bb@lanl-a.UUCP (10/04/83)
Laura plays that there are Oaths that powerful beings can make that they would not like to break. There is precedent for this in Greek Mythology -- swearing by the river Styx or by the head of Zeus was about the only thing a God or Goddess could do to make a mortal believe something. Although my players have never met anything more powerful than a planetar and Tiamat (and these only briefly) and have never had much communication with deities, I would say that CE's like the demon princes could not by their very nature make such an Oath and be expected to live up to it. The Greeks never said what would happen if a God broke this Oath so it's up to us to think of suitable punishments. I would say that if a Greek God broke an Oath, Zeus the Father, the Fates and the Furies would all know instantly and Zeus would hurl the offending deity to Tarterus for eternal torment. The same sort of thing holds true for other pantheons with a leader God like Zeus, Ra, Odin. Actually Odin is interesting, he and the Aesir broke several Oaths, that those acts doomed them to Gotterdamurung (sp). Devils can be bound by Oaths, as can all Lawfuls. Neutrals and Chaotics can be if their pantheon has some higher authority figure to punish them. The CEs are a different story. Compared to the Greek Gods for example, the Demon Princes are a pretty weak lot, though they are a great number of them. By definition they have no superior types to punish them for misdeeds, they are not a pantheon with historical roots. So it seems OK to me to let the CEs be themselves and let the unfortunate character beware when dealing with them! Actually I am more inclined to play the DP's as weaker than they are stated in the MM. The Deities and Demigods has something about the princes -- some are lesser deities, some are only demi-gods, etc. I think that although individually powerful, the DP's really aren't of God-like stature, not individually as powerful as the Arch-Dukes of Hell. They are many many of them though, and many many tough and powerful lesser beings in the Abyss that serve the DP and augment his power. (Well, they may be on par with the Arch-Dukes, but not greater.) Someone said something like deities are the source of magic, thus the source of wishes. I don't play that way, though D&D is certainly playable that way. I will publish something I've written for my campaign as background material later that will fully outline the cosmology I invented to fill in the gaps TSR left when they presented the Multiverse. I'm not saying that a God can't give a wish, just that the 9th level MU spell doesn't come from a God, but that it, like all MU spells, is something like a special purpose tool that consumes magic just like a tool that requires energy to be useful, and that magic is much like energy in the way it behaves. b2 ...ucbvax!lbl-csam!lanl-a!bb Bryan Bingham
tim@unc.UUCP (Tim Maroney) (10/05/83)
It is not just a matter of making up a new rule that governs the consequences of breaking an oath. To break an oath (or to make an oath falsely) is to lie. Lying is always motivated by fear of the possible consequences of telling the truth to the person who is lied to. (There are other possible motivations for lying, but the act of lying is interpreted as an admission of fear by almost every sentience in the universe.) Given this, it would be an incredible thing if a god were to lie to a mortal. The god would be implicitly expressing fear of the mortal, and would lose a great deal of face, and probably lose a good number of worshippers. Note that this is not any magic effect that I'm talking about, just public relations, which even the chaotic evil gods have to worry about if they want to keep their worshippers and servitors. The upshot of this is that Orcus would no more lie to you than he would kneel to you. The loss of status in each case is comparable. The only gods that would ever stoop to lie to a mortal are gods whose nature is explicitly illusory above all else -- for instance, Loki or Trickster. Even in these cases, they will prefer to tell the exact truth in a deceptive way, and there will be some loss of face involved in them taking the easy way out and just plain lying -- any idiot can lie, but deceiving someone with the truth takes a good deal more skill. What is more, any asking by a mortal of a guarantee that the god is not lying will be treated as the insult it is. The most probable reaction of the god to being insulted in this way is to kill the mortal. Again, an explicitly illusory god will prefer to give some seemingly irrefutable token of faithfulness which in fact is nothing of the kind. Of course, this says nothing about mortals taking oaths. This is a situation that arrives with reasonable frequency. The best way to deal with this is to either invent a new clerical spell Oath (like the Rune Spell of the same name belonging to Humakt in RuneQuest) having the desired characteristics, or to add a few rules to the basic idea of swearing by your god. The latter approach could involve something like the following: Breaking a solemn oath sworn to your god causes the god to astrally mark you. A being with an astral mark cannot receive clerical spells from any source -- this includes most healing, so it is not a thing to take lightly. The mark can be removed by Atonement, but only if the breach of oath was involuntary. Otherwise, nothing short of major questing for the church will ever allow the mark to be removed. More detail can be added by individual DM's as well as I could add it, so I won't go into it more here. This does not seem an excessive consequence, in a world where there are real gods. Swearing an oath by someone and breaking it is a direct insult to the being sworn by, and you are lucky to be allowed to live at all. Oh yes -- the Oath spell can be simulated in AD&D by one or more Quest and/or Geas spells. _______________________________________________ Tim Maroney, duke!unc!tim (USENET), tim.unc@udel-relay (ARPA)