MOB
>and mate, it's particularly galling when:
>a. the material you worked on "like crazy" was created in collaboration
>with Greg, and published, presumably with his approval (albeit in mere
">fan" sources, for want of any official product line at the time);
I can see why this would be galling. Yes. I accept that you are pissed but there is little I can do about that other than to write it the way you wish it written, and then other people will be pissed.
>b. the material you worked on gained wide acceptance amongst the Gloranthan
>readership, found its way into people's own gaming and writing and
>generally added to everyone's MGF enjoyment of Glorantha;
Yes, but it doesn't mean if can't be changed or disagreed with.
>c. the replacement material on the face of it doesn't seem to be anywhere
>near as interesting and looks suspiciously like change for change's sake;
and,
Not the case IMO.
>d. one of the original authors even seems to deny there was a previous
>version.
Ask Greg yourself, I can only repeat what I heard, with my own subjective ear. Perhaps he has an opinion on it you could change?
>What we publish becomes canon.
>I'm sure the screenwriters of "Highlander 2" thought this too.
And so did the writers of some Gloranthan fan stuff. This is what I'm getting at. Do you think it hasn't occured to me that I might be retconned a few years from now? Of course it has. This is implicitly understood when you write for Glorantha, or at least I would have thought it would be. When joining an evolutionary process you can't simply expect it to stay static and not change anything of the past.
>What is canon is widely believed by most gamers to be "true" and given that
>"truth" it makes it rather hard for those who disagree with the canon to be
>in the same ball park of arguing as those who agree with canon.
>Yet it states in "Strangers in Prax" that Glorantha has no horizon, yet we
>ardent Gloranthaphiles know this isn't true.
But if all you had to go on was SiP, you would thing it was true and would fight furiously for the previosuly written word because its written and why change it?
>Stafford hamfistedly tried to retcon the Yelmalio cult out of existence, but
thanks to >work of Nick etc to clean up Greg's nasty mess on the floor, the
good folk of the >Sun Dome seem more real to me than the latest list of
incomprehensible names in
>tomes like GRoY, FS or whatever.
Greg is still working on the whole Yelmalio thing. Naturally the Sun Dome seems more real to you than the Emperors list in FS, cos _you_ wrote it, loved it and cherished it (I was going to say "named it George" but unless you were a Marvin the Martian fan, you wouldn't get that)
>Anyway, I prefer the term GAG
>("Generally-Accepted-Glorantha") to "canon": one of the things that
>originally attracted me to RQ/Glorantha was that unlike AD&D, it wasn't
>prescriptive and dogmatic.
But you seem to be prescriptive and dogmatic about change yourself. Change that affects work you were linked to. Its not as if I'm arguing with anything published by Chaosium, AH or Issaries.
>This is the double edged sword of publishing in Glorantha.
>I see the double-edged-sword as the fact that fan-publishing kept Glorantha
>going for much of the past decade while its erstwhile owners were too
>feckless to bring out anything of their own,
Feckless? Ouch. Not fair on Gregs efforts really.
>and now that it seems they
j>ust about might be up to it, a lot of good material
You say this as if it were a "truth", that the material was "good" and that is it. I think some of the material was awesome, some was not. Likewise people will say many things about my own work. You liked some of my writing, but not others. Some people love Onslaught and write to me asking for more, others hate the character to the bottom of their being. The only truth i see here is one of taste and subjective beliefs.
>is being unceremoniously binned, dismissed as mere "fan speculation", or
(worst >of all) possibly even being worked into new stuff without
recognition of its
>provenance.
Anything where others have helped in the writing of SGU will be mentioned and the authors thanked in the intro section.
>We ALL want more product, we just don't want product that interferes or
>contradicts OUR view of the way things are.
>Correct. So I wonder why you (and presumably Greg) are going out of your
>way to completely fuck around with what has been accepted as GAG by the
>very same people I assume you want to buy HW?
No-one is going out of our way to do it. I'm going out of my _way_ to give you and anyone else who wants to take a shot to debate the issue through with me. Thats my job as expert and author.
You see a great conspiracy to flatten your work when there isn't one. Its called points of view and we all have them and I happen to disagree with some of your and you mine. How normal.
If I think it is okay for you and any other player to bin my work for their own game and view, why do you find it so hard to accept that I can do the same for your work yet have no malice or "beastliness of forethought" attached?
Did i not describe only the other day the great gameplay that I got out of the Coders? Do you really think I dislike your work, which is truly excellent stuff and well concieved? I think you are mistaking my view on this.
>Or are current Glorantha
>fans considered to be such a piddling minority of the vast multitudes of
>potential HW purchasers that we don't matter?
Nope, they are the core audience, but like the Elmal debate, people get angry, debate, agree, disagree etc and life goes on. Gloranthahiles both love Glorantha enough to stay with it through the pain of evolution and are sensible enough to bin what they don't like.
>I know fine well that some people will read my stuff and say "hey cool"
while
>others will wish to insert an ice pick in my head, rather like your
namesake.
> Again, this is inevitable.
>Interesting, because in the all the years I've been writing Gloranthan
>material, involved with TotRM, helping develop the LARPS, and in my own
>small way, *helping keep Glorantha alive*, no one has ever reacted to my
>work - or that of my colleagues either - in such a violent fashion. Until
>now, it seems...
Well seeing that you respond to a post I directed to Ttrotsky, I assume you failed to see the joke that he undoubtedly got or are deliberately taking it out of context to make some kind of point. I'm not sure what it is you were trying to say here.
I supsect that you think that because I'm disagreeing with you, I'm being "violent"? Is that right?
Martin Laurie
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