Re: Runes of the East Isles gods

From: Todd Gardiner <todd.gardiner_at_pmDZu1kaWiNc6vA8ej39Ezepp7WgpHCwqbYEHJUMFJzKouXbLDni2BQ53LI55m>
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2009 14:20:29 -0700


On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 1:28 PM, nils_w <nils_at_a_ioGJaSTNrGOHwUJbePPPOM8IEciyMCW2QNyJRCTfmW05qkNSuDFHsgg-mjTt0nq1CM5p2oUqKuQIV4.yahoo.invalid> wrote:
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> Important caveat here, mysticism is by definition non-magical.
> That said, most mystic cults are imperfect and do grant magic
> powers. These are not actually mystic thoughand are in fact
> detrimental to eventually reaching liberation.

My semantics do not agree with you here. "Magic" is the demonstration of powers that cannot be done through physical interaction with the world. Thus, by connecting to the Hero Plane you can express the runic powers of your god by "being" him, or you can call spirits that use magical powers, or you can recite a rote that channels power through various nodes to cause a specific effect, or you can refute existence and do odd things that others cannot do. Magic is the action, not the source.

Even the rules do not call Theism and the others "Magic", but they are the systems by which mortals can gain magic. So far, HQ2 has no rules for Mysticism. But previous rules did grant Magic through your mastery of the mystic tradition.

According to the background material I have read for the various mystic traditions, that tradition is always a minority in the population. If granted through a god, there is usually a lay population that still sacrifices to the god and gains magic through the theistic system. One of the reasons that mysticism is a minority is that is has to be supported by the community, since the mystics gain no useful magic (or, more likely, have little interest in using it for reasons that derive from the gross nature of the world, such as feeding people; in fact, do so is supposed to slip the mystic back down the slope of enlightenment).

Ultimately, the mystic is supposed to transcend in some way and leave the net of time. I would say that escaping the Great Compromise is some pretty powerful magic!

But, to return to the gods. describing their nature, I feel, should be done by myth and by describing the culture that associates with their pantheon. Generating the rule-based units that are used to connect player (and non-player) characters to the gods should only list the units that are relevant to this process. That would be Runes, in this case. Runes that the players do not connect to or that do not exist for playing purposes, in my way of thinking, are limited. They are too short to use as a shorthand for describing the interesting ideas of this god's myths and too limiting to give a quick-view into who that god is. Perhaps they are a great starting point for opening up the stories about this god, but trying to reverse engineer the stories into a rune association (without using that rune for gameplay purposes) seems like square-peg-round-hole-ism to me.

That said, I would LOVE to see a list of Runes that are useful for HQ2, even though all I have is the limited Glorantha rules that are in the core book. I'm only grumbling about the process of adding a pantheon descriptor rune to all/most/some of the gods in a pantheon when it serves no purpose but to say the god is in this pantheon (or sub-group, or whatever).            

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