: I really do wish it was all that simple, but I cannot
: help but stare rudely at the errors in GURPS.
: Seabolt made up stuff from his own imagination (digging
: mandrakes will kill men and dogs [did he ever even
: play, for example, Relic where you send units to dig
: up roots?]) and things he just plain overlooked in the
: game (the Deceiver's fate at the end of Shiver), etc.
Mandrake roots in traditional mythology and other RPGs do kill you if you dig them up. He seems to have just continued that assumption without noticing that you can dig them up in game without dying. He admittedly does have that fault, of overlooking some things in the game itself - such as the Deceiver dying! - but he seems to have gotten all the info from the texts down nicely.
: I can't tell all the time when he takes a genuine Bungie
: idea and adds his own stuff to it, or simply takes his
: creative freedom and starts his own little additions
: to the universe. Sure, some stuff in there is from the
: prerelease info, but since Bungie didn't/couldn't
: implement it, does it even exist as canon?
My take on this is, a lot of stuff from prerelease didn't make it in because Bungie couldn't implement it. Other was left out because of story changes. But the stuff that Bungie told Seabolt must not have been nullified by the story changes, otherwise why would they even mention it to him? This leads me to think that most of the major and probably much of the minor information in GURPS was actual Bungie info, and I would say that so long as it's not something clearly contradicted by something we witness in the game, then GURPS is cannon. Some parts of Myth 1 and 2 contradict eachother too - the infamous "Shades are undead Avatara" from TFL, when M2 flavor texts indicate otherwise, for example - but we don't call one game or the other non-cannon over these minor disagreements.
Myth III, on the other hand, had very little Bungie influence and had to be winged by someone who obviously doesn't grok Myth's story half as well as some people here (no offense to Scott Cambell as a writer - his universe is rather interesting and well fleshed-out, when you know more than just M3 tells you - but it's not the real Myth universe). It has some very major flaws, such as the Trow, who served Balor DESPITE his being the Leveller (ie normally they wouldn't serve the Leveller), working for Moagim for no apparent reason; or the Spider-cults/Smith errors; and so on.
Therefore some of it's the very premises for it's major plot arcs are faulty, and if you knock all the holes in those the entire story falls apart. Mandrake roots kill you? Well, then a few optional parts of a few levels fall apart. Hell, even the Deceiver still being alive after Shiver wouldn't collapse the Myth II story, as many debates have pointed out.
: "The following text taken from Bungie's Myth site:
: The story of Myth centers around a deity which appears
: in this world in cycles of a thousand years. During
: one cycle the deity will appear as a Savior; in the
: next, as a Destroyer. At the beginning of Myth, The
: Fallen Lords, he has returned in the guise of
: Destroyer, with the Fallen Lords, a group of
: resurrected and powerful generals. These beings and
: their legions of undead and spirit forces rise up to
: destroy the living beings of this world, while the
: player controls the living and tries to stop the
: onslaught."
: The above prerelease info says it is the same creature
: which alternately is Savior and Destroyer. However,
: unless this creature can be at 2 places at the same
: time, this is impossible. Further, and much more
: importantly, the whole possibility of the Leveler ever
: being a hero is proven wrong in the Myth II epilogue
: right here: "Although the hero of every age of
: light is different, every dark age is ushered in by
: the same beast[...]"
Yet TFL seems to operate largely under this prerelease story concept. Connacht killed Moagim and became the hero of the Wind Age, which we all presumed to mean he was the one who ushered in the Wind Age; Balor's been around for at least 300 years now in the previous (unnamed in TFL, but as we learn in M2, the Wolf) age making a mess of things (see the Myrmidons). It's the Light's turn now, so the hero Alric comes along and kicks Balor's ass and we all live happily ever after. But they seem to have changed that in mid-development, thus Balor is still the dark Leveller (as opposed to Alric being the light Leveller, the Savior), the past 1000 years have been Light, and the Wind Age was dark.
