>>> Sheng Seleris and Oorsu Sara did not
> I may have misread this. Or re-reading, if their powers didn't come from > misapplied mysticism, where did they come from?
There's no such thing as misapplied mysticism. There is only mysticism and failed mysticism.
Looking at the example of St Anthony and the first monks, some of the temptations they struggled with were succubi wanting to do naughty things to them. If they failed (which of course they wouldn't write about), they presumably had a nocturnal emission and vowed to try again harder. Promises of the world rarely figure into these temptations (apart from the two well-known cases of Buddha and Jesus).
So in my opinion, failing mysticism in glorantha incurs a sense of worldiness that makes many things easier to do. Most failures quickly reject their fallen state, cleanse themselves and try again. Sheng's fall from grace in my opinion was so great that he got a ridiculously large bonus (like say three bump ups in any task) to anything that he did. Plus there was the fact that he, like Ingolf, was unwilling to admit that he was a screwup. If he did give up what he had, he would have only been a thousandth of the man he was before.
I personally don't believe that Sheng was offered the world. That was a interpretation created by his enemies to explain his power. What did set him over the edge and into the Abyss was his prior oath to stand on the Red Moon which he was going to leave unfinished, and posed by his tempter at the last minute to take advantage of his flaws.
So Sheng's powers were pretty much what he had known when he was a Pentan Warlord plus some extra knowledge of the Kralori Underworld that he gleaned when he was in the Instant Torture Camps. At first he was expecting that his status would pretty much allow him to ravage Kralorela with ease but its only when he started having problems that he began to look elsewhere for answers.
--Peter Metcalfe
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