One thing Lee Insley missed off his comments on Roman funeral customs in
#207 is that the origins of the gladiatorial games lie in a wish to appea=
se
the spirits of the dead with a blood sacrifice. Firstly this was done by=
sacrificing prisoners and later this perceived cruelty was softened by
making the prisoners fight each other, thus giving one of them a chance t=
o
live. When gladiatorial combats were first offered as a spectacle to the=
masses they were held under the pretext of honouring a relative of the sponsor. Caesar typically broke with tradition by giving a spectacle in memory of his daughter as previously only males were honoured by such combats.
Adding my two pennysworth to the Babs Gor saga, if people are unhappy wit=
h
power gaming wankers running psychotic axe maidens with 2000% attack then=
bin the spell Axe Trance alltogether and alter Slash to opperate in the
same manner as Crush, +10% to hit/+1D4 damage per point and put a limit o=
n
how many can be stacked at any one time. This would make them no more
dangerous than a ZZ Death Lord while a priestess with a couple of points =
of
Slash, Great Parry and Shield is still a bloody hard bastard by any
standards. As to a Babs Gor worshippers effectivness in combat compared =
to
other cults consider which of the following would be more scary 'in
reality', an armoured man with a shiny broadsword and cool demeanor
(Humakti) or a wide eyed, bad tempered, scarred woman with desiccated
penises hanging from a blood stained axe screaming KILL!!!!!!! I know
which one I would run from. On a more purile note I thought that the
phrase "jerking penises" would be more applicable to a worshipper of
Uleria.
Duncan Rowlands (duncanrowlands_at_compuserve.com)
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