>Leaving aside other special abilities, what's left is the practice of
>contacting the spirit world through ecstatic worship. Perhaps shamans
>are specialists of it.
Perhaps they are - but what does it mean to be a Shaman then? We have a pretty good idea of what increasing levels of theistic worship involve (the sacrifice of the Self to the Divine Powers) but we don't have a similar equation for animist religion, nor what distinguishes a shaman from other animists.
>But should an animist heroquest be the
>same thing as spirit travel like shamans do, using a set of special
>"otherworld" skills (spirit sight, spirit combat)?
Spirit Sight is a skill for detecting spirits on the mundane plane while Spirit Combat is knowable by non-Shamans. I can't grok the importance of Shamanic Escape as it seems to be little more than a get-out-of-the- spirit-world-free and there's little indication of why Shamans know this skill. The only different that I can discover is that most Shamans travel as discorporate spirits (HW:RiG p208) while non-shamans must enter it body and spirit together.
--Peter Metcalfe
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