Re: turning men into beasts

From: Sandy Petersen <sandyp_at_idgecko.idsoftware.com>
Date: Fri, 31 May 96 14:39:15 -0500


Turning Men Into Beasts
>The typical morocanth does not cast one-use divine spells. The
>relevant number is not the total number of morocanth, but the total
>number of morocanth kahns. Kahns have other uses for their POW.
>Better uses? Maybe.

        And maybe not. Note that shamans also have access to this one-use divine spell. ALSO note that certain spirits can know it. And so can a khan's awakened riding beast. And it can be enchanted into an object. Etc.

        In addition, an initiate can ecologically produce the effect of a one-use spell by sacrificing his own POW into an enchantment and giving it to a shaman in exchange for the shaman's use of a one-use spell. If the shaman values the enchantment as much as the lost POW, you have produced a way to trade initiate POW for shaman POW. I'm sure this technique is used among the Morocanth, though it may not prove effective among many human clans.

        The question is whether a scribe or a healer or a redsmith or a magician or a leatherworker or an herbalist or a translator or a PC would be worth having the tribe sacrifice a few points of one of their shaman's POW. I think the reply is a resounding YES!

        I further believe that the morocanth actually have a subtype of shaman, who devotes himself to managing the sentient slaves, works with the Eiritha females, probably takes certain female characteristics upon himself, and specializes in Fix Intelligence, among other things.

        One-use POW isn't that big a deal. If a typical shaman gets 2-4 POW a year (an underestimation, IMO), he can afford to blow 1 of those pts each year on a Fix Intelligence. If the working lifespan of a shaman is typically 30-40 years (my own stereotype of these guys is that they often seem very old), this means that each shaman could produce 30 or more fixed INT individuals in his lifetime, without particularly specializing in the subject. Add to this the herdmen created by the occasional khan, the extra herd men created by the slave specialists, and those formed in heroquests and Sacred Time re-enactments (I, for one, am certain that a captured human is magically turned into a herd man at every Sacred Time ceremony amongst the morocanth), and it soon becomes the case that the number of former humans is about the same as the total number of morocanth (i.e., about 2% of the population are shamans -- and I estimate nearly 50 herd men produced per shaman). Every morocanth could have his own former human. Of course, they don't.

        But since only the top few percent of morocanth get important slaves worth keeping by transforming their families, we don't need nearly as many Fix INTs as we even have available to us - -- at least not for that purpose.

Sandy P.


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