Re: Dragonrise arc

From: Keith Nellist <keithnellist_at_...>
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2008 11:18:23 +1100

John Patrick Hughes
"Not Dragonrise - the Hero Wars at a year by year, campaign by campaign level, starting after Dragonrise and sketching to the Fall of Glamour. Working the same way we did for Whitewall - start with KOS (which gives a broad interpretation of the entire century) add bits, change bits and create bits in the same broad brush, campaign focus way we did for White Wall."

The Hero Wars are not my area of special interest in Glorantha, but I am interested in the process by which a group, particularly a text-based group, might generate a chronicle, with added bits, changed bits etc. of a time in Glorantha history. I had wanted to make it a game, a competitive game, and tried to come up with rules that could be applied to a piece of text. (eg adding footnotes, mistranslations "Waha here should be Tada - they both imply Khan", "Pavis means the City in this case, rather than the man", "virgin here means simply young woman", "the houris are not beautiful and seductive women but actually grapes or perhaps sultanas")

I had wanted to do something similar for the history of Pavis from the founding to the death of Balastor after I realised that a standard role playing campaign was simply not going to cover the time quickly enough. I was inspired partly by KOS as a format, but also by the way a lot of Gloranthan information has been presented - as actual Gloranthan documents translated into english. The advantage of this method was that it gives room for error, gives room for alternate explanations and interpretations, and allows for YGWV. I had the idea that I could get other people to contribute by getting them to play the role of scholars - biased scholars with an agenda to promote - but scholars nonetheless making commentary on and "translating" contemporary sources. They (the players as scholars) would then criticize each other, in a scholarly manner - ie ruthlessly backstabbing, undermineing, ridiculing and pointing out the obvious flaws and fallacies in each other works. The Truth of One True Glorantha would never be established but loads of good ideas might be suggested.

For the The Hero Wars we have a built in Illiteracy Era to make the whole thing plausible. The players would take the role of scholars under the Harshax trying to ascertain what actually happened, why the northern and southern versions of the Composite history were different, why the Battle of Iceland was not mentioned, etc, but not in the form of real-people explaining that Greg had changed his mind, or forgotten, but with 'real' in-Glorantha explanations as to why the sources are incomplete/inaccurate/createdbythePuppeteertroupe/

Keith

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