From: ngl28@rz.uni-kiel.d400.de
Date: Mon 04 Oct 1993 - 21:39:08 EET
Colin Watson in X-RQ-ID: 1879
Subject: Warding; Spirits
>Graeme A Lindsell(on Dorastor):
>> See my review of Dorastor I posted here a couple of months ago
>Yeah, I remember it. I even mentioned it to my GM before he bought Dorastor.
>We laughed and thought "Surely it can't be any grosser than the normal
>Published stuff". We thought wrongly.
Snake Pipe Hollow SPOILERS AHEAD - skip this paragraph if you haven't
played it yet!
With regard to grossness, I was disappointed - what I saw was survivable,
which I would have thaought Dorastor was not. But then the chaos horror of
snake pipe hollow was limited to one chamber as well, the rest was simply a
collection of a few monsters - nothing a band of Runelords (Storm Kahans
or similar) couuldn't exterminate on an average day. I've never played it,
though, and I was told that actually playing it can scare the hell out of
you.
>Geoff Gunner (on the Spirit Plane):
>I think physical combat is more suited to the God Plane.
>>A thought; What's the ground like ?
>The "ground" is a haze of static plant spirits. Where there are no plants,
>there is no ground (eg. in a desert. Navigation could be quite tricky without
>any visual cues).
I hold it that places and minerals have their spirits, too. they only have very slow life cycles, and need vast amounts of substance to produce useful amounts of POW. This makes enspelling "dead" matter fairly easy, unless one tries to do so on loads of matter - one might have to overcome some resistance, then. Minerals etc. also regenerate MP extremely slowly.
And a desert would have landmarks - beasts in their burrows, plants in hibernation (only faintly connected to the mundane plane), and last not least the life on the edge of the desert as faraway dawn. Only really dead places like that in Prax, or the Copper Sands, are totally devoid of life.
>>re Colin Watson - 1 POW loss per month seems good to me.
>This was a monstrously arbitrary decision on my part. I started with 1 POW
>per year and decided it wasn't quick enough, so 1 per month it was!
>I reckon the deterioration should be different for different types
>of creatures: eg. Wraiths POW should deteriorate *very* rapidly (same for
>any would-be undead), but wraiths CON should dissolve more slowly than for a
>normal human spirit (1 per month again?).
>>And the results of `eating' a spirit ? A POW gain roll, in the normal
>>manner ?
>Yup, I'd say so. Regular spirit combat is the best way to survive on the
>spirit plane.
I think the RQ3 POW-gain roll is a bug, the seed for munchkinism.
>>I would rule only if the target spirit was completely destroyed.
>MP completely destroyed, yes; but not POW. Destruction of POW should be quite
>difficult.
First you let the spirits (at least the non-aggressive kind) fade away within short time (btw, what do people mean with "month" with regard to Glorantha? Half a season, i.e. 4 weeks? One cycle of the Red Moon, i.e. 7 days? or one of the Blue Moon, i.e. 1 to 6 days?), then you leave thenm running around emptied of life force, to be conquered again as soon as they have regained one MP. This makes the aggressors gross, allowing them to build up their POW by the hour. (Munchkin spirits would look out for Spirits ten MP weaker than themselves, fight them down, and wait for POW to rise. Repeat until godhood.)
>I see POW as an attribute which "attracts" MP from the background pool in the
>spirit world. The bigger the POW, the faster it attracts MP, and the more it
>can hold.
But this background pool is fed by POW only. Still, I agree on the general picture.
>Ghosts, wraiths, ghouls. I, too, would like to hear poeples views on how
>these creatures come into being, and why they do what they do.
Ghosts: trapped souls, doomed to an existence on the border between spirit plane and mundane world. Can be created by variuos rituals (Humakt, Zorak Zoran, Thanatar, sorcery, shamanism, by Create or Bind Ghost). Never a state reached by own design without help from the living.
Ghoul spirits:
a) failed Vivamorti (or similar cultists) trying to regain physical existance
b) on my non-Glorantha alternate Glorantha/Earth gameworld there are
necromantic cults allowing their dead an existance as undead. Unlike the
spirit magic Create Zombie, these undead are powered by trapping the
spirit's POW for mundane effects. The trapping usually is a temporal effect
and wears off as the corpse rots away. If you want to look at it from
another view, Ancestor Worship which calls the ancestors into some corpses,
no matter what individual, as long as the race is right.
Wraiths are an enigma to me. I don't understand why they have CON, but their lack of POW makes them at least from the rules aspect into undead. Maybe CON is needed to maintain some link to the living.
>And any views as to how elementals fit in would be appreciated too.
RQ tells us that the elementals reside in the appropriate god planes, where
pools or similar of the primary matter (associated to the deity, I'd
suppose, i.e. Orlanth/Storm Bull/Valind Air, Yelm/Lodril/Gustbran/Calyz
Fire...)
To enter the spirit plane, they would have to cross the border of the god
plane into the spirit plane, and then wander about. This makes them
comparatively scarce except close to the fitting god plane sections.
I'd like to see more types of elementals, not just will-less matter animated by magic. Look at the Dehori for darkness spirits, and try and translate these into the other known elements. Hollri seem to be half way between elementals and demons, although ice is no official element. There could be light "elementals" of solar or stellar types, too, not just of moon. E.g. for Pole Star, Star Captains, Dayzatar, Tolat... (or were these the extinct Gold Wheel dancers?)
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