>The time this seemed to work best was when the party were
>following a magic road, and found themselves in a strange
>place with a thick poisonous yellow atmosphere.
>After several clues the players realised that they were
>in Sherlock Holmes' London in the middle of a London Particular
>(smog). They were good enough role-players that their characters
>continued to assume they were in some chaos-tainted area.
I'm sure they enjoyed it, but from the point of view of general gaming in Glorantha this raises a few questions in that campaign. If the players can wander into other worlds and back again, can anyone lese? If not, why not? Why hasn't it happened before? Does this version of Old London have a resident population of lost Gloranthans who have made it their home?
Also, why did the players assume the place was chaos tainted? There are plenty of strange, unusual and dangerously alien places in Glorantha that are nothing to do with chaos.
Personaly I've no axe to grind on this. I've played Gloranthan crossover games too and enjoyed them. I have come to feel though that they mainly serve to remind me that the game I'm playing is not real, that the character I'm running is an arifical construct. This I think leads to a less satisfactory roleplaying experience. If the character I'm playing can't reasonably be expected to believe in the world he or she lives in, then I think that spoils my own suspension of disbelief.
Alexandre Lanciani :
> I think that, for MGF, Glorantha should be closed or its delicate
>equilibrium of myths, history and facts could be shattered and its rich
>background could be diluted.
> But I also think that, if I were playing an Elric or Hawkmoon
>campaign, one of the first outer dimensional places the characters would
>visit would be Glorantha.
That strikes me as reasonable. The Eternal Champion series supposes a myriad of worlds, one of which might quite reasonably resemble Glorantha. Likewise among the Shadow Worlds of Amber there may be many shadows that resemble Glorantha to various extents. The thing is that these multiverses do have common magical and metaphysical laws that apply to all shadows and spheres and these laws are not the same as Glorantha's. These worlds can only resemble Glorantha, they cannot _be_ it.
I once worked on a description of a Glorantha like Amber Shadow, close to the courts of chaos. I assumed that the rune analogues were fragments of broken pattern and that Arachne Solara's web was a partial pattern somewhere in the underworld. Heroquesting was a limited form of shadow walking mastered by those who had imprinted parts of the Rune Pattern. This would make quite an entertaining trap shadow created by an accomplished pattern master, but ultimately I'm not entirely satisfied with it. I might use it in a game where the players were unfamiliar with Glorantha, to borrow some local colour.
Simon Hibbs
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