Allied Spirits from Steven E. Barnes on 1996-03-21 (Glorantha Digest Vol 02)

From: Steven E. Barnes <akuma_at_best.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 1996 22:52:01 -0800

Hmmm, the mailer at my last message; hopefully this doesn't get duplicated.

> From: Argrath_at_aol.com
>
> This is, IMHO, backwards. The allied spirit has a direct ISDN link to his
> god, and rats on the priest or lord at the first sign of slippage from the
> List of Things to Do and Not Do. Moreover, the priest/lord has NO way to
> compel the ally to do anything, except a Command spell

The realtionship with an ally is not adversarial, except perhaps in paranoid cults such as Krarsht. As such, your ally doesn't "rat" on you. A flaw in your analysis: what happens if the priest/lord is Illuminated? Wouldn't the ally report on all his misdeeds? In fact, it would be able to immediatly spot the psychological change, should the character suddenly become Illuminated.

I further consider an ally to be a personification of one's subconciousness. It will only rat on you if you have a subconcious desire to be punished. This is a possible explaination of how Illuminates can ignore cult restrictions.

-steve