On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 9:22 AM, Greg Stafford <glorantha1_at_otEm0wgetZM1gDgyDm10lSLnHbgBOSRMezr-v8HAM7N790652DGWdh8qIn6bKc4gvwVBcq1-JJLsByJIE4th.yahoo.invalid> wrote:
>
>
> Peter asked
>
> *2. Do the Safelstrans have any myths about Orlanthi Gods that the
> Heortlings consider to be strange or wrong?
> *
> The answer is Yes.
> the kind of "yes" that provokes follow up from me
>
> EVERYONE has a collection of erroneous information about their neighbor's
> religion
>
> Long, long ago I had to decide what point of view to present Gloranthan
> game
> information
> It took a while to work it out clearly, so earlier publications do not fit
> precisely
> I chose the one we use for practical purposes
> The point of view is either:
> *culture-centric, presented from within the culture
> OR
> *objective, from outside of Glorantha (example: *Genertela, Crucible...)
>
> * *true, within the bounds of Glorantha Truth of course
> *simplified, so that (for instance) all the people of the western
> Glorantha highlands region worship a god named Orlanth
>
> These last two erased a large part of reality, which is the finite but huge
> amount of misinformation that everyone uses in their (our) daily lives
> sometimes we make important decisions on that misinformation
> In HeroQuesting it is actually a critical part of the information that is
> ignored, because the Orlanthi do not all know, agree, think, feel or
> suspect
> that Malkion is One God, just one god with a tremendous ego problem. Many
> of
> the polytheists know from experience that there is a Malkioni pantheon with
> a king god, a priest god, a shaman god, an earth goddess, etc., and that
> saints are just like the theist worshiped Heroes. Their stories about their
> neighbors presume these facts, and they prepare for heroquests based on
> that
> information. They might have heard the "truth" as we, outsiders like
> demigods watching our play of mortals, and might even have read the Abiding
> Book.
> Did meeting the "hari krishnas" and reading their gurus' books ever convert
> a fundamental monotheist, or vice versa?
>
> We as players and gamemasters and observers recognize a negative modifier
> to
> success when a theist enters the Mental Planes, and if they prepared and
> brought the wrong weapons then it doesn't matter how many Dark powers are
> thrown at the Malkioni Earth Goddess, the negative modifier for that is
> huge. We see two things, two modifiers. The Ernaldan heroquesters just see
> it as one: the inherent difficulties of entering the Enclosed Realms. The
> Monotheist types always waste a huge amount of time and power gearing up
> their "devil destroyer" weapons, made to raise the internal activity of a
> demon's souls and contain it within their skin until they implode, because
> the space they occupy has intensified to the level of their original world,
> to which they return immediately. *pop*. It works on something like that
> principle, but the whole "demonic" programming (does this entity hate the
> One? Know the One? Fear the One? Fear me? *Activate!*) and energy is
> wasted.
>
> Can't they test it empirically and work out the most effective methods?
> Yes,
> of course they can. Everybody knows that the God Learners did that, and
> were
> quite effective at it, and isolated principles that could act (unequally)
> upon almost anything. It might have worked if the Principle of Unintended
> Consequences wasn't applied to errors!
>
> *It is so ignorant and unfair for those indigenous *mraloti* people to hold
> it against us because we gave their women only two breasts! Why can't they
> just feed their litters with cow milk like the rest of us? -- *Zenstorfan
> the Reconstructalist
>
> One of the reasons that I encourage people to write your theories and ideas
> from within a clear stance and source is because that's how reality
> actually
> is.
>
> and with YGWV your heroquesters just might find out that Ernalda actually
> IS
> the One Goddess or that Glorantha is inside a giant volcano that's going to
> explode and send everyone's souls across the universe (yes, I once heard of
> that campaign :D ).
>
> Misinformation seems unfair to give to the players, when actually that is
> the on-the-ground reality of the characters. Since "seeking the truth" is
> always kind of a part of questing, the obligations required of us to make a
> concise and understandable game pretty much just jumps a whole level of
> "investigation".
>
> So it goes.
> --- Greg Stafford
> Game Designer
>
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>
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