On seeing Loren Miller's question "Where exactly is this in the rules?", I was immediately struck by the fear that I had either misremembered the rule or had been thinking of a house rule or something from another game, so I tracked down the passage. It's from the RQIII Magic book on pgs 23-24, in the section on divination, and is also repeated verbatim in the the draft of RQIV I have under the spell Divination:
>The god does not know what a priest of initiate is thinking and
>cannot deduce motivations. A god knows facts. A god cannot
>invade anyone's mind, though he or she will know when a
>worshipper had lost faith.
On reading that last line, my first thought was "Aargh! Fumble!," but when I thought about it a bit I came to two quick (defensive) conclusions. First of all, it seems contradictory: faith doesn't strike me as a fact, more like a motivation, so I would probably wind up ignoring that statement (as, it turns out, I guess I always have). Secondly, simply because a character has become illuminated doesn't mean that they have automatically lost "faith", just that there has been a shift in their perceptions of the world and the divine (which, to repeat myself, I would peg as the loss of "awe"). Most Lunar illuminates, for example, clearly continue to believe whole-heartedly in the divinity of the Red Moon -- in fact, they may be even stauncher in the defense of their religion than non-illuminates -- so even if you were to accept the rule as written, an illuminate would still be in the clear until they in fact mentally rejected their god.
I agree with Pam Carlson that self-guilt is probably a strong source of Spirits of Reprisal, though to tweak the issue I'd be willing to argue that guilt itself might arise from the fear of punishment -- you lose your fear of the gods, you lose your fear of their wrath, and bingo, goodbye guilt. (And, as an aside, I apologize to the spirit of KanOra the Mana Alk Elsor; I was sorry to learn of your demise. I didn't mean to imply that Nysalor was actually a Bad Guy, only that narrow-minded barbarian scum think so :-)).
Peter Metcalfe:
>The Strange Fragment and Argrath's
>Saga all differ markedly from the orthodox LBQ peformed by Orlanth
>& co. Yet I don't hear of anybody insisting that Argrath was Slime
> Incarnate as a result.
That's probably because most of those that objected to Argrath's Heresy went into hiding after they learned about the six-legged contracts on their heads; after all, history is written by the victors -- or, as someone pointed out in a previous post somewhere, by their children.
>I prefer the term Benightenment myself for Troll Illuminates. But I
>can't really get a handle on what the Ralian Trolls permit the
>practice of Illumination for. Sense Illuminates? The Bright Empire
>is been dead for 2000 years. Ignore Cult restrictions? Like what?
>Join Zorak Zoran and you'll have virtually no burdensome cult taboos
>that I know of. Join Arkat Kingtroll and you can learn sorcery as
>well. All this without the aid of illumination.
While it's true that at that point the Bright Empire was dead and Gbaji chopped up into little pieces (unless, of course, you believe that Arkat was or became Gbaji at some point), I don't think that would diminish the need to have a few of the Benighted around to sense those that might have escaped the Arkati's dragnets, particularly if you happen to be paranoid and given to conspiracy theories (a seemingly popular Ralian pasttime). A good earth analogy might be the continued theories even today about the Templars and the Rosicrucians ("We know the Gbajis are somewhere, we just haven't figured out where they're hiding yet."). From another perspective, illumination might also come in handy if you're running a sprawling, multispecies empire, in that one of its effects is the diminishment of fear and prejudice towards people who aren't like you (no illuminates in the former Yugoslavia, I sadly suppose).
On the other hand, this assumes that people become illuminated simply because of its instrumentality. This is certaintly how most player-characters approach it (when I think about it, since the publication of CoT, I don't think I've played in a single campaign that didn't have at least one character actively seeking illumination so they could surreptitiously get some forbidden spells or chaos features), but I'm not sure that's how most Gloranthans would see it. Illumination in its most organized forms strikes me as a form of mysticism, or as a potentially dangerous mystery cult that lets you in on some of the great mysteries of the universe, in which case you're joining for what you can learn, not for the neat side effects. As such, I think there would always be some, even amongst the chaos-hating trolls, that would actively seek to maintain a place for it in their culture, even if only in secrecy.
(Shine?)
Mark
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