Re: Sin-Eater; mounted combat; handouts

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From: David Dunham , via RadioMail (ddunham@radiomail.net)
Date: Thu 07 Oct 1993 - 09:24:55 EET


>From: MAB@SAVAX750.RUTHERFORD.AC.UK (Mystic Musk Ox)
>ne of the themes was that of a Sin-Eater. The idea is that a village
>has a carnival each year. For the carnival, food is prepared which contains
>the sins of the villagers. Someone (preferably an outsider) then eats the
>food, thus ridding the village of the sins. In the production, the food
>is poisoned such that the eater dies and takes the sins to the land of the
>dead. The sins seemed to be got into the food by each of the villagers
>chewing something, which was then spat into a bucket and then included
>in the meal.
>
>Does anyone know if this is a real ritual (presumably apart from the
>poisoning) which takes place in the real world? It sounds very Catholic
>to me.

Reminds me of the Aztec goddess Tlazolteotl. (She was an earth or moon deity, if I recall correctly.) One of her titles was "Eater of Filth."

>From: Brian.Curley@ccmail.adp.wisc.edu (Brian CURLEY)
>Subject: Mounted Combat
>I think your interpretation of mounted combat sounds good. It's also extremely
>realistic. The SB player should have known that this Zebra Rider's mount was
>far
>faster than he was and there was no way he was going to get a strike in before
>the ZR blew by him.

Pardon, but someone has to ride by amazingly fast for me to be unable to swing at them. That may be because I'm inconsiderate enough not to time my swings to once/melee round :-)

Melee rounds and strike ranks are game conventions. Where they conflict with the real world (as in the mounted vs footman example), they should be relaxed.

>From: gal502@cscgpo.anu.edu.au (Graeme A Lindsell)
> Barntar: what detail is available about Barntar, the Orlanthi
>Plough/Farmer God, outside of KoS? I may be starting to GM
>Dorastor: Land of the Big Laughs in a few weeks and I suspect
>that there will some PC Orlanthi farmers in the party. If there
>is no detail available I will play Barntar initiates as male
>Ernalda initiates: men can rise to acolyte in the Ernalda cult.

Don't know of any (Nick probably does), but in my non-Gloranthan game, I had a plow god closely associated with the barley goddess. The men were responsible for planting and harvesting, the women for tending.

>From: gal502@cscgpo.anu.edu.au (Graeme A Lindsell)
>One problem I have is that Chaosium/AH player
>handouts tend to give out too much information IMO. I found this problem
>in Griffin Island and I'm seeing it again in Dorastor: I dont want to
>give the players the handouts because I think it tells them too much.
>Do other people do this?

I gleefully give out all the handouts applicable when running Griffin Island (I think I've used all but two so far). Yes, they may give out more info than has been played, but I believe in abstraction. The characters have more time to learn this stuff than we do to play it, after all. And when it's common knowledge, they've grown up with it, and know (if not understand) all the nuances.

The handouts are to save time (and give players something to refer back to). As such, they should convey as much information as possible. Yes, I give them the map before they visit the entire citadel. They will, sooner or later, and it's not worth the game time to do selective revealing.

(I especially like the Griffin Island handouts because they're all so biased, depending on the speaker.)

In Dorastor, I'd have liked to see more of the "common knowledge" extracted from the text and put in handouts.

David Dunham * Software Designer * Pensee Corporation Voice/Fax: 206-783-7404 * AppleLink: DDUNHAM * Internet: ddunham@radiomail.net

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