(Message rqd:33) Return-Path:Received: from Holland.Sun.COM (sunnl) by homeland.Holland.Sun.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA04657; Wed, 16 Jun 93 17:16:57 +0200 Received: from glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM by Holland.Sun.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1e) id AA03457; Wed, 16 Jun 93 17:16:25 +0200 Received: by glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA05088; Wed, 16 Jun 93 17:15:29 +0200 Date: Wed, 16 Jun 93 17:15:29 +0200 Message-Id: <9306161515.AA05088@glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM> From: RuneQuest-Request@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RQ Digest Maintainer) To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (Daily automated RQ-Digest) Reply-To: RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (RuneQuest Daily) Subject: RuneQuest Daily, Wed, 16 Jun 1993, part 1 Precedence: junk Status: OR The RuneQuest Daily and RuneQuest Digest deal with the subjects of Avalon Hill's RPG and Greg Stafford's world of Glorantha. Send submissions and followup to "RuneQuest@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM", they will automatically be included in a next issue. Try to change the Subject: line from the default Re: RuneQuest Daily... on replying. Selected articles may also appear in a regular Digest. If you want to submit articles to the Digest only, contact the editor at RuneQuest-Digest-Editor@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM. Send enquiries and Subscription Requests to the editor: RuneQuest-Request@Glorantha.Holland.Sun.COM (Henk Langeveld) --------------------- From: kenrolston@aol.com Subject: RuneQuest Daily Message-ID: <9306151128.tn39716@aol.com> Date: 15 Jun 93 15:28:56 GMT X-RQ-ID: 1073 Curtis Shenton: Sorcery needs to be able to support all sorts of cultures? Well... yes, theoretically, but my bet is that we haven't enough CONCRETE background about most Gloranthan cultures to speculate about their sorcery. I prefer to work on the settings where we have the most detail (ie, Sartar, Prax, and the Lunar Empire). I have much more confidence in a Unified Field Theory of Divine Magic, since it is plausibly arbitrary and not subject to logical analysis by its mortal practitioners. A Unified Field Theory of Sorcery, on the other hand, is a bit more like Natural History or Science, requiring higher standards of internal logic for a tolerable design -- and I have my doubts of ever understanding Gloranthan metaphysics well enough to model its actions through sorcery simulation rules. Of course, I hardly wish to discourage energetic theorizing about global Glorantahn sorcerous metaphysics. It just isn't a priority for publishing in the near future -- not because it wouldn't be cool and interesting, but because i doubt a consensus could be reached on it without knowing a LOT more about other Gloranthan cultures than I do. Ken Rolston --------------------- From: okamoto@hpcc90.corp.hp.com (Jeff Okamoto) Subject: Re: RuneQuest Daily, Tue, 15 Jun 1993, part 2 Message-ID: <9306151648.AA05469@hpcc90.corp.hp.com> Date: 15 Jun 93 16:48:56 GMT X-RQ-ID: 1074 > From: JARDINE@RMCS.CRANFIELD.AC.UK > Subject: God Learners, Mythology and Us! > > Who cares whether all the God Learner's disciples were wiped out? > Because, we all know that some of them are alive now and using this net! Unless you know the God Learner's secret, you are not a God Learner. Jeff --------------------- From: grendel@sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu (John Castellucci) Subject: RQ Adventures #1 still available Message-ID: <9306151853.AA20502@sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu> Date: 15 Jun 93 04:53:39 GMT X-RQ-ID: 1075 Copies still available! RQ Adventures (published 3 times a year) Dedicated to exploring the world of Glorantha through original material. The 1st issue is now available and contains a full length scenario, Escape From Duckland. The adventure is 32 pages of excitement including 10 full encounter descriptions, 8 fully described characters for use as PCs or NPCs, encounter stats, player handouts, maps and more! Set in Sartar, the adventure describes a journey from Apple Lane south to Holy Country. "I love it!" - Ken Rolston (and many others!) RQ Adventures is professionally typeset and printed -- issue 1 is 32 pages saddle stapled + cardstock cover (same format as TOTRM). Issue 1 is $5.00US for United States residents (postage included) $6.00US for foreign (no foreign currency accepted) Make checks payable to: John Castellucci and send to: RQ Adventures Fanzine 2006 22nd Ave. San Francisco, CA 94116 USA --------------------- From: joe@sartar.toppoint.de (Joerg Baumgartner) Subject: Elmal/Yelmalio Message-ID: Date: 15 Jun 93 19:05:48 GMT X-RQ-ID: 1076 Hi there! I just received my copy of John Castellucci's RQ Adventure #1 and loved to find this note on page 12: "There is current rife in Sun Dome [...] This tablet claims that the god of Sun Dome is actually Elmal [...] Scholars are bitterly arguing over