Kudos to Jeff for his account! I look forward to hearing more at Tentacles. How many of the SFC are coming?
Jane asks how to explain Fimbulwinter. We've got what we've got as references. Yeah, the actual explanation is that it's a neat idea that got incorporated into official history many years after the initial stuff was printed, but that's a mundane explanation that just irks some players.
So, KoS not mentioning the Fimbulwinter is a discrepancy that calls for very special pleading. I can think of several ideas for people to bat around, but I can think of objections to most of them myself. Nevertheless, in the hope that more virtue may be found in them than I see, here goes.
Basically, either the writings, sagas, legends and folktales mentioning it have just not survived to be collated into KoS, or something prevented people from writing of it or preserving any such records, or such references were not chosen for preservation.
Besides which, why suppress it? After all, Orlanth Came Back. His major enemy was eventually defeated and killed (not brought back with him, as in the LBQ). You'd think that the indefatigable spirit of the Orlanthi would rejoice in the opportunity to admit that the Lunars did their absolute worst, and caused a major snafu with the Fimbulwinter (which is our personal view of that event). Then their Goddess dies anyway when the Orlanthi survive, regroup and rebound.
2. Everyone forgot? Seems very unlikely, unless some major HQ was involved to take their memories away. Plus, if the writings are contemporary, there should still be references there. (Actually, the HQ idea is tempting, but I don't know what to do with it. Who'd do it, and how?)
3. Did Doranda the Quill edit her sources so as to omit any mention of Fimbulwinter in the Argrathsaga? That, actually, is the single most likely idea in my opinion. Scribes frequently have agendas of their own. Signs of active manipulation and massaging of texts are found remarkably frequently in surviving ancient literature. It is particularly common in religious works, which KoS is as are the various historical books of the Old Testament. It is usually detectable when slight clues are left in the text, as in the "Ashart died of heat." entry. Biggest objection? That Doranda was definitely not the only early scribe of the Copying Period. Various regional variants are known of the manuscripts she collated and copied (KoS, p.7, "This text is different. First, it is marked to indicate which passages are from the different Northern and Southern versions.")
4. The publisher of KoS could have done it. That person shouldn't have had any reason to omit the Fimbulwinter was the actual collator of the texts in KoS. He or she wants the people of Harshax to wake up and realise that a great disaster is heading their way, for which they must prepare. Any descriptions of previous disasters would just be grist to the mill. OTOH, the introduction to KoS has all the earmarks of some nutty millennialist with the wish to persuade his readers that Devil's return is imminent, and that the end is nigh. Tweaking of dates selective editing and outright falsification of events are to be expected from this type of author.
5. Last possibility that I can think of is that Harshax forbade the mention of Fimbulwinter. From what little one can gather about the tendencies of the Harshax Dynasty, they seem prone to absolute methods of settling scholastic arguments. If a Harshax decreed that the Fimbulwinter had not occurred, I suspect that that would be the end of it, at least in official written sources.
So there you have all the possibilities that I can imagine just now. 3, 4 and 5 all deal with future events, and are therefore less interesting, though to me more probable. We know nothing whatsoever of the post-Illiteracy times except what the Author of KoS accidentally includes. No-one's playing that era, and it seems unlikely that anyone will.
Alison
> But back at the question of fitting KoS: the fall of
> WW has never been a problem. It's the Fimbulwinter
> that follows it. The Death of Orlanth. The way this
> major climatic change and complete loss of magic is
> noted only as "Ashart dies of heat" by people living
> in Sartar at the time.
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