[Glorantha] Re: Missionaries and the hard-of-learning

[Nic Hughes]

--- In HeroQuest-RPG at yahoogroups.com, "Jane Williams"
<janewilliams20 at y...> wrote:

>>These people survived the darkness but it was probably so
>>    
>>
horrifying that

>>they dare not try anything other than what they did to survive.
>>    
>>
>Yes, quite possibly, but the point here is that the missionaries
>  
>
couldn't

>just say "Look, this is edible" (munch) and be believed/understood.
>  
>
Which

>they could do if they'd been facing normal human beings. They had to
>  
>
use

>magic to get the point across.
>  
>

Perhaps the chasm between their levels of cultural sophistication were
just too wide to bridge another way, or at least to bridge in any
reasonable amount of time. Imagine trying to explain[1] to a
Neanderthal that all he has to do to get a meal is pick up the phone,
press the predial and then hand his credit card over to the pizza
delivery boy. Given the abject state of most of the survivors the gap
between them and the missionaries would have been this dramatic.

Which would probably be fun but hard for players to get their heads
around in-game. I'll confess I would be tempted to run something like
this as a one-off flash-back just to show how bad things can get -
then if the Orlanth Is Dead storyline followed the players would maybe
have a glimpse of the visceral fear this event would evoke in the
Orlanthi peoples.

And from what Greg says, this is because the

>people they were teaching had been brain-damaged, somehow. And the
>missionaries hadn't, somehow.
>
>  
>

I doubt if this is quite what was being suggested. Perhaps more of a
soul-destroying centuries deep form of pessimism that leads people to
believe they have no control whatever over their fate. Or its more a 
matter of simply not having the root concepts and ideas to understand 
what you are being shown and told - what the missionaries are doing 
is too far out of paradigm for the survivors.

Of course if you want a pseudo-scientific materialist explanation then
take a look at some of the more-or-less-credible hypothesis raised
about the "hobbits" on Flores and how in a situation of near-permanent
food shortage they might have gradually evolved smaller brains capable
of maintaining their current level of technology but no longer able to
expand upon it.

[1] Plus there is the fact that the Darkness was populated not just by
ravening slimies but also by all manner of deceptive demons. Believing
any one of which would lead to death of a person or possibly their
whole family. Paranoid scepticism was a survival trait; levels of
refusal to believe what you see that would be certifiably insane in a
normal world were probably needed to stay alive in the Darkness.
--
Nic