Sandy here states something that I would like to agree with even more forcefully than Sandy stated it. I am diametrically opposed to the position of those who state that Glorantha should NOT be Earthlike. Why? For several reasons, which first require that we answer the question "Why do we care about Glorantha?"
Somewhat like John Hughes, I see several processes in which people actually care about Glorantha. There may be more and I invite others to contribute. To differentiate myself from John, note that I think that his level distinctions are irrelevant because I deny that Glorantha is a thing in and of itself. It is only meaningful, and more importantly, _it only exists_, when people care about it enough to use it in a process. Maybe we should call this process Glorantha-ing to distinguish it from the name of the world within the process.
One of the reasons that Glorantha is popular and can work for all these purposes is that it holds together very well. Theologically Glorantha holds together well, especially with the recent Gregging (the Elmal furor) to install believably realistic pantheons of gods in all the theistic societies (especially the Orlanthi). Linguistically and culturally it holds together somewhat less well, though the recent Carmanian and Dara Happan material seems to be retconning distinct linguistic styles into the world. I am not at all qualified to judge Glorantha militarily, but as it was developed very early on as a setting for wargames I can only hope it makes sense.
Glorantha as Wargame Setting
"I don't care if you are fighting the enemies of the sun, it won't send down a mega-sunspear unless you have mega- magic."
Glorantha was first exposed to the public as the setting of White Bear and Red Moon (now Dragon Pass) and Nomad Gods. There were a lot of powerful magics flying around, and amazing heroes, but behind the scenes the normal folks worked pretty much like normal folks do on earth. They are human, they eat the same kinds of food that earth humans do, they make babies the same way and die the same way, they get sick, they learn, they get married and work for their survival, they love and hate each other like earth humans do. They are exactly the same as earth humans, except that they are fictional and live in a fictional world. That's why you can use the same rules for armies in Glorantha that you can use in an Earthly wargame. Foraging, picketing, morale, etc, all work just like they work on earth. If Glorantha got too far from earth then you would have to make up entirely new rules, and my guess is that they wouldn't be as satisfying to play.
Glorantha as Rolegame Setting
"Just because the sun is a flaming horseman doesn't mean you won't be blinded if you stare at it for an hour."
The most widespread reason to care about Glorantha is undoubtedly because it's a great place to set a rolegame. There's a lot of material. There's a lot of room for GMs to insert their own material. However, official new material for Glorantha needs to be pass an important criterion. It needs to intuitively make sense so as not to disrupt the players' willing suspension of disbelief, and it can't be so different from the players' past experience that they have to consciously juggle too many facts all the time, as this makes it impossible to actually roleplay their characters. I think the 7+/-2 rule comes into play here. If the players have to keep 5 or more distinct cognitive chunks in mind at any time then some are going to start losing track of their own character. If you get up to 9 distinct cognitive chunks they have to keep in mind then they will all lose track of their characters. The situation is even worse for the GM. At any time the GM is keeping her worldview in one chunk, her plan for the evening's entertainment in another, one or two NPCs in other chunks, and the game rules in another chunk. This takes up 4 or 5 chunks to start, and if an official publication adds something else that she has to remember then some GMs are going to start falling apart. The best way to minimize those additional facts, best because it has been tried and tested often in fiction and in gaming, is to make the game world consistent with Earth. That means that GMs can just fold their knowledge of Earth into their worldview and not have to take up an entire cognitive chunk with a piddling detail about kinship or inheritance or 85 different flavors of Powzie. The best guideline we can use for this type of Glorantha-ing is Keep it Fun, Maximize Game Fun.
Glorantha as Shamanic Journey
"Does the sun mean something important on glorantha that I could take back with me to earth and use there to my betterment?"
Greg Stafford has hinted that this is how he sees Glorantha. Sometimes I think he was joking. Sometimes I think he was serious. If Glorantha can indeed work as a tool to send the consciousness into an otherworld where the mind/soul is reforged and strengthened then it has to have some correspondence to the world that the soul/mind returns to. If the hero goes to the other world to save his world and returns with an irrelevant elixir or secret, then his trip was wasted. If we are going to learn something valuable from traveling to Glorantha, then it won't be exactly how to kill the Crimson Bat. It will be something about dealing with people and society and religion, things that REALLY exist on earth.
Glorantha as Fictional World Design Workshop
"Why do you have fourteen different so-called intelligent races living in the Rockwoods who don't know each other exist?"
When you have a roadmap, what do you have? You have a guide which allows you to navigate some area and experience the things which are to be found there. Since Glorantha is a process, not a thing, a map to Glorantha would allow you to experience the process of Glorantha-ing. A large part of the glorantha process, and indeed the only part that occurs on this digest, is map-making.
It's very tempting to show off when you're drawing a map. If you're good at drawing mountains you might start by drawing the mountain range really well, then you want to draw more so you start putting mountains in the desert. In a cooperative effort, others will also be good at drawing mountains, and inspired by your efforts they put mountains in farmlands, in the swamp, in the ocean, until it's mountains everywhere. Pretty soon you have TOO MANY DAMN MOUNTAINS!
This happens in cooperative world design too. Pretty soon if you have a good number of contributors you have too many subterranean chaos cults with miles of tunnels, too many broos, too many secretive immortal sorcerors, too many conspiracies, too many competing groups of lunar secret police, too many mad chaos heroes who want to destroy the world (bwa ha ha ha), too many intelligent humanoid races, too many dungeons. TOO MANY DAMN MOUNTAINS!
So how do you, the Glorantha-er, judge which contributions you keep and which you throw away? You develop a worldview which has your overall map on it. At the beginning this map will be close to earth, because that's the map we all start with. As time goes on your worldview will evolve into a weirder and weirder picture. If you are sharing your worldview with others, in a rolegame, a wargame, or in the digest, then it can't be any weirder than they will tolerate, or they will think there are TOO MANY DAMN MOUNTAINS! They might not tell you this directly, instead they might say "Let's play Magic the Gathering instead this week."
IMO, if you are to be able to attract new minds to your wargame, your rolegame, your glorantha discussion forum, then you can't allow your map of glorantha to diverge so far from our shared map of earth that it's incomprehensible without six months of study. And that's why I think it's important that we make sure to keep Glorantha as much like Earth as possible.
It's fun to draw mountains, but you wouldn't want too many, would you?
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