"Someone in our campaign made the point that if the gods were dead and the
shape of the world changed, Glorantha could be turned into Earth - no gods,
different continents etc. Not that I believe him, of course, but an
interesting idea."
I suggested that the conversion of Glorantha into Earth would follow the Tolkien model where a flat Middle-Earth is turned into a "bent" world, i.e., modern Earth, and the disappearance and possible reappearance of the Gods in the past and future is covered in the whole Saberhagen Empire of the East-Swords series!
But note that all the Gods were not killed in the KOS episode (it seems to
have been an Orlanthi "all!") and there seems to be nothing in Glorantha
to prevent the apotheosis of many characters into Gods to fill the
"empty" slots. That seems to have been the case with Argrath, who became
the new Orlanth! A nice opportunity for fourth age Hero questers -- to
become the new God of XXXX -- which is obviously why writing was rediscovered
among other things.
It is quite possible that something similar happened after the original Gods were "all" destroyed in the Chaos Wars.
Finally, I am sure that the Invisible God himself started in a humbler fashion -- as an hilarious example of this, see chapter 38 of James Branch Cabell's Something About Eve, in which a certain well-known God explains how he "rose" from being a Midianite (or Arabian) storm God to the single God of a Chosen People to the triune God of a large part of the Earth.
Jim Chapin
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