location, characters and motives which will be coloured by the geography, history, cultures and of course the mythologies of Glorantha.


Simon Hibbs

[pete_darby]

Simon, I really don't get where, if anywhere, we're disagreeing here: perhaps when I say "it would make it gloranthan," I should be saying "to a casual observer, it would look gloranthan." It's like the old Judge's Guild scenarios (Duck Tower? My memories of the time are hazy at best); you've got Gloranthan "bits" all over the place, but even at the time I remember people saying it "felt" more like a D&D adventure with ducks than a runequest adventure.

So yeah, when you start looking into "Why trollkin? Why lunars? Why a duck?", you start plugging into gloranthan genre conventions, and it starts looking gloranthish, rather than D&D with ducks.


Slight threadjack: For an even simpler reason why everything in glorantha is ultimately coloured by myth: everyone has magic, the magic comes from mythic sources.

[simon_hibbs]

Simon, I really don't get where, if anywhere, we're disagreeing here:

Quite so, just tossing in my 2p worth.


Simon

[pete_darby]

Simon, I really don't get where, if anywhere, we're disagreeing here:

Quite so, just tossing in my 2p worth.


Simon

Note to self: decaff.

[Wulf]

One of the major problems I have trying to introduce two newcomers to Glorantha isn't so much 'what makes it Glorantha?' as much as 'how do I tell the players about this?' I dislike stopping play to tell them 'ah, but your character already know about this...'. So, in my experience, the problem isn't so much defining 'Glorantha' as finding a way to pass on that definition in character and without interrupting play. Getting 'bits' of info about the setting can just make you feel LESS informed as it becomes more and more obvious that you just don't know what's going on.

And my take on magic is that everyone has, and does, magic, but very few think of it as THEIR magic. Barntari plough well because they pray to Barntar, not because they have 'Plough a Straigh Furrow' feats. Longhouses stay airy because the inhabitants always thank the air spirits that clear the smoke, not because they have 'Clear the Air' charms in the hall. Gloranthan magic is all-present and all-pervasive, but to the inhabitants it's the world that's magic, not THEM. That, I feel, is the way to introduce the players to their character's magic. Myths come into it because Gloranthans see myths as simply really old stories, not as some... erm... mythic... tales. They are about Gods, but that's not so far distant from daily experience, there's a little God over there, in that rock. And if you breathe deeply, that's Orlanth in there. You met him, just last winter, in the Sacred Time ceremony.

This primarily applies to Theists and Animists, of course, but then so does my campaign.

Wulf

[simon_hibbs]

Note to self: decaff.

Actualy, on re-reading my post it does come across as being very combative, and I assure you that was not intentional. I've been way busy at work for the last few months and so I'm writing posts at break-neck speed these days, so I'm not spending as much time re-writing for politeness. Many appologies.


Simon

[contracycle]

Contra: if the designers of Mage had made that design decision, it could be the source of many immensely cool stories, IMHO. What is that secret, why is everybody so down on discovering it? In Glorantha, it's because the answer nearly broke the world last time. Ah, but this time, we'll be careful and only do it for the right reasons...

My answer to that is strongly "no".  Or more precisely, I'll allow that some people might find that sort of thing entertaining, but I would find it terribly frustrating.  I mean, its not even a secret if its merely missing.

When I-the-player know the True Origin Of The World - even if my character does not - then I and the other players, and the GM, are all on the same page as to what the SIS is, how it is constituted, and what the paramaters of play are.  It can also be used for dramatic effect - that is, the things that originate from outside the known, bounded world are lent dramatic impact due to this very fact.  It allows me-the-player to engage more constuctively with the character and the world becuase I am able to deduce things from first principles by observation of an at least coherent SIS.  And even more importantly, if I'm the GM, and the players pose a question like, "So, can we raise the dead?" then I cannot answer it from the game material... in which case the material is of dubious merit, having only got me into a hole I would not have been in otherwise (if I were using a less ambiguous game).

I contend that a Mage game built this way could only be run once: because the purpose of the game would be to address this pressing question, what is the nature of reality.  The story, then, would be about "discovering the true nature of reality", but once it was done, it would be done.  It would be... well, weird, to start another game with different characters and come to another answer - but that would be necessary if we were to reprise the only available story.

Again, I'll allow that perhaps a game could be set up in this way: a bunch of props are provided and the purpose of the game is to engage in existential speculation through play action.  But Glorantha does not appear to me to be written in this way or structured for this form of play.  Maybe it is, that is why I asked for more explication of the anticipated role of myths in Actual Play.

But after all that, what do you need to knwo about the GL in a "modern" (17th C) campaign?

1. They were very powerful, and messed with the fundamental nature of the otherside
2. The whole of creation, mortal world and otherside, co-operated in their destruction, and is still on the lookout for them
3. There really shouldn't be any of them, or their artifacts, left.

Well, my first response is, I don't know, because I by definition do not know what I do not know.  But even so, if they are now meant to be gone, and no remnants remain, why even talk about them at all?

The answer "because they had such an impact on the worlds history" does not appear at all useful to me if I am not told what that impact is and was.  I don;t mean "whay talk about them" in in-character voices in Glorantha - I mean, why talk about them in Gloranthan products AT ALL if I am not supposed to use them in the game I actually play?  "If its in the game, its in the game" should be the operational principle, I would think.

If all of creation is on the lookout for them, then that presumably includes my character.  Which immediately prompts me to ask: how do I recognise one?  The answer that I do not need to know is frustrating, because then why bother to establish the fact that the whole of creation wants to wipe them out?  It is tacitly assumed that the GL are anathema, but why?  If I do not know what they did wrong, why would I be hostile to them?  If they had immense power - and they seem to by implication - then why would I not quite reasonably seek out them and their works in order to solve my problems?  And if I were a GM, and the players proposed such a thing, who would I, not knowing any more about the GL's than they do - be to say them nay?  You say that the average heortling would run a mile or assault them on identification... but why?  If I encountered a GL morphed into a table lamp for whatever reason, it would not particularly strike me as weird or worrying - Glorantha is full of stuff that could be shaped by other things, what is it about this one that is so troubling?  Now a Broo morphed into a table lamp might be MORE worrying, because I at least know that I am supposed to hate and fear Broos, and WHY.