[Glorantha] The Pharaoh's origins.

[Peter Metcalfe]

Robert Davis asks about the Pharaoh:

>Do we know who he was or where he came from?  Has anyone got any
>theories, and what is the best source for reading more? Lokarnos?

The only source is an old statement from Greg that he fell out of
the future, which has never been clarified.  It seems to conflict
with his thinking about time travel in glorantha, so assuming the
Pharaoh was an actual time traveller strikes me as unsatisfactory.

When writing up the Machine City some years ago, my idea about
the Pharaoh was that the Zistorites had a time machine which
enabled them not to travel to the physical future but to a projection
of what glorantha would be like when the plans of the Zistorites
came to fruition.

To avoid Old World contamination, exploration of the World of
Tomorrow was restricted to chosen Travellers.  At the time of
the destruction of the Machine City, a Traveller had the sense
that something was rotten in the World of Tomorrow and was
exploring it to find the cause.  Thus when Zistor fell and the time
machine wrecked, he was trapped in the world of tomorrow and
didn't return to Glorantha a couple of centuries later.

Can one reach the World of Tomorrow?  If one can repair the
Time Machine, yes.  What's it like?  While I would treat the
World of Tomorrow as a short world, I'm not actually certain
of what it looks like due to the fact that I used so much
possible material (War of the Worlds, Frankenstein, Time
Machine, The Tripod Triology, Casablanca) for places elsewhere
in the Machine City.

Nick Brooke has suggested that the Pharaoh is John Carter
of Mars so I'm tempted to turn the World of Tomorrow into
a Zistorified Red Moon aka Barsoom.

--Peter Metcalfe