>Our western dislike of suicide is, I believe, based in Christian
>religion, which classes suicide as the sin of despair. This is not
>the case in Glorantha, so I don't see a problem.
In the first place, Western distaste for suicide stems from a number of things besides the sin of despair; I've heard it explained that murder is bad, and so self-murder is bad. Even more convincingly, there is a tradition that suicides are obviously insane, so the stigma of madness attaches to it.
Regardless, I don't think that most Gloranthans take suicide any more lightly than do Earth folk. They have no more proof that they will reincarnate after death than we have of a glorious afterlife. And they are just as fearful of death as are we, I expect.
This topic has been hashed out before, but the bottom line is that Gloranthans are just about as hosed as we are re: survival after death. The only mitigating feature is that probably fewer Gloranthans are agnostic or atheist than on Earth, and thus a lazy-minded Gloranthan just assumes that "of course" there's an afterlife.
>I believe that most Gloranthan cultures accept the notion of
>mercy-killing
Probably, but this does not mean that a CA is allowed to kill anything but a non-sentient animal to avert suffering.
>I don't accept the notion that they are all vegetarians. This choice
>may occur in some cultures but it doesn't fit my image of CA in
>Orlanthi culture.
Obviously the way you run Orlanthi is entirely up to you, but the vegetarian notion isn't just something made up by Bill Keyes. Be aware that you are consciously altering an aspect of this cult from the Gloranthan "norma" (whatever that is).
>I don't see that CAs would stand and allow themselves to be killed
>or tortured if they could pick up a weapon and try to do something
>about it. Especially, I can see that they could do so to save lives
>other than their own.
I don't think that CA are minimaxing cost-effectiveness analyzers. While a CA driven wild by terror may well pick up a weapon and try to fight, I think that this would be regarded as a transgression by all temples, and that all temples have honored examples of CAs who had let themselves be killed rather than engage in combat.
>Most of these rules seem to be intended to prevent power-gaming
>munchkins from making a mockery of the cult's pacifist nature.
Not really. No powergamer worth his salt would ever play a CA anyway. (The traditional powergaming cult par excellence in RQ II was always Seven Mothers.) The intent of the rules are to make the cult of CA seem extremely harsh, and to give it a strong personality. One of the great flaws of GoG was the manner in which the various religions were vanillicized, which was only partially made up for by the What The Priest Says.
I don't think that an Orlanthi really knows of the existence of an "Orlanthi mindset". Rather, he looks around him and sees the variegated amazing breadth of his culture and religions, with the strongly different stereotypes of Orlanth as compared to CA as compared to Storm Bull as compared to Lhankor Mhy, etc., and feels that his own faith and mores are sufficient for any reasonable person, no matter how aberrant his personality.
Truls Parsson
>I was under the impression that Shang Hsa was the false emperor
>of the new Dragon ring (the God Learners). But Nils put him as
>being before Yanoor who was overthrown by the GLs. So I was
>wondering where does it say that Shang Hsa was before Yansoor?
>Or is this just speculation by Nils? If Shang Hsa is not the
>false emperor who is?
Shang Hsa May-His-Name-Be-Cursed was not a member of the False Dragon Ring (who were not God Learners, by the way, though they originally started out as such). He was earlier than Yanoor. He was regarded as an evil emperor, but still an emperor, and all the shrines to All Emperors contain a dark cobwebby niche for him.
I don't think the False Dragon Ring had an emperor in the classic sense. There might have been some entity or person who took the place of the emperor, but he would have been a puppet only, a tool to focus the worship MPs into the Ring itself.
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