From: RuneQuest-Request@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RQ Digest Maintainer) To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (Daily automated RQ-Digest) Subject: RuneQuest Daily, Wed, 13 Oct 1993, part 2 Reply-To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RuneQuest Daily) Sender: RuneQuest-Request@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM Precedence: junk The RuneQuest Daily and RuneQuest Digest deal with the subjects of Avalon Hill's RPG and Greg Stafford's world of Glorantha. Send submissions and followup to "RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM", they will automatically be included in a next issue. Try to change the Subject: line from the default Re: RuneQuest Daily... on replying. Selected articles may also appear in a regular Digest. If you want to submit articles to the Digest only, contact the editor at RuneQuest-Digest-Editor@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM. Send enquiries and Subscription Requests to the editor: RuneQuest-Request@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (Henk Langeveld) --------------------- From: paul@phyast.pitt.edu (Paul Reilly) Subject: Responses Message-ID: <9310122143.AA19112@minerva.phyast.pitt.edu> Date: 12 Oct 93 21:43:49 GMT X-RQ-ID: 1977 Paul Reilly here. Stuff about natural laws: >>Greg: >>You ask whether gods' physical manifestation, such as Yelm as the Sun, >>violates the Compromise, since they still obtrude upon the world. It seems >>to me that the Compromise guaranteed each diety's dominion over his or her >>domain, and that for many gods, this domain is a very real thing (Sun, Earth, >>Storm, Winter, etc). So, Yelm killing you with Sunstroke is legal under the >>COmpromise. >Seems like a short step between this and Yelm SunSpearing folk who he >doesn't like. *That's* within his domain too. :-) I have to go with Greg here. In the Celestial Court theory of the universe, the actions of the Celestial Court determined the basic natural laws. Aether chose to live atop the sky, thus Fire and Light are drawn upward. Ge (Gata?) had a fixed shape, so Earthy things have a fixed shape, etc. This principle continues on down the line, thus how plows behave is determined by Barntar. Once Time is started, the mythic acts that determine the laws are 'frozen in'. Fire now always rises, etc. - to alter these basics violates the Compromise. But Fire is still a manifestation of Aether's primal power, it is just that it always behaves the same way. In some sense _every_ mating draws on Uleria's power, _every_ killing uses the power of the First Sword, etc. So when A kills B with a sword it is through Humakt's power that the killing is made possible, much as Yelm kills someone through sunstroke as above. But as long as they are following the _fixed_ pattern agreed to in the Compromise, everything's OK. Mortals retain free will and can invoke the Primal powers through Rune magic, without violating the Compromise, but must sacrifice part of themselves to access these special powers. >>Any ideas for fixes that get at the proportional values of STATS? I have If we believe the resistance table then the stats must be logarithmic. This is fine with me, as long as people realize it. Something should be done about Magic Points in this case, rather than POW. And the stats of big monsters should be fixed - they should be in the tens to low hundreds range, only major Gods should be in the thousands (if even them). ------ Nils' comments on the spirit plane are very good. This sort of junping around fits in well with tales related by Siberian shamans, for example. His ideas on following trails of 'cowness', etc. are what I was describing as following a Fibre which leads to the Platonic reality on the God-plane. Thus all fires are connected to The Fire (Aether), all bears are connected to The Bear (Rathor), all lovers are connected to The Lover (Uleria), etc. There is also a lot of 'geography' on the way between the Mundane plane and these Absolutes. Nils also coments: > I envision an ancient forest in the mundane plane as being >many times larger on the spirit plane. This fits in well with the description given by various shamans in 'The Way of the Shaman'. Things are _bigger_, _livelier_, etc., rather than grey and featureless. - paul More on the spirit plane another time... --------------------- From: 100270.337@CompuServe.COM (Nick Brooke) Subject: Subcults, etc. Message-ID: <931012212548_100270.337_BHB39-1@CompuServe.COM> Date: 12 Oct 93 21:25:49 GMT X-RQ-ID: 1978 I'm busy this month, but will try to make some time... ___________ Simon Hibbs said: > Please, people, I think you are all taking the rules a little too > seriously. I am fully in favour of good ideas about what the spirit > plane is like, and some good material has come from this discussion > thread. But try thinking