From: Rob Mace (mace@lum.asd.sgi.com)
Date: Wed 19 May 1993 - 11:36:40 EEST
Brian Hebert writes:
> They sat then and watched the birth of Father and Mother Duck and
> rejoiced in their perfection. Their questions over duck nature remained
> unanswered, their private hopes denied, but the two brothers reached a
> pact there at the birthplace of their race. They forged a bond of
> harmony between them and took it within themselves where it worked great
> good at healing all their buried pains and fears. They returned to the
> mortal world and founded their cult together.
>
> ===
>
> Someone remarked on the weakness of that last sentence as the foundation for
> a cult and I agree. I'm not entirely clear on how apotheosis is supposed to
> work. Can anyone illuminate me? ;')
That someone was me, and I will try to explain what I know about apotheosis. None of this is official. It is based on what we have been able to glean from the stories. Also parts of this are from my experiences in Steve Maurer's Hero Quest game. Since he has not given us exact details on what is going on parts of this are my guesses as to how he is working it.
The main thing a hero needs to gain apotheosis is a lot of followers that believe strongly in that hero. And that hero needs to be able give something back to the followers so that generations to come will continue to worship him. This is sort of what happens in Daka Fal ancestor worship. It is also so related to heros drawing power from the support of their followers. We play that heros on a quest that is important to the followers will gain temporary will for that quest. The prayers(temp pow) of the followers go to influencing the success of the quest. This ties back into a post I made a couple of days ago about how worshipers influence the reality of the gods they worship.
Two good examples of heros that reached apotheosis are Pavis and Sartar. Both were founder heros. And both became protector gods. After their apotheosis there followers continued to follow their teachings and lent them their power to have their blessing and protection. I think that Iron Hoof in Sartar is a good example of a hero that will follow this path and eventually reach apotheosis.
An example of the start of apotheosis from Steve's game is the Lady Juliette. She is a Hero of Yelm and her followers can use Sun Spear once each day against those that Juliette has declared to be the enemy of the Sun. The Lunars have resettled a lot of farmers at the mouth of Snake Pipe hollow. They used to give the farmers protection but since a sizable portion of their army in Sartar had recently been eaten by a dragon they were short on troops and had abandoned these farmers to their fate. When our group of heros was passing through the area they asked us for our help against the monsters that were attacking them. We were in a hurry so could not stay but Lady Juliette made them her followers and declared the chaos in Snake Pipe Hollow to be the enemy of the Sun. The next day as we traveled away we saw fire raining down from the sky. Later Steve mentioned as an aside that these farmers had started to send prayers to Juliette. We are not sure what all the ramifications of this will be. I have a couple of other examples but don't have the time to post them now.
In the case of Dha-Naald and Dha-Fhee there should be cult history of the time of their return from their quest. It should talk about how they brought harmony to the Ducks possibly allowing the ducks to drive away some sort of oppressor.
> I have a Balazar based scenario I could post, but I haven't seen many
> scenarios and I don't want to take up space with inappropriate stuff.
> Any interest?
I don't know about others but I would like to see it. I don't think that scenarios are inappropriate. My guess as to why we haven't seen many is that most people don't have their scenarios in a postable machine format.
Rob Mace
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