It's not so much to do with the inhabitants of the otherworld, as the practicioners of a magical method that "reaches" the world in question.
I wasn't wild about the Short World article on the web site, but from Greg's commentary at Tentacles, it makes a good deal more sense to me now. It's not so much to do with sticking up large, obvious signposts to say "THIS IS A SHORT WORLD", as the concept being, in one respect, an explanatory device for why "false" mythical paths can be magically effective. I'd go so far as to say one can take the concept as far as one likes in constructing "sufficiently powerful lies" as to be as indistinguishable from the "truth" as one wishes...
> I'm kind of wondering what happens if a mystic, say, goes
> visiting one of these 'short worlds', and converts one of the
> inhabitants to the mystic path, and said inhabitant spends years
> meditating etc.
This sounds not unlike what's already happened with the Dream World. One can rationalise it either as a short world that was mystically "connected up" to the transcendent world by Counter Force Major, or as a "lost" part of the collective otherside, which was rediscovered to have had such a connection all along...
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