To elaborate, while acknowledging that it gets complicated to use the word "prior" in the Godplace...
But let's have a go.
Prior to when the 4 worlds collided, they were worlds, not otherworlds, where the beings of each tradition / philosophical approach lived together undifferentiated.
Interesting side question (and the main use of this question is to send Gloranthan scholars insane): - did the initial peaceful collision lead to the integration of all magical approaches of the Gloranthan Court? - or did the Gloranthan Court pre-date the separation of the worlds prior to the later collision? If this is true, it quite possibly leads to a "It's turtles all the way down".
BTW, we should consider that there were 4 worlds to be a simplification; there may well have been additional worlds that did not have the philosophical / magical / cultural / populational "oomph" to make it through the Godplace and maintain or create a link to the transcendant. These could worlds include the Dreamworld, the Dragonworld and the Chaosworld (which is too unstructured to really deserve the term world).
Anyway, the collision of the worlds led to the end of the Green Age, when differentiation occurred, leading to the Golden Age, then the Storm Age, the Lesser Darkness and the Great Darkness (different cultures have different names for these places). However, the world of the beings of the mystical approach somewhat maintained a unity of purpose that meant Great Darkness did not completely wreck the fabric of their world. However, the worlds of the other approaches were extremely damaged, to the point that mortals could no longer survive in them in any reasonable fashion.
Heort had the insight of the Second Son / Star Heart, which seems to me to be be a transcendant or mystical secret. This enabled him to unite and lead his people and neighbours to the "I Fought, We Won" and later led to a better time (remembering that during pre-history, time and place are fairly interchangeable words). I propose that this mystical secret enabled Heort to lead all participants to the world that was previously limited to the peoples and immortals of the mystical approach (for simplicity, let's refer to it the "inner world"). This did not happen all at once, instantaneously and simultaneously in all locations, as we have learned from "The Missionaries" at http://www.glorantha.com/new/myth.html
At approximately the same "time", the most powerful immortals made the Great Compromise (other cultures do not see this in the same way as the Orlanthi), where they agreed that they would fix their worlds by becoming unchanging. Mortals were unable to maintain this kind of existance. The three worlds of the theists, the animists and the sorcerers became the otherworlds.
Even more speculatively, I suspect that the mortals brought some remnant parts of their previous world with them. These parts included some geography and those immortals that now live in the "centre world", leading to the "mystical world" increasing in size. But the peoples myths and stories of their geography were so broken that the pieces had to be fitted together in a patchwork way. This led to the mixed world of Glorantha that we see today.
> > It is only after the mortals migrated to the
> > "mystical world" that the 3 worlds became
> > otherworlds.
>
> Perfect example of how using "mystical world"
> will only be misleading and confusing.
I agree...
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