East Isles navigation

From: Nils Weinander <nilsw_at_ibm.net>
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 1998 22:24:49 +0100


Writing as appointed regional expert of the East Isles here (yes, I'm mighty proud to get this honour). So far it has been quite a learning experience. Greg has rather recently started writing stuff about eastern Glorantha and it's really cool. Things I thought I knew about the East Isles have been gregged big time, but what is forming now is bigger and better, and many ideas that were hinted at in the East Isles material in Tales #17 wil be worked into the picture one way or another.

If anyone has ideas for the East Isles and want to be in on this, mail me and tell me what you have and what you want to do. Currently my co-authors Greg F and Sandy are quite busy in the real world, so I would appreciate more people to try ideas on etc.

Now, I have a question for the Digest readers. Many East Islanders are superb sailors, with superb ships. I would assume that they have superb navigation skills as well.

Personally I don't know squat about either sailing or ancient world navigation. Does anyone have any good ideas for how the Islanders do navigate? Do they have magical compasses which always point towards Vithela? To they have charts of winds and currents (of some symbolic kind, most Islanders are illiterate)? Is it an oral tradition, memorized by rote? Do they navigate by the stars?

Some wiseguy will probably say "yes" or "all of these", but can we come up with something more specific in the end?

Finally an island you might not have known of before:

Hortalixi. The island of fruit. This is where all citrus fruit originally come from. Reportedly there are 222 different kinds of fruit grown on Hortalixi. The hortalixians say that fruit are higher form of being, semi-divine or so. If humans grow and eat fruit in a responsible fashion, their consciousness will ascend to higher levels. The major deity of Hortalixi is the sun which is worshipped as the Big Orange.



Nils Weinander | Everything is dust in the wind nilsw_at_ibm.net | http://www.geocities.com/Paris/8689/

End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #331


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