I tend to think that the Godplane is the 'deeper' part of the heroplane, and the spirit plane is more or less visiting the heroplane in spirit only.
>I'm afraid I have no time(!) for the pseudo-relativistic 4-to-3
>dimensional mumbo jumbo theories. IMHO they are completeley and
>spectacularly missing the point.
Agreed.
If you want a dimension to measure the heroplane in, think of it as
something like degree of abstraction. If you are deep in the heroplane, you
still work in time and space - but you are also working at a level of deep
abstraction, where you meet gods who control and wield primal powers.
>David Cake misunderstands (through MY fault, not his) my statement that
>tampering with the GodPlane is a bad idea...
No, I think you are quite right that tampering with the GodPlane structure (or in my terms, the deepest parts of the heroplane) is a very bad idea. But all heroquesting is changing the structure of the heroplane in some way (even if only to reinforce an existing pattern), so its a matter of degree.
Where I disagree with you is on whether the monomyth is a good idea - - I think constructing the monomyth was a good idea for the God Learners, it was only when they started to believe it was the whole truth rather than an overview, and tried to make the world conform to that conception, that it was bad idea.
>To which I can only reply: Arkat (as the first
>God Learner) only cared about the GodPlane to the extent that it could
>provide him weapons to defeat his enemies.
I disagree strongly - Arkat did not care about how people thought of him, and was willing to make enemies - but he cared about the GodPlane, if not his former allies. Remember, Arkat is responsible for the dictum 'no heroquesting without respect'.
But I almost agree on him being the alltime coolest Gloranthan, if it wasn't for my relatively recent conversion to the Lunar way. Naturally, the Red Goddess now grabs that title, for her subversive mythic transformations.
> I mostly agree with this, but would not describe the gods as
>'cosmological powers'. I would describe them as beings of immense abilities
>that have aligned themselves with Powers. Some beings are naturally aligned,
>ie, they have a natural propensity towards certain powers and by continued
>use of them, align themselves.
The lower-case 'p' there was intentional - I meant that the gods are powers in the sense that they are really powerful, and this in a cosmological (ie heroplane/ magic/ mythic) way. The gods are not Powers, though some gods are aligned with a Power so strongly that they are able to wield it in a way unavailable to any other, at which point the question of 'is the god the Power' becomes a moot point - the power is certainly associated with them in an incontrovertible way.
> Perhaps 'aligned' could be read as
>'optimized to tap into the flow of Power'.
Its also to do with the lack of free will. If you choose the power for long enough, eventually the power chooses you. A god of Death becomes unable to NOT choose Death, and eventually must always act in the a Death based way. Humakt may have chosen Death over Air (at least in Orlanthi myth, whether this really means his worshippers chose Death over Air or not is a different issue), but Humakt can no longer choose Life even if he wanted too. The Orlanthi Humakt can not choose Air either. Gods have no free will, they require worshippers to make decisions for them.
>Somewhere (but it could have been Gregged RQ2
>materials; might have been in Elder Secrets) I read that the Polaris used to
>be somewhere else, but moved in order to fight the nasty chaos thingies
>coming in the hole in the universe.
According to GRoY, it was actually the entire sky dome that shifted - - Polaris was always where he was on the sky, but that was not always the center.
>However, it does make you think that
>if the skydome is actually a sphere, in that it encompasses Glorantha
>below, then what's on the bottom half of the sky dome? What can be seen
>from the stars that dip below the horizon?
The Underworld. According to Gregs talk at RQ Con DU, the white planet that was eventually to fall down, and then rise up again as the Red Goddess, first fell because it dipped below the horizon, and saw the Underworld. This caused it to change colour to red.
There are stars in Hell, and they are on the lower half of the Sky Dome.
I think, like our world, that some stars dip below the horizon.
There is a hidden issue here - if the stars on the bottom of the
sky dome appear in the sky of the underworld, then logic would dictate that
when you enter the Underworld, you are actually turning upside down, which
is news to me.
Cheers
David
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