Having by happenstance drifted back into the ambit of matters Gloranthan under this nym (I departed from Henk's RQ mailing list, to which I had subscribed under my wageslave account, when it became necessary to know what an Antirius was in order to sensibly contribute to the discussion), and spend a mind-altering few hours scanning the last year or so of archives, I guess it's time to stick my head above the parapet, and venture some words on recent subjects
Babs:
Mark wrote:
> From time to time people will complain that, say, the cult of
> Babeester Gor gets magic that is way too useful.
Every so often people make this claim, and I never can believe it. Let's look at those spells
Great Parry - an entirely futile spell, if your Dodge% exceeds your Shield Parry% : and a sucessful dodge also means you're not affected by knockback. A waste of 3 permanent POW, if you ask me. [OK, the spell would have been of use in RQ2, where the Dodge skill didn't exist, and you could stack Defense with parry, but the spell didn't get specified under RQ2. This spell would also be a real bugger to simulate under any other FRP with which I'm familiar]
Slash - for 3 points of POW, you can emulate Fireblade, a 4 point battlemagic spell, with the following benefits i) duration ii) doesn't come off your magic resistance iii) flexibility of increment. All told, this probably makes a fair trade, when compared with the 1 Rune = 2 battlemagic standard of Shield
Axe Trance - your axe becomes almost an unlimited level Bladesharp matrix (you get twice one of the two benefits of bladesharp for 1 battle magic POW). And here is where we get to the stuff about magic that was being talked about in the last week or so.
In my experience, and I'm talking about me here, not you, prosthetic battlemagic POW has been rarer than hens' teeth; and with characters not played beyond strong initiate (80-odd percent in primary skills), rune magic has effectively been an NPC-only thing. In that context, the lack at RQ3 of RQ2's 4-point-max stacking limit for Rune magic (which would tame Slash), or the concept that 180-odd points of battlemagic POW would enable Axe Trance to push your Axe critical percentage to 95% were purely theoretical - practice cut in much sooner. Heck, we didn't even approach the de facto RQ2 limit of 6 points of battlemagic in one casting, which would be a reasonable limit to retain.
I played a BG warrior in times gone past, and in that game, the GM's feeling was that the cult magics weren't much to write home about - indeed we added Silence and Invisibility to the list (based on the material in Wyrms Footnotes - and reprinted in Wyrms Footprints, page 32, last paragraph but one), to balance the available repetoire *up* to comparison with the other warrior cults.
As it happened, the only points of Rune Magic sacrified for, under the "It's the High Holy Day, and didn't you ought to be thinking about preparation for your ordination, dear" persuasion of priestesses were one point each of Worship and Slash, and those not intended for actual use, POW being too precious for casual expenditure.
> Logically,
> they'll say, every warrior would want to join this cult, but
> we know this isn't the case, therefore the write-up is wrong.
Taking your point in the general sense in which I think you intended it, rather than following the Babsist digression there are a number of points that can be drawn from it (or at least different aspects of a central truth)
Nick Brooke responded:
>Arguably, we do only have a short-form writeup of Babs Gor. When
>you see the full writeup (including cannibalism, self-mutilation,
>and the terribly constrained life the Holy Avengers must lead),
>you'd probably see better how it works.
It's fairly obvious that the Axe Maidens indulge in major scarification, tattooing and other bod-mod; though we never settled the issue of whether hair was cropped, braided or just left wild and matted with mud.
But OTOH, BG is by no means the only cult that could be interpreted in a fashion that would take all personal freedom away from the initiate - a Sun Dome Templar would be spending all his time squarebashing, for example, if that was the approach you wanted to take.
One aspect that we played up was the connection with Voria (ibid) : as well as time spent standing sentry duty at the Ernalda shrine occupying time "at home", the first thing to do on return was the ritual purification from the Voria priestess, and being on call to help in nursery duties (= changing nappies, probably laundering them as well, and being clambered over by small children - and having to put up with it).
