> Apparently rival religion's
> rites in the Sacred Time involve attacks on each other (elves/dwarves,
> trolls/light, lunar/Orlanth, Storm Bull/chaos are mentioned in the
> various examples in various products), or defense against other's
> attacks. One wonders what the death rate is from all this! So,
> here's my question: what religions have sex rituals (other than the
> obvious Uleria)
The Orlanthi have quite a number of sex rituals, generally called marriages because of the wider consequences. A Kings Sacred Marriage with (a priestess of) the Land is effectively a ritual coitus. Standard marriages may have a lot of feasting and oath-swearing around them, but there is one great event central to them - not the defloration of the bride, though, there's another rite for that: Voria's fires of spring. Note that this is not restricted to virgins, these fertility rites provide children even to impotent men. Great magic indeed...
There are numerous heroquests with certain sex elements, too. Read the myths and extrapolate...
> and what religions sacrifice intelligent life, and
> are the "ritual combats" just sacrifices or are they real fights, as
> COP implies?
Among the Sartarite Heortlings the Orlanthi Summons of Evil usually only makes the bearers of masks or similar the ritual foes, but such is the magic of this ritual that in times of real danger this real danger may be summoned right into the ritual - as happened with Kallyr's minor Lightbringers' Quest. If there is a darkness enemy in the ritual, I have little doubt that enterprising priests will purchase a bunch of food trollkin to be despatched (very enterprising ones might sell the carcasses back to the nearest Thunderbreath restaurant, as a troll parallel of Hosts). More often than intelligent life, animal life is taken, e.g. birds for enemies from Fire/Sky.
> And I would like to have a better idea of these attacks
> against/defense against foes in the Sacred Time: these would make
> participation in a religion a bit more of a high-risk activity!: not
> to mention the potential for your priest getting killed, or at the
> least, losing his POW gain because his ritual was interrupted!
I'm not sure the officiating priest necessarily must lead the attack,
this is what makes the most sense of the old RQ2 Lord/priest structure
of all cults: some do officiate (priests), others do act (lords). In RQ3
the ranks have been merged in many cases, but individuals still prefer one
route over the other.
- --
- -- Joerg Baumgartner joe_at_sartar.toppoint.de
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