Re: Visualizing (was Re: when do I get the windlord?)

From: Bryan Thexton <bethexton_at_...>
Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 11:11:12 -0800 (PST)


Here is my take on the tula stealing game. To do it, you need to move boundary markers over a very wide area, and probably perform some ceremony before, during, and/or afterwards (at a guess, you need to plow at least a token amount of the land). You show up, and your footmen start moving stones, plowing, whatever it is you do. The home clan scrambles together as many folk as they can, and race out to drive you off. During the course of the fight, they probably re-move some of the stones again, try to kill your plow team, and generally disrupt your actions as well as try to drive you off their tula altogether. In the meantime, as whenever a clan is raided, their god-talkers are performing dire ceremonies to their most warlike gods, getting ready to call down great calamities upon your head.....but these ceremonies take time. Perhaps you defeat them, and chase them all the way back inside their fortifications and make off with a little loot along the way. You patch up your wounded, and gather up the stragglers, and then get the heck out of there. The only reason you have a chance at all of defeating them on their home turf is the factor of surprise.

In general, your magic will be strongest on your home ground, and so will theirs. This is the ground their ancestors know, this is the ground that they regularly call their gods blessing onto, and so on. I figure that part of the reason you can only take two major actions per season is that to project your clans magic to protect warriors, explorers, traders, or what-have-you outside your tula, even briefly, takes extensive ceremonial preparation. When it comes to the intensity of a battle, it is only good for one battle. So come the morrow should you battle again, you would be little better off than godless outlaws, while the home team would have had a chance to prepare all of their gods most potent blessings against you. You really don't want that�imagine what wrath of Orlanth (or whoever) several hundred people with their back to the wall could call down with close to a day to prepare. This is also why after a great victory you can only burn a few steads or tear down a piece of fortification. You are on a clock.

This would also make a decent explanation of why you can't fight your way through a blocking clan to get at another one. Not only are you not magically equipped for two battles, probably your ceremonies name your enemy, so attacking anyone else would again be without the benefit of magic, and as soon as you showed up at their doorstep looking to cross and they decided they might not let you, they would have started their ceremonies, just in case.

--Bryan

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