>Saravan Peacock:
>>IMO Orlanthi certainly do have a strong sense of cause and effect in the
>>God Time. They just don't think much about it before they do something.
>
>Before Time, there was no cause and effect, but there was Power and effect. In
>order to truly achieve something, a Power had to be invoked, such as Death
>being
>used on Yelm. After Time, things got a whole lot less predictable, and stupid,
>seemingly unrelated things would start happening. "He fell over and stopped
>moving, m'lud. All I did was cut his throat!"
>
>IMO.
Hmmm... Interesting. Upon writing my original post, I found that I
absolutely disagreed with the idea that there was no cause and effect
before the Dawn. As I said, the idea seemed incomprehensible. However I am
happy to be persuaded otherwise. It seems to me that the gods quite
regularly invoked Powers "to do" things. It is the "to do"-ing that is the
cause. Orlanth used the sword Death _to_ kill Yelm _coz_ he was a pompous
git (and Orlanth hated pompous gits who wouldn't let him do what he
wanted...). That is the cause. He didn't just bump him off for the hell of
it. Yes, he needed the Power to do it, but that is the Instrument. Unless
you posit that there is some inherent being in the sword or power Death
that kills Yelm, and that this might be interpreted by normal folks as
cause and effect rather than just the Nature of things...(i.e. a sort of
Nature/Fate)?
The main problem is that most Post-Dawn beings really cannot understand a non-cause-and-effect environment. That is why the myths are told to make sense of it all. I think the Pre-creation Cosmology section of the old Lords of Terror gives us a good view of a similar problem. Lots of people trying to comprehend how the world could have started out of nothingness or chaos or whatever was there 'Before'. And no one knows...
Anyway, by the by, I think Loren Miller's Pavic document in GD v.03 #258 is a very good interpretation of how post-Dawn people (and indeed, we) could make sense of the situation. Real change in the nature of the universe which can be experienced is one of the things that makes Glorantha unique and fascinating (for me at least).
Pax
Saravan.
End of Glorantha Digest V3 #263
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
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