From: Sandy Petersen (sandyp@idgecko.idsoftware.com)
Date: Wed 03 Jul 1996 - 18:45:58 EEST
I said that the only Gloranthan folk I could think of who invented
distilled liquors were Dwarfs.
Alex Ferguson
>Isn't it Received Wisdom that the Lunars have gin?
>Sartarite whisky is too obvious a cliche' to pass up.
Is it? Are they? I don't know. Alex mentions Inora's Brandy
(apple wine fractionated by freezing), which sounds sensible. I bet
the famous Clearwine isn't _just_ fermented grape juice. I really
don't know, and part of the reason I wrote the above was an effort
to needle the folk like Alex into making suggestions along these
lines.
I have always understood that distilled liquors are a
fairly modern invention on Earth, no? On the other hand, MGF may
require hard booze in Glorantha. In which case I guess one of the
Second Age magicotechnologically advanced civilizations must have
invented it.
Ere now, most of the places that have had real powerful
liquor in my own campaigns have done so not by distilling, but by
incorporating drugs into their booze.
Alex F.
>age-changes are fairly often seen in fairly independant places.
The three (or >so) different Empires in the 2nd age managed to fall
apart pretty much >separately, not as the result of a single Magic
Bullet or First Cause.
Alex, surely you're not claiming that the destruction of
Every Single Empire near the end of the Second Age was coincidence?
There were more than three -- offhand I can name at least six: The
Wyrm's Friends, the Middle Seas, the Eastern Seas, the False Dragon
Ring, the Six-Legged, the Errinoru Elfdom.
I would say that the Shot That Killed Ten Million Men
(Sarajevo, 1914), is a fine example of this kind of activity, though
it is particularly easy to trace this one to events following that
killed people from China to Mesopotamia to Flanders. The Second
Age's end was more subtle than 1914's, but this doesn't mean it
wasn't connected.
Compare to the destruction at the end of the Cretaceous --
a huge number of dominant animals died, in every nation, in wide
variety -- not only dinosaurs, but pterosaurs, ammonites (a sort of
cross between snail and octopus, one of the most common sea animals
at this time), and more. Why pterosaurs and not birds? And this
wasn't even the biggest extinction Earth has suffered -- at the end
of the Permian 96% of all land vertebrate species became extinct!!
This destruction can't be coincidence, but it's rather hard to point
to relationships between the death of river-dwelling salamanders
and mountain-top grazing beasts.
The Second Age comparisons are apt -- all the empires
shared something in common; some feature or trait in the air, or the
mythology, that let them form, and that ultimately failed or
changed, or detonated so spectacularly.
Sandy P.
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