Sidhelien Spirituality

[AndrewTall]

<snip>just that I am trying to run a discussion that is based more on given fact rather than possibilities. I am very much interested in theories and argumentation, but not when I want to discuss hard facts and how they relate to each other, at least on the first layer of this discussion

A big problem is that facts are few and far between on the origins of species and the nature of gods in particular, with some canon being vague, a 'local's interpretation' or the like. This can be seen negatively as promoting confusion or positively as encouraging DM-chosen campaigns, or more readily as a bit of a pain! Although it certainly does give us something to talk about!

as far as I know, we have not even set all of the groundwork, since some of us want to express their opinion on a totally different worldview (e.g. the "gods" never were true deities).

That would be me I guess - and perhaps the issue is more that I disagree on what a deity is - or that I see the transition from a minor spirit such as a pixie to a major spirit such as a god as being one of a continuum rather than a series of discrete and distinctly different states.

My tuppence on the death of the gods at Deismaar is that possibly the death of one god - or even two or three - would not have caused the destruction of any other god nearby, but that the death of so many in a short space of time in a single physical location could have had a significant effect on the local reality - several places note the vast energy released when the evanescence (sp?) is breached, perhaps when Azrai killed so many of the other gods the death of such powerful spirits (or whatever you want to call them) tore the barrier between Cerilia and the Spirit World - a barrier incidentally which Azrai very much wanted to breach.

In that case Azrai may have wanted to fight a number of the gods at once, either to breach the evanescence and merge the two planes (for example if he assumed that he could survive the merger but needed some such great event as a trigger to merge the planes) or could have wanted to draw the other gods into a fight confident that he could win and not realising the effect that their deaths would have.

note that the wiki is not currently available for such material, as far as I understand - if I am mistaken, please feel free to use it by all means.

The wiki is available for anything which is not offensive to readers, or derogatory to WOTC i.e. anything which would endanger the existance of the wiki / br.net.

When putting up pages the convention is to put a banner to indicate the type of page in question so that users can see whether a page is canon or a non-contentious extrapoloation thereof or a page which requires a little more caution in use. Having no banner indicates that the page has nothing contentious, or that anything contentious is clearly marked as 'some sages say', 'theories include', etc to make clear that the comment is not necessarily in accordance with canon.

'Observation' banners indicate that the page contains something that may not accord with canon, or represents a non-neutral viewpoint without copious disclaimers.

Fanfic is another banner to basically say 'be warned, this is my stuff and may not fit your campaign'.

Username pages almost by definition are non-canon and some omit other banners. I encourage people to use colour banners for campaign specific stuff, house rules, etc - see the wiki 101 or read the bottom section of the main page of the wiki which shows index pages for the main areas of fan-generated pages and notes the banner colour for each.

Ideally anything that anyone made for their BR campaign should be able to go on the wiki and be shared with everyone else - if we restricted the wiki to 'stuff the mods like only' or 'strict canon only' it would useful perhaps as a reference tool but otherwise would be a dead document.

[RaspK_FOG]

Gary, I repeat that I am not attacking your opinion on the matter; nor did I try to do with any of the other people discussing this topic. I tried to present a counter, by merely pointing out that there can be a number of differing opinions and anyone can hold on to them, especially scholars of the age you mention, with unimaginable fervor, just like some scientists of our days do even when their theories seem flawed to the eyes of others (I am indeed referring to rather modern scientists, not implying anything).

I am anything but annoyed at everyone's ideas, but I find bringing them, in this discussion... largely offsetting, which is my only argument against them. From an entirely hypothetical and literary standpoint, I believe they are interesting; from a player standpoint, I am not sure I would entirely appreciate them, but I would certainly not find them unlikely. If I did not insist on making this matter crystal clear is so that we stop, if I am correct, something which is rather irrelevant to the topic I tried to bring to the fore, that is, the true aspects of the spirituality of the Sidhelien.

Hence, there are two choices left: we either drop the original discussion completely and devote ourselves to the intrinsic possibilities, or we can drop all the argumentation over an example off the top my head and be constructive with what little we have. What would you have me do?

[kgauck]

Kenneth, again I did not mean to point out something along the lines of anyone here not being an authority or whatever, just that I am trying to run a discussion that is based more on given fact rather than possibilities.

The authority I was referring to were such facts. Things may be unambiguous in the setting but actually close off good adventuring possibilities. For instance, I like the idea that players might reenact some divine drama, even Deismaar. If the gods are paragons of conduct, their strategies and actions should provide a useful guide to characters in the setting. So, an event that lends itself to adventuring is great. Events that rely on divine reasoning that doesn't make sense to mortals is not a guide to followers to emulate.

