Re: Illumination

From: Ngakpa Namgyal <namgyal_at_...>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 20:50:21 +0100

My take on Illumination in a campaign - should I need to ref. such a situation - would be to ignore the rules in ILH2 entirely. I have to say the ILH2 stuff on Illumination, Sevening, the All and the like left me absolutely cold. In *my* Glorantha that latter stuff in particular simply doesn't exist. It all felt terribly contrived to me and rather badly written - I had to keep re-reading it to get my head around it, a bit like the original Hero Wars rulebooks which put me off things Gloranthan for a good five years. It was clanky and sort of lacked poetry really, a lightness of touch, which given the specific subject matter I felt was a great shame.

In a forthcoming Lunar campaign I'll be running Illumination itself will be a possibility; if the need arises it will all happen through roleplaying, and I'll ignore rules entirely. I don't feel it's reasonable to have a game mechanic like Illumination that could 'happen' to a character without at least a peripheral awareness that it was happening on the part of the character, and some degree of active participatin on their part. My principle of late is that players should get what they want for their characters - the downside of which is that they get what they want for their characters. A 'real world' analogy would be the perspective that you can't brainwash someone without them to some degree permitting that to occur, and engaging with the process. Not that Illumination and brainwashing are the same thing mind you. But anyway, in terms of game mechanics that stuff is all pretty lame to my mind, so I ignore it. Gosh I'm a grumpy beggar. Riddlingly yours, Nam.