> My answer is the same as before: I'm not interested, I'm afraid.
Shame. In that case we'll just have to take ages trying to work it out ourselves, and that's going to be slow.
> World design seemed to take on a different bent; boxes started being ticked;
> we started to say 'no' rather than 'yes'.
What I say is "how?" and "why?" because the answer to either of those is usually a good story. Link either of them in to "what were their motivations?" and "how will everyone else around react to that?" and you're away.
> I find it a little curious that what many of us might consider the most evocative areas of Glorantha--
> Dragon Pass, Peloria, Prax--are noted aberrations, hold-outs against broader, later regulations of
> climate and geography, and "this should go there".
Are they? Dragon Pass isn't exactly a small place surrounded by huge expanses of mundanity: it's a largish area, with some interesting points within it. Prax, too, is not small - miles and miles of desert (which therefore needs to behave like any other desert, or we get terribly confused), with interesting things like the Block dropped in the middle of it.
> If Dragon Pass was sketched today,..., would it contain slumbering dragon-mountains, ....
> giant windmills, Earth cultists, giant flowers, demon-horse riders &c. in such
> kaleidoscopic proximity? I doubt it.
I think that whoever drew it might have included a scale, and a scale that made sense, at that. Most of our problems now are that the scale does not make sense, and does not fit the "stories" behind each place. It takes days to cross the Stormwalks, and crossing them in winter is the stuff even heroes only dream of? Better make them say fifty miles across, or even a hundred, not ten, then. You still get your heroically impassable mountains with little villages dotted up the valleys, and fewer players saying "huh? I could walk that in an afternoon!" But whoever drew the map didn't spend the ten seconds thought that would have taken, so instead, we're stuck trying to work out how to fit something that gets at least half-way towards the drama we wanted into too small a space.
> I'd rather Glorantha loosened its tie and went crazy, instead of enfranchising mundanity.
But how can we have the fantastic, like Kero Fin, and a cork-screw-shaped mountain in the middle of a normal range, if there's no normality for it to stand out against?
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