about what you want the spirit plane to be > like, then propose rules for it. Extrapolating solely from the current > rules is futile. I half-agree. I think we need a rules model that "explains" the spiritual ecology about as much as we need one for the Praxian ecology (how many rabbits support a hyena / how many skullbushes support a high llama?) or the human digestive system. Which is to say, not at all: it feels like Mostali World-Machine-building, and not role-playing, to me. But some of the questions these discussions raise can be interesting, tho' admittedly a lot of it looks like either Super-RQing (POW 1000 spirits, player character shamans with big fetches, ludicrously frequent POW gain rolls) or God Learning (all those global theories about the Spirit Plane, God Plane, and points between). Simon is right: rules that make no sense are less helpful than sensible ideas for which the rules haven't (yet) been written. ___________ Nils Hammer wrote about the "distortions" of the Spirit Plane. I liked his discussion, which rings true. The "Mythic Places" and "Faerie" supplements for 'Ars Magica' (a game I half-admire, but imagine would be unplayable) had some nice-looking ideas and none-too-clunky mechanics for this kind of manipulation of the environment. In their Faerie, if you want to find the house of Death, travel West. Doesn't matter where you start from, because Death always lives in the West... This reminds me (happily) of some of James Branch Cabell's stories, always good source material for heroquesters. As Nils' discussion makes plain, this kind of model requires *very* heavy role-playing and use of subjectivity in deciding what goes on: after all, *we* know that Death lives in the North... ___________ Paul Reilly talks sense as usual. If we want to know what the Spirit Plane would look like, we should read up on what people who have been there say, or talk to them, or go there for ourselves. As usual, research is a great step forward for anyone's Gloranthan Lore (and it's easier for most to get to a local library than to the Spirit Plane). These various "grey fog" and "crystalline forest" descriptions leave me bothered and bewildered. A problem with the "All Spirits = Dead Spirits" suggestion mooted earlier (esp. re: vegetation) is that I am *certain* that if you went to Big Elm Valley on the Spirit Plane you would see the spiritual form of the Big Elm (whatever *that* looks like), which is still very much alive and well. The question of rabbit spirits v. embodied rabbits is perhaps a chicken-and-egg one. To a rabbit, the spirit plane ecology feels as if it works the same way that the mundane ecology does, I feel sure. The question of whether or not animals use magic was mooted indecisively back in WF#14 or so. I'd imagine that the old Greek myth (found in Plato's "Protagoras", I believe, tho' my brother's nicked my copy) about Man being given some special "equalising" power (in that case, political virtue) to make up for his lack of special abilities (claws, teeth, fur, fins, etc.) could be applied to Gloranthan use of magic -- though not by the Hsunchen, of course. Lions don't cast Keenclaw or Ironhand spells because they don't *need* to, any more than rhinos need Protection or wolves Mobility. Now we could do with good rules for morale and natural attempts to Demoralise... ____________ David Dunham asks: > So how exactly do subcults work? Can you sacrifice for Strongblade > (Hiia Swordsman subcult) simply by going to a Humakt temple in the > Grazelands? Or do you have to sacrifice POW to join Hiia's subcult? > Can you belong to multiple subcults of the same religion? I'd say that if you go to a Humakt "temple" in the Grazelands and impress the local priests with your Hiia-like behaviour by defending the Feathered Horse Queen or her mundane representatives (horses, or the Grazeland royal prerogatives in general), you might be invited, as a special favour, to sacrifice for Hiia's special Rune spell. You'd also be taught the special war-cry, and would hear a lot about the deeds of this Hero in a Half-Shell. But the priests of Hiia (or any other sub-cult) wouldn't just hand their Rune-spell out freely to passing Humakti tourists who quite like the idea. You don't need to sacrifice a point of POW to access hero-cult Rune magic if you're already an initiate of the main cult. You could conceivably join the hero-cult "on its own" (i.e. Grazelander Humakti who *only* sacrifice for the Hiia special spell), but I can't see many people going for that... Joining multiple sub-cults of the same religion would usually be easy for a well-travelled or pious individual, as long as they didn't have conflicting restrictions. Imagine two Humakti sub-cults, one of which kills Healers while the other defends them. Obviously they'd be found far apart; just as obviously, they'd be impossible