On the subject of 13 year old Queens.
>How many societies allow marriage to children. Surely childhood
>ends with Intiation into favoured cult. I suppose this should be
>favoured Pantheon now.
It's not a question of whether the girl is considered 'a child' by our standards but whether she has reached _puberty_ before she is _eligible_ to be initiated into the woman's cult. Most people prefer to wait but decadance has always been trendy among the lunars...
Dave Ford:
>For my Praxian campaign I am trying to put together information about the
>Yelorna cult. Any information on the goddess, beliefs, history, skills and
>magic of the Yelorna Amazons is welcome.
The Cult Writeup was in the Big Rubble which is now out of Print.
Yelorna originally came from Ralios. The Cult was introduced into Prax by the Bright Empire of Nysalor where it was taken up by the Unicorn Tribe there. The Cult of Yelorna was exterminated by Arkat in Ralios and later on in Dragon Pass by the DragonKill War. The Yelornans of Prax are the only ones left although there is a Temple of sorts in Pavis.
The warriors among them ride unicorns, which means they are virgins. They use in battle the lance and the bow. I think that only a small fraction of the tribe actually ride the unicorns or the unicorn tribe replenishes its numbers by stealing female children. Their magic is not very spectacular and their main rune spell is the Shooting Star which acts as a combination firearrow and multimissile 1 and is stackable.
Joerg Baumgartner:
>Well, I liked the 80% solution
aka Estonian Vodka ;-)
>because it let me use the age range I am used to while inferring
>iron age life spans on the Gloranthans,
Iron Age Life spans, eh? This would be something like 'the average man lived to see 55 years before croaking'. It has been remarked on this digest before that this sort of figure is the _average_ life expectancy at _birth_. Since the infant mortality in those days was simply horrendous, this takes down the life expectancy down quite a bit. Of course, depopulation through fighting also makes a sizable dent in the life expectancy.
As an extreme example, let us say the infant mortality in a village is 50%. Those that survive then live to become 70 years old before dying. The average life expectancy is then 35 years which gives a totally misleading impression of the village demography. Thus the use of averages needs to be used with care. (Although 50% is excessive, An infant mortality rate of 30% in the first year has happened all too frequently in history).
KoS on p234 says that the ratio of adults to children in Clearwine is 75%. We'll assume that the kids who don't have an adult counterpart lived to be 15 years while those that do lived to be 70 years. This liberal guesstimate and use of step functions allows for the fact that most of the children have survived the childhood diseases and the deficit in adults comes from the deaths due to fighting (The Good Rat is unlikely to be counting newborn babes).
The average life expectancy is then:
70 * 0.75 + 15 * 0.25 = 56.25 years.
And this is excluding the infant mortality rate in the first five years. Iron age life expectancy, here we come!
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