Andrew Logan Montgomery
Exploring the Otherworlds of Fiction, Magic, and Gaming
Welcome!
"Come now my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we'd be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest..." - Kenneth Patchen, "Even So."
THIS IS A BLOG ABOUT STORIES AND STORYTELLING; some are true, some are false, and some are a matter of perspective. Herein the brave traveller shall find dark musings on horror, explorations of the occult, and wild flights of fantasy.
Monday, March 11, 2024
RITUAL AND PLAY IN RUNEQUEST
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Easy is the Descent: A Look at the MÖRK BORG and ShadowDark RPGs
Two final very OSR-features of these games is the widespread use of random tables and the reliance on treasure for character improvement. MÖRK BORG's random tables start right on the inside covers, and do more to describe the atmosphere of the setting than the text itself. The weather table gives results like lifeless grey, piercing wind, deafening storm, and gravelike cold. The next table generates items found corpse-plundering. ShadowDark's are more comprehensive than suggestive, allowing you to whip up dungeons (to be fair, both games do this), hex crawls, settlements, neighborhoods, NPCs, monsters...basically everything. You could run entire ShadowDark campaigns with these random tables. The randomness speaks to the "emergent play" feature of OSR games, that the "stories" emerge from the dice and what happens at the table, not extensive backstories or elaborate scripted plots.
Monday, January 15, 2024
"The Adumbrations of the Prophet," A Received Malkioni Text
The text known variously as The Adumbrations of the Prophet or Adumbrations: Being the Discourse of Malkion the Prophet unto Hrestol the Perfected One, is a brief 45-verse tractate. It is part of a very ancient tradition among the various schools of the Malkioni, a discourse between a master and a student intended to reveal technical or religio-philosophical instruction. Widely circulated in Loskalm, and occasionally turning up In Lunar scriptoriums, the text is outlawed throughout much of the Malkioni world. It is, clearly, a Hrestoli text, but it also purports to have been copied from a chapter of the lost Abiding Book, a claim few serious Third Age scholars take seriously. More likely a product of New Hrestolism, it attempts to show how Hrestol was led to his First Age reformations by the "clear teachings" of the prophet Malkion. It is a curious document, but one that is useful in elucidating the more unique aspects of Hrestolism.
Aaaaaaand it is also nonsense.
Recently I was re-reading Poimandres, one of the better known bits of the Hermetica. Just a few weeks earlier I had been reading about one of the Vedanta schools, Achintya-Bheda-Abheda. Without going too deeply down the rabbit-hole of Indian philosophy, the Achintya took up the middle ground between the monist Advaita schools (the individual soul and the Supreme Person are the same) and the dualist Dvaita schools (the Supreme Person is separate and distinct from the individual soul). The Achintya, whose name was popularized in the 1996 Kula Shaker hit "Tattva," held that the answer is beyond human comprehension (achintya means "difference," bheda means "knowable," abheda means "unknowable," so essentially "difference is neither knowable or unknowable"). What struck me though was their basic argument was that the difference between the soul and the Supreme Person was a difference of quantity, not nature. And that got me thinking about Hrestolism.
So enjoy this bit of fluff. I tricked to stick as closely to Poimandres as I could, but a few Indianisms snuck in there as well. Let me know what you think.
ADUMBRATIONS: BEING THE DISCOURSE OF MALKION THE PROPHET UNTO HRESTOL THE PERFECTED ONE
1. Once I lay in a state of such perfect contemplation that I was neither awake nor sleeping. My senses were tamed, my mind turned inward, alert yet inactive, receptive without producing thought. I waited as the dawn awaits the light.
2. And it seemed to me that a presence, unbounded by dimension, unencumbered by definition, filled the empty space of my being. I could neither see nor hear it. It was invisible to my senses and beyond the capacity of my understanding. Yet my heart knew it was there, and leapt in my breast. This organ was like a mirror reflecting this invisible, infinite light.
3. Then, in this incomprehensible vastness there formed a focus, a center, a presence. A voice. "What do you want to hear and see; what do you wish to learn from your understanding?"
4. "Who are you?" I asked.
5. "I am the First to receive the Word. I am the Son of Aerlit and the Father of the Law. I speak for that which is beyond speech. Through me the infinite passes and all must pass to attain infinity. I am Malkion."