this point [...]" First time I recognized myself in an adventure (arguin bitterly - now, really!) I can only recommend this excellent piece of work! -- -- Joerg Baumgartner joe@sartar.toppoint.de --------------------- From: carlf@Panix.Com (Carl Fink) Subject: RuneQuest Daily, Tue, 15 Message-ID: <199306151940.AA16126@sun.Panix.Com> Date: 15 Jun 93 11:40:10 GMT X-RQ-ID: 1077 To: runequest@glorantha.holland.sun.com Subject: keeps going and going and going . . . . marks@slough.mit.edu writes: R> Maybe he was confused by the Glorantha book, which states >that "Aside form the dwarves and a few minor atheistic cultures, >the Malkioni are the only practicing sorcerer culture in >Glorantha." Given that sorcery IS used in other societies, this >suggests that there is a real difference between merely having >some sorcery around, and being a sorcerous society. Yes, good point. While Eastern society is full of sorcerors, it isn't built around sorcerors/sorcery the way Malkioni culture is. It is once more suggested that we leave sorcery out of the basic rules. This violates the First Commandment we set up when we started out: Thou Shalt Not Ruin Existing Characters. That is, it would become impossible to keep running existing sorcerors. --------------------- From: carlf@Panix.Com (Carl Fink) Subject: RuneQuest Daily, Tue, 15 Message-ID: <199306151943.AA16409@sun.Panix.Com> Date: 15 Jun 93 11:43:45 GMT X-RQ-ID: 1078 To: runequest@glorantha.holland.sun.com Subject: keeps going and going and going . . . . marks@slough.mit.edu writes: R> Maybe he was confused by the Glorantha book, which states >that "Aside form the dwarves and a few minor atheistic cultures, >the Malkioni are the only practicing sorcerer culture in >Glorantha." Given that sorcery IS used in other societies, this >suggests that there is a real difference between merely having >some sorcery around, and being a sorcerous society. Yes, good point. While Eastern society is full of sorcerors, it isn't built around sorcerors/sorcery the way Malkioni culture is. It is once more suggested that we leave sorcery out of the basic rules. This violates the First Commandment we set up when we started out: Thou Shalt Not Ruin Existing Characters. That is, it would become impossible to keep running existing sorcerors. --------------------- From: gharris@Jade.Tufts.EDU Subject: Some Sorcery Comments Message-ID: <9306151633.aa02592@Jade.Tufts.EDU> Date: 15 Jun 93 20:33:20 GMT X-RQ-ID: 1079 Well, I thought it was finally time to put together my thoughts on the direction sorcery will take, so I'm taking some time to put my thoughts down on magnetic media. First of all, I think that sorcery as delineated in RQIII is broken. THe example Paul Reilly gives of an apprentice sorceror casting oodles and oodles of Damage Boost 6 spells with long duration illustrates what I think is wrong with the system. However, that isn't the same as what Paul Reilly thinks; he points to Duration as a problem. Me, I think it's Free INT that's the big offender here. The main problem with frre int is that, even with no matrices or enchantments of any kind, the degree of your skill isn't the limiting factor, so an apprentice can cast as powerful a spell as a magus. Moreover, I don't think Range is a problem either. Paul Reilly mentions the problem of casting trnscontinental assassination spells via Sight Projection. Well, first of all you have to get the Sight Projection there. You can only cast it line of sight, which is maybe 10km max. Then you have to move it at 1 meter per SR (which translates to 3kph). If you want to cast a spell at someone 1000km away, you're going to have to concentrate on your sight projection for weeks, during which time you won't be able to see anything around you. Furthermore, if your Projected Sight has to pass over any magical barriers, or if your target has any companions who have some form of magical sight, then you won't be able to sneak up on them and will be vulnerable to many forms of magical attack. So Range doesn't really present an imbalance wrt Sense Projection. For any other spell except for Teleportation, range is restricted by line-of - sight, so you aren't going to get people casting Palsy at 16 kilometers. Thus, leaving Range as is won't cause any difficulties. We still have a problem with Duration, although it is fairly minor if we restrict manipulation to 1/10 skill (you'd need an 85% Duration to cast a week-long spell using the old table, and Duration is a hard skill. Moreover, the number of people who can even learn Duration is going to be restricted in most sorcery-using societies, so the number of people who can cast such spells will be very few; probably fewer than 1 in 10,000.) It is still possible for a sufficiently poweerful magus to keep hundreds of long-duration spells up all the time. This is clearly undesireable. The question is, what to do about it? The solution presented in the proposed draft of sorcery rules is even worse than the problem it means to cure. If you require a magus to sacrifice a point of power to get