>Do we know who he was or where he came from? Has anyone got any
>theories, and what is the best source for reading more? Lokarnos?
The only source is an old statement from Greg that he fell out of the future, which has never been clarified. It seems to conflict with his thinking about time travel in glorantha, so assuming the Pharaoh was an actual time traveller strikes me as unsatisfactory.
When writing up the Machine City some years ago, my idea about the Pharaoh was that the Zistorites had a time machine which enabled them not to travel to the physical future but to a projection of what glorantha would be like when the plans of the Zistorites came to fruition.
To avoid Old World contamination, exploration of the World of Tomorrow was restricted to chosen Travellers. At the time of the destruction of the Machine City, a Traveller had the sense that something was rotten in the World of Tomorrow and was exploring it to find the cause. Thus when Zistor fell and the time machine wrecked, he was trapped in the world of tomorrow and didn't return to Glorantha a couple of centuries later.
Can one reach the World of Tomorrow? If one can repair the Time Machine, yes. What's it like? While I would treat the World of Tomorrow as a short world, I'm not actually certain of what it looks like due to the fact that I used so much possible material (War of the Worlds, Frankenstein, Time Machine, The Tripod Triology, Casablanca) for places elsewhere in the Machine City.
Nick Brooke has suggested that the Pharaoh is John Carter of Mars so I'm tempted to turn the World of Tomorrow into a Zistorified Red Moon aka Barsoom.
--Peter Metcalfe
End of Glorantha Digest, Vol 11, Issue 256
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