> > If not, I'm sure that Rory or somebody will straigten me out.
>
> Whereas Rory is stellar in his intimate rules knowledge, I'd never wish
> upon him the obligation to try to explain my Gloranthan cosmology and
> metaphysics. Spare the poor man that!
We're appealing to his triple mastery in "explain complicated things so that simple people can understand them". His actual knowledge of the subject matter is an augment :)
> Let me start by saying that there are different methods of thought and
> discourse possible, and they are mutually exclusive. Thus
> rationality, an
> extremely human trait that we have developed par excellance, is one
> method....
> However, this is incapable of explaining everything about the
> unknowable.
> The intuitive, irrational or impossible simply to do not reduce to
> rational explanations.
And, I've always found, the English language is extremely bad at conveying non-rational explanations. It can be used to check that we've reached the same conclusions: "do we agree that if X, it intuitively follows that Y?", but can't convey that understanding to someone who doesn't already possess it. Which is a right pain :(
>> "for those sorts who engage in specialized magic, given that >> religion is mixed, there's nothing other than concentration standing in >> the way of them having magic from more than one otherworld."
> Concentration = specialization in one deity.
Huh? Vocab check. In the Roolz, "concentration" means specialisation in one otherworld. The word for specialisation in one deity is "devotion". Which was meant?
> Furthermore, the person normally has an affinity for the deity in
> question. It isn't really a matter of a Gloranthan choosing
> which deity to
> worship. It is more a matter of finding the best one
> available. Which is
> why the Orlanthi adulthood initiation takes at least two years.
And, I would guess, why some people find themselves drawn to a deity *despite* their own wishes. There's an ability (maybe a flaw, since the PC doesn't control it) missing here: something like "drawn to <deity>", or "connected to", "affinity for", or something. Convert it to "initiate of" or "devotee of", and it stops being a flaw.
> God Learners had documents and studies on it, and concluded that there
> were no fewer than three, but never came to a complete and absolute
> conclusion (which would have required a mapping of the entire
> God Plane, for instance).
And what would it tell the Gloranthans if they knew? Back when I was doing a physics degree, I learnt that there are at least 11 dimensions, three of them physical, Time, which is imaginary (multiply by the square root of -1 to treat it like the rest), and the rest curled up very small. Guess how much difference this made to my life?
Looking at Orlanth:
> Such as? will you cast some detection magic there? Go and
> look under his table and behind his high seat?
There's a rules example of how hard this might be. OiD p 63. Voria appears on the battlefield. If you want to do ANYTHING, there's a resistance of 10W6. And that's little Voria, not Orlanth in his own hall.
Powered by hypermail