From: ian i. gorlick (igorlick@bnr.ca)
Date: Thu 01 Sep 1994 - 17:28:00 EEST
THIS IS ALISON PLACE, NOT IAN GORLICK.
Vinga:
To Lewis Jardine (5943):
Thank you for the compliments on Cloak of Snakes. I was petrified
giving it, let me tell you!
Although I agree with most of what you write about Vinga, I would picture her in a somewhat different light, of course. For instance, I don't think that Vinga would be scared to marry if she met a man who pleased her sufficiently. He would just have to take her as she is, with a propensity for independence, self-reliance and doing what she thinks fit for her.
I am not sure what you think intuition is. I consider it to be a subconscious summation of cues that lead one to a sudden conclusion without puzzling out the intermediate steps. It can be overwhelmingly wrong, but it isn't connected with any ability to have offspring. Are you picturing fertility as including a fertile mind, one that brims over with ideas? If so, that is novel, and I shall have to think about it.
To Bryan Maloney (5953):
I don't know of any evidence that Vinga is Orlanth's daughter, and for
you to play her as his sister sounds great. When I was trying to come
up with an Orlanthi myth, I was using King of Sartar to give me ideas,
and there was Kallyr Starbrow, a follower of Vinga. I knew that Kallyr
tried the Lightbringer's Quest, which meant to me that Vinga had to be
closely related to Orlanth. There were three other references to Vinga,
all of them vague. This left me with a goddess who was undefined,
except that she was followed by women who wished for a warrior's life,
and therefore I tried a coming-of-age story about her. Now that I
have started thinking of her in this way, I probably shan't stop, but
unless someone else with more information than either of us can point to
something in print, neither of us is wrong. If you do have anything
more on her than that, or you have written stuff, I would very much like
an e-mail on it. Likewise to Lewis.
Bless Earth
To Bryan again:
Also, you play a more bitter Genertela than I do. I don't know where it
is written that crops in Genertela will fail without this spell. If it
is official, and not just the assumption of various subscribers that
Genert's death doomed the whole of Genertela, could you please cite the
reference? We play that Prax and the Wastes, where Genert's Garden used
to be, may have been that badly affected, but not the rest of the
continent. While I agree that crops fail often there because it is a
marginal land, I don't think that they are doomed to failure without
Bless Crops. I think of this spell as a prudent insurance policy.
The given area is quite generous, considering that it is calculated in time. A day-long rune spell is quite something, as I think that the spell implies that it can only be cast while doing the day's plowing (or something similar). No, I'm not trying to force anyone to figure out all the stuff that I mentioned in that posting (5909), but anyone who is curious, (and many people were discussing it) might actually like to know one place to check some of this out. As for being anally retentive (I think that I was included in that), you should see the habitual state of my house! A pedantic and didactic hairsplitter, yes (like many on this daily), but not a neat freak! My mother still lives in hope, though.
To reply to Alex Ferguson (5956), our festival ended up on Aldrya's day in a roundabout way. Ian mixed up Bless Crops, or Bless Earth, or whatever it's called, with Sunripen, which must be cast on that day. I think that I'd still keep it there, if possible, because Voria=virginity as well as spring, and that just isn't what we want from our crops and flocks! I'm sure that there is another festival for Voria, too, but much less lewd.
Hyaenas: in reply to Loren Miller (5947) and Pam Carlson (5949) Actually, Loren, it was Alison Place who wrote. My husband put a more definite disclaimer than usual on that message, because he didn't want anyone to think that he has strange dreams like that! However, your point about broo is well taken. I have thought of them more as a bastard tribe of Prax because they are sentient (they are occasionally hired or sought as allies in the intertribal strife), but many are probably closer to fixed-INT animals, and they are definitely way above the nuisance level.
Concerning other, smaller, carnivores, I assume that there are plenty, including all the ones you mention, Pam. I particularly like meerkats, myself, since I've seen them on TV and watched them in the zoo. Hyaenas are actually viverroids, themselves. Your comment about their evolution sent me to one of my favourite references, Mammal Evolution: An Illustrated Guide, by Savage and Long (honestly!). It seems that among the carnivores the canids are on one branch, along with bears, raccoons and eared seals, while hyaenas, civets and mongooses, and the cats come off another, with Viverridae being the sister group to Hyaenidae. Sorry about the pedantry, but taxonomy is something that really interests me.
As for really big raptors, I don't think so. There are the condors of Condor Crag, which are large enough to bear a human, but they aren't predatory. One of the Borderlands scenarios involved climbing one of the crags to grab some eggs. It seems that one of the tribal rulers in Balazar was jealous of his Yelmalion neighbour's huge hawks. These he had found while heroquesting, so I don't think that they are available anywhere else.
I like the sound of your white bison trek. By the time your fellows find AND free him, will they all be greybeards? It sounds as if you could spin this out forever.
bye, Alison
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