First off, I offer up an apology for the dissertation-like nature of my last couple of posts; I fear I have once again been infected by the spirit of the KoW, but hopefully the purification rites have been successful.
Erik Sieurin brought up an interesting point in his post on pantheon initiation:
>Usually, when you need someone Really Worthy as an enemy in some
>special ceremony, you summon your enemy (and some high-ranking
>associate of the god will appear - like a Broo Chieftain if you want
>a Raglagnar.)
which IMO was echoed by Pam and Michael's ideas/questions about the cyclical nature of the seasons and what could be called the 'chicken or the egg' question -- whether the season dictates the rituals, or the rituals dictate the order of the seasons. Michael noted the problem of Dark Season, in that presumably few Orlanthi actually want to bring about the Darkness, and suggested that the coming of Dark Season would result from Uz rituals which would be opposed by the rituals of other folk.
It sort of strikes me that, following Michael's thinking, one way of looking at this would be to view a lot of festivals or rituals as being oppositional in nature; in theory, then, all cults should have both 'positive' holy days or festivals, in which they attempt to be proactive in the world, and 'negative' or 'anti' holy days, festivals, or rituals, in which they are attempting to mythically and magically interfere with someone else's proactive ritual. The IceBreaker rituals in Peloria would be a good example of this. One of the odd elements to many HeroQuest rituals, IMO, is the rather convenient and somewhat hard-to-explain appearance of appropriate foes at the proper moments; for calendrical rituals this becomes easier to swallow, perhaps, if the 'summoning' which Erik mentions really isn't necessary because the ritual adversaries are already readying their own antithetical ritual as part of their cult calendar (the Yelmalions in Varosh's CoP narrative cheated, IMO, by providing their own adversaries, instead of waiting for their proper foes to show up). What this would mean, in effect, is that in addition to the more-or-less proactive holy days listed in current cult write-ups, a listing of oppositional rituals would be needed as well (this could also help explain what rune levels are doing with 90% of their time; in addition to doing positive stuff for their own divinity, they have to spend a lot of time interfering with other cults).
Some other comments, mostly on Michael's postings; he wrote:
>Anybody have any RW examples of cultural year-cycles not based on
>spring-summer-autumn-winter?
A bunch of folks already mentioned other calendar cycles, but at least _seasonally_ the wet-season/dry-season model comes to mind as the most obvious alternative.
>If we accept that God Time is non-linear, i think that
>the Seasons are (mostly) created by the seasonal rituals, even though there
>are phenomena, like Yelm's State of Radiance, that make these rituals
>easier or more difficult to perform, effectively forcing the seasonal
>rituals to happen in a certain progression.
Whether or not God Time is strictly 'non-linear' (I seem to recall that Peter Metcalfe and I got into some circular argumentation on that question recently), Time certainly is, so even if the God Time is nominally non-linear it becomes linear in Time, IMO. In a sense, I think it could be argued that the Seasons are the God Time as viewed through the "filter" of Time, so I would think the Seasons have an existence independent of the rituals; the rituals are performed, IMO, to determine how the Seasons impact a given community.
Both Erik and Michael continue with the question of the interconnection of broader (and presumably more powerful) community rituals and individual divine magic, ending with Michael writing:
>A sidethought: what if the clan must successfully perform a Big Communal
>Ritual in order to get access to Rune Spells associated with the ritual? If
>the Fertility Ritual fails, can anybody in the clan cast Bless Crops? Or
>does a failed ritual weaken, but not inhibit, the power of the associated
>spells? ... [snip] ... So, the make-up of the year is affected by an
>Order-of-the-Year ritual in Sacred Time, cultural rituals of the seasons
>and Specific Phenomena, lozenge-wide and local.
In glancing over Nils' YAHQS (thanks for sending it to me, Nick) it occured to me that his system could perhaps be adopted in some fashion to represent the functions of a calendrical festival system (which would hence also be tied directly into a HQ system -- my apologies for what follows to those who don't have his system, consider this a plug). A given festival or ritual event would have an assigned 'difficulty rating', representing the ideal level of magical and spiritual energy which should be expended by the festivals' participants; the difficulty rating might vary based on local conditions, cf. Michael's notes on Praxian conditions and the influence of Skyfall Lake. In some way, the number of participants, their level of participation (associate initiates, initiates [sigh], priests/lords), and any special undertakings on their part would produce a magical rating (perhaps in conjunction with Ceremony rolls and spell casting from holy folk?). If the community's magical rating was less than the ritual's difficulty rating, then Bad Things would happen -- either the ritual could be an outright failure (no Bless Crops this year) or a 'modifier' might be invoked in some way (2 pts of POW necessary for a Bless Crops spell). If the difficulty rating was matched or exceeded, then things are either As Per Normal or Really Good.
In the case of failed rituals, then HeroQuesters could perhaps attempt the rituals on their own, or perform different rituals to either intercede on behalf of their communities or save their own skins. It might also be possible to say that each community's magical rating is in effect a pool from which they can draw resources (similar to Nils' idea of one-use support points) and that they have to be careful in rationing their magical potential over the course of a year on different festivals and rituals -- hence, the weakness of the War Magic of the clan that spends their magic rating on farm festivals, and the weakness at farming for the War Clan. A community could even expend some of its magical rating to make the difficulty rating of their adversaries' ritual-events higher, if they know the proper oppositional rites.
It might eventually be possible to describe every calendrical ritual along the lines of Nick's ZZ HQ, as a series of specific 'tests' corresponding to the underlying myths, with the communities' ratings (or those of their priests or avatars, to make it even more HQey) being challenged at each step, perhaps even approaching the level of detail of the Garhound festival. Or, at a relatively simple level, each festival/holy day could have a Body, Spirit, Mind and/or appropriate skill difficulty rating, depending on the _kind_ of ritual it is and what was required of its participants (lots of dancing in a ritual requiring, frex, the application of Body rating points).
Just some thoughts. Liked Michael's idea of an Ernalda-in-the-Underworld - Inanna parallel (Ernalda in Ty Kora Tek's court, bound to the wall?) as a counterpoint to a solar-based explanation of the seasons; I still think there would be room for a midwinter fire festival like the one I described, though :-). Oh, and as an aside to RMM's Rick Meints, as the fella that actually brought up Judges Guild (which you tsk-tsked specifically in your post), I would only want to point out that I specifically asked if anyone knew a) who owns the current rights to their catalog, because AFAIK someone bought 'em, and b) what Paul Jaquays, the admirable author of the specific RQ works I mentioned, was up to. Both of these questions were raised _precisely_ because of the copyright issues involved in those works; no one has replied to them, though I don't know if that's simply because no one knows or that those that might -- the Chaosium folk and Sandy, frex -- are presumably still merrily post-Convulsing in what was once Dorastor w/o Broo.
Mark
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