From: Trent Smith (trentfs@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Wed 26 Jul 2000 - 07:01:24 EEST
NOTE: I've moved this thread from the RQ-rules list, where it no longer
belongs. That also explains the extended quotes -- in case anyone who
doesn't read that list wants to know what's going on here:
> > (me, Trent Smith):
> > >you've got your cause-effect relationship backwards: bronze (as
opposed to,
> > >say iron) is the metal that Gloranthans mine from the earth because
the
> > >designers wanted Glorantha to have a Bronze Age feel!
> >
> > (Simon Hibbs):
> > Which designers do you mean? Have you talked to them
> > about this?
>
> (Steve Perrin):
> Me, for one. I was still remembering some research I had done on Bronze
Age
> civilizations while in college (not to mention some of the more obscure
> fantasies of L. Sprague de Camp) and came up with the idea of using Bronze
> and trying for a Bronze Age feel. Greg went along with it. Of course, we
were
> doing a fantasy Bronze Age...
>
> > Please quote any reference in any RQ product ever
> > which says that Glorantha is a Bronze Age world.
> > One will do. It says is RQ2 that the principle
> > metal used in Glorantha is Bronze. That's not the
> > same thing. Please point out to me the Bronze Age
> > earthly parallels for the Lunar Empire, Kralorela,
> > Loskalm (which was the first part of Glorantha ever
> > written about), Seshnela, etc.
"Glorantha is a Bronze Age world" (RQ2, p.5). This reference could not be
more unambiguous. Which is not to say that it is necessarily correct. For
one thing, the "Glorantha" in question really consists only of Dragon Pass
and Prax; the only areas which, at that time, had been detailed in-print,
and the only areas with which the author of that quote (Steve Perrin,
presumably) would have been familiar. Loskalm and Seshnela and Kralorela
were not being considered, because they weren't known about to anyone save
Greg (and perhaps some readers of Wyrm's Footnotes).
Secondly, you must consider that, as Steve Perrin says above, they were
"doing a fantasy Bronze Age," which means, essentially, deliberately
anachronistic, with whimsy and imagination typically taking precedent over
historical authenticity. Thus, it wasn't a problem that supposedly Bronze
Age cultures were more socially, philosophically, and technologically
(except in metal-use) advanced than their historical-terrestrial analogues,
as long as the idee-fixe of "ancient world instead of medieval cliche"
remained, and they looked like cool ancient Greeks (see the cover of the RQ
rulebook, those old Glorantha miniatures, or even Roger Raupp's more recent
RQ3 work ("Sun County," etc)).
Sometime later, at or perhaps slightly before the creation of RQ3, there
was an apparent rethink, motivated by the fact that 1) game-bronze shared
more characteristics with real-world iron than real-world bronze, and 2) the
scope of the game was expanding towards non-Bronze Age (not even "fantasy
Bronze Age") cultures, but they couldn't use iron because that had already
been defined as rare and having special characteristics (anti-magic,
invented by Mostali, etc). So, we got the dubious notion of "Gloranthan
bronze" as the standard metal throughout the world, regardless of supposed
technological level, which begat the (to my eyes) somewhat silly notion of
medieval Loskalmi knights (like the guys on the cover of G:CotHW Book 2, and
p. 76 of G:IttHW) armored in gleaming bronze.
Some folks probably like the idea of distinctly non-Bronze Age cultures
using a metal called "hu-metal" that looks like bronze because it's Not Like
Earth, but that argument doesn't hold any more water for me here than it did
in the argument over an ideogrammatic script for Western (oops, pretend I
didn't mention it). If I were to have a campaign set in the West (which I
never have), I wouldn't have my knights armored in bronze, because to my
aesthetic sensibility that's just, well, silly (and aesthetic sensibility is
what it really comes down to -- the only remaining "Bronze Age" thing about
any Gloranthan culture at this point is the way its soldiers look ("Sun
County" again, or G:CotHW Book 2, p. 29)). But, I wouldn't have them all in
Gloranthan iron (ur-metal) either; they'd still use "hu-metal," but, for
some reason, in the West it looks less red and more gray -- surely there
must be a mythological explanation!
> > >Even if someone pulls forth some unpublished Staffordiana showing that
> this idea
> > >dates back to 196x, I'll still maintain that it was done to
differentiate
> > >Glorantha from run-of-the-mill fantasy of the day (Tolkein and his
> > >rip-offs).
