RuneScape Forum Archive | Transcendental Creatrices?

Feb

2011

Subrosian1

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Mod Rowley said :
This might suggest the dragonkin homeworld was the last one created before Freneskae, and should have set off alarm bells that whatever led to Mah's current condition actually started back then. It's got me thinking about links between the dragonkin homeworld and Iaia.

Moving away a bit from the topic, it's only me that thinks that the Dragonkin homeworld IS Freneskae?

Forcae says that orikalkum (metal of dragon stuff) comes from their world (that he calls empty).
It means that if dragonkin are from the previous universe and they can return to their world, there's only one world that exists on both universes.
Also, a fairy from Zanaris says that their dragon longswords come "straight from Frenaskrae", confirming that the kin were there sometime. This also explains why muspah can drop dragon equipment.

14-Mar-2016 04:57:02

AttilaSquare

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I've wondered about that possibility, even though Mod Rowl*y suggests otherwise - largely for this reason: if the five elder goddesses had gone through multiple previous cycles together, would they have to make multiple worlds to achieve a perfect world? If they knew how to construct a perfect world from the start, how many worlds would they make? Or did another elder goddess die off at the end of the last cycle which caused them to make multiple worlds in order to rediscover how to make the perfect world of Freneskae?

It's also possible that the dragonkin who survived in the abyss migrated to Freneskae, bringing their armor and weapons with them, to confront the elder goddesses before the goddesses left Freneskae to create the primordial plane and the other early planes of the current multiverse.

14-Mar-2016 05:15:34

AttilaSquare

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Hey, everyone. I think this thread deserves a bump and a little more life in light of what is to come in 2017. Happy New Year!

02-Jan-2017 21:37:37

Rondstat

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Heh, I just read this very interesting and well-written thread that should be right up your alley.

With regards to Dragonkin - we got an interesting bit of lore from Runefest, that the last cycle was not summarily destroyed and then began anew, but rather the current crop of Elders moved through the universe, destroying their predecessors' work, and then recreating it for themselves. Interestingly, this would mean that each cycle begins with observing the most advanced examples of planetary creation, and producing the poorest copies. Anyways, this means the Kin would have spent less time hiding than we thought, and they actually became enslaved to the Stone because they were the first False Users.

With new lore from Children of Mah, and (less so) Endgame, I've thought a little about this. I like how you've laid out the purview of each god, but I'm not sure such an epistemological view of the creators makes perfect sense in a universe where - if all goes well - there are no reference points outside the Elders themselves (though maybe you're indicating the perspectives of the creatrixes - in which case, apologies for misunderstanding). Especially in light of the strange connection between Wen and Mah.

I like to think of things in more physical terms. Jas is a purely Newtonian force, pure movement and progression in a perfect plane. Bik gives us a more quantum perspective, chaotic creation that is internally consistent, alterable without ascribing to such clean rules. Ful I see as representing inertia, friction, and (somewhat counter-intuitively) relativity. The more abstract creation of her sisters cannot function without being couched in a context, a constancy, that necessarily modifies the forces that comprise it. Mah I see as representing the singularity, the spark of potential that completely subverts any existing order. This gives us phenomena like baryogenesis in our own universe, or mortal life in Runescape.

05-Jan-2017 10:44:45 - Last edited on 05-Jan-2017 11:05:25 by Rondstat

Rondstat

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Hers is the subversion that is the germ of any new cycle, and yet, because it can do little in progressing that cycle, in establishing the rules and processes that create it, she is the least of the Elders. And then Wen - antimatter. The counter to any creation, and flow of energy, any iota of matter - annihilation. She is the counterbalance, and without Mah to subvert her, each plane would be net neutral, as much creation as destruction.

This is why, for this cycle and this cycle alone, the Elders needed artefacts, items that could subvert their own laws of reality and set creation in motion. And also, perhaps, why Wen would sabotage Mah - their essences are in direct competition.

Or, (more probably), they're just progression, constancy, alteration, destruction, and potential, and things don't go much deeper than that (blech). Still, it's a lot of fun to theorize. Certainly, my dumb outline takes a lot of inspiration from your (excellent) breakdown of Bik and the concept of alteration. I don't think I know enough about Kant to provide an especially valuable perspective on this. But I like to think there's a space here where ontology and physics can coincide - and I hope Jagex doesn't shy away from more challenging perspectives on their mythos in game, as we move into the next chapter of the 6th Age!

05-Jan-2017 10:53:28 - Last edited on 05-Jan-2017 12:02:49 by Rondstat

AttilaSquare

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Hey, Rondstat! I'll check out Duke Fishron's thread today.

