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Seven Mothers Temple Layout & Defenses


Crel

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1 hour ago, Tywyll said:

So.... how do you destroy them? Surely you can wipe out an enemy temple in some way?

Sure. Earthquakes are a proven method to collapse temples, so can be precision meteor strikes or tornadoes. Fire damage, corrosive agents on the regalia, a thunder beast earth shaker charge...

A Seven Mothers temple might have a portal to a Chaos Void. Might be of use to dispose of regalia.

Approaching the wyter in the magical equivalent of bomb disposal team armor (spirit screen, Shield, countermagic, sorcerous stuff) will even the odds. Eliminating the direct contact of the wyter will hamper its information flow and decision making. (Depending on the contact person, eliminating the human component might things worse, though.)

There are ways to desecrate consecrated areas, just like there are ways to remove the markers of a Warding. A price might have to be paid, in health or magic.

Often the guardian spirits will have specific foes in their past. Find them and convince them to aid your cause.

In case of doubt, the tactics of the Battle of the Somme do work, although there is a cost.

Telling how it is excessive verbis

 

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1 hour ago, Tywyll said:

So.... how do you destroy them? Surely you can wipe out an enemy temple in some way?

Start by removing the worshippers.  Keep the priests away.  This is much of the tactic used by the Lunar Empire in Sartar.  Worship of a deity like Orlanth was banned.  Those who tried were taken prisoner and sent off to work as slaves (or killed). Over a number of seasons this will begin eroding the temple defenses.  

Then apply powerful ritual magics.  This might require multiple seasons and include heroquests to defeat the targeted deity.  We don't really have specifics in RQG for these type of magics yet.  A good example is in the old Cradle scenario (in RQ Classic Pavis book) where the Lunars created a powerful magic "chain" that went through the passing cradle and nullified its magical defenses.

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4 hours ago, Tywyll said:

So.... how do you destroy them? Surely you can wipe out an enemy temple in some way?

If you just want to force majeur them out of your way, then you need overwheming power on both the Middle World and the Otherworld (sounds like Heroquest material, for all but the newest/smallest shrines)...

Maybe you can bargain with an even bigger spirit, or some godling to wipe out the wyter for you?

 

 

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On 5/18/2019 at 5:55 AM, David Scott said:

The straightforward answer is that you aren’t meant to. However don’t forget that wyters can’t regenerate POW so topping it up to maximum just means it has more to spend. Not that it’s fixed. 

But you can top it to its maximum during holy days.  Then have it cast, (say it has max power 42) a Shield 35 on itself for an entire year, do the ceremony, have worshippers sac power to get it back to 42 again, wait till next holy day then do other stuff.

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Page 287 of the core book says about the Ernaldan clan (which would apply to the Seven Mothers too)

Quote

who offer it magic points and sometimes even points of characteristic POW (which could bring its POW up to a maximum of 42).

That 42 Power Wyter could - on full moon days - cast a Shield 35 with Extension 5 on itself lasting 2 years (full moon doubles temporal spells).  Next holy day, having been brought back up to 42 from worshippers, it can cast Shield 30 with Extension 5 for 2 years upon 25 members of the community.  Next holy day, do it again or cast, idk, lets say Spirit Armor Enchantments.  30 points worth on 25 worshippers.  Next holy day, make 30 point magic matrix enchantments on 25 items.  Make 25 items each with 15 Mindblasts seems good.  Will that work?

It would seem so according to RAW. 

The math works out to this:  use 8 power to hit 40 worshippers.  Shield 27 with extension 5.  For lunars, that lasts 2 years and cost the wyter 40 Power. The guys getting the benefit from the wyter then sac 1 POW to the wyter each in exchange, bringing the wyter back up to 42 power.   In two years, you can imbue 200 worshippers with Shield 27. 

Why don't we see Lunar patrols and lunar army with Shield 27?  Why not everyone who has a wyter?

I don't see any limits on how much power can be sacced to the wyter other than species maximum.  The rules don't say the wyter can only gain power by marking it, they say the worshippers can give it.  So the 20 points David talks about make no sense to me.  That's paltry compared to a minor wyter's power or the power that it imbues its worshippers with.

I'm guessing these troublesome words need to disappear from the RAW?  and sometimes even points of characteristic POW (which could bring its POW up to a maximum of 42).

Edited by Pentallion
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1 hour ago, Pentallion said:

Remember when everyone said Sword Trance wasn't broken, a Dismiss Magic would take it out?  Now a minor Humakt temple can have 40 warriors sac a point each to the wyter for shield 27 for a year.  Good luck knocking down the Sword Trance.

