From: Joerg Baumgartner (joe@sartar.toppoint.de)
Date: Thu 02 Dec 1993 - 14:48:31 EET
Carl Fink in X-RQ-ID: 2500
>markg@engrg.uwo.ca (Mark Gagnon) writes:
>>Subject: Receiving Divine Magic from "human sacrifice"
>>I'm curious if anyone has considered the implications of sacrifice:
>>followers of the non-chaotic deities receive spells through sacrifice
>>of personal life force [POW]; I have read nothing indicating that
>>chaotic and evil deities would grant divine magic through the sacrifice
>>of a non-worshipper's life (and POW). Any comments on this idea? I
>>would think that a chaotic or evil deity would demand that sort of
>>sacrifice...
> I've done that in a non-Gloranthan game. There is one such effect
>in _GOG_, although I can't remember which deity it is that grants the
>arrival of one chaos monster, its strength dependent on the power of
>the sacrifice.
I have toyed with using the Stormbringer demonic magic for two nations of particularly nasty ogres and humans (not mingling) for my Alternate Glorantha/Alternate Earth/generic fantasy RuneQuest-setting. Rather than basing the number of points to spend on the demon's ability (as in Stormbringer 4, or sorcerers of Pan Tang) on the caster's sum of ability points, I wanted to base the number on the POW points of the sacrifice(s). Yes, this is grisly, but my players have already encountered these guys, and managed to cope withthem.
My idea was a variant of divine magic. The demonist (to give the magic a name) would have to sacrifice POW to gain the ability to (reusably) summon a certain breed of demon. To regain the use of the ability he would have to do some ceremony, including more sacrifices (but probably less powerful, thus less grisly). The summons would be a matter of few hours, less than the regular RQ summoning times. Each different summoning would have to be learned as a separate skill. A summoning within minutes would be possible, too, if the demonist uses a parallel to the Axis Mundi spell (reusable divine magic, reuse gained much the same way as the summnoings), or expends permanent POW.
With the appearance of Elric! and its introduction of MP-depedant summoning of tailored demons this might have become a bit outdated, but I like the implication of the necessity of sacrifices to uphold the caster's abilities. The Demon Needs in Elric! do something similar, but only for the demon.
I'm not so sorry to introduce non-Glorantha RuneQuest proposals into this list. I'd like to see more, such as RuneQuest in Harn, Lankhmar, or Tekumel - all of these have been mentioned on rec.games.rpg.misc. If anybody has any conversion, please post them! (That's you, Loren, for EPT.) Also Alternate earth conversions, cults, etc. I like Glorantha very much, but RuneQuest _is_ excellent in other settings, too. Why confine it to one setting, thereby cutting off a large market of potential buyers? Chaosium's Thieves World pack showed the the way to go. We ought to be able to do so here. By staying Public Domain, we might attract players from these other settings into helping AH sell RuneQuest, and thereby increasing the output of official Glorantha material.
I volunteer to email the information of my non-Glorantha campaign setting to anybody who wants it in German language. The maps are available as Atari monochrome bitmaps, too. Email me personally, if you're interested. The stuff is still quite disorganizd, but I'll gladly discuss the finer points of it via email.
Anyone else?
--
-- Joerg Baumgartner joe@sartar.toppoint.de
From: RuneQuest-Request@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RQ Digest Maintainer)
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Subject: RuneQuest Daily, Fri, 03 Dec 1993, part 2
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