Greg Stafford thusly:
>
"There was not even really Darkness..." So while we might have thought "Hey, for trolls the Darkness wouldn't have been so bad", that's wrong. It wasn't a friendly Wonderhome-style darkness. Sure, there wasn't a sun around, but that didn't help much for trolls--telling going up to a troll in the Darkness and saying "Hey, look, no sun! Isn't that great?" is like going to a terminal cancer patient and saying "Boy, you sure have done well losing weight!"
Probably the trolls don't call it the Darkness. (Any sources tell us what they do call it?)
> Who is said to have survived---Orlanth, Urox, Elmal, Enalda.
[...who in fact all died, as Greg explains...]
But it's probably significant, at least in a role-playing sense, that their worshippers don't think of them as having died. (Especially in the case of Elmal and Urox.)
To a Yelm worshipper, it's a key part of the mythos that he died and triumphed over death. To an Elmal worshipper, it's a key part of the mythos that he endured all through the Darkness and never succumbed no matter how bad things got. (Even though a God-learner might look and say, "They both got weaker and weaker, they both stopped helping their worshippers, they both ended up in Hell holding the Great Net, they both returned--what's the diff?")
So, for example, if you stab a Yelmist through the heart and leave him cold on the ground, he may have a last-ditch "return from death" magical option. If you do that to an Elmalite, his magic will be something more like "in spite of everything I'm not really dead". Similar practical effects, but the feel of the heroquest will be very different.
> NO GODS SURVIVED.
Which we (now) know is the case, but probably very few Gloranthans see it
that way. A Heortling will tell you, "Ernalda died, and Orlanth passed
living through Hell to rescue her". A Praxian will say "The Great Bull lived
through the Darkness and endured until the Dawn." (A Dara Hapan, on the
other hand, will say "Yes, Greg's quite right. Shargash destroyed the rest
of the world, and finally himself, to avenge Great Yelm's death.")
So KoDP isn't mistaken. If you go to an Elmalite clan, they'll say, "We didn't have to awaken our god at the Dawn, because Elmal never died." KoDP is accurately reflecting that clan's (somewhat mistaken) mythic view.
Is that a fair reading?
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