FWIW, I agree with everything Andrew says. I felt BG has been made far more transgressional than either Humakt or Storm Bull, and also more or less psychologically plausible, by the sentence forbidding them to love or even display affection. This is in both Storm Tribe and Sartar Companion.
It also pretty much ruins them as interesting characters - as they are more or less locked in emotional stasis, there simply are very few interesting stories to tell about them. They kill, or fail to kill, but you essentially can't tell a story about how they *feel* about anything.
I also believe this is a drastic change to the cult as previously depicted in the RuneQuest era - historically, Babeester Gor has *never* been loveless, or even slightly celibate. "Although young, she is no virgin, for her deeds would be too awful to do alone. Her husbands or lovers vary, and there are some children as well." - Wyrms Footprints. When the cult was written up for RQ3, the restrictions on the love life of Maran Gor cultists were documented, but no such restrictions mentioned for BG.
So I never played them even as celibate (and hey, they are strongly associated with beer and drunkenness). But if it was really felt that the cult had to be significantly changed from its historic roots, I could have lived with celibacy as a cult requirement. It would be a change that I find unnecessary (we already have an earth goddess obsessed with celibacy and barrenness, in Maran Gor, making BG too much like Maran isn't particularly interesting), but a plausible version of the cult.
But a BG cult that can't care about the children they protect, that can't develop some affection for the priestesses they guard, that can't love the community they guard, that can't display cameradie for her Axe sisters, that can't even show affection for their own mothers? Just doesn't work for me, seems both implausible and dull to play. They wouldn't be a small, rare, cult, they'd be a miniscule one, and an unsustainable one (should one of them be psychologically undamaged enough to display affection for a newborn relative, or their mother, or such, they risk becoming the target of their own cult, as they are both forbidden to love if they remain in the cult and forbidden to leave the cult). And it isn't even consistent with the myths in the cult write up (in either version) - Babeester Gor is embraced by her loving mother.in both sources
Humakt and Storm Bull might professional killers, Uroxi are essentially tamed monsters, but they can be something else in between all the murdering. That works fine. Transgressive, but not one dimensional. Even chaos cults might be full of warped sociopaths, but aren't actually forbidden from displaying some form of affection.
But BG cultists were changed so they were literally forbidden to ever be anything but dead inside, and it pretty much ruined the cult for me. They went from being a fun cult to play, to being unplayable as a PC, and hard for me to believe in. Sorry.
Cheers David
*and to make that reference a little more high-brow, the BG beer myth is essentially a Gloranthan version of the beer story of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet - and Sekhmet absolutely was not celibate, and her festivals more or less drunken orgies.
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