6. "Oh Prophet, master, teach me. I wish to learn the workings of things, and in knowing to know the mind of the Invisible God!"
7. "Then be attentive. Keep in mind all that I reveal to you. For my words are subtle, and easy to mistake. Already have then been misunderstood. You must behold them in a clear light."
8. "I hear, master, and I listen."
9. And it seemed that he did not speak and yet showed me. I did not see, but I understood. For from the infinite and the undefined came thoughts, hanging like bright jewels upon a perfect thread. Black and empty was the first, like a hole that eats the light. Then silver-blue and clear came the next, deep and yet reflective. Green and verdant was the following one, with a solidity those before it had lacked. Then the darkness was lit by a great blaze, as the next form radiated warmth and heat in all directions. Then the last, dark gray and flashing, howling, raging, restless. It shook the forms that had preceded it, and I thought the thread they hung upon might break.
10. "Have you understood this I have shown you?"
11. "In your patience I shall come to know it."
12. "They are the First Thoughts of the First, formless, shapeless substances yet each with a nature unique to themselves. None is like the other, yet they, like the Mind from whence they sprang, have no definition."
13. "I see the truth of it, master. I beg you go on."
14. Then, from the Mind of the First there came thoughts that were like sounds, because as each rang out there was an immediate echo. Yet the echo was the opposite of the sound it mirrored, inverse and averse. Each clashed with its echo, and in this exchange the earlier thoughts--the ones I first beheld like jewels--could now be defined. They each reacted to these vibrating notes and their echoes, they came alive and were capable of change.
15. "Has your understanding yet opened to you?"
16. "It becomes more clear. Pray continue your instruction."
17. Then came the final thoughts, and these were like shapes. And they took the first and the second thoughts and gave them form. And together these thoughts were like letters graven in stone or written on paper, for they combined in patterns that gave purpose and meaning. The darkness was lifted from my eyes and my understanding was clear. "I see now, master."
18. "The first thoughts are Essence, the second thoughts Energy, the third Shape. They are the foundation of creation. From them all nature proceeds."
19. And I saw this was so. All that lived and breathed, all that existed, all beasts and spirits and gods were but the products of these thoughts. And they were the product of the First Mind. "All things are known by these Runes, for they are of the Runes. But the Invisible God cannot be known, for he is the Mind that thought the Runes. A mind can know the thoughts it contains, but the thoughts cannot know the mind."
20. "Your comprehension is insufficient. Your logic fails. The veil has been lifted from your eyes but you screw them shut against the light."
21. "Have patience with my stupidity, master. I attend."
22. "When water is taken from a well does it cease to be water?"
23. "No, master, it does not."
24. "When one fire is kindled from another is it no longer fire?"
25. "It is still fire master."
26. "Then the son of a father. Is the child the same as the parent?"
27. I considered. "They have the same blood but they are different, master."
28. "How can this be so? if water taken from water remains water, if fire kindled from fire is fire, how can a son drawn from a father's body not also be the father?"
29. I thought upon this deeply, and at present replied. "Because the father and the son each have their own minds."
30. "Is the nature of the child's mind fundamentally different? When the child grows to manhood will it not also think, and speak, and do, and see?"
31. "Of course, master."
32. "Then I ask you again wherein the difference lies."
33. "Master, I have no answer. I kiss your feet. I beg of you to enlighten me on this point."
34. There was a sound like a sigh. "The answer is that there is no difference. Water in a well and water in a bucket are both water, but the vessel containing them is different. Fire in a hearth and fire in a lantern are both flame, but the vessel containing them is different. Mind in the father and mind in the son, but the vessels containing them are different."
35. "My ignorance has been penetrated master. I see the truth of it.
36. "Just so, Son of Froalar. The mind that informs you is the same as the mind informing your father, and his father, and his. The vessels containing this mind differ, and each accumulates different memories and experiences, but they are of the same nature. Your mind if like a torch flame lit by the torch before it. The flame is the same but it is passed from torch to torch. So then I ask you, noble talar, if all things in this world have their origins in the Runes, what pray tell me is the Rune of Mind?"
