Its contains the following chapters:



And some information on Workol:

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Member of the CoE (Council of Elitists)

I don't have the McDonald document, but all I see here is terminology, not a system. And frankly, it's just Terran terminology.

I find the attempt to shoehorn the gods and elements both into four planets, sun, and moon to seem forced. Where is Halea - don't lovers want horoscopes too? Morgath is Odivshe? There's no way Larani is orbiting around Agrik - at least in Trierzon! On the one hand, three planets have names suggestive of the gods, the other three bodies do not. That hardly seems compelling to me.

But the important question is, "Can you build a system around this?" The fact that this topic has been running on the board ever since the board was put up, and yet no one has ever produced a damn thing that can actually be used tells me the answer is, "No".

Feel free to prove me wrong.

My P'varic-based system is simple, poetic, and lends itself to computer-aided analysis. It works, and so far everything else is just wishful thinking.

You must have an interesting definition of a "system".

The mechanics of the system presented by McDonnald is the same system discussed and presented by me in earlier threads which is the system in use on earth by Astrologists.

The relationship of the planets to gods is the same system presented in earlier threads by others. It is based on the same system used by Astrologists on earth.

The system of using the names of gods for planets and using the gods and their characteristics for the basis of astological equivalence is the same system used by Astrologists on earth.

(You know the god "Mars" the planet "Mars" Mars the god of war conflict - astrologic significantors for such things being attached to that planet in interactions with others.)


Teran Astrologists at the time that Astrologogy was developed had only 4 or 5 planets to work with. The others weren't added until modern times when more planets were discovered.

Part of the reason no computer model was ever added for Harnis because the planet's cycles are so predictable with peroids of (0.55, 1.00, 2.00, 10.00 and 85.00) that EVERYTHING astrological repeats every 1870 years but even more so that almost everything repeats every 10 or 110 years - but Harnic history doesn't follow any of those patterns so regardless of the starting point of the planets a computer model doesn't fit.

Not that that makes a computer model with no basis for a starting point in 720TR an improvement. Being chosen by you as a favorite spot because you are building a computer model you like a particular configuration doesn't really grant it a degree of Harnic authority.

But you say yours "works" while the real systems that have been in use for thousands of years need to "prove" themselves?

I think you have that backwards.

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More to the point though is that you have a system which you've decided to use. If the McDonnald article worked or not is immaterial as you've already discarded all the Harnic ideas and historical models that have been presented before (and that this other article uses all of) in favor of this other system you've invented based on: nothing.

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Member of the CoE (Council of Elitists)

Just the canon Astrology article.

Sorry I didn't include your favorite fanon. Are there any other complaints you would like to register before you see it?

I never got any answers to my long list of earlier concerns. Do you think it would be worthwhile to continue with yet more?

But OK.

I worry also that the product of the system you are proposing would produce something that Harnic Astrologers could measure up in the sky and get the answer you are expecting (without having to use your computer program to find the hidden pieces of data they can't get by measuring the observable from Harn).

I worry that the strange pieces and values you have assigned to the configuration of the planets are very limited. That absent the deep psyco-social relationships of the gods and planets the relationships you have reduced them to are simple one dimensional vectors of Energy, Wisdom or Endurance will provide little in the way of interpative meaning.

I worry about the fact that you have randomized in some strange way a position for the planets when there is no basis for such a choice. By such nearly any position would seem just as valid but that anyone who should choose to use your system will have no means to produce an alternate starting point and will be stuck with whatever significant motivators you have inflicted on your campaign through your method (or lack of method).

I worry about the significantors you have chosen to add (Energy, Wisdom,Endurance etc) that don't seem to follow and method or share any commonality with any other Harnic Sciences, Philosophies, Religion or Tarotry and to what end they would be used.

Oh and then the big concern that this system that has no observable background in Harn having divorced itself from most Harnic roots, religions, etc will then propose that it is the formost method of Astrology used on Harn (even though it clearly wasn't) and to try to rewrite history in order to justify its place in the natural order of things.

Being able to use it without the on-line tool seems like reasonable worry.

How the systems you add do/did interact with the major Astrologoical events of past history. While the Sable Eye held dominance in Western Harn where were these other astrologers at? And why they would react so dismissively to the gods planets that all other astrologers considered central.

Are practicers of this style welcome in the Guild of Arcane Lore? do they practice their forbidden art on the side of the road for pennies or do great lords seek their advice to know what thier endurance score will be like tomorrow? Or do poor gamblers hope some favor shown to the Astrologer will give him the advice needed to keep him from getting killed after the game?