>
> As far as RuneQuest (rather than Glorantha) is concerned, this is very
> correct.
>
> > Greg Stafford hadn't read any Tolkien untill about a decade
> > after he started working on Glorantha, so it's hard to
> > see how he could have been doing anything deliberate to
> > differentiate from it. Remember that AD&D and other Tolkien
> > ripoffs hadn't happened and the Tolkien-esque was not as
> > common a fantasy theme as it is now. If Stafford had any
> > fantasy fiction in mind when writing about Glorantha, it was
> > probably the books of Robert E. Howard and Lord Dunsany.
> > However the real inspiration for Glorantha is real world
> > religion, philosophy and myth. I'm afraid the "Compare
> > Everything to Tolkien" brigade tell us more about their own
> > preconceptions about fantasy than they do about Greg's.
>
> Now here is where my question about when Greg started working on Glorantha
> comes in. Around 1982 or 1983, the Lord of the Rings movie came out, and
Greg
> saw it and talked knowledgably about it and how it related to the books
(and
> I'm sure we talked about Tolkien before then--I just don't have as vivid a
> memory of the occasion as I do of sitting in his living room and
discussing
> the movie). Greg was about 35 at the time. Has he said he has been working
on
> Glorantha since he was, say, 22? Keep in mind that I believe his first
> stories were about a rather undifferentiated fantasy world and featured Si
r
> Ethilrist and the Black Horse troop (if I remember old stories correctly).
First off, I wasn't aware that Greg hadn't read Tolkein when he began work
on Glorantha. Second, I find this at least slightly hard to swallow. After
all, despite what Simon says, it was in the late 60s when Tolkein was
nigh-ubiquitous in Anglo-American youth culture -- "Frodo Lives!"
Furthermore, if this 'decade' between starting on Glorantha and reading
Tolkein is to be taken seriously, alongside Greg's claim (G:CotHW Book 1, p.
36, G:IttHW, p.254, and elsewhere) that he "discovered" Glorantha in 1966,
that puts him not having read Tolkein until c. 1976, which seems impossibly
late. I mean, surely simple curiosity would've gotten the better of him
before that!? Thus, while I can accept that the earliest Gloranthan work
(none of which I've ever seen and most of which, frankly, I don't really
care about) was done before Greg knew about Tolkein, I'll still maintain,
until Greg himself tells me otherwise, that he MUST have felt Tolkein's
influence well before 1976.
> > > .....Now, as Greg has gotten older and
> > >more serious about Glorantha, he's attempted to go back and make these
> > >things seem logical and "real" and integrate them into a proper
Gloranthan
> > >framework
> >
> > The seminal work on Mostali was done in 1982, and was not just invented
> > from whole cloth then. Mostali have not changed in any significant
> > respect since. To understand Mostali, it helps a lot to understand the
> > assumptions behind their psychology. The Mostali psyche corresponds
> > with the Ego in Freudian psychoanalysis. They are exclusively obsessed
> > with their place in the world and their interaction with it. Their job
> > function determines who and what they are. They have no Id and no
Superego.
> > If you think about them in that way, I think you'll find them a lot
easier
> > to understand.
> >
>
> As may be. Greg put a lot of work into making the Mostali different.
This hardly bears comment: I say the description of the Mostali is (or at
least at one point was) largely satirical; Simon Hibbs says they're an
example of a Freudian archetype. These are both valid conclusions that can
be drawn from the available source material (but look at ESoG Book 2, p. 10,
column 2, paragraph 1: that's not meant to be satirical!?), and any further
argument would quickly devolve into "My opinion is better than yours!" so I
won't bite.
Trent
------------------------------
End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #780
***********************************
To unsubscribe from the Glorantha Digest, send an "unsubscribe"
command to glorantha-digest-request@chaosium.com. Glorantha is a
Trademark of Issaries Inc. With the exception of previously
copyrighted material, unless specified otherwise all text in this
digest is copyright by the author or authors, with rights granted to
copy for personal use, to excerpt in reviews and replies, and to
archive unchanged for electronic retrieval.
Official WWW at http://www.glorantha.com
Archives at http://www.kondalski.org/brian/Glorantha
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri 13 Jun 2003 - 22:17:46 EEST