: A couple quick thoughts (addressed to everyone, not just
: Sili): If the North is supposed to be more orderly,
: that would mean that both the Trow and the Berserks
: would have to be orderly people in the extreme. I'd
: buy the former; the latter I have a little trouble
: with. Again, in the south you would have chaotic ghols
: and dwarves. Hmm. The south seems to corner the market
: on technology (though the Trow were the first
: blacksmiths...). Would you suggest that comes from the
: creativity of chaos or the stability of an orderly
: society? Seems to me it takes a little of both.
Hrm. Well, if south is chaos and north is order, and the continent is in the northern hemisphere, then south on the known map would be closer to balance.
: If it's evil to the east, good to the west, then is
: Muirthemne more evil than Madrigal? The avatara better
: people than the heron guard?
: The problem, as I see it, is Brownian Motion. You seem to
: suggest that there's some kind of influence pulling on
: people in every corner of the world. Yet the mythworld
: is famous for its _lack_ of geographical
: segregation--the various races are quite mobile and
: cultures are radically mixed. If you think of
: mythworld people as particles of
: order/chaos/evil/good, they seem to have been mixed
: very well--like pouring cream and sugar into opposite
: sides of a cup of coffee and then stirring it
: vigorously with a spoon. After a while it's impossible
: to say where the cream was added and where the sugar
: entered. Even the untamed lands have been contaminated
: (specifically by Damas). Do people bring their
: tendencies with them, or has the Mythworld been mixed
: enough that such polarities are no longer noticeable?
I think that, as you said, there's some Brownian motion in there. Or you could call it probability. I was talking about tendancies; things to the east tend to be darker, things to the north tend to be more orderly, things to the south tend to be more chaotic. Since we're right in the middle of a temperate zone - not perfectly balanced but not completely extreme, with equal influence from both extremes - things aren't very clear-cut.
There can be light races in dark areas, chaotic bubbles in orderly areas, and vice versa. Thus the Dwarves in the southeast, the chaotic dark; and Berserks and Mauls in the north, where it should be orderly (at least western zerks are light and eastern mauls are dark, so that makes sense).
And since things work on such a large scale, the differences between Muirthemne and the Province, Herons and Avatara, etc, should be negligable; especially when you take probability and Brownian motion into account.
