> I just got a vision of a pantheon of gods behaving like a bunch of
> adventurers wracking their brains to figure out neat ways of thwarting
> their old enemies, helping their friends and protecting Glorantha from
> chaos. Almost like Republic of Rome.
More like Moscow Centre vs the Circus vs Langley, ala John LeCarre. After
all, the claim that Gods lack Free Will and the supposed Rules of the
Compromise imply at least as much need for plausible deniability as
the major Powers and Superpowers had during the Cold War. The Black
Fang Brotherhood is already described like it is really a False Flag
operation, and KoS can be read to support the claim that the Lunar
Empire is really a vast piece of strategic deception by the Chaos Gods,
like Uncle Felix Djerzinsky (sp?) ran a vast anti-communist underground
in the Twenties, so that the anticommunist governments paid for all
communist intelligence and subversion activities.
> I have a growing feeling that the scheming gods, the patterns of the web
> and heroquesting agents are possible to quantify in pretty simple game
> mehcanics. Does this qualify me to become a God Learner or just a Mad
> Scientist (or both)?
This belief certainly sounds GLish. You become a Mad Scientist when you
decide to "improve" things using the "simple game mechanics". And they
can't be too simple, or the Second Age Empires wouldn't have all fallen
together. It sounds like the Gods may not be as passive and willdepleted
as we think, at least on the time scale of decades.