How to play a pure sorcerer

[Qizilbashwoman]

6 minutes ago, metcalph said:

The description of Orathorn in the Guide ("They have ventured out of their lair only once, to their regret, in the campaign that culminated with the Nights of Horror". p372) makes it sound like at least some survived.  FWIW I'm still stunned at how close Orathorn is to Gonn Orta's Pass.

SOUNDS LIKE A JOB FOR... DUCKS

@DannyK

 

Edited October 19, 2019 by Qizilbashwoman

[jajagappa]

15 hours ago, metcalph said:

how close Orathorn is to Gonn Orta's Pass

Clearly the Orathorn mages have an active trade going on with Gonn Orta. Probably getting troll-related goods from the Elder Wilds (maybe the trolls trade the skeletons of Balazarings for the mages to use?).

[Qizilbashwoman]

5 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Clearly the Orathorn mages have an active trade going on with Gonn Orta. Probably getting troll-related goods from the Elder Wilds (maybe the trolls trade the skeletons of Balazarings for the mages to use?).

You think the trolls are working with open necromancers? I think we have different understandings of how trolls relate to necromancy. Only Zorak Zorani tolerate the undead, and it's their own warriors who are reanimated to keep fighting after death.

[jajagappa]

1 hour ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

You think the trolls are working with open necromancers?

Trading with Gonn Orta (and note I said the skeletons of Balazarings, not trolls), who then trades with someone else, is not the same as "working with" necromancers.  Bear in mind that Orathorn is the closest settlement to the Hellcrack. 

[davecake]

The Orathorn sorcerers could also have dramatically changed (as the Pentans did). They may no longer be necromancers, they may have decided that directly invoking Chaotic powers is a terrible idea, they may have decided that they need to learn more about the Lunars, they may decided to never meddle in human affairs again, they may be obsessed with finding a secret weapon against the Lunars in case they ever face them again. Maybe they'll be a great ally for Sheng when he returns, maybe Argrath, maybe they have decided that any further involvement in politics is a disaster and have created great magical wards so they can survive the hero wars. Or they are all Chaotic monsters. They can be anything you like. We know there are abut 5,000 there. They are a family of immortal sorcerers with terrible powers and undead servants. The rest is speculation. 

While we know Hon-Eel fought the Chaos creatures called headhangers there, we don't know if they were summoned by Orathorn or not, they could be a result of Lunar Chaos gone horribly wrong. 

[soltakss]

I don't think the Orathorn Sorcerers are Chaotic, or play with Chaos Powers.

What happened at the Night of Horrors was that the Orathorn Sorcerers were being hard-pressed and summoned their powers of Death/Undeath, which caused the opponents to crank up and summon more and more arcane magics until everyone was trying to outdo everyone else. Lunars invoked Chaos magics, rather than Oranthorn Sorcerers, but I can never remember whether Orathors was on the Lunar or Pentian side, my gut feeling is that they were helping the Pentians, but I am by no means sure.

 

[Qizilbashwoman]

2 hours ago, soltakss said:

I don't think the Orathorn Sorcerers are Chaotic, or play with Chaos Powers.

Necromancy is Chaos, like the Undeath rune it uses; Zorak Zorani "necromancy" doesn't involve the Undeath rune (if I remember correctly) because it's actually an extremely bizarre use of ZZ's Disorder rune.

Selling skeletons to necromancers is kkiiiiiindddd of "working with with necromancers"

Also they are explicitly Pentan and they also definitely fought on the Pentan side.

Edited October 20, 2019 by Qizilbashwoman

[Tindalos]

There does seem to be a distinction between the chaotic undead (ghouls, vampires, dancers in darkness) and non-chaotic undead (skeletons, zombies, mummies revenants,)

Probably due to the first lot being between life and death, and the latter group being dead but animate. (Either purely through magic, or by the original spirit in the case of revenants.)

There's also wraiths, but they're a different subject.