The same goes for bloodlines, since I hold that a blooded character has tendencies to emulate the old god from whom their spark of divinity is derived.

It would be ideal if we had full mythologies to use as guides for priests and blooded characters to borrow from, but what we do have is Diesmaar and little else. Making it more useful for adventures and characters to emulate seems good.

[RaspK_FOG]

In all honesty, a lot could be said about what could and could not be supplemented: I miss the feeling of a complete list of holidays and fasting and what not would ever be deemed proper with most deities (some few in some settings have such guides, but most of them have nothing other than: "he or she has one major event then - priests pray at dawn").

[ryancaveney]

In all honesty... I miss the feeling of a complete list of holidays and fasting and what not

This is *precisely* what I have been trying to say. The official information we have to go on is a garment so threadbare that we as campaign-building DMs simply must embroider so much extra onto it (both to keep our NPCs from looking naked, and to keep the whole thing from just falling apart) that each individual's results can be totally contradictory to everyone else's, even though we all started with identical materials.

why come up with a completely new theory (since there is no definitive backing to what you suggest) rather than leave things vague and be done with it? What begs such definitive detail that even possible nontruths (campaign-wise) are better than a story of few details?

Because in order to be happy with even imagining the running of a campaign, I simply must have answers in my own mind to all these questions, even though I currently have no players to ask them of me. I derive much of my gaming pleasure from worrying about such details, even when I'm a player in someone else's campaign. So do lots of other people around here, given the flood of specific information pouring from the pens of people like Gary and Kenneth. I don't agree with everything they have to say, but even things to which I am adamantly opposed help me conceptualize the game world as I prefer to see it, because disagreeing with other people's details helps me decide which ones I really do like best. It's only glossing over missing details that annoys me. =)

To me, leaving things vague is a complete non-starter for anything I can't ignore entirely. The fact that I have noticed something not definitively detailed begs plenty loud enough for me. Non-truths are a risk I accept to achieve my goal of generating more truths, because there just aren't enough truths to go around without making some up. I am delighted to hunt down non-truths and expunge them when encountered, but what counts as truth vs. non-truth in BR is not nearly as clear-cut as you seem to think.

You may be forgetting that Tolkien changed a lot of his material - in other passages the above is subjected to change... I am not trying to say you are wrong; rather I do not find it productive to suggest that something which is biased from personal preference to come in on a discussion relating to what the given material is and what we can deduce from it.

I'm not forgetting that at all; in fact, it's part of the reason I mentioned Teodor Profiev. Tolkien created his mythology over the course of sixty years or more. As you correctly point out, as he did so, he repeatedly changed his mind -- but it all came from him, so it's all canon, even when it disagrees with itself. The problem vexed him, and he wrote about his own frustrations with the difficulty of revising his own earlier works when he felt trapped by them. Others may disagree with me on this, but I personally don't accept that what he thought in 1972 is *necessarily* more authoritative than what he thought in 1942, or vice-versa. I prefer to see the issue as I think he (at least in part) did himself, as a historian. When there exist multiple records of a single event, they usually disagree with each other in at least some details, and almost certainly in the intepretation of what happened. Which is the truth? We cannot know for sure, and different people will weigh the same evidence in different ways, and come to different conclusions. When that happens, the disagreements themselves are the most illuminating part, because they help us figure out what we think for ourselves, and expose us to more ideas than we would have come up with in isolation.

I point to the Vos paladin not as an excuse for going wild, but as a cautionary note on the inconsistent quality of what passes for Birthright canon. It had multiple authors, so they may not even themselves have always agreed on what was true, or even realized they disagreed. Whatever the reason for his publication, his mere existence presents a problem for every BR DM. Is he really an editing error, or was he intentionally included for some reason at which we can only guess? Since he contradicts the rules, what is to be done with him? If the rule trumps him, is he deleted or is he merely changed to a dual-classed fighter/priest? If he trumps the rule, is he a rare exception or a common one? If a rare exception, how many others are allowed, and under what conditions? I can imagine a dozen different solutions quite easily, and I'm sure others here could come up with many more. The point is that the existence of contradictions within the canon makes it the DM's job to *interpret* the contradictory sources and decide what the underlying truth "really is" within his or her own campaign. This goes for rules perhaps even more than setting details -- does a trade route need a guild holding at both ends, or just one? Competing justifications have been found within a single paragraph! In the end, each DM must make a firm decision one way or the other to enable the game to be played at all; but whichever way you go, you're still playing Birthright. Which way seems better is a matter of personal taste as much as anything else.

