Re: Map discrepancies; rare books

From: Argrath_at_aol.com
Date: Sun, 11 Feb 1996 17:00:23 -0500


In Glorantha Digest V2 #379, Steve Lieb writes:

>In Gods of Glorantha, the (great!) map in the beginning of the book says
>something about a range of mountains shown just east of the White Sea - the
>commentator on the map advises that this is the only glaring error. Sure
>enough, these mountains are not shown in either the Genertela book or on the
>map that accompanied the Glorantha set.

It's a range of _hills_, not mountains, and it's hard to tell what the commentator means by "central Pent." If the range of hills referred to is the one shown as the source for the two major rivers flowing north, then it IS shown in G:GCHW book 2, page 64 as well as the large map. If the commentator meant the range paralleling the Shan Shan Mountains, then you're right.

>HOWEVER, it does show up on the introduction to glorantha book (book 5 in
>the RQIII set) AND, more interestingly (and IMO more authoritatively) it
>shows up in Cults of Terror. Now, what exactly happened here?

Well, neither range is in my copy of Book 5. There is a range of mountains shown in east-central Pent in CoT, but why are older sources more authoritative? A better approach is to treat more recent sources as more authoritative than older ones, unless the older sources are unpublished and not generally available ;-). Incidentally, the east-central range appears on the map in the Nomad Gods rulebook, the map in the Agimori article in WF 12, and the Sea of Neliom map in WF 11, but doesn't appear on the RQ 2 world map, the Trollpak Book 1 maps, or the Big Rubble world map.

>(Also, on a related subject - what happened to Genertela between CoT and
>now? If you look at the map in CoT Genertela has some striking differences
>to the current geography....)

Genertelan geography has developed over the years. The most dramatic changes were from WB&RM and NG to RQ II. The changes since that time have been more incremental in shape, though scale problems abound. Frex, the 1st and 2nd editions of Trollpak have the same map, but one has a scale of 1 in. = 10 miles and the other has a scale of 1 in. = 8 km. (This is one case where the later source is less authoritative, because it conflicts with other recent sources and the discrepancy is probably due to Chaosium's, uh, cavalier attitude (a nice way to put it) wrt map scale.)

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