Re: The God Learners Secret

From: Jane Williams <janewilliams20_at_Th2ZevKKiadb8WKTj_ehzMu9xl_Fk848ZqGHgWqv9JsKW8e8gJRWHPmcMtv0q>
Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2007 18:10:14 +0000 (GMT)

>
> Sorry to have taken so long to reply here. My router
> seems to have
> burned out or something, and my presence online has
> been extremely
> sporadic. Furthermore, I will be gone to DunDraCon
> this Presidents' Day weekend,

When's that? Some American celebration?

> _Glorantha, The Second Age_ by Robin Laws states the
> God Learner
> secret on page 13. Hasn't everyone who is interested
> in the secret bought that book to find it?

Quite possibly, and if so, they will have been disappointed. What that says, in precis, is that the GLs could make real changes to gods. We've known that for years. The Secret is *how* they did this, and if the Second Age book says, it certainly isn't on that page.

> I have laid out the general outline of this in _The
> Middle Sea
> Empire_, pages 40-44. Those pages illustrate the
> sorcerous method of HeroQuesting to the Gods War.

And fascinating reading it is, too. A full history of how they developed their techniques for raiding theistic heroquests. But, though far more detailed, it's still what they did, not how they did it. Or, more puzzlingly, it looks very much like how PCs normally do a HQ! You research the myth, you figure out what the stations will be, then you work out how to get past each one, either with subtle application of the right ability, or brute force combat. It isn't at all clear what the GLs did that was different, that meant that they could bring back an item from the God World, where a PC can't. And that, surely, is the Secret we're after?

> "Sorcery is something you DO, Animism is something
> you HAVE, and Theism is something you ARE."
>
> One of the ways to understand what the GL did was to
> understand that
> the GL went to the Gods War to learn magic that they
> could bring back
> with them and reproduce through spells kept in
> grimoires or other
> magical items. So many of their secrets revolved
> around being in a
> theist myth and capturing a method of doing magic
> hat was external to
> themselves, rather than internal as it would have
> been for theists.

And this sounds like a real difference. Treating the magic of one Otherworld as if it was the magic of another. Looking around for parallels, I can think of two other groups who do this sort of thing:

  1. Lunars. They've invented their own Otherworld, and mix the existing ones.
  2. Tricksters. Which is an intriguing thought, when you consider that this trick, too, backfired, and on a huge scale.

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