I have always tried to say that since the official material we have to go on is so often inconsistent or incomplete, it is part of the essential job description of a BR DM to engage in "discussion relating to what the given material is and what we can deduce from it" with other practitioners of the discipline. That's exactly why this list exists. However, I do not think it is even in principle possible to do that without being heavily influenced by our own idiosyncratic biases and personal preferences. The best we can do is honestly identify them, explore how they influence our thinking, and listen to others with an open mind.

suggestions have been made mostly as proposals of the "truth" they hold behind the setting rather than as a plausible resolution of any number of issues.

What is the difference? How can one offer a plausible resolution without proposing a possible underlying truth? You must have some idea of the underlying truth in order to form any opinion of which resolutions are plausible and which are not.

I am very much interested in theories and argumentation, but not when I want to discuss hard facts and how they relate to each other

As I see it, there is exactly one "hard fact" on the entire topic of Sidhelien spirituality: they don't have priests because they don't worship gods. That's all we know for sure. I don't see how there is anything more to be said on the topic without suggesting theories about why that is so. Therefore, I see your complaints about my and others' comments as saying, "please stop discussing what I want to talk about," which confuses me. I know my own "the so-called gods were really just dragons" theory is considered by many to be totally different, but I don't see it that way at all. I can explain everything we know in the published setting books based on it, so there simply is no factual way to decide whether my theory is more or less correct than another which also does so, due to the scarcity of available evidence with which to be inconsistent.

Any DM with a penchant for filling in the gaps (even one much less extreme than my own) must take on only parts of the whole campaign world at a time, and develop rough-and-ready guidelines for making quick decisions. Here's mine: the elves are right. Whatever the topic in question is, whatever the Sidhelien think about it is correct. Of course, that's not my only or my final answer to any question, but it is the starting point I use to frame my construction, and I find it very useful in fleshing out an interesting and satisfying Cerilia from the rough sketches that were published for us. Therefore, my train of thought back in 1997 went like this: the elves don't worship gods is a fact; I'd like to come up with a way for them to be objectively correct in that belief, if I can; therefore, let's suppose that there really aren't any gods to worship, nor were there ever. If I do that, can I still explain Deismaar, bloodlines, priestly magic, etc.? Yes, and here's how...; what's more, the result of making that explanation adds more predictive elements to my underlying theory of how the world really works, which I can then use to help me make still more decisions about campaign world details of interest. It's a perfect example of exactly the kind of world-building I most like to do.

it would be great to have a rich collection of well-developed and well-organized alternatives to harvest for games. This thread, for instance, has given several possibilities for elven life/afterlife that are very interesting and possible within the canon or with only minor revisions

This is the reason I still come back here after all these years and all the times I have left for a while. That is precisely the way I have always used this list, and wanted others to use it. It's what I said I wanted back when the idea of a 3e conversion first came up: I don't want one official way to do anything, I want a menu of as many options as we can come up with for everyone to pick and choose from as they like. And I got what I wanted before the people who wanted an official document did, because the discussion that preceded the document was itself the end product I was after. The way I pay back all the people from whom I have stolen ideas over the years is to encourage others to adapt mine, or in rejecting mine come up with more answers on their own. Thank you, Rowan! May you find fertile hunting grounds here.

[RaspK_FOG]

Seeing now at last where you come from, I accept that as a most viable position; please do continue and I apologise for my insistence.

Note, this could be greatly helped if an inclusion of all such theories and hypotheses are explained at least partly in a variation of the original post or something along these lines (i.e. close to the top and/or near the bottom), where anyone can take a look at them and where you can easily revised them.

I am all for such options, and theorising in-universe is very good, I think; I wonder if we could settle down at some point and devise more such material (e.g. complete catalogs for fasting, etc.) - I would also appreciate it if you checked up my entry on the various age categories of Cerilian dragons.

[geeman]

At 07:40 AM 12/27/2007, RaspK_FOG wrote:

>Hence, there are two choices left: we either drop the original
>discussion completely and devote ourselves to the intrinsic
>possibilities, or we can drop all the argumentation over an example
>off the top my head and be constructive with what little we have.
>What would you have me do?

