Stephen:
> > One of my gamers is trying to figure out their backstory. At
> > the moment, it looks like Dad became a Windlord and promptly
> > took off adventuring, and Mum is an Ernaldan devotee. We
> > started discussing _why_ someone with brains and skills would
> > choose to marry someone who was on the path to Windlord...
Rob:
> Just like Orlanth and Ernalda in the myths then! Get into the
> Heaortling mindset - this is normal stuff for them.
The actual discussion with Stephen was about why an Ernaldan devotee would _stay_ married to someone once they'd become a Wind Lord. I'm still getting up to speed with the HeroQuest worldview -- I used to play RQ quite some time ago -- but my understanding is that becoming a Wind Lord is automatic grounds for divorce (let's see: Storm Tribe p. 15). This man is not going to be able to do the basic things to support his family, he'll seldom be home, and he'll not be bound to sexual fidelity. He's an anti-Durev.
Getting them married in the first place was easy. Appropriate match of families. The gods moved in both the characters, and it was assumed/hoped that Viggo was still in his Seeker phase, and that a powerful re-enactment of Ernalda placing the child Barntar in his father Orlanth's arms would bring about the change which would settle him and bring him to the Steader phase, where he could channel the god's energies more, er, productively. It didn't work that way: Viggo was off following the wind when his first child was born, and in the end it was his Elmali brother who took the child to the head of the bloodline to be recognised.
What we have is a version of the Orlanth-Ernalda-Elmal triad with Viggo-Unn-Valmar. For 20 years, Unn and Valmar have been the functional equivalent of the married couple, while Viggo wandered. Yet I think Unn has chosen to stay married to Viggo, rather than to divorce and remarry, say, Valmar. I've been thinking about the motivations of the various characters -- why did Valmar never marry, instead choosing to raise the children of his bloodline rather than the children of his body? -- and how their choices and roles lock together to take what's essentially a tragic premise and produce something that's worked, with some sadness, perhaps, but without lasting bitterness.
Cheers,
Jennifer
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