So for the form Runes, I decided I wouldn't add anything directly. What I did instead was adjust the definitions. Let's take it from the top.
Plant: So one aspect here is that these are not masks for scientific terminology. Anything that's sessile is in the form of Plant. Corals are sessile for the majority of their life-cycle but have a free-swimming phase as a larva or planula. They'd fall under Plant for their sessile period but something else for the free-swimming period, because this is orthogonal to zoology and botany. The classification means something different here.
Animal: I renamed this one from "Beast" because of aesthetic reasons. This one had a bit more defining text trying to cladistically define "animals" via number of legs, and then I had an epiphany. More about that when we get to Dragon.
Human: I renamed this one from "Man" because of aesthetic and also feminist reasons. To be bitchy and self-indulgent for a second, these terms are facing the people at the table or reading the game material, so justifications on the basis of "that's how people in my invented fantasy world would say it and so it's uncriticizable" are of course silly if not contemptible. To continue a less bitchy self-indulgence, there's a joke about Diogenes of Sinope! One of the all-time classics, of course, but to tie things back together, all of these definitions are explicitly contingent, uncertain, subjective, and in this case, very clearly incomplete or wrong. This is the Glorantha method seeping in a bit- these definitions aren't absolute, they have unclear boundaries, the terminology is created by an imaginary person's mind, etc. And how do you resolve those unclear boundaries if it comes up in play?
Oh, that's the easiest thing in the world. For Runequest, you use one of the three-four action resolution systems and roll to determine what the boundaries are! So these parts of the notes are there to remind me of the distinction between what Donald Rumsfeld fumblingly called "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns"- there are some things which I, as the prepping referee (as Runequest 2 calls it) have written down and highlighted but don't know. My knowledge is imperfect and the "impossible thing before breakfast" (as they used to say on The Forge) is cut off at the knees because I acknowledge I can't and don't control "the story" or "the world" singularly.
Dragon: This one I shortened from "Dragonewt", not because Dragonewts are a specifically Gloranthan thing (of all things, they've become genericized in the depths of "Monster Girl Encyclopedia" derivatives and also in a more general sense in TRPG-derived Japanese fantasy) but because "Dragonewt" doesn't really mean anything as a shape term. What's the shape of a dragonewt? It's... kind of like that of a bipedal dinosaur? Vaguely hadrosaurish?
On top of all of that, Dragonewt has always felt awkward to actually employ, because it's so specific and tied to these beings that are exceptionally slippery and hard to get a grip on, for players to interact with them in any kind of way beyond them being a crude exposition mechanism.
So instead, I defined it as "this is the shape of everything without legs", making it a whole family of creatures from earthworms up to gigantic snake monsters, and possibly also fish. Now Dragon is everywhere and it's fairly easy to make it a tactile part of the world- "Dragon(ewt) Power cults" can interact with terrestrial creatures in ways that have immediate meaning.
Spirit: "Without permanent bodies". Sometimes, flexibility requires some precision of wording. "Spirit" in fantasy fiction when it refers to a category of being tends to be somewhat murky. Just what are these entities?
Where fantasy fiction draws inspiration from the real world, of course, "spirit" is often pointing at concepts like "kami" or "manitou", but these concepts are, in their own contexts, not really distinct categories of being, but a concept of mindedness, consciousness, and will which extended outwards beyond humanity. Which is to say, there's not really a separate category of "fox spirits" which are distinct beings from regular foxes, it is simply the case that foxes are a type of person and some foxes are able to do extraordinary things like change shape or talk to humans to play pranks.
Can I rehabilitate this concept? Not by myself, but for my purposes, I can define it as "this is something without a well-defined body", and so things like ghosts can fall into this without getting into Warcraft 3 unit barks like "the spirits are restless", hopefully. And also play with the double meaning of the word, perhaps, if this game gets enough people who know what "egregore" refers to.
Chaos: So in Glorantha as it has developed, Glorantha as she is spoke, "Chaos" is this abstracted term that is quite divorced from the plain meaning of things. "Chaos" is this combination of mutagenic radioactive waste, the concept of moral evil, various forms of nihilism, Moorcock's understanding of the term as filtered through Games Workshop (where it arrived from early Gloranthan material), and a tiny little remnant of the term's use in mythological studies as derived from the Greek primordial void Kaos. I hate it.
