Rurik; Meat

From: Nick Brooke <100270.337_at_CompuServe.COM>
Date: 09 Jun 96 13:37:37 EDT



Dominic asked:

> Does anyone remember 'rurik the restless' from the RQ2 rulebook? Was he
> a real character that was run in an ancient runequest game, and if so,
> what happened to him?

Yep: he was indeed an old player character, a Yelmalion Rune Lord who died (alas!) fighting a trollkin. It was all rather chancy: he had lost a lot of POW making his Divine Intervention to escape a Shade, and didn't have enough left to do it a second time, when a runtish but lucky trollkin impaled him in the leg the very next round...

Apparently Rurik Runespear lost his spear for a while, and was mockingly known as "Rurik Runespoon" by his not-so-close friends. His RQ2 stats were printed in Wyrms Foootnotes #13, so you may be able to find them. And you're *almost* right about the career as a quiz-show presenter: he hosted a problem page called "Advice from Rurik" in the last few issues of that magazine.



Declan wrote:

> If we knew cows could think, feel, write poetry, love, philosophise and
> otherwise be 'like us' I think eating them would be out of the questions.

In Glorantha, I'm afraid this is obviously untrue. There are intelligent and unintelligent varieties of many species: consider the intelligent fish of the Zola Fel river, "awakened" Praxian steeds and Rune Lords' familiars, the dumb herd men, etc. And that doesn't stop anyone eating any of them.

As for the posited "universal taboo on eating sentients", you can't claim it's universal while knowing that the Sun Domers and the Lunar Empire happily eat that exquisite delicacy, Newtling Tail.

I agree with your points re: Praxian morality and the Covenant of Waha, I just can't see why you extrapolate from these to an obviously false pan-Gloranthan case with universal taboos, vegetarianism rampant (oh no! plants can talk, too!!), etc.



Nick

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