I had the idea this morning (sleep, it does a body good) that maybe Heortling common magic shouldn't be Flesh Man or the Thunder Brothers but the Ancestors, worshiped as a whole through the medium of the wyter (which is a Mortal World entity, even if the Ancestors aren't). Each clan has a "bag of tricks" that its members learned at some point and the Ancestors remember. These include the Flesh Man feats passed down from the earliest days, feats learned from the Thunder Brother ancestors, charms learned from Kolat and his children, and even the occasional spell (I imagine the Balmyr and Locaem, living along the Chorms River, probably have clans who know a few spells to deal with darned thing. This Common Magic also holds Natural Magic for the clan -- if all male members of the Frekori clan are born with the ability to fly, then it's one's parent's membership in the clan that determines if a child is born with the ability. If you marry and move to a new clan, you probably give up your common magic from your clan or at least some of it -- using "foreign" common magic is probably a sign of not trusting your new ancestors or something. The nice Narrator might allow a character to keep their ratings and/or swap abilities.
>Still there is a salvageable quality to some of the ideas here. I
>just need to center the religion in the mortal world and maybe make
>it more mixed. I understand Peter's objections and never intended
>the religion to be just fighting magic.
Anyway, I think, in general, this is a good idea, and much more evocative than the Universal Flesh Man Cult -- I mean, really -- when have the Heortlings been unified on anything -- you can only get 85% to admit the sky is blue on a cloudless day, and that's after a couple of hours of bellowing and arm wrestling....
Peter Larsen
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