to combine and remain sane. If you play with the *wonderful* RunePower system (D.Cheng, prop.), I'd advise treating both sub-cult and associate cult Rune spells as exceptions to the general rule: they have to be sacrificed for individually, by name. Makes your magic assortment more personal. Reusability -- presumably you can only renew a sub-cult's Rune spell at the shrine to that sub-cult. What this means for initiates' annually-reusable Rune magic is anyone's guess: do you have to live at the shrine, or regain the spell by performing major (Holy Day?) worship there, or what? I'm intrigued by the notion of developing separate "Acolyte" status within a subcult -- an Orlanth initiate from a stead near where the shrine is located might be an Acolyte of Orlanth's Lightning Spear, gaining that spell *only* with seasonal reusability. This subject overlaps extensively with Trickster Rune Magic, which some funny folk out there use a lot. If anyone has played the Trickster shrine- hopping game long enough to work out the problems and solutions inherent in it, it'd be nice to hear about them. Though Trickster reusability would make much of the experience irrelevant, I suppose... I'm very much in favour of having loads of scattered or local sub-cults to give regionally distinctive flavour to Gloranthan religions. As "sub-cults" of a major religion, the requirement for numbers of initiates is presumably met by the body of the mainstream cult -- or do you imagine you need 100 Orlanth Rex cultists in one place to gain any O.Rex Rune spells? This would be the factor distinguishing sub-cults from spirit-cults, which lack the support of a parent-cult. _______________ Graeme Lindsell came up with a neat variant on Humakti Berserk. I'd done something similar myself a few years ago to avoid the same problems, and arrived at much the same result, so by applying the normal rule of synchronicity this now feels like a problem identified and solved. Make Sever Spirit a sword-enhancing spell? Yeah, that sounds almost right. But it should certainly be a one-off (i.e. reusable spell that only kills one person each time), perhaps triggered when you strike a blow. Hard to work out how to do it, though: if a Humakti Sword hits his opponent, he's *probably* dead already... It's a good question; looking at the workings of Death Swords and Ironbreaker might give us a few leads as to how it works. I've seen a letter from Greg Stafford in which he says that Hrestoli women aren't able fully to participate in the upwardly-mobile caste system. And, if we're going to puzzle over Western nuns, why not deal with monks at the same time? The subjects overlap, and are equally interesting. _____________________________ re: this Zebra/Urox business: Could some stalwart defender of Strike Ranks (which actually sent me to sleep during a particularly tedious battle last weekend) please write a defence of the existing rules? I would be amused to see it... ==== Nick ==== --------------------- From: gal502@cscgpo.anu.edu.au (Graeme A Lindsell) Subject: Resurrect in Glorantha Message-ID: <9310130415.AA05259@cscgpo.anu.edu.au> Date: 13 Oct 93 14:15:51 GMT X-RQ-ID: 1979 Resurrect and Glorantha Given Greg's comments about how there is 90% less healing in Glorantha than in RQ I've been wondering about Resurrect. As a 3 point one-use spell I don't have too many problems but the re-usable Chalana Arroy version seems to be way too effective IMO. In a city with 3 High Healers with 2 Resurrects each there are going to be a lot of powerful people (ie Rune Levels) with access to easy resurrection. Has anyone got any ideas for reducing CA's Resurrect but still giving them an advantage over the other cults? I have a couple myself: i) Make it a 1 or 2 point one-use spell for CA. ii) Change the Resurrect spell so it is a ritual Enchant as well as a ritual Summon, and include a POW cost for casting the Enchant part. If the POW cost was (say) 2 POW per successful Resurrection the CA's would be less likely to want to cast the spell (and the cost for a Yelm priest to resurrect would be 5: 3 for the one-use spell and 2 for the actual casting) Opinions? I'm also wondering about the various Restore Health spells. There is a Queen mentioned in Dorastor who is crippled from an early age by Creeping Chills. In RQ she would just pop down to the nearest CA temple, make a suitably large donation and be healed. Any ideas? Graeme Lindsell a.k.a gal502@huxley.anu.edu.au --------------------- From: gbailey@aol.com Subject: Fantasy Hero RQ Message-ID: <9310122143.tn180808@aol.com> Date: 13 Oct 93 01:43:03 GMT X-RQ-ID: 1980 I've worked on RQ spells in a Fantasy Hero form. I may even get to run a FH game soon, probably basing it in Pavis. E-mail me if you want to exchange RQ->FH conversion material. Maybe we can do an Adventurer's Club article together. Glen gbailey@aol.com