Before a host of others all begin to wonder just what Sandy Petersen admitted to, here is my statements re: G: CotHW population figures. Their purpose is to gamemasters who feel they need some sort of numbers to get a handle on what is going on in a given region. They are NOT intended to imprison or restrain gamemasters who feel that the numbers do not produce what THEY need for their campaign.
The numbers are the crudest, grossest, kinds of estimates. I hereby state that the numbers are ALL off by _up_ to a factor of 5 as a regular thing, and that occasional estimates are off by even more - -- up to 100 if need be.
Anyone basing serious theories about Glorantha by using those numbers is going the wrong way round -- use the theories to forge the numbers, please.
Also, short-term population fluctuations are much more prominent in Glorantha than Earth -- the broo population can increase by a factor of 100 to 1000 in only a few years, for instance. If the Winterwood elves hatched out all their seeds, then within two decades, they'd have a million(!) elves sprouting from the Winterwood. On the other hand, if the Kingdom of War manages to conquer Loskalm for any length of time, then Loskalm's population will probably plummet like Cambodia's during the mid-1970s.
Nick B.
>Of course, I'd want Troll and Wolf and Flower and Cobweb spirits to
>behave differently stat- wise; it could be reverse-engineered by
>working out suitable ecological niches for the existing spirit
>categories.
Hokay, let's reverse-engineer them. First off, let me state that, IMO, heaps of spirits are NOT creatures which ever inhabited an earthly body. I don't think that the average Power spirit is the ghost of anything at all, but rather that it is a native inhabitant of the spirit plane.
Most non-sapient spirits immediately return to their parent deity upon death for recycling or melding. In addition, this is a good place for me to bring up the collective soul theory again -- in which four-five dogs will all share the same soul, or five million ants (say). One useful side effect of the group soul is that it keeps the spirit plane from being all cluttered up with garbage ghosts of corn stalks, earthworms, and numberless planktonic organisms.
Of course, there's non-sapient spirits on the spirit plane in great numbers -- I'm just explaining why they don't make up 98% of the available encounters.
Colin Watson:
>So why should we bind dumb (1D6 INT) "Intellect" spirits when we
>could bind smarter spirits? "Because they're the only ones which
>can hold spells"? But why is this?
To continue the Horse/Goat analogy -- one of the reasons we ride horses is because we _can't_ ride goats or deer -- they're too small. This doesn't apply to intellect spirits, because even a little bitty one is still handy. There are smarter intellect spirits than the basic 1d6. Such spirits usually have a high POW -- the smart intellect spirits with low POW totals were all snapped up in the First Age, by god, man, and beast, and are gone "poof". If a shaman was out hunting for intellect spirits, and he spotted a spirit with an INT of 47 and a POW of 188, he'd just walk on by -- it's basically useless to him.
Wow. I just had a brainstorm. I suddenly realized that many Intellect spirits are the (fragmented) ghosts of slain Godlearners. It makes perfect sense.
>It's surpirising there aren't more mutually cooperative
>relationships between shamans and spirits.
I encourage this type of activity in my campaigns. I require spirits to be bound into objects or fetches in order to keep up with the shaman (otherwise, it would be too easy to get left behind or wander off), but they'll make deals with shamans, no problem. "You want to bind me in that lamp? Okay, but you have to promise to let me out and burn something big up every six weeks."
>traditionally ghosts are capable of initiating spirit combat and are
>able to posess bodies of the living. Why don't the spirits of the
>newly-slain attack their killers to posess them?
Because their spirits are on the spirit plane, not on the mundane plane.
>After some thought I think your theory of Intellect Spirits as spell
>recyclers is cool for spirit magic spells, but I'm less happy
>applying it to Sorcery.
Then don't. Maybe (most) Intellect spirits _can't_ memorize sorcery spells -- if this were the case, it would solve a common uncool games situation, in which good Malkioni wizards bind evil pagan spirits to memorize their spells for them. I'm all for it? Is the motion seconded?
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