> What other ideas do we have on how these entities operate in
> general? For example, can they offer magic to their
> followers? f so, how? How does the number of their followers
> affect their personal abilities or the amount of magic they
> can offer? ..
You can guess who I'm going to pick as an example, can't you? That's right, the one who's documented :)
No, to start with, let's start lower-level and take Random PC X, who happens to be a devotee of their deity. They've improvised a new Feat while on the heroplane once, and cemented it. They'd like to teach it to some friends.
Well, fine. The friends learn the feat the same way as they'd learn any other - little heroquest where the leader goes through the relevant myth, they tag along, when they get back they know the feat. The only difference is that the officiating priest is a PC, not an NPC. So while this isn't "normal", it's well within the bounds of possibility for PCs, as long as they're Devotees. They can offer something from a deity, dependent on that deity, but which can only be obtained by using that PC as an interface.
Back to our documented example - who isn't a Devotee, and can't do this sort of trick in quite the same way. In Thunder Rising we have her providing some very specialist magic to anyone who comes along on a rather high-level quest. Only, she doesn't. What she does is persuade Rigsdal to do it for her. And that's an important distinction to my mind. Yes, her ability to persuade Rigsdal to do her favours is unique to her, but she still can't offer magic to anyone without his help.
How does the number of followers affect any of this? AFAIK "community support" only applies to HQs. So I'd say that it affects these "Heroes"' ability to do stuff on other planes, and it therefore affects the sort of abilities they can gain by HQing. But while on the mundane, they've got what they've got, and having thousands of followers doesn't affect their own abilities as such. Yes, having an army to back you up can help in fights or in intimidation, but AFAIK only in the same way as it does for anyone else. The difference is one of scale, not of type.
Powered by hypermail