gloranthan photreconnaissane

From: styopa_at_iname.com
Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 20:59:26 -0600


>From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_yeats.ucc.ie>
>Steve Lieb says, in defence of "too good" maps:
>> Of course, it may have to do with the fact that not many bronze age =
>folks
>> had the ability to fly, either. ;)
>Not _that_ many people in Glorantha have that ability, either, and I
>don't think one can fly arbitrarily high, either. Indeed, surely
>the best flyers are the Orlanthi, and on the evidence of the samples
>that started this thread, they have about the worst maps?

I think that's splitting hairs on the main point. Until the Montpelier brothers, number of humans that could fly = 0. Even if the number of people that could fly was vanishingly small - say one hundredth of one percent, that still means that close to 400 can in Maniria, and almost 1000 in Loskalm.
I think there's a radical change in viewpoint that comes from this, and it would be present if you divide these even by a factor of 10. (Remember, that actual "flight" isn't really necessary - a boosted mystic vision would allow the sage to view things from on-high from the comfort of his or her easy chair.)
Look at *most* medieval maps - they refer to things by size, and by distance, but its uncommon that you see a map that refers to things in what we would recognize as a "cartographically rigorous" fashion. (This is excepting mariners navigational maps, which were exceedingly accurante for the time. But if you want to talk about mariners, IMO, it'd be a foolish sea captain indeed that wouldn't have/hire someone who could do such a thing during a voyage. The value of such early-warning in terms of pirates, storms, shallows, monsters, etc would be almost priceless.)

Alex continues:
>> In Glorantha, any large scale merchant, ruler, or scholarly =
>institution
>> worth its salt would have a basically perfect map of at least their =
>area,
>> if not the world.
>
>I think this assumption is Boring and Uncool, for reasons similar to
>the objections raised to the idea of perfect, multiple-compass
>navigation. Glorantha with Lozengal Positioning Satellites (dwarf
>ones aside) is getting too far away from the idea of "ancient world
>as it really _should_ have been" and into "cod fantasy".

I will certainly accept the argument in regards to MGF. But that's like arguing "orange" is prettier than "blue" - it's purely subjective. I personally don't see why it would be against MGF, though - 90% of the players will already have a mental map of places better than any bronze age navigator could have hoped for. I think it actually makes things easier for the players that they can make decisions based on this knowledge, rather than "pretending" they don't have it...

For a dim American: What's a "cod fantasy"? I hesitate to visualize such thing.

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