The Invisible God Scam brought to light

From: Guy_Robinson.sbd-e@rx.xerox.com
Date: Mon 11 Apr 1994 - 17:19:54 EEST


It is a real shame that Glorantha is ridden with far too many fantasy names that are a curse to most fantasy writings. Most of Joerg's otherwise excellent answer was obscured by these fantasy names.

First off I would not, and did not, claim that Orlanth was a scam. The religion I was accussing to be state-bearing was those of that focus on the Invisible God.

I now know that the God Learner writings, rather than just contempory American terminology coined the phrase theist. This make it a lot easier for me to swallow. However I would still classify differently.

Fabricationist (sorcery) and Observationist (cults) seem to be good definitions for me but I am admitedly biased :-)

I suggest this as Sorcerers construct and learn their spells while the Cult members receieve their spells from their more Visible dieties. Pehaps the Sorcerers built their God too and crusaded to dominate enough people to power it.

I am a Big Picture person essentially. When I work on preparing a background for play I have to assure myself that the background works on both the people scale and for the Big Picture.

This is why I am working on the generic sorcerer rather than homing in on the detail.

Sandy said something about the difficulty of getting a Priest to cast his spells relative to coaxing a spell out of a Wizard.

Well, I disagree.

The priest has sacrificed POW for his reusable spells and as such would treat Bless Crops spells differently from those that assure his defense and offensive capabilities.

However a Wizard has only one source of spells, the MPs that he has to hand. As all his spells use this source he might refrain from using them to allow him to hoard them to aid his defense against the craven attacks of fellow 'Good' Wizards or to root out any dissidents within his supposed Utopia :-)

The Priest however can cast his peacefull, society strengthening spells and still have powerfull Battle and Divine Magic to hand at a moment's notice.

Nick Brooke asks if I favour free access for people to guns. Being an Englishman this something I would never support but I must admit that I do sympathise with the accursed Ramblers ... :-)

Regards


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri 10 Oct 2003 - 01:33:37 EEST