If it was quite that simple, then no Vadeli would have any descendants or parents. He would kill his parents as soon as possible. He would have children only when he needed a couple for his next immortality ritual and then he would kill off all he needed plus any excess. This procedure would avoid any risk. It must be acceptable for a Vadeli to have some living descendants around but not too many or they will breed out of control.
I like the idea that one's 'life-force' is dissipated among one's children and that the Vadeli must get it back to maintain their immortality and vigour. I think this should be at the core of all their immortality magic.
Having living parents is not a threat to one's own life-force, so Vadeli do not need to kill their parents. They do have to worry about their parents killing them to collect back the parent's own life-force. This provides enough incentive for patricide and matricide.
Vadeli need to have some children around in order to have a supply for their immortality rituals.
That is why they must have some children, now why won't they have a whole bunch?
Here are two possible baffle-gab mystical explanations, choose the one you
prefer:
1) If they have too many then their life-force becomes too dissipated and they
become physically and psychically weaker, in other words they age. (You can be
immortal but not eternally youthful.)
2) Some philosophers describe the effect as having too large and complex an
array of descendants that gets caught by the web of time and the individual is
dragged along and becomes older. If you are too anchored in the fabric of
destiny by your descendants then you become subject to the vagaries of time.
Now let's add a few more assumptions.
Infants don't add as much oomph to a ritual as a young adult in the prime of life. The infant has the life-force that was provided by its parents and not much more. If you give the brat time to grow up then you can recover your investment with interest.
Life-force is passed on through one's children to grand-children and so on. The ancestral life-force can be concentrated by in-breeding. Your children's life-force was only one-half yours and one-half came from the other parent. By severe in-breeding it is possible to get descendants with much higher concentrations of your life-force which makes them better ritual victims.
These provide reasons for Vadeli to allow some of their descendants to get to sexual maturity, and practical reasons for some of their foul incestuous practices.
What consequences can we predict from these theories?
(Clarification of nomenclature: a Vadeli with a capital V indicates a mature adult who uses the immortality magic to extend his life. A vadeli without a capital indicates a descendant who has not got immortality and who has been bred by a Vadeli for use in the ancestor's immortality rituals.)
A Vadeli will keep a stock of descendants around to be used as consumables in his immortality magics. They will also be abused in other foul ways to fuel other magical endeavours.
The vadeli will be kept as animals mostly, and not allowed to learn more than basic language, if that. To allow more would be too large a risk for the ancestor Vadeli. Often they would be penned like pigs and forced to live in their own wastes.
Stocks of vadeli will be mostly female. Male Vadeli will impregnate their daughter and grand-daughter vadeli themselves. Female Vadeli will have to keep a son or two about, the sons will be used to occassionally impregnate the mother Vadeli but mostly to impregnate their sister vadeli, after all Mother doesn't want to be inconvenienced by too many pregancies herself. The Vadeli will keep careful records of all the matings in order to know exactly how concentrated their life-force is in the current crop of vadeli so that they can select exactly the number needed for any sacrificial rituals.
The Vadeli will only increase in numbers if some of the vadeli breeding stock escapes from their pens and is allowed to learn magic. This can happen if the ancestor Vadeli dies by some mischance. Then other Vadeli may choose to train some of his descendants to be their apprentices. (If they aren't related then they have no reason to come into conflict, so they can be trusted more.) Or a rival Vadeli may steal some of the breeding stock and aid them to reproduce in order to dissipate the life-force and weaken the ancestor Vadeli.
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The idea of these as castes rather than races sound promising. You can move up through the castes if you learn the magics appropriate to them.
The cautious browns have the basic immortality as described above. They control their offspring carefully and try to avoid any risks.
The reckless reds use blood-magic and the sacrifice of non-descendants to gain extra benefits. They may take the risk of having more descendants around because they have access to more life-energy from non-vadeli victims. Browns may study the arts of war and combat magic for many centuries before deciding to move to the red caste if they ever do, as long as they remain brown they have little chance to practice any of the theory they study.
During the Closing, the reds almost became extinct on their little islands. They had no-one to abuse except each other. If the Closing had lasted just a few decades longer they might have become as extinct as the blues. A few survived to the Opening. Since then they have taught the rituals to a small but growing number of ambitious browns. (NB. the current reds are mostly recent promotions. There are a few of the grossest who have survived as reds from the Second Age, these are fit opponents for Heros. Most of the reds may have been browns for many centuries but they have only been reds for decades, so they have had less time to build up the magical arsenal or superlative combat skills of the ancient reds. They have still had a long time as browns to learn a lot of stuff, so they aren't pushovers, but they can be fought be less than Heros.)
The Blues can remain a mystery as far as I'm concerned. Whatever secrets they had were lost with them. I have no problem with the idea that they were some form of living dead, it has some fun implications. Being dead they were ageless, so no longer needed to worry if their descendants were reproducing too much. They would need to ensure that some of the descendants did keep reproducing, because they still need the occassional descendant to renew their immortality spell. The poor descendants have an ambivalent attitude towards an ancestor-blue. The blue will be concerned that his blood line continues but have no concern about which particular members continue it and occassionally he will harvest some of it.
End of Glorantha Digest V3 #116
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
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