Indeed true, though I suspect that for some people, it starts to become automatic that you get drawn into doing it the "magic" way. Eventually, when every road you walk down is a Magic Road, it's time to sepnd more time with your divine family.
> If you do the SLBQ, and do a mega-depth-shift
> to turn it into the real thing, it'll take 14 days.
I don't think this is necessarily true; otherwise, why wouldn't everyone with a bit of sense do it this way?
> (And, I suspect, you'll only get 14 days worth of healing, MP recovery
> etc. en route. While taking several years worth of damage.)
Oww, that'd do it. Though I suspect such things as "natural" healing and recovery are problematic on any HQ.
> >> (A really, really good [HQer] might [shift to Hell] accidentally...)
> > ["free will" is getting used up, lots of "self" on the HP]
> I was thinking less of will and more of "attunement" with the HP.
Isn't that what all the talk of "will" is ultimately describing, though? The balance of ones self being shifted from the Inner World to the Invisble. Or to rephrase, going from a condition of complete free will, where you can do anything you like (circumstances permitting), to a state of doing exactly and only what the Myths About You say you will do.
[DIY magic roads, or: does this Chariot to Hell stop at Halikiv?]
> Why not? You'd have to be a very good HQer to think it was worth it, but
> there's no rule against it.
Indeed not, I know this can be done, what I was musing about was whether it really was a "special case". I'm just a little perplexed that it's so often described as a particular "type" of quest unto itself.
Richard Melvin:
> [Harrek's skinning and eating of the Polar Bear god]
> And, as you hint, this is not the kind of thing you can run a stable
> culture on - more a kind of 'burn the furniture to keep warm' measure.
Greg was asked something about this at one of the HQ seminars, and said something that could be construed as meaning that "adversarial" HQs may well be <= zero-sum, but that stuff like the Sacred Time ceremonies are positive-sum. (Personally, I suspect it depends on what exactly's being added up.)
> _following the path_ [...]
> _making the path_ [...]
> _paving the path_
> Type II HQ, using magic to make existing Type I quests easier.
Reasonable terms, but again, I think the definitions are trying to turn a continuum (and a multi-dimensional continuum one at that), into an infeasible small set of discrete cases.
1 and 3 seem even more fuzzy cases to distinguish that the original I/II split. "Paving", if I read you right, isn't extrapolative at all, but is just a "deeper" version of "following".
James Turner says, of Monrogh quest for the truth/Yelmalio:
> it sounds like an "Orlanth are you known as God X" type of quest
> which the digest agreed was impossible to answer.
I think it was "agreed" rather, at least by some of us, that if you asked such questions by Divination, you might get no answer, an Oracular answer, an answer that was must likely to be at least roughly in line with local prejudices, or a Thunderbolt up your left nostril, according to tastes. A quest would give you a more "definitive" answer, though gets into "Did I observe reality, or change it?" territory. Many people were of the view that you don't get viewpoint-independant, non-repeated such asnwers, by either method; some hated this suggestion, in cases To Peeces.
I commend to the Digest the answer given to this rest of this question by the Right Honourable member for the New Zealand parmesan cheese graduate lab, which seemed to be pretty darn definitive. If you want a mythic rationale as to why the Yelmalians are Correct after all, Jean Durupt's ideas are worth a look, though tricky to put in terms of recent Objective History(TM).
Jose Ramos:
> Alex agrees with me (always pleasant) and proposes a way to mix
> roleplaying and rollplaying in the Test of Holiness. I will go a bit
> further, and say that politics will play a lot.
Oh, absolutely, certainly in some cases. Probably appointments to some Lunar priestly positions drop through your letterbox in the morning post, never mind all this Mythic stuff. Even some old RQ2 recognises how non-absolute these Strict Religious Requirements are. ("Wanted, Champion of Pavis. Urgently. No experience necessary.")
Equally, some cults may be absolute sticklers about Traits and Skills, and the like. Circumstances will vary, as doubtless will tastes, and Gloranthas. My main concern was just to address some points about Statistics and Damned Trait Rolls, not particularly to advocate one set of cultic agendas over the other.
> I have been thinking that support will work only on bits the
> supporters themselves know. So it helps in reenactment quests (wich they
> know) and in some fregments of experimental quests, but certainly not all.
I don't know, it depends what sort of Support it actually is. It could take any form, from a bunch of acolytes standing around the temple, reciting the myth, chucking MPs at the altar, and doing everything but actually directly participate, to the sort of implicit support you get from the very existence of your own immediate family. These may behave quite differently in practice.
> And when you reach deep cult secrets, support will be lost (the
> lightbringers alone in hell).
I think that Alone in Hell is the very place that outside "support", in some unquantified sense, is absolutely crucial. At this point, the quester's Companions are no use to him, (hence the Alone), and outside help is all that can save him, together with his own inner resources.
Slainte,
Alex.
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