>While Alex surely can (and will) speak for himself, we discussed much of
>this at and after Tentacles.
>
> > If I understand you correctly, you are objecting to making the scale of
> > inhabitants the Mundane, physical world more vast than two levels of
> > Mastery. Correct?
>
>Not exactly what Alex was aiming at. There is no problem with a select
>few mundane people tossing several masteries around. The objection was
>that every clan had a WWW person officiating at their services, because
>every such person would need one to three successors in training at at
>least WW or in case of casualty there could be no more worship services.
>These WW people would need a huge pool of W people to draw from, etc...
>Compare the difficulties of small nations to assemble first grade sports
>teams against huge nations or nations with a huge potential of dedicated
>practitioners, like Norway in skiing.
One of the things I get from Greg's fiction is that there are lots more of these sort of people around then was thought before.
At the risk of repeating myself forever, here is a quote from an old digest of my report from the LA con.
>For those unfamiliar with Harmastsaga, it is a full blown narrative novel
>of Glorantha, during the penultimate days of the Gbaji Wars. This is not
>anything like GROY, Entekosiad, or even KOS. It's a full blown fantasy
>novel, like you would pick up in Waldenbooks.
>
>I had never been exposed to any thing like this of Greg's before, with the
>possible exception of the narratives from Cults of Terror or Cults of Prax.
>It was a bit like listening to the work of a mutant offspring of Joseph
>Campbell and Robert E. Howard - with an emphasis on the Howard.
>
>The fragment that Greg read was that of an Heroic combat. There were
>several dangerous men, pitted separately against a prepared Hero, with all
>his Hero Powers prepared and active.
>
>This guy had the ability to incarnate an ancestor from the Godtime. In
>addition, he was under the effect of a Hero ritual which boosted his powers
>significantly, but which inflicted any wounds he took on his supporters,
>who were channelling their strength through him. On top of this, he was
>wearing artifact level arms and armour, and knew several Heroic Maneuvers
>which exploited these weapons to their fullest.
>
>Needless to say, he kicked ass.
>
>I was blown away by the reading because I had not imagined Gloranthan
>personal combat could be anything like this. Admittedly you don't meet a
>hero every day, but later on, during a bull session in a bar, one of the
>SFC guys (again, don't remember the name) asked Greg how often the average
>Gloranthan sees a combat like the one in the reading.
>
>Greg sez (nonchalantly), "Oh, about once a year."
>
>SFC guy's eyes bug out a little..., but he sez "Oh. OK."
>
>The reason why this is significant is that, because of RQ scaling, I
>believe we have a somewhat distorted view of combat in Glorantha in general.
So, you see, I don't have a problem with having lots of people with Levels of Mastery in the W to WWW range. I think that it may be the norm, for most of the History of Glorantha.
>If you want to play a character starting out in 1621 and participating
>in the big events by 1625, you will have to start out with a level of
>mastery (at least) to reach the required level. I guess this is the
>dreaded "one level bump up" problem which caused much non-discussion
>earlier...
You have no doubt seen Eric's comments on this already. Plot Points (or whatever they are called now) are not experience points. The way you get better in this game is by raiding the Hero Plane wholesale: hence the name Hero Wars. (Which you need no lesson on, of course, I just let my rhetoric get the best of me.)
>In game terms, becoming such an individual
(able to deal with Cwim-level entities)
>is counter-productive. What I
>need in my game is a _group_ able to deal with such a threat by
>cooperation. One jack-for-all-monsters is boring.
That seems to me to be primarily an issue of style. I am more concerned whether such a thing is possible or not.
>I would have thought that a level of mastery indicates just this:
>mastery of the skill or ability. Sufficient knowledge and ability to
>better non-masters 9 times out of 10, and to pass on this knowledge. In
>RQ-terms, this would be a Lhankor Mhy initiate (who needs mastery in a
>couple of knowledge skills), a Yelmalian Sun Lord, or a Wind Lord.
I don't know what the actual definition will end up being, and I am torn between some of the ideas we have all been discussing.
>Look around in your personal circles - how many people of
>international competition level in whatever they are good at do you
>know? (If the answer is ">10%", you're the member of a hero band...)
As I said before, this percentage may be higher for Joe Sartari (thanks Alex). He may know a fair amount of individual in his tribe who could qualify, through use of hero rituals of various sorts.
>Your rating for Sartar High Council seems greatly overdone to me,
>especially for people like the Wilmskirk mayor, unless you rate them for
>their obscure "talk for the ordinary people" ability (and looking at
>some of the failures in the High Council, I doubt that).
True, But I was only speaking in the most general of terms. Generally I think Eric has the right of it: it may not be possible to have an absolute conversion scale between the two games, and we might only distort our understanding of Hero Wars by trying.
DWRT
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