Part of what inspired this question is the quests in KoDP. Orlanth cannot fight Daga because Daga is his brother's grandson. So he needs to find another way to defeat Daga. But during the same myth, he fights Gagarth, who is actually slightly closer by blood, being his nephew rather than his grand-nephew. So does becoming a Gagarthi involve severing one's kin ties, the way becoming a Humakti does? My initial sense is yes. If not, it seems that Gagarthi would frequently be responsible for kin-slaying, just in the course of acting as bandits, and therefore Gagarth would be considered a Chaotic deity, which, so far as I know, he is not. Related to this question is how close the kin-bond needs to be in order to generate a risk of chaos from kinslaying. Obviously killing a first cousin is close enough. But what about a second cousin? A third cousin? A fourth cousin? Obviously the further the bond extends, the more likely one is to accidentally trigger chaos by killing a distant kin. In actual Germanic society, the obligation to avenge the murder of kin was tied to the ability to inherit from them; if you couldn't inherit from X, or everyone had forgotten you were kin with him, you were not under an obligation to avenge him or help him seek vengeance. Does that apply in Heortling society, or is there some other rule?
Andrew E. Larsen
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