And it's interesting to note that revenants don't possess the Undead rune (unless they somehow possessed it in life?) and so likely wouldn't detect as Chaotic either.

(And given the subject of the thread, it's probably important to point out that the rulebook's sorcery spell of "animate dead" doesn't seem to create an undead being, just forces a dead body to move, and seems to have more in common with the old sorcery spells of Animate [Substance])

[soltakss]

My Orathorn is the finger of a god of the Underworld, who burst out but was stopped in the process. Orathorn Castle is his finger and has a pathway to the Underworld. It is literally Hell on Earth, where Hell and the Mundane World overlap. In my Glorantha, it has sorcerers who animate corpses and create undead as easily as making light. They are a mixture of mad scientists and people from Hellraiser. Their Hanging Gallery is exactly that, a room full of corpses that hang from the ceiling, which the sorcerers can animate and inhabit.

My Orathorn varies ...

[metcalph]

Disappointingly the items for sale in both Borderlands and Griffin Mountain are rather pedestrian although there's lungers, an enlightened chimpanzee and a perch for human sized birds of an unknown race (not the roc which is probably related to Condor).

IMO Orathorn is a large hollow bubble halfway between the World of the Living and the Land of the Dead.  It's smaller than the Hellcrack which surfaced during the Gods War releasing the trolls (Senbar is a more recent surfacing).  The undead servants are actaully residents of the Land of the Dead magically compelled to serve the sorcerers.  The Sorcerors are there to keep Orathorn balanced between the two worlds.  They are unpaid but it's also cheap immortality.

So what happened during the Nights of Horrors was that the sorcerors were raising another geological bubble beneath to the Lunars and trap them within the land of the dead.  The panicked Red Emperor summoned Chaos which, combined with the close presence of the Land of the Dead, punched a hole in the cosmos and unleashed a raw invasion of chaos.  Whoops Apocalypse so to speak.  The only flaw is that the battlefield of the Nights of Horror is not shown on any map which is damned odd.  

I do think Orathorn was substantially developed by the Celestial Empire as a stately pleasure dome for Sheng Seleris and is stocked with Yurts full of treasures and demonic guardians.  The sorcerors themselves have diverse origins from the lands surrounding Pent and beyond.  For example there might be a sorceror from Kralorela under the New Dragon's Ring, a Huan To from Sendar, a Carmanian Magi etc.

 

[Joerg]

10 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Necromancy is Chaos, like the Undeath rune it uses;

If Undeath is a rune of its own (I think the rune you are referring to used to be called "Hunger" and has nothing to do with Zombies), that rune doesn't mean Chaos. Likewise, the Lunar rune doesn't automatically imply Chaos - there is e.g. Annilla who hasn't had a personal connection to Chaos (unlike her Artmali descendants).

Trolls use Chaos regularly.

("Wait. What?")

Trolls harbor (or heard) their chaotic cave troll cousins, who participate in their culture as Kyger Litor cultists (though rarely initiates). This includes the ZZ cult, too - it is anything but unheard of that ZZ assaults include cave trolls.

 

A mummy guardian of a tomb is a form of necromancy which doesn't necessarily involve Chaos.

And Skeletons may use parts of dead people (or beasts), but aren't reckoned as undead.

10 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Selling skeletons to necromancers is kkiiiiiindddd of "working with with necromancers"

Also they are explicitly Pentan and they also definitely fought on the Pentan side.

The Orathorn sorcerer family is Pentan by location, not by culture.

[Qizilbashwoman]

7 hours ago, Joerg said:

If Undeath is a rune of its own (I think the rune you are referring to used to be called "Hunger" and has nothing to do with Zombies), that rune doesn't mean Chaos. Likewise, the Lunar rune doesn't automatically imply Chaos - there is e.g. Annilla who hasn't had a personal connection to Chaos (unlike her Artmali descendants).

