Maybe we finally convinced him: or maybe that statement is so vague as to be meaningless. But as long as female PCs and NPCs can worship Orlanth Adventurous (in some form or other), Orlanth Thunderous (in some form or other) and Orlanth Rex, I'm not going to object if they have to miss out on Orlanth the Father. I never did like Nandan, anyway :)
A very tentative thought, BTW, in the interests of equality. If Nandan exists, the opposite might also exist. Given Nandan's origins (group of men with no women trying to produce children), I would guess that a female equivalent would be most likely to emerge in an area that had just been deprived of all its men. Not just "most", but ALL. One man to 100 women would be enough to continue breeding, after all.
The only places that spring to mind are Esrolia and Pent, in both cases after their respective catastrophes. I can't say I'm very convinced: Esrolia at least would be more likely to go for the "children without male intervention" option, that being something Earth goddesses are good at. And the Pentans seem to have just died. But if you really want a Nandan-opposite, that's where I'd go looking.
Mike said of Vinga:
> In fact it's a real pity that only women are allowed to join....
Now, there's a thought. Why are only women allowed to join? And why only men in OA? Since both exist and fulfil about the same game function, this isn't a problem of unfairness, but it's still intriguing.
My guess at OA would be that he is also (IMO) Orlanth the Youth, with strong overtones of Orlanth the Seducer. These days, Trickster has more or less taken over that role, along with the Thief aspects, but the prohibition (or at least, reluctance) might still hang on.
Why only women to worship Vinga? That's a bit harder, especially as it involves data that Harald Smith and I were discussing last year and that he asked me not to release. But the tentative conclusions we were looking at implied that the original goddess on which Vinga was based was a powerful Earth goddess in her own right, pre-Darkness, and one of the few aspects that she kept was that of control of female fertility. And I can't really give away any more than that without being unfair to Harald, I'm afraid.
Jane Williams jane_at_williams.nildram.co.uk http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~janewill/gloranth/
Powered by hypermail