> (1) Are the magical societies simply hero bands, or are they actually a cult or religion?
The magical societies are a mix of two things that are different in rules terms. Some of them are hero bands. Some of them are spirit societies (practices in HQ1 terms). The ones mentioned in Drastic Prax (which come from the Nomad Gods board game) are large enough to be treated as practices. That said, when we wrote up the Sword Man, I think we treated it as a hero band. Either approach works pretty well. A hero band _can_ be distributed across the plaines. There's no reason they all have to be in the same place.
>From an ecological perspective, I'd say that it is possoible for a hero band's spirit to "grow" big enough to be treated as a practice. Of course, that means that people went on quests, and discvered that their puny little hero band spirit was actually something much larger, not that the spirit got bigger. I think this happens with the White Bull spirit across the early years of the Hero Wars.
> (2) What kind of magic do they practice? I suppose the logical answer is shamanism, but that makes them indistinguishable from other Praxian magicians.
Mostly animism. In HQ1 terms, some of it is misapplied. They don't need shamans, necessarily. A practitioner can fill a fetish. Because the animist method of worship is overwhelmingly followed in Prax, I'd keep the deviations rare. (Of course, the PC's always go with that.) The ones that practice sacrifice or veneration are the ones that other people find really weird. I think the star witches probably use sacrifice, because so many of the sky entities are divine. Plus, that makes the knowledge that they get just that much more esoteric.
Generally, I agree with what Roderick said.
> Note that t he society as a whole probably does *not* have a single guardian
> that everyone shares - expecially the cross-Nation ones. Each local group
> will probably have their own guardian. The Guardians *may* be connected or
> related somehow, but you need to be relatively close to your guardian to be
> able to call on its magic, so having a single guardian doesn't make sense if
> the Society is scattered all ove the Waste (and remember the people we
> normally refer to as "Praxians" are native to the Wastes - of which Prax is
> just the best and most desireable bit).
I'm not sure that Roderick meant this, but I think it is very rare for magically separate hero bands to go by the same name and think of themselves as one unit, without having some higher spirit involved. For example, the serpent dancers aren't "really" 30 different hero bands with different guardians working under the same name. They are one society that worships someone that lets them control serpents. (I'd say the Serpent-wrestler aspect of Waha). But you can have, for example, lots of "Storm Bull hero bands" who have their own guardians -- but they are tied together by their common worship of Storm Bull, not by having a common guardian or a common name. I'd say the star witches are the only ones that I can think of off the top of my head that go by a single name, but are really a collection of independent organizations. And that's because I think they worship divine entities in the sky, so there's no spirit binding all that together. If you disagree about them worshipping divine entities, then I think you'd need to think about who they do worship and whether its the same spirit that all of them worship.
> Other societies are warrior fraternities, women's societies, etc.
A good point. Some societies have no relationship to any magical anything. It's the local chapter of the Kiwana's. (Which will make no sense at all to those of you outside the US, I suppose.) And some of them appear to be harmless fraternities, but have deeper magic (like in Masonic conspiracy theories). And a few of those are chaotic. Yet one more reason not to trust people in other societies. You never know what they'r really up to.
Chris Lemens
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