>The debate goes on vs. Shamans and Sorcerers.
> For what it's worth, I'm continuing this discussion NOT in
>order to prove to Joerg the error of his ways,
That is not only, I suppose...
>but also because I
>think it is interesting and useful (at least to me) to hammer out
>whether a shaman actually _is_ better than a sorcerer at handling
>spirits. Joerg has usefully taken the Devil's Advocate position.
Baumgartner, Dayzatar and the Bat - we defended Wakboth at the Ritual of the Net...
>1) Even a lengthy discorporation ritual is superior to the
>sorcerer's ability in this regard -- i.e., nothing. If a spirit's
>hiding, the sorcerer can do little. The shaman can hunt it down on
>its own turf.
The powerful sorcerer (i.e. one equivalent to a shaman with own POW + fetch POW in the high 30s) worth his salt will summon (in fact, release) some useful spirit and let it do the job. I admit that the shaman has the same option.
The discorporation as the _only_ suitable method for a shaman (or, in fact, anybody) to exorcise a spirit is something that has bugged me for some time. It doesn't feel right.
I don't think that the shaman can effectively hunt down a spirit which sticks to the mundane plane. Too many border effects are there to hide the spirit. IMO the most usual trick is to ambush the spirit when it returns from the mundane plane into its spirit plane lair, something less effective against bound spirits haunting a specific locale or area. The usual way to deal with such spirits is to remove either the binding, or the cause for it.
> 2) If the shaman wins a spirit combat, bringing a spirit's
>MPs to 0, he can bind it into his fetch or a magic item, whether he's
>corporate or not. He doesn't even need a Control spell.
Great. Really useful. Does the spirit regain its MP? If it does, then this is a somewhat nice feature. I'd purchase "Control <spirit species likely to attack in spirit combat>" plus "<...> Binding" matrices then, if I were to enter spirit-haunts. If I happen to win the spirit combat, I should have that MP to spare.
Anyway, I tend to play spirits like animals (spirits which can attack like carnivores) or even like sapients. This means that only a sapient or extremely desperate spirit will attack a shaman when there are so many weak prey souls in the flock. Does the wolf attack the shepherd or his dog when all he wants are sheep?
Of course, the shaman and his fetch will stand out on the spirit plane like the shepherd's fire in the night. Spirits of prey will be attracted, hover shyly around, and yet leave the shaman alone. (That is spirits which want to feed on an entire soul/possess a body. Spirits which just want to have a small nibble at some spiritual blood, like mosquitoes, might well attack the shaman. They might even get away with it...)
> 3) A spirit cannot break off combat unless it has 10 MPs more
>than the shaman, so a losing spirit isn't going anywhere. But a
>Protective Circle keeps a spirit from getting at the sorcerer at all
>(if it works), so a spirit who fails is still free to flee.
Here the rules get fuzzy as well as unsatisfactory. The same spirit cannot break off spirit combat with any embodied entity unless it has 10 MPs more than its victim, or the victim has zero MP?
What about magical protection against spirit attacks (provided from outside sources, that is): will this be a sufficient reason for a spirit to break off its attack when the protection makes all attacks futile?
Anyway, I suppose that the sorcerer's approach to spirits is "catch a thief with a thief". Get some spirit plane entity (why not one of the saints or even angelic beings of the Malkioni pantheon - yes, there are such) and set it to the job. I bet that this is a standard shaman practice, too, and more so for priests.
Malkionism is not that different from theist religions. There are traditions which have been suppressed by the early God Learners, but re-discovered by later ones, which knew exactly how to deal with the major and minor spirits of the land or whatever power there was. In fact the 1st Age wizard was the magician most likely able to deal with any deity or spirit there was, because of his lack of allegiance to one of the specialized powers. Trust a darkness priest to be better at handling shadows or Dehori, but stick with the (1st Age) sorcerer when it gets to handle all the other spirits, elementals or whatever.
Shamans rarely are that universal in their approach. In fact, most shamans are culturally limited to interact with the spirits they know. This will include enemy spirits they know (like the Praxian crack tribal shamans can eliminate chaos beasties), but they will be at a loss when unknown stuff comes. At least that's how it should be, IMO.
I know that the shaman has to face the unknowable, and survive it - that's what the Bad Man combat is about. (And what a lousy game mechanic it has... this ought to be one of the first things on the to-do list for Glorantha: The Game.) However, all of this still remains within his culture, within his culture's array of unknowables. It still doesn't enable the shaman to overcome the unknowable, or to stand it off when it comes to territorial claims (like possessed bodies), the shaman only gains the insight(?) experience(?) illumination(?) to deal with it.
I say that a sorcerer entering the ruins of a foreign culture (say the Big Rubble) _should be_ better able to fend off haunting spirits than a shaman entering the ruins of a foreign culture (in this case any shaman but Praxian and troll ones, to whom Pavis was a known enemy culture), simply because the sorcerer is less preoccupied with cultural taboos and superstitions wrt these entities.
End of Glorantha Digest V3 #171
WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html
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