From: Rich McAllister (rfm@Eng.Sun.COM)
Date: Mon 21 Jan 1991 - 09:56:33 EET
Nice to hear from another longtime Storm-Bull PC player (one of my
favorite characters is an impala rider SB initiate.. a definite
challenge to play a berserker shrimp and keep him alive and on good
terms with his god.)
Based on my play, I've got a couple of reactions to your article. BTW, our group (playing since about 1980, I think -- it's been a loooong time!) also mainly sticks with RQ2 rules.
> The first thing my SB did was look at a map, find the first thing that
> said chaos (chaos woods), and convince the rest of the party to head
> there and beat up everything which moved. Fortunately we never got
> there or my poor little initiate, just out of initial training, would
> have been swiftly plastered by nasties.
Here is the major trouble with playing Storm Bull PCs: keeping them alive.
> The main query is why does the writeup of SB in CoP, when taken with
> the other cults and in the Companion, make SB look like one of the
> major Gods, when this seems to conflict with the actual mechanics
> eg. Priests can only learn 1 and some 2pt spells..
> SB beat up the Devil;
Well, right there is the "mythological" reason for the restrictedness of SB priests: note in the CoP writeup, it mentions SB was sorely wounded, losing much power in this battle (had to be recharged by Ernalda, as I recall.) The implication is he's never quite recovered his original power, and the weakened power of his priests reflects this.
However, I have another argument from a gaming point of view: it's important that SB characters be *forced* to deal with characters from other (saner) cults. If you get a bunch of SBs together, they're just going to run out and get themselves killed. By weakening the magical powers of SB, we force SB characters to work with other cults in order to get access to powerful magic; the other cultists must then try to restrain the crazy SB character to stay alive. It's a great way to have some conflict within the PCs without breaking the whole party apart, and it's a great way to keep the SB character alive.
The most obvious thing here (it even happens in CoP) is the association of Chalana Arroy healers with Storm Bull berserkers -- you have to have the CA people around to calm the SBs down after the battle is over, else they start pounding on each other/friends/trees/rocks/etc.
Rich
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