: This is ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE.
: 1. The Dark seeks not to conquer but to destroy...
...was the opinion of the Westerners of the Mythworld, who obviously never had a chance to sit Balor down on a couch and psychoanalyze him. Given the relative restraint Balor showed during the Great War (i.e. he didn't torch the Province and surrounding regions as he had the Cath Bruig), I think it's quite possible that his intent was simply to reduce the world to chaos and barbarism, not to expunge all life from its surface. You can seek to destroy without seeking to permanently destroy everything, right? Some Fallen Lords, I grant you, think differently--like Soulblighter. But if Soulblighter could blow up the world by shattering the Cloudspine, why didn't Balor? Or Moagim? I don't think the Mythworld would continue to exist if the Levellers didn't show some restraint. It's just so much easier to destroy than repair that, after two or three cycles, the cumulative damage would produce worldwide extinction.
: 2. The Myrkridia have never lost a battle until Connacht
: 3. The Myrkridia advance mercilessly, look how quickly
: they took the West in M2SB.
True, but in what sense did they "take" the West? The Myrkridia are, fundamentally, animals. They're unstoppable in a fight and they mow down whomever they happen to meet, but they don't have a battle plan, and they aren't intelligent enough to form a strategy for eliminating the human race. Think of other predators at the top of the food chain, like great white sharks. Just because they can't be beaten in a fight and they tend to attack anything that looks tasty doesn't mean that they can't coexist with other creatures. You just stay out of their way as much as possible. The West was peculiarly vulnerable to Krid attack because of its high level of civilization, which meant large stationary towns and villages, easy for Krids to decimate. A lower-tech, sparsely populated, nomadic people would find it easier to avoid the Krids, whose numbers would be kept in check by the usual environmental factors--lack of food, their tendency to try to kill each other when bored, etc. (We had a discussion on this subject a few months ago, if you want to look through the archives.)
Furthermore, we know that Muirthemne survived the Krid attacks, unstoppable as the Myrkridia may be. This simply means that their inability to lose a battle doesn't apply to battles with large stone walls. When they saw the Krids coming, the citizens simply closed the gates and threw rocks at them until they got bored and went away. Which probably applies to the other large cities, too.
: And you expect me to believe there was a single living
: thing left on the planet after A THOUSAND YEARS??? A
: thousand years of a merciless Myrkridian offensive
: that never lost? The cycle does not work that way! Its
: a thousand years of Light and Dark, and the Dark might
: rise and give battle for only a few of those years. In
: TFL it was only what, 100 years of battle at the most.
: The Cycle still makes perfect sense as do the eras and
: heros. Dont try to mix it up and confuse us with
: pre-release crap and GURPS crud.
Of course I expect you to believe that the Myrks attacked for a thousand years. It says so in the very same prologue where you got the bit about the Myrks never losing a battle. "Connacht was the first human in a thousand years to survive a battle with the Myrkridia."
I dunno where you get that the Dark ages are much shorter than the Light ones, or that the Dark age is only one of battle rather than Dark rule. Both the MadJman of the TFL prologue and the sane Heron Guard of the Soulblighter Epilogue agree that the Dark holds definite dominion over the world during that period of the cycle.
I'll stop defending GURPS when you pry it from my cold, dead--wait, that doesn't make sense. Start Again. I'll stop defending GURPS when Bungie says *anywhere* that GURPS is not a valid and acceptable source of information on the Myth universe. And stops rhapsodizing about it in its entry at the Bungie Store.
--SiliconDream
