No.
> 2. Why not? It appears that there's no game benefit of not
being an
This goes back to the time and expense it takes to be initiated and devoted. If you a city street sweeper you don't really care to be initiated. You worship God (Lodril, Orlanth, whomever) on his holy day and the rest of the time you do your own thing. PCs are extraordinary this way. Now remember this is only the DH culture.
> initiate. Is this simply an imperfection in how HW reflects
> Glorantha? Or is there really no benefit in Glorantha to just
being a
> lay worshipper?
There is a great benefit of being a lay member, the local priests don't call you out for being a heretic. ;-) The only a lay member gets is the ability to call on divine intervention.
> To me, it seems that there should be some sort of 'lay
worshipper'
> privileges - some minor but extremely broad magic that most
people in
> a society have access to. This would reflect the RW
household/common
> worship of the sort that you see in most pantheistic religions -
where
> you say a prayer to the rain god if the crops are dry, pour a
libation
> for the wine god when the new wine is opened, etc.
People do do this and when it rains assume that the god heard them. He probably did and is just doing his normal job. Initiates and Devotees can get the god to go to extraordinary lengths for them.
> My general suggestion would be that, in game terms, this would
be
> reflected as a contest vs. the character's 'Worship (Pantheon)'
> attribute, with appropriate high improvisation modifiers. This
would
> then allow access to the main attributes of the main gods of the
> pantheon.
Then there is no difference from an initiate. This phenomena of few initiates is restricted to urban cultures IMO, DH, Nochet, Loskalem, etc. Because the city has priests that take care of this stuff for you automatically for the benefit of the entire city. In the countryside you are back to most people being initiates (in DH you are looking at Lodrili).
>
> So, for example, a Lunar, say an initiate of Etyries, could, in
the
> heat of battle, call on the aid of Yanafal Tarnils, even if he
isn't
> an initiate of YT. If he wanted to augment his close combat, he
could
> try for an augmentation at, say, -10 to -15 or so.
If you are an initiate of Etyries and wish to call on the powers of YT (and expect an answer) then you had better initiate into YT as well.
Wesley
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