Nicolas Hughes:
> A superhero can choose to save an army rather than themself - and then must
> make a heroic escape to stay in the game. Other than that IIRC nothing can
> stop an attacking dragon except another dragon.
Which is probably as it should be. However, there should always be a warning not to extrapolate games' rules into Gloranthan reality. The DP rules are purely a construct to map a certain type of wargame and do not mean that all of Glorantha acts in a certain way.
> A defending dragon can be eliminated but its never clear if the attacking
> army actually kills it or just makes it not want to play along anymore.
I am sure it just rolls over, goes away and pretends not to have been killed. In the EWF, Heroes killed True Dragons on a regular basis. In the GodTime, Orlanth killed more True Dragons than anyone else. So they can be killed.
> There is nothing stopping you from having an interesting story involving
> dragons, any more than in a different genre you could not have in
> interesting story involving an impending nuclear strike. The story probably
> does not involve you standing up and taking the nuke on the chest, unless
> you are Superman.
If you have characters at the weaker end then a story involving a True Dragon will probably be of the "a mountain turns upside down and a dragon comes out, do you (a) run away, (b) stay and die or (c) pretend it's not happening and die?"
Medium level characters may well have "a mountain turns upside down and a dragon comes out, do you (a) run away, (b) stay and die, (c) pretend it's not happening and die, (d) go up to the dragon and try to talk to it and find out what it wants, or (e) summon a hero to fight the dragon?"
High level characters could well have "a mountain turns upside down and a dragon comes out, do you (a) run away, (b) stay and die, (c) pretend it's not happening and die, (d) go up to the dragon and try to talk to it and find out what it wants, (e) summon a hero to fight the dragon, or (f) Fight the dragon yourself?"
There's a lot of common ground, actually.
Mikko Rintasaari:
> concluding thought on the dragons
Concluding? I doubt it very much :-)
> EWF survivors (some fairly nice, some nasty and one rather like Sheng
> Seleris) are becoming pretty central in my game. I want to be able to make
> use of the True Dragons in my game, and I'm thinkin of what vision of them
> to present.
That all depends on how you want Dragons to be percieved. Are they all evil leftovers of the Dragonkill War? Are they simply neutrals who were attacked in the past and defended themselves? Has the Dragonewt Dream affected the status of True Dragons in Dragon Pass? Are they connected to the EWF survivors or are they independent beings?
Don't forget that standard Glorantha EWF survivors include Pavis, Delecti, Yelmalio Cult (allegedly), Sun Dragon Cult, Dragonewts and Orlanth Rex. Some people of Dragon Pass claim they survived the Dragonkill and have remained in their homeland ever since. Old Storm is one, the Marshers in the Upland Marsh are another. Most of them have absolutely no Draconic links at all. Weren't the Sisters of Mercy part of the EWF? And the Six Sisters in Battle Valley? And Ducks? And the Beastmen and Grazelanders? There are lots of EWF survivors if you look around, although they probably wouldn't think of themselves as such.
> I think I'll go with my King of Sartar inspired vision presented earlier.
> I think beign able to fight a dragon is a mental trick, a change of
> perspective rather than having abilities in the w6 range.
The Heroes who fought Dragons in the EWF seem to have done it in several ways:
I don't know how the Solar heroes killed dragons, but I would assume they invoked Yelm in his various dragon Killing guises and used Imperial Rightness to kill the dragons.
So, they all used a change in perspective, either making themselves god-like or reducing the dragons to killable proportions, then used their "normal" abilities to kill them.
> (I use 10w4 superheroic as the ultimate maximum of a "mortal" being in the
> mundane world anyway, meaning that even a superhero will not get any more
> powerful.)
Hmmm, I'll not comment on that restriction/ceiling on extended campaign play.
> In KoS the hero responsible for EWF experiences strange things. A dragons
> shrinks to his size, or he grows to the size of the dragon. I like this to
> be a case of draconic enlightenment (as in Zen-buddhism), rather than the
> hero having masteries equal to the dragon.
I think it's more a case of the EWF Hero being able to comprehend the dragon on more than one level, so he becomes mataphorically its equal. That doesn't happen to most people, though, so it should be very rare. Heroes of the EWF are inherently draconic in any case.
Unless you have the EWF being reformed, most Heroes who fight Dragons will be of the other types.
Fighting a True Dragon should at the very least involve a huge ritual with loads of preparation and support, then a fight. It is almost impossible to fight a True Dragon without preparation, which is why the Lunars and their massed armies, heroes and magicians were gobbled up. It also explains why the Dragonslaying heroes of the Invincible True Golden Horde could not destroy the True Dragons at Dragonkill - they were not geared up to fight so many dragons at once, perhaps they completed the ritual to kill one dragon but in the meantime their clans were eaten by 2 or 3 more.
See Ya
Simon Received on Mon 03 Jul 2006 - 13:40:13 EEST
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Wed 18 Jul 2007 - 23:38:04 EEST