Re: Illusion

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_...>
Date: Thu Sep 16 11:42:17 2010

> And that's my point - in Glorantha/HW/HQ/Greg's mind "Illusion" means "the
> whole shebang" as opposed to "only an aspect of a thing". Sure, you could
> probably *cripple* your illusion so that it only "covers" one sense, but a
> default "Illusion" is solid, 3 dimensional, smells right, sounds right,
> echoes right, changes air temperature etc., because it *is* right. An
> Illusionary cow will detect as "cow" to any sense (mundane or magical) that
> you want to apply to it - at least until it goes "poof" when the duration
> runs out...

I still think it's misleading _in the extreme_ to talk about "default" Illusion -- particularly where we're talking about the Trickster. In particular I think a lot of baggage is being imported from contexts like the Lunars and other more "mystical" cultures, where this view of Illusion may in some sense be more grounded, to one like the Heortlings where it's entirely the domain of "Eurmal Stuff".

Given that the main purpose of a Trickster creating an Illusory cow would be to Pass Shoddy Goods, or to Have a Larf, insisting that the _only_ way to do this is to create a fully-aspected, substantiative, 100% operational bovine (with limited 'duration'), or to do that and self-consciously work down, which strikes me as precisely the sort of physical creation that's immensely hard to do in Gloranthan magic, seems a little perverse. (i.e. it'll logically lead to either 'illusions' being a practical impossibility, or generically useful 'creation' magic being unreasonably easy.)

At the risk of sounding like a sad old RQ3-head, that approach has a certain logic to it. Different aspects of an illusion need to be 'stacked', the more fully-realized you want it -- or more straightforwardly in HW, the greater the difficulty of the 'Glamour'. The easiest thing to do ought to be alter a single person's perception of something -- easiest of all to do this to yourself, to go by another RQ3 'feat'. ;-) Arguably this isn't "Illusion" magic in stricto sensu, but it would seem pretty silly to declare it null and void as a category of magical effect. Easiest "true illusion" would be something without "substance" (what Simon Hibbs rather derisively called a 'cow hologram', for example). This for me _is_ still a "true illusion", since it's not as if all "real things" per se have substance -- why should all illusions?

A cow with substance would be somewhat harder; a cow that would give milk, or a bull that could service a "real" cow harder still. And yes, it is a thorny issue as to what happens to the illusory lactose and genes (or runic analogues) when the illusion 'expires'... I suspect it's again a function of how 'good' an illusion it is, i.e. to what degree does it approximate a 'real' (transient) entity -- since in the limiting case, a good enough 'illusion', with long enough 'duration' _is_ the same thing as a 'real' being in the frangible world -- Simon and I agree on that, at least.

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