Re: Glorantha and Earth (diatribe Greg)

From: Loren Miller <Loren.Miller_at_marketing.wharton.upenn.edu>
Date: Wed, 13 Sep 1995 12:36:32 EST


Robert McArthur <mcarthur_at_fit.qut.edu.au> writes, in response to my using "we" when talking about shamanic journeys to glorantha:
> Making statements of absolutes like this really (sorry Loren) gets
> my goat. Speak for yourself Keemosabe!!! (sp?) Everyone is at
> different levels of themselves. Sure, Greg may want to be on the
> shamanistic path and want to learn a valuable thing from HIS
> Glorantha. The young women sick of D&D may want something totally
> different.

I addressed the young women sick of D&D (really? I thought young women played Vampire!) in the "Glorantha as rolegame setting" bit. This is about the shamanistic path. Greg claims, semi-seriously, that Glorantha could be a valid shamanistic otherworld, but I believe it's clear that most if not all Greggings are not performed for the would-be shamans, but are done to make the map of Glorantha-ing work better for rolegame use, and as a by-product to make it *more* earthlike.

> Anecdote: I am writing a Dragon Pass map generator for myself and other GMs.
> Someone suggested that I really should get Greg to examine any maps of Glorantha
> before making them available. WHY!

I worked a little with Greg on the Carmania material. I had very limited access to him and things moved slowly, but I believe they got to a satisfactory conclusion eventually. In the future I plan to write more unofficial stuff, it took over a year to produce the unofficial but Greg-approved Carmanian stuff. So this is my totally meaningless impression of what goes on when you work with Greg.

Greg seems to be very concerned that a pernicious error (such as "giants and cave trolls are chaotic") will sneak through a work-in-progress and end up becoming dogma. This means that anytime you publish something that will necessarily affect a lot of campaigns he is going to want to reconcile it with his own opinions on the matter, and being rather more interested in control than he pretends he is, he wants to fix it before publication rather than in the errata or the bugfix release. So this means that things will move very slowly when you're producing official material, and only slightly less slowly when you're producing unofficial material that is approved by Greg.

I don't mean this to be an apology for the unforgivable lack of currently published, usable campaign maps of the Dragon Pass area, or of any other area of Genertela or Pamaltela, but that's the process that's going on. I think the only way to get these maps done is to do them yourself. So if you're writing a computerized mapper, then run a small beta test and *use* and *incorporate* feedback from glorantha scholars, and then to run it by Greg, including printouts and slides in case it doesn't run right on his computer system. Furthermore, if you take the SJG freeware contract and modify it appropriately, and then propose that Chaosium use something similar for its intellectual properties, then he doesn't have to worry that some lawyer will try to steal his copyright.

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