>From: David Cake <dave_at_difference.com.au>
>>The split of magic was introduced in RQ3, prior to that the split was
>>battle magic/rune magic. The former being equivelent to common magic.
>
> Not strictly true. While the split was made more explicit,
>and rules for sorcery introduced, with RQ3, shamans have existed, and
>been a separate (if somewhat overlapping) status to priests, since
>RQ1.
> The difficult part has not been the battle magic/rune magic
>split, but that some shamans have always had some access to divine
>magic, and this was very much the norm for a shaman in Gods of
>Glorantha (and there were mixed sorcery/divine cults there as well).
>So while there have always been three types of magic, its generally
>been presumed that some overlap was more common than it seems to be
>in HW. But this is perhaps simply a matter of degree rather than
>indicating deep metaphysical changes? Or not?
Well that may have been the intention but from the RQII material I got the impression of just two types of magic with shamans being a variant of priests. Certainly what are now called "Great Spirits" were then described as "Gods". Of course there are still overlaps such as Storm Bull and the whole misapplied worship concept.
> Its interesting that some of the earliest sources, such as
>the History of the Lunar Empire, sound more like something that could
>happen in actual gameplay now than they did when they were written.
Indeed, I could never make sense of the relationship between WBRM and RQ at the time. It all fits together much more clearly now but that may be the extra information available on the web.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/ --__--__--
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