What is Glorantha Like?

From: John Hughes <nysalor_at_...>
Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 12:48:34 -0800

My own (admittedly idiosyncratic) approach has always been to see Glorantha, and particularly Sartar, as a more concentrated form of our own world - brighter colours, deeper shadows, stronger winds, colder colds, wetter waters.
It is somehow more alive - there are generally more creatures per square km, birds flock overhead by the thousands, trees can grow to enormous heights, powers and spirits sport and play all about.

I also play that growing devotion to the gods opens one's eyes to the power and beauty of the world around you. Most Orlanthi can 'see' the colours and textures of the different winds, can glimpse the shapes of the cloud creatures of the air and perceive the shy curious powers of the woods and waste.

Devotees spend a great deal of their time learning and living myths, first by word, then by vision, then by ritual, then by quest until their conscious lives are often literally 'within a myth'. More and more, they live within two worlds, and the worlds sometimes become as one - a rare glimpse of tremendous power, beauty and terror. They can also glimpse 'auras', sense the deities attached to a person, feel the after-effects of magic upon an item.

A powerful hero might walk across a landscape and see revealed within it the timeless forms of the godplane - the eternal powers, terrors and forms behind the mundane manifestations. A part of their consciousness *is* the deity - wrought by rote learning, visualisation, and by the infusing of the deities power in heroquest. The rituals they have learned pervade every aspect of their life and consciousness. And their world is transformed.

John

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nysalor_at_...                              John Hughes

Questlines: http://home.iprimus.com.au/pipnjim/questlines/

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
(Sign above the entrance to Loud Lilinas, New Pavis)