>From: Greg Stafford <Greg_at_...>
>
>I want to make it clear: the form is the same for theist, shamanic or
>sorcerous
>quests. The whole preparation, crossing over, "stations" with their
>HeroQuest
>moment, return and then mundane consequences work for all three.
And there's only one set of rules to cover all of this, so it's pretty clear how these things work structurally. I'm really only concerned with content and aesthetics here. What's in the stations?
> > I'll simply ask directly, what do these wizardry myths contain,
>typically? I
> > know that's a gross question, but are there no typical myths?
>
>I am at a loss about what a *typical* theistic heroquest might be!
Well, for one, the acts are performed by gods or heroes, not spirits or shamans. But apparently that's not very important...
>It seems you are making this harder than it needs to be.
>These holy people have to solve the same problems that gods have to solve:
>hunger, blight, infertility, enemy invasion, drought, alien entities,
>flood,
>etc. etc.
>
>Their resolutions would be much the same: find a solution and perform it.
>They method of magic used is different, but that does not appreciably
>alter the way the problem is solved.
So, if I'm understanding correctly, myths are largely the same between the three major forms of magic? Or the differences aren't important enough to worry about?
To put it somewhat like Bryan did, when I'm looking for inspiration for theistic myths (and what might be in stations of heroquests that represent them), I look at real world theistic societies like the Norse, Greeks, Chineese or Egyptians. When I'm looking for inspiration on what sort of elements to put into animist myths, I look to the myths of Earth's animist cultures of which I'm admittedly less familiar, but which nevertheless still gives me certain ideas.
So my thought was to look at western monotheistic myths to figure out what a wizardry myth might be like. The myths that occur to me are things like Archangel Michael tosses Lucifer, St. George Slays the Dragon, The Holy Grail, the myth of the Golem, etc. I find that though, yes, the quests of all of these forms involve the same human issues (as Prof. Campbell would point out avidly), there is still an aesthetic that's unique to each, and even themes that tend to be more prominent in one than the other.
For instance, at a symposium I was at during last GenCon, John Wick spoke about a major thematic divide between Western myth post dark-ages, vs theistic and Eastern myths. His point was that, largely outside of Western myth, the themes of the stories are that if you step out of the natural order of things, that you get stomped on. Hubris, to use the Greek term for it. In these later Western myths, starting with Arthur and such, there's the "rugged individualism" ideal often that says that one has to make his own way. The point of Percival's tale being, for instance, that only by making up a new rule does one succeed (he speaks in Seige Perilous to obtain the grail).
Now, you may correct me on this, and maybe Wick was inorrect in his point, I don't know. I'm certainly no expert. But that's quite the problem. As I'm not an expert, I need easily accessible forms of inspiration to be able to create my own myths, and I assume most players do as well. I don't know that there are enough Gloranthan myths enumerated to give an idea of the sorts of themes and such that are appropriate to each. Maybe there are, but frankly I don't have time to learn them all. It would be much easier to make up my own myths as I need them using my already reasonable level of understanding of Earth myths. Reasonable here meaning "enough to create more entertaining myths for play from."
So is my method somehow fatally flawed? Basically what I've been saying all along is, "Use what you know of Western Earth myths to make up similar stuff to represent Wizardry HQs in play" as a solution to the problem of the narrator in question looking for inspriation. I'm not seeing what you're intending to suggest with your responses.
If it's just that all Gloranthan HQs are more or less just like any other Gloranthan HQ, and one shouldn't worry about aesthetic differences to the myths and such...well, OK. But I still like my solution better. That is, I like having some different feels to the sorts of quests that occur based on different myths of the diffferent sorts of magic.
Is this just a case of my Glorantha varying from the norm here? Or, in fact, are there things we can say about Gloranthan wizardry mythology.
>Powerful beings who have discovered (one might say invented, though
>incorectly
>since they pre-exist on the Sorcerous Plane) how to access magic from a
>node
>would have left a path to do the same thing that can be followed to gain a
>similiar magic. So, yes, those could be repeated into the Planes.
OK, at the risk of sounding argumentative, I'm going to try to explain my POV. You frequently talk about the characters who are from Glorantha not knowing things the players do as they are informed by the rules, since they are not aware of these things, the rules being for the players to play the game. Oddly I get accused of assuming that the characters do know what the players know, when, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I personally don't even buy at all into the idea that the rules do anything to define Glorantha, for me they simply exist to tell real players who gets to say what in play.
That said, the labels on the mechanics aren't that interesting to me. If the heroquest mechanics can be used to run a game in which a trip to the spirit world is done to "charge something up" or something, then what's labeled as the heroquest rules seem to me to be the "what sometimes happens in otherworlds" mechanic. Yeah, I understand that a Gloranthan won't use the term heroquest for anything other than trips to the hero plane (if they even do that). I understand what you're saying about what the Gloranthan thinks. It's just that I was thinking in terms of how to use the mechanics of the game.
That is, I think a lot of the terminological discussion here about terms like stationary quest, ritual, ceremony, hero quest, god quest, vision quest, whatever, all can be cut away by saying this: The people of the world will use whatever language they have to describe what's going on. There are several sets of mechanics provided in the game Hero Quest that can handle working through them. Use the ritual magic modifiers to add to the possibility of success for single rolls when taking extra effort to ensure magic works. Use the comminity support rules to figure out the bonuses for a community helping out. Use the heroquest station procedure to emulate going to another world for some benefit. Use the heroquest challenge mechanic to determine what a character (or community) gets from a risk taken.
Well, at least that's what works for me. And works well. The hard part, to me, is figuring out what to put in the myths.
Mike
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