See, it's funny you put it that way, because I'd always had it in my mind that it's not that the world has a stiff opposition to innovations, it's just the fact that on an experimental heroquest you don't know what to expect. There are lots of nasties, lots of things that will trip you up. Just giving the correct answer to the right person (being?) is so, so important on the hero plane that if you don't have a clear plan of what to do, you have very little chance of staying on a safe path. The deeper into the hero plane you go, the more scary things get (right up to those great gods with eight masteries of skill levels)
Heroquesting according to myth (I thought) is a way of safely navigating the very scary, very dangerous heroplanes. Someone (a hero, a god) did it that way once and it worked, so everyone's been doing it that way because it works and nobody is game enough to try something different (...because the last guy that tried it didn't return/returned insane/returned as a broo/whatever).
If you do enough hero quests, you realise that the same place appears in different myths. As far as I know what Arkat initially did was start on one quest and continue on a different one when he came to that same place. Easy enough, I guess (does that make for the myth of "How Orlanth wooed Ernalda but changed his mind and quested for the Lightning Spear instead")
Harry.
Powered by hypermail