Modified Animism

[WiredNavi]

I've just started a new campaign, Ill Winds, running the HQ system.  Ill Winds is a tribal fantasy and is set in an explicitly animistic world; there are no such things as daimones or essences.  Obviously, shamanism is a very big deal, and I want to expand the power, importance, and interest of dealing with spirits; furthermore, since there is effectively only one overarching tradition, abilities like Venerate [Tradition] become less significant (since pretty much every character has Venerate Spirits).

Shamans are the religious leaders of the people, and encounter many, many types of spirits on a regular basis.  I would like to expand systemically on the kinds of things that shamans experience when dealing with spirits.

What I've done so far is:

- Change the ability generally used to create charms and fetishes from Venerate [Tradition] to Bind Spirit or Pact With Spirit, modified by any appropriate abilities.  They also can obtain abilities such as Aid Spirit, Heal Spirit, etc.

- Make resistance to binding spirits within charms and fetishes based on both the attitude of the spirit to the shaman and the power of the spirit, so that it would be easy to contain a Blow Fast 13 zephyr spirit but much harder to create a fetish out of a Lightning Stroke 5w2 storm spirit.

- Change the results so that a complete success indicates that the spirit is bound immediately, while lesser successes indicate that the spirit will be satisfied if the character agrees to certain taboos, sacrifices, rituals, etc. - for instance, a marginal success might indicate that if the character wishes to bind the spirit, they (or whoever will possess the fetish) must agree to spend at least five hours each week in ecstatic communion with it, or obtain some rare and powerful item to use as the ritual token, etc.  If and when the shaman agrees or fulfils the request, the spirit becomes bound.

Any other ideas?

*edited to correct the stupid url.

[lightcastle]

Sounds like you've got a very good start on expanding the Animist tradition.

I personally like the idea that both power and attitude are part of binding a spirit, but I always figured you just use attitude as the main part of the struggle, with power as an augment.

I have a question, your Bind Spirit ability, is it a general ability? Are the spirits divided into anything resembling practices, or by other divisions (Spirits of the Air, spirits of vengence, etc) and Shamans specialize in those differences?  

As for the partial binding question, that seems neat, but would it be practical? Are you going to come up with requests for every type of spirit? Will you save that just for more powerful and important spirits?

[WiredNavi]

*edited - double post.

[WiredNavi]

I personally like the idea that both power and attitude are part of binding a spirit, but I always figured you just use attitude as the main part of the struggle, with power as an augment.

The idea behind that is the assumption that the spirits generally have a status which roughly corresponds to their power, and that higher-status spirits are more capable of resisting compulsion and more likely to demant real expertise and complicated bindings on the part of the shaman.  Also, the larger a spirit is, the more capable of independent thought and conscious will it is - that 13-rating zephyr spirit pretty much just flies by going 'Whooooosh!' but the 5w2 storm spirit is likely to be just as capable of coherent conversation and bargaining as your average person.

I could just as easily give each spirit a separate resistance approximately equivalent to their power, but it seemed unnecessary.  And as far as the original method goes, I didn't like the idea of a shaman binding a huge spirit with 10w3 in a couple of abilities very easily just because the spirit was very friendly to their village and only had an 'attitude' resistance of 5w1.

I have a question, your Bind Spirit ability, is it a general ability? Are the spirits divided into anything resembling practices, or by other divisions (Spirits of the Air, spirits of vengence, etc) and Shamans specialize in those differences?

Bind Spirit is a general ability right now.  They could specialize somewhat, by purchasing a separate ability in 'Affinity With <type> Spirits' or somesuch, which could then be used as an augment for Binding those spirits (or really, doing almost anything to them).  However, one of the other mystical traditions, that of the Channeler, is very much about emulating the powers of a particular type of spirit (so a Storm Channeler would be able to cause thunderclaps, rainstorms, etc) at the cost of becoming more and more like that type of spirit.  I didn't want the Shaman and the Channeler to overlap too much, so I tried to make the Shamans mostly generalists at dealing with spirits and the Channelers mostly specialists dealing with a particular type of spirit.

As for the partial binding question, that seems neat, but would it be practical? Are you going to come up with requests for every type of spirit? Will you save that just for more powerful and important spirits?

Well, the more powerful the shaman's Bind Spirit, the less requests the spirit will make in general because.  I don't anticipate there often being really outrageous requests for little spirits because they're easy to bind; it's when a shaman starts trying to bite off more than he/she can chew and barely succeeding at Bindings that the spirits start making real demands.  And yes, I'd planned for the things most often requested by smaller spirits to be 'appropriate ritual tokens', which is pretty much a gimmee assuming the player can think of an appropriate token to bind the spirit into.  The larger a spirit is, the more self-willed and conscious it is, and the more complicated things it's likely to want.