Doug Thayer writes:
> The question in my mind is not whether I can find in my Glorantha a place
> for dinosaurs. The question is, why aren't they more widespread?
And follows up with quite a few insightful and inventive ways that
Dinosaurs could be used instead of steam engines and large machines.
This is the most Flintstone-like display of inventiveness seen yet on
this list. I still don't see it happening in modern (16xx) Genertela.
I don't see it that way, and we already have the Flintstones. Why do
we need another? I have two mutually contradictory reasons for
rejecting the idea. Take your pick.
- Clearly, dinos were used in a Flintstone manner during the days of
the Empire of the Wyrms' Friends. A culture that *invented* the wyrm
as an imitation dragon would have been sure to use the dumb cousins of
the dragons in everyday life. After the True Golden Horde swept down
on the EWF and destroyed the human part of the empire, and before the
true dragons awoke and destroyed the invaders, they layed a curse on
the Dara Happans and Carmanians so their descendants would never again
be able to control Dragons or Draconic animals (Dinos, Wyrms).
- Dragons notice whenever one of their kin is enslaved and forced to
labor for others. They count among their kin dragonnewts and
dinosaurs. Those who enslave a single dragonkin are likely to be
plagued with the attention of inquisitive and possibly bad-tempered
dream-dragons. Those who enslave lots of dragonkin are the prey of
multiple dream-dragons, and have been known to cause hungry true
dragons to waken. Dragons don't grok human individuality, so they
count about a square mile of population as a unit of humans.
I think either of these explanations would allow the use of occasional
dinos in scenarios (mad philosophers, vadeli traders, the baron's pet
triceratops, etc) without encouraging the development of full-scale
dinosaur-powered industry.
- --
+++++++++++++++++++++++23
Loren Miller <loren_at_hops.wharton.upenn.edu>
"I don't have to practice what I preach 'cause I'm not the kind of
person I'm preaching to!" The Book of The Subgenius