I finally got around to exploring Loren's wonderful Glorantha home page yesterday. As my tools for exploring the Web are limited to a black and white Mac SE and fairly slow modem, I missed a lot of the fun (the graphics), and at times felt like a blind man in the Louvre. However, I was blown away by the set-up, and recommend that you all check it out if you haven't already done so.
Loren's home page (address given at the end of every Digest) also contains links to other Gloranthan home pages, including those of Dave Dunham and Rob MacArthur. Riches galore!
[Sigh, come the tax cheque, I just gotta upgrade to a new mac. The Web and its easy searching of archives makes projects like the Gloranthan Digest so much more valuable and accessible.]
When Martin Crim was preparing the Glorantha FAQ that appears on the home page, he asked me to prepare an essay on the 'levels of reality' discussion that we had in mid '93. I sent it off to him but heard nothing more: he seems to have gone off-line around that time. [Martin, you out there?] While the present FAQ contains a link to my original Digest posting, I thought I'd post my update essay before it disappears into the hidden depths of my hard disk. If nothing else, those mentioned can complain to me that they've been misquoted! :-)
This is not intended to resurrect the levels debate, merely to share a summary originally prepared for FAQ readers.
Cheers
John
MARTIN CRIM'S FAQ PREAMBLE I. What is the Focus of this Mailing List?
In brief, this is a mailing list for discussion of Greg Stafford's shared fantasy world of Glorantha....
INSERT THIS SLIGHTLY MODIFIED SECTION INTO THE FAQ... John Hughes sees several categories of discussion, depending on whether one is talking about:
Of course these categories are far from absolute, and there is often an interplay between the various levels. They are intended as conceptual tools, useful for clarifying certain problems. Some of the implications of these different perspectives are discussed by John in [a separate linked document].
Some Digest contributors have raised the question of whether Gloranthan material can be fun at the same time as it is accurate. The general consensus is "yes," but people (of course) disagree about how much realism counts. This debate is recurring, and basically boils down to personal preference. Some people find it fun to draw conclusions about First Age Solar religion from the style of dress of the gods on the Gods Wall in the gray-cover version of the 'Glorious ReAscent of Yelm'. Others like to have their Duck Death Lords kill zombie broos. Many like a little of both. That's one of the reasons why exploring Glorantha (and participating in the Digest) can be so much fun.
AND HERE'S THE LINKED DOCUMENT COMMENTING ON LEVELS AND ON THE NATURE OF GLORANTHA.
DO DUCKS HAVE TEETH? On Exploring Glorantha - Some Tools for the Fantasy Ethnographer and Adventurer
"I had in my hands a substantial fragment of the complete history of an unknown planet,with its architecture and its playing cards, its mythological terrors and the sounds of its dialects, its emperors and its oceans, its minerals, its birds and its fishes, its algebra and its fire, its theological and metaphysical arguments..."
Jorge Luis Borges "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".
"No amount of academic knowledge is a substitute
for a poor imagination."
Devin Cutler, in the 'levels' discussion, RuneQuest Digest.
"Stwand And Delibber. Dis is a hoist, Won mowve und ya oil
broo-bait!!"
Quackbeth the Hueymakt, one-legged duck bandit.
(various encounters, Pavis 1612-15, Sartar 1615-21,
Far Point 1621-32).
The world of Glorantha is complex, engrossing, occasionally frustrating, yet always tremendous fun. It's a contemporary example of a shared fantasy world, a psychological and social creation whose ancestors include Gilgamesh and Dante, the Egyptian 'Book of the Dead', 'The Journey to the West (Monkey)', Edward Abbott Abbott's 'Flatland' and the thought worlds of Albert Einstein. To enter Glorantha is begin an other-worldly journey. Throughout human history, such journeys and worlds have served as vehicles for our stories and myths, vehicles for our hopes, fantasies, and wildest dreams, places of wonder and adventure, testing grounds for our conceptions of what can and cannot be.
Glorantha participates in the ancient tradition of other-worldly journeys, albeit in a new form: a shared cosmos explored primarily through group roleplaying. Yet like its ancestors (many of whom loom large in the structure of Glorantha itself) it is a mindspace, a mirror and magnifying lens for our imagination. It presents itself to us as a frontier and a mystery, a place to experience adventure and wonder.
It is also significant that Glorantha emphasises humour and enjoyment in a big way. Rather than for some religious, spiritual or literary purpose (the genesis of most shared worlds), Glorantha was created to be a FUN place to visit. And no matter how rabid our powergaming or fervid our scholarship, its always good to keep this fact in mind.
The second vision is more implicit, and somewhat less central. Through the RuneQuest rules system, Glorantha bears the stamp of a particular style of male fantasy roleplaying dominant in the late seventies. This vision emphasises accessibility, simplicity and heroism, but, being only a step or two removed from its wargaming ancestors, concentrates on combat, lone adventuring and exotic monster-bashing. Anything beyond these particular themes - for example the dynamics of family, society and religion - are abstracted or ignored for the sake of simplicity and fluidity.
Of course, roleplaying has matured a lot in the last twenty years, giving us new ways to share our stories and dreams. RuneQuest has attempted to keep up with the change, to balance the joy of one-armed duck bandits and the catharsis of broobashing with an equal emphasis on storytelling, discovery and characterisation. In addition, other roleplaying and storytelling systems have arisen as alternative vehicles to explore the richness of the old Lozenge.
These two visions of Glorantha: one emphasising detail and diversity, the other simplicity and enjoyment, stand in creative tension. When the two strands can be integrated, as in Trollpack, the results are breathtaking. Getting the balance right is the aim of a lot of discussion on the Digest, and the cause of most of its arguments. Together, these twin visions constitute much of what Glorantha is about - and together they raise the broader issue of what roleplaying is, can be, and should be, and just how closely the world of Glorantha should be tied to roleplaying games such as RuneQuest.
Personally, I like to draw distinctions, at least in my own mind, as to what type of reality I'm discussing. I see at least four fairly distinct levels of Gloranthan 'reality' which are sometimes reconcilable, sometimes not. If each is a 'map', let me list them in terms of smaller and smaller 'scales' until we reach the final level, Gloranthan 'reality' itself.
We could argue about my names of the levels and how they intermesh, but for me the important point is the fact that there are several distinct ways of dealing with Glorantha.
In my experience, most campaign and convention games and published modules operate on this rules-driven level. This is not necessarily a bad thing, for the rules level can be surprisingly versatile and resilient. It depends on the expectations and needs of the players involved. However, certain of the more 'absurd' Gloranthan phenomena (cult membership rules, initiation, certain spells) were derived for and work only at this level.
When beginning a campaign, a gamesmaster should decide whether RQ (or other system) rules describe Gloranthan reality or merely simulate it. If they describe it, something like a magical system than swaps points of POW for INT or SIZ will make sense. If it merely simulates it, then such spells confuse the simulation with the reality, and would probably be discarded.
End Part I
Continued in Part 2 of 2.
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