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Member of the CoE (Council of Elitists)

I just want to be able to provide players with horoscopes that they can understand and have fun with.

I don't feel compelled to slavishly follow the fanon idea that astrology is based on divinity. I have a hard time imagining Laranians viewing Agrik as the sun, Peonians accepting that their own goddess is anything but Kethira herself, and all the other religions allowing themselves to be ignored. Three (out of six) "planets" have suggestive names. That may be compelling to you, but it's not to me.

I don't feel compelled to include the Sable Eye. Workol was a discredited incompetent that couldn't predict his own death. The canon description of Workol implies that he was not influential anywhere but within the court of a simple-minded emperor.

And I definitely don't feel compelled to follow Terran models. In fact, I have a strong aversion to terms like "trine" and "ascendant". There are two reasons. First, I have a hard time imagining how the two worlds happened to share those specific concepts (especially when other astrological systems within Terra generally did not). Second, some people take astrology very seriously, and might perceive any attempt on my part to implement those ideas to be ridiculous or even insulting.

I certainly don't feel compelled to try to make the system be able to predict any historical events. If your criteria for a system is that it should predict, say, the death of Balsha and the Rape of Thay, well, all I can say is, "Good luck with that." And I deal with the "cyclic paradox" - the fact that history does not repeat itself even though the planets do. Lunar precession figures heavily in my system, and it is not on the same cycle as the planets.

I certainly don't believe that my system is the only system in use. That would be a ridiculous statement - and one that you are dangerously close to making with your insistence on following one specific Terran pattern.

I do feel compelled to start from canon. My system is based on the two well-documented canon elements of Arcane Lore - Astrology and P'varic alchemy.

I do feel compelled to use actual celestial data that are within the reach of an Arcane Lorist. My system is entirely based on observations that can be made with the naked eye and simple tools and recorded in tables for future use.

I do feel compelled to use as few elements as necessary, as this is intended to be used by non-experts. Not every player is familiar with the subtleties of the divine relationships, but they are familiar with ideas such as "wisdom" and "energy".

I do feel compelled to provide "interpative meaning". You will be surprised just how much you can wring out of very few elements.

My primary purpose is to provide a fun and usable in-game aid. There is nothing in fanon that allows a GM to easily play out a horoscope reading based on actual celestial data. Soon there will be.

"slavishly follow"???

You dost protest too much.

It is evident from earlier threads that your choice to not "slavishly follow" terran astrology has more to do with the fact you had no clue how terran astrology functions. That you produced a "astronomy toolkit" and decided to apply it to astrology with no understanding of the difference.


Similarly your not "slavishing following" divine naming relationships to the planets also results as least as much from your failure to look into the subject as any decision to reject it for failing to make sense.





Failure to look into anything regarding astrology, Harnic history or planetary naming scheme vastly simplified your decision making process to discard all as insufficient and move to a system completely of your own design. While admittedly knowing nothing about astrology you decided that whatever you came up with was better.

But primarily you had already designed a astronomy tool to produce an output that you were going to use as an in game tool. Using the tool is the only goal and the details that go into it are secondary. Using any Harnic background that complicates using the astronomy model as in-game tool detracts from that goal and is the primary reason Harnic history, planets, astrology and gods are discarded.

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Member of the CoE (Council of Elitists)

To be fair, though, that's not all purely fanon. Four of the planets do have names that identify them with gods. (What I just don't understand, however, is why they don't *just* have names identical to the gods, but strange variants on them instead...)



Actually, it's four: Epeon (Peoni), Alaran (Larani), Kenor (Save-K'nor), and Mergus (Morgath). The only ones that don't are the sun and the moon (same as here).

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-- Jim Chokey

"Argent, chief embattled tenne. A coney of the field and crossed carrots proper"

And, of course, even the most rudimentary research into the planets shows that the names of the planets go beyond a "suggestive similarity" to the names of the gods.

The planet Alaran associated with Larani has has three small moons: Avarkiel, Hyvrik and Angcaradina. Larani's Angcaradina, her blood-red mail. Hyvrik, her red and white checkered shield, and Avarkiel , her sword, which is also called "Oathbinder" and "Herald of the End of Life".

Kenor is associated with Save-K'nor. Save-Knor's number is 6, Kenor has six moons: Hyvrus, T'nor, Kychus, Fressus, Brall, and Cullus. - Var-Hyvrak (Hyvrus) the Illimitable Tome in which "all" mortal and divine knowledge is kept.