a long duration, but nevertheless temporary, spell, the net effect is that sorcerors will not cast these spells. In fact, with the restrictions placed on sorcery in the draft, it's difficult to see how any primarily-sorcery-using society is going to resist conquest by eight trollkin and a war beetle. (well, perhaps I exagerrate). The way I, and even many of the more theisticly biased on the list, see it, a permanent sacrifice of power should result in a permanent gain. Carl Fink correctly points out that there do exist other examples where permanent power is sacrificed for temporary effects, namely divine intervention and the blessings of Hrestoli saints. While this is true, it is something that bears closer examination. First, consider Divine Intervention: this is something that is very rarely done, except when the alternative is almost certain death. This is hardly an attractive route to power. Giving sorcerors the ability to do something that initiates only do when severely threatened hardly seems like much of an ability. Second, there are the blessings of the Hrestoli saints. Well, these haven't actually been published, so using them in an example is a bit dicey, but I'll let that pass, as I've got a copy of the material. In fact, for well over a year I've been playing in a Fronelan campaign were a majority of the PCs are Hrestoli. Some PCs have actually invoked the blessings of saints. Of course, the two most attractive blessings, Gerlant's and Paslac's, are the ones that give a *permanent* effect. The only non-permanent blessing that has been invoked is Talor's, by my character, and believe me, it won't happen again. There was even one character who maintained a personal POW of 19, because there was no good reason to gain a patron saint and invoke his/her blessing. So, when I say that sacrificing permanent power fro temporary effect is a hose job, divine intervention and saints' blessings don't refute this; they are hose jobs as well. So, what other means can we use to limit the number of long-duration spells that a magus can have up at one time? One suggestion that has been made is that the magic points used to cast a long duration spell do not regenerate while the spell is up, or that such spells require some sort of magic point maintainence cost. I dislike these ideas for a couple of reasons. First, it would be a bookkeeping nightmare. This alone would be enough to disqualify it. Second, it is counter to the way pretty much all other magic works in RQ. Generally, you fuel a spell with magic points, cast it, and it is done. Except for active spells, a cast spell is a separate entity from the caster (much to the consternation of those who want others to cast a healing spell on them, but have countermagic up). There doesn't seem any good rationalization for changing this for sorcery. Another thought was that the magic points used to manipulate a spell must be a magus' personal magic points. Again, there is no good rationalization for this. Magic points act as fuel in spirit (and divine, where applicable) magic. Sorcery is much more mechanical in nature, so this certainly shouldn't change. A magic point is a magic point is a magic point. Similarly, all the various suggections that sorcerors be restricted from using various magic point batteries and storage devices are equally difficult to justify, and are unnecessarily crippling for sorcerors (some theistic bias is showing through on the part of many members of the list). So, we have to look elsewhere. The first really good suggestion I saw fro this was to make exponential duration a ritual, requiring an hour per point of magic in the spell. To me, this seems an excellent and justifiable mechanic. It doesn't really go counter to anything we know about sorcery-users, and it prevents a magus from casting the oodles and oodles of spells, since even an intensity-1, week- long spell will take a full day to cast. Most powerful sorcerors have better things to do with their time than keeping the local constabulary supplied with Damage Boost 6s, and that's *all* he'd be able to do, if that. Since to really be able to cast many long duration spells, a magus would need a Duration well over 100%, as well as similarly high levels in the skills involved, we won't have that problem too often. This is the mechanic I would prefer. Secondly, there is Paul Reilly's suggestion of a sorceror's Twin, that is, a fetch-like "being" to which the magus can give permanent Pow, and this Pow somehow limits the number or power of long-duration spells a magus can keep up. This is a good mechanic in a number of ways: it gives sorcerors a gradual means of increasing in power by allowing them to devote their personal energies to their magic; it doesn't have a threshold where the magus suddenly is able to do something much much more than before; and it is consistent with the ways in which priests and shamans increase in strength, that is, by the sacrifice of permanent power for a permanent increase in ability. The question is, how will a Twin work? A number