Trolls harbor (or heard) their chaotic cave troll cousins, who participate in their culture as Kyger Litor cultists (though rarely initiates). This includes the ZZ cult, too - it is anything but unheard of that ZZ assaults include cave trolls.

uh... there's an Unlife Rune and it is a Chaos rune. Vivamort-Nontraya and Gark have it, although we'll have to see in the new GGG. Undead creatures were subsumed by it, including skeletons. I believe it is Trollpak that notes it is an exceptional use of undead by Zorak Zorani that uses his Disorder and Death runes to raise creatures of death; it's specifically not Chaotic.

I know Chaos is a specific rune, but Unlife is a subrune of it!

Also, Cave Trolls were warped by Chaos, but they aren't Chaotic. There's a difference. You can be cursed by Chaos and not actually Chaos yourself. The taint of Cave Trolls is present but comparatively minor, and honestly a relatively good boon, and they show no Chaos behavior. They're pretty much pure troll minus usually being dumbasses of the highest order.

[Joerg]

5 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

uh... there's an Unlife Rune and it is a Chaos rune. Vivamort-Nontraya and Gark have it, although we'll have to see in the new GGG. Undead creatures were subsumed by it, including skeletons. I believe it is Trollpak that notes it is an exceptional use of undead by Zorak Zorani that uses his Disorder and Death runes to raise creatures of death; it's specifically not Chaotic.

I wonder whether the myths of Nontraya describe Vivamort before his fateful encounter with Wakboth. There is no real evidence for vampiric activity in the Gods War, though there may be plenty in the Grey Age. Nontraya/still complete Vivamort is about the reign of the non-separated dead from the living.

5 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

I know Chaos is a specific rune, but Unlife is a subrune of it!

As Moon is accused of? And plenty other uncomfortable ones (e.g. Storm)?

Unlife is an antithetical as much as synthetical rune to both Fertility/Life and Death/Separation. Is that really a sub-rune of Chaos?

There are cases of runes within runes, like the dual runes in the ownership tables of older publications implying the Infinity Rune for this deity to be the closest to the pure runic expression of that kind of magic.

There might be similar antithetical syntheses of the other three pairs of power. Dissonant harmony. Static change. Antifactual truth, or permanent impermanence.

 

5 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Also, Cave Trolls were warped by Chaos, but they aren't Chaotic. There's a difference. You can be cursed by Chaos and not actually Chaos yourself.

Good news for the Telmori, then.

5 minutes ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

The taint of Cave Trolls is present but comparatively minor, and honestly a relatively good boon, and they show no Chaos behavior. They're pretty much pure troll minus usually being dumbasses of the highest order.

Trolls are so good at fighting Chaos because they are so similar to it. You can excuse lots of cave troll behavior which is as typical for Chaos as it is for Darkness as troll behavior, hence non-chaotic. Apart from Nysalor, most Chaos also thrives in Darkness and shuns the light. ZZ adds Disorder to Darkness, becoming even less discernible from other Underworld Chaos or near-Chaos like Nontraya or Shargash.

[Qizilbashwoman]

4 minutes ago, Joerg said:

Good news for the Telmori, then.

I actually don't know if the Telmori deserve the reputation they have; their god is their Hsunchen wolf deity, they just unfortunately turn every Lunar week into wolves in what is a pretty heavily settled territory. I don't know a lot about them, though.

[soltakss]

19 hours ago, Qizilbashwoman said:

Also, Cave Trolls were warped by Chaos, but they aren't Chaotic. There's a difference. You can be cursed by Chaos and not actually Chaos yourself. The taint of Cave Trolls is present but comparatively minor, and honestly a relatively good boon, and they show no Chaos behavior. They're pretty much pure troll minus usually being dumbasses of the highest order.

Try telling Storm Bulls that.

Lunars would probably preach exactly that message, that Cave Trolls, and Sea Trolls for that matter, were cursed by Chaos and have a slight taint as a result. As they are not Chaotic in behaviour, that clearly means that just being tainted by Chaos does not make you Chaotic. Yes, it makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

Edited October 22, 2019 by soltakss