Greg:
> Defiant entities are exceptions to many rules, of course. So perhaps my
> 100% was overstated. I'd have to see a whole list of the defiant entities.
Surely that's, you'd have to write it, so _we_ could see it! Is there some useful characterisation you can make about who the "defiants" are? Is defiant a category of exception to such rules, or essentially a synonym for any possible such exception? For example, if someone got a brainwave and wrote up some minor otherworld entity, and decided (just for yucks, or some deep reason) that it should be "defiant" is there some rule of thumb we might use to judge whether this was on the right lines or not?
> But off-hand, I cannot think of one that has the power to go from one
> Otherworld directly to the other.
The "100% never directly" makes sense, yes, I was just compelled to poke at the "only via the mundane world" part.
> >And isn't
> >it possible, if one had the correct knowledge, to go from the God
> >World, to the Eternal Battle (say), and thence to the Spirit World?
> The Eternal Battle is one of those Shared Place, the equivalent of going
> through the Middle world.
> Same for the Underworld.
OK, that's a fairly large set of exceptions, though granted not of any interest or use to the "normal" worshipper or magician. What about draconics? Are they in some sense in more than world, or in a Shared Place that's not strictly in any of them, or...? (I appreciate that this isn't necessarily going to be a clarifying example so much as a further-befuddling one.)
On the comment that the Heroplanes are "like" the mundane world: firstly this is _really, really_ confusing terminology, though I admit I might just be being a bit of a RQ2/3 hag here. Meself I prefer to think of these simply as "Mythic Ages". "Heroplane" still conjures up to me images of the Sky World, etc (perhaps better called the Outer World), places that are inhabitted my "Hero Scale" entities. (Maybe back in the Golden Age all warriors were Heroically Good, say, but we have considerable evidence that this was not so in the Dawn Age, for example...)
Is it true to say, then: there is the otherworld(s), which are "more or less" eternal and unchanging. (I hedge here: is Orlanth's Hall 'created' in the Storm Age? Or is that simply when it's "discovered", i.e. a connection from the "mundane world" of the day to that part of the otherworld is discovered.) The mundane worlds are entirely mutable. Now, what about the Outer Worlds of the Mythic Ages? (What I'm struggling not to call "the heroplane of the heroplane...") Presumably if I go to the Sky World of the Storm Age it's _not_ unchanged from that of "today", but equally I'd expect it to be both less changed, and more "subjective" than the mundane worlds of those Ages. So are such places in the Otherworlds per se, or not? Are they "somewhat" in them?
It seems to be that some quests must involve _all_ of the above. For example (once again) Orlanth's LBQ. This starts in the "mundane world" of the Storm Age (O. being more "personified" in them days...), heads into the Outer World of that Age, then ends up in both the God World and the Underworld. Or is that an even more confusing way of looking at it?
Cheers,
Alex.
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