Re: How powerful are City gods, Tribal spirits, petty gods...

From: bryan_thx <bethexton_at_iEGor7KX3hrsWaBFMMu-yLnhxpNfnG0phssew7rPwQ8-WDUN266BX7X87bqtosirs0>
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:42:57 -0000

wrote:
>
> --- In WorldofGlorantha_at_yahoogroups.com, "Jeff Richard" <richaje@>
> wrote:
>
> > Resistance is always going to be relative to your hero, not to some
> > outside yardstick (which really doesn't work with HQ given the
> > difference styles in awarding and spending Hero Points). The
> > question is what role do you want the city guardian to play in your
> > story?
>
> Sadly this doesn't much help me. If I wanted totally subjective or
> arbitary levels, why would I use a game system for it at all?
>
> Of course I'll be the one filling in the blanks, but I'm trying to
> portray Glorantha for my players to the best of my understanding of
> how She works.
>
At this point I have the same concerns about HW2. More, I'm frustrated that _HW2_ answers are being given to _HQ1_ questions, when most people do not have access to those rules yet. I'll love hearing HQ2 answers once that set of rules are published; to hear only HQ2 responses now in response to HQ1 questions seems almost insulting.

However this is the Glorantha list, not the HeroQuest list, so I'll let that drop.

With regard to your question, I think that city gods are actually still of the class "Guardian spirit/daimone/essence", like clan wyters and so forth. Some of them have been around for thousands of years, and so may be more apt to have accumulated more abilities, but at heart that is how I would model them. So they may be 10W4 if the number of citizens in the city supporting them is large enough. They will have the usual defence, awareness, and blessing model at around that level, with the usual issues about who can use those and so forth. Additional powers that they may have accumulated may be at more variety in level.

There is two reasons I suggest the Guardian model.

First, we know that many new cities have been founded since the dawn, and in many cases they really do seem to be NEW cities, not recreations of god-time cities. That implies that the city god was not always of that form. In general the very ability to create new, green-field, cities suggests that you need to be able to turn something into the city god.

Second, that is how the guardian of the city of Fay Jee was modeled in Blood Over Gold. Not every city will be the same, of course, but nowhere have I heard it suggested that Fay Jee is all that odd in that relation.

Now, in RuneQuest the city gods have always been modelled just as gods. I don't think the Guardian model has ever been adapted to RuneQuest? But in general I don't think large Guardians function all that differently from actual Gods, except in the more extreme cases of things like Heroquesting, so there it probably does not matter.

Regards;

--Bryan