: But I like my theory! Look, you have to admit that no one
: who was really good could spend their life in pure
: happiness in the Mythworld. Even if their country was
: pleasant, what about the rest of the world? When
: Myth's poor inhabitants aren't being made into Thrall
: or devoured by Myrkridia, they're dying from the Black
: Plague, the common cold and all the other health
: problems of the medieval world. In Light Ages the Dark
: living races are miserable; in Dark Ages the Light
: races are. Every champion and every archmage seeks
: desperately to carve something lasting out of his
: world; then it gets torn down and rubbed in the dirt a
: thousand years later. Face it, if you can observe such
: a world with total peace and concord, you're either
: stupid or a big freakin' sadist. :-)
But what if they don't observe it at all? They're on another continent, and Mythworlders can't sail across oceans (except maybe the Berserks). The Faraway people are perfectly content, so why should they bother expanding off their continent? Population problems can be solved by having fewer kids, which should be an easy choice for a perfect civilization to make. The point is, they may not even be away that another continent exists, and have no interest in it since everything is perfect in their corner of the universe.
Of course, there is the question of how Mythworlders know of the Faraway. "But I suspect the Head told them (and this was back when the Head could do no wrong)." >:-)
: From the TFL journals: Distance from the northwest corner
: of Forest Heart to the southern edge of the Dire
: Marsh, directly south of the mouth of the Gjol = 250
: miles.
: Distance from said point on the edge of the Dire Marsh to
: Rhi'anon = 500 miles.
Smea just posted below that it's 300 miles. Care to quote your sources?
: Doesn't look that way on the map, does it? It looks like
: the two distances are about the same. But all maps
: involve distortion, and maps from this primitive era
: doubtless involve more than most. I'd take the
: 250-mile measure as the more accurate one, since it's
: in a more civilized and human-known area. In this
: case, the known Mythworld spans about 1500 miles
: east-west.
I would tend to take the Gjol->Rhi'anon = 300mi figure best,
because it's closer to the 250 miles from Forest Heart to the Gjol, but it's also in a straight line instead of that curve past Myrgard.
: The known part, from above, would span about a 20th of an
: Earth-sized Mythworld, or a 10th if we take the Dire
: Marsh--Rhi'anon distance. If your model is right,
: there's room for things to get very very bad to the
: East.
Call it a 20th then. Now lets say the Cloudspine, the center of the Mythworld, is right on the good/evil equator; that means that only 10% of the quadrant we speak of (from the good/evil equator to the evil East Pole) is occupied by the know lands. I can see things getting pretty nasty to the east.
Another thing that dawned on me last night. I'm thinking that the latitudinal line running through the Faraway has perfect balance all along it, and as you travel farther away from it, things start to polarize, more order to the north and more chaos to the south, with the middle still staying fairly balanced but in increasingly more uneasy balance, until the latitudinal line of the Far East is pure order on the northern half, and then it immediately changes to pure chaos as it crosses to the southern half.
The point is, what of the poles? If standing on them you should be in either pure order or pure chaos. However, if the latitude of the Faraway is balanced all along itself, then if you lean in the right direction from the poles you'll be in perfect balance. Leaning in any other direction will put you in various other degrees of balance. Odd, huh?
And another thing I was thinking of. Since the known lands seem to be entirely in the northern hemisphere, and things get chaotic to the south and orderly to the north, then that would tend to put the known lands on the side of order, since they're in the north. But there's plenty of chaos in the world too.
So I'm thinking, the equator is the chaotic "pole", and the poles are both order. The further from the equator you get, the more orderly things get, and the closer, the more chaotic. That way the known lands can still be fairly balanced between chaotic and orderly poles.
I wonder if Tireces came from the southeast, like Connacht came from the northeast (wrt the orderly/chaotic spirits).
: Anyone up to make an enormous map with a number of wells
: and watch to see when the sunlight falls in each, in
: order to calculate the curvature of the Mythworld and
: therefore its size?
Heheheh :-)
