>Your question about altered states of consciousness comes from a strange angle.
>I feel able to role-play these things in the absence of clunking great heaps of
>game mechanics, as do all RQers (or we wouldn't have a hobby). And you can't
>deny that some people are lurking out there waiting to abuse shamelessly
any new
>game mechanics we might write. So, just at the moment, this is a sleeping dog:
>I'd say, let it lie.
And Loren Miller writes:
>I'm thinking here about how this might work in the game rules.
Oops. Guess the cat's out the bag on this one.
However, I would like to know, Loren, to what extent we can discuss mechanics here. I have not seen much of them since I subscribed, until you had brought them up. Since you are Computer Guy, I'll take my lead from you. I must admit, this is the sort of discussion that I wanted to have.
Peter Metcalfe writes:
>While I can't speak for my Evil Twin, Spiffy, the God Learners were heirs
>to a culture that had fought a brutal war against the the practitioners
>of Illumination and wiped it off the face of the earth. To say that some
>of them explored illumination and did not realize what exactly they were
>exploring seems unlikely IMO.
I'm afraid you miss part of my point. To be specific, It seems to me possible that the Gl's struggled with the impact of the _conception_ that all constructions are untrue, while not realizing that this was the spiritual insight offered by Nysalor. I say possible because I don't really know, nor can I intuit, what actual knowledge the God Learners possessed regarding Illumination. I think I'll have to read the original Stafford transcription before I make up my mind. But I do think it is possible to struggle with this conception (as many people struggle with it in Our World) without benefit of Illumination or Illuminates.
>
>The God Learner 'struggle' would have look like this:
>
>GL: The Empire of the Deciever knew magical secrets which allowed them
>to ignore cult restrictions without fear of reprisal among other things.
>The secrets was wiped out by Arkat. The question remains: how did they
>manage to do this? And more importantly, how can we replicate their
>discipline without falling into the lure of the deciever?
I do believe that the struggle that Stafford was describing was more along the lines of a moral and intellectual anxiety, as opposed to "Cool! How do we do that!", but, like I said, I'll have to read the original address to make up my mind for sure. I will keep your opinion in mind, though, and report back to you.
Thanks
Doyle
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