I can just about get his way of thinking. He's seen enough of the real world to understand that logical effect is often an after the event rationalisation of what happened. The repeated economic bubbles over the last few centuries show that people's actions are often not governed by cause and effect. You can call it collective insanity if you like.
>> 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.
Or the more common reason for Gods falling out - that their natures are in conflict. Yelm doesn't fall out with Orlanth over any one thing. Orlanth must challenge authority, Yelm must resist such challenges.
>> 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.
Well the Roman Empire was a mess for most of its history. The neat legions of the school text books lasted a century or two at best. The overtones of British Empire are uncontradicted although the Soviet analogue has disappeared. I always regarded that as a joke, it was too anachronistic.
>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.
The bureaucracy is still there, the military bit is called the Ordenviru (I can even spell that right these days).
>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.
The whole point is that no empire has ever existed with a single set of cultural values. Not the Romans, not the British, not the Soviets, not even the current American one.
The Lunar culture is an overlay on those of Dara Happa, Rinliddi, Carmenia, Tarsh etc. Just as the Roman one was an overlay on Greek, Celtic and Egyptian ones.
>> 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.
And if we are to make sense of that we need to consider the cultural differences between them. It may also be worth considering the other conflict the Empire is involved in - against the Pentan nomads. They are probably the bigger threat to the Heartlands. When the Emperor withdraws support from Tarsh's war against Sartar it is probably because the resources are needed in Oraya.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
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