I say :
> For example - Joe Heroquester dies
>and goes to Hell, finds the secret exit (which he learned about in a
>previous quest) and comes back, meanwhile his family bury the body. Now
>Joe has two bodies, the one that is dead and buried and the one he came
>back in.
Peter Metcalfe says :
>But this is *not* a _temporal_ paradox! A Temporal Paradox is Joe Hero
>going back in time and killing his grandfather before he has a chance
>to begat Joe Hero's father. The 'paradox' you have cited has two
>solutions:
I did not say it was a temporal paradox, just that heroquests can cause paradoxes in general. It was an example of another kind of paradox. I am just making the point that what would be a paradox for us would not necesserily be a problem on Glorantha.
>I do not like to invoke a shifting or multiworld Glorantha. Yet
>at the same time, I do not like to invoke Calvinistic Determinism
>and intervene heavyhandedly (ie nailing the PC's up as Moorcock did
>sounds a bit crass if done more than once). For a PC to go back in
>time and be prohibited from doing some things _implies_ that there's
>something special about his time (where they have free will) as
>opposed to the time he is in now (where they apparently). This sounds
>awful. IMO the past is dead and buried whereas the future is unmade.
The problem is we don't have a sufficiently good understanding of time in Glorantha. It certainly is not the same as real world time. I think to understand time in Glorantha, we need to understand the godtime. We also need to know what the relationship is between one age and another, what happens when one age ends and another begins.
I think of the Great Compromise that created time as like an insurance policy. Take Death as an example. Suppose that Orlanth had used Death on Aldrya instead of Yelm. Suddenly all the forests in the world would die, Aldrya and all her works would be consigned to Hell. Ok, Aldrya is a major goddess, so you would expect that. As another example though, suppose Waha was cut down before the Dawn, the entire Nomad way of life would go down with him. Because the godtime is not linear, if you are dead it is almost as though you never existed. Your actions nolonger have any power, because you are not there anymore to enforce them with your Will (so to speak).
The Great Compromise is like an insurance policy, because it means that if you get slotted at least your kids, dependents, life's work, etc don't go down with you. In the compromise everyone agreed that they would respect each other's existence, their right to act, and to honour those actions. i.e. The actions of gods and men in time are persistent in and of themselves, while in godtime such acts were part of (and therefore dependent on the existence of) the being that performed them.
Sorry if I am being repetitive, but it's a complex subject and I want to cover it unambiguously.
I believe that some forms of time travel are possible in glorantha. The Compromise can be circumvented, if not utterly broken. The point is that it is not remotely the same as time travel in terrestrial science fiction and cannot be treated using modern SF paradigms.
I don't like the idea of a multi-world Glorantha any more than Peter, I just don't see that it's necessery. The past is different in Glorantha because it has happened, but that does not make it utterly inviolate. In a sense the past is part of the present - it's consequences are part of the world and made it the way it is, that's the context in which you can heroquest to it.
Simon Hibbs
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