"What happened before time?
Don't be silly. There was always time. Night followed day. Day followed night. Week followed week, in the orderly progression of seasons.
Did people always grow old and die?
Some say that long, long ago there was no aging, and that culture heroes such as Orlanth and Barntar were alive then, and that they still age not. If they don't age then how was Orlanth born Thundrous, in his youth wandered as an Adventurer, and finally put aside his childish ways, grew up and became King? Or how did his queen come to be born as Voria, have children as Ernalda, and care for the hearthfire as Asrelia? Simple answer. They aged.
Then what changed with the compromise?
It wasn't a compromise. It was a change imposed on the nature of reality by arachne solara, who was once the great goddess glorantha, who had to separate the worlds in order to save them and had to imprison the gods in a single world so they would not run rampant over the cosmos again. It was the net that kept the gods from interfering in the world we live in now, which has always had time. Before the great goddess glorantha was transformed into arachne solara she used to usher beings between the sacred world and the mundane world everyday. Everybody could visit the sacred world. Everybody could talk to their ancestors. Everybody could see the magic in the land, could speak with animals, could whistle up a wind. And everybody could tear a little hole in the fabric of reality and let chaos in. After glorantha was transformed into the spider, she spun her web out of the remains of the devil wakboth, threw it around the many worlds to protect us all from chaos, and the living were confined to one world, the mundane world where animals live, and the dead were confined to the other world, the sacred world where the gods live. Ever since the net has divided the two worlds only dedicated holy people can cross the border, and it takes mighty rituals to summon up the remnant energies of the glorantha that once was to make that crossing." whoah!
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End of Glorantha Digest V3 #258
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
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