From: David Weihe (weihe@danet.com)
Date: Wed 30 Apr 1997 - 23:17:26 EEST
> > I was looking over the Yelmalio cult write up. One geas is, "Do not speak
> > or help an Orlanthi." However, Yelmalio is supposed to be the only fire/
> > sky/light god/dess that the Orlanthi worship.
>
> Follow-on question: if a Light Son orders his hundred troops to help an
> Orlanthi village, and one of them has this geas, how does he reconcile the
> military need to obey orders with the divine prohibition? Would you expect
> him to go immediately to the commander and say why he can't help?
My guess is that they use the same trick that lets Americans serve in
the French Foreign Legion without having to give up their citizenship.
The FFL requires an oath of obedience to their officers, not to the
French government, thus there is no oath of allegience to a Foreign
Prince (if I remember the words of the Constitution correctly). The
officers are all French citizens, of course, and their oath is to the
government.
Likewise, while helping the village, the trooper is obeying orders
to remove the threat, not to help the village. If ordered to heal a
villager, OTOH, he might have to refuse, since that is helping an
Orlanthi more directly. On the third hand, if ordered to hand over
his healing matrix, he could, even though the officer was obviously
going to use it on the same Orlanthi. It is the job of an officer to
explain the difference, ideally without having to crucify too many
of the less philosophically-adept.
Similar quibbling and hair-splitting is used by other groups in
Glorantha, such as the Brithini Horals. There is an article about this
in the Archives somewhere that was hilarious, describing how when they
attack the enemy, it doesn't count as killing them, since the soldiers
just hack the enemy until they stop moving, which didn't kill them back
in the GodTime, when the "Logical Laws" that govern Brithini society
were laid down.
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