Slave Collars, Arrows, Humakti Piety from Paul Chapman on 1997-06-07 (Glorantha Digest Vol 04)

From: Paul Chapman <mercutio_at_btinternet.com>
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 1997 12:31:35 +0100

Slave Collars:

Thanks to Sandy for the valuable info on Slave Collars. Being a picky (and very inquisitive) bastard I still have a few questions about this:-

OK, Slave Bracelets and Collars are different... what is the difference?
What (and how) do slave collars prevent Divine Magic/Divine Intervention (I seem to remember reading somewhere (Strangers in Prax?) that they temporarily "severed the wearer's link to his/her god")?
What do they do to Shamanic Fetches? And what about Magic or Power spirits bound, say, into tattoos all over the subjects body? Of course you can always shave the tattoos off (ouch! - I'll add that to my list of good reasons not to have tattoos as matrices!) but I just wondered if the collars do anything about this.
When the collar is initially put on, how quickly does it bleed off the wearers' MPs into the ether?
Are they difficult to physically break?

Those are really exacting questions, I know, so please feel free to ignore any or all of them!

Homing Arrows:

Sandy's suggestion for an actual homing arrow was good, just the sort of difficult thing you'd have to do in order to create such a powerful variant. I still maintain that there are lots of non-homing Arrows with special magical properties, most (but not all) of which will be easier to grow than an actual Homing Arrow.

Humakt:

I liked Thomas Gottschal's Humakti stuff, BTW. I'm not convinced that to be like Humakt you have to be _completely_ silent _all the time_ (thus not necessarily preventing spellcasting). Whilst geasa make the worshipper more like the god, it is possible for the geas to be _more_ exacting than necessary in order to emphasise one aspect of the god. Frex, Jorkar Stilltongue the Sword of Humakt hasn't spoken since he was 15, but he chose his total silence due to his personal belief that anything said aloud is going to be inexact and thus a lie, a belief which he gained from an extension of Humakti teachings based upon his troubles in adolescence (just off the top of my head, let's not get too excited about this example). Most of the other Humakti don't have this _personal_ belief and thus think Jorkar is a bit of a loony, very pious yes, but still a bit extreme in the absolute truth department. They love truth, but don't feel obliged to remain silent like Jorkar does (BTW, Jorkar has 160% Sense Assassin as a result... he's paranoid too as a result of his adolescence, and blew his 7 x 20% extra gifts from remaining silent all the time on this! :-), although Hralf doesn't say anything on Freezeday to show his respects.

Also, a Humakti who was pious enough to _never_ speak may find he gets better gifts than suggested in the RQ Cults book out of it. These gifts are only the "minor" Humakti gifts, I have a list of the major gifts that I believe were published in Tales #5 (this is just a guess, I have them in electronic format so they're probably on the web somewhere), these gifts require minor HeroQuests to get hold of and have terrible geasa associated with them.

Off the top of my head, I seem to remember one of them was a long the lines of: "Gift: Humakt will aid you in any one task; Geas:You are guaranteed to die in the attempt". There were a few more, some of which required you to kill a Healer every now and again, or kill your own family, that sort of thing. They were all horrendously powerful Gifts, though, and very Humakt. These were the sorts of things mentioned in KoS - the Household of Death took terrible geasa upon themselves in return for massive power from Humakt.

So, a really devout Humakti, probably specialising in one aspect of Humakt
(Truth or Death, frex), might well be able to get another such gift. Frex
(along Thomas's lines): "Geas: Never speak again, you die if a single word
ever passes your lips; Gift: May cast Humakti Rune/Battle Magic without speaking, although all offensive magic becomes non-ranged and requires a strike with a sword. Gains an innate Detect Truth ability as per the Rune Spell, operational at all times."

Comments?

Paul.