>O.K., sure the Invisible God is "different" or "mysterious", but
>using that as the reason why theistic Gods can provide constant,
>relevant information to their communities and IG is, basically,
>useless seems a bit of a copout.
A reasonable point based on a false assumption. I don't believe that theistic gods give anything resembling constant, relevant information.
>"the Invisible God knows everything - getting an answer is the real
>problem."
While theistic gods neither know everything nor can you get an answer.
>Maybe I'm too practical, but, if Thor, Wotan, and Apollo could
>*really* be visited and *really* talked back and provided direct and
>useful benefits (spells, feats, good crops etc.) to large numbers of
>people, it's hard for me to imagine the Judao-Christian-Islamic
>faiths, much more IG-like, ever catching on big-time.
Except, again, they don't. Yes, you can heroquest. You can meet your god, but you can (normally) only do so under very ritualised conditions. Rituals that bind the god as well. Yes, you can go meet Orlanth, but he will only tell you what is appropriate to the quest you are on. You can't walk up to him and ask anything you want. (There are heroquests that do allow this, but they are hard, and normally limited to one question...)
>I've always had this question about Glorantha. "Gee, I can worship
>Orlanth and get Lighning Bolt to satisfy my power-mad side, I get
>Divination and Heroquests to know he really exists to satisfy my
>religious side, and, as a free bonus, I know that my Priest is not
>really an Ogre. Or I can worship IG and get, well, close to
>nothing."
But you don't know any such thing. Illumination and all sorts of other magics can mean your priest is an ogre. The Malkioni deny that your god does exist, claiming he is no different than Zzabur, except Zzabur is (a) more powerful and (b) more honest. And in theory sorcery is more powerful (cf. Zzabur, again).
> Yes, I know Saints have been developed, but the whole area
>is still relatively weak. I hope that, as Glorantha gets further
>explored (and published), there will be some benefits to worshipping
>IG. Else you need, IMO, a better explanation for IG worship. Or, as
>an alternative, tone down the benefits of theistic worship that we
>aare discussing in this thread. No more auto-read-your-soul stuff.
I think this is all true. In general, the benefits of malkionism have not been well explored yet - but that will change as the western books come out. I also don't believe there is any auto-read-your-soul stuff. There are examples of using theistic magic to enforce modes of BEHAVIOUR, and there are examples where you as a human voluntarily open your soul to a god, but this is subtly different.
re: Illumination
>Our group has been running Illumination as a skill, just like any
>other. Starts at 0, when you answer that key riddle it goes to a
>base level, then it can improve like any other skill. You roll at
>the beginning of a "episode" (a bit fuzzy), so a character may be
>Illuminated sometimes and "normal" at others. We're mainly Lunars.
>In order to cast certain spells (e.g. Chaos Gift, it's very rare in
>our group!), you must
>a) either be really chaotic (not a good idea)
>b) feel Illuminated that episode.
>
>To do fancier stuff like ignore geases you have to succeed at your
>skill at a certain level. This seems to work fairly well. We're not
>actually using HW mechanics, but the same idea should work in actual
>HWs.
I don't think Illumination works like this - you either are or aren't. You don't feel more illuminated some days than others. I also doubt that most illuminates use Chaos Gift anyway.
The idea of using illumination as a skill in a contest to protect you from agents of reprisals and so on is probably more reasonable. I'd probably insist that the roll was made AFTER the action was taken, as you wouldn't know how safe it was until later... In return I'd allow that once a given situation has proved safe, it always is. In other words, only roll the first time you break a given geas. I seem to remember Peter Metcalfe coming up with similar ideas, based on mystical strikes.
Might be worth moving any further discussion on this to hw-rules, though.
Cheers,
Graham
-- Graham Robinson graham_at_... Albion Software Engineering Ltd.
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