Victor Lane:
> Concentrating magic and the different
> other worlds are aspects of Glorantha and I think dropping
> those rules would mean dropping a part of Glorantha.
Firstly I dont agree that this is the case. If I did I could probably learn to lurve the concentration rules.
There has been huge quantities of published and unpublished stuff about Glorantha over the years. But I can't recall this ever having been described as the way that magic works. As far as I am aware it's just turned up in the new rules. As such it looks to me like an attempt to putting constraints on HP spend and not an attempt to model something important about the way magic works.
I would argue that its easy to tell that concentrated magic and the three worlds theory are not how Glorantha is known to work. They are simplifications of it that satisfy a desire to categorise and define neat and tidy rules. If thery were an accurate protrayal there would not be the level of confusion that there is over what concentration *means* in terms of common magic; or over common magic cults and cults with mixed magic types etc etc.
The three worlds theory is really some sort of God Learner theory. Its not how most people *in* glorantha think. And we know its not how things actually work. Its how a few groups in Glorantha may theorise about how magic works. As such its fine. Its OK for those theorists to have convoluted explanations for how the cult of Storm Bull functions.
But its not OK to add stuff like this in to the rules as some sort of universal truth about Glorantha. The one thing that the rules should ensure if they dont want to contradict 25 years of information is that there are *no* universal truths that all Gloranthans can observe and hence must agree on.
Nor should some metaphysical structure be forced on us when there are already perfectly good reasons why people *choose* not to mix different types of magic. Think about why the average Orlanth worshipping theist does not nip off and learn a spot of Meldek Sorcery; in a minute you can have half a dozen good reasons, most of them telling us things about his relations to other people and his view of himself, and all with more interesting potential for play than some postulated metaphysical categorisation scheme.
Victor Lane:
> The magic rules in HQ are designed to represent how magic
> works in Glorantha.
An interesting thing about HQ is that it shows that you can get a good (and I think much more flexible and satisfying) sim of a setting by *explaining* how it works so that everyone at the table gets it, rather than by introducing rules to model it.
So I think that even for a Gloranthan game the whole concentrated magic thing is a double mistake.
Mike Holmes:
> I use concentration in my game
OK I'm suprised. If I had to pick one person who I was confident would have thrown it out it would have been you.
The example you give is of out-of-game player musing over how to best spend his metagame currency. If considerations about magic types etc were simply handled in-character he would be concentrating more on questions of his relationships to the sources of his magic, what others would think, etc.
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