> > (me, Trent Smith):
> > >you've got your cause-effect relationship backwards: bronze (as
opposed to,
> > >say iron) is the metal that Gloranthans mine from the earth because
the
> > >designers wanted Glorantha to have a Bronze Age feel!
> >
> > (Simon Hibbs):
> > Which designers do you mean? Have you talked to them
> > about this?
>
> (Steve Perrin):
> Me, for one. I was still remembering some research I had done on Bronze
Age
> civilizations while in college (not to mention some of the more obscure
> fantasies of L. Sprague de Camp) and came up with the idea of using Bronze
> and trying for a Bronze Age feel. Greg went along with it. Of course, we
were
> doing a fantasy Bronze Age...
>
> > Please quote any reference in any RQ product ever
> > which says that Glorantha is a Bronze Age world.
> > One will do. It says is RQ2 that the principle
> > metal used in Glorantha is Bronze. That's not the
> > same thing. Please point out to me the Bronze Age
> > earthly parallels for the Lunar Empire, Kralorela,
> > Loskalm (which was the first part of Glorantha ever
> > written about), Seshnela, etc.
"Glorantha is a Bronze Age world" (RQ2, p.5). This reference could not be more unambiguous. Which is not to say that it is necessarily correct. For one thing, the "Glorantha" in question really consists only of Dragon Pass and Prax; the only areas which, at that time, had been detailed in-print, and the only areas with which the author of that quote (Steve Perrin, presumably) would have been familiar. Loskalm and Seshnela and Kralorela were not being considered, because they weren't known about to anyone save Greg (and perhaps some readers of Wyrm's Footnotes).
Secondly, you must consider that, as Steve Perrin says above, they were "doing a fantasy Bronze Age," which means, essentially, deliberately anachronistic, with whimsy and imagination typically taking precedent over historical authenticity. Thus, it wasn't a problem that supposedly Bronze Age cultures were more socially, philosophically, and technologically (except in metal-use) advanced than their historical-terrestrial analogues, as long as the idee-fixe of "ancient world instead of medieval cliche" remained, and they looked like cool ancient Greeks (see the cover of the RQ rulebook, those old Glorantha miniatures, or even Roger Raupp's more recent RQ3 work ("Sun County," etc)).
Sometime later, at or perhaps slightly before the creation of RQ3, there was an apparent rethink, motivated by the fact that 1) game-bronze shared more characteristics with real-world iron than real-world bronze, and 2) the scope of the game was expanding towards non-Bronze Age (not even "fantasy Bronze Age") cultures, but they couldn't use iron because that had already been defined as rare and having special characteristics (anti-magic, invented by Mostali, etc). So, we got the dubious notion of "Gloranthan bronze" as the standard metal throughout the world, regardless of supposed technological level, which begat the (to my eyes) somewhat silly notion of medieval Loskalmi knights (like the guys on the cover of G:CotHW Book 2, and p. 76 of G:IttHW) armored in gleaming bronze.
Some folks probably like the idea of distinctly non-Bronze Age cultures using a metal called "hu-metal" that looks like bronze because it's Not Like Earth, but that argument doesn't hold any more water for me here than it did in the argument over an ideogrammatic script for Western (oops, pretend I didn't mention it). If I were to have a campaign set in the West (which I never have), I wouldn't have my knights armored in bronze, because to my aesthetic sensibility that's just, well, silly (and aesthetic sensibility is what it really comes down to -- the only remaining "Bronze Age" thing about any Gloranthan culture at this point is the way its soldiers look ("Sun County" again, or G:CotHW Book 2, p. 29)). But, I wouldn't have them all in Gloranthan iron (ur-metal) either; they'd still use "hu-metal," but, for some reason, in the West it looks less red and more gray -- surely there must be a mythological explanation!
> > >Even if someone pulls forth some unpublished Staffordiana showing that
> this idea
> > >dates back to 196x, I'll still maintain that it was done to
differentiate
> > >Glorantha from run-of-the-mill fantasy of the day (Tolkein and his
> > >rip-offs).
>
> As far as RuneQuest (rather than Glorantha) is concerned, this is very
> correct.
>
> > Greg Stafford hadn't read any Tolkien untill about a decade
> > after he started working on Glorantha, so it's hard to
> > see how he could have been doing anything deliberate to
> > differentiate from it. Remember that AD&D and other Tolkien
> > ripoffs hadn't happened and the Tolkien-esque was not as
> > common a fantasy theme as it is now. If Stafford had any
> > fantasy fiction in mind when writing about Glorantha, it was
> > probably the books of Robert E. Howard and Lord Dunsany.
> > However the real inspiration for Glorantha is real world
> > religion, philosophy and myth. I'm afraid the "Compare
> > Everything to Tolkien" brigade tell us more about their own
> > preconceptions about fantasy than they do about Greg's.
>
> Now here is where my question about when Greg started working on Glorantha
> comes in. Around 1982 or 1983, the Lord of the Rings movie came out, and
Greg
> saw it and talked knowledgably about it and how it related to the books
(and
> I'm sure we talked about Tolkien before then--I just don't have as vivid a
> memory of the occasion as I do of sitting in his living room and
discussing
> the movie). Greg was about 35 at the time. Has he said he has been working
on
> Glorantha since he was, say, 22? Keep in mind that I believe his first
> stories were about a rather undifferentiated fantasy world and featured Si
r
> Ethilrist and the Black Horse troop (if I remember old stories correctly).
First off, I wasn't aware that Greg hadn't read Tolkein when he began work on Glorantha. Second, I find this at least slightly hard to swallow. After all, despite what Simon says, it was in the late 60s when Tolkein was nigh-ubiquitous in Anglo-American youth culture -- "Frodo Lives!" Furthermore, if this 'decade' between starting on Glorantha and reading Tolkein is to be taken seriously, alongside Greg's claim (G:CotHW Book 1, p. 36, G:IttHW, p.254, and elsewhere) that he "discovered" Glorantha in 1966, that puts him not having read Tolkein until c. 1976, which seems impossibly late. I mean, surely simple curiosity would've gotten the better of him before that!? Thus, while I can accept that the earliest Gloranthan work (none of which I've ever seen and most of which, frankly, I don't really care about) was done before Greg knew about Tolkein, I'll still maintain, until Greg himself tells me otherwise, that he MUST have felt Tolkein's influence well before 1976.
> > > .....Now, as Greg has gotten older and
> > >more serious about Glorantha, he's attempted to go back and make these
> > >things seem logical and "real" and integrate them into a proper
Gloranthan
> > >framework
> >
> > The seminal work on Mostali was done in 1982, and was not just invented
> > from whole cloth then. Mostali have not changed in any significant
> > respect since. To understand Mostali, it helps a lot to understand the
> > assumptions behind their psychology. The Mostali psyche corresponds
> > with the Ego in Freudian psychoanalysis. They are exclusively obsessed
> > with their place in the world and their interaction with it. Their job
> > function determines who and what they are. They have no Id and no
Superego.
> > If you think about them in that way, I think you'll find them a lot
easier
> > to understand.
> >
>
> As may be. Greg put a lot of work into making the Mostali different.
This hardly bears comment: I say the description of the Mostali is (or at least at one point was) largely satirical; Simon Hibbs says they're an example of a Freudian archetype. These are both valid conclusions that can be drawn from the available source material (but look at ESoG Book 2, p. 10, column 2, paragraph 1: that's not meant to be satirical!?), and any further argument would quickly devolve into "My opinion is better than yours!" so I won't bite.
Trent
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #780
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