Subject: MYSTARA-L Digest - 7 Jul 2002 to 8 Jul 2002 (#2002-175) From: Automatic digest processor Date: 09/07/2002, 17:00 To: Recipients of MYSTARA-L digests Reply-to: Mystara RPG Discussion There are 13 messages totalling 606 lines in this issue. Topics of the day: 1. Regarding Urt (3) 2. Modrigswerg (3) 3. Sentient Races List - Addenda 4. Modrigswerg 2 (3) 5. MA1018 events (3) ******************************************************************** The Other Worlds Homepage: http://www.wizards.com/dnd/OtherWorlds.asp The Mystara Homepage: http://www.dnd.starflung.com/ To unsubscribe, send email to LISTSERV@ORACLE.WIZARDS.COM with UNSUB MYSTARA-L in the body of the message. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 10:16:13 +0200 From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Havard=20Faanes?= Subject: Re: Regarding Urt --- David Knott skrev: > From: "DM" > > It was so until the boxed set Hollow World came > out. Mystara's hollow > > and there's another mini-world inside it, so it > isn't possible for it to > be a > > Monolith (since it has no core). > On the other hand -- What if Urt = World Shield? Exactly! I dont see any reason why a Monolith cannot be hollow in the first place. The thing is though, whether Mystara is sentient or not doesn't really matter does it? Monoliths cannot really do anything anyways, except cause a few volcanic eruptions when they are pissed off. And noone has so far found a way of killing a Monolith either. Probably one of the reasons why the Monolith was left out of WotI... Havard ______________________________________________________ Følg VM i fotball 2002 på http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 10:40:39 +0200 From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Havard=20Faanes?= Subject: Re: Modrigswerg --- The Stalker skrev: > On Sun, 7 Jul 2002 11:17:47 +0200, > Dwarven wizards? I must confess that I have my > concerns about this idea > already. I disagree with you on this one. Dwarven wizards were not allowed in the Original D&D, but the concept fits very well with how the Moulder Dwarves are described. The Moulderers were never detailed in OD&D, but IMO a separate Dwarven Wizard class (based on the Dwarven Cleric) would be very approprate for that game IMO. IMC the Dark Elves are High Elves (Celestial Creatures) who have been corrupted by Loki and serve him. Most dwell on the outer plane of Svartalfheim, but some are sent into Mystara and work as agents there. Following the Stalker's theory, these Dark Elves approached the Modrig who desired to become magic users and corrupted them, at least to some extent. They are now capable of becoming magic users, but lost some dwarf-abilities. Also, this brought disgust from the other dwarves who drove them away. > Say, does anyone remember if any Immortal patron(s) > were established for > the Modrigswerg dwarves before? Nope. However, they have been credited with forging Thor's Hammer and Odin's Spear (In the Northern Reaches Gaz). I suggest that the Moulders are not really evil. Rather they are very neutral and chose to deal with good and evil creatures in the same manner. The good dwarves of Rockhome have seen how the Modrig have had buisness with evil creatures, and assumed the the Modrig were evil aswell. The Modrig, however, similarly to dwarves of Norse Mythology worship no gods. Unless ofcourse the Modrigsvergs Brokk and Sindri have achieved Immortality yet.. Havard ______________________________________________________ Følg VM i fotball 2002 på http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 11:42:04 +0200 From: Giampaolo Agosta Subject: Re: Modrigswerg Havard Faanes wrote: > > I disagree with you on this one. Dwarven wizards were > not allowed in the Original D&D, but the concept fits > very well with how the Moulder Dwarves are described. I don't see the Moulder Dwarves as performing spellcasting: at most, they would build magic constructs (items and such). Even then, they seem to make up mostly fake magic items. AD&D-wise, I'd allow them to use the Mechanician wizard kit from Al Qadim, at most. > I suggest that the Moulders are not really evil. > Rather they are very neutral and chose to deal with > good and evil creatures in the same manner. The good > dwarves of Rockhome have seen how the Modrig have had > buisness with evil creatures, and assumed the the > Modrig were evil aswell. IMO, they're also quite Chaotic, which would only add to the Rockhomer prejudice. > The Modrig, however, similarly to dwarves of Norse > Mythology worship no gods. They're likely to be too moody and/or depressed to worship any Immortal, indeed. -- Giampaolo Agosta agathokles@libero.it agosta@elet.polimi.it http://digilander.iol.it/agathokles ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 11:44:40 +0200 From: Giampaolo Agosta Subject: Re: Regarding Urt Havard Faanes wrote: > > And noone has so far found a way > of killing a Monolith either. Which anyway would not be a good idea. BTW, if Damocles/Asterius was a Monolith, then maybe someone did find a way to kill a Monolith... -- Giampaolo Agosta agathokles@libero.it agosta@elet.polimi.it