> If you are looking for griffin mountain you have to
> cover a lot of territory, and there are huge forests
> to get in your way, large hilly regions to cross,
> rivers to ford, and then the harder task of figuring
> out if that mountain you see in the distance is a single
> mountain on it's own, or a spur off of a mountain range.
>
> Sending a sylph straight up for five minutes carrying
> someone with Farsee made a lot of this much clearer.
You could do that ... but there isn't a great deal of Air/Storm worship happening around the Balazaring area. Far more likely to send an awakened Vrok Hawk with a good memory along to scout out, or -- better still -- a Hawk Rider from Dykene. (IMG there's also a small Hawk Nest at the YO Temple in Elkoi, too, but they're closing down operations in the face of Lunar opposition. Spying and all that.)
> Some people are arguing that it is heretical to use
> a sylph this way. Why?
'Cos the Yelmalions might just take exception to someone mucking around in their territory, not using their officially sanctioned methods. Might just send up one of their own to check out the intruder in their Sky.
The Lunies could well wonder about these spies too. After all, they have to put up with the Hawk Riders for the time being, but sylph-riding sounds like Orlanthi stuff, and right now they're ripping down Whitewall, to make a point about _that_ particularly meddlesome Deity...
> Jeff Richard also argued that Orlanthi are the only flying people.
> While I'm sure most Orlanthi believe that, the hawk riders of
> Dykene, the wyvern and moon boat riders of the lunar empire,
> the sorcerers of the west, the imminent masters of the east would
> all disagree (well, maybe not the imminent masters, they would
> claim that they are not people, they are dragons).
And the Uz Beetle-Bombing Brigade might have opinions on the subject, too! I suppose Jeff's probably making the distinction between people flying, and _flying_people_.
One final point: particularly in Balazar and the Elder Wilds, literacy isn't exactly endemic. Map-reading's part of literacy, to a fair degree. You need to be cognizant of the use of representative symbology, and -- unless there's a common mapping system -- one person's symbology's going to differ from another's. So even if someone else did draw you a map, your own chances of making sense of it are not great. After all, how often do _you_, a player character who rarely leaves their stead for more than half a day's trot, get to see a plan view of Balazar?
In Balazar, maps are for nobles and religious zealots. Most other people wouldn't understand a map to _be_ a map if they were shown it and given time to study it, and of course exact scale is a fiction. A LM or IO Sage -- or a YO Hawk Rider -- would both know what it was and have a pretty good chance of interpreting it; most others would be stumped, unless you could take them aloft and show them what it's supposed to mean.
Jon
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End of The Glorantha Digest V6 #425
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