From: RuneQuest-Request@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RQ Digest Maintainer) To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (Daily automated RQ-Digest) Reply-To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RuneQuest Daily) Subject: RuneQuest Daily, Tue, 02 Nov 1993, part 4 Precedence: junk --------------------- From: watson@computing-science.aberdeen.ac.uk (Colin Watson) Subject: Time to DI... Message-ID: <9311011812.AA02784@condor> Date: 1 Nov 93 18:12:30 GMT X-RQ-ID: 2177 I asked: >> should the "standard" DIs be available to all or not? ______ Graeme A Lindsell replied: > I like the idea of limiting DI's to the powers of the God in question, >but my GM thinks otherwise, for game reasons: the expense of a successful >DI is so great that the supplicant should get what he asks for. I can see that game balance might demand flexibility in the matter of DI. But personally, I'd say if the PC asks for too much then the DI should just fail - no POW loss, no result. When you choose a God to worship, you should take into account how it might be able to help you in times of need. >He has a legitimate question: what useful DI could Thed, Goddess of Rape, >give a broo worshipper in extremis? Well, I could make some distasteful suggestions, but I'll settle for this: (Assuming the poor broo is in a near-death situation) Thed could take the broo's spirit and transplant it into a un-stillborn (broo) fetus thus preserving the broo's life (and postponing the ultimate termination of its damned soul) in a domain-appropriate fashion. Sure, the broo gets slightly screwed - loses his equipment, has to "grow-up" etc; but at least it preserves his memories, spells etc. More than he deserves from Thed IMHO. Use a little imagination; it's a dangerous thing. > In our current game our Storm Bull artist nomad has a "Bison Of >Disintegration": every time he does one of his trample attacks the >victim DI's out of there. Oh dear. I hate it when DI becomes the knee-jerk response of every NPC when faced by superior PCs. I think the PCs should get to nail the bad-guys once in a while. I also hate it when the opposition always blows every last point of their one-use Divine Magic, safe in the (GM's) knowledge that they'll never have to fight another battle. Oh, sorry, was I ranting...? _______________ > Aside on DI's: I'm becoming increasingly disturbed at the way gods >devour their worshippers souls for divine intervention. Perhaps DI >should take sacrificed rune magic instead: that is what the god has >real control over IMO. Interesting idea. I suppose it depends how you look at it: I'm sure the Vivamort cultists would say that the initiate has to sacrifice POW in order to control the god appropriately. Divine spells which have already been bought just won't do, the god ain't interested in buying back what he has already sold. Maybe "atheist" sorcerers would say that the god is not smart enough to do a spell-for-DI swap. All it understands is POW. What would the theists say? Hmm... ___________ Nick Brooke replied: >Not. Trouble with DI is, of course, the poor GM has to think fast for a >one-off special effect at a crisis moment that (presumably, given rules) >wasn't anticipated. I find a good fall-back position is to duplicate spell-effects of the god, but on a grander scale. This is usually what I do on the rare occasions that an NPC succeeds in a call for DI. (The PCs must've done something pretty nasty, or stupid, before I'd have the opposition DI-ing mind you). I rack on 5 or 10 points of cult divine magic which can't be dispelled or whatever. It's quick to work out and it makes the point beautifully. Successful DI on behalf of a PC is a rare occasion which merits some thought (and celebration). I usually take a time-out to think up something appopriately spectacular. And the players don't usually mind the hold-up. ;-) I'll even take suggestions from the players concerning how the DI should work (within reason). >But I don't like either "standard" calls for DI, or >"standard" responses. Me neither. >Any more than I like those outbursts of "Let's *all* >try to pick the lock" that can hit even the best playing groups. This I don't mind *if* they do it in a genuine attempt to open the lock (after all, how else do you find out who is most suited to the task). On the other hand, if they do it purely to get XP checks then I take a different attitude. ___ CW. --------------------- From: C442196@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu (Newton Hughes) Subject: di effects, dwarf senses Message-ID: <9311012139.AA22194@Sun.COM> Date: 1 Nov 93 21:04:34 GMT X-RQ-ID: 2178 Graeme Lindsell asks what kind of result a call for divine intervention to Thed would have: how about that gaping black hole that her priests