Re: Re: Mountains in Dragon Pass

From: John Machin <orichalka_at_...>
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 2009 16:36:53 +1000


Just a caveat: My POV is highly subjective. I'm not really in this as a world-builder, I play in Glorantha and (aside from vague refences to Bat Shit Alchemists) I've never really had any ideas about how to expand it in ways that are not immediately relevant to the game I am playing or running. I'm here mostly to watch, to steal (er "be inspired"), and to comment as a hypothetical end-user. Oh, and to probably be lured into world-building at some point.

2009/9/4 Jane Williams <janewilliams20_at_...>:
> Not while I'm climnbing them they don't!

Well, as mentioned, my (previously) local mountains made a lot of the UK's look like hillocks. And my current local mountains hardly deserve the name.

So my "mountains" have varied quite considerably.

(And NZ's mountains vary while people are climbing them with unfortunate regularity :( )

> Oh, don't be daft! So one player's looking at the Alps, another at the Himalayas, and another at a 500-ft hill? While all travelling
> across them at the same speed? And if you're using a pre-written scenario, the writer had another set of assumptions entirely, and
> didn't tell you which ones?

:(

If all your players live on different continents I figure that could be a legitimate problem; in that case I would assume that the GM could say "imagine these <insertrangehere> when I say mountain".

I suppose if you were worried about movement rates being the same that'd be really important - but I don't care if my players take three days to cross a pass and yours take three weeks. My games tend to move at the speed of plot, rather than the speed of an unladen Sartarite (whatever that is... don't most of them have Movement magic of some sort?) so I don't particularly mind.

If the writer specified certain compositions, geological timescales, snowlines, and foliage density in their scenario... I'd probably have nodded off. That sort of thing fascinates me if I am going to climb a mountain (okay, it has been a bit of a while since I have...) but it's not what draws me to Glorantha so I wouldn't really care about it. In short: I'd make it up - whether the detail was there or not.

Is having different thresholds for simulation daft? If so then I must be a bloody moon-man from upsidedownland or something... (an argument could be made for the upsidedownland bit I admit...).

> Can you imagine the plans? "So we walk up the valley, we'll be there lunchtime."
> "No, we rope up, and use iceaxes, and take enough food for a week."
>
> Or the reactions to bits of scenario plot?
> "A week later, and your scout has not returned."
> "Well, no, it's a long way, might take him ten days."
> "Huh? It's two hours walk!"

Really I can't imagine that conversation at all; my assumption is that the GM's description of the mountain would have solved this problem. It is a highly entertaining straw man though!

I'm happy to use someone's definitions of mountains for my games, as well as their movement rate tables for locations in Dragon Pass. If such things don't exist I am happy to continue making it up.

(FWIW I vaguely track the Lunar week and ask the players when they'd like to arrive, modify if that jars with my internal assessment of the time needed, then frame the contest around that. When it comes up.)

-- 
John Machin
"Nothing is more beautiful than to know the All."
- Athanasius Kircher, 'The Great Art of Knowledge'.

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