Colins Spirit plane postYet More spirit stuff

Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

From: yfcw29@castle.edinburgh.ac.uk
Date: Thu 14 Oct 1993 - 15:27:17 EET


Colin Watson writes :


>IMHO RQ GMs are *meant* to be God Learners. It seems reasonable to me
>for GMs to seek a coherent theory to rationalise the nature of magic etc in
>their campaigns. It really helps to have a framework to base ideas on, and
>I think that the rules should provide one. Obviously the characters shouldn't
>know how the framework operates (or even that it exists) but I think the GM
>is entitled to know.

I am not too keen on this use of God Learner immagery. The GLs had a very mechanistic, lowest-common-denominator approach and a 'universal' rules set capable of encompasing all Gloranthan magic and myth would inevitably fall into the same trap.

We can get round this partly by having well thought out, clear rules for those situations which commonly affect the characters, but we do not need those rules to be infinitely extensible. c.f my comments a few days ago about the traditional spirit combat rules. They work for most campaigns and I have nothing against them, but for my own games I need more detail, so I use the RQ4 stuff. The two sets of rules are completely incompatible, but both are equaly valid as representations of Glorantha, but with different emphasis.

e.g. I might rule that spirit combat between embodied PCs and ghosts should use the old MP vs MP resistance table rules, while the shaman should use the spirit combat skill rules while on the spirit plane. This would be a sensible trade off of detail and playability as appropriate to the situation.


>>A problem with the "All Spirits = Dead Spirits" suggestion mooted earlier
>>(esp. re: vegetation) is that I am *certain* that if you went to Big Elm
>>Valley on the Spirit Plane you would see the spiritual form of the Big Elm
>>(whatever *that* looks like), which is still very much alive and well.

>I must say that I'm beginning to like this idea in principle.
>Ok, let's say that the spirits of "spiritually significant" corporeal
>entities can protrude into the spirit plane.

This has prety much always been the case. The spirit encounter rules in RQ3 mentioned places where the spirit plane and material plane coincided, so that disembodied spirits could interact with physical places and people. Perhaps The Bilg Elm is such a place. One of the spirit paths crosses the material plane at that point and so the visibility spell is not necessery.

Perhaps the high POW of the tree bends the spirit plane towards it over time?

About spirit travell:

Nils Hammer's ideas about spirit travell using the skills and runic affitiations to moderate the characters movement along the spirit paths could be extended to include traits and passions, for those of us interested in using them.

Which reminds me :

There was an interesting posting in the Chaosium Digest about a 'Raw Passion' percentage system which is interesting. It seems like a very simple and easy to use idea, creating custom passions for each character during play. The rule was by Loren J. Miller for the Stormbringer game and is in Vol 2 no 2 of the Chaosium Digest on soda. Mail the line :

send chaosium archives vol.2.2

to almanac@erzo.berkeley.edu for a copy.

Simon Hibbs

Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri 10 Oct 2003 - 01:31:54 EEST