>Jonas wrote:
>
>> what gets me is how the HW rules have divvied up the chores.
>>
>> Small to medium-sized spirits: ecstatic worship
>>
>> Big spirits: sacrificial worship
>>
>> Gods: misapplied ecstatic worship
>
>I'm not sure I understand where these divisions come from.
>From HW p.212, "Spirit Cults" and p.249, "Ecstatic Worship of Gods"
>Yu-kargzant is a pretty big spirit, and he gets ecstatic worship
>(Apparently, in the days before the Feathered Horse Queen, he was
>getting sacrificial worship, a concept introduced by the vendref.)
If this is true, and it wasn't 'misapplied', the "Three Otherworlds" paradigm is crumbling rapidly, IMO.
>I don't think there's really a difference in size between a great
>spirit and a god. That one has a different form of worship from the
>other is perhaps an accident of birth more than anything (and it
>appears that many entities can transcend this, like Urox/Storm Bull).
The difference is _supposed_ to be which is their 'home plane', God or Spirit. Page 246 almost makes it clear that different kinds of worship are needed to reach through different kinds of planar barriers, not because the entities they're directed to are so very different but because the worlds they reside in are. The rules stop just short of stating this explicitly, but I can't see any other reasonable interpretation right now.
So what I'm wondering is, what motivation could a Shaman have for offering the 'wrong' kind of worship to a being that he encounters on the spirit plane? The other examples of misapplied worship mentioned in the book all seem to basically be cases of mistaken identity, but that is obviously not what goes on in a spirit cult. Everybody involved knows that these are spirits, not gods. It would make much more sense if the 'spirit cults' were very minor local traditions, sort of like subcults for theists. So in the example on p.212, Koschei would instead learn the Lord of Snow Tradition and get easier access to Snow Spirits. Cheaper in Hero Points, more useful in the long run, and better integrated with the animistic worldview.
The current rules for Spirit Cults seem more like an attempt to shoehorn in the effects they had in RQ than anything else...
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