The Let's Play Archive

King of Dragon Pass

by Haifisch

Part 17: Tricksters

The horrible thing about Maran Gor's explanation here is that she's absolutely right about what's going to happen...

A few more Trickster/Godlearner points:
The really big deal with the Tricksters is that their appointed role within the system is to be rulesbreakers. In other words, they reinforce order by being disorderly. (Urox, who also has the Disorder rune, does the same thing by breaking stuff up in Orlanthi society, because he focuses on breaking Chaos.)

But that's a macro-scale view, one which people within Orlanthi culture really don't have. The advantage of Bonding is that it creates an official place for an Eurmal within their society and allows for the possibility that they'll be useful.

Tricksters have a lot of potential aspects. Thieves, drunks and liars aren't the only options available. Eurmal also has seducer, murderer and destroyer aspects. Also, recall that doing things that run against the clan's ways can lose us magic, so when the Eurmal decides to anger the dragon instead of treating it as a friend, the whole clan suffers.

The Godlearners made the huge mistake of applying what we might consider scientific principles to a reality which doesn't actually operate by them, but their big problem is a total lack of piety. They aren't even particularly good worshipers of the Invisible God (who is the Malkioni deity).

Their big problem, though, is that some of their most powerful sorcerers pretty much behaved like power gamers/Internet trolls/min-maxers/rules lawyers, but towards the fabric of reality. On the order of saying "Thou shalt not kill" means you can torture innocents as long as they don't die as a result and "Do not covet thy neighbor's wife" means any woman who doesn't live adjacent to you is fair game.

Recall that the fabric of Gloranthan reality is stretched very thin indeed, and Chaos results if you cut through. Tricksters can violate law without breaking reality, because that's their PLACE in reality. Whereas the Godlearners liked to do things like slice a piece of reality away and stitch it back in somewhere else so that they could observe the results.