me:
>> I can't imagine that the Lunars would set out to drive Orlanth from the
>> Middle Air if it couldn't be done.
>
>Why not? Both mystics and politicians often find it useful to attempt the
>impossible. Besides, "can't be done" overstates the case. It's more like
>"can't be done without fundamentally altering the nature of reality in ways
>that can't be predicted, but which might possibly not result in the
>destruction of everything." Arguably not all that different from Lunar
>policies towards Chaos, Godlearner experimentation, the EWF, or the Broken
>Council's wonderful "Oh, I know, let's make a perfect god" scheme.
But each of these was destroyed, not by the "impossibility" of what they were doing, but by human error and failings. Nysalor was not destroyed because he was an evil chaotic force summoned into the world. The Bright Empire fell because the actions of Nysalor's followers (apparently) and bad behavior of certain Imperial servants and allies encouraged the formation of strong alliences against the Empire as much as the philosophical differences between the High Council and its enemies (Uz, Dragonewts, Traditionalist Orlanthi). And so on for the others. The tragedy of Glorantha is the promise of so many great ideas is squandered, not because of melodramatic wars between good and evil, law and chaos, coke and pepsi, but because people screwed up and wasted their chances. Kind of like the real world....
>If I were to pose a question about Lunar strategy, it would be why "We are
>All Us" seems to have degenerated into "We are All Us except Them". Perhaps
>the current expression of the goddess is being limited by it's expression in
>a solar context. When will the wheel turn, and the red moon make way for her
>white sister?
A very good question, indeed. Assuming that the "future history" seen in KoS is set in stone, the Lunars are doomed, but they should be doomed by their failings not some misplaced decimal point in a calculation. In some ways, the War in Dragon Pass is a testing. The Emperor always summons his Shadow. Sheng is gone but Argrath is coming, and the Empire/Emperor aren't what they were when they fought Sheng, so the test doesn't work out as well for them.
Peter Larsen
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