Mergus "the Sable Eye" (aka Black Orb, Bukari, the Shadow of Incarnate Evil, the "Black Pole", the "Orb That Cannot be Viewed", a sphere of black nothingness, etc.)

Mergus, Workol and the Sable Eye is probably the most significant link of Harnic History, Astrology and Astronomy. Regardless of the system decided on dismissing or ignoring Workol or the Sable Eye as insignificant is blatant evidence of a lack of understanding of the subject matter.

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Very true. That said, I suppose it does still leave open the question of to whether that's merely a naming convention (which is also the case in Terran astronomical nomenclature), or whether Harnic astrologers place value and meaning in such associations.

I for one, find it entirely plausible that the various planet names developed as art of an older popular mythological tradition, linking them to the gods, but that more recent, philosophically informed arcanists dismiss that as 'ancient superstition' and see Pvaric associations, rather than divine associations, as being the proper and educated approach to understanding the heavens' influence. I also think it's possible that there could be a little of both mixed in there.



True.... although I've often wondered about how well known these facts are, even among arcanists. There's no way these moons are visible to the naked eye- and although we're told that there are few telescopes in Melderyn (and possibly elsewhere), I tend to think that knowledge of these satellites is probably limited to handful of well-educated astrologers... and what astrological significance (if any) is ascribed to them, I'm not sure.

BTW: I've never thought about the names of Kenor's moons before. You're right about Hyvrus being associated with the Var-Hyvrak..... but I wonder about the names of the others. I'll need to check the Save-K'nor article to see if there are any obvious associations with those.

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-- Jim Chokey

"Argent, chief embattled tenne. A coney of the field and crossed carrots proper"

Two points to keep in mind:

First, as far as Terran naming conventions go, various cultures had different names for the planets in our solar system. The Greek, Babylonian, Roman, and Chinese astrologers did not all refer to "Mars", "Venus", etc. The mythological associations, such as Venus being seen as bright like that goddess' mirror, or Mars being "blood red", would be culture-specific. Thus, you'd have to ask which culture the astrologer who named the known planets comes from. Given the gods chosen to name, I'd assume it was someone from a culture where Peoni, Larani, and Save-K'nor are considered primary. Whatever associations you might assign to a given body would follow that cultural bias.

Secondly, the Astrology article specifies that the astronomical data about those planets is presented as GM background only. What is actually known about those bodies by Kethiran arcanists may vary considerably.

Good points!
I figure the Sindarin would have names for every major star (and most of the rest), which would predate any human culture.
They would probably have the "naming convention" most commonly used.

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Leave the gun, take the cannolli.

And historically, Astrology was a very different thing than religion. In general, priests and astrologers were different groups, and usually the two groups did not get along very well.

The identification of planets with deities was a matter of analogy, not theology. The exceptions were of course the Sun and Moon, but we don't have myths of Venus or Mars in which the planetary connection is implied. This is an important point - we do have myths about the constellations - e.g. Heracles, Cassiopeia - so the Greeks clearly connected the celestial with the divine. But I'm not aware of any comparable myths that connect, say, Venus with the eponymous planet, nor any rituals that connect the goddess with the planet. The name alone does not prove much. Many things have been named for gods without implying a direct and meaningful connection. (Mars Bars!)

The same is true in Venarive. AFAIK, Not a single religious ritual is tied to any planetary phenomenon other than the new and full moons. If people truly associated Alaran with Larani, one would expect a mention of a biannual holiday in the Laranian Church.

Meanwhile, astrologers and alchemists were very closely connected. The main alchemical tradition presupposed astrology, and we see that in a lot of ways. Most alchemists also cast horoscopes. This is explicitly true in Venarive. The two "arts" explicitly mentioned in the GoAL are astrology and alchemy. Tying the two together seems to me to be natural and obvious.

Various groups on Harn have tried to tie the days of the week to the gods but not succeded - and the churches, for the most part, have not tied religious significance to the weeks overmuch. I think the planets are tied to the divine naming and Astrology but the churches also are not.

If I was making an Astrology article I would look intently at McDonnald's Astrology article as I doubt he developed it all without consulting Robin on some of the details.

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The planets orbital peroids are no accident being integers to 2 decimal places. Robin obviously attached immense significance to details of the planets and their naming. Nothing about the solar system is natural or by chance.

and the naming also has me scratching my head.

