> Last Saturday, in Sandy Petersen's RQ campaign, we finally located a ship for
> some stranded Outer Atomic Explorers, which enabled them to return to the Void
> beyond the world (long story, mostly weird and confusing) . . .
Just out of curiosity, was this at all inspired by my years-ago posting about an Outer Atomic Explorer-based scenario? Sandy commented positively on it at the time.
I don't remember the Ban being timeless: those inside of it certainly remember years of imprisonment, after all, except for Rathori who slept.
As long as I'm making my annual posting: a while back I asked what would be seen, if a Zzaburite, an Orlanthi, and a shaman flew through the Middle Air together to look at the sun from close range. Presumably the Zzaburite would expect to see some natural source of light and heat (perhaps controlled by the sorceror Ehilm), the Orlanthi would expect to see the Evil Emperor, Yelm, bound to his path, and the shaman some kind of sky spirit.
The answer I got was that the *strongest belief* would determine what was seen -- that is, if this experiment was repeated, what was seen would totally depend on the mental force, the will, of the respective priest, shaman, and sorceror.
Now I see Peter commenting that Orlanth is always seen as a human male because he "is" that. Couldn't strongly-believing followers (by the Berkeleyan argument given previously) simply force Orlanth to become a female cow or whatever? Or does the belief-makes-it-so effect not apply in this case? Or is Orlanth qua Orlanth at least somewhat defined, but not necessarily the "real" storm god? Or what?
I mean, a while back someone (MOB?) posted that Shargash was in some sense also Orlanth -- but Shargash is a deathgod who lives in the Underworld, right? He's more like Humakt than Orlanth. Then again, another theory bruited about here has been that originally Humakt *was* Orlanth before Arkat artificially split the single religion in two, but how could he do that if Orlanth "is" anything fixed?
So it's weird to me.
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Carl Fink carlf_at_dm.net Science and Technology Programming, I-Con XXI Stony Brook, New York www.iconsf.org ------------------------------
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