From: Paul Reilly (paul@phyast.pitt.edu)
Date: Tue 14 Dec 1993 - 01:39:24 EET
Paul Reilly here. A few quick comments today.
Nature of Chaos: I started to write something about this a while ago. In our campaign Glorantha is a bubble of Order within the Void of Chaos. In Chaos ALL things are possible - flying half-men half coke-cans, things which are simultaneously single and multiple, etc. Worlds (like Glorantha) are made out of Chaos by the EXCLUSION of many of these possibilities.
My old response started:
>And for the stupid question of the day, why is chaos so wrong and what makes
>it so different(better? worse?) from pure evil?
This is actually one of the Great Questions of Glorantha and not stupid at all. According to an Arkati philosopher of the Argan Argar Chain:
"The World is a piece of Darkness wedged in a sea of Chaos. This is not a physical lodging; instead the world is a place where rules apply and contradictory things cannot be true at once. In the Void of Chaos, all things coexist together: Light, Darkness, flying elephants, half-men, and most especially, vast inchoate formless half-stuff with no logic or continuity. Thus the Void contains _all_ possibilities, but by containing all, there is no way to differentiate between one thing and another, hence no true existence.
Pure Darkness, on the other hand, is the _exclusion_ of all possible things. We believe that in the beginning Glorantha was formed as a bubble of pure Darkness within the Void. They began to interact; the Darkness _excluded_ most of the possibilities of the Void, leaving a world where _single_ things could be true."
Building on this, we see that the other Elements may have arisen through the interaction of Darkness and Chaos. As Chaos seeped into the original Darkness, they mutually interacted leaving _more_ possibilities and _less_ structure.
For a long 'time' the world worked in a 'perfect' machine-like fashion, with Yelm, Artmal, and that crowd as 'rulers'. The Mostali were happy. We view this as a period with Intelligence but no free will and perhaps not even consciousness. This is the period we sometimes call the 'Old World'.
Then another dose of Chaos came in with Umath. The old Laws were overturned and many were destroyed. New things, regarded as 'chaotic' (defying accepted natural laws) came in - Death, Freedom, etc. Eventually these got integrated into the Gloranthan structure and gave us new (less restrictive) laws.
So we see that Glorantha reacts against Chaos incursions. Another example of this is when Glorantha 'cloaks' a 'naked' chaos hole with a piece of Gloranthan reality - typically a Chaos creature. We see this in Thed's spell to summon the Void. More on this in another post - running out of time today.
In fact, I'd better go now. Apologies if the above seems disconnected, I will try to write a better article another time.
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