That's an interesting bit of lore! I'm surprised I haven't come across it yet - it probably means this thread is pretty outdated.

I did not have too grand a plan for this characterization of the elders. I'd like to think of anima, maybe sapient anima specifically, as enjoying some kind of equality with even the highest beings - equality in being-rational, for example, and not equality in degree-of-sophistication-in-rational-thought. This prevents the elders from becoming wholly unintelligible and perhaps even uninteresting.

Based on this premise, I wanted to develop an account which any rational being could understand - transcendental argumentation strikes me as a promising way to do this. But yes, it means that a complete description of being only in terms of the elders becomes impossible - there's always one's own perspective to account for, one's intentional relationship to the beings one encounters. So this is perhaps just a different sort of project from the one you've outlined. My goal was then to treat each elder as an aspect of the transcendental-intentional relation to being exhibited by everything rational, or all sapient anima.

I want to try to summarize your account, simplifying it a little, to clarify it for myself.
Jas - locomotion
Ful - inertial frames of reference
Wen - physical symmetries
Bik - quantum fluctuation
Mah - physical asymmetries
This is neat. I'll have to give this some thought, to see if these five aspects of reality deserve the privileged status of THE FIVE but also could be supplemented with more aspects that characterized previous multiverses.

05-Jan-2017 14:54:57

Rondstat

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Ah, okay, I understand now. You know, I've never considered the 'sapience' of anima, but given the difficulties of codifying the magical 'laws' of Gielinor, it would absolutely make sense - or at least make things much easier to compartmentalize. But yeah, with this insight, I think my rough stabs at the Elders are aiming at a different aspect altogether.

You have put it far more succinctly than I could. Unfortunately, the 'realms' I've ascribed to each Elder don't have any of the elegance of your phenomenology inspired analysis. If Jas is classical mechanics and Bik is quantum mechanics, well, you've pretty much got the laws of physics covered right there. To make the others fit, you sort of have to abandon any hope at parity.

I hadn't really framed it this way, but summarizing Wen as representing 'physical symmetries' is actually very appropriate, very clever. Better than just saying 'antimatter'. And I think it gets closer to the core of the devs' intent in designating an Elder of reversion.

If this is the difference between 'consciousness' and 'being,' then, I think Wen may be the biggest sticking point between the two paradigms. Whether as the reflective beginning of understanding, a repository of substance that allows for perception and novel thought, or as the opposite of substance, its dark reflection that stands ready to undo what is.

In more Runescapey terms, you could maybe say it's the difference between a goddess of past revisions and a goddess of the void (though I know that's reductive and doesn't really accurately portray what either of us are getting at).

So, in your pentalogy, how would you characterize progression and anticipation with respect to understanding?

07-Jan-2017 07:52:57

AttilaSquare

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I think we're on the same page about our two different explanations. Unfortunately I don't think my model is very elegant; it sounds good, but I don't think it'll hold up for very long or help us anticipate anything new about the elders. So much about them remains to be explained - I think it'll be better to redevelop this once we receive a little more information.

I would describe Jas' role first as the dimension of our temporal experience that anticipates the continued existence of the world, our expectations that things will continue to exist in the ways that they have thus far, and our consequent sense of our capacity to act in the world based upon our knowledge of it. This fundamental expectation underlies our ability to pursue projects, to develop plans, to imagine what could be. Obviously our ability to form goals for the future depends what the past shows us to be possible and what the present shows us to be the circumstances with which our work to achieve our goals must begin, but this sense of the future is a distinct element from these other two.

When I first wrote this - and now I'm pretty much opening a new topic - I wanted to associate with Bik the fact that all three temporal dimensions are populated by particular forms, and Mah with the fact that these forms have the capacity to change from one into another. This allowed me raise the question, What was lost my with Mah? I could say something like flexibility, a paradigm within which life in time might make sense.

Then I could look to the constitution of Gielinor for how the elders might have sought to restore what they lost in Mah - and maybe take a lead from the fact that Gielinor is an anagram for 'religion.'

08-Jan-2017 14:26:06

AttilaSquare

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My plan was to speculate about the elders by finding ways in which Western thought might also have lost something Mah-like and then how it has sought to recover what it lost, possibly through a rethinking of religion, and then maybe I could even point to how different trends in Western thought might correspond to different degrees of attention given to different phenomenological features of consciousness - this would be incredibly ambitious, and is a stretch from the start, but my hope was that maybe I could uncover some concepts that the Jmods were working through themselves, subconsciously - simply because our heritage poses certain questions for us when we have a certain constellation of concepts in play and a certain comportment, e.g. trying to deal with things that are deep and mysterious.

08-Jan-2017 14:26:23

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Transcendental Creatrices?