Art of Sorcery

From: Peter Metcalfe <metcalph_at_quicksilver.net.nz>
Date: Sun, 08 May 2005 14:25:44 +1200


Mikko:

>Basically I'm going with the monotheistic "Only the true believers have
>souls, everything else is just matter and energy to be exploited as we
>wish" attitude.

I don't know of any monotheist, real or gloranthan, that actually believes in that.

>And when I wrote about the sorcerer "knowing" all the denizens are really
>illusions and nothing more than swirls of essense I just meant that the
>sorcerer doesn't consider them real because they aren't humans with a soul
>in his opinion. I'm not saying I agree with the sorcerer.

So you set up a major gloranthan philosophy to hold fundamentally false beliefs?

>This was inspired by Robin Laws at a pre-Hero-Wars Convulsion where he
>talked about a sorcerer encoutering a minor Storm God.

There's a difference between a sorcerer encountering a Storm Godling and a sorcerer on the sorcery plane. One is a product of the Great Error while the other is his own spiritual home.

>The Storm God
>proclaims to be Hedkoranth, a God of Storm, but the sorcerer insists that
>it's just a powerful consentration of storm-magic (essense).

That's the wrong way of looking at it. When the sorcerer looks at the godling through symbolic sight, he sees that it is a repository of theistic Energy, which is something that his philosophy judges to be false. In order to correct it, he must magically transform the godling, through a process known as _demonization_, to transform it from a theistic godling into an essence. The process is not a subjectivist one that is resolved by determining who has the stronger PoV.

> And if the
>sorcerer wins the challenge, then to him Hedkoranth is just that, and
>while the sorcerer lives Hedkoranth is going to be a bit sick, because of
>the sorcerer tapping his strength to power his magic.

You are conflating two differeng things here. Tapping is magical destruction to liberate magical energy for the sorcerer. It has nothing to do with the sorcerer's perception of what creatures on the other side look like.

--Peter Metcalfe


End of Glorantha Digest, Vol 11, Issue 145


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