From: alex@dcs.gla.ac.uk
Date: Wed 08 Jun 1994 - 10:48:53 EEST
Nick Brooke doubleplusgoodduckspeaks:
> > "Hey! You can't do that! Everyone knows time travel in Glorantha is
> > impossible! It breaks the Compromise!"
> Yeah. But does it happen despite that?...
Humans are allowed to break the Compromise. This is a rule. Pretty routinely, in fact. Time seems to be a rather more strictly enforced rule (though a consequence/part of the Compromise, of course), since the Gods can't break it under (supposedly) _any_ circumstances, while they can ignore the rest of the Compromise, if they really want to.
> While I dislike bringing what I feel are non-Gloranthan concepts (like time
> travel, parallel dimensions, genetics, etc.) into my world-view, if there's
> a good story to be told which uses them, I'd say "Go ahead: tell it!" We've
> probably "travelled through time" on HeroQuests before now without noticing
> it, and I'm sure other instances of the Great Compromise "breaking" spring
> to mind (both Waha and Cacodemon seem to have a loose grasp of its terms).
I think the interesting case is this: we can HQ back to any "point" before the beggining of Time, and pretty much merrily change it however we like. (Put that Gift Carrier down, Sending Gods.) But to ten seconds after the beginning of Time? Tricky. Greg has certainly at times stated or implied you (or at least battalions of Lunar heroes) could do this, but it seems a potentially messy business to me. Ditto the whole "My Oppositional HQer was a 2nd Age Zorak Zorani" scandal.
On the other hand, was 0ST the "Real" start of Time? The Westerners don't seem to think so. The Dara Happans of only a few years after the supposed event don't seem to think so. So what's the deal? If Time suddenly starting, fundamentally changing the nature of the Universe, why didn't these blockheads notice? Does Time for the DHans start a few thousand years earlier?
Of course, the above oversimplifies this somewhat: HQing back to the Dawn Age, even if it were possible, wouldn't put you in the "mundane" First Age world (at least in the first instance), but rather, in the Invisible World of the First Age; the Heroplane, even. This might simply have the effect of changing the modern world accordingly, as with a "classic" HQ, to the Godtime, rather than starting a whole causotemporal sequence of events back from the time HQed to, through to the present, as with "real" time travel.
> Alex: Carolyn Cherryh's haggis'n'kilts fantasy novel "Faerie in Shadow"
> translated "Geas" as "Necessity", which seemed to work well enough. A fun
> book, too, if you can stand cod Scots (better than the real thing...).
Cod Scots and cod Gaelic, too, by the sounds of it. I must ask a passing Irish person about this, for a second q-Celtic opinion.
More of a haddock man,
Alex.
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