There are of course many reasons why this is the case, peculiar to me and more general, but broadly, the thing which I dislike strongly is that the nexus of all of these things leads to the absolutely most fucking basic-bitch framing of the setting as being a reskinned post-Tolkien series of fantasy bricks with some Warhammer highlights. It's an endemic thought-terminating cliche and-
But pure reaction doesn't get us anywhere. The "problem" of Chaos in Glorantha is that it's a chaotic mixture of multiple different things which are difficult to disentangle. You can't actually make an anti-Chaos Chaos out of "they said I was mad. Mad!" energy.
So let's go back to... Kaos. The primordial void. This terminology led to the idea of the Chaoskampf myth, a motif wherein a god or hero with weather associations struggled against a monstrous creature with watery associations, frequently a serpent with many heads. And by a long process I will not go into too much more detail on here about, this transformed into a term used by the scholar of medieval Norse culture Margaret Clunies Ross to refer to the strange beings in Norse mythology who seem to live in a place that's outside of the world of the gods and the trolls and the berserks and the heroes, beings like the anthropomorphic personifications Thor and Loki and Thor's servants encountered in Utgarda-Loki's castle, the Midgard Serpent Jormungandr, Surtr, the Fenriswulf, which she calls the "chaos monsters", beings which obey logic that the warring tribes of Aesir, Vanir, and Jotnar cannot understand.
And let's expand that a little bit here, and- now Chaos-shape is "chaotic" in the sense of dissonance and of similarity with the chaos monsters and some of their equivalents in other mythologies, like the diorite giant Ullikummi of Hittite myth, or the very-explicitly-not-a-dragon-or-serpent difficult-to-describe monster Tiamat of the Babylonian work of religio-political propaganda Enuma Elish. So- unusually big or small creatures. Inanimate objects that walk by themselves. Chimeras and other hybridized creatures.
And then draw that out a bit- the form of Chaos also incorporates blob monsters. It incorporates speculative-fictional hive minds. It also takes the part of the Runequest rules where all "lycanthropes" (including werebears and wereboars and weretigers) have a "Chaos taint" and retains it by making shapeshifting part of this. What this all adds up to is- Chaos is the form Rune that contains everything that is directly counter to naturalism and the naturalistic. And then there's a subjective belief, once again, that Chaos is the origin point for all life and it's Spirit and Dragon that combined with it to produce legged animals and plants and hominids.
Is this true? That could be discovered through play.
Finally, I put a little disclaimer that "of course" there are other Forms which "have yet to be articulated". A double meaning there, of course, between "I ran out of ideas" and "People may need finer or different distinctions in the setting at some point".
One final rant: all too often, the way in which Runes exist in Gloranthan discourses is in a kind of "tyrannical Platonism" where determination of what Runes apply to which entities is seen as a kind of absolute dictated by particular arcane rules that resembled nothing so much to me as the more obscure hands in mahjong. And then once you have made that determination, it perfectly sums up the entity. It was thus to my shock and delight to find in the original Runequest rules both the origin of these arcane rules and the direct statement that they were not absolutes, but relative statements related to game mechanics.
So part of working through the lingering effects of that segment of discourse is this gleeful application of a different approach, wherein Runes are metaphysically meaningful but not in an absolute way. It is possible (and this is highly relevant for Runequest, a game about getting Runes) to discover new ones! Or invent them!
The next segment will cover the Conditions and, depending on how prolix I end up being about those, possibly the Powers.
These have been fascinating posts!
It occurs to me that runes always end up with extra associations even if not specified. I prepared to throw in a joke about a Blend S-style maid café where each maid emulates a different form rune, and realized only a fraction of what I meant by that had anything to do with physical forms. But not only have we all been outside and know what plants are, we also ascribe associations to them ("interconnectedness" is one for me; I would have been more surprised by the absence of something like the Sylvari Dream of Dreams than its presence; the Hist actually provides Argonians with their hivemind. You no doubt have your own such associations.)
Which ends up meaning that giving a coral the Plant Rune isn't just a reclassification but something that will, if remembered, affect how coral is perceived in the setting, even if your game has no c(h)oralgirls around to invite you into their perfect harmony.
Yes, exactly! Part of the ambition here is just to scatter all these handholds for myself, or for any players, to grab onto and pull with! And part of that is just bringing your own ideas and preconceived notions into things and saying "let's push the joystick that way and see what happens".