drop sacrifices into and summon monsters from? Count me in on the side of the people who say the god's powers to DI must reflect his acts in Godtime. I noticed in the Different Worlds index fragment an article on Dwarf Senses by our most prominent new subscriber to the digest. I never under- stood this Earthsense thing; it seems hard to explain and not too useful. I just got done reading Aristotle's Parts of Animals, and was impressed by how much trouble he had with the concept of measuring heat. Certainly it would be a lot more significant for dwarves to have an infrared-type heat sensing ability? As I understand it the biggest challenge in forg- ing a decent steel weapon is knowing how hot the metal is, and anyone who could tell how hot something was just by looking at it would have a big head start in that skill. Certainly d&d set a bad example by giving infravision to everybody and his dog, but in the case of dwarves isn't it appropriate? --------------------- From: graeme.lindsell@anu.edu.au (Graeme A Lindsell) Subject: Some Replies and DI's Message-ID: <9311020220.AA18949@cscgpo.anu.edu.au> Date: 2 Nov 93 18:20:36 GMT X-RQ-ID: 2179 Peter Michaels writes >In this case, perhaps the Uroxi religious emphasis is more >that of the specialized defender against chaos. (Hmmmm... if >Humakt was Orlanth's Sword, was Urox Orlanth's Shield?) IMO one difference between Praxian and Sartarite Storm Bullers is that the later are exclusively male; not that there are many female Praxian Storm Bull initiates, but it one of the few alternatives to Waha/Eiritha in the nomad culture. Women in Sartar with a violent bent would join Babeester Gor or Vinga[Orlanth]. As for the Urox=Shield, I'm not sure. Storm Bull could equally well be a later god to join the pantheon, but he has a unique function. One thing I find odd about Humakt is that he doesn't seem needed in Theyalan culture: they already have two male war gods (Orlanth and Urox) and two female (Vinga and Babeester Go). Why do they need another? Nick Brooke writes: >Just leave out the Pyramids (tempting, I know, for the Esrolite >Necropolis, but I think it'd be going too far). As far as I know (ie not very far) the Egyptian pyramids were just tombs, unlike the pyramids of the New World. While I'm sure the Pharoah respected his old used-up bodies, I doubt he'd waste that much money on them :-) >Hey, let's stick a Lighthouse up there... I'd be surprised if Choralinthor Bay didn't have a network of lighthouses. [Millions of Malkionist sects deleted] This is all a very good reason to see a solid cult write-up of the Invisible God. Roll on Strangers in Prax! Though I expect I'll be ignoring the sorcery parts, since I prefer the various mods by Paul Reilly and Burton Choinski (sp?) that have been posted here and on the RQ4 list. Does Greg have any - very long term, I know - plans to do a Malkionist KoS style book? We really need much more detail on them. David Dunham writes re mobile Orlanthi Temples: >That's a reasonable interpretation, but not supported by the RQ3 rules, >which define temples as fixed sites. And casting Sanctify isn't >necessarily a solution, since you'd need a way to recover your Sanctify >spell. Does it define them as fixed sites? I thought they were defined by number of worshippers, with the various "fixed" parts ie temple defenses there for colour more than anything. As long as you had a few hundred worshippers (ie the clan) with you, you could regain the Sanctify. Divine Intervention. Yesterday I suggested that perhaps DI should be rolled against sacrificed rune magic rather than power. Just to explain a bit, I usually think of rune magic more in the sense of David Cheng's Runepower concept - that the points sacrificed for rune magic are now part of the god - rather than the more usual "use POW to buy some spells" idea. For someone using the latter interpretation of rune magic, the DI vs Spell Points concept would make less sense. IMO it has two advantages over the current method of DI: firstly the god doesn't destroy the soul of his/her/its/their worshiper, and secondly the more pious the initiate (ie the more points sacrificed for rune magic) the greater the chance of getting the gods intervention. Re appropriate DI's: if we were to limit people to those DI's that are within the power of their god, then should PCs be able to DI to associate gods in their pantheon? This might help the problem of pantheons in RQ that has been discussed here lately, and also be a motive to join the more conventional pantheons: an initiate in the Lighbringer pantheon could call for almost any DI through the various associate gods. An initiate of Humakt can really have only two options: a) Lord, turn me into a Death machine or b) Lord, kill me now. Graeme Lindsell ---------------------