Chris :
> There has been a lot of focus on distinguishing theism, animism, and sorcery. I can't imagine that, despite those differences, they do their rituals the same way. For example, we know that theist ritual tend to involve sacrificial worship, where animist rituals tend to involve ecstatic worship.
Well, I've no idea if this will be any help at all, but theist rituals basically involve the worshipper sacrificing some form of individuality in return for power, whereas I think that an animist worshipper would instead try to positively *affirm* his/her own personality in order to gain a spirit's (hopefully beneficial) attention.
This would suggest (to me anyway) that theist rituals are focused on the (mythic) past, whereas animist ones would instead be focused on the present.
Symbolically, the energies would be flowing in opposite directions -- theists attempt to bring part of the otherworld into themselves, whereas animists try and manifest themselves to the otherworld.
The banging of drums, the chants and the dancing, all have the purpose of grabbing the attention of some part of the otherworld and trying to make some new trade with it, instead of the theistic method of attempting to reiterate the exchanges of the mythic past.
I think this would mean that animist mythology and tradition would be different in nature to theist mythology and tradition ; as an opposition between who we are as an identification with the gods, and the spirits that we know as a living relationship based on a bunch of stories concerning meetings and exchanges and promises between these spirits and our ancestors in the past.
In game terms I'd agree with your idea about X beats Y, because these things will be inevitably resolved by d20 and a contest ; but I've said this before, the nature of the exchange will depend on the relative social/magical power of the participants -- weaker spirits will be told what to do, those of equal power will trade stuff between themselves, stronger spirits will have to be obeyed in exchange for powerful favours. The Masteries system makes this sort of hierarchy very easy to describe, those with 2 Masteries must offer some form of acceptable obedience to those with 3 Masteries or more for example.
The only animist rituals I've ever written professionally (for a French Hero Wars supplement) were 60% the players trying to rally social/magical support for their requests to the spirits, 5% D20s to see if the spirits agreed with this request, 35% searching in the Other Side for whichever story-related purposes. But of course, simple summonings of weaker spirits would be resolved by simple contest, or : does X beat Y ? :-)
I can't see any reason why the weaker spirit shouldn't be manifest as a lingering benefit (the benefit *is* the spirit), but I'd see spirits of similar or stronger power than the player characters as providing some sort of exhaustible resource, having its own independent target number, and numbers of times it can be used according to the specific conditions reached after negociation/agreement with the spirit, or imposition of authority, or whatever.
A related question is what sorts of limitations are imposed by the Compromise : I'd guess that they would require that relationships between the worlds must be initiated by the mortals, except for some evil spirits doing otherwise.
I don't know if this will be any help at all, it's just to detail the answers I came up with for the same basic questions :-)
Julian Lord
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