From: Colin Watson (watson@computing-science.aberdeen.ac.uk)
Date: Sun 28 Nov 1993 - 19:31:32 EET
So the effects of Chaotic features are not magical? Up to now I'd assumed
that some of them *were* magical (ie. they would detect as magic), regeneration
included.
Likewise I thought most healing potions (those that heal Hit Points instantly)
would count as Magic. No?
We're all traveling forwards in time naturally. If you travel against the normal flow of time (ie. you travel into the past) then surely when you stop traveling backwards the normal flow of time will resume and you'll find yourself heading for the future again. eg. I travel into yesterday. One day later I'm back where I started. Or are you saying that once you start to travel backwards in time you cannot stop, ever?
To avoid paradoxes it's safer to restrict time travel to the "forward" direction.
However, if the Gloranthan gods live in a subjective Godtime which is temporally perpendicular to "Real Time" then there's no reason why they shouldn't know information from the future of Real Time: Say, a priest from the *beginning* of the Third Age goes on a HeroQuest; and a Runelord from the *end* of the Third age goes on a similar HeroQuest. Say, they both meet Orlanth and tell him everything they know. Now, because Godtime is completely independent from Real Time, who's to say who spoke to Orlanth first? Maybe the Runelord got there first, so Orlanth could subsequently tell the priest stuff from the *end* of the Third Age even though the Priest originated from the beginning of the age (and will return to that time when he completes his quest).
However, the way I see it, the Gods are being bombarded with info from all Ages all the time in the form of prayers from worshippers etc. But Gloranthan Gods have no concept of Real Time, so the info that they know will be hideously garbled. They cannot sort it into temporal order because they have no frame of reference. If you ask Orlanth "What will happen next year?" he cannot answer. He might well know of events which will occur in the following year, but he cannot separate them from all the other randomly ordered events which he has been (and will be) made aware of.
Hence one cannot Divine the future. (At least, not with any cast-iron
guarantees).
But that's not to say that information from the future can't filter into
the past: A Priest might get a vision from his god which makes no sense;
because neither the God nor the Priest are aware that the vision comes
from the Priest's future.
And if the vision is an image of a Map with "Fourth Age Glorantha" written on it then it's a bit of a dead give-away... ;-) [So all you Eurmal worshippers out there; get out your quills & parchment, scribble a quick map; and offer up a prayer to LhM. The public has a right to know, after all.]
___
CW.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri 10 Oct 2003 - 01:32:29 EEST