RE: What world-building lessons have you learned from Glorantha?

From: David Cake <dave_at_Zphgr_XEzu-Zo6_2wCR3FSxXHGFML3ee2OL0IlMjPHLrRYjGzCOOuBzIjevcurAh3XkhAZY>
Date: Thu, 9 Jun 2011 01:11:57 +0800


At 5:55 PM +1000 7/6/11, John Hughes wrote:
>
>Which leads to
>
>
> 2a. Cut away the failures.
>
>Thirty five years. What works? Sartar works. Prax works, kinda,
>though its been ignored of late and a sense of the ludicrous is
>essential for sustained interaction. The Lunar Empire works, though
>we still don't have a decent vision of daily life. The West could
>work, if people would only stop stuffing Trotsky around and get his
>stuff out there.
>
>But the East, the Isles, Pamaltela? Thirty years since they were
>first systematically described, and almost nothing of use has come
>out about them. Time to forget 'em? I've no doubt that there will be
>chapters about them in the next reprint of the World Guide, but you
>have to ask, WHY?

        Is this just because the further we get from the psuedo-European territory, the less comfortable we are playing without the tropes of a thousand Tolkienesque fantasy novels?

        I know Glorantha has plenty of nice original ideas of its own and is not just derivative of real world cultures, but I'm talking more about us as fans. Very few of us really know African myth or Pacific Island myth or Buddhist myth well? Or perhaps more importantly, know the trashy pop-culture derivatives of that that makes for good gaming fuel?

        I spent years sticking my head into stuff like the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali because Greg said it was *terribly important*, and came to the conclusion that the reason I was confused about how it translated to Glorantha was because Greg was confused about it, and it was not that big a deal, because really what we needed was not a deep understanding of mysticism in Glorantha based on studying tantric texts, but a trashy shallow pop-culture understanding of mysticism in Glorantha based on detailed study of ideas from many trashy wuxia films.

        Or maybe we are just waiting for someone to come along and do with the pile of material on Pamaltela or the East Isles what Loz did with Dara Happan myth in Dara Happa Stirs - take a big pile of deep background stuff that is impenetrable to the average gamer, and produce a fun playable scenario that uses it all, and then gives you pointers on how to run with it yourself. Perhaps that person will be Loz again, bringing some fire to Pamaltela in Harreksaga. Lets hope.

>
>3. Don't fuck with established gods.
>
>Will Vinga ever be mentioned in a SMJR publication? We can only wait and see.

	*mutter*Babeester Gor*mutter*
	I would also add, don't fuck with established gods, and say 
you've just discovered a clearer vision of the way they have always been (hey, now Humakt gives off radioactive death power and makes flowers wilt! Also, he doesn't care that much about honour after all!).

>4. Try to come up with at least one new idea every three years.
>
>Or even every five. Endless repetition of the same basic tropes is
>not creativity. Genre fatigue is real, but it can be overcome.

        I used to get a sense of this. Through the 90s, as the layers of Pelorian/Dara Happan mythology were gradually revealed, our sense of what Glorantha was was changing regularly. Lately, the quality of the finished product is nice, but a lot of it feels like ever more detailed going over the same few details. I'm glad that Jeff is gradually getting Gregs various thoughts and writings congealed into new Stafford Library stuff, but it seems more a process of codifying and refining the known rather than revealing the new lately.

>1. Be aware of game ideology
>
>There is a general perception that Glorantha is becoming more
>conservative. Or maybe its eighties feel and structure is just
>becoming more dated.
>
>The creative network that once spawned stories and myths and
>scenarios and discussions and web sites and conventions is but a
>shadow of what it was five years ago. Boys-own adventure isn't what
>it used to be.
>
>The basic Gloranthan mythologic is that whatever is True, whatever
>is Real, comes from the past, the deep past. In a value-neutral
>sense, it has to be conservative. The subtlety of Glorantha's mythic
>mechanisms are muted by its absolutist sense of religion and cult:
>there is little room for sociology, for change, for people. A basic
>criticism of the entire Eliade/Jung/Campbell approach to myth is
>that people don't matter, only ideas ('archetypes') do: Ideas can
>only repeat themselves, people can only repeat deep patterns.
>Derived from these ideas, Glorantha suffers in the same way.

	Yeah, the ideology is an issue.
	Basically, you can't just say gamers should suck up the 
ideological constructs of the game world because its mythically valid. For one thing, someone made that myth (and Greg, and all the rest of us, have our own ideological biases). For another, if the ideology messes with the extent to which we are creating playable game material, readable fiction, etc, then its got no reason to be there.

        There are ways around it (my favourite being just turn the ideological position into not The Truth, but The Truth According to Someone, and make room for the opposing point of view). But we need to avail ourselves of them.

>If it's useful, publish it yourself. Or put it on a web site where
>the three experts on Second Age Uzbekistan folk dancers can have
>their fan boy orgasms. And possibly write something playable.

        I like to think that Glorantha is multiple hobbies in one. It is gaming, sure. And it is a body of quite odd literature (that I quite enjoy reading, even in the depths of the obscure mythic source material like the Entekosiad. No, *especially* in the depths of the entekosiad). And it is a sort of complex game of scholarly nitpicking and speculation that I also quite enjoy.

	Cheers
		David

           

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