From: Simon D. Hibbs (simon@fcrd.gov.uk)
Date: Fri 12 Jul 1996 - 18:07:47 EEST
David Dunham :
>And I thought we had several examples of warriors
>"going back" to fight battles like I Fought We Won or Castle Blue,
>which were noted by historians of the time as mysterious spirits or
>something.
Peter Metcalfe :
>Only the Nights of Horrors had strange alien beings
>whom Greg said were future Heroquesters. I don't believe this is the
>case and have explained why in a previous digest
Peter is trying hard to avoid the possibility of temporal paradoxes in
Glorantha, but I think it is a losing battle. Apparent paradoxes are an
inevitable consequence of heroquesting. For example - Joe Heroquester dies
and goes to Hell, finds the secret exit (which he learned about in a
previous quest) and comes back, meanwhile his family bury the body. Now
Joe has two bodies, the one that is dead and buried and the one he came
back in.
Personaly, I don't have a problem with this. The GL techniques for mass
producing magic items probably used a variant of this principle. You
create the item, make a myth of it on the heroplane, then repeatedly quest
to that part of the heroplane and bring it back as many times as you like.
(I'm getting on to shaky ground from here on, but I'm going to take a
stab at it anyway)
Temporal paradoxes are just another wird side-effect of heroquesting, but
there are limitations on what can be done by heroquesting that ameliorate
the problem.
Greg has said that heroquesting is a process of transformation, the
heroquester changes himself and gains power by doing so. Heroquests can
also change a cult, or even a whole society. I believe heroquests can
change Glorantha too, in a sense the world can re-shape itself into a new
form, and this is what happens at the changeover between ages. The world
becomes a different place.
It is possible to explain the Nights of Horror incident by saying that the
battle actualy took place on the hero plane, so the 'heroquesters from the
future' were arriving at the heroplane, not at the mundane site of the
battle. Barntar is a different kettle of fish, if he is from a future age
then the obvious conclusion is that the 'current' age is part of the
heroplane so far as Barntar is concerned.
This leads me to suspect that the rules of time travel in Glorantha are
somewhat skewed. For example, it is not possible to heroquest from the
current age into a future age because it does not exist yet. Past ages, on
the other hand, have already happened, so they already exist and can be
quested to. Thus it is only possible to time-travel _backwards_ in time.
Travelling forward in time would then be restricted to the pedestrian
route, i.e. staying alive long enough.
Simon
------------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri 13 Jun 2003 - 16:51:29 EEST