>
> Yeah, but you don't pick the god; the god picks you. I'm sure there
> are plenty of disappointed initiates (well, not really; they all ought to
> be pleased with who calls them). "Oh great, I get called by the god of
> Plowing and toil, while my brother gets called to the god of fornication
> and sleeping late...."
God also calls priests and rabbis: for some strange reason they tend to be Catholics and Jews respectively. What I'm wondering here is whether the belief in being 'chosen' by a god is merely a normative belief within Heortling culture, or whether it is true in some absolute and meaningful sense. PCs, of course, tend to choose their cults.
New Adults are communal worshippers. By this stage, their particular skills and proclivities will be well recognised - the sword and spear proto-warriors, the skilful healers, the Roitina dancers, the eager skalds. According to TR, the initiate 'nominates' the god they think has chosen them, the elders later assign not-necessarily-the-same deity, and if everyone is still unsure at the end of a few years, then 'obviously' Orlanth and Ernalda have chosen them.
Given that (especially the minority) cults are niches for the socially liminal - eccentrics (LM, Odayla, Vinga), sexual minorities (Heler, Nandan, Finovan) the mentally disturbed or wounded (Humakt, Urox, the Gori) and stark raving lunes (Eurmal, disciples of just about any cult :)) - then the worshippers base skills and personalities would seem to be a large part of the 'choice'. Cults do tend to die out in clans for explicable reasons, not necessarily through obscure divine fiat. Given the Heortling attitude to wyrd - accept it but also fight against it with all your strength, I suspect that the notion of being 'chosen' by a deity involves all sorts of psychological, personal, social, political, historical and class factors as well as divine intervention. And no one can make you do anything.
I tend to play deities actively 'intervening' in a person's cult membership later in life, usually after some traumatic event that tears them out of a certain lifepath into one radically different - either for peace or war, solitude or herodom.
Either way, there are some nice storytelling and campaign possibilities. A clan where *all* the initiands in a given year are chosen by a particular god - Urox or Heler or Roitina or Kev or... (shiver) Eurmal. A political situation where Lunar-cowed elders 'ban' membership of weapons cults. And then young folk start having dreams... And of course, death-wielding herdboys and widwives who are suddenly 'chosen' by a god, or weaponthanes who put away their weapons forever to take up the scroll or pipe or shepherd's crook.
Cheers
John
nysalor_at_... John HughesQuestlines: http://home.iprimus.com.au/pipnjim/questlines/
A stag with broken antlers approaches without fear, its flanks scarred by claws. If you let it be, and act immediately on your greatest fear, then much good will come.
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