First off, I will readily concede David Dunham's point that there's little reason in pursuing the BUTS idea heavily until some sort of "approval" from either Chaosium and/or AH has been obtained, though I had taken Eric Rowe's seeming enthusiasm as a good sign; consider my scenario-laden "wish list" withdrawn. As a side note, Pete Maranci mentions the handy old book o' _Foes_, and it occurs to me that on a certain level some of the things which will come up in a BUTS discussion are actually more along the lines of publication suggestions for AH and/or perhaps RMM. An updated _Foes_-like book (given how Stat heavy RQ is), perhaps along the lines of the recent character formulations in stuff like LoT (description + STATs + scenario hooks), seems to fall into that category of "product I'd like to see and would probably pay money for".
Nick Brooke, in response to my 'orphan' theory:
>Really "for all their *alleged* anti-Lunarism" -- I was taking the low
>incidence of civil unrest as an argument against the "You hold her down,
>I'll slash her throat" attitude to Lunar priestesses, charity workers, etc.
>which some posters have posited is held by all Sartarite Good Ol' Boys.
"Alleged" it is, and I agree with your position, btw; I was just tweaking the argument a bit. In fact, I would be willing to suggest that rebellions rarely involve large portions of a subject population anyway, at least directly; I can't help but suspect that most Orlanthi, even if they don't like the Lunars, watch (bemusedly) from the sidelines.
Jane Williams poses an interesting question in the "Celtic or Saxon" thread:
>Another random thought: should we also be comparing with Heroic Age Greece?
>Trojan War, that sort of thing? Clan based, pantheons, heroes wandering off
>doing their thing, no regular army, just a mob out for loot. And it's
>genuinely Bronze Age, too. Sounds possible to me, but
>I don't really know enough to make a proper comparison.
A good point, IMO; my instinct is to reach for Moses Finley's _The World of Odysseus_. He draws an interesting -- well, essentially speculative -- picture of Dark Age Greece which actually has some "Orlanthi" resonance, including --
The parallel isn't exact, obviously, but it does seem as though there's some room for exploration there. The emphasis on the "estate" or household rather than the clan is seemingly more Pelorian at this point, though as the dominant social connections seem household and kin based it does make it *virtually* "clannish", and there seems to have been an anti-trade attitude (trade as the province of the Phoenicians?) amongst the nobility that doesn't mix well with the Issaries cult.
Erik Sieurin and Michael Raaterova continue their crafts/smith dialogue:
>Among certain Celts (no, I don't remember which), those who practiced
>certain crafts (such as jewelcraft and weaponsmithing) were counted
>as "aes dana", "skilled people(?)" right along with druids n' their
>ilk. Is that the case here - some crafts are thaneish, others not?
I think Erik is thinking of the Irish "Celts" in this case, "aes dana" being "men of art"? In a really reductive, Dumezillian way of putting things, the ancient Irish -- at least at one point, IIRC -- included bards, priests ("druids"?), seers, artisans, and craftsmen as the third "class", alongside the noble/kingly class and the warrior class. I think I've seen references to the effect that craftsmen held a similar status in 1st century BCE Gaul, so maybe this can simply be taken as more evidence pointing to the difficulty of using the term "Celt" or "Celtic" in any meaningful fashion. Seems to me that the Orlanthi vary so much from place to place that there's room for both "valued" artisan-crafters being held equal to thanes in some places and proto-serf crafters as veritable thralls in others.
A final note, I like Michael Raaterova's speculations on the directions that pantheon initiation might take; the idea of letting sacrifice and other rituals have some sort of efficacy, even in cases where there is no (initiatory) link on the part of the sacrificer, makes a lot of sense, though there is always the danger of making them reductively instrumental. It might be possible to relate sacrifices/rituals to potential "blessings", rather than divine "spells" per se, though that's a pretty big wrinkle. I would still think of cultic practice as being pretty specific to individual divinities, but agree with the idea that there are clear connections and groupings between divinities that wind up being part of a single "tradition", i.e., the cults of farmers as opposed to that of warriors. Keep it coming.
Just my 2 cents.
Mark
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