> Ok, but the gods aren't stupid... they must know there are other
> deities
> around.
Well, actually no they don't, not in the absolute sense anyway.
Check out the HeroQuest Challenge rules, which will most likely be in HQ:RiG, and discussion of the mechanism on the web, and think out the philosophical and cosmographical implications of them.
Telling Yoghurt God A about Yoghurt God B eventually leads to an identity challenge, where the yoghurt itself finally decides which of the two is the "real" yoghurt god, and banishing the other into non-existence.
In absolute, anyway.
Of course, telling Yoghurt God A about Pancake Goddess C would have different results, but generally speaking cross-pantheon communications lead to turmoil and trouble.
> Nonetheless, what I am hearing is that the gods each live in
> their own plane of existence and don't really have a mechanism for
> communicating across those planes, yes?
The mechanism of that communication is called the Gods War.
> Andrew:
> > Of course, there are other ways to make a god. If you're a boy god
> and
> you
> > know a friendly goddess, you can always make new gods the
> old-fashioned
> > way.
> > But as I understand it, no gods who participated in the Great
> Compromise
> > will do this (since this would require the gods to change)... but
> perhaps
> > chaos gods still do this?
>
> Wait, could they still do this? Or would it break the Compromise?
Yes they can, no it wouldn't. This is IMO an exception to the rules of the Compromise, because the new godling would be bound to the Compromise by virtue of his conception, gestation, and birth inside it. From an Inner World POV, the new godling wouldn't actually appear to suddenly come into existence, but the magicians would "discover" the story about his parents having it off, search for him, and find him cuddled up in his own cosy little corner of the Compromise, and conclude that he "always existed, we'd just never heard about him before".
Gods do the old-fashioned thing outside the bounds and limitations of Cosmos and Time : this is because the basic, cosmogenetic forces of Creation, Creator, whatever are not, cannot be subjected to those limitations.
What the Seven Mothers did was something different (because DX cocked-up, basically, but that's still NDA-fodder, isn't it?).
The creators of Nysalor/Gbaji DID break the Compromise though, because they created this god _within_ the bounds of Cosmos and Time and in opposition to the bounds and limitations of these things.
And now I have a headache. Thank you. ;-)
> > The relationship of the gods with the Inner World
> > is a highly complex process (NOT static) that cannot be
> > accurately described using the binary functions of normal
> > Western logic.
> >
> > Although Greg has on occasion given it a pretty good shot ... ;-)
>
> Well, forgive me for being OOC for a sec, but given we are talking
> about
> an invented mythology here, and everyone involved in the creation is
> still alive, there should be some clear answers available.
Greg's clear answer on these issues is that they are ineffable.
This is of course a poetic decision, but what is important here is the matrix of oppositions, and not any so-called key to unravel them. Reading Saint Augustine, Montaigne, and many Renaissance authors can be helpful here, to understand the limitations of western logic, from a western point of view.
Julian Lord
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