Alex

One could also have less grandiose cities with more mundane means of oxygenating oneself. You wouldn't want the whole city to be a giant air bubble, but you might have Breathing Halls that are. Having to visit them would be something intermediate in lifestyle terms between frequent snacking expeditions, and decently-spaced cigarette breaks. How those are being replenished is a whole other topic. Physical transportation of air down from the surface in large containers seems excessively onerous, but maybe snorkels, or some kind of air vents on the sea bed. Whether you get breathable air from plants is an angle of glorabiochemistry I dare not speculate on. Or atop subaquatic sea mounts, say. I wonder if there's a Gyndron city someplace? Someplace deep, presumably. That'd be a strange and scary sort of location, even for other merfolk. Not least as you'd be depending on magic or "guest air" if it's beyond the depth you can surface from before you suffocate...

I think this is, happily -- nay, wonderfully! -- an area where there's room for Gloranthans to disagree, and for those disagreements to be very much like those of the Gloranfans in this thread. People would likely agree in general terms that there's a somewhat jumbled quality to the God Time as one experiences it through myth, ritual, and HeroQuest. The Orlanthi, and anyone else buying into the "Year 1: Sun Rises" premise, will see that as an inherent thing -- if anything, as Charles says, any apparent linearity is something of an imposition by the observers, and the "deep reality" is even more thus. Those cultures with extensive, detailed (and needless to say, mutually contradictory) calendars back to the Green Age think the reverse: they actually happened in a strict temporal order, and the jumbly nature of the magical effects are due to the sad, sad state of things in the modern day world. Accumulated errors in storytelling, and the malign influence of foreign, degenerative forces in the Otherworld. But it's nothing that clean living, a return to traditional values, and some vigorously corrective HeroQuesting won't prolo-- eh, I mean cure!

I don't know that the current canonical slightness is -- guess I should actually read that section of the Guide! -- but back in the day, one idea was that the sun at noon was by-and-large inside the Upper Sky in celestiological terms, except for close to the Winter Solstice. That gives getting on for half the variation one sees on Earth. (Though as you say, in a way that's weirdly quasi-tropical compared to mid-latitudes expectations -- as conditioned by both poster location, and the most obvious cultural "analogues".)

That's the chap. Turns out to be on p249 of my copy, though. (Jalk's Book > RotO > Society > Responsibilities > Obey Chosen Leaders (logically enough).)

Dear lazyweb; I'm trying to recall the location of an outline of a myth/parable about the "follow chosen leaders" value. My best recollection is that it's not given in full narrative form, but is just described in the abstract. The outline of the outline (as it were) is roughly on the lines that a named protagonist can't decide on "a thing right and wrong" (or some such phrase), and asks a series of people (also named, or at least identified by relationship with him) who give him veeringly contradictory advice. The resolution is course that he has to decide which of these are "chosen leaders", and follows the "obvious compromise" between what those people told him. Ring any bells with anyone?