Some of you may recall that one of my players has decided she wants to have committed some form of atrocity in the past that she is fleeing from. Greg himself suggested that kinslaying is the quintessential Orlanthi sin, and she has decided to be Orlanthi. I need to know the punishment for kinslaying, or rather, the kidnapping of a chief's child.
What she's come up with is the following: A Lhankor Mhy sage, her clan is struck by a series of bad omens and ill luck. She links this to a prophecy from an ancient text from when she had done her studies (she specialized in prophecy). Of course, no one else can read it, and it is open to interpretation, and Orlanthi are not really prophecy people (they seem more omens, not written prophecy, from what I can see). Add in that the prophecy is foreign (Not Orlanthi! It doesn't apply to us) and allegorical, and then top all that off with the fact that if she is right, it means the newborn son of the clan chief will be the doom of the tribe, and she doesn't think anyone will listen.
So she steals the kid and gets rid of it. (she's a bit of a hothead) Even so, she can't bring herself to kill it, not outright. We haven't yet decided exactly what she does. One theory is throw it in the river, the other is leave it on a mountaintop. Both classical ways to do infanticide. The last is the rather disturbing idea of her secretly bringing it into a heroquest and using it as something that is sacrificed or lost during that, thus stranding it in the otherworld.
What I want to know is what would be the expected punishment for this? Would it be considered kinslaying and she slain on sight? Would she be branded as a traitor of some kind and exiled? In the end she gets away, although not unscathed. I'm trying to figure out what the Orlanthi reaction to this would be.
The final irony? She was wrong. The omens didn't stop, she did it all for nothing. (Thus her sense of having committed the ultimate wrong, which has caused her to flee to Karse and her old mentor, hoping for some way to atone.
LC
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