Everyday Orlanth
- Thread starter Rurik
- Start date
Rurik said:
Wyrms Footnotes had a sketch version of Orlanth with the major Aspects - Adventurous, Thunderous, Rex and Lightbringer. The RQ2 version, or one of them, had the Minor Council, with Orlanth Lawspeaker, Orlanth Goodvoice and so on. These were already being treated as subcult aspects of Orlanth. RQ2 specifically refers to Orlanth Adventurous and does not describe the other versions of Orlanth.
So, splitting up a major god into different aspects is fine, if that god has control over different areas or appeals to different types of worshipper.
It all went a bit far with HeroQuest, where aspects multiplied enormously, so that Vinga, for instance, a very minor goddess, has several aspects.
In RQ terms, the Thunder Brothers would be subcults of Orlanth, so members of Orlanth could get a single new spell from the deity as a subcult. They could also worship the deity properly and get more spells and skills, but that is more time consuming.
So, Varanorlanth would provide Bless Woad to Orlanth Adventurous, but worshipping Varanorlanth properly would also give Avoid Enemies, Craft Tools, Find Edible Food, Find Potable Water, Fist Attack, Grapple, Kick Attack and Wilderness Survival.
soltakss said:
I think you're mistaking subcult for aspect... or drinking Jane's koolaid again. Vinga is a goddess with a set of subcults. She might be best described as the female aspect of Orlanth (he does contain multitudes, don't he?) just as Nandan is the male aspect of Ernalda (and now, I have a cult for my groumet cook character to join!).Remember, depending on where you are from, Vinga is of varying level of importance.
Only the greatest gods have several aspects. Orlanth. Ernalda. Yelm's various stages might be consdiered aspects. Shargash. Lodril. Each would be its own cult in MRQ but would be an aspect with a few subcults in HQ. I reallky wish that the Lodril/Oria material had made the cut in CoG2 as those two cults are very interdependent.
Just sayin'
Jeff
Voriof said:
Vinga is a minor goddess - basically it is how woman can directly contact Orlanth.
Back when David Dunham and I wrote the PenDragon Pass section for Enclosure, we tried to build in local variation for aspect subcults. For example, for Orlanth Adventurous we had Standard Divine Magic (e.g., , Bless Woad, Flight, Worship Orlanth, etc.) and Possible Special Divine Magic (e.g., Battle Luck, Lightning, Teleport, True Weapon, and so on). All Orlanth Adventurous subcults would have the basic package, but each temple would have a spell or two off the Possible Special Divine Magic list. We then detailed three variants of Orlanth Adventurous.
That way, the tribal temple of Orlanth Adventurous might offer slightly different magic than known to the god-talkers of the Orshanti clan. And so on.
Just like in ancient Greece (which had hundreds of little Zeus cults - my favorite was Zeus Lykaios - Zeus the "Werewolf"), there will be hundreds of little Orlanth cults in any Orlanthi land. Same thing for any widely worshiped cult. There will be some small differences between the cult of Yelm as practiced in Raibanth and that of Alkoth. They don't disagree with the mythology - they just care to emphasis different myths in their ceremonies and rituals.
Jeff
richaje said:
Hmm. I had always thought it was somewhat different. Storm Tribe, Thunder Rebels and the emails I have from Greg certainly seem to differ a bit on this. Just sayin'. Basically Vinga is a different aspect of Orlanth.
Hindi practice is like this to day throughout the Indian subcontinent. And yes, I spent part of this summer investigating in Turkey was a shrine to Hermes Psychopomp and on the edge of the next karst-pit was one to Zeus Typhon-binder (the pit supposedly was where one of Typhon's heads was imprisoned).
Yes, hard to reflect in the short-sorm or even long-form cults. That's really up to the game master or a specific scenario. I certainly played up the local variations when I was writing Trader Princes as each House has its own little accretion of useful spirits, saints, and gods that make life decent for that particular House.
Jeff
Voriof said:
We're beginning to downgrade Vinga a bit. Certain people who will remain nameless have tended to expand Vinga in all directions. Now Greg and I are thinking that there are probably several minor goddesses that allow women to contact Orlanth (which is the same thing as saying that they are minor subcults of Orlanth).
Exactly. You name the myth about Orlanth, somewhere there is a small cult dedicated to that myth.
Jeff
richaje said:
Aheh. I see. That seems reasonable. I admit certain folks are very interested in making Vinga into ze ubergoddess and Ernalda into the driving force behind the entirity of the Storm Tribe... but I gave up kool-aid years ago.
However, I have mixed feeling about re-conning it however as I am more-or-less comfortable with Vinga as is.
Sounds reasonable. That's the whole point of the Dragonslayer cult in CoG. Its down to about 2 shrines and a half dozen shell-shocked drunks these days. But then I have always felt that each clan/tribe had its own magic due to their particular mythological experiences.
Jeff
OK, I know this has been discussed before, but...
If the different aspects of a god are so closely related ( 'just' emphasising a different myth, or subset of myths ), how hard should it be to move from aspect to aspect?
