Fonrit

>From: Joerg Baumgartner <joe_at_toppoint.de>

> > This feels wrong to me. Misapplied worship should not be a
> > core of a viable religion as its wrongness makes it inefficient
> > - worshippers won't be able to learn secrets for example -

>The percentage of worshippers who actually learn secrets is very low,

But their great magical leaders will be handicapped compared to everybody else.

>and even religions using a misapplied type of magic will eventually have
>heroes whose admittedly lesser secrets will be available to the
>devotees.

And what religions are these? Even the core of the Aeolian religion (the Bishop Saints) is not misapplied worship. Secrets are important because they are representative of transcendental being.

> > yet the Fonritans are supposed to have been one of the few
> > peoples to have resisted the God Learners to some degree.

>Perhaps they did so because they did not go for the greater magic, but
>for the concentration of lots of magic in their leaders.

The Kralori did almost exactly the same thing but the God Learners still kicked their heads in.

>At one point, Greg said something about wishing that he had presented
>all religions as "misapplied"

No. What he actually said was that he wished the starting religion could have been presented in the HeroWars rules as "mixed" (worshipping Gods and Spirits for example) with heroes eventually restricting themselves to a purer form (a recent post of his called this "concentrated" magic). Misapplied worship is something different (namely worshipping a God as a spirit and vice-versa) and is far from common - the Aeolians are the only known religion to practice it to any large extent.

>In case of Fonrit, the sheer number of people inhabiting rather limited
>stretches of land might be a reason why animistic worship could be as
>unefficient as misapplied theist worship

There is nothing intrinsically inefficient about animism. The Darjiinians are animists yet have a high population. Glorantha does not follow the real world model of animism -> organized religion -> philosophy.

> > Even though the structure of the Fonritan Pantheon is based on
> > the Pamaltelan origin myth, the core entities the Fonritans
> > worship are not Pamaltelan Great Spirits but actual Gods.

>The core entities are the Garangordites - heroes who portrayed these
>Great Spirits in a theist manner.

No. The core entities are the ancient deities of the Artmali civilization that inhabited Fonrit in the old days. The Garangordites have interposed themselves between the worship of the Blueskins and the deities themselves. "Instead of allowing the Veldang to directly worship the original deities, Garangordos was able to interpose their worship through the veneration of the Garandites [...]" RM p43.

>They managed to stand off the God Learners for long enough, but
>they failed to defend against the purer Doraddic magics of Kemparana,
>for instance.

Kemparana is not a Doraddi but a thief. You are thinking of Katele, the Pure City, which was set up after the God Learners were gone.

--Peter Metcalfe

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