Re: More cameos: Sailors are sorcerors!

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 19:55:01 +0100 (BST)


Hal Bowman, by Public Demand, posts some scenario kernels:

> It can be staged wherever Sorcerors are hated and
> feared and where they can be detected by a simple test at close range.
> It is especially handy if the PC's are from a culture whose sailors
> don't really understand that Open Seas is Sorcery.

Interesting cameo, but I feel forced to Pick At the premise, in two respects:

That knowing one spell makes one a "sorceror", in any strong sense;

More likely is that Detect Sorceror magics work by identifying persons who have familiars, or Vessels, or whatever is marking the formal transistion to Proper Sorceror these days. Detecting knowledge of just one spell, with no other "sorcerous baggage", ought at any rate to be much harder than this.

And that Open Seas really is a sorcery spell.

I know it's written up that way in RQ, but I think that's just a game abstraction. Dormal's quest seems to have been thoroughly Pan-Cultural, so I suspect his ritual isn't really specifically "sorcerous" at all, in any meaningful way. Plus of course, whatever the exact nature of the original, I feel sure that it's been "adapted" to it's various end-user cultures to a degree where for example, the Orlanthi think it as being just the theist Hero Cult type affair.

Slainte,
Alex.


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