>What happens if the Orlanthi refuses to say his lines? What
>happens if he just agrees to let Humakt have Death? Does the quester 'win
>an easy victory' or does the quest go bad?
The quest probably goes a bit funny, but it's highly unlikely that an Orlanthi would do this. He's effectively throwing away a big chunk of his personal identification with Orlanth. The Humakti's quest might fail as a result, but with no long term consequences for him. The Orlanthi though will now have big problems doing any Orlanth/Humakt crossover quests himself in future. If he does a heroquest where Humakt is an ally, Humakt might refuse to help because he remembers what Orlanth did in the previous quest, or other Hero Plane denizens might not recognise him as Orlanth, or challenge him 'You're no Chief of mine'... etc, etc. The consequences should be appropriate to what happened in the quest, but may not even be obvious.
> 2) What is the difference between a hero discovering a new mythic path
>and the Godlearners constructing a new path? From a game mechanics
>standpoint, there doesn't seem to be much difference, ...
I think you might be suffering from a missunderstanding. I don't think the God Learners realy created any (well ok, prhaps many) new myths or mythic paths. What they did do is take existing myths and change them a bit, or transplant myths from one culture to another, or modify one myth so that it's more like another one. This sort of thing isn't realy a God Learner technique, but one they adapted from Arkat to their own purposes.
When discussions of heroquesting come up, the debate often seems to focus on this kind of experimental heroquesting, but in fact this kind of thing is extremely rare in Glorantha. In a typical culture such as the Heortlings, this sort of think might get done once in every half a dozen generations, if that. It's dangerous not just to the questers, but also to the whole culture and is the kind of thing religious wars are fought over.
> Part of the reason I'm dwelling on this second question is that my CA is
>going on a quest to learn how to heal someone's mind. I told the player
>that the cult had long suspected that there was a myth for this, but that
>most of the details were unknown. She's been trying to piece together
>enough of the myth's probable events to be able to do the quest, but she
>doesn't want to fall into God Learnerism and make a path that never existed.
The big danger in doing this is that if she messes up the quest, she could very easily end up worshiping a goddess of insanity and mental torture. Beware! Most cults will only try things like this if they are truly desperate.
Simon Hibbs
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