11 Beasts; water power

From: David Dunham <dunham_at_pensee.com>
Date: Tue, 4 Jun 1996 15:27:51 -0700

In 300 S.T., the World Council of Friends fought the Battle of Eleven Beasts in Fronela. This was fought against "bear-people, wolf-people, wooly mammoth-people, reindeer-people, rhino-people and a sixth Hsunchen tribe that we did not recognize." Anyone have guesses as to what they were -- or what the other 5 Beasts are? (Actually, we know one of the others was the Tawari bull-riders, who led the Beast side of the battle.)

Ian Gorlick wrote

> my calculations based on the rules indicate that a large undine or sylph
> (10 cubic meters) can do work at the rate of hundreds of horsepower, while
> medium ones (3 cubic meters) can put out tens of horsepower

Horses have STR 32; large undines STR 70 so that sounds like only twice the horsepower to me. However, undines never tire, and that's certainly an advantage. On the other hand, neither do rivers tire, and give about the same power yield, by your numbers. Undines require large bodies of water to be summoned, but you could have any number on the shores of a lake (or small stream).

However, since this is the Glorantha list, not the RQ rules list, I suspect you'd run into trouble if you lined the shores of Lake Oronin with sylph-driven water wheels. The Blue People may not be as powerful as they were pre-Dawn, but they would become irate if you enslaved undines en masse. Hopefully people would notice the ominous bulge growing in the middle of the lake and free their undines before disaster struck.

Or, we could notice the difficulty of controlling an elemental of POW 35. A smaller, 1 hp undine (about 5 m^3) has POW 17.5 and so is much easier to deal with, the safer 3 m^3 undine (POW 10.5) has only STR 21. I believe creating machines with POW 35 undines would in effect be very capital-intensive. The smaller undines aren't so technologically destabilizing.

---