: My problem is that it isn't explained HOW he did it. Did
: Alric get Tramist's Mirror at Soulblighter's tax
: auction? Did he pull some kind of David Copperfield
: type stunt (he is a magician, after all), get blown
: apart, come walking out from behind a bush and say
: "I'm okay folks! Thanks for coming and tip your
: waitress"? I'm willing to forgive most of the
: glaring contradictions, but this one contradicts the
: eyewitness evidence of everyone who has ever solved
: that level.
Well, it explains how he has used what we've come to call "loopholes in the universe". That is, he finds some technicality in the laws of how things work, and when he dies, he can say to the Gods, "Nuh uh, look at page CMXCIX of the Book of Death! So-and-so technical was invalid, so I shouldn't have really died!" and they send him back. So he literally cheats death. Though GURPS says the body is supposed to be relatively intact for this to work, I suspect that isn't always the case. Magic is all about making exceptions to the rules. Nobody is every completely dead in Myth.
: Unfortunately, they probably never will. Much as it
: hurts, I'm afraid there will never be a Myth 3, and I
: don't see Bungie bothering to respond to our questions
: when we seem so good at arguing them out amongst
: ourselves. I agree with your point about unreliable
: narrators, but what about the manual that comes with
: the game? You'd think that would be a kind of
: Encyclopedia Mythica, but sometimes GURPS expressly
: contradicts it.
My personal criteria list is that later sources are considered to supercede earlier sources, and when paper and digital sources are released simultaniously (fex, a game and it's manual), the digital source (the game) is considered to be "later", as any last-minute changes could be made to a digital source much more easily than to a paper source.
Look at the TFL manual - they call the Barrier the Devoid. But TFL itself supercedes that, calling it the Barrier. And if the Myth II manual differed (say they called it the Great Barrier), then that would supercede TFL. And if Myth II differed (say they called it the Central Barrier), that would supercede the Myth II manual. Unless, of course, the two statements can coexist - so if Myth II called it the "eastern desert" at times, that doesn't invalidate it being called the Barrier by others. Like the Wolf Age and the Age of Light, which are the same period but differently named by different sources.
I apply basically the same criteria to GURPS, though I allow a little slack on minor details (like the spelling of Tramist's Mirror and the Town River) since it wasn't hand-written by Bungie. But big things, like the history of the world and the nature of various Fallen Lords, I take to be verbatim sources.
The exceptions to this are when stated things directly contradict observed things. So if GURPS had said that the Deceiver *did* die and stayed dead after his battle with the Watcher, then that would be obviously wrong, because in Myth II we see him in the Stair of Grief, and he's not completely dead. But instead it says "perhaps he did die", meaning that it's not sure he died, and he even if he did he could have come back using the aforementioned methods, to be almost-killed when crossing the Stair of Grief.
So basically, my criteria for reliability is:
Observations supercede statements; then later sources supercede earlier ones; then digital sources supercedes paper ones; all exepting minor or consolable differences.
