It doesn't simply look like a 'large object' in any material sense, according to any published description. Which doesn't prevent you from suggesting it anyway, of course, but let's at least be clear about this. {I've pointed this out more than once now, and it either gets misrepresented, or ignored.)
> This solves many problems
... which? You're presenting it as a 'fix' to the complete straw man of a 'physical model', which no-one has _ever_ suggested that I can think of. You instead give us a new 'magical model', with no indication whatsoever of why it'd be better than the previous (or indeed any other) 'magical model'.
> Admittedly there is a proud Gloranthan tradition of being vague, but one
> should be able to tell the players what the moon look like, even if they
> do a few experiments.
I agree. It clearly has implications for, for example, the Lunar calendar, which I wrote an (as-yet-unpublished, Graham!) article on last year -- and was highly unamused to get one set of comments telling me that the searchlight model might or might not be true, who knew? Kinda needs to eventually either be Officialised or Unofficialised one way or the other, and a bit of detail put on it to boot. There's nothing inherently vaguer about one vs. the other, though.
I just don't much like _this_ description. It somewhat incidentally contradicts RQ2 sources (as you accuse the 'searchlight' model of doing), makes no sense mythically (despite you throwing the word in every so often without any supporting myth or so much as hints at same), and it introduces an unnecessarily large disjunct into the moon's appearance as any sort of material entity.
As a further exercise, you might want to consider how you propose the moon does (or does not) rotate (or rather, appear to rotate), given the info on that from Greg in [some TotRM or another]. Is one side always visible (in the sense of seeming to 'face' the observer, whether in light or dark)? Is one side always in the dark portion (whether 'visible' or not)? Does the rotation and the phase change happen independently?
Cheers,
Alex.
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