>Vingans, Humakti and Storm Bulls get more fun than Babs Gori. That's
>why their magic isn't as good.
Well, Vinga's name hadn't been uttered - or at least hadn't seen print - back in '88 when that particular game began, so really wasn't an available option. And as we considered the magical advantage to be the other way round, then we could argue that Babsi should get more fun. Besides, Humakti and Storm Bullies are likely to be safe from nursery duty!
Magic (and what a new system might do):
As we have seen above, two different groups playing from the same set of rules can come to radically different interpretations. Thus any one person's re-engineer and rebuild, even if it preserves the overall effect for his own use, is likely to cause major upheavals for others.
Over the years I've used the existing RQ magic system as a touchstone to see whether other "generic" magic systems can cope, and the results are usually not good. Point systems find it difficult to cope with things like the Humakti reusable Sever Spirit costing the same as other death cults one-use version; or with trying to make all the Transform Head spells come out the same (if they can cope with them at all : the Telmor and Basmol versions are easy, albeit usually costing different amounts, but I've yet to see one that can cope with the Gorakiki-Bee variant).
Personally, I feel that the current approach with its game-world-relevant features - like the Sever Spirit or Transform Head examples - is likely to be a better starting point than Hero style modularity.
Reminiscences:
Often, in Gloranthan matters, these days, I feel like one of those characters lurking in odd corners of Glorantha who can remember previous Ages, when Things Were Very Different.
I miss the good old days when, armed with RQ2's main material, and based mainly on hints and the styles of armour that it was perfectly consistent to model the Lunar Empire as the Persians, the Sartarites as the Athenians and their allies (with Orlanth=Zeus), the Sun Dome Templars as Spartans, and the Praxians as Bedouin. That was certainly how we played it when we used the Borderlands material - a bunch of Sartarite Orlanthi (and one mad Humakti) with Greek names, bargaining with unsavoury Arab types in the Horn Gate bazaar still remain fondly lodged in my memory.
Does such thing as a bazaar even exist in the canonical Horn Gate?
You could do that sort of thing back then and still meaningfully communicate with other cognoscenti (I recall one campaign in which the visualisation of Sartar was based on Achaemenid Persia, for example, but from which one could draw usuable - even if, as it turned out, completely different saving the name from canon - cults, locations and the like).
Even though my visualisation of what is a Glorantha and the revealed canon have drifted apart[*] (though the camapign in which I played the Babsi discussed above accepted that Sartar was vaguely north-west European), to the extent that I would now merely use elements of it in any fantasy game I were to run [and not only because my players would greet any suggestions to use it raw because i) they loathe the random skill gain rules from RQ, as merely the most prominent misfeature of the system and ii) they most emphatically don't want to play Stone-Age barbarians (Balazar) or Red Indians (Prax), and if they were interested in celidhs, they'd go to one for real (Sartar)], it is still a world to which I return to draw from again and again, primarily for what it is not.
It is not a sink of cliches that were fresh when Tolkien assembled them but which have been recycled via schlock fantasy fiction and RPG commonplace in ever decreasing circles (the "elves" aren't the standard issue Aryan Uebermensch, for example).
It is not a round world subject to modern astrophysics with magic and/or gods bolted on (a particular suspension of disbelief destroyer for me, having been an astrophysicist at one time). What really suprises me is how many fantasy worlds do follow the "Copernicus plus magic" route and the general lack of fantastickal cosmologies in RPG settings. But then I guess I'm an odd fish ; I'm much happier seeing a complete rewrite of physics (indeed to the extent that the quasi-scientific rather than outright mystical explanation of troll digestion in the dissection page in the original Trollpak disappointed me) than I am to see disregard for the laws of economics.
[*] though I had some material in early issues of TotRM, under my meat name, it soon became clear that the party line and I had essentially no common ground left in which I could pitch further submissions.
This mail is not signed. You can't trust its authenticity! What is the digest policy on digital signatures?
Powered by hypermail