37. In an instant my delight at understanding was extinguished, as the sun is hidden by sudden cloud. Every tree, grass, flower, and shrub had its origin in the Plant Rune. Every star, every spark, every candle flame and wildfire had its origination in the Fire Rune. From whence then came the mind? "Master I..." I stammered, confounded, but reminded myself to think deeply upon my master's clear teachings. The flame of my mind was lit by my father's, and his by his father's, and so on back and back. Yet what was the origin? What was the first flame?
38. At this there was to my senses a great flash of light, yet I could not see it. There was the roar of a thousand thunders, but I could not hear it. The earth itself trembled and heaved beneath my feet, and yet never really moved at all. Revelation washed over me and transformed every fiber of my being.
39. "Mind comes from no Rune, master. It comes from that which conceived the Runes. Because of this mind is above the Runes. It masters the Runes. The Creator exists in his creation. In the omnipresence of his mind are we bound. We are of the same nature as the Invisible God, the same character, but the difference between us is of quantity, not of kind."
40. "And?" The Prophet asked me.
41. "All mind is the same mind, as all the waters of the world are the same water, be they contained in well or river, puddle or ocean. Thus there can be no real difference between men. Talari. Hrolari. Dronari. Zzaburi. These are different vessels carrying the same essence. The castes could be changed as easily as pouring water from one container to the next."
42. "You have seen the truth of it. See you to the heart?"
43. Before this teaching of Malkion's to my thought men had been bound by their castes, separated from one another. Now I perceived the universality of brotherhood. Yet as I followed the perfect logic of his clear teaching, I saw my way to its end. The misunderstanding of the Law of Malkion not only separated men from their brothers, but also from their Creator. "If the mind that informs me is of the same nature as the Maker of All, then to know my Maker I have but to know my mind. And to return to my Maker, all I need do is let go of those things that keep me separate from him."
44. "Just so."
45. "Prophet I fall before you. I touch my lips to the hem of your robe. I am no longer who I was before I heard this teaching. I will go forth armed with the New Law, and bring it to my brothers. I swear to seek only my Maker, to rend each veil that separates us until my mind, like a mirror, reflects The Mind. Oh a thousand thousand praises, First among Prophets!
Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Cults of Runequest: Mythology and Eliade's Eternal Return
This is part two in a series of posts about the new Cults of RuneQuest: Mythology title. See part one here.
Glorantha, Tradition, and the Fantasy RPG Dilemma
The Gods World. HeroQuesting. Time. In its first twenty pages, Mythology tackles many of Glorantha's core concepts, but these three in particular are the trickiest for new players, and the most important to getting the most out of the setting. "Cults" are familiar to most newcomers, bearing rough similarity to character classes or the clans/tribes/traditions of settings like the World of Darkness (RuneQuest is referenced as an inspiration in both the first and second editions of Vampire: The Masquerade). "Magic" is familiar as well, though in Glorantha it has deeper meaning attached to it. Even "Runes" are somewhat relatable if one is at all familiar with the concept of elements (classical or chemical). "The Gods World," "Time," and "HeroQuesting" are different, however. They are firmly part of a world that the Enlightenment put a sword to, a world alien to modern minds. A world most fantasy RPGs have declined trying to engage with.
In writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien used the highly anachronistic Hobbits to ease the modern reader into pre-modern, or Traditional, reality. Bilbo lived in a world of clocks, schedules, and pocket watches. He wore waistcoats, was deeply concerned with middle class notions of respectability, and lived in a house called Bag End (quite literally the English for "cul-de-sac"). Seeing Middle-earth through his eyes softened the alienness of it. Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin later served the same function. One of the reasons The Silmarillion is more challenging for many readers is they do not have the Hobbits to serve as this bridge. It displays Middle-earth as the Traditional world, a world of living nature animated by spirits and inherent divinity. The sacred permeates Middle-earth, and where the setting's inhabitants work to acknowledge this and live with nature, they thrive. Where they reject the sacred, the inner, and turn to what Tolkien called "the Machine," setting themselves over nature, the world becomes a poisoned hellscape.
By (the Machine) I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of the development of inherent inner powers or talents..the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world...
