On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 3:55 AM, John Hughes <john.hughes_at_jqd3bTHA2KA9gjKNYKRswgT7lHitBX6K6D55n9OmLlMmhUny9-MXwtsePLkPCqRdwdvnuivlVXyP4wD_o5iN2gc.yahoo.invalid> wrote:
> If we've moved forward from campaign date 1608 ST through to 1619 ST or
> so in thirty real-time years of official scenarios, that means we can expect
> the campaign for the Fall of Glamour (1670-ish) in about 2190. CE. (If man
> is still alive. If woman can survive. Woo oh...)
>
Well, some folks demonize the Hero Wars as a player freedom limiting
meta-plot. Not me - I am eagerly (foolishly) awaiting the Great Argrath
Campaign - but some.
> The basic Gloranthan mythologic is that whatever is True, whatever is Real,
> comes from the past, the deep past. In a value-neutral sense, it has to be
> conservative. The subtlety of Glorantha's mythic mechanisms are muted by its
> absolutist sense of religion and cult: there is little room for sociology,
> for change, for people. A basic criticism of the entire Eliade/Jung/Campbell
> approach to myth is that people don't matter, only ideas ('archetypes') do:
> Ideas can only repeat themselves, people can only repeat deep patterns.
> Derived from these ideas, Glorantha suffers in the same way.
>
The idea of the Hero Wars, if I understand Greg correctly, is that what you
describe represents Glorantha as it works when things are normal. The
gut-wrenching terror of the Hero Wars for Glorantha's imaginary inhabitants
is that those old rules get violated - slowly at first, and eventually left
right and center. In other words, Glorantha is a nice conservative toy with
predictable internal logic that gets thrown to the PCs, who have their
wicked way with it. Naturally this idea and that of the Hero Wars meta-plot
are almost completely incompatible. Essentially, the meta-plot is one
person's game log. (Or a condensing of several people's game logs) Us it for
inspiration and ideas but let your players determine what actually happens
in any particular game.
> So what *is* Glorantha, really? What can it be?
>
The dragons are right - Glorantha is a dream. Your dream. OK, so clearly it
is more than that since the same thing could be said of any game world.
Trying to define exactly what sort of dream it is won't ever succeed, IMHO.
When thinking about "canon" I once described "Glorantha" as a solar system
of individual Gloranthas. Not as a a bunch of little fan created planets
circling the great sun of Greg's Glorantha, but rather a bunch of suns in a
multiple-star system. All of those stars circle around a center of mass that
is actually empty space. Glorantha is like that - it is the network of our
influence on each other as we tell stories. Greg created Glorantha and owns
the rights to it's publication, which it has granted to Moon Design. I don't
argue with that at all. It's just that when I speak of "Glorantha" that
isn't what I mean. What is my point? Er... Um... Yea. I remember - there is
no such thing as "The One True Glorantha", or even "Generally Accepted
Glorantha" or anything else. If you meet Malkion on the road kill him.
Yes. This really is how I think. Pity my wife.
-Kevin McD
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