http://digilander.iol.it/agathokles ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 11:53:24 +0200 From: Giampaolo Agosta Subject: Re: Sentient Races List - Addenda Andrew Theisen wrote: > >> Cryion > > Myself and a few others (S. B. Wilson, IIRC among others) thought that the > Hyborian reaches would be a good location for mnelds of Cryions. I agree. Checking at the Vaults, I found two more appearances of Cryions: in the Hollow Moon, and in Frosthaven. >> Gakarak > > I always kind of liked the concept that Gakaraks were ancient Treants, > centuries or even millennia old, that had grown more powerful and more > distrustful and wary of lesser sentient races. Yes, that's a good possibility, though the Gakarak is somewhat more humanoid than the Treant. Marco Dalmonte also mentions the possibility that the fabled "Tree of Ordana" is actually an ancient Gakakrak. -- Giampaolo Agosta agathokles@libero.it agosta@elet.polimi.it http://digilander.iol.it/agathokles ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 13:59:59 +0200 From: =?iso-8859-1?q?la=20Volpe?= Subject: Modrigswerg 2 I thought about the MU issue. Personally my idea is: there were MUs among dwarves, but this trait has been deleted by Kagyar when he reshaped the race. The Modrigswerg too lose this trait (except for a few that, after the exile, will be able to use some MU spells but are in fact worshippers of Entropy, thus more similar to clerics - but I will detail this better). Thus this will explain why Mystaran dwarves cannot become MUs. I will take a look at Dark Elves and Svartalfheim by Haavard to see if they can fit. After the exile I thought about this: 1)part of the Modrigswerg leave by sea and reach Ostland, becoming eventually the Graabjerge kingdom detailed by Jacob in the Almanac. 2) in the other part of the Modrigswerg there is a bloody civil war that exthenuates the Modrig clan; nearly all worshippers of evil are killed (a few might manage to flee somehow somewhere underground or where you please - room for other writers to fill); the surviving dwarves are hit by madness caused by Loki and/or Hel; the exile suffered by their brethren, the bitterness of a bloody civil war and a curse from the gods bring the Modrigswerg to become solitary, hostile toward strangers etc. etc., shaping them as the race they are now. Not evil nor good, mostly chaotic (not disorganized, but indipendent and isolationistic), and they retain some abilities to create magical items (I'd suggest an intervention by some norse gods). It is to be noted that the ancient dwarves were not only followers of Kagyar, so I'd assume that when the reshaping takes place (immediately after the exile of the Modrigswer) Kagyar takes at heart the destiny of the dwarven nation. There is no reason for the Modrigserg to worship or hate Kagyar, but this is another trait that divides the two cultures. After the exile (I have to check and determine the dates) Kagyar brings the dwarves to Rockhome and give both them and the Modrigswerg false memories (during the reshaping, I suppose). The Rockhome dwarves and the Modrigswerg do not meet or talk to each other until the Rockhome dwarves don't start exploring the outer world (something that happens quite late, if I recall correctly). Relationships between Rockhome and Modrigswerg have never been detailed too well. I suppose there is moslty distrust, but I want to tinker with this a bit. Let me know what you think, Iulius Sergius Scaevola Captain of the XXth Cohort Port Lucinius, Thyatis ______________________________________________________________________ Scarica il nuovo Yahoo! Messenger: con webcam, nuove faccine e tante altre novità. http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/?http://it.messenger.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 05:37:40 -0700 From: Herve Musseau Subject: MA1018 events > Most people might guess, but some newcomers might not know and some old timers might be confused since the events don't seem to be up at the geocities site (or haven't you guys just gotten around to it yet?) It's quite a pain in the ass to upload the files to geocities, and since we have a nice new spot at starflung I think I'll just don't bother with geocities. ===== ___________________________________________________________ Herve Musseau http://www.geocities.com/hmusseau/ __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 14:58:07 +0200 From: Daniel Mayer Subject: Re: MA1018 events Hi, Herve! Just try to fetch a german woman/man who hasn't already an "Arcor"-Account. It's free, no banner, but one needs to live in Germany for registration (she/he'll get a nice letter with pw). It gets you 50 MB of FTP-accessible space. I never had problems with "server is down" or similar and the server's quite fast. One can only get one account, as far as I know, and my account is nearly full. So, german MML-Members, get an account and help our staff. www.arcor.de Daniel > > It's quite a pain in the ass to upload the files to geocities, and since we > have a nice new spot at starflung I think I'll just don't bother with geocities. > > ===== > ___________________________________________________________ > Herve Musseau > http://www.geocities.com/hmusseau/ > > __________________________________________________ > Do You Yahoo!? > Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free > http://sbc.yahoo.com > > ******************************************************************** > The Other Worlds Homepage: http://www.wizards.com/dnd/OtherWorlds.asp > The Mystara Homepage: http://www.dnd.starflung.com/ > To unsubscribe, send email to LISTSERV@ORACLE.WIZARDS.COM > with UNSUB MYSTARA-L in the body of the message. > ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 13:17:39 -0700 From: Chris Furneaux Subject: Re: Regarding Urt > And noone has so far found a way of killing a > Monolith either.Probably one of the reasons why the > Monolith was left out of WotI... But can you imagine the experience points!!!! *grin* One could in some way relate the Megaliths to the gia(?!?) theory from final fantasy the movie (by far the most interesting part of the whole move). if damocles was a Megalith, then there could be some interesting consecuences. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 17:13:56 -0700 From: The Stalker Subject: Re: MA1018 events On Mon, 8 Jul 2002 05:37:40 -0700, Herve Musseau wrote: >> Most people might guess, but some newcomers might not know and some old > timers might be confused since the events don't seem to be up at the > geocities site (or haven't you guys just gotten around to it yet?) > > It's quite a pain in the ass to upload the files to geocities, and since we > have a nice new spot at starflung I think I'll just don't bother with geocities. > Yes, well I don't blame you. Still, you might want to leave a link to the new site there, or if you really are fed up with Geocities, just dump it completely and leave a note that the almanacs have moved to Shawn's site. - The Stalker ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 17:54:45 -0700 From: The Stalker Subject: Re: Modrigswerg 2 On Mon, 8 Jul 2002 13:59:59 +0200, =?iso-8859-1?q?la=20Volpe?= wrote: > I thought about the MU issue. > Personally my idea is: there were MUs among dwarves, > but this trait has been deleted by Kagyar when he > reshaped the race. I didn't like this idea and I spent a bit of time thinking why... After all, I'm not completely contrary to the idea of dwarven wizards (though I think they should be very few and be subject to racial stigma), so what was my problem? Well, it's the Kogolor dwarves in HW. They don't seem to possess any more arcane knowledge than their Rockhome descendants, so how could the Kogolors who were 'left alone' have arcane traits? However, it sounds to me like you want the original dwarvers (the outer world ancestral Kogolors) to have wizards among them. Can I ask why? I don't see much reason for it, especially not if the emerging Modrigswerg are going to have arcane traits among them (and we seem to agree there), but then you might have something in mind that I'm missing. > The Modrigswerg too lose this trait > (except for a few that, after the exile, will be able > to use some MU spells but are in fact worshippers of > Entropy, thus more similar to clerics - but I will > detail this better). Thus this will explain why > Mystaran dwarves cannot become MUs. > Actually I revised my opinion a little. I wouldn't allow dwarven sorcerors since dwarves are inherently non-magical, completely unlike a sorceror (since I won't allow sorcerors IMC at all that will never be a problem for me, but then we're not talking about what I do at my table). However, I can see the value of allowing some wizards among the dwarves, though they would suffer humiliation and scorn from their peers over it... As for dwarves creating magical items, that I would definitely agree with. No problem there at all. It would be appropriate since dwarves created the weapons of several gods in Norse mythology (including Thor's hammer and Odin's spear, as Haavard mentioned, and even the chain they use to capture the Fenris wolf, I think). However, creating magical items is not the same as casting wizard spells. Besides, Gaz 6 has rules that allow even standard D&D dwarves, which would correspond to 3e dwarven fighters, to create magical items. Those could easily be revised a little. > I will take a look at Dark Elves and Svartalfheim by > Haavard to see if they can fit. > Yes, I'll take the opportunity to say I liked what you said too, Haavard. > After the exile I thought about this: > > 1)part of the Modrigswerg leave by sea and reach > Ostland, becoming eventually the Graabjerge kingdom > detailed by Jacob in the Almanac. > > 2) in the other part of the Modrigswerg there is a > bloody civil war that exthenuates the Modrig clan; > nearly all worshippers of evil are killed (a few might > manage to flee somehow somewhere underground or where > you please - room for other writers to fill); the > surviving dwarves are hit by madness caused by Loki > and/or Hel; the exile suffered by their brethren, the > bitterness of a bloody civil war and a curse from the > gods bring the Modrigswerg to become solitary, hostile > toward strangers