Tolkien, 1951
Fantasy RPGs, which owe so much to Tolkien, to Homer, to Virgil, did not have the luxury of point of view characters to ease modern players into Traditional settings. So instead, fantasy RPGs chose to simply toss the Traditional out of the setting. This in effect turned them into the dice and paper equivalent of a Renaissance Faire. Sure, they looked medieval or ancient, but this was a facade. Most were set on worlds that orbited suns, where the laws of physics, biology, and chemistry were mostly intact and magic conveniently operated like a science. It was a "force," an "energy," that like electricity or magnetism could be directed by repeatable procedures to produce reliable effects. The societies in these fantasy games were surprisingly egalitarian and firmly capitalistic. You adventured for coin so you could buy better and better things. "Danger? How much are we getting paid?" Nothing in these RPGs challenged players to try and look at the world the way that their actual characters would have. They could play Bilbo rather than Aragorn or Boromir. It wasn't roleplaying. It was a mirror.
If you are coming off of experiences like this, then, Glorantha can be a head-spinning one hundred and eighty degree turn.
Make no mistake, Glorantha has its own anachronisms. It is a fantasy game, not a slavish recreation of the Bronze Age. But is a setting and game that refuses to jettison the Traditional aspects of mythology and legend from the dragons and swordplay.
That brings us back to the Gods World, Time, and HeroQuesting.
Mircea Eliade and Traditional Cosmology
We--like dear old Bilbo--live in a world of clocks, calendars, schedules, Time. Minute follows minute, day follows day, year follows year. It is a linear forced march. Our watches and alarm clocks provide the drum beat.
Yet imagine the point of view, for a moment, of a farmer or a shepherd 5000 years ago.
Time is not a line, it's a circle, a wheel. The sun rises and sets. The moon waxes and wanes. Days grow shorter then longer again. Without clocks and calendars it isn't about numbers, it's about events. It isn't next winter, it is winter come again.
This is not to say the ancients were ignorant of the passage of time. There is a line in the Mahabharata that likens it to a chariot wheel. The wheel turns, and from our fixed vantage point the same spokes come and go and return again, but at the same time the chariot is moving down the road.
But chariot wheels sometimes break. This was a constant danger in the minds of ancient peoples. The moon goes dark...but what guarantee is there she will wax full again? Winter comes and nature dies. Will it be reborn? Will the sun climb back out from the land of the dead? What is it that turns the wheel?
And a deeper question looms...why? Why does the sun set and rise? Why do the nights get longer? Why does the moon go black?
The answer to both questions was clear. Something set the wheel in motion, something started it, and that something must be what keeps it in motion. That thing is outside the wheel, not turning with the wheel but instead turning it.
Romanian religious historian Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) was among the first to formulate these observations. Eliade was--and remains--a titan in the field because he essentially helped to create it. It was an 18th and 19th century academic conceit to dismiss religious experience, to pass it off as something else. For anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1854-1941) magic and religion were developmental phases, like childhood and adolescence. Magic was practiced by "primitive" humanity, followed by more mature religion, until both were replaced by mature science. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) predictably explained religion as the product of psychological complexes. Karl Marx (1818-1883) had economic and political explanations. Perhaps the closest we get to Eliade was Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), one of the founders of sociology, who at least saw religious experience as a natural aspect of human life. Cult, to his mind, was like culture, forming bonds between individuals and creating commonality.
Eliade had a more radical notion. Perhaps religious experience was just that...religious experience. Perhaps it was an encounter with the transcendent. With the sacred. Durkheim wrote of the sacred, but he viewed it as a feeling of awe, devotion, respect. He was careful to skirt the supernatural. Eliade instead saw the sacred as a universal experience of something outside. He was careful not to assign it to any one religion or tradition. This all led him to one of his most famous concepts, eternal return.
To simplify, Eliade theorized Traditional humanity being conscious of two types of time, Profane and Sacred (Eliade used the term "sacred time" extensively, a phrase Greg Stafford would later adopt for Glorantha). Profane time was the wheel, the circle, we discussed above. This was the world inside of Time, the world that turned endlessly through days and seasons.
Sacred time was what existed outside the wheel, the world outside of Time. It was what set the wheel in motion and what kept it turning. Outside of the wheel, it was a single, omnipresent now. This is where all the things that set the wheel in motion existed. Gods, heroes, sacred ancestors.
