Gremlins, Staffs, Leonardo

From: Erik Sieurin <BV9521_at_utb.hb.se>
Date: Wed, 8 Jan 1997 15:53:01 +0100


Gremlins are created from faulty nilmergs; someone sees to that these nilmergs become faulty from the beginning, and not all of those nilmergs are detected. I suppose the Trickster is responsible, in some way. Waste from recycled dwarfs is used to create nilmergs, imo, but it is normally not a case of transforming faulty dwarfs into nilmergs.

That the staff should be holy to Issaries, the god of travelers, is obvious. It is the staff carried by a wanderer. It also doubles as a weapon, but it is not is primary use. A trader in a campaign of mine had a staff containg a magic spirit. It was NOT a Allied Spirit per se; the spirit rented its magical services out to the user of the staff in return for donations to Issaries temples and the opportunity to learn magics from Issaries. The character, when he received a large amount of money, donated large sums to the temples as pre-payment for casting of spells in suitable situations.

I see that I will belong to a minority again, since I don't concur with the weird technology vision of God Forgot. It is fun, but since I've already used another (somewhat similar to that of Joerg Baumgartner) I'll stick to that. Leonardo is an important figure in my campaign, BTW, since he is the tutor to one of the characters. He never makes more than one machine of the same kind, once he either has perfected a design or become frustrated with it, and his inventions are throughly unpractical. His work, like much other performed by the idle rich of God Forgot, is an attempt to regain old glories of their Brithini ancestors by rediscovering principles of Logic, not create an industrial revolution of some kind. IMC he is very similar to Archimedes as he is described in the curious Swedish fantasy novel "V=E4gen genom A" ("The Way through A") which unfortuneately have not been translated into English.

One thing that separates my God Forgoti ( :-) ) from Joerg's is that they are all, in their way, sceptical philosophers, including the peasants. When buying a piece of meat at the market, the butcher can start describing his argument for animals not having souls (much better than the common argument, he'll tell you). The farmers at the inn will hold fevered debates regarding whether the Invisible God is active in the world or not, and how. Yes, this is snatched from a satirical description of Byzans I read somewhere, where they were alll theologists according to a visitor.

Erik Sieurin


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