Well, that completely negates the surprise aspect, which is Carl's whole point.
[...]
> So if the worshipper fears that Humath is the lord of death,
> then it is a possibility that he might discover. However, given that fear,
> that worshipper would not go HQing and discover that Humath was the queen
> of the mermaids.
Why not? Perhaps in my Glorantha Humath *is* drag queen of the mermaids, slumming it from his day job at the morgue.
Or is your point that (given that fear) the worshipper is not going to do such a deep HQ and possibly find out an unwelcome truth (which he fears) or a surprising truth (which would be neat!). unwelcome.NE.surprising
> Further, some Humathi could conceivable go into HQing and
> meet the same old Humath who has always been there, the primal storm god,
> one of Orlanth's kin, who is unaware that death even exists.
Well obviously, and Carl's scheme obviously allows it. Why obviously? Because the main point of many HQs is the transformation of the god; i.e. you HQ back to how the god was *before transformation* and go through the transformation story.
> HQ is the personal experience of a cultural pattern.
Strangely enough, this does not seem to be the view of pre-modern people. Nor do I particularly like turning magical experiences into post-modern anthropology.
> [It is not reliving history/time travel]
It seems to me that many people [e.g. early Greg, late Greg] have widely differing ideas of what the HeroPlane is, and what HQing is. Though reliving history would not be my choice of what HQing really is.
> HQ reveals deeply relevant truth that has been obscured by metaphor.
Well maybe; this seems to be what modern people might think about HQing in the real world - but unlikely to be what ancient world people thought.
IMO, ancient world people are more likely to have fallen into the "objective trap" - the trap of thinking that there is some objective reality behind the HeroPlane and that they are interacting with real entities, even though their experience of it is necessarily subjective.
Of course, that is not answering the question of what the HP actually is; and the answer to this is something which I think is fun to have varying from one campaign to another. [In my RQ campaign - which ok, is not set in Glorantha - there is not a single HP but many, and the nature of the "objective" HP's differ].
Anyway, I find it more fun to run/play in a world where the HP is more than just a projection of the "mundane" sphere - even though the players may not know just exactly what it is. I understand that other people have other tastes.
Frankly, I find the idea that the important part of HQing (or indeed the entirety of HQing, if I understand the more extreme subjectivist positions - which I undoubtably don't!) is the personal transformation of the Hero (possibly with supporting cast), to be rather mundane. Certainly I would not have invented such a grandiose term as HeroQuest for such an everyday thing. OrdinaryQuest perhaps. I mean, we (ordinary humans) do all that in the RW all the time anyway and we (roleplayers) did exaggerated versions in our RP games already.
>[Does Tolat call himself Shargash?]
I don't really see the problem - don't universal translators handle name shifts? And perhaps the ultimate nature of Tolat is well-hidden; it might take a seriously heavy HQer to penetrate the god's disguises. [And once you get down to such seriously heavy HQing, the question seems to arise as to whether the HQ is itself affecting mythreality.]
Cheers,
- --
...........................Malcolm Cohen, NAG Ltd., Oxford, U.K.
(malcolm_at_nag.co.uk)
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End of Glorantha Digest V4 #556
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