I'm not convinced. This would seem to imply that such a rock is more magically accessible to the local "common-concentrated" person (whoever that might be in the Heortling context, if anyone), than it is to a theism-concentrated but otherwise magically generalist godi -- the archetypal Hantrafali, say. After all, many of the most sacred sites of lots of religions (co-)exist in the material plane; doesn't imply to me that (say) Kero Fin or Pairing Stone are sources of common magic rather than theistic.
> Greg gave an excellent
> example that I believe has already been summed-up on one of the lists
> where he talked about how most people in Glorantha don't care about the
> source of a particular magic. If sacrificing to a divine berry bush
> means you're going to get more food, then that's what most people will
> do. If performing ecstatic worship rites to an animist stream means
> you'll catch more fish, so be it. The world is made of everything but to
> paraphrase Orwell, some things are more everything than others. Most
> trees are just trees with an equal mix of divine, spirit, and essense. A
> tree or grove that leans more towards spirit, however, will most likely
> be inhabited by a dryad.
Sure, which is why I'm somewhat ill at ease about the (IMO) overly rigid and falsely discretised 'otherworlds' distinction that _cause_ these things to be any sort of Big Rules Issue in the first place. (Whether these be the HW rules or what I can glean about HQ's, subtly different as those may be.) So much of the game is 'narrator's discretion', it's not clear to me that this wouldn't have been the best approach here. Essentially all these decisions come down in practice to deciding how 'compatible' it is to worship say, that god and this god, or some god and That Rock Over There, whether for merely social, or inherently magical reasons. Mapping them on to Ultimate SimGloranthan Truths simply in order to do this seems both a little crude as a method (that'll be a -20, or a 0, or a flat cost or a double cost, in a rather binary way), and rather to "eff" the ineffable, as it were. That's split milk though, so I'll try not to cry too hard.
> The Seven Mothers have their origins in the mundane plane (I don't know
> if this is the official view but was my rationale when I first read that
> it was a CM religion.) I'm guessing that as a collective, they provide
> the common magic based on what they did before ascending.
Hrm. Still sounds a little artificial to me, I have to say. Is that magic then _not_ available to initiates, devotees, shamans, and sorceresses of the individual Mother cults, due to their being "noncommon" ?
> Ok, you got me there. There was less of a division between spirit and
> divine way back in RQ days. Heck, the gods *provided* spirit magic!
Indeed. Like I said, I'd be the last one to want to argue from a position that RQ[n] made perfect "simulationist" sense, even if that were the primary objective. Having the Heortling gods give out most of their initiate-accessible magic via 'intermediary spirits' does indeed seem unlikely, RQ-rules driven, and perhaps bordering on the mildly bonkers. _However_, it'd be not unreasonable to assume that much non-cult magic was indeed of animist origin, given that the Heortlings do have the odd (in more ways than one) shaman kicking around.
> Hey, I certainly understand. As originally written, the CM rules were
> fine from a gameist point of view but made no sense world-wise (that was
> my biggest issue with the whole thing). It makes much more sense now.
It's making incrementally more sense to me now, I must admit. Admittedly my initial post rathered overstated my reaction -- just that some of the information, outside of the context of range of how it's used in practice in the game, does cause a certain amount of head-scratching.
Cheers,
Alex.
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