It has been pointed out that weregeld (or weregild? Someone give the right spelling here please, I _know_ it's not were"guild".) is NOT just the equivalent of a civil fine, but is set so high that NOBODY wants to spend it. Seven years income, for instance, is pretty much impossible for anyone to pay.
Weregeld is purposely set high in an attempt to prohibit such violence. It's not "putting a price on life", but a prevention of murder. Note that societies with Weregeld do not generally have prisons or other obvious forms of punishment for criminals, and no one wants a blood feud, so weregeld is set and hopefully no one kills anyone else.
>As for personality types - broo are unhinged, yes, but I don't think
>that's necessarily the case; it's *possible* to get altruisitc
broo, >it's just a lot less likely given the complete lack of a
social >setup.
Broos have an extremely well-organized society, actually, much more tightly-knit than the average PC adventuring party. And there are altruistic broo, but they're generally only altrustic towards members of their own species (and are grossly exploited for that trait, of course).
>I don't see that there is a personality type a human can have that
a >broo *can't*, although the proportions are going to vary pretty
>wildly. A cool, calculating broo is certainly possible, even if
>most of them are solidly into the 'kill kill kill rape what's
left' >mindset.
Because broos are chaos mutants, obviously anything is possible. HOWEVER, I believe that the average broo is, by human standards, psychopathic, sociopathic and exceptionally aggressive.
Picture a being devoid of empathy, to whom other entities are only important inasmuch as they serve _him_ (the typical pathology of a psychopath). Add to this a mind filled with a turmoil of rage, lust, and sour hatred to a degree unknown to all but a very few humans, and you get an extremely dangerous combination.
Doesn't mean there aren't plenty of cold, calculating broos, but even these guys, once their enemies are at their mercy, generally vent their lusts to the full.
David Cake doesn't care for my version of the trolls. Apparently at least in part because he doesn't accept Freud.
Dave, get a grip. This is a magic cosmos in which phlogiston is used to power dwarf engines; the world is flat, for Heaven's sake; and the greek elements have validity. The Freudian id, ego, superego are a handy tool for understanding the Elder Races, and much of what has been written in the past and will be written in the future is gonna be based on that interpretation, so brace yourself. :)
>I think trolls have an ego and super-ego just the same as humans
If it helps your own comprehension of these beings, why not simply pretend that a troll's id is dominant over his ego or superego or whatever post-Freudian interpretation seems best?
>for a troll to be unable to refrain from eating or mating when his
>moral senses told him it was the wrong thing to do is not only
much >more at odds with our notion of intelligence, but is also
>contradicted by some things we know of them.
But you see, a troll doesn't have a "moral sense" by my interpretation. If the troll is a being of the id in the full Freudian sense, this doesn't mean he can't react to circumstances appropriately. No one argues that a cockroach has finer sensibilities, but they don't blindly rush out to eat your sugar cubes under all possible circumstances. They have a complex repertoire of behavior, as do trolls.
>I do think trolls exonnerate different values, and stress the more
>primal values, but I don't think the difference is THAT drastic.
If trolls aren't exceedingly different, then why even have them? I once ran a game in which one of the players condemned me as a racist because I made the assumption that her dwarf PC was short, with stubby legs. She insisted that her dwarf was tall and willowy (her exact words!). I foolishly tried to argue that there would seem to be no point in even _having nonhuman PCs if you couldn't stereotype them, but she was having none of it.
Anyone that wants to have trolls be humans in rubber suits is fine by me, but I prefer to have the differences be much deeper and vaster than just cultural. Your listing for trolls, David, makes them sound no more different from me than an Andaman Islander or Yanomamo Indian. I think a troll is more different from _any_ human than any human is from any other.
My id-based view of trolls helps explain a lot about them. It explains why they are hard to convert to other religions. It explains why they don't really give a shit about the Red Moon being chaos. And it explains why they are so horrendous and hard to deal with.
Plus it gives them a very unhuman psychology that is effective and consistent in interacting with the world, all of which is, to my mind, absolutely essential for a gamemaster to use in portraying nonhuman NPCs and a player to use in running same.
jsnead
> I would be interested to hear some ideas about Aldryami writing.
I think elves have a number of different writing techniques. The major one is the scriptree technique, in which an elf grows a bush, tree, or other plant into a particular pattern. The direction the leaves grow, the number of branches, blossoms, etc. all have meaning. You don't "read" each branch individually, of course. Instead, the entire plant has a holistic meaning and it must all be considered to make sense of the message. Different species of plants must be groomed in different ways, but can all be used to send the same messages.
I know that they also grow messages into the living bark of certain trees.
>Also, does anyone have any useful advice about playing elves?
Naturally, the typical PC elf is a renegade. One way to look at elves is to play them as though they had no self-awareness. They don't distinguish between themselves and the outside world in the same way that psychologists used to think babies were.
But since they are intelligent and unselfish, they respond to this by trying to keep the outside world as content as they are themselves. To expound further upon my "trolls = the id" theme, elves represent the superego, the inhibitor, the balancer.
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