From: Alex Ferguson (abf@interzone.ucc.ie)
Date: Thu 10 Jul 1997 - 20:56:03 EEST
Michael Cule:
> That becoming a God is a trap. That in making yourself into a
> transfinite being you loose what is most valuable to yourself, that is
> you loose yourself.
I think that's basically correct. But I'm beginning to think it of
it as being much less a question of "forcible plane-shifting", which
is a very literalist way of looking at it, as being trapped in the
_myth_ you've made. Jaldon, say, is just as trapped in this way as
a hero who makes no re-appearances on the mundane plane, and to some
extent I suspect the various Manifest Hero Ruler types are/were too.
It's also true that heroes will often want to "formally" apotheosise.
If nothing else, mustn't life get a bit boring when all your traits are
at 39, by which time you've become almost literally hyperdeterministic?
If putting on your dressing gown in the morning sends you off on the
Arming of Orlanth HQ? When your wife goes down to the 15-storey temple
to you when she wants to whisper sweet nothings? Too much of that and
Mundane Life must seem pretty redundant, not to say bordering on the
infeasible.
> being forcibly dragged into the HeroPlane to take part in someone else's
> Quest [because] once you have 'broken the seal' on the barrier that
> seperates you from the HeroPlane you are no longer protected from it.
Or to make this sound less like PlaneScape [;-)] -- once you're mythically
linked to a particular quest, someone can give t a good hard pull from
the other end...
> By the way, could I repeat a request that may not have gotten through.
It got through in issue #33, and I answered it (in my own feeble fashion)
in #34...
David Cake has it done to him by Myth, before he does it to it:
> More to the point, looking at
> heroquesting as something that happens to the heroplane rather than
> something that happens to the hero is essentially wrong.
Looking at it exclusively _either_ of those those ways is patently
wrong, as analysis of the useful (and perhaps defining) phrase
"interacting with myth" will fairly quickly tell you. I've maintained
through this discussion that it's essential to regard it as a two-way
street.
> What we need is not rules for heroquesting, we need
> a) a whole lot more insight about heroquesting
I'd agree, and while some of the discussion has been shamelessly
mechanistic (in some cases more so than I'd want to end up with in a HQ
system, never mind start out with), it has thrown up a lot of concepts
which are at least worth hauling up on to Sacred Top to see how they burn.
> and
> b) rules for the results of heroquesting - which is, in effect, rules for
> magic that are both more scalable and more flexible. But the important
> thing is that the rules we need are not so much about the act itself, but
> the capabilities of the returned hero.
Speaking personally, I think that sounds like a short route to a very
I feel, rather, that the insight (and the magical goodies) are only really
superficial idea of the "transformative" effects. To put an admittedly
extreme and unkind spin on it, one could interpret this as "Well, I
don't know much about what happen on my HQ, or why, but I _do_ have
these neat new powers." Turn page for optional Personal Insight.
going to be understood through the process intended to bring them about.
(That sounded rather tautological, in fact.) If we understood (or even,
had rules for) the Process, then we'd hopefully understand the result.
Cheers,
Alex.
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