From: Kevin Rose (vladt@interaccess.com)
Date: Wed 13 Aug 1997 - 22:36:10 EEST
I'd orginally sent this about 3 weeks ago, but something went horribly
wrong with my email link to chaosium.com. But the topic seems to have
come up again, so here it is.
>
> Daniel: I don't want to spend ten hours a day eating grass and bushes.
Do
> herd-men have human-like vocal cords? You'd have the advantage/disadvantage
> that you couldn't impregnate human women, as your body is that of a different
> species. If anyone found out you'd done that they would have enuf
> material for jokes for a long time.
They are not a different species. It's a magical difference, not a
physical difference. To quote (more or less) from Borderlands:
"A person that becomes a beast loses Intelligence and Charisma. It
becomes herbivous, able to live off the plains. It can no longer have
intelligent offspring with its former kind.
"A beast that becomes a human gains Intelligence and Charisma. IT
becomes omnivorous, requiring the same quality of food that people eat.
He can still have fertile offspring with his former kind, but they will be
unintelligent."
This applies to humans or the beast riders animals. This implies that an
awakened bison needs much better quality food than a regular bison and can
have fertile, inteligent offspring with another awakened bison. But I
never ran a game that this mattered in. . .
Borderlands does explicitly lay out a techinque to build a spy in which
you capture a person, turn them into a herdman and bind a cooperative
spirit into the body. The new person will be a vegetarian, but its a
fairly nasty trick. If you look at some of Sandy's past discussions as to
morocanth slave control techiques it seems to be the sort of thing they
would do without a second thought.
Kevin
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