If you do that, the Wyter is completely vulnerable to Spirit Combat... it's going down!

And, of course, the obvious thing to do if you know that's what your enemy has just done, is to get those 40 worshippers to chase after the diversion, while the rest of your assault team race into the temple and destroy it.

(also, Shield doesn't defend against Spirit Combat either - you'd only need 3 or 4 out of that 40 to be possessed and turn on their friends to make their life just that wee-bit complicated)

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The thing is, nobody, not even the Coders, have ever been printed up with the hint of having a wyter blessing.  Wyters are a new thing.  I'm leaning towards the opinion that the sentence in the example about Ernaldan cults was a mistake.  I'd like to know, one way or the other, however, from Jeff or someone.  Because from David's comments about the 20 points, it makes me doubt that the worshippers can give the wyter power all the time.  I'd say just give it a power gain roll on holy days or if it marks its power.

 

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For defensive spells a temple gets (1 point per 100 worshipers), what POW are those spells casting with? Assuming species max of 21? More? Whatever the wyter's happens to be? 200, since it's a piece of the deity itself defending itself? (p.288 in RQG Core is the Temple Defenses entry.)

I'm inclined to go with 21 from a game balance perspective, since that means humans can at least potentially resist. Though, any Rune Lord who opposes would then always have a 50/50 to resist the defense.

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2 hours ago, BassJon said:

Check the Rune Fixes entry on Extension. Basically says the tune points can’t be regained until the extended spell expires. 

Dont see why that doesn’t apply to wyters too. 

Wyters are a bit confusing, because there are two mechanics for rune magic.

The core rules say that they spend permanent POW to cast rune spells, and that POW is provided by worshippers. When you have hundreds of people with not much better to do with their POW (they aren't out adventuring and heading for Rune Master status), that could work.

The Gamemaster Adventures book gives them Rune Points.

It has been raised on the Core Rules Questions thread, not very satisfactorily if you ask me. Hopefully the Campaign Guide will straighten it out.

My take is that all wyters have RP, limited by their CHA as normal, and additionally can cast rune spells with POW if their RP runs out. It doesn't make sense that some wyters have RP and some do not.

Also, those RP don't come back the next day, they come back at the next Holy Day worship. I think. That's what Jason implied in the CRQ.

I might not allow wyters to use Extension on spells cast with POW. It breaks the RP economy if they can have an unlimited amount spells running constantly (limited purely by how much POW they can get from worshipers).

Edited by PhilHibbs
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41 minutes ago, Crel said:

Well, what do you suggest for a temple defense's effective POW then?

Effectively unlimited - but, based on number of worshippers and the type of cult it is.

If a Wyter's POW comes from the amount sacrificed by the worshippers, then there shouldn't be an in-game limit. There will be practical constraints though.

Also, although the community members sacrifice POW and MPs to the Wyter (probably regularly),. I'd also suggest that the Wyter needs to expend POW (and possibly MPs) to keep the community intact, as well as having to use up the POW for rituals, healings, etc etc.

I also find the different POW maximums listed on p287 to be somewhat arbitrary and silly - 50 worshippers have a max POW wyter of 30, yet 15000 worshippers only get double that ??? If there's an awesomely wonderful reason why the vast difference, I'd love to hear it. But I suspect it's merely an arbitrary decision (If we were applying a similar formula to the gods themselves, this really wouldn't fit).

However, I'l also concede if people notice (and use) the suggestions on p286 as to how Wyters are formed as a better guideline of their POWer, and abilities. The "...include the spirits of dead heroes, genius loci, children of gods, artificial psychic constructs, souls of extinct spirits, intelligent elementals, and many other possibilities" becomes (potentially) its own limit. At the moment, RAW, there's "Wyters are spirits" as well as "they act nothing like a spirit.".

My comment was aimed at the idea that there needs to be a game balance...

 

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23 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

If a Wyter's POW comes from the amount sacrificed by the worshippers, then there shouldn't be an in-game limit. There will be practical constraints though.

I've never seen any precedent for a mechanism for mortals to stack up POW in an unlimited manner, in Runequest terms, or more broadly for worshipers to create an entity of unlimited power in Gloranthan terms. That's simply not how the game or the world work.

23 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

Also, although the community members sacrifice POW and MPs to the Wyter (probably regularly),. I'd also suggest that the Wyter needs to expend POW (and possibly MPs) to keep the community intact, as well as having to use up the POW for rituals, healings, etc etc.

