> A question about everybody's favorite chaos horror, the Steed of the
> Goddess, the Great Bat. We all know that it eats creatures body and
> soul, but...umm, what happens afterward?
One answer appears in Tales #16, the shortly-to-be-printed Lunar Special: it produces magical chaos-tainted bat guano, on which nasty chaotic plant thingummies grow. Rodin Greenbeak has all the details, as usual...
> If the spirits it eats are effectively being sucked into the Void it
> would seem that anywhere the Bat goes is going to be POW short and
> perhaps a bit unstable.
That seems to fit this chaotic monstrosity rather well. As far as I know, anyone eaten by the Bat is GONE FOR GOOD: they simply don't come back. No resurrection, no afterlife: nothing. (Unless you count being transformed into chaos-tainted bat guano). It's scary, I agree, but that's why most barbarians know better than to rebel against the Empire. (Those who don't are no real loss to the universe: in the long run, the Bat is improving the human population by winnowing out these losers from the eternal Dance of Returns. Everything has a part to play, in the Lunar scheme of things).
For a while, I've been thinking there is some confusion in Zorak Zoran's Rune magic: he seems to have a single, distinctive power which RuneQuest treats as two entirely separate spells.
I refer, of course, to Berserk/Create Zombie. Anyone who fights against ZZ trolls knows that wounds which would drop any living opponent will fail to kill these berserk warriors, who carry on fighting, oblivious to pain, to the loss of limbs, of internal organs, etc. The implication seems to be that a ZZ Berserk killed in battle will continue to fight as a Zombie; maybe their Berserk spell (and a ZZ-specific Zombie description) could be rewritten to make this the case.
Any takers?
Also, a bit of ZZ eschatology.
The end of the world will be like a big Trollball match, Uz against Dem. "Dem" (of course) will be the hordes of Chaos. "Uz" will include all of the trolls who have ever worshipped Zorak Zoran. And what do we use for a ball? Glorantha Herself. Sure, She may get a bit damaged in the process, but that's a small price to pay if Uz can beat Dem after Extra Time, when the final whistle blows and the big red balloon goes up. The losers, of course, will be gutted... :-)
> Since the Lismelder don't have a high skill in undead lore...
Big Hralf of Gorin's Stead (Greydog Lismelder) begs to differ!
"When we killed the beer-hunting vampire who robbed the Goodale Path, we dispatched its twisted soul back to Delecti with every safe method known to the lore-masters. We beat it about the head and body, drove a stake through its black heart, exposed the twice-a-corpse to direct sunlight, threw it into the stream (but not for long), scattered innumerable poppy seeds on the skeletal remains, and finally buried them upside-down in Maran's clean earth. All but the fanged skull: we took that back to the Greydog Inn, and you can see it on the wall above the bar to this day. So who are you to call us the No-Good Gorins?"
[Note: if we ever need a "Dracula Returns" plot in Greydog lands, we need only start a bar-room brawl in the Greydog Inn and hit the skull with a little spot of blood: nobody can say we aren't nice to David Hall!]
___
Pam asks:
> Anyone have any ideas what the Pelorian "foxaret" might be like?
It's a kind of fox that nests in deserted minarets, naturally. They hunt Gutter-Perchers (a type of prairie dog which makes its colonies in drain pipes) across the red-tiled roofs of Naveria...
Or maybe not. :-)
Powered by hypermail