Critical to all of this was Eliade's observation that in the Traditional mind, the essence of a thing resides in its origin. Its origin established the nature of a thing, formed the pattern of its existence, its identity. Thus creation stories, myths, contained tremendous power. If you knew the origin of thing, you could exert influence over it. And the way in which human beings learned these origin stories was hierophany, the "breakthrough" of the sacred into profane time. These revelations--like the sages who first heard the Vedas or Muhammad hearing Jibreel recite the Qur'an, gave humanity the origin stories of things so that they might use these stories to participate in the sacred.
The eternal return was made possible by these hierophanies. By having the origin story, one had the beginning of a thing, one could touch its source, which lay outside of profane time in the sacred:
In Glorantha
It is easier to see now how Greg seized on these ideas and digested them, re-interpreting and reweaving them. Hierophany is Myth, the revelation of sacred time to mortals. Sacred time is the Gods World;
Saturday, October 14, 2023
CULTS OF RUNEQUEST: MYTHOLOGY, The Forward and Introduction
This is the fourth in an ongoing series of posts on the Cults of RuneQuest series. The posts will continue as each book appears. Go back and read the first here.
Further, there is far too much to discuss here for just one post, and I would like you to regard this as more of a discussion than a review. Here we will just set the stage by discussing the Foreword and the Introduction, two very important chapters that set up the rest of the book and entire series. Look for further posts on Mythology in the days ahead.
The Indispensable Guide
Mythology should have been the first release in the Cults of RuneQuest series. That is not me speaking ex cathedra: it says so right on page 5. It is a sentiment that I happen to agree with, however. I also agree with the statement that immediately follows: It is an indispensable guide for anyone seeking to play or gamemaster RuneQuest. I have a quibble with the article in front of "indispensable" however. The "an" should be a "the."
The truly great fantasy settings--and there can be no doubt that Glorantha qualifies--come with worldviews. Howard's was that in the contest of barbarism and civilization, barbarism would always win. Tolkien's was rooted in his faith. There is a divine plan and it is wrong to surrender to despair, hope and faith must triumph. Moorcock saw that opposite extremes are ultimately just reflections of one another and equally toxic. The only sane position is balance. Greg Stafford's worldview--at least the one that informs Glorantha--can be summed up in just a single sentence from his "Foreword" to Mythology. There he tells us:
Truth is found where we find a way to be at One with ourselves and the cosmos.
Let that steep for a moment until it brews in your head. He goes on to say:
If we are touched by a thing, whether it is a story, a person’s action, or even some distant event, then it holds meaning, and therefore, Truth, for us. It is our responsibility, then, to pursue this, that we may do our part to preserve the cosmos and live once again among the gods.
The worldview of Glorantha is that Truth is cultural, Truth is local, Truth is individual. The sin of the God Learners--and it is a sin that we see perpetrated every single day in our own world--was to believe that their Truth was Universal and applied to everyone.
Facts and Truth
Now...I can hear some of you in the back there saying "feelings are not facts." And you are quite right. Your mistake is that you think facts and Truth have anything to do with one another.
Wednesday, October 11, 2023
HYDRA! A Look at the Jonstown Compendium Release
When we last looked in on Jonstown Compendium author Peter Hart, he was serving up what I felt was a very "classic" feeling RuneQuest adventure, Bad Day at Duck Rock. Duck Rock reminded me, in a good way, of scenarios like Apple Lane or Snakepipe Hollow, but updated to RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha and with much better lay-out and art. This time, however, Peter is giving us full on, full throttle, post-Dragonrise Glorantha in his Hydra! (yup, the exclamation mark is part of the title), available now at the Jonstown Compendium. Hydra! has all the hallmarks Bad Day did. To quote one of the customer reviews (all five-star thus far), those hallmarks would be "high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution." But Hydra! is bigger, bolder, and leans more towards releases like Black Spear or (ahem) The Company of the Dragon in tackling some of the heavy hitters of the setting (one of which I shall mention, the other I shall not spoil).
Like Black Spear or Company, Peter goes all the way back to White Bear & Red Moon/Dragon Pass with his titular (and rightly exclaimed) Hydra. Because we are talking about the Hydra here;