Puzzle Canal to Second Age Pavis

[Goldennose]

I have an idea to warp the adventurers to Second Age Pavis with some strange magic from Puzzle Canal... And make them play good scenarios of Pavis Rises. Has anyone else done something similar? And what are good scenarios in Pavis Rises book? We play RQG, but I quess scenarios are easily modified.

[Darius West]

This poses some interesting problems.  Time is a god; the nerfed form of Kajaboor who was entropy.  To have time run backwards is also to have entropy run backwards.  Presently on rare occasions Time (the god) chooses individuals to receive visions of the future and become oracles, but this has yet to properly cement itself in Gloranthan culture the way it did in Earth's ancient world i.e. there are no Sybils in Glorantha... yet...   As to travelling backwards in time, well, that is some seriously huge magic.  It was touted sometime ago that the Lunars were dabbling in Time Travel, and that of course means that the Sartarites would have to develop their own time warriors, but the paradoxes that causes are too world breaking so the idea was abandoned within Glorantha.  I am inclined to think this was for the best.  So allow me to suggest an alternative... Reincarnation.  While in the Puzzle Canal, the players become entranced, and take upon themselves the identities of individuals who lived in the past; the environment of the Canal evoking their memories.  They enter the canal as people from 1625, and leave in the past as similar people in the Second Age.  Eventually, after you have had your fun, they will awaken back in the Puzzle Canal, having experienced a powerful mystical event that they remember in the form of their new skills.

On a related note, I was a bit underwhelmed by Pavis Rises.  I mean, Pavis was a city of wonders that is still worth picking over the ruins of hundreds of years later.  I didn't get the sense of that from the write-up.  At very least, Pavis needs to have a more-or-less modern water supply to every home.  Laundry would still need to be done a la India, down at the riverside with  rocks, but pipes would be bringing water to the home, and disposing of human waste.  I mean, if the Minoans were nearly there, why not?  I would also encourage magical street lighting of some form, probably managed by the sorcerers of Iffinbix, and certainly not involving the burning of oil.  This in turn would lead to a vibrant city nightlife, made all the more enticing by the fact that Prax is cooler at night.  It is quite possible that this leads to Trolls taking more of an interest in Pavis than they otherwise would have (with all of those eventual negative consequences).

Next consider that Pavis was a happy collision of many otherwise hostile cultures, and that means amazing things would have been possible.  Cosmologically speaking, the Pavis experiment was to recreate the Green Age, but as with Glorantha, this led to other ages, and eventually a God's War where this city/world microcosm also fell apart.  This means that potentially there is the possibility of magical co-operation that would have been impossible at any other time, producing some magical items that would have been impossible at any other time.  For my money, Pavis Rises failed to convey this at all;  Pavis seems like just any other city, just plopped in the Praxian desert and a bit out of context.  Let's just say that there was room for it to be so much more.

Edited January 21, 2020 by Darius West

[Runeblogger]

I thought of doing that in my campaign too, it's a great idea. The best thing would be to weave a lot of interplay between the two ages. A bit like in the videogame The Day of the Tentacle, if you know what I mean.

I was also a bit disappointed by Pavis Rises, but the scenario about the giant looks fun.

[EricW]

The Elric book Stormbringer has an interesting treatment of this idea. Elrik visits an idealised afterlife, where his father questions him about disturbances in the realm of the dead, and his fear of a prophecy that their afterlife would endure as long as the Dreaming City existed. Since Elric had led an expedition to destroy the city a few years earlier, it was a fairly uncomfortable encounter.

The characters don't have to visit the literal second age, they could visit a dream version. What happened to all the people who died in the Dragonkill? Its possible they were simply consumed by the dragons, but this isn't the only possibility. Maybe it happened so quickly they never realised they died, perhaps they still think they are alive, living in an idealised fantasy world where they restored their friendship with the dragons, regained their dragon magic and restored the empire to its former glory. Who knows what strange magic or perils you could encounter in such a place?

There is a story in which Elrik does actually travel in time, back to the immediate aftermath of the civil war which cemented his people's allegiance to chaos, but I thought the dream version was in some ways more interesting.

Edited January 22, 2020 by EricW