Surely the ideal of any fantasy system is to genuinely explore the ideals of essentialism and determinism by actually getting into the mindset of fantastic races. The beauty of Glorantha is it achieves this, and far beyond the monsters as fodder of D&D and the monster as a creation of evil of C&S. The actual duality of good/evil has been broken - rather disturbing in itself. Gloranthan races really do have a different way of eating/sleeping/talking/thinking/acting etc. Consistency is an inter-racial or multi-cultural impossibility. Mindsets are just too different. As a true Sartarite, I have no idea if Lunar expansion is "civilising", nor even if their attempts to kill me are not merely them saying "Hi!"; I only know what it means to me, my tribe, my leaders and my gods. We cannot, then, know what other cultures think - or even if they do think as we know it.
In conclusion, I do not think any human "unavoidabilities" are unavoidable for Gloranthans. I would prefer to argue that as mere humans we cannot comprehend the concepts that other races understand, because we have no common ground to recognise these concepts. Unfortunately, I have just read #334 and what Sandy Petersen has to say. My actual mechanics of the binary rune system were pretty much the same, so I suppose that will teach me to take a day off work and miss a Digest! I've still sent the philosophy stuff because I think it does add a little more.
Tim Eccles
End of Glorantha Digest V2 #2
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
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