>>(unless you buy the Stafford line that cause and effect are not related, >>and that's several levels of insanity too far), so we need to understand >>what those reasons are.
> I don't remember Greg ever being quite that sweeping.
An email conversation I was having with him once about normal humans on the normal plane - he asked why I was insisting that cause and effect had to match, when I was asking why someone might have done something. Since the only possible answer was "because I'm sane, so are the characters and so are the readers", I gave up on getting any sense out of him at that point. Once you realise that's how he "thinks", half the incomprehensible bits of his writing make sense: or rather, you realise why they don't make sense. KoS had motivaions for everyone, including the authors of the various pieces: anything written after that seems to have logic missing.
> He does say that
> on the God plane effect does not necessarily follow cause but that's
> because everything happens before time.
They're not necessarily in chronological order, no, but there's a causality order. "I hate you because your future self will kill my brother" works, "I hate you because the plot requires me to" doesn't.
> I'm not sure what ILH1&2 so drastically rewrote about the Lunars.
You know more about them than I do, but I Nick reckoned it was a mess, and I'll believe him. What I mainly noticed was that they changed from being a nice comprehensible loose pseudo-Roman analogue with overtones from the British Empire and the Soviets to something messy and unpronouncable, with no central structure ever given, only some non-standard bits around the edges. So I've ignored it. My military Lunars carry on having Roman ranks that I and my players can recognise, the civilians continue to escape from the Brits in India (usually the "Carry On" version), bureaucracy continues to be the worse possible nightmare of red tape I can come up with from any possible source. If I ever want "this is weird and unusual for Lunars" then the new stuff has sources for me, but it doesn't cover Lunar normality at all.
> Certainly a big motivator for Lunar actions is the competition between
> Dara Happa and Tarsh for control of policy.
In the Dragon Pass area at least, yes, very much so. KoS makes that very clear.
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