Whitewall Panel at Continuum

From: donald_at_...
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 20:08:34 GMT


First of all many thanks to Jane for organising this and everyone who turned up to listen to her, Nick and I expounding ideas.

A couple of things appear in my notes which seem worth raising on the list.

The first was from John's powerpoint demo (which has some lovely pictures to reinforce the text, unfortunatly we didn't have time to do them justice). That is that he's set Tatius's arrival as 1620/Illusion/Storm. That's fine by me although there's a bit of a conflict with KoS which implies that it was immediately after the BatBlat. That's fairly easily reconciled by taking the earlier date as the date of his appointment and the latter as his arrival at the siege. Does anyone have any alternative dates or can we fix it like this?

The second was a comment about Fereshori Rastillia being like a UN weapons inspector looking for weapons of mass destruction. She's sure that Tatius has an atrocity or two planned and wants to discover and hopefully prevent them. He in turn wants to keep his plans secret so there's a lovely cat and mouse game for Lunar PCs to get involved in. It also leads to rumours reaching the defenders that Tatius is planning something worse than the bat.

So what are Tatius's plans here? For an answer I turned to KoS where the Seven of Vistur caused the deaths of several hundred Lunar soldiers in building ramps to storm WW. Now bearing in mind that this section is written from an Orlanthi point of view it may well misunderstand what Tatius is doing. There is something significant about this because otherwise why mention separately the deaths of a few hundred soldiers in the final assault.

So the following came to mind - Tatius's objective is to kill or bind Orlanth. He plans on doing so by magically forcing the souls of the defenders to act as a cage. Unfortunately by the time the ritual occurs there are no defenders left to use this way and he has to use whatever he's got which is the nearest block of expendable troops - spearwall infantry, mercenaries, the odd Orlanthi clan warband. So why aren't there any defenders? because Fereshori Rastillia caught onto this plan and helped Kallyr get all the non-combatants out of WW allowing the combatants to retreat without the dishonour of abandoning the vunerable. She didn't expect Tatius to use his own soldiers this way or she'd have stopped that as well.

Alternatively Tatius originally planned to use his own soldiers as the bars of Orlanth's prison and Fereshori Rastillia tried and failed to stop this mistreatment of good lunars.

Of course we know that in fact Orlanth wasn't imprisoned effectively, maybe some of the souls used refused to remain there, were corrupted, or whatever.

I'm sure there were other things but my alcohol/sleep balance at the time means I can't remember them.

-- 
Donald Oddy
http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/

Powered by hypermail