>I think I mis-presented my reason for studying the God Learners, or I
>have failed to express myself clearly. I don't intend to actually
>*run* Glorantha, I want to cannibalize that Second Age God Learning
>and allow my hubris-ridden character to "research" it with the vast
>means at his disposal.
I'd picked that up which was why I qualified my comments as being applicable to Glorantha but not necessarily anywhere else. It is a Gloranthan list however so people will tend to answer as if you are playing there.
>I do understand the concept of questing in Myth. Several publishers
>have produced books in which *planes* (the cosmic kind, not the one
>EADS can't deliver) may have mythological elements to a greater or
>lesser degree. What I have inferred from that is that a PC "becomes"
>a figure in a myth which is on an endless loop; the God Learner desire
>to *change* those mythological worlds is what fascinates me. If I can
>understand what they did (or were trying to do), their work will
>inform the future flow of the campaign which I am running in the
>Forgotten Realms, where once, long ago, there was a certain ... ah ...
>*awkwardness* called "The Dawn Cataclysm" which resulted in a Greater
>Goddess literally dividing into two separate, antithetical deities.
><insert meaningful cough with undercurrent of "Star Trek, the TV
>series">
>
>There exists a novel in which one of the current Greater Gods (who had
>loved the pre-Cataclysmic, undivided goddess), endeavors to reunite
>the two halves back into the whole which he had once loved. The
>results are, as sages of matters Gloranthan might guess, rather ... ah
>... *different* than what he had intended, just as whatever it was
>that the God Learners did failed to work as they had planned. I could
>very easily picture my PC playing the part of one of the God's mortal
>henchpeople, but that would only be logical if my PC had somehow
>accumulated vast lore about the deities themselves which made him
>useful to the project design. Accumulating such knowledge has a
>tendency to transform a mere human's brain into so much Jello(TM)
>pudding in most game settings, which is an outcome I'd prefer to avoid
>for MY character. I want him and the other characters to leave this
>upcoming fiasco, older, wiser, and -- preferably -- not
>_feebleminded_. ;)
It would do so in Glorantha if you really understood the gods. Myth simplifies the god plane to the level of human understanding. The God Learners assumed that that level of knowledge was all there was to it and tried to alter things. As a result they broke myths until Glorantha (the world) fixed things by eliminating them from history. So your character is either going to be feebleminded, dead or destroying the world.
In Glorantha there are many people who act as their god's mortal henchpeople. But they do so because they believe in their god and that the god's way is right.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/
Powered by hypermail