Greg Stafford:
> The alien World modifiers are applied when going into one of the
> Otherworlds (Godworld, Sorcery Places, Spirit Plane and sometimes,
> Underworld).
> Those types of heroquests are quite extraordinary. Most heroquesting takes
> place in the Hero Planes (ie- the Golden Age, the Storm Age, etc.).
> Unusually powerful and dangerous quests go to one's own Godworld. [Such as
> the Orlanthi raiding to the Yelmic heaven). Some even more extraordinarily
> powerful and dangerous quests go to another Otherworld.
Put this way, it starts to make more sense to me... (Finally!, quoth FGS.) Rather than being inherent to a "place" in any obvious sense (the heroplane seems to make sense when regarded as a "place", albeit a very magical one), this implies to me that the "alien mods" are applicable to _conceptions_ of various parts of the "mythic landscape". So the different parts of the "mundane" world, or indeed of the heroplanes, can be understand in _different_ ways, by travelling to _different_ otherworlds from them. It just happens that for some places, say the far west, are overwhelmingly "best understood" by sorcerous methods, and "working" theistic myths (for example) are few and far between. (The theistic "godplane map" of the west might look like a largely blank patch with the odd dire warning, and a dirty great big link running across it corresponding to the Westfaring...) But this isn't exclusive of there being places, especially in the "centre of the world" which it's possible to conceptualise more or less equally successfully with more than one method. (The "interface areas", or whatever it was Greg called them earlier.)
> No one has ever (not even Arkat or Gbaji) been able to go directly from one
> Otherworld to another [except in the Darkness, when they were all broken
> and crammed into one indivisible mess anyway].
I think I can grok that. (The now-notorious Tentacles diagram would imply this to be impossible, certainly.) One wonders where the dragons fit into this, though...
> YGMV of course. The main reason for them to be that way now is that these,
> and some other Absolutes of the Gloranthan universe, are going to be broken
> in future HW material.
The Absolute that can be broken is not the True Absolute, glasshoppah. (Sorry, couldn't resist, especially on the author of the Nenduren myth...)
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