etc. etc., shaping them as the race > they are now. Not evil nor good, mostly chaotic (not > disorganized, but indipendent and isolationistic), and > they retain some abilities to create magical items > (I'd suggest an intervention by some norse gods). > > It is to be noted that the ancient dwarves were not > only followers of Kagyar, so I'd assume that when the > reshaping takes place (immediately after the exile of > the Modrigswer) Kagyar takes at heart the destiny of > the dwarven nation. There is no reason for the > Modrigserg to worship or hate Kagyar, but this is > another trait that divides the two cultures. > Actually there could be. I noted that the HW Kogolor dwarves worship Frey, Freya, and Garal, but not Kagyar. Either he was not a dwarven patron at the time, or else they abandoned him. In either case there would seem to be no basis for letting Modrigswerg dwarves be inclined to follow him as they would seem to have either turned from him or to never have been his followers in the first place. > After the exile (I have to check and determine the > dates) Kagyar brings the dwarves to Rockhome and give > both them and the Modrigswerg false memories (during > the reshaping, I suppose). You know, you touch on something that is odd here. If Kagyar was never a dwarven patron back then (and the fact that the Kogolors don't worship him would see to suggest that), then why did he give the Modrigswerg dwarves false memories? Why did he bother with them at all? > The Rockhome dwarves and > the Modrigswerg do not meet or talk to each other > until the Rockhome dwarves don't start exploring the > outer world (something that happens quite late, if I > recall correctly). > As most things I depends a little on what you call 'late'. Gaz 6 tells us that with the exception of invading orcs and so, the dwarves did not explore the world outside their mountains until after the Battle of Sardal Pass in 492 BC (Gaz 6, p.44). I wouldn't call that 'late', really. It was still almost half a millennium before Thyatis was established... In fact, there is a reference on the historical timeline (Gaz 6, p.45) that tells us the dwarves begin a program of exploration outside Rockhome in 475 BC. > Relationships between Rockhome and Modrigswerg have > never been detailed too well. I suppose there is > moslty distrust, but I want to tinker with this a bit. > Yeah. > Let me know what you think, > Well, I did. - The Stalker ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 02:33:41 -0400 From: David Knott Subject: Re: Modrigswerg 2 From: "The Stalker" > > I didn't like this idea and I spent a bit of time thinking why... After > all, I'm not completely contrary to the idea of dwarven wizards (though I > think they should be very few and be subject to racial stigma), so what was > my problem? Well, it's the Kogolor dwarves in HW. They don't seem to > possess any more arcane knowledge than their Rockhome descendants, so how > could the Kogolors who were 'left alone' have arcane traits? However, it > sounds to me like you want the original dwarvers (the outer world ancestral > Kogolors) to have wizards among them. Can I ask why? I don't see much > reason for it, especially not if the emerging Modrigswerg are going to have > arcane traits among them (and we seem to agree there), but then you might > have something in mind that I'm missing. I am inclined to agree with you because of the description of the Kogolor dwarves as well as the fact that the Blackmoor modules don't bother to revise the traditional treatment of the dwarven race. In 3e terms, I think the Modrigswerg do indeed have sorcerers among them -- but I also thing that they developed this trait after they were split off from the original dwarven race, as opposed to retaining that trait from an ancestral race that freely practiced both divine and arcane magic. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2002 02:41:22 -0400 From: David Knott Subject: Re: Modrigswerg From: "Giampaolo Agosta" > They're likely to be too moody and/or depressed to worship any Immortal, > indeed. Actually, I would factor that bit into their ability to cast arcane spells as sorcerers. The ancestral dwarves and the Rockhome dwarves who replaced them had a normal talent for divine magic but none for arcane magic. However, the chaotic Modrigswerg basically traded in their divine magic for arcane talent, with the results already documented in Gaz 7. I am inclined to interpret the lack of game rule information about the Modrigswerg as an admission that they could not be adequately covered by any pre-3E rules -- in other words, by any rules that prohibited dwarves from being arcane spellcasters. In 3E terms, the Modrigswerg would seem to be one of the dwarven subraces who dwell deep underground, avoiding sunlight. By trading off Law for Chaos and divine blessings for arcane talent, they have gone totally bonkers -- few if any of them are sane by dwarven, human, or even elven or halfling standards.... ------------------------------ End of MYSTARA-L Digest - 7 Jul 2002 to 8 Jul 2002 (#2002-175) **************************************************************