Re: Status of Mongoose RQ publications' Glorantha content

From: Kevin McDonald <kpmcdona_at_grG55wylMQYcrx7W7EJym8Rek2l4Km1wue_3IVcw91_ZCoO8Y3QFwLtR3LmKmQ65HJ4>
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 23:43:49 -0500


On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 12:05 AM, L C <lightcastle_at_vmVqcZiwocSfFBO7toXWuWw3wSUrNCPiPqsUD514pk-zqfgwp6FE2kh7S6I9MMm91eMAMmwVV0TaMYGoSvMl.yahoo.invalid> wrote: >
> Then why bother to have a canon?

Good question! As far as I can see it is a matter of continuity. Breaks in continuity are an irritant that makes willing suspension of disbelief more difficult.

> I mean, I agree it shouldn't be a straightjacket, but unless you are
> recommending we ignore the published products as just one team's
> campaign, it would be nice to have some general sense of what is and
> isn't in and where it's going, so that the engaged and interested fan
> base can be contribute meaningfully. (Or so I would think.)

<Warning: Pompus exposition ahead>

You are right here, for the most part. I am not saying that published sources - or fan publications - be ignored. I am recommending that they be taken for what they are - contributions by creative people to a collective body of work. Sometimes these creations conflict with what came before or are superseded by later publications. That's just the nature of the beast.

What I want to avoid are compulsive attempts to define what Glorantha *is* as if it were something objectively real that we are attempting to discover. It is an issue for me because I think on some level that is exactly what I was trying to do for a long while.

The point where a light went on in my head on this issue is when Mongoose's take on Glorantha began to be published. I was faced with the possibility of two different visions of Glorantha, both from "official" sources, one of which I was biased in favor of and the other I was initially predisposed to reject. Then I remembered that even within my beloved Chaosium/Issaries/Moon Design versions of Glorantha there were inconsistencies and changes made over time. There are also many great fan contributions, and the the line gets blurred when talking about Issaries/Moon Design. What *should* be canon and what shouldn't? Should something we don't like be accepted just because it was published by a license holder? Should only Greg's work be considered canon? Should everything?

Maybe there is more than one canon, I thought - Moon Design and Mongoose. If there are two, then why not more? Or maybe defining what is and is not part of the One True Glorantha is doomed from the start. I imagined the entire body of Glorantha publication as a thousand individual Gloranthas all rotating around a center of gravity where nothing actually exists, like a multiple star system, held together by consensus rather than gravity.

I found the thought to be liberating, because I had previously been focused on making sure what I wrote jived with *all* the previously published facts and lived in fear of the day when something official was published that shattered the castle of glass I was building. I was gradually becoming less creative and inspired as I became more and more obsessed with making what I wrote "right". This had the effect of taking the wind out of my sails, creatively speaking, and I stopped writing new stuff.

Now I use the previous publications as inspiration and as a starting point for creative expression. Certainly we shouldn't dump ideas - "official" or otherwise - for no good reason. When there *is* a good reason, though, we should feel free blaze a new trail and let the community decide if what we did was an improvement. Write, learn, revise, repeat.

Humm... something tells me I have lost track of what I was trying to say so I will stop now. :)

-Kevin McD            

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