Re: chaos mages/sorcerers

From: Peter Metcalfe <metcalph_at_437V9Og6j2yisBse_4pvIY4JwgiRaYdles4Cxwn3_eZYPL_gCqyRwwXC64FRssh53Zv>
Date: Sat, 03 Dec 2011 12:47:40 +1300

On 12/3/2011 3:06 AM, Richard Hayes wrote:
> Equally I quite like the idea of a Second Age society of sorcerors in Pamaltela which made zombies for manual labour, which may or may not still be around in some form in the Third Age. (The idea was triggered by the posting a few weeks or months ago about using the Nontraya cult in Pamaltela as a campaign villain).

You don't need a second age society of Zombie makers to have been created by the God Learners or even revolve it around Gark.

IMO Fonritans do not believe in a life after death, seeing death as infidelity to Ompalam's will. They mummify their dead and inter them in massive cities of the dead. It is their belief that when the world is returned to Ompalam's will, the dead shall live again. The cities of the dead are carefully walled off from the living cities because of fear of rebellion and other related horrors. Some virtuous dead are able to move of their own accord representing their fidelity to Ompalam and as a result they live in the community of the living.

Now Fonritan Sorcerers have discovered a magic by which they give some portion of their life (or more usually, a life from a stray dog) to one of the dead to make it act for them. Dumb servants are preferred as intelligent dead plot to acquire their own supply of life. Intelligent dead form communities of what are known as ghouls or mummies ekeing out a furtive existence on the fringes of Fonritan society as bandits preying on the living.

Gark is a malignant inversion of the accepted understanding. Instead of the world being turned to rightness when the dead live again, Gark's followers believe that this will happen when the living all die. He does not teach any special magics of creating or making zombie labourers as from Gark's point of view, the perfect dead are the least mobile. His missonaries are ambulatory dead who have taken it on themselves to suffer for the salvation of others.

So if a God Learner wants to learn how to make Zombies, he would most likely learn how to do so from the Fonritan sorcerers, _not_ waste pointless time and resources trying to imitate a chaotic deity.

> Whilst other explanations are certainly possible, a Second Age cult could credibly be the work of a Godlearner sorceror who researched and reconstructed the magic of the existing Gark cult and manipulated it to his own ends.

Gark is chaotic. The God Learners were strongly antichaotic. Moreover reconstructing the magic of an existing cult and manipulating it to his own needs is powergaming philosophy and not how a God Learner would think or act. The God Learners didn't create Zistor because they wanted a constant supply of +3 magic swords, Zistor came about because they identified a hole in their cosmology and tried to fill it with the purification rune.

--Peter Metcalfe