I also find the different POW maximums listed on p287 to be somewhat arbitrary and silly - 50 worshippers have a max POW wyter of 30, yet 15000 worshippers only get double that ??? If there's an awesomely wonderful reason why the vast difference, I'd love to hear it. But I suspect it's merely an arbitrary decision (If we were applying a similar formula to the gods themselves, this really wouldn't fit).

All decisions on game mechanics are arbitrary decisions. Wyters have a limit to how powerful they are, that's not arbitrary, that's Gloranthan metaphysics. Some game designer had to decide on a numerical way to represent that limit. How can that decision ever be made in a way that is not arbitrary?

23 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

My comment was aimed at the idea that there needs to be a game balance...

In principle I agree, but if there are in-world reasons why something has to be balanced, then the game has to implement balance. In this case, moderating the relative power of temple, clan, and tribal wyters, these things clearly are in some kind of balance in the world and so it is legitimate to model that balance.

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1 hour ago, Shiningbrow said:

My comment was aimed at the idea that there needs to be a game balance...

And mine was looking for the POW a temple defense spell is cast at (p.288), not really looking at Wyter information. I don't see anything in the text which says that the POW backing those spells is the Wyter's POW; it sounds more like the god's POW itself than anything else based on the description of "ancient or historic temples" which "may well have 30+ points of defense because of its importance to the god."

To my mind, the "realist" approach would be that these spells are given by the god. They work automatically. No matter how strong you are, if you grab the sacred sword in the Temple of Humakt's sanctum, you're taking that Sever Spirit and you are dead (to draw from the example of temple defenses given in the text). 

In contrast, I'm thinking about coming from POW 21 on a game balance perspective, because this gives adventurers (or other sacred-site-raiding folks) a chance, albeit unlikely, to resist the spell. More of a chance than coming from effectively-infinite POW. Another alternative would be to use the wyter's POW as that backing the temple defense, but it sounds to me from the text that the POW comes from the god, not a wyter, because a very holy site with few worshipers still might have a great deal of POW bestowed for temple defenses.

Using POW 21 means that Rune Lords basically always have a 50/50 chance to shrug off those divine defenses, which I feel... conflicted about? It feels too easy, but at the same time giving a substantially developed character a 50/50 to either "save or die" or "save or suck" does still generate a substantial risk.

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38 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

I've never seen any precedent for a mechanism for mortals to stack up POW in an unlimited manner, in Runequest terms, or more broadly for worshipers to create an entity of unlimited power in Gloranthan terms.

True - but the current enchantments, RAW, can allow for something similar (not truly unlimited, but practically so by the number of people sacrificing their POW in the area). In theory, I think you could create an enchantment that has huge amounts of Rune Spells (and Spirit too), with tons of MPs powering it, and bind a spirit that could be linked to it all.

While we don't have mechanisms fully in place yet for a lot of the huge stuff that went on, and we do have Argrath summoning dragons to eat entire temples - and that's got to be do-able within the RAW somehow... so, the above POW limits are pretty insignificant in comparison.

 

44 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

That's simply not how the game or the world work.

But but but... mere mortals have raised gods! And killed gods, and trapped them in the underworld, and then helped get them out again (So, I'm saying, yes, it is how the world works - and they're momentous occasions)

 

46 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

How can that decision ever be made in a way that is not arbitrary

This is true.

However, it should also be consistent (making it less arbitrary). The ability to emPOWer a Wyter by worshippers  is inconsistent with the idea that such Wyters can be limited, especially when 50 worshippers can contribute up to 30 POW, but 15,000 worshippers can only contribute 70. Other than "we don't want it to be higher (for X-unknown reason)", it doesn't actually make sense (to me).

Btw - potential ruling could be - Wyters are typically emPOWered to X POW, based on number of worshippers in the community, who are expected to sacrifice 1 point per 3 years (as an initiate). However, further sacrifices of POW can be made, but to ensure the survival of the community, no individual is permitted to have their POW reduced below (insert appropriate number), otherwise it becomes detrimental, and a greater tax on the Wyter's abilities to protect them.

Now, if the Wyter was actually a spirit (as per p286), then this whole argument goes away...

 

57 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

In principle I agree, but if there are in-world reasons why something has to be balanced, then the game has to implement balance. In this case, moderating the relative power of temple, clan, and tribal wyters, these things clearly are in some kind of balance in the world and so it is legitimate to model that balance.

And I agree with you. As has been said previously, the whole "people can sacrifice POW to the Wyter" is the contentious point.