of suggestions have been made in this area, and I'll try to address them separately. First, how will a Twin allow a sorceror to maintain spells and how will doing so restrict him otherwise? There are two basic options I see here: you can have a magus maintain a number of spells up to the amount of pow in his Twin, or you can have a magus maintain spells with total intensity up to the amount of pow in his Twin. Clearly, the first is much more powerful. I think if the first option is taken, one might restrict a magus to total manipulation of a spell based on his pow plus the unused pow of the Twin. However, this is unlikely to be much of a restriction, since the limit of skill in spell divided by ten is much more likely to be the bottleneck. You could have the limit be personal pow plus Twin's pow divided by some number, but I think that's an ugly mechanic. However, I would say that the magus must maintain sufficient magic points in his Twin to equal the spells (or intensity of spells) maintained, similarly to how a shaman must maintain magic points in his fetch to keep spirits bound. Overall, I think I would lean toward the latter option, that is, limit the sorceror to a total intensity of constant spells no greater than the pow of his Twin. How would this affect other skills? I would think that spells maintained by the twin would last indefinitely, and would have whatever range and intensity (and multispell, which becomes very useful under these rules [but that's okay, it's now a Very Hard and Rare skill]) it had when cast. Duration would now only have linear effect, and any number of spells can be cast that do not need to be maintained by the Twin; these spells would have normal range, duration and effect. I would say that if a spell maintained by the Twin is cast on an object, and that object moves out of the range of the spell from the twin, the spell is broken. So, what would the other effects of a Twin be? I don't think very many limitations should be placed on a magus' Twin. It is already much less powerful that a fetch, as it cannot act for the magus and cannot move about. The idea of requiring the magus to follow vows or geasa, or to meditate to maintain the Twin is not very much in keeping with the philosophy of sorcery, that is, it is the manipulation of natural energies and the Twin is the magus' natural energies harnessed and controlled. If anything, a magus would have less need to modify his behaviour than would a shaman to maintain a fetch. This is not to say that some *cultures* wouldn't necessarily requires vows of their sorcerors who serve priestly functions; but these restrictions should be societal, rather than magical in nature. Furthermore, I don't think it's reasonable that possession of a Twin would be at all discernable to mundanes. A normal person cannot tell be looking that a shaman has a 60-point fetch, or that a Storm Voice knows Cloud Call 20. Why should they be able to tell that a magus has a twin? The presence of a Twin would of course be readily apparent to anyone with any sort of magical vision (including a limited form of Mystic Vision [say intensity 1] that would go along with having a Twin). I also strongly dislike the idea that a Twin bound into an object or creature could be lost or destroyed. It may be unusable until it can be bound into another creature, or another object enchanted, but it shouldn't result in anything more than an inconvenience for the magus in question. Well, that's pretty much it for my thoughts on the direction sorcery should go. Overall, I feel there are a couple of good ideas out there, neither of which unfortunately is currently in the rules, but that we need to be careful of a couple of things: one, there is a *strong* theistic bias among the members of the list, probably because of the strong theistic bias of much of the published material, so people seem to be very enthusiastic about placing limitations and disadvantages on sorcery, far more so than is desirable; two (and this is in some way related), people are tending to give sorcery attributes that should remain cultural. Sorcery itself is a very mechanistic system, and shouldn't require a lot of mystical mumbo-jumbo like vows and geasa and such to work. In fact, many of these should have *no effect* on sorcery. Think about it: what are you making a vow too? The power of sorcery doesn't come from some god or spirit. -- gharris@jade.tufts.edu George W. Harris "He'd kill us if he had the chance." Dept. of Mathematics Tufts University The Conversation --------------------- From: prharmaty@aol.com Subject: Re: Crimson Bat to Visit / Mayor takes a Holiday Message-ID: <9306152128.tn44537@aol.com> Date: 16 Jun 93 01:28:09 GMT X-RQ-ID: 1080 Re: MOB & the Crimson Bat. I'd love to hear the aguments used to convince the Crimson Bat Cultist that they ought to stop over at some other town. "Oh, our folks are weak of body and soul ever since the disentery outbreak. We're hardly worth devouring. You should choose the fat people of a better place to suck the life force from."