From: owner-rq-rules-digest To: rq-rules-digest@hops.wharton.upenn.edu Subject: RQ Rules Digest: V3 #59 Reply-To: rq-rules Errors-To: owner-rq-rules-digest Precedence: bulk Content-Return: Prohibited Return-Path: owner-rq-rules-digest RQ Rules Digest: Thursday, 5 September 1996 Volume 03 : Number 059 TABLE OF CONTENTS Steven J. Pierce (Fwd) POW & Enchantment WKnow92814@aol.com STOP sending these mails. mg1160@messiah.edu RuneQuest, Earth, Glorantha Harry Bowman Mindlink and Extension and Shield Simon D. Hibbs Vicarious POW sacrifice. RULES OF THE ROAD 1. Do not include large sections of a message in your reply. Especially not to add "Yeah, I agree" or "No, I disagree." Or be excoriated. If someone writes something good and you want to say "good show" please do. But don't include the whole message you praise. 2. Use an appropriate Subject line. 3. Learn the art of paraphrasing: Don't just quote and comment on a point-by-point basis. When paraphrasing you demonstrate exactly how well you understand the point someone was trying to make. 4. There is no number 4. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: "Steven J. Pierce" Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 01:02:15 +0000 Subject: (Fwd) POW & Enchantment I think I sent this to the wrong address the first time. Sorry if anyone gets more than one copy of it. Here's my thoughts on POW and enchantments. Note: I don't run RQ such that everyone has access to large amounts of magic, so my solutions may not translate as well for Glorantha-style worlds where everyone is supposed to have some magic. Sacrificing your own POW requires _skill_ and knowledge that is not easy to obtain. Thus, your average beggar can't sacrifice POW because she/he lacks the skill and knowledge to do it. If a beggar had that kind of skill, they'd have other marketable skills that would allow them to raise their social standing. Priests and Initiates are aided in sacrifice of POW by being in sacred places which have been consecrated and by doing their sacrifices during holy times when their deity is likely to be paying attention and helping them along. Naturally, the worship must be done right, and is the skill involved in divine magic POW sacrifice. Shamanic folks are investing a piece of their own spirit in creating an enchanted item. This means that that item is linked to the shaman, and that link can be used in many ways by other spellcasters if they are clever. This gives the shaman a reason to make sure that too many items aren't floating around such that an enemy can get to them. Sorcerors are doing something similar to shamans, though they don't look at POW as being spiritual, they just see it as personal magic energy. A sorceror is by nature not as personal about the POW, thus, the link between sorcerous enchanted items and their creators is much weaker in most cases. That said, I think an enchanter should be able to use another person's POW, but I put restrictions on it. Willing donors must have magic skills at least sufficient to help the enchanter. Both people must make their ritual skill roll, and they must use a spell to temporarily link their magical energies. This is risky. Botching that spell can cause serious harm to one or both people: losing POW without getting the enchantment, unexpected magical phenomena, attracting wandering entities, etc. are all possible. Each point of POW transferred requires an extra roll to succeed. The two people can continue to try POW transfers after a failure, if they choose to do so. Unwilling use of another's POW requires much more skill and effort than willing donors require. Typically, only nasty people will try stealing POW. This involves long rituals and a forceful theft of POW from the victim, who gets to resist. A resisting victim makes the spell linking the energies of the two people much more dangerous, and all fumbles are much more drastic and more likely to hurt both people. The yields in POW theft ritual spells are much lower than from willing donors, because for each point of POW the caster tries to take, there is a separate resistance roll as well as the required skill roll by the spellcaster. The spell is terminated by the first successful resistance by the victim. Remember that for each skill roll the caster has to make, there is a chance to fumble. Also, if the victim makes a critical success on the resistance, it could hurt the spellcaster trying to steal POW. I like to use group enchantment as more viable than single person enchantments. This is sort of like the idea that covens of witches or guilds of sorcerors or temples full of priests all work together to make more powerful magics. In fact, temples are holy because they have been sort of mass-enchanted by the priets over time Finally, I argue that this does not lead to tons of powerful magic items for the following reasons: 1. Each extra person involved has a chance to fumble. This makes life dangerous. Wise spellcasters will protect themselves from the ineptitude of less skilled folk most of the time. 2. People who steal POW from unwilling victims will rapidly acquire a bad reputation and may be hunted down and killed for being heretics, evil, or other such reasons. 