Spirit plane stuff

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From: yfcw29@castle.edinburgh.ac.uk
Date: Mon 11 Oct 1993 - 17:31:24 EET


Although the discussions on the nature of the spirit plane, it's relationship to the mundane and hero planes, etc have been quite interesting, there have also been some very large chunks of irrelevant musings on stuff which is realy just pointless to contemplate.

The spirit combat and POW gain rules are onlt there to adequately simulate such things from a PC perspective. As such they are perfectly reasonable and fair. The only problem occurs when one of the players is a shaman, then the loose ends of the system start showing up and a bit more detail could be used.

What the spirit combat and POW gain rules were NOT designed to do, is provide and accurate and extensible, robust simulation of the daily goings on in the spirit plane. Is it surprising that there are anomalies when we try to use it for this purpose? No! ..... Do I care? No!

When my players start regularly interfering in the affairs of 1000 POW spirits, then I will start worrying about it. Untill then the detailed mechanics of such a spirit's virtual metabolism are utterly irrelevant. RQ does not have game mechanics for the effects of eating crunchy nut cornflakes with added vitamins and minerals every breakfast on my character's fatigue, so why should it have long term detailed rules on the metabolisms of spirits.

BTW. About spirit combats between high-POW spirits (or any high stats). Who ever said the characteristic sacale in RQ is linear? Look at the SIZ chart. The difference between SIZ 5 and SIZ 6 is much less than the difference between SIZ 50 and SIZ 51. A spirit with POW 1000 might actualy be twice as big as a spirit with POW 990.

RQ is only a very rough simulation of the real Gloranthan world. Many things which are perfectly feasible in Glorantha are utterly impossible to simulate using the RQ rules directly. Many things possible in RQ are at best unlikely or difficult in Glorantha. I use the rules to adjudicate situations where the PCs are directly affected. If I have a duel going on between two foreign sorcerers, in which the PCs are not directly participating, anything goes. I will describe what happens as a bystander in Glorantha would see it. I would never even mention POW, MPs, even specific spells. After all, people will not talk about MPs and POW any more than we talk about HPs and fatigue points in the real world. ie POW and MPs are not absolutes, they are probably abstractions of a number of related factors. We don't use fractional MPs because it would be inconvenient, but POW and MPs are no more quantised than other nebulous concepts such as STR, DEX and APP. (Oh look, that girl is exactly 10% prettier with that makeup on! (APP rises from 10 to 11)).

Please, people, I think you are all taking the rules a little too seriously.

I am fully in favour of good ideas about what the spirit plane is like, and some good material has come from this discussion thread. But try thinking about what you want the spirit plane to be like, then propose rules for it. Extrapolating solely from the current rules is futile.

My own view is that the spirit plane and mundane plane are quite distinct. When a spirit casts visibility it 'phases out' of the spirit plane and can't be got at from it, the same goes for bound spirits. Otherwise we would all get frequent spirit plane encounters coming at us from nowhere. These are distinct planes, any other interpretation means that vast numbers of spirits are immediately all arround us, but are just invisible. Second Sight must threfore just give more informaion about visible spirits, perhaps allowing us to see spirits 'through' walls and such as well.

P.S.
I realy liked Colin Watson's real time / god time chart. That is a neat way of modeling the relationship.

Simon Hibbs.

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