It would be useful to know more about this character. He/she seems to be a sorcerer (denigrating Divine Magic as just another form of shamanic/spirit magic): the detached POV appears most appropriate for this, but then it's odd that sorcery is so denigrated ("weaker than spirit magic"). If OTOH the character is a user of Divine Magic, it'd be weird for them to have such a contemptuous theory about how their God's magic works ("just like a bigger form of spell spirit").
> I have met a Sword of Humakt who claimed to have travelled down
> the River of Cradles with Argrath in a Giant Cradle not once but
> three separate times. =
Now this sounds bizarre. I can live with "Gloranthas" in which this does (or doesn't) happen, but running the Cradle as an annual event, and then crossing between game worlds such that a Humakti who's been through the Cradle scenario three times can meet Eshaella, who knows Argrath but has never heard of the Cradle -- that's confusing. What were the circumstances? Or did this happen in RQ Tournament Limbo?
> Essentially there are two basic approaches to Magic; the Shamanic
> or Spirit traditions, and the Sorcery traditions. I include Divine
> magic with the Spirit tradition...
I doubt any worshipper would do so.
> The spirit tradition involves creating attachments with other enti-
> ties or fragments of entities. These entities actually perform the
> magic, not the spirit mage.
That's an interesting model, but I'm not sure it's the status quo. The shaman or spellcaster steals the relevant knowledge or ability from the spell spirit (by winning the fight), and can thereafter do it him/herself. When we were building RQ4 these many years ago, the discussion included variant models for spirit magic (e.g: the Bladesharp spirit who sits on your sword-blade, making it sharp) and the differences these would make to its use (i.e: having the same spell active in two or more locations simultaneously becomes tricky; if the spirit magician has a cloud of dominated spell spirits hanging around, why can't you detect or take action against them; etc.). I like the mechanism of Allen's reconciliation (victory in combat is what warps the caster's own spirit to be able to do what the spell spirit did before), but I'm not sure it adds much as an explanation.
The difference between spirit spells and divine cult spirit spells might be a fertile ground for investigation. The author treats spell spirits as a shamanic feature, divine magics as a "divine" feature, but doesn't deal with the common overlap between the two: shamans who obtain divine magics from their (shamanic) deity, and cultists who receive divinely-approved spirit spells from their temple.
> [in Sorcery] it is this pattern that is actually performing the
> magic. The sorcerer is performing magic directly when creating
> the pattern.
Is the "pattern" a spell-in-being, and the creation of the pattern a spell-cast? And what sorcery rules is this describing: RQ3 by the book, or the Petersen Permutation, or something else? Odd that the author treats sorcery spells as "weaker" than spirit magics, when this plainly ain't so.
So, kudos to Eshaella (and Allen) for an interesting model; but an in-character-POV piece that doesn't tell us who the character is ain't quite as useful as a "What the XXXX Says...", for obvious reasons. I'd like to know more about the character (and world) to judge the piece more fairly: please do tell us!
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Nick
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