re: heroquesting

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_cs.ucc.ie>
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 18:16:25 GMT


David Dunham says, of Heortling heroquests:

> But they do not result in spells. They result in something happening.

Well, they'd result in feats, but I take it (or at least, desparately hope) that's not your point. If you're saying this simply _can't happen_, then I simply disagree with you, and see no basis for your contention. As you may have gathered from my previous post to that effect.

> Divine magic
> heroquesting creates a result by the performing of the heroquest.
> Orlanth didn't perform the Lightbringers Quest to learn the Return
> Sun To Sky feat. The deeds of the quest returned the sun (whether
> it's direct or symbolic doesn't really matter).

You're answering a point I didn't make, by putting a substantially different case. ("Proof by example" is the logical flaw/debating strategem at issue.) I can't immediately think of a snappy feat an Orlanthi would want to (re)learn or (re)discover, but that's hardly the point. If you didn't know the Rain feat, or wanted to learn a dragonbreaking secret (without a prior tradition), what _would_ you do? If this aren't gripping examples, generalise as necessary to learning _any_ new feat. The particularlisation to 'new' feats is partly misleading, since any feat-gaining (or any worship ceremony, come to that) is essentially of a piece with 'heroquesting', as regards the nature of the interaction.

In order to formalise the result of a HQ as a 'learnable' feat for the plebs there my be 'minor details' like forming a hero cult, deification, etc, involved, but we needn't sweat that right now...

Cheers,
Alex.


End of The Glorantha Digest V7 #235


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