I concur. I also state that Darkness _is_ the source of unknowable fear and formless terror. You can be afraid of a fire monster because it is huge and hot, or of a huge storm because it is mindless and destructive, but you are afraid of the dark and what it hides because you don't know what lies there.
I don't buy Ian's argument that we are anthropomorphosizing the trolls -- Ian, all of us are _humans_. Humans are (sometimes) afraid of the dark. The fact that trolls find comfort and peace in the dark is really just extra evidence that trolls are creepy and terrifying creatures of the night. (That said, there are things in the dark that even trolls fear, and one of them is Subere.)
Martin
>The spell I object to, because it seems so obviously designed for
monsters
>to use against PC's, is Kyger Litor's Blinding.
Pshaw. Why not object to Sunspear, or Mindblast, or Lightning, or any other attack spell? Because the trolls have an attack spell, too? Consider that one of the primary features of darkness is that it _blinds_ sighted creatures. And that Kyger Litor, herself, is blind. Blinding always seemed to be one of the _more_ appropriate spells to me. The one I couldn't figure out was why the Storm Bull (in cults of Prax) didn't have Berserker except as a loan spell.
Neil
> OK, I admit defeat. I can't seem to find any resources that give me
> _numbers_ of animals herded by nomaic herder type people. Can anyone
> help?
I once worked out that an average well-off Sable Rider family (with two adults, two subadults, and two children = five adult-equivalents to feed) requires 45-50 beasts to provide a war steed and riding beasts, and to produce enough food to keep body and soul. This assumed that part of their food was by gathering or hunting, but at least 75% was from the beasts themselves (including milk).
Dave Dunham says that 8-10 Masai folk require 125-140 cattle, but they are considered "rich".
My calculations led to about 10 Sables per adult-equivalent, and Dunham's Masai keep 14 per person -- though I don't know if this counts children as a full person. I'm sure the Masai are better-off than most Sable Riders. Of course, the Masai have more than just cattle, too -- they have separate donkeys, goats, sheep, while the only other commonly domesticated animal amongst Sable Riders are dogs.
Note that Sables are more like cattle in size and breeding than any other Praxian beast except Bison. I'm sure the Impala and High Llama folk have different numbers. Rhinos would, too, but since they don't live off their steeds in the same way, this wouldn't apply.
Sandy
End of Glorantha Digest V2 #671
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
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