Debate is good, if for no other reason than it helps one refine one`s
own arguments, so by all means continue presenting your ideas and
arguments as you feel inclined. I can`t say I`ll always agree, but I
do hope you`ll get something out of my disagreement just as I expect
to get something out of yours. I`d not presume to tell anyone what
to do (unless I have to step in as the BR-l moderator--which I hasn`t
been necessary in ages....) The only advice or suggestion I`d give
on what you should do is this: Once you`ve learned or got everything
you think you can from a subject THEN let it drop....

Gary

[irdeggman]

Gary, can you provide me a BR source for the following statement from your pdf (which is well written, by the way).

The Sidhe are known to have controlled sources and various items of power before the Battle of Deismaar,

I don't readily recall any such reference, but I could be wrong.

There is text that specifically states that an elf must be blooded to cast realm magic, even though they can cast greater magic without a bloodline.

BoM pg 5
"Still fewer possess the bloodlines that allow them to cast realm magic."

[geeman]

Here are some musings about BR elves and fear of death:

When it comes to the psychology of BR elves, I think we should be very careful with human comparisons because doing so runs the danger
of anthropomorphism or even IMO theanthropism (attributing human qualities to the divine.) Of course, the Sidhe are not gods in the D&D sense or even common sense, but they are immortal spiritual beings whose nature appears to prohibit them from worshipping gods in the way that mortal can, and who seem nonplussed by the gods as anything other than very powerful beings. Thinking about the Sidhe as "gods" in the most minor sense gives us possibly the best way of thinking about their attitude towards death.

As such, the Sidhe are far more "alien" and otherworldly than elves portrayed in other D&D settings. In most settings the demi-human
races are pretty clearly human analogs. Sure, they are different "races" but can`t we all think of real world human cultures that pretty closely mirror those races? Most D&D elves are long-lived hippy ectomorphs with pointy ears and a strange penchant for green garments. They`re just missing the bongs and tie-dye.

The Sidhe, however, are fundamentally different from humans. Yes, the Sidhe and humanity can interbreed, and the Sidhe accept half-elves amongst them, but one of the reasons I personally like to differentiate between mortal "souls" and elven "spirits" is that "spirit" really implies something otherworldly. The Sidhe are tied to the material world in a way that those with a soul are not. Their psychology isn`t just alien, it`s extrinsic in that they are tied to nature. Death to elves represents part of their continuum in the natural order. It`s not necessarily something to fear in and of itself. Oh, one should avoid death--not to do so would be unnatural--but fearing death to the Sidhe would be like the cloud fearing lightning.

I didn`t include much of this in the PDF I posted, but there is a comparison to be made between the Sidhe and some materials presented
in the description of the Lost Soul. I do think BR elves reincarnate, and their spirits are tied to the Prime Material plane of Aebrynis in a way that is similar to the way a soul is "trapped" in the SW. To the Sidhe, death is like the temporary destruction of a Lost Soul. Their spiritual energies are temporarily dispersed, but they will reconstitute in more or less their original form sooner or later. Such an experience is not necessarily pleasant or unpleasant for them, but a fear of death if it exists at all would be somewhere low on the list of emotions they might experience at such a time. More likely they would simply resent death--and the person who brought it about, particularly if it were a mortal.... Maybe they`ll think about joining the GS next time around.

Even if one does not think the Sidhe reincarnate, though, one can still see how they might think by considering them in this way. Death to them means simply mingling their energies with nature. They return to the "continuity" of the spiritual world, if you will.

Gary

[geeman]

At 05:29 PM 12/27/2007, irdeggman wrote:

>Gary, can you provide me a BR source for the following statement
>from your pdf (which is well written, by the way).

Thanks.

>>The Sidhe are known to have controlled sources and various items of
>>power before the Battle of Deismaar,

It never actually says sources directly, but in the BoM p26 there is
info on elves using "ancient ley lines" before Deismaar and that
those ley lines have been found to be connected to modern source
holdings. It says they didn`t create those ley lines, and it does
not say specifically that such "ancient ley lines" must be attached
to sources, but at some point a ley line has to be attached to a
source or to a ley line that is itself linked to a source, so from
the existence of ancient ley lines alone I infer the existence of
ancient sources. Plus, it says ancient ley lines were employed so
there must have been ancient sources since without a source a ley
line isn`t much good for anything.

Like "ancient ley lines" the "ancient sources" were probably not
created by the elves, but discovered and employed by them. The
ancient ley lines (and any ancient sources that they might/must be
attached to) are part of that whole Land`s Choice thing....

Gary