I must have been unaccountably lucky in my mountains, then. Looking at Sartar's orography, I'd say the easiest way to see most of it from 5,000ft was to walk 5,000ft up the nearest mountain. Doing much more with magic should require a _lot_ of power/skill/effort/religious merit, not just some paltry little rune spell.
> But of this amount of people, you
> find that indeed, they DID draw "panoramic maps" (i.e. what you are talking
> about) - you can find such things as far back as Homeric art.
And my point is, I don't believe that short of outright Hero Magic, flight magic is more or less _unable_ to let you do significantly better, if at all. (As someone rather facetiously pointed out, aside from the 'difficulty' of the magic, sans photography it's not the most stable of platforms to work from...)
> 2) proportion of fliers who would be doing such a thing: I have two
> arguments for this. Firstly, only in our era (where maps are everywhere)
> could it be even suggested that maps aren't that important. I think that's
> a late 20th Century mindset.
I think you'll find that I did _not_ suggest this. Inappropriate to the setting, yes; unimportant, no. Not only is the end-result inappropriate, I feel, the method 'seems wrong': one could hardly conceive of a more 'materialistic' application for _divine_ magic. Bordering on profanity, really.
> Second, Glorantha is, by every measure, a magic-RICH place. They use
> magic for practically everything.
Glorantha is a very magical place, but that's not to say it's "cheesy magical effect saturated". If someone suggested that horseless carriages powered by Mastakos rune spells were a jolly addition to the canon, based on the 'magic-rich' argument, I doubt it'd get much credence. Magic, and theistic magic in particular, has to be not just obtained, but only _used_ in manner that's congruent with myth, and with the (vagueness warning) 'feel' of religion and culture.
> But [the Orlanthi] would have very accurate maps
> of the things that were important - gross geographical features, politcal
> boundaries, roads, bridges and fords, cities, "danger areas", etc.
This just conjures up too many images that _I_ find inappropriately faux-'late 20th Century'. If magic merely acts to replace technology, what's the point of having an 'ancient', or even more to the point, a 'magical' world at all?
Until Greg starts to wear pocketless t-shirts,
Make mine mythic!
Alex.
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