Joerg appears to take issue with my comments re: the "truth" content of some of the stuff that's in the Jonstown Compendium. He writes:
>Rather than answer that question, I'd pose a counter-question: Who do you
>think wrote this (self-important outside-observation) of which country's sun
>folk? How much of this is mis-interpretation, and how much is
>over-generalizing from possibly single examples?...Again, IMO
>one has to ask where in Glorantha this belief will be found. (Not
>whether; I doubt there are many believes not found in one corner of
>Glorantha...)
Hmm; rather than answer those questions, I'll simply say that it seems to me that the Jonstown Compendium should be taken a lot like the "Rumor" listings from stuff like the old Griffin Mountain; some of it is probably "true", some of it is "false", and the true/false nature of the rest can probably vary from campaign to campaign based on what the GM and players find to be MGF (come to think of it, it would be nice to have more of those kind of True/False/Your Choice kind of presentations; as reductive as they might be, they would certainly clear up a lot). In a sense, I would argue that just because some scribe wrote something down and stuck it in a book has nothing to do with whether or not that something is "accurate" and therefore useful to a discussion of Gloranthan "reality"; that someone somewhere may _believe_ that a Yelmic culture somewhere follows a Lesser Sun, Yelm the High Sun, Dayzatar Above All progression model doesn't have anything to do with whether such a Yelmic culture exists (indeed, the point being that AFAIK it doesn't, though I certainly could be wrong). My point was that simply because the Jonstown Compendium lists those as being the HeroQuests of Harmast Barefoot, there's actually no reason to assume that those actually _were_ the HeroQuests of Harmast.
On a certain level, I guess I'm sort of agreeing with Carl Fink that there are (or should be) clear "limiting" factors to beliefs and belief systems, and that the "believing makes it so" paradigm seems to ignore the very common problem that people can just be plain _wrong_ in the beliefs they hold about the world around them. If a Sartarite were to believe whole-heartedly that Argrath and Yelmalio were seperated at birth and are actually the twin bastard children of Wachaza and the Red Moon, then I'm sorry, that Sartarite is a demented madman (and no amount of HeroQuesting is gonna make his belief so) -- though of course I suppose in somebody's Glorantha somewhere that might actually be the case (sigh).
OTOH, Carl wrote:
>And I think there's an "external" reality, and the question is either
>true or false, no matter what you personally or collectively believe,
>in the same way that fossils didn't disappear during the millenia of
>belief in Divine Creation.
Hmm; as a minor aside, I would want to point out that while fossils didn't disappear, they were often mistaken for being the "bones of the gods" -- and if you were to follow this RW "external reality" model, one could very easily wind up arguing that the "bones of the gods" and the "blood of the gods" found in Glorantha are "actually" nothing more than dinosaur (or some other extinct animal type) bones and funny looking crystals.
Carl also wrote:
>...Now, in the "whatever is believed is true" universe, some future
>heroquester can retroactively rearrange history so that he and his
>sister saved the city, or the city was never in danger, or we failed
>and the city *was* eaten by chaos. Anything we did is ultimately
>meaningless and futile, because it may never actually have happened.
First off, there's a part of me that would argue that the possibility of meaninglessness and futility should be a real one, even in moments of "victory", though that might just be because I'm a pessimist. Secondly, IMO there's a distinction between the events of the GodTime which must now be visited on the God Plane through HeroQuests and "actual" "history". I would think that one of the side effects of the Compromise is, in effect, the imposition of "linear time" from that point forward. IMO, no matter what you do you can't go back and "change" history, though you might be able to "participate" in it. To take the Gbaji curse against the trolls, frex, a troll HeroQuester that managed to "break" the curse by interposing herself between Gbaji and KL in some fashion wouldn't cause history to be rewritten so that no trollkin were ever born; the curse would only be lifted from the moment in "linear" time she succesfully completed her Quest and then forward.
If Monrough did indeed HeroQuest to "change" the truth about "Elmal(e)" (like the idea of a female sun, btw, about time one showed up around here), he would only have affected this change at a specific moment in time and probably a specific place; his historical ancestors would have still worshipped Elmal(e), not Yelmalio, and his neighbors would remain unaffected. The God Plane, IMO, can contain all of these variations side by side and simultaneously without contradiction.
Michael, Peter, and Joerg continue to mess about:
>>I propose the Mhystic (and possibly illuminating) trigram E-L-M as the
>>functional name of the Sun God/s.
>How do you fit Somash into it, tho?
Hmm; perhaps Peter is referring to So[el]mash[io]?
Sorry for rambling.
Mark
End of Glorantha Digest V2 #656
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