Hi Nam
YGWV
Have you seen Barbarian Adventures? There is an illuminated guy in
there.
The playable illuminates are the cosmically aware guys, who instead
of sitting at a wall contemplating the nature of a leaf actually
start behaving almost like a sociopath, but hiding that from people
because they still understand, at least in principle, that social
groups have particular behaviour norms.
For this reason illuminates have always been much more fun as NPC's
for me. Great bad guys if you will. Of course, that also means that
you don't really need rules for illuminates. Player characters need
rules, and the physical magical environment use rules.
I had a mystic (failed?) npc in my game who could pass through solid
rock and fly and block swords with his bare hands. There are no rules
for mystics, so I made up what the NPC could do just from watching
chinese martial arts flicks.
Regards
Rob
- In HeroQuest-rules_at_yahoogroups.com, "Ngakpa Namgyal"
<namgyal_at_...> wrote:
>
> My take on Illumination in a campaign - should I need to ref. such
a situation - would be to ignore the rules in ILH2 entirely. I have
to say the ILH2 stuff on Illumination, Sevening, the All and the like
left me absolutely cold. In *my* Glorantha that latter stuff in
particular simply doesn't exist. It all felt terribly contrived to
me and rather badly written - I had to keep re-reading it to get my
head around it, a bit like the original Hero Wars rulebooks which put
me off things Gloranthan for a good five years. It was clanky and
sort of lacked poetry really, a lightness of touch, which given the
specific subject matter I felt was a great shame.
>
> In a forthcoming Lunar campaign I'll be running Illumination itself
will be a possibility; if the need arises it will all happen through
roleplaying, and I'll ignore rules entirely. I don't feel it's
reasonable to have a game mechanic like Illumination that
could 'happen' to a character without at least a peripheral awareness
that it was happening on the part of the character, and some degree
of active participatin on their part. My principle of late is that
players should get what they want for their characters - the downside
of which is that they get what they want for their characters.
A 'real world' analogy would be the perspective that you can't
brainwash someone without them to some degree permitting that to
occur, and engaging with the process. Not that Illumination and
brainwashing are the same thing mind you. But anyway, in terms of
game mechanics that stuff is all pretty lame to my mind, so I ignore
it. Gosh I'm a grumpy beggar. Riddlingly yours, Nam.
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>