Re: Make up new Gods, dang it!

From: Roderick and Ellen Robertson <rjremr_at_Pe3RKICa1Mca45t1zIyxp4AWAzF-jMXZnBNhUaW0ts33grch9fcfg88EQGEtF3DW7AFzp>
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2007 19:57:53 -0700

>> 2. Also, IMPORTANTLY: Remember that most people in ALL cultures use
>> mixed magic, and thus "pay the same costs" for their magic.
>
> I am trying to, honest!
> The impression that I got from most cultures (other than those in the
> Lunar Empire) was that one tended to dominate - and my reading of the
> mechanics suggests that, unless one's common magic is required for
> staying alive, concentration is often a "good deal". Perhaps it might
> have been clearer if all common magic was a talent and there was some
> other term for the "basic" magic obtained from a particular religion?

Once you get above the "First level" of worship, there *tends* to be a concentration on a single magical system - The Orlanthi have only two animist traditions, and hundreds of Gods, Goddesses, Godlings, Godlets, Mini-Gods, God-on-the-Cob, etc. I'm not sure how many Dara Happan beings are Spirits or Essences as compared to Gods. The Lunars are actually a single system. The West tend towards Essence Worship/Sorcery the heck its called. The Praxians tend towards Spirits. But they all worship Beings from different Otherworlds.

Note that the *religion* may have a single way of dealing with Otherworld entities, so you can easily get Misapplied worship ("We worship everything with sacrifices. I'm not sure whay this god is so weak -nobody can Devote to it. Good thing its only a marginal god anyway...). The Heortlings *do* think Kolatings are wierd (I know we said it somewhere, Greg!), because they *don't* sacrifice to Kolat, they worship him with animistic rites (and get "proper" magic from him as a result). The average heortling also uses animistic rites, which is why they can get Charms from their neighborhood Kolating, instead of feats. So part of the wierdness is that we don't worship Kolat like other gods, he has much different rites - the difference is much more than between, say, Orlanth and Ernalda.

RR
He was born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad R. Sabatini, Scaramouche