> Does the same apply to Mythic Russia? As I recall, you have stats
of
> major heroes and monsters with numbers (a good thing). Or is
> Glorantha different?
I think so. While there are those -- including yourself with your splendid work on the Bashkorts, soon to appear in print -- who are also contributing to what we could call the canon of MR, there is no attempt to pretend to the same kind of creative scope as Glorantha. Furthermore, MR starts from an existing real-world body of knowledge: the world as medieval Russians thought it was and how their stories presented it to be. Now, it may well be 'fantastical real-world knowledge' rooted in myth and belief, but it is there, and the challenge is to adapt and flesh it out.
With Glorantha, despite all the writings out there already, there is still so much to be created from scratch. For example, when the UW book 'Sons of Kargzant' was written, there was almost nothing known about the Char-Un, so we could have fun and create as we pleased. Had there been an official keyword, say, then that would immediately have limited our scope, just as a set of stats for Orgrol the Fat would have.
One of my great beliefs when I was MD's Acquisitions Tsar was precisely to keep what did not need to be known or what could not be fleshed out properly, unknown. Not as part of some malign plot against the buying punter, but to ensure that when someone comes along with some great new take on some region, hero, conflict or faith, we can commission them straight away, without (a) telling them that they had to change their ideas to conform with canon or (b) deliberately rewriting canon and causing the consequent dismay.
Putting aside the legal technicalities of ownership, Glorantha is explicitly a work of consensual and participatory co-creation; that's one of its great virtues.
In short, yes, Glorantha _is_ different!
All the best
Mark
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