And to summarise the rest of your post, if I understand it, you'd like to do the same in Glorantha.
> Which book or two (any system, but preferably one available at less
> than fifty dollars on Amazon or eBay) will teach me most
> about the God
> Learners and what and how they are studying (*gods*, apparently)?
Not an easy question. To start with, in the "now" of Heroquest Glorantha, what the Godlearners are doing is being dead. They died out due to sideeffects from their Godlearning some time ago, and no-one knows what their Secret was. Mongoose, however, are publishing Glorantha as it was back in the Second Age, when the Godlearners were at the height of their powers.
That doesn't mean you couldn't be the one who rediscovered the Godlearner Secret in the Third Age, of course.
What the Godlearners did, though, wasn't so much trying to become Gods as studying the existing ones and trying to change them and their myths. Swapping the places of two different Earth Goddesses, for instance. You're new to Glorantha, so I'm not sure if you understand the concept of "Heroquesting" - basically, you go on to the Other Side, the Heroplane (available at several levels of mythicality/mundaness) and repeat the myths of your god so as to get new skills. Sort of like a roleplayer pretending to be a warrior so as to get XP..... normally, one rule of Heroquesting (and roleplaying) is that you can't bring back actual material objects to the real world. The GLs could, somehow. You can't make permanent changes to myths. The GLs could, somehow. Think of them as system-editing the universe, right up to the point where they cut the wrong wire, hacked the wrong bit of code, and got wiped out. There's probably a Matrix analogy I should be using, too.
I'll leave, for the moment, the question of which book you should read about the Godlearners, because in order to achieve your aims, I don't think the Godlearners are necessarily the best way for you to go. They did not become gods, that was never their aim.
There is a culture in Glorantha that explicitly says that its citizens can, and where possible should, raise themselves up to demi-god level. Several of them have done so, and are now major deities in that culture. Take a look at the Lunars. I am no expert on Lunars, but they seem to me to be designed to do exactly what you want.
Powered by hypermail