If it's that simple, then why wouldn't an Orlanth adventurous character, having learnt a couple of new ( to him ) myths about Orlanth Slaying dragons ( and perhaps some tutoring from a sympathetic priest ) be able to just 'slide across' to Orlanth Dragonslayer?
As written, it would be little different to joining Yelm!
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More on topic, I always liked the 'simple' 3-way breakdown of the 'old' days, where each of the Orlanthi aspects was emphasising a different rune. I can see that breaking by myth is just the same thing taken to another layer, but simplicity does have it's appeal.
If the different aspects of a god are so closely related ( 'just' emphasising a different myth, or subset of myths ), how hard should it be to move from aspect to aspect?
If it's that simple, then why wouldn't an Orlanth adventurous character, having learnt a couple of new ( to him ) myths about Orlanth Slaying dragons ( and perhaps some tutoring from a sympathetic priest ) be able to just 'slide across' to Orlanth Dragonslayer?
As written, it would be little different to joining Yelm!
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More on topic, I always liked the 'simple' 3-way breakdown of the 'old' days, where each of the Orlanthi aspects was emphasising a different rune. I can see that breaking by myth is just the same thing taken to another layer, but simplicity does have it's appeal.
Trifletraxor
Mongoose
It's that cabal of evil game-hating scholars & Greg who wants to make it all obscure and confusing. Soon they'll tell us why simplicity is stupid! :wink:
SGL.
SGL.
Trifletraxor
Mongoose
richaje said:Trifletraxor said:
Give me an example of a simple religion.
Jeff
Well, we're talking about RPG her, not real life. I don't feel the need for a full bible and several books on it's various interpretations to play a PC worshipping a divine god. :wink:
SGl.
Trifletraxor
Mongoose
Cult wrtieups like those found in River of Cradles, Sun County, Doreastor Land of Doom and Lords of Terror are ideal the way I see it (after a collection like Gods of Glorantha or Cults 1 have been given out of course).
SGL.
SGL.
Trifletraxor said:
We are talking about a body of stories set in a fictional world that centers on mythology and religion. Mythology and religion is the raison d'etre of Glorantha and is the most important component of Gloranthan background. It might not be important to know this stuff to play a PC, but it is important that detail exists.
Jeff
Trifletraxor said:
And that's probably the approach Mongoose will take. Just for what it is worth, myself and several other background writers don't think it is a very useful format for modeling these cults. Too much gets sacrificed to fit stuff into a cookiecutter format that results in key information being dropped out.
Jeff
Mongoose Steele said:
Or we're told that we're waaaay over page count and where's that adventure anyways? I nearly went mad trying to shoe-horn Trader Princes into 55,000 words. When Moon Design took over the contract, they expanded the word count to about 120,00 - it was heavenly. Like putting on shoes that actually fit after 'making do.'
One other point - try to mirror reality too close and half the time you end up with farce and caricature (sp!). I have to admit that one or two games go way too much into detailing social origanization... which ends up with a group having the population of a large high school having a govermennt considerably more complex than Republican Rome. :roll: I think, as written in Cults of Terror, Thanatar falls into this category. Waaaaay too fiddly considering the usual grouip is a few dozen guys hiding in a cave.
Jeff
richaje said:
Yeah, sorry about that. I couldn't come up with anything better considering the nature of the material and the density of information required. The Short Cult was at best a compromise. And frankly, the old-style long-cult is also too much information of the not very useful kind. I think I'd prefer something like the short-cult writeups in Storm Tribe but they chew up about 2000-3000 words each. That's about 5-6 pages at Mongoose's page density which would mean about 15 cults to a 96 page book after room for additional spells and rules is taken care of.
But you have to admit, the GL were all about the cookie cutter! :twisted:
Jeff
Voriof said:
Different game, different terminology. The HW writeup has Vinga, with 2 Affinities and 11 Feats, Defender Storm Subcult with 2 Affinities, 1 Secret and 7 feats, The Red Woman Subcult with 1 Affinity and feat, Vinga the Avenger Subcult with 1 Affinity, 1 Secret and 5 feats and Vinga the Spearwoman Subcult with 1 Affinity, 1 Secret and 5 feats.
Since HW/HQ feats roughly, and I emphasize roughly, correspond to Divine Spells in RQ, each of these subcults has a lot of divine spells available to them. In RQ terms, they are the equivalent of minor cults rather than subcults. So, you have 5 different versions of Vinga, all but one being the equivalent of minor cults. So, they would be similar in scope, but clearly not in scale, to the different Aspects of Orlanth, Yelm or Ernalda.
Don't forget that RQ subcults traditionally only grant one, or at most 2 or 3, spells to the main cult, so having between 6 and 11 spells makes htese not traditional RQ subcults.
Different game, different terminology.
Voriof said:
And, in RQ, those subcults become independent cults, by and large. So, a lot of the Orlanth Subcults in HQ are separate cults in RQ, probably considered Associate cults. There would be the Thudner Brothers subcult of Orlanth's various Aspects, which give a spell each to the cult, but to get more from them you would have to join their specific cult.
OK, so perhaps having full Aspects might be too powerful, but HW did suffer from the "Vinga With Her Hat On" and "Vinga With Her Hat Off" being two different subcults.
Voriof said:
Maybe they'll appear in CoG3?