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2 minutes ago, Crel said:

And mine was looking for the POW a temple defense spell is cast at (p.288), not really looking at Wyter information. I don't see anything in the text which says that the POW backing those spells is the Wyter's POW; it sounds more like the god's POW itself than anything else based on the description of "ancient or historic temples" which "may well have 30+ points of defense because of its importance to the god."

To my mind, the "realist" approach would be that these spells are given by the god. They work automatically. No matter how strong you are, if you grab the sacred sword in the Temple of Humakt's sanctum, you're taking that Sever Spirit and you are dead (to draw from the example of temple defenses given in the text). 

In contrast, I'm thinking about coming from POW 21 on a game balance perspective, because this gives adventurers (or other sacred-site-raiding folks) a chance, albeit unlikely, to resist the spell. More of a chance than coming from effectively-infinite POW. Another alternative would be to use the wyter's POW as that backing the temple defense, but it sounds to me from the text that the POW comes from the god, not a wyter, because a very holy site with few worshipers still might have a great deal of POW bestowed for temple defenses.

Using POW 21 means that Rune Lords basically always have a 50/50 chance to shrug off those divine defenses, which I feel... conflicted about? It feels too easy, but at the same time giving a substantially developed character a 50/50 to either "save or die" or "save or suck" does still generate a substantial risk.

Fairy Floss.. (Fairy Nuff's twin).

I'd take the numbers indicated to be the amount a Wyter currently has at any random time it's needed to calculate, based on both the amount of POW previously sacrificed, minus the amount used by the community for various functions.

If there's holy regalia in the temple - such as Humakt's Sword, and 21 is the POW the Wyter is casting at, then it doesn't take a lot of Countermagic or Shield to ignore that Sever Spirit completely (1D6 HP damage is insignificant with the Heals available) and be off with it. (keep a Guided Teleportation to get as far away as possible 😛 )

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35 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

But but but... mere mortals have raised gods! And killed gods, and trapped them in the underworld, and then helped get them out again (So, I'm saying, yes, it is how the world works - and they're momentous occasions)

They have, but the process has always been unique and one-off, not something that can be given a trivial game mechanic that any group of people can do.

35 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

Now, if the Wyter was actually a spirit (as per p286), then this whole argument goes away...

I must have missed something, in what way is it not a spirit?

34 minutes ago, Shiningbrow said:

And I agree with you. As has been said previously, the whole "people can sacrifice POW to the Wyter" is the contentious point.

I don't see how it is contentious, can you go over it one more time?

  • It is a spirit
  • It has a maximum POW based on the community side, on an exponential scale
  • Community members can sacrifice POW to it
  • It sometimes needs to spend that POW, so it will rarely be at full capacity

Seems ok to me.

Edited by PhilHibbs
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38 minutes ago, Crel said:

And mine was looking for the POW a temple defense spell is cast at (p.288), not really looking at Wyter information. I don't see anything in the text which says that the POW backing those spells is the Wyter's POW; it sounds more like the god's POW itself than anything else based on the description of "ancient or historic temples" which "may well have 30+ points of defense because of its importance to the god."

I would be inclined to use the wyter's POW, but sure, it's really high. Shamans have a way of shrugging off mega-high POW attacks, maybe Rune Masters need to have a similar mechanic as well, in order to be able to potentially attack a temple. Or even another clan. Then again, a wyter would get a lot more benefit from its resources by buffing its own heroes, rather than attacking the attackers.

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So I started running the scenario I'm using stuff from this thread for, and something came up which I'm curious how other GMs would handle.

Create Fissure.

As was mentioned in passing above, an earthquake definitely can cause problems for monumental construction, like temples. While a natural one (well, as "natural" a quake as exists in Glorantha...) is beyond the scope of what adventurers can achieve, the Create Fissure spell's scope definitely could damage or destroy a small temple.

In my session, while my players were attempting to figure out how to destroy/deactivate the temple, one of them suggested finding a priestess of Maran Gor to assist. The Issaries initiate does a Spell Trade for Create Fissure (offered 1D6 points and rolled a 6), then unleashed it on some of the soldiers encamped nearby, defending the temple.

They almost chose to strike the temple itself--the Create Fissure 6 is 30m long, 6m wide, and 30m deep--and I'm glad they didn't, because I'm not certain how to handle it. On the one hand I'd say yes, strategically placed that would certainly do significant structural damage to a large building. (The description notes a D6 damage to a structure's "armor points," but those are undefined elsewhere.) But, would a temple have protection against that sort of large-scale magical attack? I felt like since it was a sacred ground, maybe the caster has to overcome the wyter's POW to affect, but I wasn't really all that sure how to handle this moment.

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