Re: Re: Heroes and Gods

From: Peter Metcalfe <metcalph_at_...>
Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 21:18:22 +1200


Gan Gero wrote:

>Thanks Peter and Jamie, but I stress, here, the Malkioni Otherworld:
>it is dead, full of concepts and essences and no living spiritual
>being. No angels, no cherubins, no spirits of the dead, just Node-
>saints.

There are angels and dead people in the Malkioni otherworld, it just hasn't been described like that of the Storm Realm.

For "angels", there is Yingar the Messenger who brings words of import from Malkion to Mankind (he is however a grandson of Malkion). For the dead people, well, there's Solace. There are also unicorns and eskavals floating around the place.

What follows is really my speculation:

My conception of the spell planes is that most of the time, visiting them is not consciously viewed as travelling to the Otherworld. A Malkioni might go to church and pray for a while before going through the portal (atheistic Malkioni might have recite the spell to persuade the University Scouts to unlock the gate).

The adept plane is pretty much like glorantha except that it's more magical and impressive. Unicorns frolic through enchanted grottos while in the white-walled cities, holy men recite prayers in magnificent churches while wizards study spells amidst sprawling tome-cluttered libraries. There also some elements of ordinary life on the adept plane: bakeries, farms, markets. etc. Mundane visitors to the Adept Plane normally don't bother with these as there's no spells to be learned by chatting to ordinary people.

If you are especially holy, learned (for sorcerers) or pious and obedient (for ordinary people), you might purify your mortal body such that you can live in the adept plane without harm. This is where most of the inhabitants of the Adept Plane come from as the original inhabitants have died out (inhabitants live a long time there but most of them aren't immortal). This explains why it's so difficult to find Sog City lecturers if you really need to talk to them...

The Saint's Plane is even more magical and fantastic. Instead of unicorns, there are monocerouses etc. It's also rather abstracted. Brithos probably lies wholly on this plane. I suppose an inhabitant of the adept plane could purify himself to live on the Saint Plane but it would be a long slow process and Saints that were mortal Malkioni far outnumber them.

Unlike the Gods Plane, there isn't really any element of time travel (unless one visits the Brithini lands). The fashions of the mortal world will be recognizable in the Adept Plane, while contemporary politics and battle occupy the minds of many ordinary folk there.

Adept planars might recognize themselves as being part of the local kingdom and sometimes take actions to aid their mortal kin (if an enemy army razes the city, they might house refugees there until it's safe to go out again). But religious identifications are more important (and even more so in the Saint's Plane). If a node happens to be shared by two or more sects (like Dormal being shared between the Loskalmi and the Quinpolic League), then the node would be quartered into rival factions who hold interminable religious disputations about the merits of each faith. Sometimes fighting might break out but it's recognized as a very bad thing (IMO the last time a war waged across the adept plane was when the God Learners fell...)

>This is not StThomas, this is Plato!

Dante's "Paradiso" is similarly dry (although I did want an Aristolean planet-plane relationship for the Rokari).

>The process of santification, in Malkioni, is a matter of personal
>growth, like in Buddhism, not a matter of "vocation" or
>of "obedience" or of "heroic adherence to the rule" or of "Extreme
>love".

One can become a Malkioni saint through vocation (many of the guilds are headed by Saints) and all the other things that you mention IMO.

--Peter Metcalfe

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