Why bind a spirit?

[womble]

1 hour ago, Blacktoad said:

Hi All, I am putting on my evil enchanter hat for this question...

In the RQG book it states that for enchanting an object "The POW sacrificed for the enchantment does not have to be provided entirely by the enchanter; if the enchanter sacrifices at least 1 point of their own POW, others can voluntarily contribute to the sacrifice, with no limit."  Can you command a bound spirit to sacrifice its own POW for this purpose?  Or would the 'voluntarily' qualifier preclude this?

Toad

That is pretty evil

I'd say you've hit the nail on the head with 'voluntarily'... Command/Control/Dominate preclude volunteering, so no you couldn't, I reckon. Might be an ability of a Chaos being or off a Hero Quest, but would be very powerful indeed, especially since an enchantment can be built up over time. So you start a 50-point Enchantment, but haven't got 50 points of Spirits handy, just squeeze 'em when you got 'em...

 

[PhilHibbs]

13 hours ago, Blacktoad said:

"The POW sacrificed for the enchantment does not have to be provided entirely by the enchanter; if the enchanter sacrifices at least 1 point of their own POW, others can voluntarily contribute to the sacrifice, with no limit."  Can you command a bound spirit to sacrifice its own POW for this purpose?  Or would the 'voluntarily' qualifier preclude this?

You cannot. Magical power is all tied up with free will, you trade your free will for magical power. Gifts and geases are one of the few places where this free will loss actually manifests in game terms, Sandy Petersen's sorcery rules is another, but it is pervasive in Gloranthan magic. If you take away someone's free will, they do not have access to it in order to initiate a magical transaction.

There was a set of heroquesting rules knocking around a few decades ago in which WIL was a stat. You build it up in normal play and then start spending it on heroquest powers, or something like that.

Edited January 2, 2019 by PhilHibbs

[womble]

4 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

There was a set of heroquesting rules knocking around a few decades ago in which WIL was a stat. You build it up in normal play and then start spending it on heroquest powers, or something like that.

At the risk of departing from the topic:

"Will(?power?)" sounds like an interesting stat to include. I tend to think of it as being an element of POWer. To draw analogies to the 'physical' stats, I think of INT as being the equivalent of DEX, POW acting like CON, and CHA acting like STR...

And while I was typing that, I wondered whether 'POW v POW' rolls really orter be 'CHA v POW'... CHArisma being defined as 'force of personality'. Opens up other questions if your Glorantha fancies meandering down that divergence, natch... 

Edit: and shouldn't your spell SR be based on your INT rather than your DEX? How much physical coordination does it take to look at the focus on your sword's hilt?

Edited January 2, 2019 by womble

[PhilHibbs]

3 hours ago, womble said:

Edit: and shouldn't your spell SR be based on your INT rather than your DEX? How much physical coordination does it take to look at the focus on your sword's hilt?

INT SR for spell casting has been suggested, the Elric! game system has something similar. Spells do require gesturing, though, so DEX has an excuse for being in the equation.

[Blacktoad]

Thanks for your thoughts and clarifications guys.

Cheers,
Toad

[BlueFalchion]

Kinda resurrecting an old topic, but you all forgot about matrixes. 

If you want to get technical, a bound spirit has access to things that it's touching. e.g. the person holding the crystal. 
The problem with a crystal is that you can't modify it. What you want is to have an item inscribed with spirit binding enchantment, then a power storing enchantment. 
Your instructions to the spirit is to fill the power storing matrix. (they're touching so it 'should' be able to do this.)

Then if you want to take it further you add on a linking rune and inscribe spirit magic spells, so you can use the stored magic to cast them. Add on some conditions and you can get pretty wild. 

Take a sword and do all this with the condition that anything that's touched by the blade of the sword (not the hilt) gets hit with a disruption spell. 

If you want to get vicious on area effect spells, Have a block in a temple enchanted, if you have 100 worshippers you can make it store one 10 point Dispel Magic, 20 disruptions with 22 linking conditions, 10 points in area, exclude worshippers, target enemies of the temple, link to power storing, store 36d10 of MP, and allow anyone in the vicinity to either use the MP stored or refill it. It'll only have about 5 uses, but the first 5 will die spectacularly. If you add on a binding enchantment you have an automatic refill as well. Also, i might have messed up my addition a little, but you get the idea. 

 I know most of the spells are limited to RuneMasters in RQG, so you'd need to either make it a huge endeavor or find a bunch of sorcerers to do it. 

Though it should still work fairly well on small scale stuff. 

Now if this is overpowered, (Which it is) another method would be to bind spirits into animals, and then command them to replenish the power storage of the stone. Each member can probably have one animal. now you have a small army of cats/dogs/crows/goats/etc hanging around making sure the storage matrix stays full. Add in any humans defending the area...

Most of this came from my brother and i playing Avalon Hill RQ3 using Sandys Sorcery rules. He took a dark troll followed in the steps of Arkat then made a shade his familiar, and dumped most of his stats into it. (There was no 1 point max limit in the version we had) The shade learned sorcery from the Troll, then the rest of the campaign was the familiar exploring while the Troll stayed home and made magic items using POW from trollkin who were eager to please their master. (Troll had 18 INT, dropped it to 9, the shade got 18d6 INT as a sorcerer.)

Edited October 3, 2020 by BlueFalchion