3. Unwilling POW theft is dangerous even in comparison to willing POW sharing. 4. How many people do you know who would literally trade part of their soul? Many religions would probably see this in a rather negative light. There are probably going to be cultural forces pushing people to resist doing that. 5. Both Shamans and Sorcerors would have reason to keep the number of magical items they make low, or at least make sure those items won't fall into the hands of their enemies. Those items contain at least a residual link to their maker. Creative foes can do nasty things with that... Steven J. Pierce Master's Student in Experimental Psychology Mississippi State University E-Mail: sjp2@ra.msstate.edu WWW: http://www2.msstate.edu/~sjp2/index.html ------------------------------ From: WKnow92814@aol.com Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 03:19:38 -0400 Subject: Re: STOP sending these mails. Henrik, I think Loren (who actually runs the Runequest Digest) is on vacation but the system automatically recognizes the keyword "unsubscribe". Good bye, William Knowles, chronic digest lurker ------------------------------ From: mg1160@messiah.edu Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 10:14:16 -0900 (PDT) Subject: Re: RuneQuest, Earth, Glorantha And lets not forget RUNES IN SPACE aka Other Suns by FGU. If its Starship generation system were less cumbersome I might even use it. Mark Groff Harry Browne/Jo Jorgensen - Libertarians for Pres. in '96 ------------------------------ From: Harry Bowman Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 10:43:41 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Mindlink and Extension and Shield I bet this has been covered before, but the archive is crashing my browser... 1. Mindlink: can Mindlink be used to stack divine magic: Paul Priest is cast spells on Hugh Hero. 100 initiates stand by, each has Mindlinked with Paul, each has 2 spells (1 pt each) of divine magic for this job. Can Paul cast all 200 on Hugh, and do they stack? 2. Extension: does this really double duration each time? And how does it stack? The 2 spells for Paul's job are Shield and Extension? In this example, does Hugh get Shield 100 for 4 x10 ^25 years (2 raised to the 100 : Ext 1 = 30 minutes, Ext 2 = 1 hr; 24 hrs/day, say 280 days/year...)? Or worse, does the Eye of Hal (an item we can insert into the story in place of Hugh) get these spells? 3. Shield: This prevents friendly magic (e.g. healing) from affecting the character, correct? Can one critical past it (and how?) ? Does is extend out to cover the character's clothes, etc. (Like the shields in Dune...) Thanks, Hal hbowman@morgan.edu ------------------------------ From: "Simon D. Hibbs" Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 16:42:31 +0100 (BST) Subject: Vicarious POW sacrifice. Andrew O. Mellinger : ..... > Simon, you in particular were responding with 'If reasonable answers >aren't good enough for you...' which is (IMHO) unfair. From my >prespective they weren't even close to answering the question I had >proposed, thus my frustration. I apologize for any insult taken, as it >was never intended. .... I think I got a bit overheated on this discussion. From your description of the enchanting process as you see it, we have very fundamentaly different conceptions of how it might work. I tend to agree with William's description, since untill the Enchanter has put POW into the object it is not magical. I might define the Enchant skill as "A skill which enables a magician to project their POW into an object in the form of a magical enchantment spell". From my perspective, the enchantment process is enacted by the caster on their POW, which they then project on to the item. Hence my (admittedly unstated) assumption that the POW must transit through the enchanter, in order to be 'processed and refined' into the enchantment spell. Your description of the process does correspond with some real world rituals in form, but I would argue that such rituals involve the sacrifice of magic points - not POW. I don't think the Ceremony skill has any other uses which involve POW sacrifice. E.g. worship ceremonies only involve MP sacrifice. Sorry for getting uppity. Simon ------------------------------ End of RQ Rules Digest: V3 #59 ****************************** This is the bottom of the RuneQuest Rules Digest. RuneQuest is a trademark of Avalon Hill, and Glorantha is a trademark of Chaosium. With the exception of previously copyrighted material, unless specified otherwise all text in this digest is copyright by the author or authors, with rights granted to copy for personal use, to excerpt in reviews and replies, and to archive unchanged for electronic retrieval. Send electronic mail to Majordomo@hops.wharton.upenn.edu with "help" in the body of the message for subscription information on this and other mailing lists. WWW material at http://hops.wharton.upenn.edu/~loren/rolegame.html