Angbarillius - the sword (constellation)
Angcaradina - Larani's blood-red mail (moon)

Ang - from Middle Earth Elvish "Ang" is Iron which fits both for both Angbarillius and Angcaradina.

The moons:
Hyvrik - Larani's checkered shield
Hyvrus/Hyvrak - the Illimitable Tome

Also the names of Kenor's other 5 moons.

Middle Earth Tolkien Elvish world roots are widely used in fantasy writing and also common in Harn World. May give clues to other word roots in planet naming like Kenor's moons. That could give a clue to who was naming them and/or to some of their properties.

Properties/Descriptions:

Angcaradina as a moon makes me guess to iron deposits and red color to the moon (not that it can be seen directly by most).

Mergus the planet farthest out the "Sable Eye" seems to me, despite its large size is probably a barely visible large dark orb do low light reflection etc. and a cold dead world of immense significance as suggested by reference to being named after Bukrai.


Middle Elf word roots - based humor
Mor-goth was the "Black"-"Foe of the World"
(Morgath on Harn is an obvious reference.)
If we instead named Mergus "Morgoth" it could be the "Black"-"Foe World"

(and of course I remember that kind of thing because Feanor renamed "Melkor" as "Morgoth")

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I wondered that too, though I couldn't find anything in Save-K'nor in the reference I checked. It still seems like they are probably a reference to something Save-K'norish.

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Member of the CoE (Council of Elitists)

Digging into the code and data and doing some research I have figured out what some of the items corospond to for venus but I don't really know what they mean.

Can anyone tell me what any of the values would be for the various planets of Ketheria?
Can anyone tell me what the Venus.M value relates to?

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Member of the CoE (Council of Elitists)

Surprizingly I've gotten the program to compile and load and even learned what a *.svg is and create a few icons.

Though I've broken a few bits and have a lot to change to match Harn I've managed to produce something that at least looks neat:

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Member of the CoE (Council of Elitists)

Before you get too deep into what you are doing, take a look at this. I put a simple GUI on some of my astronomy tools. It could use some dress-up, but it works and the math is sound.

To run, go to a command prompt (or create a shortcut) and type "javaw Astronomer". Java is case sensitive - "javaw astronomer" will not work.

You will get a simple dialog box. You can enter a latitude and longitude or use one of the pre-programmed locations, and a time and date, of course. There are three tools here - a star chart, a horoscope, and a set of basic tables for a day or a month. The program generates .svg or .txt files which should open automatically in a browser or notepad window. It isn't fancy, but it works.

The star chart needs more stars - only the zodiac are included right now.

I also have eclipse and conjunction finders, but no GUI to go with them.

It's Windows only. In principle it should be easy to make Mac, Linux, and even an Android version. I just used a Windows system call to output the SVG file in a quick-and-dirty way.

I really can't begin to advise how you would convert a Terran model to Kethira. I have a book on Computational Astronomy that includes source code to model our solar system, but I decided early on to start fresh. So my code is all in Java and is based purely on the parameters from the Astronomy article. There is a lot of conversion between coordinate systems required, and it gets really complex really fast. Everything is inter-related, so adjusting for, say, the 360-day year affects multiple parameters in that list of equations you show. Honestly, I suspect that the best way to figure out the right parameters would be to use my model to calculate them.

The variables refer to the parameters of the elliptical planetary orbit of Venus. Wikipedia has some articles with fancy illustrations explaining the different parameters.
Alas, the according data for Kethira's planets has neither been published in EH 7+8 (Astrology 1-8) nor in HarnWorld 2nd ed. (Kethira 2+3) - but maybe I missed a newer publication.

So, the parameter settings would have been to be made up (guessed) using the sparse, simplified data (referring to circular orbits, which are highly unlikely) given in the mentioned canon articles and some celestial mechanics, but I am not an astronomer.

Regards

Xris

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Ich mag den kleinen blauen Elephanten!

Thanks

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Member of the CoE (Council of Elitists)

Found one more:



M is "mean anomaly" in degrees.


I have just found some helpful description: http://www.stjarnhimlen.se/comp/ppcomp.html.

Best regards

Xris

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Ich mag den kleinen blauen Elephanten!

I got an idea last night and searched for the values in the formulas. Because they are standardized data and formulas Google led me right to a page they all came from and that explained them.


Then I wasted hours trying to fix Yael (it defied math/logic that suggested a simple value and demanded a trial and error approach to fit it right).


I don't know why I'm bothering. I have no plans to use the thing.

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Member of the CoE (Council of Elitists)

I accidentally left out a file from the .zip package above. This package should work.