From: Colin Watson (watson@computing-science.aberdeen.ac.uk)
Date: Mon 20 Jun 1994 - 21:16:03 EEST
Over the weekend I decided to have a browse through King of Sartar to see if I could find any good precedents for cynical worship. The book virtually fell open at the section on The Gbaji War and, lo and behold, here we have Lokamayadon, High(est) Priest of Orlanth, who decided to screw Orlanth completely by collaborating in the construction of the new god, Gbaji. [Ok, maybe it's debatable whether he was a True Priest Of Orlanth or not; but he was certainly well-into the cult.]
Along with worshippers of other cults Lokamayadon used his magic ( =Orlanth's magic?; what other magic would he have?) in direct opposition to Orlanth's best interests. He wanted people to worship Gbaji.
"He forbade all ancient rites of Orlanth. Whenever the elders attempted to initiate new boys, they were all killed. Lokamayadon tried to slowly strangle Orlanth to death in this way."
[He would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for a pesky kid by the name of Harmast Barefoot. Harmast was a Hero (in the mold of Luke Skywalker) who was the first in a generation to be initiated into the true rites of Orlanth by (Obi Wan) Vargast Two-ring. Vargast was subsequently slain by Darth... er... I mean Lokamayadon.
With the knowledge gained, Harmast embarked upon the first mortal LBQ. Where Orlanth had sought to recover the unjustly-slain Yelm; Harmast sought to recover all those good Orlanthi who had been unjustly-slain by Lokamayadon. Harmast returned with Arkat. I like to think that Arkat here represented the avenging spirits of all those dead Orlanthi (Ar-kat = "Our-cult"). Not surprisingly, when Gbaji met his own creating-force he self-destructed.]
But I digress...
The point is: would Orlanth let things progress as far as they did if he had any choice in the matter? It seems to me that Lokamayadon managed to successfully dupe the cult of Orlanth to the point that he got right to the top. Then he grossly abused his position and nearly destroyed the cult. And he wasn't on his own; there were other Orlanthi involved in creating Gbaji too.
So I think the judgement of whether an initiate/priest is "truly devout" is made by the cult, not the god, and there is a chance that the cult will make a mistake.
Having been caught out once, I'd imagine the Orlanthi are pretty wary of falling for the same trick again. Lokmaydism is considered evil and chaotic (and therefore presumably punishable by death). __
Ah well, apologies for the scholarly wibble. The Doc said if I roll 2 percentile dice every four hours the symptoms should pass in a coupla days. :-)
___
CW.
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