From: Nick Brooke (100270.337@CompuServe.COM)
Date: Mon 25 Oct 1993 - 09:58:41 EET
Re:
>> If they [Templars] had divine magic they could recover it at any
>> Christian church.
,
> They never had *anything* remotely similar to RQ Divine Magic, so
> how can we say how things would have been if they did?
Yeah. From the Trial records, it seems they probably used something closer to Jon Quaife's Demonology...
> Anyway, my Varmandi stead has a Long house and another four or five
> stead-houses in the main settlement along with a tree house (I couldn't
> resist putting the bard up in it - sorry!)
Nothing to apologise for! In David Hall's Greydog games, I always see us as the "indomitable Sartarites". It works well, and lets players know how their characters should behave and see the world.
Hmm... a feline equivalent for Dogmatix?
> [Apple Lane]: How do the clans feel about the weirdo's who live there?
It's pretty clear that Apple Lane can only survive under the Peace of Sartar: take that away, and the Colymar would rise up from the south, the Malani descend from the north, and they both try to carry off all those (clanless) metalworkers, skill masters, and concubines for themselves.
As a clansman, I view Apple Lane the same way I'd view a great (but at present impossible) opportunity to cattle raid: "One of these years we'll take it, boys!"
> I want my young Orlanthi to have had little or no contact with the
> outside world (apart from other Colymar). Is this realistic?
Yes, if you like it that way. If you're a Gloranthan parent, would you want your kids to go talking to strangers?
> You imply that shamans have access to resurrection as well.
Of course shamans have access to resurrection! Pretty useless, else. ^^ ^^^^^^
Problem is (as always with RQ shamans) that most of the really interesting and useful things real-world shamans can do have been left out of the rules as "HeroQuests". (Which makes me wonder why shamans were left in at all, but there you go...). I suspect the "featureless grey" spirit plane is another casualty of this world-view (as if you start detailing another plane in a way that makes it interesting to go there, you're heroquesting already).
Game balance solution: shamans, priests and wizards (and sorcerers) can all do Resurrections. But it's a far more strenuous ritual undertaking than the existing RQ rules provide for (I agree it's not simple as it stands, but it's still a little prevalent), thus less common even for Chalana Arroy.
In my head, I don't believe in resurrections. Last time I was in a game where someone got messily killed (falling fifty yards from a giant desk), I successfully lobbied against scraping him off the floor into a barrel and carrying him down from the Plateau of Statues to the nearest Chalana Arroy temple: a complete waste of time, effort and money to bring him back. (So we left him drying in the sun for a week, per RQ2 CoP Yelmalio funerary rites, in case God wanted to intervene, then gave him a good burning).
Mind you, he had *fumbled* a Divine Intervention roll while falling. And I suppose a flat floor counts as a Zorak Zoran crushing weapon: that was a proper Yelmalion heroic death, IMHO.
When I die, I want to stay dead (fellow-players, take note). Please don't drag me back as a cripple in hock to the Healers' Temple...
> [The Red Goddess] does have a substitute air god available for would-be
> storm cultists (alas, I don't recall the name of the Lunar air god, but
> she is a female, nicknamed Calm Air).
The goddess of calm air is Molanni the Traitress, concubine of Yelm and mother of Daga, the god of Drought (who Barntar, among others, vanquished by rescuing Heler from the Blue Dragon).
I've heard her called "Orlanthia", or perhaps "Orlanthio", back in the days when Greg thought "Yelmalio" was a diminutive (and insulting) form of "Yelm" (i.e. before the Elmal schism was invented).
Nobody is going to get much running & shouting joy out of her worship.
On this "initiate of one god" business, I think the answer is that RQ doesn't yet provide a structure for the kind of hopping between cults in a pantheon that is likely to go on. The rules may well be there (is there a corner of some rulebook that says initiates = lay members of associates?), but they haven't been effectively brought to light. The "transition problem" we looked at earlier (Voria --> Ernalda --> Asrelia) is similar to this "pantheon problem".
When do you join Storm Bull? Is it at your coming-of-age ceremony? If so, you're never an Orlanth initiate (which seems odd to me). Or does it happen later? In which case, per RQ mechanics, that's another point of POW sacrificed. In Greg's ms. for "The Life of Harmast", it became clear that in a (literary) First Age Heortling initiation ritual, the kids go into it representing the Five Brothers and get "picked" for the cult most appropriate (i.e. going through the same tests, you could come out as Vadrus or Urox or Orlanth...); cf. "Initiation of Orlanth" in KoS.
I'm asking from the point of view of someone who isn't big, burly and brutish at age 15 (when Orlanth initiation can happen), but gets to be that way later on. (Of course, he could just be a big/burly/brutish Orlanth initiate, but cults usually attract stereotypes as Sandy's entertaining "Orlanthi Life" write-up shows).
Can I stress that I'm not powergaming here (and wanting to multi-cult myself into exhaustion and penury). I just wonder when and whether you can /shift/ your religious emphasis to devote yourself to a now-more-suitable member of the pantheon.
Or, to put it another way: I find it attractive that almost all Sartarites will be initiates of Orlanth and/or Ernalda, but it seems hard to penalise players for this by requiring Sartar Storm Bulls to sacrifice 2 POW in character generation for two separate initiations. I'm feeling around for another way they can participate in the communal religion (not just as lay members, now we're in RQ3 days when just about *everyone* is an initiate. Problem wouldn't have arisen in RQ2 when the initiates were more of a cultic elite, but times change and I like the new system).
> Is it just me, or have the RQ bulletins gotten significantly smaller
> over the last week?
It's just you! Honest!
Henk, I'll be back on-line in the second week of November, after some vicious accountancy exams and a trip to Dublin. 'Til then, I'm writing (and thinking) for RQ on borrowed time, and ought not to be doing it at all.
Can't kick the habit.
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