Who apparently agrees with much that I've said, which is a nice surprise!
Answering Ian Welsh :
> I don't see what Monty Hall has to do with Orlanthi sorcery users.
Neither do I.
> Do you fear Wind Lord Adepts? They'd be fairly ineffective, even if
> there were rules to allow them.
Any rules I've ever seen on meta-magic, ie some Greg stuff and the RQ4 discussion thing, are based on the idea that mortals have a physical body and a divine portion. (Brithini and a few others perhaps not fitting into such a blanket description ...) Briefly, an Adept Wind Lord would have to cut his soul into two pieces. This means that, yes, Adept Wind Lords would be very ineffective. (I'm simplifying. Read "Sorcery used with other magic types" in Sandy's sorcery for a better description of mixed magics.) Simultaneous possession of a Fetch and of sorcerous Presence is, AFAIK, virtually impossible, BTW. A meta-magical reason why sorcerors cannot be shamans and vice-versa. Probably transgressed by a few weirdoes somewhere in Glorantha, though ...
> Successful warlords like Greymane or his sons are quite certain to
> have sorcerers serving them.
Are they? The Solanthi are fairly ordinary Orlanthi, AFAIK, aside from their curious relationship with swine. In my campaign, Greymane doesn't need sorcery because he has HQ powers. Also, the Solanthi are hostile towards the Trader Princes of south Maniria. (Who have conquered the mouth of the Solanthi River.) I play that this translates as a hostility towards sorcery, which Greymane as Tribal Leader can't easily bypass.
Greymane *does* however have sorceror allies among the Ditali, who are an orlanthi tribe with sorcery-using leaders. Don't know very much about them, though ...
> Apple Lane has Third Eye Blue iron-smith sorcerers (herding goats)
Heh! This is correct. Goats, also, are filthy animals.
Answering me:
> > One thing that seems to have been inferred by other contributors to
> > this thread: "sorcery" means "western sorcery". (Am I wrong?)
>
> Sorcery as in "a magic system based on the Logicians' world-view and
> magics" does mean western sorcery, yes. It has been spread throughout
> Genertela by various means, the God Learners ... SNIP ...
> I might accept another source of sorcery if you can give me a
> plausible origin, but I don't know of any.
Kralori mysticism, East Isles magic, and Dwarf magic are all non-western sorcery or sorcery-like traditions. Dwarf magic, and some form of mysticism similar to Eastern sorcery could, conceivably, have engendered certain magical practises among the orlanthi. Did this happen? Don't know, myself. I do think, though, that some Meldeks, instead of doing a poor man's version of western logical magics, do a poor man's version of Eastern mysticism ... This is yet to be described, which doesn't help us much. (It's based on the use of mystical Tools, though.)
> > The existence of orlanthi sorcerors (barring the few isolated cultural
> > cultural exceptions like Chalana Arroy, maybe Issaries, etc..?)
> > hasn't been demonstrated.
> That's because almost all of our information on Orlanthi comes from
> regions recently colonized by religious regfugees ...
We are in agreement.
RQ3 sorcery also stinks, which is big reason number two.
> In what way would this be different from humanist sorcery?
Hmm. You're right. The differences wouldn't be in the difficulty of gaining Presence, etc.. The Arts, and the Methods used for Meldek sorcery might be different. I think I'm going the other way now, though, and my opinion would be that there are various kinds of Meldek among the orlanthi, some of whom emulate western sorcery, some of whom don't.
> > Making enemies of most of his friends, family, and neighbours, of
> > course,
>
> You mean, like joining a Humakti regiment doing service in Esrolia? Or
> joining the Sun Dome Templars? Or the Lunar Army? Running away with a
> Donandar circus? ...
Exactly.
> > with his evil heterodoxy ...
>
> Heterodoxy: maybe. Evil: why? "Because he's different from us, we're
> no longer good enough for him"?
Sorry. Useless relic from the "orthodoxy" vitriol phase. Discard it.
> Arroin is a patron of surgeons,
This was one of my proposals; I'm intrigued; have you come across the idea somewhere else?
> A "Cult of Arroin" with hierarchy, worship services and Holy Days is
> fairly unlikely IMO, unless you have a leading medical facility
> training surgeons for all the lands around it.
The "Cult of Arroin" as such is dysfunctional, (except among the aldryami) because Arroin grants no acces to the Hero Plane or to the God Plane through worship or Rune Magic. In this, at least, worship of Arroin somewhat resembles worship of the Invisible God.
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