Hmm, that's a point. ANyway, I think the Sea of Fog is a natural place for pirates to flock to. Easy to hide in, difficult for punitive expeditions to search efficiently. IMO, the Mokato empire effectively cleared the eastern seas outside the Se of Fog from pirates. I suggest that the tradition for the pirates to go there en masse started at that time.
> Well, it's clearly possible, but it leads By Inspection to the next
> conundrum, that is, is it valuable from a Determination of Canonical
> Glorantha PoV, or indeed from a Working Assumption for the Next Ten
> Minutes of my Game (a much more marginal case, I admit) to 'decide'
> an objective truth which is superior to that of Gloranthans, in some
> sense.
I think an objective truth (or something resembling it) can be useful when it comes to drawing conclusions on a matter you haven't thought too closely on before. If everything is shifting and undecided, it is hard to be consistent on the fly. Mind you, this "objective truth" need not be shared by other GMs (if we are talking about actual gaming situations).
The situation where the need for absolutes arise is probably fairly esoteric though. My personal preference for objectivity at some level stems from too many years of systems development. The holy grail of a perfectly contained, consistent an complete model makes you accept the fact that implementation will always deviate...
> > 1. Simply defing that entity A and entity B _are_ the same
> > behind all masks.
>
> Sure, but how does this inform us about Glorantha prgamatically,
> is this equation isn't something that's evident to Gloranthans
> themsleves? (In other words, Level III vs Level Iv, to put in those
> dread terms.)
This I think is immediately useful. If we decide that A and B are indeed the same and we know a lot about A but only a little about B (on the practical level), we can make an informed opinion about B from that equivalence.
> > 2. "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and tastes
> > like a duck it most likely is a duck."
>
> Gloranthans are notoriously tetchy about which Aspects of Duckness
> are the most pertinent to consider. Does Orlanth quack like
> Shargash, or not? One could argue such things either way.
Indeed. In thi particular case, I'd say they don't quack very similarly at all.
> > 3. Entiy A shares aspect X and aspect Y with entity B, but
> > not aspect Z. That makes them quite similar. With proper
> > definitions of entity and aspect of course.
>
> Similar is a term that I'm less likely to want to (or to be
> able to) poke holes in.
OK, "equal to 66.666...%" then :-)
> I don't say one should thow them out, I just think one should
> be wary of making identifications unwarily, or without saying on
> what basis one does so.
A wise admonition.
> I feel compelled to add that while this is something Nils and I
> seem to differ philosophically on, I've yet to find an instance
> where it leads us to think very different things about Glorantha.
Probably because I take some silly armchair historian position, which has no effect at all on how I see the perception of the inhabitants on Glorantha...
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