[Glorantha] Travelling the Essence Planes

[Greg Stafford]

The issue of how the Pure Otherworlds look seems to bother some people.
Let me assure you first, that YGWV.

Trotsky said

>Heck, as far as I can tell, the wizardly planes don't tend to have that
>much of a landscape anyway, compared with their theist counterpart

I want to refer this whole discussion to HQ, p 176.

"Humans perceive these planes from inside the nodes."

> - the
>nodes themselves may look quite like the gods' houses in the Divine
>world,

Well, like the inside of their houses...

> but you don't really travel between them in the same way. I don't
>get the impression that a map of an Essence plane/region would look
>anything like, say, the map of the Storm Realm in Thunder Rebels.

Correct.

You are inside a spell on the Spell Plane, and then you tavel from that,
as if through a tunnel, to the Saint Plane, which would be like the inside
of a perfect place for that saint.

> My thinking is that maps can be constructed of the Essence Planes
> in a similar way to the Storm Realm but only the inhabitants of the
> Spell and Saints planes can travel through them "normally".

Because there is no "normal" way to travel between them. There's no way to
go to the generalized Spell Plane and look out over some vast plane wherfe
they are bobbing about like froth upon a sea.

> Visitors
> to those planes (ie our Heroes), lacking the timelessness of the
> plane, are unable to travel normally outside the nodes.

Absolutely correct.


> From: Mikko Rintasaari <rintasaa at mail.student.oulu.fi>
adds

> This is a great shame.

YGWV. But MY point is that the Otherworlds are different.

> It reminds me of the description of the Spirit
> World as a featureless gray plain.

To a non shaman. To a person properly equipped to travel them, there are
landmarks etc., often corresponding to terrain that is familiar to the
living. Thus in Prax the souls appear to be amidst a vast herd of creature
on a vast plain.

> I'm going to use a more lively version of the Essence planes in my
> Glorantha. We have descriptions of denizens (fire bears, monoceroi...) and
> some likely features (track grass), so I'm going to build on that and say
> that the essense planes have an actual landscape much like the God World.

Good for you. Go for it. But, YGWV from mine, which has a Essence World
that is like series of enclosed definitions that have links to things
outside themselves.


=====
Sincerely,
Greg Stafford

Issaries, Inc.
2140 Shattuck Ave., pmb #2030,
Berkeley, CA 94704